Death on a Branch Line(13)
I dashed along to the end of Platform Ten, and down the slope into the black gravel. As I ran along the tracks, I could feel the weight of the gazes from the station upon me. Some loony, driven crackers by the heat, was trying to run to the sea-side! In the forbidden area under the great signal gantry, I began to collect up the papers. Some creaking of the mechanism above me told me to beware; I looked up and a signal fell with a great thud, so that I first thought it was going to drop all the way onto my head. I looked into the station, and a filthy goods engine was coming through it, pulling an eternity of empty, lime-washed cattle trucks. This again was irregular. The train ought to have been using the servants’ entrance so to speak, going around the outside of the station on its way north. At any rate, it was soon alongside me, and the endless shuddering wagons gave the spilt papers another mix-up, and a few more of them were carried away. I caught up another twenty or so papers from off, or in-between, the tracks. I had seen prison-issue paper, and this was not it, which made me think that Lambert must have written these notes before being arrested, and that he’d then been allowed to keep them. I tried to make out a bit of the writing, but it wasn’t easy. ‘It is the printer that I feel sorry for – the compositor,’ I read, and then again: ‘It comes down, like most things, to mathematics.’
Standing on the tracks, oblivious to on-coming trains, I shuffled the papers and read: ‘He says that the work is Euclidian, and this he means as a commendation of it!’
I had taken too long to puzzle out that word ‘Euclidian’. I looked at my silver watch: six fifteen. The wife would be waiting on the footbridge, with her bag packed for Scarborough.
Chapter Eight
I slept right through to Malton, with the wife reading on the seat over-opposite. After our change at Malton – which did smell of malt, as though the dizzying heat brought out the true character of the place – we were over-whelmed by fields. At Amotherby station, two wood pigeons cooed somewhere out of sight. At Barton, a man and a bicycle boarded.
In-between were vast golden fields with the telegraph poles standing calmly in the corn, each with its regulation shadow made by the low sun. As we approached each station, the poles would move closer together, bringing the wires up to the signal boxes or small station houses.
And it was that bloody hot …
The harvest had already begun, and there were corn stooks in some fields, the bushels arranged in a cross – hundreds of crosses to a field, like an over-toppled crucifix or a mistake made over and over again. In one field, men were still hard at it, following the harvester which rolled forward like a moving factory. In another, men were going about some late hay-making: six fellows around a stack on a cart, tossing up the stuff with pitchforks. Up and up flew the hay, ascending always to the very top of the stack. It was like seeing the force of gravity reversed. Two ragged-looking horses had the next field to themselves, and the sun gave them a golden outline.
We had practically the whole three-carriage train to ourselves. A couple of others had boarded at Malton, and the bicyclist from Barton was aboard somewhere. It was Friday evening, and most people who were going to do something for the week-end in this great swelter were already about it. I had not yet seen the train guard in order to ask for the stop at Adenwold.
The wife was reading, going between the Yorkshire Post and the Freewoman, a paper taken on subscription by the place at which she worked part time: the Co-operative Women’s Guild, York branch. It was all about the women’s struggle, and what was wrong with men.
She’d said practically nothing since train time at York, when I had explained that, since Scarborough was full up, Adenwold might do just as well. She’d just sighed, and said, ‘I don’t want to go to Adenwold.’
But she’d climbed up into the train all the same.
She wore her new light, white dress with the wide belt and the short skirt that showed off her pretty new calfskin boots. It was one of two new summer dresses, and the second was in her bag. Her new, highly polished straw boater with the blue silk ribbon was beside her on the seat. It had been bought especially for Scarborough. Lydia had a very simple connection with the sun: it turned her brown in May, and that way she stayed until October. It made her dark eyes darker and brighter too; and the whites of them whiter.
I’d decided that the full explanation of what I was about ought not to follow too closely on the news that we were not bound for Scarborough. I was ready for her response to the story of Hugh Lambert: ‘It’s too daft for words!’
Well, it was her fault that I’d get caught up in these tangles from time to time. She’d wanted me off the footplate and into the railway police, it being a more respectable sort of profession, but police work bored her, or at any rate my accounts of it did.