Death on a Branch Line(44)

But for all that, the row with the wife was just as strong in my thoughts. It was hardly our first one. We had small ones regularly about the late hours I was called on to work. It all boiled down to the demands the Chief placed upon me, which the wife did not understand. The Chief’s wife seemed to stand anything; he lived his whole life in a man’s world.

‘I’m sorry I packed you off,’ I called to her through the trees, after twenty minutes or so.

‘You did not pack me off,’ she called back, crashing through some ferns. ‘I chose to leave.’

‘Well, I’m sorry that I made you choose to leave then,’ I said. ‘I just think it was a bit of a distraction to start telling him that you couldn’t use a railway timetable.’

‘Credit me with some intelligence, please. I wanted to keep him talking,’ said the wife.

‘Funny way of going about it,’ I said, ‘… by talking yourself.’

‘I had the idea that I was on the verge of a discovery.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, get back in your box,’ she said. ‘And take that flipping cap off.’

‘I will not,’ I said. Indicating a path, I stopped and said to the wife, ‘After you.’

‘Stow it,’ she snapped back, but she led off in the direction I’d shown her.

The woods gave out and a cricket ground came into view. The pavilion put me in mind of a white wooden railway station. At one end of the ground stood three tall poplars, and they might have been giant wickets, only they stood some way beyond the boundary. The wicket was a strip of especially bright green light.

I followed the wife along the lane that bounded the pitch, which turned out to connect with the second village green of Adenwold. We walked past the silent churchyard, the shops and cottages, and began drifting along the hedge-tunnel, where the bees whirred as they worked the great green walls. The neglected ladder remained in place, looking very forlorn, for the hedge could grow and it could not.

I heard what might have been a motor-car in the far distance, and stopped to try and make out the sound, but the wife kept walking, drawing her straw hat against the left-hand hedge, and taking down her hair, which you would have thought a complicated business but which she accomplished with two impatient strokes of her right hand. When she took her hair down, that always meant she was going off into her own world.

As we trudged on past the station yard, the hour chimes from the church floated up, the bell toiling with great effort, as though climbing a steep hill to the maximum number: twelve o’clock. Hugh Lambert had forty-four hours left; his brother possibly fewer still. The train that might bring the Chief was due in twenty-seven minutes’ time. I called up to the wife: ‘I’m off to meet the train in. I’ll come up, presently.’

But she just walked on towards The Angel.

I crossed the station yard, and walked up onto the ‘up’, where a smell of white-wash, combined with the great heat of the day, made me feel faint. The whole of the platform seemed to tilt for a moment and the signal box lurched.

The signalman was up there, leaning on his balcony. Eddie by name. He appeared to be grinning down at the porter, Woodcock, who sat on the fancy bench smoking, and looking at a pot of white-wash set down by the platform edge. He’d started renewing the white edging, but had got only about a third of the way along. I took my top-coat off, and draped it over the fence that separated the ‘up’ platform from the station yard.

‘You had enough of this place, mate?’ said Woodcock. ‘Are you making off?’

I made no reply to that, but removed the Lambert papers from my coat pocket, and sat down by the fence to read them:

The dog is everything to the boy, and accompanies him at all times. He uses it a good deal for rabbiting, of which he knew I disapproved, but Mervyn Handley has an innate diplomacy, which always prevented him from speaking about his pursuit of rabbits in my presence. I would often think that he would have been the perfect son for father to have. Aged eight, I fell off the cob, and had concussion of the brain; later, I perfected the art of going backwards on a pony. I doubt that Mervyn would have required a leading rein for year after year, as I did. The boy has taught himself shooting, but I’m sure that he ‘shoulders’ a gun (if that be the correct expression) in the right manner, and I’m sure that, given the chance, he would be the ‘hard man to hounds’ that Ponder and I were always supposed to become. He could never be categorised as a booby or a mollycoddle, even by a man so keen to employ those epithets as father.

I do not mean to be patronising about the boy. There is more to him than pluck and a keen eye. He is intelligent, and who is to say that he does not have the brains to take a first at Cambridge as Ponder did? This, of course, will remain undetermined.