The Necropolis Railway

by Andrew Martin

  I returned to Lower Marsh still in excellent spirits. All had been put straight at Nine Elms: I was not a spy, Smith was gone, and all the men stood above suspicion on that score as well as all the others. Stanley was the one, and the only thing left to do was find him.

  As I approached my lodge I was feeling a want of sleep and a sort of dreaminess that lingered from my injury, so I was not as surprised as I might have been to feel, upon opening that door, a singular sensation of travelling backwards in time, for I could hear my landlady saying, 'Well, it's a pound down.' As I slowly climbed the stairs, I continued to listen: 'Wash day is Saturday, and you are to leave out your laundry on the Friday, if that is quite all right?' There came the voice of a man, which I could not hear clearly. 'There is a good supply of cocoa in the kitchen’ my landlady was saying as I reached the top of the staircase, 'or at any rate there will be presently, when I have a chance to arrange it, which is very beneficial on the cold mornings. You will notice that the ceiling is quite free from leaks.'

  When I reached the top of the stairs I heard my landlady say, 'We have one other gentleman in the house. He works on the railways, not driving but cleaning the engines, yet he is keen to get on, and of a most amiable nature.' More fast words came from the man, but still I could not make them out. The two were in the unoccupied room, the one that was to be let. 'Might I ask your own occupation?' my landlady said as I moved along the upstairs corridor.

  'Barrister-at-law,' said a light, fast voice. 'Advocate, that is. And yet the work is not of the common legal run but rather concerns the education of the public on matters touching -'

  I seemed to stop him in his tracks as I stood in the doorway, for I was a dead man as far as he was concerned.

  "This is Mr Stringer, the railway gentleman I was just mentioning,' said my landlady.

  He was looking at the right side of my head, where the bandages held the gauze over the sutures. His eyes were orange, his face yellow and shining. He still wore the twisted greenish suit, but he had not shaved, and this time his papers were under his arm and he carried a cane.

  'You were saying, Mr Stanley,' my landlady went on, 'that your work touched on ...?'

  'Interment,' he said, moving his gaze from my bandages to my eyes.

  It was the cane, and the thought of it splitting my sutures, that was the main thing on my mind. At least it was at first, but then I looked at my landlady, who had suddenly somehow understood all. The fear on her face destroyed her beauty, but it was nothing to what this maniac might do to her.

  'Every turn I take is a turn for the worse,' said Stanley, and then I heard a single, strange bird call. It was Stanley's cane, flashing through the air, and I somehow avoided it by taking a pace back. The next flash came, I ducked, and was upon Stanley, pummelling him about the face, wanting to hit harder but also wanting to hit faster, because I was like a man putting out a fire. For a moment he just seemed to take his beating, with the smell of old wooden halls rolling out of his mouth as he panted under the blows. He threw me off quite easily, though, as soon as he was minded to try, and I was more amazed by flying through the air than I was hurt by landing against the door, shutting it in the process. Stanley advanced upon me, slashed again, and I believed the tip of his cane stroked my eyelashes. He would have taken my eyes like somebody rubbing out a chalk line.

  He came forwards again, and I could go no further back since I was already against the door. Stanley pulled back the cane again, readying himself for the next downward stroke, and as the cane climbed upwards, it made the same bird-call sound as before, except in reverse. He stood there with the cane held high in his hands, looking like a great, twisted tree, and began to bring it down fast, while starting up a slow roaring that contained the words 'You are all in darkness', or 'All is darkness': the cane was coming to snap my sutures this time without doubt. My landlady was moving towards Stanley from the side, slowly, prettily, with head held high.

  And then came a fearful explosion of wood.

  I saw that Stanley was on the stone flags of the kitchen below, looking like a broken star, with his papers fluttering to the floor around him, for they were slower than he had been. His eyes were open, and the fire was rolling upward through them, while the waves of blood moved away from the top of his head and out towards the chimney piece and the boiler.

  One of his feet was facing the wrong way.

