'Oh just… morbid interest.'
'I could tell him a few tales,' I said.
'You've caused a few smashes yourself, I dare say,' she said, looking up at me and shaking her hair out of her eyes.
'In a roundabout way,' I said.
'You hardly know whether to claim credit for them or not.'
I was for some reason lifting my hand, which might have gone anywhere and done anything at that moment; might have stroked her amazing hair or pressed down on her bosom. But in the end it landed on my collar, and gave a tug for no good reason apart from the fact that the whole house was overheated.
'Any road…' I began, and I heard the wife's voice, saying, 'Don't say that, Jim, it doesn't mean anything.'
'Will you be staying with us tomorrow night?' asked Amanda Rickerby.
'Depends on the engine,' I said. 'But it might come to that.'
'Good,' she said. 'Good night, I mean,' she added, with a very fetching smile, and I felt both an excitement and a kind of relief that anything that was going to happen between us had been put forward to another day. When I walked into the hallway, I saw Fielding, lingering there apparently adjusting the coats on the stand, and I was glad I'd kept my pocket book and warrant card in my suit pocket. He left off as I approached, and climbed the stairs at a lick.
I dawdled up, thinking of the wife and Amanda Rickerby, weighing the two in the balance. Neither was very big on housework but in the wife's case that was because she was too busy doing other things. I couldn't imagine Amanda Rickerby in the suffragettes, as the wife was. She couldn't be bothered. Was she on the marry? She certainly acted like it, and I felt guilty for not letting on that I already had a wife.
Had she been the same with Blackburn? He'd evidently been a good-looking chap… But surely a woman who owned a house as big as Paradise would want more than a railway fireman.
… And what had she meant to say to me about going to bed?
Had she proposed joining me?
As I came up to the undecorated landing, I thought with anxiety of the wife, calling to mind the Thorpe-on- Ouse fair of the previous summer. It had been held on Henderson's meadow by the river. Robert Henderson and Lydia had coincided more than once there, and he'd as good as forced Jack Silvester, who kept the village grocery, and was a tenant of the Henderson family, to give her a prize at hoop-la even though her hoop had not gone over the wooden base on which the prize – a jar of bath crystals – had stood. Silvester had called out, 'Oh, bad luck!' and then immediately met the hard eye of Henderson. The wife was always going on about the condescension of men to women, and here was a very good example of it, as I had later told her. The crystals were not rightfully hers; she ought not to have taken them. Instead, she would soak for what seemed like hours before the parlour fire in the perfumed baths the crystals made. Lily of the Valley – that was the scent, supposedly. The stopper had come wrapped about with ribbon, and the wife had carefully replaced that ribbon after every use of the crystals.
She'd told me that she couldn't believe she'd gone all these years with un-scented baths, so perhaps it was the crystals themselves and not a matter of who had been responsible for her getting them. Her plan was to get on, and I believed on balance that she was determined to pull me up with her, and not run off with Henderson. She surely wouldn't have made such a great effort into making a trainee lawyer of me if she meant to clear off.
I always knew what the wife wanted, and sometimes our marriage came down to nothing but the question of what she wanted. But what did Amanda Rickerby want? On all available evidence, me in her bed or her in mine, but I could hardly believe that was right. Her approaches were too direct. Women went round the houses when they wanted to fuck someone.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I lay on my own narrow bed at the top of the house. I'd kept the window open, and the scene beyond was now illuminated by the flashing of the lighthouse, which seemed to light up the whole empty horizon for hundreds of miles, the light then dying away raggedly like a guttering candle. With each successive flash, the sea seemed to boil more violently.
The fire – lit, as I supposed, by Adam Rickerby – burned two feet away from my bed and it made the room too hot like the rest of the house. I turned on my side and watched the line of white light under the closed door – for the gas in the little hallway still burned – and I thought of Fielding. Well, it stood to reason that he was an ex- convict. An apparent gent living permanently in a Scarborough boarding house would have to be in queer somehow even if he wasn't broke, and he certainly didn't seem to be that. He was one of those free-floating businessmen who lived by a series of schemes, and that sort often did pretty well even though the schemes never came to anything.
I ran through some motives for murder – with which the house was fairly bursting. Adam Rickerby was generally nuts, and would defend the house at all costs. Fielding's post card company had been given the chuck by the North Eastern Railway, and he was a man with a past. Had Blackburn known him in Leeds, and been threatening to talk out of turn about him? Fielding wouldn't want the Recorded Music Circle to know he was a convicted fraudster – that'd put a crimp into his social life, all right.
Vaughan was a dirty dog in all respects, and was either honest and open with it, or a splitter who had something to hide. He paid lip service to the idea that Blackburn had made away with himself. But he also seemed to keep trying to drop Fielding in it, and he'd begun pointing the finger at Adam Rickerby into the bargain. The business of the signalling out to sea: why would Rickerby do that? His chief concern as far as I could see was sticking to the bloody meal times. Was Vaughan really trying to put the knock on Adam Rickerby? But he'd as good as put himself on the spot at the same time. By letting on that he'd shown the special range of cards to Blackburn, he was admitting to acting in a way that a sober-sided man like that could easily take against.
Amanda Rickerby? She was mysterious all-round, and she too might well have something to keep from the world at large. She drank, for starters; she was anti-religious where Blackburn had been a bible thumper, and she was funny about the rent. She was, or had been, short of money. She was up to something, anyhow.
I rolled over to the other side and looked at the fire, noticing that it was starting to smoke a little. I climbed out of bed, picked up the water jug that stood by the wash stand, and dashed a pint or so onto the red coals. The sound was tremendous. How a fire protested when you did that! I was replacing the water jug when my toe scraped against something in the floorboards. Looking down, I could make nothing out, so I edged along by the bed until I came to the table where the oil lamp and matches sat. I lit the lamp, carried it back over, and set it down. A short length of lead tube – about a quarter inch worth – stuck up. It was the top of one of the two gas pipes that rose up beyond the lamps in the room of Theo Vaughan: the stub that had remained after the gas pipe (and gas light) in my own room had been removed. Gas would naturally rise to the top of any vertical pipe, but this stub had been nipped tightly shut with a pair of pliers to stop any escape and, leaning closer, I could detect no gas smell from it. Lead, being soft, is easy to nip in that way and I was satisfied that a perfect seal had been made.
I lifted the lamp to the other side of the hearth, and there was the second outcropping of pipe. It too was tightly sealed and gave off no smell. I returned the lamp to the table, blew it out, lay back in my bed, and listened for footsteps on the stairs. I heard the chimney flute note at one o'clock by my watch, and again at four, and I don't believe I slept in all that time but just revolved endlessly the mysteries of Paradise while trying to anticipate the surges of the sea wind against the window. As I lay on the bed I had mostly faced the door but, on hearing the chimes of five rise up from the Old Town, I decided the worst of the night was finished, turned over to face the wall rather than the door, and fell asleep amid the dawn cries of seagulls.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I awoke and lifted my hand to the back of my head. A delicate sea shell, a fine crab shell perhaps, seemed to hang in my hair. I could not quite trust my hand, for it was made nerveless by cold, but the thing seemed to be at the same time part of me, and not part of me. I tried to tug at the thing, and it both cracked and melted. I brought
