important, or at least more closely touching upon their own lives, which comes to the same thing.
'Have you seen Robert Henderson lately?' I asked, when I'd come to the end of my tale.
'Yes,' she said, and in that moment everything hung in the balance. The white stones of the ruined abbey were no longer beautiful; instead they were just so many tombstones, a representation of death.
'He came over to see me yesterday,' said Lydia.
'To do what?' I said, eyeing her.
'To make love to me.'
'Hold on a minute,' I said, turning to her on the bench.
'I told him to kindly leave the house immediately,' said the wife, and the abbey and the gardens, with the crocuses and daffodils and speckless blue sky were all beautiful again.
'But there was a difficulty, of course,' said the wife.
'I'll say there is,' I said. 'It's his bloody house.'
The wife nodded and stood up, startling the peacock that had wandered up to our bench.
'You've to come with me, Jim,' she said.
'Where are we off to?' I asked, as she set off at a lick.
'He told me', Lydia said, as we tore past the observatory, through the gates of the gardens and out into Museum Street where a trotting pony with trap behind nearly did for us both, 'that there would be a general rent increase across the estate, and that he would let me know about it shortly.'
'Christ,' I said, trotting myself to keep up with the wife as she turned a corner. 'That's going some. He's a bigger bastard than I thought.'
'Don't use that language, Jim,' said the wife, as we marched diagonally across St Helen's Square with very little regard for the folks in the way.
'I told him', the wife said, addressing me over her shoulder, 'that he had better let me buy this house immediately on the terms mentioned when we rented it.'
'And what were they?' I asked, shouting over the barrel organ played by the bloke who stood every day at the start of Davygate. (Wanting to limit my dealings with Henderson, I'd kept out of the detailed negotiations about the house.)
'He'd said we could have it for a hundred and fifty,' the wife called back.
'Well,' I said, dodging one bicyclist and nearly running into another as a result, 'he'll just go back on that, won't he?'
'Oh no,' said the wife, 'he agreed to it there and then. He was very shamefaced. I think he knew he'd done wrong.'
'Well, he'll know for certain when I go round tomorrow and smash his face in,' I said.
'You won't, Jim.'
'I bloody will.'
'You won't, Jim, because he's off to India. Sailing first thing in the morning – looking after his father's interests out there.'
'It's about time he got a job,' I said. 'I suppose that's why he tried it on.' 'Very likely,' said the wife, and we were now outside the door of the Yorkshire Penny Bank on Feasgate. It was where the wife kept her inheritance from her mysterious, very Victorian father who'd died, extremely ancient, shortly after our marriage and who'd owned more than one London property.
'You've not enough to buy the house,' I said.
'Have you never heard of a mortgage, Jim?' said the wife, pushing open the door; and I saw that she'd brought all sorts of household papers in her basket.
An hour later we were at our other favourite bench – in the little park next to the Minster. The wife had arranged the mortgage in record time but even so we'd missed the start of Evensong in the great cathedral, about which I was secretly quite pleased – and the wife hadn't minded too much. She was happier than I'd seen her in a good while.
'What's the medieval word for what he was proposing, Jim?'
'Same one as today,' I said. 'A fuck.'
The wife frowned at me, for a pair of respectable ladies happened to be passing by our bench at just that point.
'I don't think those blokes with the broad swords and the boiling oil were too particular about polite language,' I said.
'Droit de seigneur;' said the wife, 'that's it,' and she shook her head.'… Incredible in this day and age.'
'We might go in after the first reading, if you like,' I said, nodding towards the Minster.
'All right, let's,' she said, and she took my hand.
'By the way,' I said, rising from the bench, 'I'm not going into that solicitor's office.'
I had been expecting an explosion; instead we kissed.
'I'm so relieved, Jim,' she said. 'I could hardly bear to bring it up after all the work you've put in. But now that we've a mortgage to repay you've got to be earning, and the wages of an articled clerk just wouldn't have been enough.'
We walked over to the east entrance of the Minster, and an usher in a red robe came up to us just inside the door, whispering, 'Are you for Evensong?'
'I am,' said the wife. 'My husband's going to take a pint of beer and meet me afterwards.'
I grinned at her, and we might have kissed again had it not been for that usher.
Chapter Forty-Four
I found 92 Victoria Street within ten minutes of quitting Victoria Station. One brass plaque by the door read 'William Watson, Tailor', another 'The Railway Club, est'd 1899'. The door was firmly locked, but then the talk would not begin for another six and a half hours, it being just then only one o'clock. I might return for it, but really I had only walked up to the door in order to establish the exact location – just in case any railway-minded person should ask me about it.
I turned and retraced my steps, entering the station on the west side, under the awning belonging to the London, Brighton and South Coast end of the Victoria operation. The names of the principal destinations were painted on a long board mounted over the awning, and I read: 'Hastings, St Leonard's, Bexhill, Pevensey, Eastbourne…'
I bought my ticket, and found the train waiting on the platform with all doors invitingly open. As the guard began slamming them shut I was not so much reading as gazing down at my copy of the Yorkshire Evening Press. In Scarcroft Road a York councillor had made a miraculous escape from a burning house. I'd been reading the same words for five minutes, and it seemed impertinent for the paper to be telling me about York while I sat in one of the grandest stations in London, so I folded it up and put it aside. Shortly after, the train jolted into life and we were rolling out from under the glass canopy into a beautiful, sky-blue afternoon. We soon began to make good speed, and I wondered a little – but only a little – about the engine. I had not walked up for a look at it, just as I had not looked at the one that had carried me south from York, and I believe that I only really noticed one station on the way from Victoria: Lewes, where the gulls screamed over the goods yard even though we were still twenty miles from the sea.
I continued in my distracted state as I walked south from Eastbourne station along Terminus Road. Why did I walk south? I had no firm idea, but that way led to the front, which was the main attraction of Eastbourne in sunny weather. After ten minutes' walking I came to the sea, and in my mind's eye the paper fan unfolded.
The frontage was called the Grand Parade, and it was just that: motors, carriages, bath chairs and pedestrians – and every face turned towards the glittering waters of the English Channel. I joined the throng for a while, before descending towards the Prom where a narrower parade was going on for walkers and bath chair patients only. Out on the milky sea there was only one vessel to be seen – a sailing boat – and it brought to mind a sign posted in York station for the benefit of engine men: 'Make No Smoke', which made me think in turn of Captain Rickerby. Since his escape, it had come out that one of the constables meant to be guarding him and Klaason at Greenwich
