Putting Hugh Lambert from my mind, I began telling Handley of my days firing, taking him on several journeys, fairly closely described: winding under the fearfully over-crowded signal gantries of the south London suburbs on the way to the great Necropolis of Surrey; racing across the Lancashire Fylde in another hot season with the windmills to left and right turning their arms over like bowlers at cricket. Next minute, the poor bloke was being shunted under the grey February skies of Dover onto the stone pier with the steamer for France rocking and waiting … And each time with trouble in prospect.
He told a few things of his own, and it was just the landlord and me sailing on the brown sea of pints of Smith’s towards midnight. At Mr Handley’s request, I’d long since stopped offering money for my pints; he had taken to me like a brother.
It was quite wrong to take the man for a lunatic, as most of his customers probably did. His voice rose and fell in all the right places; it was melodic in its low, rumbling way, and I had no doubt that he made perfect sense for all that he put away between six and eight pints of Smith’s in the two and a half hours that I sat up with him.
I was back in the bedroom as the clock struck midnight, undressing by the light of a candle stub. I fell straightaway asleep, but woke at the chime of three, and walked along the corridor to the jakes where I pissed for what seemed like about half an hour. Returning to bed, I dreamed of a train formed of a locomotive pulling a line of carriages that somehow became brake vans that were all finally revealed as cricket pavilions. The train wound its way through pretty country-side, slipping the pavilions here and there as required by teams of cricketers who stood waiting at line-side locations. The slipping of the pavilions went off perfectly, and the cricketers were delighted to have them, but somebody somewhere raised a voice of objection, and it was a woman speaking out even though there’d been no women involved in the giving and receiving of the pavilions.
I turned over in bed, and the wife was sitting up.
She was talking to Mervyn, who stood in the doorway.
‘It’s four o’clock, Mervyn,’ the wife was saying to the boy.
I too sat up, and the boy glanced at me and then looked away, his eyes roving about the room as though the purpose of his visit had been to inspect it.
‘Mervyn,’ I said, ‘they’ve shot your dog.’
‘Who?’ he said, quickly.
‘That’s just what I want to know.’
He stood silent. In spite of his question, he knew who’d done it.
‘Mervyn,’ I said, ‘Master Hugh will be hung at eight o’clock.’
‘I’ll not speak to you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll speak to your missus.’
Swiftly and silently, as though she’d known all along that it would fall to her to hear out the boy, Lydia climbed out of bed and, taking the boy’s hand, led him into the corridor – and whatever was said didn’t take long for she was back within a matter of seconds.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I dare say we ought to’ve woken Mr and Mrs Handley rather than making off at just gone four-thirty in the morning with their son in tow and the rain streaming down. But whereas the difficulty before had been to make Mervyn Handley speak, the difficulty now was stopping him.
‘It were all over the telegram not sent,’ he kept saying, as we walked past the row of low, bent cottages that stood black against the greyness of the dawn.
‘And it was the porter, Woodcock, who Sir George asked to send it?’ I asked again, although I thought I had this clear.
‘It were up to ’im, aye,’ said Mervyn. ‘It were ’is job, only he’d booked off for t’ day, an’ ’e wouldn’t do it.’
‘And he cheeked Sir George?’
‘I should just think ’e did, aye. Give ’im a right mouthful.’
‘But this is all hearsay?’ I said, as we passed in front of the cottages. ‘You what?’ said Mervyn.
A thin line of smoke went up contrary to the rain from one of the chimneys.
‘You know of this,’ I said, ‘but you never saw it.’
‘I saw what come next,’ said the boy. ‘Not likely to forget it, either.’
‘Let’s be right now,’ I shouted over the rain. ‘Sir George threatened to write –’
The boy nodded eagerly, saying, ‘Letter of complaint, like.’
‘Where to?’
‘Railway brass at York.’
‘Did he mean to complain about Woodcock or Hardy?’
‘Why, both,’ said Mervyn.
‘Hardy,’ I said, ‘… had he got across Sir George before?’
‘No,’ said Mervyn. ‘You en’t listening. Woodcock ’ad. Woodcock would always give trouble, and Hardy wouldn’t do owt agin ’im.’