The Baghdad Railway Club

by Andrew Martin

  . . . And he did not clap when Short rose to his feet to give the vote of thanks to the speaker, and to say that next week’s talk would be on ‘Byways of Bradshaw – some curiosities of the railway timetable’. The War Relief collection was taken, and the audience filed out. But not the quiet man who’d given me the cigarette. He was talking to Downes, who at first was standing, painfully, with his stick, but the other politely urged him to sit down. It seemed that, in his quiet way, he had a good deal to say.

  I trooped down the stairs behind Short and his friend in the muffler, who said, ‘Shouldn’t all that have come under Official Secrets? It was a bit near-the-knuckle, anyhow. And did you hear that fellow sticking up for Johnny Turk? I suppose they “didn’t have any choice” about giving our boys what for in Gallipoli?’

  ‘Apparently’, said Short, ‘Mr Hayward does a very good skit about a rather dim fellow who comes up to London from the country, and buys a ticket for the Central Line on the Underground. He says to the clerk, “But there’s no destination stated.” “That’s correct,” says the clerk, “all our tickets are alike.” “But how,” says the rather dim fellow, “will I—”’

  ‘“. . . Will I know where I’m going?”’ put in the younger man. ‘It’s an old joke.’

  And he was still scowling.

  *

  In our third-floor room at the Midland Grand Hotel, the wife was looking down at the carpet with arms folded in disapproval.

  ‘You’d have thought it would be a fitted carpet,’ she said, kicking away at the end of it.

  I ought to have known that, given the chance to have a holiday in one of London’s premier hotels at someone else’s expense, she’d object. She was a snob like Dad – the trouble was, she was snobbish about his snobbery.

  ‘I think the rooms above have only got linoleum,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s no comfort to me,’ said the wife. She walked over to the window, and pulled back the curtain. ‘And what’s that?’ she said, looking down.

  ‘The Midland Road goods yard,’ I said. I’d been watching it myself from the window a moment before. Assorted lights burned down there: orange-glowing braziers, the red and green lamps of low signals. The pilot engine had been nudging a rake of twenty empty coal wagons, as though positioning them to the very inch, and the great gouts of steam that had come rolling up through the blackness had seemed to signify the tremendous brainwork involved rather than the mechanical effort.

  ‘Well we’ve got an excellent view of it,’ said the wife. ‘I suppose they’ll be shunting all night?’

  It was difficult to think of an answer to that, apart from ‘Yes’.

  It was a good room, I thought: the wallpaper was the colour of a sweet wrapper: red and green stripes, nicely offset by the black wrought-iron fireplace, where a strong fire burned.

  ‘What was the talk like?’ I enquired, for the wife had gone to a talk as well, on what we had decided would be the ‘cheap night’ of the three we were to spend in London.

  ‘It was called “Problems of the War”. And it was extremely rambling – went on for two hours.’

  She looked harder through the window. ‘I believe they’re just moving those wagons about for the sake of it. The problem of the war’, she said, sitting down on the bed with a sigh, ‘is the war.’

  The talk she’d attended had been given by some London sub-division of the Co-Operative Society. She worked for the Co-Operative Women’s Guild in York, and the movement generally was pushing for a scheme of food rationing. Since the Co-Operative stores did not make a profit (but redistributed income to their members), they could afford to come out against profiteering and unequal distribution of food. But the wife found the whole matter ‘a great bore’, and had admitted as much to me.

  The complications of war politics had drained away some of her radical energy. She was still part of the push for women’s suffrage, but her particular group had dropped most of their campaigning for the duration. She might go either way – towards the all-out anti-war camp of the Independent Labour Party, or into the bloody Conservative Party for all I knew. Certainly she was coaching up our boy, Harry, for the best of the York grammar schools; she’d been overjoyed when I’d received my commission, and when we’d booked into the hotel, and the clerk had said, ‘Mr Stringer, is it?’ she’d cut in, saying, ‘Captain . . . Captain Stringer.’

