“Then consider it done.” He looked into the deep-set grey eyes of the woman, recognising her disease as a certain killer, probably within the year, but strength of a kind still resided there. “You will be going into a hospital in England?”
“No,” she said, “I am going home. A place is being prepared for me in a nursing Order in Languedoc. So you see, I shall have my wish after all. I shall see the south again. For a little while.”
He heard the clatter of feet in the hall and saw Deborah and a nun pass under a picture of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. There were, he reflected, less dramatic roads to martyrdom. She saw his glance and said, with the same quiet smile, “We have said our goodbyes, Mr. Swann. As you say, she is an adult child. One of my rare successes.”
There was nothing more to say. Any prolongation of the interview would put an unnecessary strain on her dignity. He took her hand, noting the blueness of the veins as he bent his head. Her smile followed him into the passage and as far as the door where Sister Sophie hovered, holding it open. Deborah was already in the carriage, her usual still self, as though she was taking away some of the Mother Superior's repose as a keepsake. The sun still flamed in a cloudless sky, but for him the heat had gone from it. He thought, “This will have to keep until I’ve had time to talk it over with Henrietta. Tonight, maybe, when they’ve all tired themselves out,” and again he felt gratitude that the decisions he had in mind were likely to be easier than they would have been a few days ago.
2
Blubb's hatred of the railroad had never moderated, not even now, when the stage-coach had taken its place in the museums alongside coracles and Boadicea's war chariot. He still referred to it as “that bliddy ole gridiron,” or, after a fifth, mellowing pint, “that stinking ole tea-kettle us is stuck wiv.” Alone among the district managers he had made no more than a token attempt to establish the equivalent of Edith's parcel-runs in his territory, declaring more than once that bag traffic, concerned as it must be with small packages, “weren’t worth a farden's pains nor the fag-end of a bliddy candle.” Adam, who had affection for the old rascal, had not harried him, knowing that he would be retiring very soon, but Tybalt, with an eye on the parcel-run income had given him any number of prods, the latest and most vigorous in Adam's absence when a few cases of French wines consigned to a City wholesale vintner were included in a shipment booked to cross Blubb's patch by South Eastern goods train.
The wine order was not important and ordinarily Blubb would not have made an issue of it, but he saw, or pretended to see, a splendid opportunity to score over clerk and railway, pointing out that it was wrong to subject good Burgundy to the shaking it was likely to get on the gridiron, and although he was overruled, and the cases were consigned to Reigate by rail, circumstances enabled him to make his point in a way that brought him tremendous satisfaction. Due to a series of unforeseeable accidents the wine was mislaid and left behind in a shunted goods waggon in a siding a couple of miles east of Headcorn.
Feeling that here was an opportunity too good to miss Blubb set about tracing it and in the course of his inquiries learned that the South-Eastern track-layers were rebuilding an insignificant bridge over the river Beult that spanned the magnificent racing section of line midway between Ashford and Tonbridge. It was, in fact, due to these repairs that the wine had gone astray, a shunted waggon having developed a fault and been pulled out of line to allow the passage of the boat-trains. It did not surprise Blubb that men mainly preoccupied with fast passenger traffic should forget its existence for three whole days after the rest of the shipment had gone on to Reigate for distribution.
Discovery of the oversight brought a gleam to his eye. He did not care a curse about Tybalt's London customers, for Reigate was suburban territory and the wine, in any case, was consigned for a London customer. But he saw at once that it provided him with a useful stick to belabour Tybalt and the railway, and that was why he undertook to recover the goods personally, driving down to Headcorn in a pinnace and relishing the prospect of giving a set of teakettle lackeys the rough edge of his tongue. He delivered himself to Michelmore, his stableman, before setting out. “They worn know where to look when I show up, wi’ my manifest, and lay claim to that there wine! Three days it's bin there, and if I ’adden tracked it down it’d be maturin’ beside the track till it was fit fer a Dook's cellar! Pervidin’ they didden swig it, mindjew, and I woulden put that parst the thievin’ bleeders. The minnit I get aholt of it in goes a report to the Gaffer that’ll make ears burn in Headquarters,” and he cracked his whip and set off in fine fettle, stopping to refresh himself at four taverns between base and Sutton Valence, where he took the road bearing west of Headcorn for the section of the track under repair.
