Читать книгу Westmorland Alone - Ian Sansom - Страница 13

I THINK I’D KNOWN IT from the moment of the crash, but it was too difficult to comprehend. She looked so perfect. She looked unharmed. She lay on her back, looking up at the grey-blue sky. She could have been cloudwatching.

I don’t talk about it unless I’ve drunk a bit – a lot – and even then I don’t tell the full story. I never mention Lucy. I find ways to avoid it, to circumvent it, as I have always found ways to circumvent everything in my life. Finally writing it all down, I suppose, writing all this down, however feeble and forgettable it may seem, however anodyne and nostalgisome – one of Morley’s favourite words, one he’d invented, I assume – is just a way of reassuring myself that it all really happened, and that it really meant something, that everything was linked together, that it wasn’t nothing, and that it wasn’t waste, that she mattered, that we all mattered. Morley’s County Guides were designed as a bold celebration of England and Englishness: my recollections, I suppose, are some kind of minor, lower-case companion. If the County Guides are a scenic railway ride then my own work is the scene of the crash.

So, first we were gathered in Appleby Station, us survivors, our wounds tended in the waiting rooms, and a cup of tea for our troubles, and then we were escorted to various hotels in and around the town to give our statements and to be offered shelter for the night. We were billeted at the Tufton Arms Hotel, right in the centre of the town, down past some railwaymen’s cottages and across the River Eden. It was a short walk but it seemed like a long way, a desperate journey: some people in a hurry, some people going slowly; and many come to gawk at us; all of Appleby, it seemed, had come to find out about the crash. The police did their best to keep them away, but it was impossible to separate bystanders from survivors: we were all jammed together, shuffling forward as one. The only way you could tell the passengers from the locals was that the passengers all looked strangely alike, with that expression of surprise and horror from the moment when the crash had occurred.

‘I’ve not seen it like this since t’fair,’ said one woman, as I jostled my way past.

‘Folk turning out to gawk,’ said another. ‘T’ should be ashamed.’

People were not ashamed, but they were baffled, just as we were baffled. ‘What happened?’ came the endless murmur. ‘What happened?’

Lucy’s mother with her baby walked on up ahead of me, weeping. I made no attempt to go to her, to comfort her or to apologise: I simply lowered my head and walked on.

In Spain I had often suffered exactly the feeling of that afternoon in Appleby: of arriving in a strange town, and not quite knowing or understanding what was happening, and with the knowledge and feeling of already having done something terribly wrong, so that the whole place seemed alien and unkind, a foreign land inhabited by foreign people suffering their uniquely foreign woes in their uniquely foreign ways. According to Morley in the County Guides, Appleby is renowned for its beautiful main street, ‘more Parisian boulevard than English High Street’ but I must admit that on that first day I did not much notice its beauty, and which particular Parisian boulevard Morley had in mind is not entirely clear, since there are none, to my knowledge, that are furnished with butchers, bakers, chandlers, haberdashers, gentlemen’s outfitters, greengrocers and pubs; Paris, for all its allurements, is no real comparison for a prim and proper English county town. A finer and – as it turns out – more fitting comparison for Appleby might be with a Wild West frontier town, in florid English red stone.

The Tufton Arms Hotel had seen better days, though it was difficult to say exactly when those days had been. It was a sad sort of place: scuffed, worn moquette carpets, cheap and pointless marquetry, cracked clerestory lights, plush, dusty furniture; like a vast dull first-class carriage. The hotel bar was the centre of operations. Tea urns had been set out on some of the tables, and plates of bakery buns. There was much bustling and much organising being done: volunteers from the local Band of Hope had somehow appeared, with their own banner, and had positioned themselves in the hotel lobby, arranging places for people to stay, and drawing up lists and matching locals with passengers; the Women’s Institute were doling out the tea and buns; and the police had settled themselves in to conduct interviews. Morley later wrote in praise of the scene as a ‘model of modest English efficiency’. It may have been. It may have been a demonstration of all that is best in the human spirit, a triumph of calm over distress and of civilisation over human wretchedness. All I know is that it was thoroughly depressing and that I was desperate to get away. I needed a drink.

