The Baghdad Railway Club(6)

Piano music floated up from . . . was it the coffee lounge, or the men’s smoking room, or the women’s?

‘There’s a man in the billiard room’, I said, ‘who’s paid to chalk up the scores. He’s called Bartlett. He was in France himself and he stopped something at Loos. He has a lot of metal in him as well, and he says he gets a terrible pain whenever it’s foggy.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How do I know what?’

‘Oh, I don’t know . . . That he’s called Mr Bartlett.’

‘Because he introduces himself to the players before the game. If he just started chalking up your scores without introducing himself that would be rude.’

‘Is that all he does?’

‘He also puts up the war news in the Mahogany Room.’

‘Then let’s not go there.’

We were just then coming around the final bend in the staircase so that the whole ground floor came into view, which was a series of islands, each one with its potted palm, a cluster of chairs . . . or perhaps just a small palm on a stand next to a single man in an armchair. Almost anything you could do in any of the lounges – smoke, drink, eat, read the paper – you could also do out here, on public show. As we stepped off the staircase, a man in uniform, unaccompanied by a woman, stepped on to it – a dark, pleasant-looking, modest sort of chap with a cigarette held in long fingers and a rolled-up magazine under his arm. He gave the quickest of glances to the wife, but not to me, and only when he’d gone past did I identify him – and this by the particular tang of the cigarette smoke trailing behind him. It was the fellow from the Railway Club talk: the man who’d seemed to have a soft spot for Johnny Turk.

I turned around, but he gave no glance back.

On the ground floor, we drifted over towards the dining room and I read the menu mounted on the stand outside. The wife looked it over, and it was all a matter of ‘potages’, ‘poissons’, ‘relevés’, all in French. But then a man in a tail-coat blocked our view of it: ‘Will you be joining us‚ sir? Madam?’

‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘we’ve already eaten.’

I didn’t let on that we’d had steak and onions on the Euston Road, but the man smiled in such a way as to suggest that he knew anyway.

‘You should have said, “No thanks, we’ve already banqueted,”’ said the wife, as we drifted off.

We went into one of the coffee lounges, where I told the wife she would be drinking alcohol, and ordered, at a cost of nine shillings, what turned out to be only a half bottle of champagne.

‘I thought the price was a bit too reasonable,’ said the wife, when it arrived on its tray, looking rather small – not that she took more than half a glass herself, but it was enough to get her started on a bit of York gossip.

‘You know that Mrs Knight-Squires is working as a tram driver?’

‘No, I did not.’

I did know that Mrs Knight-Squires was a patron of the Co-Operative Society, even if she was too grand ever to shop at a Co-Operative store, and altogether the most unlikely socialist imaginable. I also knew that the York Council Transport Committee had been hoping to train up women to replace the men who’d gone off to France.

‘She passed a test, and they put her on directly. The number nine, you know, so she’s up and down the Hull Road all day.’

‘Lot of pubs on that route,’ I said, ‘pretty low ones as well.’

The wife nodded, took a quick sip of champagne.

‘Doesn’t bother her in the slightest.’

‘But how does she cope with all the drunks?’

‘Well of course, she has a big strong conductor to deal with them,’ said the wife, ‘. . . her good friend Mrs Gwendolyn Richards.’

She burst out laughing, and looked all around the coffee lounge; then she burst out laughing again, at the end of which she was rather red. After our drink, we took another turn through the entrance hall, and the islands of seats were more populated now.

‘Shall we go back up?’ said the wife, which was a promising remark.

We closed once again on the foot of the staircase, and I noticed a strange little set-up that didn’t seem to have been there before. It was a wooden replica of an Arab’s tent, or something of the kind. It was brightly coloured, with a fairground look to it, and a dome on the top that finished in a point. The signs announced ‘Cigarettes from the East’, and ‘Coffee from the East’. A man stood inside the wooden tent. He wore a stripy tunic shirt that came down to his knees, with perfectly normal trousers and boots beneath. He was quite dark-skinned. Well, he was ‘from the East’ (I supposed).