it, for this second room was darker than the first. But this room too had a window over-looking the front, and objects began to appear by the phosphorous light of the sea beyond: a small sofa, an armchair, a clock on the wall, a high bed with mattress and covers still on and neatly made. There had been some attempt to clear the room: the dwarf bookcase held only one volume, and there were no ornaments to be seen, save for a clock that rested on a tasselled cloth spread over the mantel-shelf. A sheet of paper rested on the counterpane of the bed. I meant to read it, but as I took a step forwards, the flute note came from the fireplace, and I nearly bolted from the room as the paper jumped off the bed, and floated, swinging gently, to the ground. It was the wind coming through the chimney. I walked over, and was relieved to read only the words 'Trips by Steamer' and a list of timings. My hand was shaking as I held it though; I'd had a bad turn, and did not care to stay in the room. I stepped back through the hole, and in a moment I was climbing the topmost staircase under the eyes of old man Rickerby who gave me the evil eye from each of the three photographs in turn.
In the half landing outside my own quarters I fumbled for some matches, pushed open the door, and lit the oil lamp in my little room. It glowed red and the redness made the little room seem the most welcoming of all, and it made me immediately sleepy into the bargain. But I would not sleep. I sat at the end of the bed and removed the piece of paste-board that kept the small window from rattling. I lifted the sash and leant forward, looking down at the Prom below, letting the sea wind move my hair about and breathing deep, cold breaths. I then filled my water glass from the jug by the wash stand and took a drink. I lay down on the bed, and pulled aside the tab rug that lay half underneath the bedstead. The little copper stubs marking the tops of the gas pipes remained tightly sealed. I put the rug back, and listened to the little window shaking. Every small gust caused a fearful din, and the bigger ones seemed set fair to break the glass. I leant forward and lowered the window. It rattled less when closed. I ought really to put back the pasteboard, but I could hardly be bothered. I lay still, listened to the waves, and revolved a hundred bad thoughts: Amanda Rickerby had lied about her brother's accident because it might be seen to have given him a grievance against railway men; Fielding was not queer – or he was a strange sort of queer if he went to bed with pictures of naked ladies. I called to mind the pictures. Lucky horse! But I hadn't the energy to make use of the memory – I was tired out, having hardly slept for three nights. I thought of the wife, and how she'd say, 'You're overstrung, Stringer', and brush my hair right back, for she thought it should go that way rather than the parting at the side, and I was sure that it therefore would do in time.
… But how I liked it when she brushed it back. You'd have thought she'd have better things to do, just because she generally had so much on, what with the Co-operative ladies and the women's cause and the new house and all the rest of it.
I closed my eyes, and I don't believe that I slept, but when I opened them again I saw that there was an intruder in the room, in the shape of a twist of black smoke rising up from the red lamp. As I looked on the redness flared, causing everything in the room to lean away from the window, and then it died away to nothing. The oil had run out. I had the manual for the lamp but no more oil, and I must have light, so I dragged myself to my feet, found my matches in my pocket, and walked out onto the little landing. Reaching up to the gas bracket I turned the tap, breathed the hot coal breath, and lit it, whereupon I was instantly joined on the landing by my own shadow. I had not had sixpence about me, but Miss Rickerby, or her brother, must have fed the meter before going out.
I moved back into the little room, kicked the door shut, and fell onto the bed, where I turned on my side and contemplated the line of white light under the door. The bad thoughts came back: Robert Henderson's hair was brushed directly back. In order to have a fraction of his money I must work all the hours God gave at a job I didn't want to do. Five years of articled clerkship, and for what? So that I might offer a kid a hundred and twenty pounds in exchange for half his brain. My thoughts flew to Tommy Nugent, and I hoped he was back in York, courting his girl from the Overcoat Depot on Parliament Street. I pictured the wife again, wearing my third best suit- coat as she showed her friend Lillian Backhouse about the new garden. That was all right: Lillian Backhouse was another feminist, and the suit-coat looked better on Lydia than on me, in spite of it being twice her size.