‘Yes, sir?’ asked the barman – one of those old-style hotel barmen, a professional barman, a middle-aged gent, spruce and natty, in a tight little tie and a bottle-green waistcoat. He might just as easily be a town councillor or a greengrocer.

‘Whisky, please.’

‘So, were you in the crash?’ he asked. My torn jacket and bloodied shirt, the bump on my head, and the ragged trousers must have been a give-away. I didn’t answer. ‘Very good, sir. Drinks are on the house for anyone who was in the crash.’

‘In that case make it a double,’ I said.

‘There’ll be no trains in or out for a week, I reckon,’ continued the barman, as he was examining the bottles behind the bar. ‘So I reckon we’ll be getting through a lot of port and lemon.’ He nodded towards the crowd around the bar, mostly women. ‘So, Scotch: we’ve got Haig, Black and White, or Macnish’s Doctor’s Special. Irish, I’m afraid we’ve only Bushmills or …’ He held up a full bottle of Irish whiskey. ‘Bushmills.’

‘I’ll take a Bushmills then.’ I had converted to Bushmills at one of Delaney’s places: he served only Irish whiskey, his famous gin fizz, and other drinks even more distinctly suspect and of no discernible provenance.

‘There was a little girl killed,’ he said. ‘Is that right?’

I said nothing. I drank the whiskey and ordered another. And then another.

I could see her face in the mirror behind the bar. I could see her smile. I could feel her hand holding mine. I could hear her asking questions. She seemed to be everywhere. But the more I drank the quieter she became. I also took a pinch or two of Delaney’s powders – and eventually she was silent.

Morley, hectic and inquisitive as ever, had conveniently situated himself at the far end of the table at which the police had made their makeshift headquarters – the perfect location for a quiet spot of eavesdropping. He was armed with a cup of black tea, and was busy with his pen writing in one of his tiny German waistcoat-pocket-sized notebooks. He had about him his usual glow. Miriam was smoking and surveying the room with a look of pity and disgust. I sat down with them. I felt sick.

‘Ah, Sefton,’ said Morley. ‘The hero of the hour.’

‘Hardly,’ I said.

‘Come, come, we’ve heard all about your exploits, dragging people from their carriages and what have you, saving lives—’

I got up to leave, but Miriam gripped my arm and forced me to sit back down.

‘He’s had a shock, Father. Best to leave it.’

‘Of course!’ said Morley. ‘Yes, of course, quite upsetting.’

‘I wonder actually if, in the circumstances, we should perhaps call a halt to the book, Father,’ said Miriam.

‘Agreed,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Morley, to my surprise. ‘Perhaps we should.’

‘Really?’ said Miriam.

‘Till tomorrow morning, perhaps?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Otherwise we would slip very far behind in our schedule, Miriam.’

‘Our schedule,’ I said, with contempt.

‘Is something wrong, Sefton?’ asked Morley.

‘Father,’ said Miriam, coming to my rescue. ‘I was thinking we should perhaps take a longer break?’

‘Agreed. Again,’ I said.

‘A longer break?’ In all my years with Morley I rarely saw him riled or succumbing to petty rages, but this suggestion made him spiteful. ‘Do you both want us to give up then?’ said Morley. ‘Just because there’s been a train crash?’

‘No,’ said Miriam slowly, as if speaking to an ignorant child. ‘But you’re right: there has been a train crash.’

‘And what on earth do you propose doing when real disaster occurs?’ asked Morley. ‘As it surely will.’

‘Real disaster?’ I said.

‘A war, or a famine? Another Spanish flu? A crash is an accident. It may be a tragedy. But it is not, strictly speaking, a disaster. Do you know what a disaster is?’

‘I think I do,’ I said.

‘Has there been great loss of life?’

‘A little girl died, Father!’ said Miriam.

‘Which is tragic, but as I say, it is not—’

I moved to get up again and again Miriam held me back.

‘I’m sorry but I have no intention of continuing to work with you on this book at this time, Mr Morley,’ I said.