  'The floor,' said my landlady, quite calmly.

  It was no longer there. Half of it had gone, at any rate -Stanley's half - and my landlady and I remained standing on a sort of shelf over the kitchen. The door was on our shelf, and we were through it and down the staircase in a second.

  My landlady was first into the kitchen, and on her knees with her hair in her eyes and a towel at Stanley's head. She had lost her straw hat on the way down, and as I blew the whistle I thought: how strange that she does not cry.

  Stanley was quite dead by the time I had finished blowing the whistle, and my landlady was sitting on the floor beside him, staring into nowhere like a little doll. I began walking around the kitchen that had only half a ceiling, collecting the papers, and not being able to leave off reading them as I did so. I first collected a tiny advertisement from a newspaper: 'CASH ADVANCE' read the first, '£50 TO £5,000 ON NOTE OF HAND WITHOUT SURETIES OR SECURITIES'. Next I picked from off the smashed wood two longer items snipped from newspapers: 'COURT OF BANKRUPTCY', said one. Underneath these words was printed, in smaller type, 'before Mr Registrar Hope'. In larger type again were the words 'SCHEME OF ARRANGEMENT', and then the article began: 'His honour delivered judgement on the application made to the court to confirm the scheme of arrangement accepted by the creditors of Mr Adrian Stanley, late barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple. The scheme provides for the vesting of the estate in a trustee for the benefit of creditors.'

  My landlady stood up and sighed. She told me to take my whistle outside and blow it again. I did so, getting some very queer looks, and when I returned there was a blanket over Stanley and my landlady's straw hat was back on her head.

  From the grate, where it had drifted, I picked up an article headed: 'DIVORCE DIVISION', before Mr Justice Barnes and a special jury, 'EX-BARRISTER-AT-LAW A RESPONDENT'. It continued, 'Mrs Anne Stanley (nee Hedley) sought a divorce by reason of the alleged cruelty of her husband, Mr Adrian William Stanley, an ex-barrister-at-law, formerly of The Maples, Guildford, Surrey.'

  There was a banging at the door, which I had left open; the constables had arrived, so I read on rapidly:

  Mr Clark, appearing for the respondent, said it was a shocking case... He asked Mrs Hedley: 'When did the cruelty begin?' and she replied 'With his anxieties at his chambers. He threw a pair of nutcrackers at me, later a carving knife that hit me on the third finger of my left hand. I was quite badly cut. Our servant gave him an egg that was not quite done; he cried out "Confound you!" and turned over the table. He would wander about the house at night, talking to himself; on one occasion I asked him to please stop because he had woken the children and he picked up a doorstop, saying, "I will give you such a knock on the head with this if you keep following me about.'"

  Three constables were now in the kitchen: one was talking to my landlady, one was over the body, and one was staring at the hole in the ceiling and saying, 'Strewth!'

  I was reading the final article, headed 'AT BOW BEFORE MR KING':

  Mr William Adrian Stanley of The Maples, Guildford, was charged with assaulting Mr Grant Low. Mr Unstead, for the complainant, said that on the 15th of June, 1900, the defendant, a barrister-at-law, had taken the complainant, his clerk, to task over the bundling of a brief. The defendant remarked, 'It will be necessary for you and I to talk this over,' whereupon he struck the complainant twice about the head with a large vase. After hearing witnesses, Mr King said there was no question that the complainant had been assaulted. The defendant must pay a fine of forty shillings, with one pound costs. Mr Stanley is to be proceeded against by the Bar Council.

&
nbsp; It was some time later that I read the final three documents, which I found in the boiler after the constables and the Captain, who came on later to ask more questions, had all gone. The first two seemed to be rough drafts of letters. They were written in a very agitated hand, with many crossings out, capitals, underlinings. They had not been dated or addressed, but I had them down as some part of his plan to obtain higher wages for giving the address. I could make out nothing more than a few fragments from the two letters:

  After the service that I have given ... in view of my being required to go FAR beyond the common run of obligation that any employee however conscientious might owe to an employer ... the mere continuation of the Address will not in itself be found sufficient... it will be noted that I adhere to gentlemanly language, and make free with such words as 'please' and ‘I beg', but patience is short, and it is well if it is remembered that I am by profession a barrister-at-law, in short a master of many things pertaining to ...