Two quarts of Kentish ale had moderated his choler somewhat by the time he arrived and located the waggon on the siding east of the bridge. The sun was hot and it was pleasant to sit in the shade of the canopy where the road ran across a swampy field straddled by the bridge. The track, at this point, swarmed with platelayers working against the clock in their efforts to re-lay rails across a forty-foot gap Blubb's side of the bridge. He was a man who set great store on the adage “Know your enemy” and said nothing for the time being concerning his purpose there, and soon he became mildly interested in the work of hauling the lengths of rail into position, and riveting them to baulks of timber that formed the floor of the cross-over. Presently, noting the flash of a gilded inn sign in the village of Staplehurst close by, he climbed down, tethered the horse to a briar, and waddled up the embankment where he chanced on the foreman platelayer consulting a timetable.
He was tempted then to declare himself, but the ale, the mildness of the day, and, above all, a sense of rectitude that warmed his belly like a belt of flannel, had mellowed him to the point of jocularity, so that the fancy took him to discover how well the foreman was up to his work. He said, with a bumpkin's innocence, “What be about then? Opening up a new stretch o’ line, mister?” and the man looked at him as though he was an idiot and said, casually, “Are ye daft or summat? This is the fastest stretch o’ main line in the system. The boat-train stretch from Folkestone,” and Blubb decided to expand the hoax, saying, with a respectful whistle, “You doan zay, mister? But how's a train to cross that gap without wings? ”
The man closed his timetable with a sigh. He was accustomed to boys plying him with questions concerning his trade but it was not often he had a chance to patronise someone many years his senior. He said, “There's no boat-train due, you pudden-’eaded Swede. Boat-trains run on the tide, and this timetable tells me the first up train passes Headcorn at five-twenty. Headcorn is two miles away, so that gives me two hours to close the gap, don’t it?”
“Ah,” said Blubb, hugely enjoying his country-cousin role, “It do, pervidin’ there bain’t no freight trains in between. I see you had one waggon come adrift a day or two back. Now what be stowed away in there, I wonder? Wines, mebbe? That thirsty gentlemen in London is waitin’ to drink?”
At this point the foreman tired of Blubb and his bucolic conversation. He was hot, sweaty, and working to a tight schedule, and he turned aside to shout instructions to a gang wrestling with a bulk suspended over the last arch by a pulley on a gantry, but as he did this his trained ear detected a disturbing sound, a sustained humming, like the sigh of a far-off wind, and it tensed every muscle in his body. Shouldering Blubb aside he dropped on one knee and laid his ear to the rail and then, like a released Jack-in-a-box, straightened up, whipped out his timetable, and flicked through the thumb-printed pages.
Watching him at close range Blubb thought he was taken by a seizure. He went rigid and his eyes seemed to leap from their sockets as he whispered, “Oh, Christ! Sweet Christ, no!” and suddenly began to dance and gesticulate, screaming incoherently at the gang handling the baulk and then, when they stopped working and stared at him, breaking into a run down the track towards Headcorn and the coast.
A lifetime of coping with emergen
cies had equipped Blubb to make very quick assessments of evidence available to ears, eyes, and that sixth sense coachees had in abundance. He picked up the discarded timetable and ran his eye down the closely printed columns, noting that an up train, and a boat-train at that, was due to pass Headcorn not at five-twenty but at three-eleven. He groped for his watch, a cumbersome hunter that had once regulated journeys all over the country, noting that the hands pointed to nine minutes past three. With an oath that emerged like a belch he too began to run as the distant humming enlarged itself into a definite pattern of sound, the noise of an onrushing train travelling at maximum speed.