  She was now stretched out on the bed with her book. She was reading Little Women, and not for the first time. It was her protest book. If I saw it in her hand – it or The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw – then I knew I was in for the silent treatment. She was boycotting love-making – this ever since I’d been to the medical board and received the option of rejoining my unit in France or going for a four-month spell of officer training at a pleasant-sounding place in the countryside (for it seemed I could either learn how to be an officer, or just go off and be one). I had opted for the front.

  ‘You don’t want people to think I’m a shirker, do you?’ I’d said, to which the reply had come, ‘You’ve done your bit, Jim. You’ve got half a hundredweight of metal in your leg.’

  From the Midland Road goods yard came a repeated rapid clanging, and the pilot engine gave three shrieks of its whistle, as though in panic.

  ‘Let’s go for a drink,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’ said the wife, not looking up from Little Women.

  ‘Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s about a dozen bars downstairs.’

  ‘There are. There are about a dozen . . . And don’t call them bars.’

  But she’d put down her book.

  She got up and I watched her change her dress. When she’d finished, she said, ‘I’m not drinking alcohol, you know.’

  We went out of the room, along the corridor a little way and came to the great wide curving staircase. There were lifts at the Midland Grand, but the staircase was the big draw. It seemed to come down from the heavens, for the ceiling of the stairwell above was painted pale blue and decorated with gold stars. The balustrades were all fancy ironwork. Electric chandeliers swung over our heads as we descended past plaster carvings and assorted artworks. The hotel was like a cathedral in the days when they were still painted – a cathedral with electric light and giant steam radiators. Half the guests seemed to be treading the staircase and looking about in wonder, for nobody talked on the staircase. You got the idea that having descended, people turned about and ascended again, just for the thrill of it. About half the men on the staircase were in uniform, and most were with women. A fellow captain came towards me, and we smiled. The captain’s wife looked at my wife’s dress and vice versa. As we crossed with the other couple, the wife put her arm in mine – which meant that her dress had beaten her opponent’s.

  Piano music floated up from . . . was it the coffee lounge, or the men’s smoking room, or the women’s?

  ‘There’s a man in the billiard room’, I said, ‘who’s paid to chalk up the scores. He’s called Bartlett. He was in France himself and he stopped something at Loos. He has a lot of metal in him as well, and he says he gets a terrible pain whenever it’s foggy.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘How do I know what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . That he’s called Mr Bartlett.’

  ‘Because he introduces himself to the players before the game. If he just started chalking up your scores without introducing himself that would be rude.’

  ‘Is that all he does?’

  ‘He also puts up the war news in the Mahogany Room.’

  ‘Then let’s not go there.’

  We were just then coming around the final bend in the staircase so that the whole ground floor came into view, which was a series of islands, each one with its potted palm, a cluster of chairs . . . or perhaps just a small palm on a stand next to a single man in an armchair. Almost anything you could do in any of the lounges – smoke, drink, eat, read the paper – you could also do out here, on public show. As we stepped o
ff the staircase, a man in uniform, unaccompanied by a woman, stepped on to it – a dark, pleasant-looking, modest sort of chap with a cigarette held in long fingers and a rolled-up magazine under his arm. He gave the quickest of glances to the wife, but not to me, and only when he’d gone past did I identify him – and this by the particular tang of the cigarette smoke trailing behind him. It was the fellow from the Railway Club talk: the man who’d seemed to have a soft spot for Johnny Turk.

  I turned around, but he gave no glance back.

  On the ground floor, we drifted over towards the dining room and I read the menu mounted on the stand outside. The wife looked it over, and it was all a matter of ‘potages’, ‘poissons’, ‘relevés’, all in French. But then a man in a tail-coat blocked our view of it: ‘Will you be joining us‚ sir? Madam?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘we’ve already eaten.’

  I didn’t let on that we’d had steak and onions on the Euston Road, but the man smiled in such a way as to suggest that he knew anyway.

  ‘You should have said, “No thanks, we’ve already banqueted,”’ said the wife, as we drifted off.

