‘Is this oats or barley?’ said the wife, all of a sudden putting down her paper.
I looked out at the wide, golden fields.
‘Well, it’s corn, at any rate,’ I said.
‘I know that,’ she said.
She put the paper up again, but I knew I’d been forgiven.
She was glad of a holiday of any sort, and the beauty of the scene beyond the window was winning her over. I fished in my bag for the beer bottle I knew was in there. I found it wrapped inside the blue and green sporting cap I’d bought for the week-end from Walton and Reed’s of York. At Adenwold I would wear it in place of my bowler. I thought the cap went well with my new blue twill summer suit, but the wife did not approve of Walton and Reed’s. She held that it had been all right as Walton’s, but had gone off with the arrival of Reed. Their rig-outs were now too raffish. But this cap had been marked down from five bob to two, and, as I’d explained to the wife, it was specially tailored so that it could be folded up very flat and placed in an inside coat pocket.
‘Good,’ she’d said. ‘You can put it in your pocket and keep it there.’
There was a bit more rummaging – and a bit of a panic – until I could put my hands on the clasp knife with its bottle opener attachment. The stuff was warm as tea, but I’ll take my beer anyhow. I then fished out of my kitbag the book that Lydia had brought home for me a few weeks before: The Student’s Guide to Railway Law by M. E. Chapman, MA, LLD Cambridge – this in hopes that I might leave the railway police and train up as a solicitor. I read the familiar first sentence: ‘This book is intended to present in ordinary language, and as clearly as possible free from technical terms, a general view of the main features of the subject.’
That was a laugh.
I turned to the page about the Railway Fires Act, 1905. There were at least sixty-eight sections in that Act, and it was a sight too many. I put away the book, and took out the sheaf of papers that Hugh Lambert had dropped from the carriage window. There were about forty in all, not numbered, and I reckoned I was missing a dozen from the original bundle. The writing was tiny. I could make it out, but it was very hard going. I read:
The fire was never sufficiently banked for her. The housemaid, who had been perfectly good at making fires, was all of a sudden deemed incompetent. Not that mother would ever tell her so, of course. Instead, she called Ponder or I in to put on more fuel while she sat shivering on a mild afternoon in her cardigan. I would have been eight or nine, not yet a schoolboy. The blanket was on her knees in the morning room in summer, and then still there in the summer.
This was the time that Ponder and I became ‘my boys’, to be spoken of as such at every opportunity, and that certainly did alarm me. It was gushing, and that was not mother. Ponder knew it too, of course, and so he burrowed deeper into his books.
I looked up.
Who was ‘Ponder’? Must be the brother: John.
I wondered whether the papers held one especially important bit of information; at the moment they seemed a sort of rag-bag of memories. I thought of the scene in the carriage, after Lambert had slipped the papers through the window. The guards would have come down hard upon him for that, but what could they do? You couldn’t hang a man twice.
The wife was looking directly back at me.
‘What’s that?’ she said, indicating the bundle.
‘Just some papers.’
‘Work papers?’
‘I found them under the tracks, just under the north signal gantry.’
‘Hard up for reading matter, are you? Because you ought not to be …’
She was referring to The Student’s Guide to Railway Law.
She caught up her paper again, and I looked at the headings on the back page: ‘The Question of Non-union Men – Demonstration in York’; ‘Insurance Bill – Friendly Societies Alienated’; ‘Plan for Reform of the House of Lords – Prime Minister to See The King’; ‘Ballot in Favour of a Strike’; ‘Riots in Liverpool’; ‘Giant Leeds Blaze – Firemen Run for Their Lives’; ‘The Moroccan Sensation – Reports of a Further Grave Incident’.
‘Mr Balfour’s gone on holiday,’ said the wife from behind the paper. ‘He left Victoria this morning for Gastein. When he returns to Britain, he’s off to Scotland to play golf.’
Mr Balfour was not in government. Therefore he was unable to do anything to bring about women’s suffrage, not that he would if he could. The Women’s Movement had no time for Mr Balfour, but their principal hatred was directed at Mr Asquith who, being the prime minister, could do something about votes for women but didn’t seem inclined to. ‘Today,’ the wife was saying as she lowered the paper, ‘Harry asked me, “Why have the Germans sent a panther to Agadir?”’