faint tinkling through the iron walls, and I could not keep count of the strokes. My pillow was a link of the anchor chain, and it served as well as goose feathers. My trouble was the cold, and I would ward it off by ordering myself to sleep which I seemed able to do at will. They hadn't drugged my coffee on my first trip to the chart room, I had decided. Instead, I had picked up a sleeping sickness as a result of whatever had happened at Paradise.
The house came and went in my dreams along with all the old familiars: the red-shaded oil lamp, the over- heated blue room, the roaring white gas, the magician with his kettle, the long needle. In addition, a man with puffed-up feet scrambled about on the bathroom floor for blood tonic, and the poor fellow was cutting himself to ribbons in the process, being quite desperate. A voice spoke in my head, a smooth character sent to explain my own thoughts to me said, 'You see, Jim, he was the last man left in Scarborough.'
Nobody walked the Prom; the lighthouse was dark; the two carriages of the funicular railway stood dangling out of reach, neither up nor down; each of the three hundred and sixty-five rooms of the Grand Hotel – one for every day of the year – stood empty, and drifting black smoke had possession of the town. The sea had come all the way up to the railway station. It was exploring the excursion platforms and the engine shed beyond. I saw the wax doll in the lavender room, the blue flame of the paraffin heater, and a paper fan that, when folded out, revealed a painting of a sea-side town that was not Scarborough but showed Scarborough up, put it to shame, this one being sunlit, with handsome people walking along a pretty promenade, and a light blue sea beyond.
All at once I was there, with my own wife and my new wife, who chatted away merrily, which I knew to be wrong, and which did cause me anxiety, but I put it from my mind for I was away from Scarborough in an altogether better sea-side spot, at least for a while. Scarborough waited for me, however, and I knew I would have to go back there, to examine the disaster that had befallen the place and to account for it and to answer for it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Walking down the stairs towards the comfortable landing with my boots in my hand, I revolved the words of Theo Vaughan. Were they true? He must know that I could hardly check by asking Fielding himself.
He had, according to Vaughan, been lagged for raising funds for a publishing company that didn't exist. It went down as fraud. It hadn't been such a great amount of money, and it had all been repaid so he'd only got three months. Vaughan had once had the newspaper clipping that told the whole tale, but he'd lost it (which went a little way to his credit, I thought, since it seemed to mean he didn't have a plan to use the information, but would just blurt it out as the fancy took him).
The prison sentence explained Fielding's presence in Paradise, according to Vaughan. He'd always been keen on the sea, and had come to Scarborough to catch his breath after the shock. He found the house to his liking, if a little low class, and had taken it in hand; set himself to raising the tone with fancy recipes, a few sea paintings here and there, cigars in the ship room, sherry in the evenings. He'd put some money into the house too, and was largely paying the cost of the redecoration of the second floor, for the prosecution had not finished him financially speaking.
I approached the kitchen, and the door was on the jar, letting me see the long table. All the items upon it were a bit better ordered now, and stood in a row: knife polisher, big tea pot, vegetable boiler, corkscrew, toast rack, two dish covers. The kitchen had been cleaned, and the supper things put away. Adam Rickerby had done it, I knew. He liked things orderly. That youth now sat at one end of the table, applying Melton's Cream to a pair of women's boots – his sister's evidently – and she was reading to him from a newspaper with a glass of red wine at her elbow. She was certainly a little gone with drink, but she spoke very properly.
'Interview with foreign secretary,' she read, and took a sip of the wine. 'Sir Edward Grey had an interview with Mr Asquith at 10 Downing Street this morning…'
'Where?' her brother asked, quite sharply, as though the matter was of particular importance to him.
'10 Downing Street,' his sister repeated, before carrying on reading. 'The interview was unusually prolonged. Sir Edward Grey remained at 10 Downing Street for just over an hour and a half.'
She turned the page of the paper, and Adam Rickerby sat back and thought about what he'd heard for a moment. He then took up a brush, and began polishing the boot, saying, 'Any railway smashes?'
'No,' his sister replied very firmly.
'Runaway trams?' he enquired, with spittle flying.
'Nothing of that kind,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'How lovely to see our Mr Stringer,' she ran on, looking up at me. But as I walked over to her brother and handed him my boots, she turned two pages of the paper in silence.
I heard soft footsteps behind me. They belonged to Fielding, who was approaching in dressing gown and slippers with his own boots in his hand.
'Have you been to Eastbourne, Mr Stringer?' Miss Rickerby asked, looking up from her paper as I gave my boots to the boy.
'Eastbourne in Sussex?' I enquired.
'Well, I don't think there's another.'
'Is there something about it in the paper?'
'Are you avoiding my question?' she asked. She smiled, but looked tired.
'I've never been there,' I said. 'I just wondered why you mentioned it.'
Fielding, having given his boots to the boy, was lifting the kettle that sat on the range, pouring boiling water into a cup and stirring.
'Ovaltine,' he said, seeing me looking on. 'Would you care for a cup, Mr Stringer?'
'Oh, no thanks.'
The stuff was meant to bring on sleep, and Fielding must have made it every night, for Miss Rickerby paid him no mind as he went about it. She said, 'Eastbourne is the one place I prefer to Scarborough, Mr Stringer.'
'Well, I wouldn't know,' I said, and then I thought of something clever to add: 'But this is Paradise. How can there be any advance on that?'
'Oh, I should think there could be,' she said. 'Probably quite easily.'
Adam Rickerby was polishing Fielding's boots, going at them like billy-o.
'Don't denigrate the house, Miss R,' said Fielding, with the cup in his hand. 'Eastbourne is fine though.'
'Told you,' Amanda Rickerby said, addressing me.
'Debussy wrote La Mer at the Grand Hotel there,' said Fielding, and since he was addressing me particularly I nodded back, in a vague sort of way. 'Then again it's a shingle beach and you can't sit on it… Good night all, and batten down the hatches. We're in for a storm, I believe. You should take a look at the size of the waves getting up just now, Mr Stringer.'
He quit the room, and I too made towards the door when Amanda Rickerby spoke.
'It's late, Mr Stringer,' she said, looking sadly down at her wine glass. 'I believe that Sunday has already gone.' And then, in a glorious moment, she raised her eyes to mine: 'Have you had your treat yet?'
'I had a bottle of beer in Mr Vaughan's room. Does that count?'
'I'm not at all sure that it does.'
'Have you had yours?'
'No.'
'Well then,' I said, 'that makes two of us.'
I glanced over at Adam Rickerby, who'd finished my first boot. What he made of this exchange between a near-stranger and his sister I could hardly imagine. He was polishing hard.
'I'm obliged to you for doing that,' I called across to him.
'I'll bring 'em up in t'morning,' he said, not looking up.
I walked through the doorway, and Amanda Rickerby rose from her seat and followed. She wasn't done with me yet, and I knew I was red in the face.
'When you go to bed, Mr Stringer…'
'Yes?' I said.
'Oh… nothing.'
She wore an expression that I could not understand.
'Why does your brother want to know about railway smashes?' I whispered, after a space.