  This ended with a word I could not make out except for the 'e' at the beginning.

  The last of Stanley's papers was another advertisement from a newspaper: 'Unusually excellent furnished bed and sitting room offered to respectable person. Garden view. Thirty seconds from Waterloo Station. No servants kept. Every comfort and convenience. Very moderate terms.'

  'But floorboards not of the best,' I said quietly. My landlady, however, lying beside me on my truckle bed, was fast asleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Saturday 9 January

  We took the District Railway to West Kensington, where we got off in a great crowd of happy people. We walked out of the station and onto a road packed with cabs. Over the road were the gates of the great outdoor theatre. The benches within were empty, and the curtain was across the stage, but there were posters against all the railings for 'A Tableau of Germania'.

  We stopped in front of the posters for a while, which showed castles and some girls in pigtails. 'Do you fancy that?' I said.

  'You should really say "them",' said my landlady. 'It's more than one. Anyway, it's not really my sort of thing.' 'Nor mine,' I said.

  'And it doesn't come on until March,' said my landlady. 'And it's eight and six ...'

  'And that's for the cheapest seats,' said my landlady.

  So that was it as far as 'Tableau of Germania' went. In any case, we were not in West Kensington to see an entertainment; we had come to ride the Great Wheel, and I was going to treat my landlady.

  We walked past the theatre and through the Japanese garden, in which there was a tinkling little stream with a bamboo bridge going over. From here we could see the wheel, circling slowly with its forty cabins, and with the steam coming up from the engines at the bottom blowing against the great steel hub. As we watched, the cabins came to rest, and we stopped to look at the top one.

  'You get a good long go up there, don't you?' said my landlady.

  The Great Wheel started moving again, and so did we.

  'Do you think it ever sticks?' asked my landlady.

  'It would be nothing to me if it did’1 said. I meant because I would be with her, but she took it differently.

  'You've found your backbone in all this business, haven't you?'

  'Do you not think I had any backbone before?' I said.

  'You had an uncommon talent for twitching and looking away,' she said, 'and as for those queer speeches of yours, all about life on the rails ...'

  I had told her the whole story, of course, in the house at Hercules Court, dividing the story into the six parts, as in the hospital. She had not said a word until the beginning of part six, when she began to make a pot of tea, but she was still listening, I think. Whenever I tried to go back to it later on, though, even to the most sensational parts, she would cut me off by saying, 'You should put it all in a book.'

  With my landlady I felt that I was on the threshold of great things, but not perhaps a very relaxing time. In any event, I was not too young to see that she was good for me.

  We were approaching the low, strange buildings under the Wheel, and I realised that some of them were just like the cabins that revolved above. It took two engines to drive the Wheel. The beats from their exhausts were not in time so that it seemed as though they were fighting, but the Wheel turned smoothly all the same.

  A lot of the men among the crowd around the bottom of the Wheel were smoking cigars. A barrel organ was playing somewhere. My landlady said that there seemed to be quite a lot of Spanish-looking gentlemen, and there was a little dog twining about that looked like a Pierrot. In the air was a smell of strange spices and fried fish. It was quite a low sort of entertainment that was going on all around, but, still, there were more toppers than anything on the heads of the men - and toppers of the best sort too. A crowd of johnnies on a beano were buying some fried fish from one of the huts, and one of them dropped his. People stopped to look, while another johnny cried out to them all: 'Head full of wine! Head full of wine!'

  'He has a head full of wine’ said my landlady who was also looking on, ‘but he's rather handsome, nonetheless.'

  'Perhaps you would like to go and ask him to pay for your ride on the Wheel’1 said.