3
He first saw him as they passed in single file through the barrier to claim reserved seats in the first compartment of the last coach, a man of medium build in his mid-fifties, with a brown imperial and whiskers, and a high forehead that would have been recognisable anywhere in the civilised world.
He was moving leisurely up the platform, accompanied by two women in half-crinolines and there was absolutely no mistaking the profile, the slightly dandified clothes, the general impression conveyed by gait and gesture of an assurance close to arrogance. He said, gripping Henrietta's arm, “Good God, it's him! It's Dickens!” and when she said, vaguely, “Who, dear?” he turned on them all, his face red with excitement, and repeated “Dickens! Charles Dickens! The most famous man in the world!” and that made them all stare so that they blocked the wicket-gate and boat-passengers from the Channel packet began to jostle them from behind, and Deborah, the first to recognise the majesty of the occasion, squealed, “He's on our train, Uncle Adam! He's travelling on our train!” and she skipped ahead with such alacrity that he hissed, “Don’t stare so, Deborah. People don’t like to be stared at!” but he stared himself nevertheless, for it was something to look into the face of the creator of Sam Weller, Scrooge, Micawber, and so many others at a range of a few yards and discover, when you checked your seats, that you were occupying the compartment next-door.
They settled themselves in a flurry of excitement, his awe infecting them all, not excluding three-year-old Alexander, who demanded more information at the top of his voice and had to be shushed. Deborah said, settling him on her knee, “He's a famous story-teller, Alex, the most famous in the whole world. He's called Mr. Dickens, and Papa has a very high regard for him, haven’t you, Uncle Adam?” and Adam said he had more regard for him than for any writer alive and that he had read every word written by him. This was an exaggeration but an excusable one in the circumstances. Henrietta, who had never turned a page written by Charles Dickens, was more amused than awed, but it pleased her that the day should provide Adam with a bonus for she had always acknowledged what she thought of as his erudition. “How old is he, dear?” she asked, and Adam said he would be fifty-three, and when Henrietta said he looked older he told them that he had recently suffered a breakdown in health due to overwork, for he was regarded as the most prolific writer of the age.
The presence of so famous a man in the next compartment gave them something to talk about as far as Ashford but they were all sun-tired, and little Alexander took a nap, his fat limbs sprawled on Deborah's lap. “It's odd,” Adam said, “you remember it was only this morning I promised to introduce you to Dickens. I said I’d read him aloud to you next winter and, by George, I will, now that you’ve seen him. I’ll begin with Oliver Twist, for that's a striking picture of what goes on in the London underworld. Would you believe it? That chap in there sometimes walks about London all night unescorted looking for characters and material. They say he penetrates districts where no policeman would be seen alone. He's not simply a novelist, you see, he's concerned with all kinds of social abuses, and his books have done a great deal to make other people aware of them.” He was going to draw a parallel between Oliver Twist and Kingsley's recently published The Water Babies, that had roused public opinion over the plight of chimney sweeps, but checked himself just in time. It was not an occasion, he thought, to remind her of that incident, and he saw that he had not only her attention but Deborah's too and, through Deborah, the attention of little Stella, who was gazing up at her friend with eyes limpid with adoration. He thought, “I’m glad things have turned out as they have, and that child is making her home with us for good. Henrietta will approve, I’m sure, and Stella will be so excited that she’ll be sick the minute she learns of it.”
Pluckley flashed by and with Alex soundly asleep, and Henrietta dozing with her head resting on the cushion, the two girls began making holiday plans so that he forgot Dickens in favour of his wife. She looked, he thought, prettier than he ever recalled, with her copper hair trapping the sunlight where it swept in a soft curve from hat to dimpled chin. Odd, irrelevant images concerning her returned to him, like a review of family photographs in the brassbound album in the drawing room—Henrietta as he had first seen her, shin-deep in that peaty pool; Henrietta in ivory satin, standing beside him in the church at Keswick; Henrietta, scared but gallant, in that candlelit room at Ambleside, where he had first held her in his arms, and suddenly a rush of affection for her surged through him and he wished very much that the children were next-door closeted with the celebrity, so that he could slip his arm round her, and tell her how young and pretty she looked, and how eagerly he was anticipating the holiday they had planned.