‘And I have no intention of allowing you to give up our enterprise at this time, Sefton, simply because of misfortune. Would any great art ever have been created if we had given up because of some setback? Did any of us give up what we were doing during the Great War? Did I give up when my son and my wife—’

‘And did I give up when in Spain—’

‘Boys! Please!’ said Miriam, slapping the table with both hands. ‘I have no intention of allowing you two to bicker like children. Of course Sefton won’t be giving up on the project, will you, Sefton?’ She glared fiercely at me.

‘Well, it rather sounds like it to me,’ said Morley. ‘Tu ne cèdes.’

‘We are not talking about giving up, Father. But I do think we might at least pause in our endeavours until the tragic matters here are in some way resolved.’

Morley huffed. I gazed distractedly around the room.

‘You know you can be terribly insensitive sometimes,’ said Miriam.

‘Insensitive?’ cried Morley. ‘Me? Insensitive?’

Fortunately – before I walked off, or struck Morley for his self-righteous stupidity – our conversation was interrupted by a young man who had sidled over, obviously intent on talking to us. He looked as though he might be a butcher’s boy: his face was flushed, and he had that soft, odd, awkward manner of someone more at home with animals than with humans. He was not in fact though a butcher’s boy: he was a reporter from the Westmorland Gazette. (Morley, who had of course started out as a muck-raking journalist, had little time for practitioners of his previous profession. In private he referred to them unflatteringly as ‘Gobbos’, after Shakespeare’s word-mangling idiot in The Merchant of Venice. In Morley’s Defence of the Realm (1939) he describes journalists as ‘allowed fools, paid to express contempt for people, politics, religion and society as a whole’. Over the years he described journalists variously to me as ‘vampires’, ‘grave-robbers’, ‘cutpurses’, but also as ‘the just’, as ‘valiant heroes’, and as ‘seekers after the truth’. His feelings and ideas were often inconsistent and contradictory.)

‘The Westmorland Gazette!’ cried Morley. ‘Of course! Thomas De Quincey’s old paper, is it not?’

‘I believe so, sir, yes.’

‘Founded when?’

‘I’m not entirely sure, sir.’ The young chap’s red-flushed cheeks flushed all the redder.

‘Don’t know when? You write for the newspaper and you don’t know when it was founded?’

‘No, sir.’ The poor fellow had round, pleading eyes.

‘Do you know the date of your mother’s birthday?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And your father’s?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I rest my case,’ said Morley, though exactly which case he was resting I was not entirely sure. His metaphors and analogies were not always entirely clear or helpful. ‘I think you’ll find it was established in 1818.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘“Sorry, sir”?’ cried Morley, almost knocking over his cup of tea. ‘“Sorry, sir”? A little more gumption wouldn’t go amiss, young man. I’m not at all sure you’re cut out for this business. Well, do you have any questions for us?’

The young man began frantically flicking through his notebook.

‘Wordsworth one of the original backers, I think?’ said Morley. ‘Was he not?’

‘Of?’

‘The paper, man!’

‘I’m not sure, sir—’

‘Everybody knows it was Wordsworth! Late Wordsworth. Reactionary Wordsworth. Prefer the young Wordsworth myself, but never mind. And De Quincey was the first editor, I believe – or the second? – though he was so drugged with his laudanum that he refused to go to the office. Still the case with your current editor?’

‘Not as far as I’m aware, sir, no.’

‘And does the paper still take the Tory line?’

‘I’m not sure, sir.’

‘You’re not sure?’

‘I’ve only just started work at the paper, sir.’

‘Well, you’ll not be working there long at this rate, will you, man? Original motto of the paper?’

‘Erm …’

‘“Truth we pursue, and court Decorum: What more would readers have before ’em?” Rather good, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And do you pursue Truth and court Decorum, young man?’

‘I suppose I do, sir.’

‘Well, that’s a start, I suppose,’ said Morley. ‘Offices where, in Kendal?’

‘Yes, sir. On Stricklandgate.’

’You are a lucky young fellow. Probably the finest patch for a newspaper man in the whole of England, the Westmorland Gazette. From the hill farms of the Yorkshire Dales in the east to Furness in the west, and Helvellyn in the north to Morecambe Bay in the south …’

‘I suppose so, sir, yes.’