  We went into one of the coffee lounges, where I told the wife she would be drinking alcohol, and ordered, at a cost of nine shillings, what turned out to be only a half bottle of champagne.

  ‘I thought the price was a bit too reasonable,’ said the wife, when it arrived on its tray, looking rather small – not that she took more than half a glass herself, but it was enough to get her started on a bit of York gossip.

  ‘You know that Mrs Knight-Squires is working as a tram driver?’

  ‘No, I did not.’

  I did know that Mrs Knight-Squires was a patron of the Co-Operative Society, even if she was too grand ever to shop at a Co-Operative store, and altogether the most unlikely socialist imaginable. I also knew that the York Council Transport Committee had been hoping to train up women to replace the men who’d gone off to France.

  ‘She passed a test, and they put her on directly. The number nine, you know, so she’s up and down the Hull Road all day.’

  ‘Lot of pubs on that route,’ I said, ‘pretty low ones as well.’

  The wife nodded, took a quick sip of champagne.

  ‘Doesn’t bother her in the slightest.’

  ‘But how does she cope with all the drunks?’

  ‘Well of course, she has a big strong conductor to deal with them,’ said the wife, ‘. . . her good friend Mrs Gwendolyn Richards.’

  She burst out laughing, and looked all around the coffee lounge; then she burst out laughing again, at the end of which she was rather red. After our drink, we took another turn through the entrance hall, and the islands of seats were more populated now.

  ‘Shall we go back up?’ said the wife, which was a promising remark.

  We closed once again on the foot of the staircase, and I noticed a strange little set-up that didn’t seem to have been there before. It was a wooden replica of an Arab’s tent, or something of the kind. It was brightly coloured, with a fairground look to it, and a dome on the top that finished in a point. The signs announced ‘Cigarettes from the East’, and ‘Coffee from the East’. A man stood inside the wooden tent. He wore a stripy tunic shirt that came down to his knees, with perfectly normal trousers and boots beneath. He was quite dark-skinned. Well, he was ‘from the East’ (I supposed).

  ‘Coffee?’ he said, ‘cigarettes . . . from the Biblical lands?’

  I was about to decline, but he pressed the matter.

  ‘For after dinner, perhaps? I trust you are enjoying your stay, sir?’

  There was nothing of the East about his actual voice, as far as I could make out, but in the form of words there may have been.

  I shook my head. ‘Thanks awfully, but . . .’ He half bowed at me, and we walked on.

  ‘I don’t think there are many cigarettes smoked in the Bible,’ said the wife, as we began to climb the stairs. ‘But then again, that man is a Mohammedan.’

  ‘Not a real one,’ I said.

  ‘I think he is,’ she said; ‘I was wandering about on the top floor this morning, and I saw him.’

  The top floor was where most of the staff had their rooms.

  ‘What were you doing up there?’

  ‘Wandering about – I told you. He was kneeling on the floor and facing that direction,’ she said, pointing.

  ‘King’s Cross station,’ I said.

  ‘Mecca, you idiot.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know.’

  The drink did its work, and we had our tumble on the bed. It was a very good bed, being well sprung, and the fire had been banked up while we’d been downstairs. The goods yard had not gone away though (I had glanced down and seen that they were now moving great quantities of beer barrels) and the pilot engine, which seemed to be very badly fired, would repeatedly blow off its excess steam. I’d thought, or hoped, that I had so transported the wife that she hadn’t noticed the racket, but at the moment we concluded the business, she said, ‘What is going on down there, Jim?’

  She got off to sleep pretty quickly even so, whereas I could not. The comfort of the room only brought to mind its opposite: the Western Front . . . or maybe the noise of the goods yard had stirred something up. Anyhow I kept imagining what a five-nine crump might do to the spires and pinnacles of the hotel.

  I lay awake for the best part of an hour before deciding to return downstairs.

  *

  The clock gave a single chime as I put on my suit. There were still a fair few on the staircase, but now they were all coming up – men and women in beautiful clothes, smiling and walking with a sleepy trudge. I went against the tide, with my right hand on the banister. (With memories of the front, my right hand had begun to shake, and I held the banister to steady it.)