Then, out of the tail of his eye, he saw the station of Headcorn flash past and a moment later became aware that the train was slowing down, not gradually, as if approaching a scheduled stop, but abruptly, as brakes were sharply applied, and at the same time he saw, on the track below, a man prancing about with a red flag, reminding him of a frenzied sepoy on the walls of Lucknow, and within seconds of his stupefied face being lost to view the carriage itself began to bounce and bucket like a horse out of control and they all seemed to be lifted out of their seats and caught up in a mad, senseless jumble of arms and legs and cascading luggage. Without in the least being aware of what had happened he saw Henrietta open her mouth in a soundless scream, and the bemused expression on his son's face as he was catapulted upwards from Deborah's lap, and after that a long, grinding jangle that obliterated everything, and a rush of suction that seemed to scoop them up and swill them around like so many leaves in a gale.
He did not relate all these astounding happenings to the train in which they were travelling, or indeed, to anything that had a place in the ordered scheme of things. They were bizarre, apocalyptic occurrences, associated with a gigantic natural disaster of some kind, a tidal wave, an earthquake, or possibly a thunderstorm more violent than any thunderstorm he had ever experienced. And they seemed to go on and on, with the noise getting more deafening, and the gyrations within the compartment ever more violent and complicated, and then, just as suddenly they ceased, or almost ceased, for rumblings and crackings and splinterings continued at a remove like the long, long echo of a thunderclap rolling away into the distance. Then, in the strange silence that followed, he was conscious of a pricking sensation in his cheek and lifted his hand to it, amazed to find that the fingers came away holding a dart of varnished wood about four inches long but feeling no pain and not even realising he was bleeding until he saw blood splash down on to some grey material level with his chin and realised, with sudden and shattering certainty, that the material was Henrietta's paletot, and that the gleaming point sticking through its folds like a lodged arrow was the ferule of her parasol.
Gradually his brain began to clear and he became aware of subdued uproar around him, an outcry quite distinct from the grinding, splintering cacophony that had preceded it, a sound issuing from human throats and lungs, a confused, wailing chorus of shouts and groans and screams, some half-heard, others heard at close range. His military reaction to disaster partially reasserted itself and he dashed the blood from his cheek and tried to stand upright, finding that it was possible, in spite of a variety of obstructions, sharp and solid, or soft and rounded. At last he got his head clear and the first thing he recognised was Deborah'
s head and shoulders, hunched and withdrawn, as though she was hugging something close to her body, and then he saw that she was cradling his son Alexander, hedged about by innumerable bundles and that Alex, too, had his mouth wide open in a scream.
The steady drip of blood from his cheek maddened him, for it made concentration very difficult, and he clutched at the material it was spotting and wiped it across his face, finding that his vision cleared and his brain with it, so that he could make some kind of attempt to adjust to the lunatic confusion of a carriage tipped almost at right-angles. He knew then, at least approximately, what had happened. The train in which they had been rattling along a few seconds before had all but disintegrated and when, reaching out for Deborah, his eyes came in line with the shattered window, he could look down on a field about fifteen feet below and see men scuttling in all directions, like a swarm of beetles exposed by an overturned stone. Between the window and the field was a wide baulkhead of timber, at least two feet thick and resting, so far as he could determine, on two brick piers that had supported it but there was no track to be seen. To the right, across a wide gap in a bridge, he could see the engine and tender still miraculously upright but listing slightly to one side and half-enveloped in steam. Behind it, and linked to it presumably, were three coaches, but between the last of these and the spot where his own coach hung suspended was the middle part of the train, a horrid jumble of timber and metal bridging the full width of a small river and already erupting with people, as though a whirlwind had stripped the roof and beams from a village street exposing everything that went on beneath thatch and tiles.
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