Death on a Branch Line(79)

‘The boy?’ I said.

‘Nothing doing,’ she said.

‘I’m just off down for a pint,’ I said, and I went downstairs, and pushed through the door that gave onto the two bars.

Mr Handley was there alone, surrounded by the green-shaded oil lamps and looking at the fireless grate with his usual pewter of ale in his hand. He nodded at me before returning his gaze to the grate, saying something that was most likely, ‘I’m wondering whether to light it.’

The air was still close, and the windows all open. It was light that was wanted more than heat, but Mr Handley next said (I think), ‘I’m minded to do it.’

I asked him if he’d pour me a pint first, and as he did so I asked him the whereabouts of his wife. ‘Turned in,’ he replied, in his blurred voice.

‘Mervyn?’ I said.

‘Aye, him an’ all,’ said Mr Handley.

‘Any sign of the dog?’ I asked – just to see what he’d say.

Mr Handley shook his head, saying something like: ‘That bugger stops out all hours … law unto his bloody self.’

‘What about the bicyclist?’ I said. ‘Is he in bed too?’

‘Reckon so,’ said Mr Handley, and I felt like asking whether he was quite sure he hadn’t drugged the lot of them for the sake of a quiet life.

‘Still hot, en’t it?’ I said, presently.

‘It is that, aye,’ said Mr Handley, who, having drawn us a couple of pints, was kneeling at the grate and making paper faggots with back editions of The Yorkshire Post.

‘Always like this of a Sunday evening, is it?’ I asked him.

‘Aye, dead loss,’ he said.

‘You’d rather be farming, I expect,’ I said.

‘I liked that line of work,’ he said. ‘I liked a … when I worked.’

I couldn’t make out the middle word. It was short, sounded like ‘ewe’.

‘A what?’ I said. ‘A few?’

‘A view,’ he answered, rising from the grate.

Behind him, blue smoke rolled fast over the coals of the fire.

‘You lost the farm on account of Sir George,’ I said.

‘That’s it,’ said Mr Handley with a sigh; but then he stirred himself to a joke, which I heard quite distinctly: ‘God giveth and God taketh away.’

‘The pub must be a kind of prison for you,’ I said, ‘after life on a farm, I mean.’

‘Aye,’ said Mr Handley, but I didn’t believe he meant it, for he then said something very like: ‘I’m looking to take in hand a York house.’

‘Did I have that right, Mr Handley?’ I said. ‘You want to take on a York pub?’

He nodded.

‘Any particular one?’

‘Grapes,’ he boomed, ‘– on Toft Green.’

‘I know it,’ I said. ‘Hard by the new railway offices. Very popular spot and a regular gold mine, I should think, what with …’

But I did not want to speak further of the Grapes, which was a success – I now recalled – mainly on account of its landlord, a little, bright-eyed bloke who talked ten-to-the-dozen with the railway clerks, who used the place as a home from home. Chattered like a bloody monkey, the fellow did, and it was impossible to imagine Mr Handley in his place.

‘I’ve had a tip the present fellow’s moving on, and the tenancy’s coming up,’ Mr Handley said, ‘and I do fancy it.’

He took a long go on his pint, put down the pewter and grinned at me.

‘The living’s high in York, en’t it?’ he said.

I considered the question. The place had its gentry, of course, and it had its workhouse and its people for ever on the verge of the workhouse, but it was mainly full of respectable sorts like me. In my days in London I’d been something else: not quite respectable, a junior railwayman clarted in engine grease, living in a world of my own, believing that the be-all-and-end-all of life was high-speed trips on the main line. My ambitions had started and finished with the footplate of a locomotive. It had been a sort of dream existence, and ever since then I had been trying to make my way in the real world, and not making it fast enough. I was only the Chief’s lapdog, and the Chief was only Usher’s. We were both too small to influence events of any importance, and that is what the week-end had proved

But Mr Handley was talking hopefully of York.

As he spoke, I noticed that the six green oil lamps that lit the inter-connected bars of The Angel were surrounded by moths and that there were also many daddy-long-legs bouncing up and down the walls. The kindling in the fire was seething as the flames took hold, and it dawned on me that there was another sound coming from beyond the opened windows, a sort of sizzling. Mr Handley was watching me and smiling as he saw me noticing the rain, but there was also a questioning look to his face, and it seemed that he had just asked me something about my own life – touching on some wide and philosophical matter requiring speech stretching late into the night.