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Death on a Branch Line(61)

By:Andrew Martin


It seemed to me that of all the people around the table, Lydia was in the greatest request. She had recovered from her early shock, and I saw that this was a world to which she was very well-suited, and from which she was being unfairly kept by her low-class husband.

Milly Chandler was saying to her: ‘I don’t agree with you about religion. I think it’s all lies.’

‘Is that why the vicar’s not here?’ asked the wife.

‘I notice you make a connection between God and vicars,’ Milly Chandler said. ‘I find that interesting. In fact, the Reverend Ridley’s not here for the simple reason that he’s a perfectly horrible man who once put his hand on my – well, let us say my derrière. It was after matins,’ she added, and at this she started doing a little dance with her glass held high in the air. As I watched her – and watched especially her white, rolling bosom (that ruby necklace was a very brave adventurer) – the manservant and three other servants new to me came down the stone steps carrying a sofa and a divan.

I thought: Christ, is this for me?

But Usher indicated the sofa to the ladies, and they sat down in it. He then invited the Chief and Bobby Chandler to the divan, while he remained standing, letting everyone see his perfectly pressed trousers, and the golden watch chain stretched across the silk ribbon that ran around his middle.

During all this, the wife was talking once again about the women’s movement, and Usher flashed me a couple of glances as she did so. What had the Chief told him of me?

As the wife spoke, the Chief looked down at the glass of champagne in his hand. He was not in favour of the women’s cause: the suffragettes were too pushing. And yet he sat silent. He knew something of what was happening, and was silent on that account. The Chief had once described himself to me as ‘self-educated’ and I wondered whether I fell into that bracket. I had been taught how to fire engines, but did that really count as an education? I knew a dart from a pricker or a paddle, and that ‘little and often’ was the best way with coal and water. But my work had never impressed Lydia, and she’d thought it a blessing when I’d been stood down from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Well, I’d known what I was taking on when I married her. She was always trying to climb, both for her sex and for herself. She wanted everything a woman could have, and everything a man could have, too.

The manservant came over again, and poured more claret. The stuff was too warm. They would have an ice chest somewhere for the champagne.

‘Might you stick the claret in the ice for a while?’ I said, but the man had already gone, and I was glad about that. You had a narrow squeak there, Jim! I thought. Cold claret! The stuff had to be warmish, like blood.

I walked after the manservant, and asked him where the water closet was – I had never called a jakes a water closet before. He directed me through a dark arch cut out of a yew bush, and I was in the territory of the kitchen garden. On low black trees that looked like old men, lemons grew. They glowed in the deep darkness, but lemons? Could that be right, even in the heat of this summer? I walked a little way of the gravel path towards them and saw that they were lemon-shaped yellow apples. Anything seemed possible as (having given up my search for the water closet) I pissed by the sweet-smelling compost pens.

When I returned to my former post on the terrace, Usher was speaking to the wife, and I did not like this connection between them. If it continued, I would have to put aside my claret, top-class vintage though it might be, and lay the bastard out.

‘Are you quite opposed to violence on behalf of your cause?’ he was asking Lydia.

‘Not absolutely,’ replied the wife. ‘Are you in the case of yours, Captain Usher?’

He gave a half-smile that made his handsomeness double. Lydia never called a man handsome, but you could tell when she thought it. I put my hand into my inside pocket, and there was a single paper there. Lydia said something else about the women’s movement, and Usher, lighting a cigarette, said, ‘Hear, hear!’ He seemed to be making out that he agreed with her, but how could he? A man like that was sure to be an Ultra.

I heard the faint sound of the Adenwold clock striking midnight as Milly Chandler stepped onto the lawn with a glass in her hand, calling out that she was looking for glow-worms. A bottle of whisky and a siphon were now on the go, and a cigar box started doing the rounds. As long as both of these stayed away from me, I would not be sick.

Instead, Bobby Chandler came over.

‘Lydia and the Captain are hitting it off rather well,’ he said, but I would not rise to the bait. Instead I asked him in a rather slurring voice about Hardy, the station master.