‘You suppose? You suppose? Well then, ask another question, man!’ Morley produced a pocket egg-timer and placed it on the table. ‘You’ve got three minutes.’

‘I just wondered if you’d give me a quote, sir, about the rail crash, and your role in—’

‘Give you a quote? One doesn’t give quotes, young man. People speak, and one shapes their words, like a mother bear licking a cub into shape.’

‘Well, if you wouldn’t mind—’

‘I am reminded of the words of the great Dean Swift, sir: “For life is a tragedy, wherein we sit as spectators awhile, and then act our part in it.”’

‘Is that a quote?’

‘It’s a quote of a quote.’

‘Ah.’

‘Just write it down,’ said Miriam. ‘It’ll do.’

‘I’m afraid I cannot comment on the accident until the police have conducted their investigation and compiled their accident report,’ added Morley. ‘Next question?’

‘Is it true that the train was speeding, and that—’

‘I refer you to my previous answer. Next question!’

‘Is it true that you rescued a number of people from the carriages?’

‘I can make no such claim. The person who did so is my assistant, Stephen Sefton, who is— Sefton?’

I had made myself scarce, slipping away from the table and behind Morley to the bar. I had absolutely no desire to hear him engage in Socratic dialogue with some poor young reporter from the Westmorland Gazette, and even less desire to appear in the Westmorland Gazette.

‘Sefton?’ called Morley across the packed room. I was only a few yards away, but the crowd was dense. ‘Sefton?’ I made no response. ‘He’s probably gone to get another drink. Do you indulge?’ he asked the boy reporter.

‘Indulge?’

‘In drink?’ said Morley.

‘Well, I have occasionally—’

‘Don’t,’ said Morley. ‘The best advice I can give anyone is the same advice my father gave me as a young man: don’t smoke, drink or fornicate, and never bring the police to the door.’

Such advice was too late for me, alas: I was already busy with another Bushmills and was immersing myself in the day’s Times, looking for news of the police searching for a man following an assault outside Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court. There was nothing that I could find. I sank the whiskey.

‘Three minutes!’ I heard Morley announce, snatching up his egg-timer. ‘That’s your lot, boy. You’re really going to have to work on that interview technique.’

The poor boy reporter got up and left, and I returned safely to the table.

While all this was going on the policemen at the other end of our table were conducting interviews with passengers: I knew that sooner or later they were going to want to interview me. I was dreading the moment. I had too much to say to them without making any admissions or speaking any untruths. They were a typically unlikely and unprepossessing bunch of country coppers: one of them had big ears like wingnuts, almost like a character in a children’s comic; another was broad and squat, almost square, and was busy writing everything down, though it looked rather as though he was unaccustomed to handling a pen; and the third, clearly the most senior officer, had a bald head and a bottle-brush moustache, and he kept scratching at his rather scraggy neck and rubbing a hand across his brow, as though trying to soothe his troubled mind. Passengers were ushered before this trio by a formidable woman in a shop coat called Mrs Sweeton who seemed to have appointed herself as official usher. ‘Thank you, Mrs Sweeton,’ the senior policeman would regularly pronounce. ‘Next, Mrs Sweeton.’ I rather fancied that they knew each other very well. The passengers gave their statements and then were ushered away again. ‘Thank you, Mrs Sweeton. Thank you, Mrs Sweeton.’

Morley was clearly keeping a keen and close eye on all this, and as I sat back down at the table he shushed me and indicated to me with his hand that I should sit and be quiet, attend to the conversations, and take notes. Another man was being ushered before the police – but this was no passenger.

The crowd in the bar parted as he was escorted to the table by two gentlemen dressed in LMS uniforms, like captains of the guard – thick black blazers, emblazoned caps and shiny brass buttons. I had seen the man they were escorting at the scene of the crash, frantically rushing first to the front of the train and then back to the rear. He was tall and good-looking, with high cheekbones, and though smartly turned out in his own LMS uniform he looked terribly afraid and uncertain.

‘He’s dishy,’ said Miriam to me, as he sat down at the table: he was the sort of young man, I thought, who might easily attract the wrong sort of woman.

A total hush fell over the thronging crowd.

It was George Wilson, the Appleby signalman.