  At the foot of the staircase, I turned and saw the Eastern gentleman – the real Mohammedan – standing outside his tent-like quarters. He held a looped cord on which hung a couple of dozen small metal coffee cups, and he was speaking to the man who had been at the Railway Club, the man with the weird brand of smokes, which I now saw must have been purchased from the Mohammedan, with whom he seemed on the best of terms. He – the Mohammedan – was smiling, and he seemed to say, ‘You are right, my shepherd, you are perfectly right,’ and the other – who still held his magazine – was nodding and colouring up, as though embarrassed at being in the right.

  I observed this from across the lobby, in which only one or two of the islands were now populated. The man from the Railway Club happened to glance my way, and I knew that he now did recognise me, and at this for some reason he coloured deeper. It may have been just shyness, but he seemed somehow helpless at that moment. I felt it would be impossible to walk away from him, even though I also knew he would not necessarily welcome an approach. But I did approach, at which the coffee-and-cigarette man said something in a low voice to my quarry, and moved away.

  ‘Shepherd,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We were at the Railway Club earlier.’

  He was a handsome fellow in the later thirties or early forties, slightly built, with crinkly dark hair. I gave him my own first name, but ‘James’ instead of Jim. He gave every indication of being a high-ranking officer. I had him down as a major at least, but it didn’t do to ask.

  ‘Thanks for the cigarette,’ I said. ‘A very decent smoke . . . It came from there, I suppose?’ I said, indicating the Eastern tent.

  Shepherd nodded, but said nothing. Was it a social mistake for a fellow to show knowledge of where another fellow bought his cigarettes? Shepherd was perhaps on the point of utterance when the man who’d occupied the kiosk swept across the lobby towards the front door, having collected his coat from somewhere. (It was a blue greatcoat – nothing in the least Mohammedan about either it or his grey felt hat.)

  Seeing me looking at the man, Shepherd said, smiling, ‘His name isn’t . . . Abdullah, you know?’

  I thought: I never said it was.

  ‘
Care for a drink?’ he said, and I saw that this was the way of it with the man Shepherd: he was shy but well mannered. He would try to make up for any display of shyness, or the awkwardness consequent upon it, with a generous offer.

  A quick inspection of the lounges off the lobby told us that the Mahogany Room was the only one still boasting a fire. A dozen men sat in there, smoking hard. The first chairs we came to were set either side of a low table, and I could see Shepherd thinking, If we sit there, I will be interrogated, but we took those seats anyway. Shepherd set down his magazine, which unfurled itself to reveal . . . well, of course it was a copy of The Railway Magazine – the February 1917 number, I had it myself at home. He took his cigarettes from his top pocket and again offered me one. He set down the packet on the table. There was some writing in a foreign script, and a picture of a dark-skinned man in a fez hat walking through a pale-coloured desert at night with a rather paler woman in a red dress at his side. The man’s fez was the same shade of red as the woman’s dress. In the sky above hung a crescent moon and four stars. A waiter came; we ordered brandies (I didn’t care for spirits myself, but I knew they were the right thing to have, late on in a good hotel), and then sat back for an interval, blowing smoke and smiling. I was trying to look like an officer. Shepherd had no trouble in that regard, yet his shyness – or something else – prevented him from opening the conversation.

  We both found that we were contemplating the magazine. The covers of The Railway Magazine were always either blue or green, and this one was green. Across the top of it – as usual – was an advertisement for ‘The United Flexible Metallic Tubing Company Limited. Works: Ponders End, Middlesex.’

  Shepherd put his hand towards it, saying, ‘Good old Railway Mag.’

  ‘I have it on subscription,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ Shepherd said, blushing again.

  . . . But having said this, he once again blushed, which suggested there was something shameful in it after all. Yet there couldn’t be if Shepherd did it. I was promoting him in my mind as the seconds went by. Only a lieutenant colonel – say – could afford to be so awkward.