Amanda Rickerby came to mind once more… How had she come by the badge and why had she kept it? My head was fairly spinning. Had she asked me to lock my door in order to protect me from the boy? From Fielding? From Vaughan? (Surely not from Vaughan?) Or did she mean to come up and sit astride me as the woman on the post card had sat astride the horse? I did not believe she would do, but I decided that the moment we'd shared in the ship room ought to mark the end of our relations. I was a married man after all. I stood up, locked the door, fell back onto the bed, and even though it was hardly more than late afternoon, I was asleep in an instant, my boots still on my feet.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
'You were dead wrong about Adam Rickerby,' said the Captain, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet with the pocket revolver in his hand.
If he didn't mean to shoot me, then he might be on the point of quitting the chart room, and I wanted him to stay, firstly because I knew he had secrets of his own touching this matter and secondly because I wanted to talk on. I wanted to get behind the mist, and I now knew I could do it. The recollection of my exchange with Miss Rickerby in the ship room came with many complications, and the best thing was to talk on because my speech brought back my memory of what came next and remembering, at least, was something I could be proud of.
The Mate was eyeing the Captain, and so was I – had been for some little while. It was the difference that made the similarity so plain: the Captain's face never smiling, hers almost always; his hair short, curls not given time to begin, hers abundant. But there was a strength to the Captain's close-cut hair, a sort of possibility in it. How could I not have noticed before that they had only the one face between them: wide, symmetrical, cat-like? The boy had the same face again, but the accident or some earlier event had made mockery of it, stretching it too wide and piling on the curls. He had been over-done. Anyhow, I knew that this was Captain Rickerby sitting before me, and that he had once sent a silver compass set in a miniature ship's wheel to his sister.
'I'll tell you what happened,' I said to him, just as though he was Peter Backhouse, sitting over-opposite me in the public bar of the Fortune of War in Thorpe-on-Ouse with more than a few pints taken; and I did feel a kind of drunken happiness, for I could now see the whole thing clear.
'It was the light under the door,' I said to the Captain, who'd now sat back down. 'It was not there – the line of white light – and I was half glad of it, because I knew it would have hurt my eyes if it had been. That was part of my affliction… You see, I believe that what happened to me – what was done to me – impaired my memory, but I have now recovered my memory. I can go on from here and tell you the whole thing. I have the solution to the mystery.'
I made my play:
'The woman in the post cards,' I said,'… not the one on the horse, but the one that Vaughan had liked particularly… You see, she was Blackburn's fiancee, and when Blackburn was shown the cards in the Two Mariners he attacked Vaughan, really laid into him…'
'They came to blows over this?' enquired the Mate, blowing smoke.
'Very likely,' I said. 'At any rate they were set at odds. Perhaps Blackburn had threatened to go to the police. In the night, Vaughan must have gone up to him, perhaps to try and settle the matter. They must have fought again. Vaughan killed Blackburn, perhaps not intentionally. He hauled the body downstairs, put it on the cart over the road, took it to the Promenade or the harbour wall, and pitched it into the sea. Vaughan knew I was onto him. He'd over-heard me talking to
Tommy Nugent in Mallinson's, and so he tried to do me in by the method of…'
'It is nonsense,' said the Mate, lighting a new cigar.
'If you don't tell the truth,' said the Captain, 'you'll never leave this ship.'
I had made an attempt to disentangle myself from the Rickerby family, and failed utterly. Even the bloody foreigner could see the lie for what it was. To cover my embarrassment, I asked the Mate for a cigar, which he passed over together with matches.
Blowing smoke, I began again. 'The light', I said, 'was not there…
I had known straight away the meaning. The pain in my head made movement nigh impossible, but I had to find different air. Each inhalation carried the taste of coal into me, and these breaths could not be released. My breathing was all one way, which was no sort of breathing at all. I rolled off the bed, but was now in a worse
