As she quit the room, the wife sat on the bed.
‘Why is there any need to call it a “Yorkshire” ham?’ she said when the door was closed. ‘That talk’s all for the benefit of trippers. Doesn’t she see that we are Yorkshire?’
It was a strange thing for the wife to say, for she herself was not Yorkshire. She’d been born in London, and had lived there until we’d married. She was now looking down at her dress, as if trying to make out her knees through the muslin.
‘Well, I’m torn about the landlady,’ I said. ‘She’s sort of half-friendly, isn’t she?’
‘It’s quite obvious that her husband never does a hand’s turn,’ said Lydia. ‘Why is it his name over the door, and not hers?’
It seemed to me that the wife always fell back on her hobby horse, the sex war, when in a bad mood.
‘I liked the lad, though,’ I said, and the wife made no reply to that.
‘Still hot, en’t it?’ I said, removing my collar and moving over to the washstand. ‘You could cut it with a bloody knife.’
I lifted up the jug of water that stood beneath the washstand and began giving myself a sluice down. The washstand was too small, and, although I wasn’t looking towards the wife, I knew that she was eyeing me and thinking: Why must he slosh about so?
‘What was she doing with the lemons?’ the wife asked, as I dried my face.
‘Making lemonade,’ I said.
The wife, who was no great hand in the kitchen, seemed irritated that I knew this. She was browned off again, and the little headway I’d gained with her on the train since Malton was now lost. The Angel Inn, although clean and bright, was not up to the mark, being too cottage-like and countrified. The wife liked wildflowers and she was a good walker, but Thorpe-on-Ouse (where we lived, and which was just three miles outside York) was village enough for her. For all her Liberal-Labour leanings, the wife aspired to society, and that was not to be had in a remote spot like this.
As I put on a clean shirt, she walked over to the window, which gave onto the kitchen garden of the inn. I stood behind Lydia, towelling my face, for it was not just then safe to touch her. The garden was pretty well-kept, but lonely-looking somehow. The raspberries, growing along twines stretched between canes, put me in mind of telegraph poles and wires. Cut cornfields lay beyond, and beyond them the dark green wall of the woods. There was something not right about the woods. Shadows of trees fell upon the trees at the edge of it — and yet where were the ones that made those shadows?
Just then there came a clattering noise from close-by, and Mrs Handley came out of the back door of the inn and walked across the garden into the outhouse. She returned after a moment carrying a ham. The Yorkshire Ham. The call of a nightjar came from the yellow cut field, and it stopped Mrs Handley in her tracks.
‘Is she crying?’ I said, looking over the wife’s shoulder.
Lydia sat down on the bed again.
‘I wouldn’t be in the least surprised,’ she said.
I heard the clatter of the door from directly below, signifying that Mrs Handley had re-entered the inn.
‘What are you thinking about, love?’ I asked the wife, as I fixed what I thought of as my holiday neckerchief in place. It was green to match the sporting cap, but I reserved that for the present on account of the wife’s mood.
‘Scarborough,’ she said.
I should’ve known not to ask.
‘… The Italian band on the pier,’ she ran on, ‘… a lemon tea at the Grand… the Chinese lanterns at dusk in the Esplanade Gardens.’
If we’d gone, I thought, she wouldn’t have been so keen on it all.
‘We will go to Scarborough,’ I said, transferring the bundle of papers from my kitbag to the inside pocket of my suit-coat, which lay on the bed. ‘I’ve another leave in August, and we’ll go then. Meantime, shall I tell you how we’ve come to fetch up here?’
I had been eyeing the place next to the wife on the bed, but I thought it better to tell the tale while standing.
I gave Lydia the story I’d had from Hugh Lambert, and told her of my plan of campaign. I didn’t say whether I believed the story to be true. When I’d finished, I stood waiting for her to say, ‘Well, it’s all too daft for words.’ Instead there came through the open window a beating of air. It was the fire-breathing of the iron
intruder: the 8.41 ‘down’.
‘I’m off to meet that in,’ I said, and I snatched up my suit-coat and new cap and quit the room. Let the wife digest the story at her leisure — it was a lot to take in.
Spilling out through the front door of The Angel, I saw that the long table now stood empty, and that Mervyn Handley’s ferret had been untied and removed. The train gave two screams as it approached through the trees, and I began running along the dusty downhill road, which brought the sweat pricking under my shirt. The floating sharpness of engine smoke mingled with the dizzying country-side scents of hay, cut corn, hedge flowers and meadow flowers — and all for my benefit alone, for there was no-one else about. It was unnatural for an evening to be so close. A man deserved a rest after six, but this bugger of a sun would never let up. Seemed set on proving a point, it did: I can keep this up for ever, you know!
I ran past the triangle of dying grass that marked what seemed to be the centre of Adenwold, and across the station yard, where I had to step aside to let a man in a long white dust-coat come through. He was hatless, and with silver hair, and the coat came out behind him like wings. Behind him, the train was just coming to a stand. Had he come down early from it? He’d have risked a broken ankle if so. I turned about and watched him tear across the station yard, and then away in the opposite direction to The Angel.
He might or might not have arrived by train. My priority was to observe those who certainly had done.
I gained the ‘down’ platform, and stood level with the tail light of the guard’s van, which blazed away needlessly in the golden evening. A man was walking away from a third-class carriage. He was a clerkly sort, sweating in tall collar, black shiny suit and a cheap, high-crowned brown bowler that clashed. He carried a portmanteau and a Gladstone bag. The lad porter was on the platform, watching the man. He’d made no move to assist him.
The clerkly sort kept turning about as he walked, as if to make sure that nobody else had climbed down from the train — which nobody else had. He stopped as I watched him and gave me a steady stare for a second or two before striking out for the barrow boards and Adenwold.
As he crossed the station yard, he passed a man approaching the simmering train: a parson in a light white suit. He carried a small suitcase.
Was this the Reverend Martin Ridley, the vicar who’d been in the woods at the time of the killing? He stepped onto the platform and came past me without a glance. The porter closed on him. They exchanged a word, and the porter took the suitcase. The vicar wore a white straw hat with a red ribbon around the crown that pulled at the brim, making it wavy and flower-like. His face was redder than a vicar’s ought to be. I did not care for his looks, but he was evidently deemed worth money by the porter, who now opened a door marked ‘First’ for him. The vicar climbed up, passed down a coin or two and the porter slammed the door.
So that was one less to worry about.
The engine gave a whistle, and I watched the train move away, the reflected sun burning in the blank carriage windows. When it had gone, the lad porter turned and faced me — giving me a stare that had in it a sort of steady defiance. Maybe he’d been given a rating by the station master after my complaint, but I doubted that.
I doubled back over the barrow boards just in time to see the lately alighted fellow in the bowler skirt the triangular green. From the station yard, I watched him take the dusty uphill road. He must be heading for The Angel. After all, it was that or a ten-mile tramp to the next village.
The man appeared to be having bother with the catch on his Gladstone bag, and kept pausing to secure it. A female form was advancing on him from the part of the road that was bounded by the hedges. It was the wife in her high-waisted holiday dress. As the two crossed, the clasp on the man’s bag gave way, and the goods inside spilled out onto the road. Four heavy-looking items in green cloth bags tumbled down, and a quantity of papers floated up and a little way away in the hot evening air. The wife closed on the man, and I was a little jealous of him for the speed with which she came to his aid. She almost knelt in the road to help collect up the papers. By the time I was level with them, everything was back in the bag.
