The Baghdad Railway Club(43)

Shepherd indicated to the waiter that another glass of wine be brought for Stevens. He drank it off in one, and embarked on a description of the Liskeard and Looe railway, which unfortunately did not do anything as simple as run from Liskeard to Looe, but rambled about over half of Cornwall, so that in Stevens’s speech ‘Coombe Junction’, ‘Moorswater’ and ‘Bodmin Moor’ were all confusingly mixed up with the evening call to prayer floating through the windows. Having set out the route of the line – as he thought – Stevens then described how he’d been given footplate rides on some of its tank engines in the school holidays, and how this had led him to learn the ‘rude implements’ of firing. By that, he might have meant ‘rudiments’ – it was shocking to think how much money had been wasted on his education. The brigadier was half asleep, what with the suffocating heat, and the droning of Stevens and the prayer call.

But then our speaker took a more promising turn.

‘. . . Now, see,’ he said, ‘the fellow who principally taught me the skills of a fireman was an old Cornish chap called Kit Bassett, and he’d spent most of his life running up and down the Cornish main line on goods. Old Kit collected all the sheep from the halts that served the big farms, my dad’s included, and he took them to the slaughterhouse at Truro. Well, the knackers’ yard, not to be too polite about it. How many sheep that man carted to their deaths, it’s beyond counting, beyond imagining. Thousands and thousands, and . . .’

The door opened, and the guest of honour entered – a much more decorative individual than I had expected, and of an altogether different sex. Everyone stood up, but she wouldn’t have any formality, and motioned us to sit down as she moved rapidly towards the spare seat. It was the sureness of her movements that gave her away. She was the woman who had ridden through the public garden or park. As she took her place – in between Stevens and myself – she removed a wide-brimmed hat to reveal a mass of auburn curls. In the course of this, she and Ferry exchanged nods. I believed that he had not been surprised at her arrival. She also nodded at Shepherd, who grinned at her while blushing. Her arrival had certainly not surprised him; the lady was, after all, his guest. Her hair had perhaps once been held in place by a small ebony comb buried in it. After an expert bit of business with curls and comb, she was perfectly meek and still, waiting for our pink-faced speaker to continue.

‘. . . Thousands’, Stevens resumed, ‘and thousands . . . So when Kit Bassett turned sixty-five or so, and was coming up to his superannuation, the company took him off the main line, and he worked a link that kept him always on the branch.’

‘The Liskeard–Looe,’ put in Shepherd.

‘Correct, sir. He was put out to grass, so to say, working a stopping goods through all the villages there – well, I won’t name them all again – sometimes with yours truly standing in for the fireman.’

One of the Royal Engineers put his hand up like a schoolboy: ‘Wasn’t that against regulations?’

‘Oh tosh,’ said Shepherd, grinning and colouring up.

I glanced sidelong at the lady. She was looking down, still – what was the word? – demure.

‘Well now,’ said Stevens, ‘picture old Kit on his very last run before he goes off to be given a gold Albert or carriage clock or whatever it might be, and listening to a lot of fellows saying what a grand chap he is at the railwaymen’s institute at Truro, and clapping him on the back, telling him now it’s time to take that garden in hand. It’s Saturday early evening, and he’s riding up with Timmy Rice – that’s his regular fireman,’ Stevens added, with a half turn to the lady, as though the detail might have been of particular interest to her. ‘It’s about five o’clock sort of time, and he’s coming up to the little station at Coombe where he books off, do you see?’

‘Set the scene for us, Mike,’ said Shepherd, ‘paint the picture.’

He sat back, and the lady eyed him, and smiled. Meanwhile the red-faced, blond-haired man smiled at her – a hopeless kind of smile.

‘Well, I wasn’t there,’ said Stevens, ‘but y’know . . . a late summer’s evening in Cornwall. Not much in the way of . . . A few swallows zinging about . . . Thresher rattling away in the fields probably, and the chaps working on it waving to Kit as he goes by; the haze all around the machine, the sun going down, and the whole thing sort of golden.’

I believed that everyone around the table could figure the scene, the late sunshine of Baghdad leaking in through the window seeming not so different from the gentler sunshine of Cornwall. And Stevens was still at it: ‘. . . The sheep grazing by the tracks running away a little as Bassett comes along, but only a little jog, because I mean they knew him just as well as everyone else . . . All save this one sheep, you see, and he doesn’t run away, but he walks – calm as you like – up the embankment, and he turns, and he faces the engine head-on. By all accounts, old Kit was put into a sort of daze by the sight of it. Well, it wasn’t natural. Hypnotised, was old Kit, leaning out, staring at the beast, and the bloody thing . . .’