In one corner of the board was a space for notices of a more general nature. A seven-roomed house was for sale in Scarborough: 'In splendid condition – large garden.' My eye ran on to the notice directly beneath: 'PREPARE FOR A RAINY DAY!' I didn't read that, but moved directly to the one below.
Paradise Guest House. All rooms excellent and nicely furnished. Baths, hot and cold water. Sea views. Five minute walk from station. Railway men always welcome, cheap rates for short or long stay. Apply Miss Rickerby at Paradise Guest House, 3 Bright's Cliff, Scarborough.
Miss Rickerby – she sounded a respectable enough party. A picture composed in my mind of a thin, jittery woman who almost outdid her white dress for paleness, but I realised I'd called to mind a Mrs Riccall, who worked in the pharmacy on Nunnery Lane, York, and was known to the wife. Just then Tommy Nugent came limping into the vestibule.
'Well, I'm finally shot of it,' he said, meaning the J Class. 'I've told 'em we'll come back in the morning about ten to see what's what.'
'We'll try to,' I said. 'It all depends on events.' Tommy stood still under the gas with his cap in his hand, and he made his eyes go wide, and blew upwards, which
caused his curly hair to move.
'Quick wash and brush-up, then Paradise it is!' he said.
I didn't show him the notice posted by or on behalf of Miss Rickerby because I'd finally worked out what was making him talk at such a rate: Tommy Nugent was spoiling for a scrap, and I didn't doubt he'd prove a brave man if it came to it. But that didn't mean he didn't have the wind up.
Chapter Thirteen
I might have been sleeping in my metal quarters as I heard the sound of a bell amid the sea roar and the creaking iron. It might have been the bell that woke me. There came another, and I counted five strokes in all. Were we within earshot of a coastal church?
No, the bells were floating along with us; we had made away with them, carried them off. They rang them for the watches, and five strokes did not mean five o'clock. I thought again of the run to Scarborough, and how I ought to have known not to head for the sea. I figured a boat approaching the Scarborough harbour, lurching on the waves like a. drunkard; I called to mind the clock tower above Scarborough railway station, white against the Scarborough night, a foreign look to it somehow. I thought of the porter who was keen to lock the station gate, as though he had secret and illegal business to conduct there; I saw a heap of razors, safetys and cut-throats, and a hot bluish room. I saw again the gigantic needle hanging in the air. I began to count, and the needle faded.
The station clock tower came up once more, and I knew I had a brain injury of some sort – a concussion perhaps – because I could not see why a station would have a clock, leave alone a clock tower? It was asking for trouble, because the clock would only prove the trains wrong. I adjusted my position against the chain. No. It was churches that had clocks in the main, but why did churches have clocks? They did not operate trains. They were not in the business of time, quite the opposite really. But they did have them, and that was fact. It seemed to me that my brain was befuddled as before, but I was no longer subject to the flashes of electricity, and the sea was perhaps a little calmer. The violent rocking had been replaced with a calmer up and down, like a great breathing.
More visions came. I saw in my mind's eye an oil lamp burning red, a gas bracket giving a shaking white light.
I saw a knife polisher on a kitchen table, a packet containing rat poison and again the lamp burning red, as though by thinking of light, I might create light.
The chain room was darker than when I had been put into it. A tiny amount of moonlight came down through the hole that the chain went through, and this only illuminated the remainder of the chain. There was no mystery about where the thing went. It was not the Indian rope trick. This was the anchor chain – it ran up to the windlass on the fore-deck – and I had a suspicion that the anchoring of the boat, the end of the voyage, would be the end of me as well, because there would be policemen where we ended, and law and order generally – and the Captain meant to avoid that. Yes, it would be very dangerous even to sight land, because it would remind the Captain and the Mate that they would have to account to someone for holding me prisoner and I did not think they were over- keen to do that.
I was too bloody cold.
I sat against the chain and pulled the tarpaulin around me. I was supposed to be becoming a solicitor, a notion that seemed more than ever mysterious. I tried to recall having done some lawyering but could not. I had stood up many times in the police court but only as a policeman-witness. I had meant to be going into a quiet office over- looking the sleeping wagons of the old station, but there had evidently been a change of plan, and I would be going to the North Pole instead.
Running my hand over the tarpaulin, it came to me that it was not smooth as a tarpaulin ought to be, and it did not have the tar smell that generally came off a tarp. The smell in the chain locker was paint and oil, and I wondered whether it might serve as a sail locker as well. I swept my hand again over the canvas – for that's what it was – and found the thing I was after before I knew I was looking for it: a stretch of rope. I could not find the end of it and for all I knew it was longer than the anchor chain, but a length of it between my hands made a weapon. I sat back holding the rope and feeling there would be no half measures from now on. When the grey Dutchman came back, I would be on him; I would be on him quicker than thinking.
But after a while I set down the rope. It was too cold to hold. A short interval of time later, I pulled the oilskin more tightly around me, and made also to wrap myself in the great sheet, which might have been a sailor might have been something else again, but as I counted the faint ringing of a further six bells, it didn't seem to matter one way or another, and the only thing to do was to give in to the darkness, the rise and fall and the deep cold, and to sleep.
Chapter Fourteen
We had a scrub-down in the engine shed wash room. Then we walked back to the station along a cinder track, and climbed up onto Platform One. We exited the station through the main gates that a porter stood ready to padlock. It was only just gone seven, but he was shutting up shop. It was depressing, somehow, that a fair-sized station like this should close so early.
I said to the porter, 'Leslie White, our guard… has he come by?'
'Ten minutes since,' he replied.
With the station behind us, we stood at the top of Valley Bridge Road. A few wagons rolled through the streets but there were no trams to be seen, and precious few people.
Turning towards Tommy, I said, 'Paradise is on Bright's Cliff – it's on the south side, off Newborough.'
'Not far, is it?' he enquired, as we began to walk.
He came to Scarborough a lot but evidently did not leave the station very much. I mended my pace to his as we made our way along the dark canyon of the Valley Road. Tall houses stood a little way off on either side, beyond the Valley Gardens. They were beautifully tended, those gardens – and famous for it – but now they were enclosed in darkness. Halfway along, the sea came into view below us, with the white of the wave tops standing out clearly on the black water.
'It's getting up,' said Tommy, when he drew level with me.
He'd expected the sea to be quiet, like the town.
The tide was coming in, and the waves were like an invasion sweeping right up to the empty Promenade. The Grand Hotel was in view high on our left, the four turrets making it look like a great castle – a fortress against the sea. Lights shone at barely a quarter of the windows. The flags on the roof were all stretched out to the utmost by the sea wind.
'Bright's Cliff is on the other side of it,' I said. 'We've come a bit out of our way.'
'Oh, wait a bit,' said Tommy. 'I'm missing a bloody bag.'
