credit to you – and to the boy.'
'He's a bit mental, the poor lamb,' Mrs Rickerby said, fixing her wrap, 'but he does his best.' 'I'm thinking of trying to help him in some way. I know he has a strong interest in railways…
She eyed me. The clock ticked. I couldn't keep her long, since she was evidently over-heating in her coat and wrap.
'I know he likes to read about them,' I said, 'or to be read to about them.'
'I've read to him on occasion,' said Mrs Dawson, 'when we've done our chores of a morning.'
'About what exactly?'
She kept silence for a moment, reaching for the latch of the door. I opened the door for her.
'Youth cut to death by express train,' she said. 'Collision in station, engine on platform. Driver killed, fireman scalded. Car dashes onto level crossing as train approaches… He knows his letters well enough to spot a railway item in the newspaper, and then everything has to stop while you read it out.'
'Why?'
'Why? It's just how he is. It's how his condition takes him. He's a very simple lad, is Adam. He has this house, which he tries to keep up. He did have Peter…'
'Peter?'
'His cat that died.'
The rain made a cold wind as it fell onto Bright's Cliff.
'… And he has his little boat,' Mrs Dawson added.
'Oh? Where's that?'
'Sometimes in the stables over the road, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in the harbour.'
'How does he move it about?'
'On a cart.'
'He goes in for a bit of sailing, does he?'
'It's a rowing boat.'
In the kitchen I'd thought Mrs Dawson a kindly woman, which perhaps she was, but she didn't seem to have taken to me and I wondered whether she was the first person in Paradise to have guessed that I was a spy. Or was it just that – being married herself and a woman experienced in the ways of men – she'd somehow known I was lying about not having a wife?
As Mrs Dawson stepped out into the rain, I heard a footfall on the dark stairs. Amanda Rickerby was coming down, and I returned with her in silence to the kitchen, which was a less homely place without Mrs Dawson. It was too hot and everyone looked red. Vaughan was moving some pots and pans aside so that he could get at the beer barrel again; Fielding remained with his back to the sink with arms folded and head down, evidently lost in a dream, but he looked up as we walked in, and Adam Rickerby approached his sister, carrying the fish in its baking pan.
She said, 'Oh dear, Adam love, it's over-cooked.'
She drew towards her another dish.
'The only thing for it,' she said, 'is to break it up, put it in this, and make a pie.'
'A pie?' he fairly gasped, and he looked all about in desperation. As he did so, it was Fielding's turn to quit the room. In the interval of his absence, Amanda Rickerby played with a salt cellar, completely self-absorbed, as it seemed to me; Vaughan pulled at his 'tache and read his paper, and Adam Rickerby fell to tidying the kitchen with a great clattering of crockery and ironmongery. When Fielding returned a few minutes later, the lad was arranging the objects on the table: he wanted the knife polisher in a line with the vegetable boiler, the toast rack, the big tea pot, and so on.
'Adam, love,' said his sister, 'don't take on. I'm just going to ask Mr Stringer about summer trains, I'll see to the cooking in a moment.'
'It's too late,' he said. 'It'll be tea time any minute.'
'Well, stop moving things about, anyhow.'
'I en't movin' things about,' said Adam Rickerby. 'I'm movin' 'em back!
So saying, he walked directly through the door that gave onto the scullery, and I heard the opening and closing of a further door, indicating that he had gone into his own quarters at the back of the house.
'If luncheon is off then so am I,' said Vaughan, rising to his feet.
'Mr Stringer,' Fielding enquired from his post at the sink, 'will you come upstairs now for that cigar?'
And I somehow couldn't refuse him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
In the ship room the gas had not been lit, and the fire was low. Fielding, who entered in advance of me, was stirring it as I walked up to the left hand window and watched the storm. The wine and the earlier beer had made my head bad, and I had a half a mind to lift the sash and let in the wind and flying rain. I was in no mood for smoking a dry cigar but it would be a way of getting at Fielding. Or did he want to get at me?
He set down the poker and brought the cedar-wood box over. There were just two short cigars rolling about inside. The Spanish sherry, I noticed, was waiting on the small bamboo table. He poured two glasses, and we both drank. I saw for the first time that he wore a signet ring on his right little finger.
'Quite a panorama,' he said, indicating the window, 'as the post card people say.'
Has he brought me up to show me the view? I didn't want the sherry, but I drank the stuff anyway, as if doing so would bring the truth closer. But Fielding was only smiling politely. He seemed to have no topic for conversation in his mind.
'What ships do you see from here?' I asked, presently.
'Only this morning,' he said, 'one of Mr Churchill's destroyers.'
A noise came from the doorway, and Vaughan stood there in his Inverness cape, grinning with eyes half closed. He was thoroughly drunk by now and breathing noisily through his drooping moustache. He had not been invited, and I fancied that Fielding did not look too pleased to see him, although of course he kept up a show of politeness.
Vaughan closed on me with a post card held out. It might have been the woman earlier shown on the trapeze, only she now lounged under a tree, wearing no clothes as usual but holding a parasol, which would not have made her decent even if she'd chosen to use it for the purpose of keeping decent, which she had not done. Vaughan showed it only to me. There was evidently no question either of showing it to Fielding or of hiding it from him, but he could see it from where he stood, anyhow.
'Class A,' breathed Vaughan. 'Quite a naturalist, this one.'
'Naturist,' said Fielding, 'and be so good as to take her away'
Vaughan grinned, turned on his heel, and quit the room. Where was he going? Off to waste more of his allowance?
'I'm used to Vaughan's bohemian ways,' said Fielding, now pouring us out another glass each of the sherry. 'But it does you credit, Mr Stringer, the way that you take him in your stride.'
He sat down in his favourite chair, and I took the couch.
'I suppose they're only the Old Masters brought up to date,' I said, thinking of Vaughan's witness statement.
'It's not the highest sort of indecency,' said Fielding.
'The railway cards I liked though,' I said. 'It's not often you see a crossed signal or an out-of-gauge load on a card.'
'Something that might have appealed to a footplate man such as yourself, said Fielding, 'was our series of pictures of double headed trains.'
He was going round the houses; this surely was not meant to be the subject of our talk, but I said:
'You know there are triple-headed trains working in some places… Up the bank to Ravenscar.'
'I shouldn't wonder,' said Fielding. 'What is it there? Six hundred feet above sea level?'
'Getting on for,' I said. 'They're very short trains too.'