  She laughed, and said, 'You get in the queue. I'm off to buy you a present.'

  So I joined the back of the queue, following the lines of my sutures with my fingers.

  When my landlady returned, all in a fluster, I was at the front of the queue. One of the forty cabins had just swung down before me, and I was being shown towards it by a man in a blue coat. (All the men who had anything to do with the Wheel were dressed in blue coats.) She handed me a paper bag, and as I took it she kissed me on the cheek that was not sewn. 'It's not the one you like’ she said, 'but it is cocoa.'

  'Well, I'm sure I shall like it’1 said, and I started to read the words on the tin: it was called 'Vi-Cocoa', which I had never heard of before. 'In tiring work,' I read, 'there is nothing like Vi-Cocoa.'

  'Never mind about that, mate,' said the fellow in blue. 'Are you for a turn on the wheel or not?' Then he said, 'What happened to your bonce?'

  'Somebody knocked me into the middle of next week’ I said, at which my landlady suddenly turned to me and said, 'If, two weeks ago, you were knocked into the middle of next week, then what week are you in now?'

  It was a good question.

  I paid the money and stepped into the cabin. With my beautifully sewn face, my cocoa and the girl I was stuck on, I felt like ... well, King Edward himself, I would have wagered, was never happier.

  Twenty other people or thereabouts were shown into the cabin with us, and as soon as my landlady stepped aboard she said, 'Electric light!' The cabin was like a wide railway carriage with seats along both sides and looking glasses above them. The doors were slammed, the cabin gave a jerk and we began to rise up, but had gone hardly any distance before we stopped again.

  'We are neither up nor down,' I said, turning to look out.

  'No,' said my landlady, and she was holding my hand very tightly, 'we are up!'

  We started to rise once more, and somehow there were violins in my head. I thought: this must be the sound that balloonists hear all the time. We were above the roofs of the houses now, level with the chimney pots, and then we carried on, rising with the smoke that came out of them. The higher we climbed, the more we saw of their back gardens, and very nice ones they were. I saw my landlady looking at them, and there was an expression on her face that I would almost have called sadness, so I put my arm about her waist and said, 'We will have a garden like that. You can get them out Wimbledon way. I know, because I've seen them.'

  We continued to climb, and the large gardens slowly became quite small, and then the whole of West Kensington station could be seen, and the streets beyond going on for miles. Looking down the line of the District, I said, 'You can see the next train to come into the station from London, and the one after that.'

  My only disappointment was that I could not see the edge of the city. There
was no end to the houses and that was all about it. Our cabin stopped again, and my landlady and I walked towards the windows, for now we were at the top -just in the nick of time, too, because the light was going and the lamps were coming on.

  'Look at the lines of electric lights,' said my landlady. "They spread across town like necklaces ... I wonder whose electricity it is.' That was always one of her strange concerns.

  'Can you see Waterloo?' I asked her.

  ‘I do not want to see Waterloo,' she replied, full of indignation.

  Looking down, I could see the crowd around the base of the Great Wheel, and the walkers in the Japanese garden. Beyond the gardens were some tennis players, who looked comical as they dashed about in the gathering darkness, and not at all good at the game, but they were trying their best and my heart was filled with good wishes for them and with love for my landlady.

  Then something made me go back to the Japanese garden. A man was walking slowly along one of the paths. He wore a very fine grey felt hat. As I watched, the Japanese lights in the garden around him came on in one soft, swift burst. They were all colours and very pretty but they seemed to have vexed the man in the fine hat, who stopped and looked up at the Great Wheel, then down again, before continuing. He seemed to walk very lightly, almost floating; his clothes were of the latest cut, and I believed he was smoking a cigarette, for he kept bringing his hand to his face. The gentleman was moving towards the bamboo bridge now. Watching him walk was like listening to funny music.

  A woman was coming over the bridge towards him, and when the man lifted his hat I expected his hair to spring up, which it did not, and I expected not to see a beard, which I did. But he was Rowland Smith all the same.