The Baghdad Railway Club(5)

‘The Midland Road goods yard,’ I said. I’d been watching it myself from the window a moment before. Assorted lights burned down there: orange-glowing braziers, the red and green lamps of low signals. The pilot engine had been nudging a rake of twenty empty coal wagons, as though positioning them to the very inch, and the great gouts of steam that had come rolling up through the blackness had seemed to signify the tremendous brainwork involved rather than the mechanical effort.

‘Well we’ve got an excellent view of it,’ said the wife. ‘I suppose they’ll be shunting all night?’

It was difficult to think of an answer to that, apart from ‘Yes’.

It was a good room, I thought: the wallpaper was the colour of a sweet wrapper: red and green stripes, nicely offset by the black wrought-iron fireplace, where a strong fire burned.

‘What was the talk like?’ I enquired, for the wife had gone to a talk as well, on what we had decided would be the ‘cheap night’ of the three we were to spend in London.

‘It was called “Problems of the War”. And it was extremely rambling – went on for two hours.’

She looked harder through the window. ‘I believe they’re just moving those wagons about for the sake of it. The problem of the war’, she said, sitting down on the bed with a sigh, ‘is the war.’

The talk she’d attended had been given by some London sub-division of the Co-Operative Society. She worked for the Co-Operative Women’s Guild in York, and the movement generally was pushing for a scheme of food rationing. Since the Co-Operative stores did not make a profit (but redistributed income to their members), they could afford to come out against profiteering and unequal distribution of food. But the wife found the whole matter ‘a great bore’, and had admitted as much to me.

The complications of war politics had drained away some of her radical energy. She was still part of the push for women’s suffrage, but her particular group had dropped most of their campaigning for the duration. She might go either way – towards the all-out anti-war camp of the Independent Labour Party, or into the bloody Conservative Party for all I knew. Certainly she was coaching up our boy, Harry, for the best of the York grammar schools; she’d been overjoyed when I’d received my commission, and when we’d booked into the hotel, and the clerk had said, ‘Mr Stringer, is it?’ she’d cut in, saying, ‘Captain . . . Captain Stringer.’

She was now stretched out on the bed with her book. She was reading Little Women, and not for the first time. It was her protest book. If I saw it in her hand – it or The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw – then I knew I was in for the silent treatment. She was boycotting love-making – this ever since I’d been to the medical board and received the option of rejoining my unit in France or going for a four-month spell of officer training at a pleasant-sounding place in the countryside (for it seemed I could either learn how to be an officer, or just go off and be one). I had opted for the front.

‘You don’t want people to think I’m a shirker, do you?’ I’d said, to which the reply had come, ‘You’ve done your bit, Jim. You’ve got half a hundredweight of metal in your leg.’

From the Midland Road goods yard came a repeated rapid clanging, and the pilot engine gave three shrieks of its whistle, as though in panic.

‘Let’s go for a drink,’ I said.

‘Where?’ said the wife, not looking up from Little Women.

‘Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but there’s about a dozen bars downstairs.’

‘There are. There are about a dozen . . . And don’t call them bars.’

But she’d put down her book.

She got up and I watched her change her dress. When she’d finished, she said, ‘I’m not drinking alcohol, you know.’

We went out of the room, along the corridor a little way and came to the great wide curving staircase. There were lifts at the Midland Grand, but the staircase was the big draw. It seemed to come down from the heavens, for the ceiling of the stairwell above was painted pale blue and decorated with gold stars. The balustrades were all fancy ironwork. Electric chandeliers swung over our heads as we descended past plaster carvings and assorted artworks. The hotel was like a cathedral in the days when they were still painted – a cathedral with electric light and giant steam radiators. Half the guests seemed to be treading the staircase and looking about in wonder, for nobody talked on the staircase. You got the idea that having descended, people turned about and ascended again, just for the thrill of it. About half the men on the staircase were in uniform, and most were with women. A fellow captain came towards me, and we smiled. The captain’s wife looked at my wife’s dress and vice versa. As we crossed with the other couple, the wife put her arm in mine – which meant that her dress had beaten her opponent’s.