The Baghdad Railway Club(8)

‘Care for a drink?’ he said, and I saw that this was the way of it with the man Shepherd: he was shy but well mannered. He would try to make up for any display of shyness, or the awkwardness consequent upon it, with a generous offer.

A quick inspection of the lounges off the lobby told us that the Mahogany Room was the only one still boasting a fire. A dozen men sat in there, smoking hard. The first chairs we came to were set either side of a low table, and I could see Shepherd thinking, If we sit there, I will be interrogated, but we took those seats anyway. Shepherd set down his magazine, which unfurled itself to reveal . . . well, of course it was a copy of The Railway Magazine – the February 1917 number, I had it myself at home. He took his cigarettes from his top pocket and again offered me one. He set down the packet on the table. There was some writing in a foreign script, and a picture of a dark-skinned man in a fez hat walking through a pale-coloured desert at night with a rather paler woman in a red dress at his side. The man’s fez was the same shade of red as the woman’s dress. In the sky above hung a crescent moon and four stars. A waiter came; we ordered brandies (I didn’t care for spirits myself, but I knew they were the right thing to have, late on in a good hotel), and then sat back for an interval, blowing smoke and smiling. I was trying to look like an officer. Shepherd had no trouble in that regard, yet his shyness – or something else – prevented him from opening the conversation.

We both found that we were contemplating the magazine. The covers of The Railway Magazine were always either blue or green, and this one was green. Across the top of it – as usual – was an advertisement for ‘The United Flexible Metallic Tubing Company Limited. Works: Ponders End, Middlesex.’

Shepherd put his hand towards it, saying, ‘Good old Railway Mag.’

‘I have it on subscription,’ I said.

‘Me too,’ Shepherd said, blushing again.

. . . But having said this, he once again blushed, which suggested there was something shameful in it after all. Yet there couldn’t be if Shepherd did it. I was promoting him in my mind as the seconds went by. Only a lieutenant colonel – say – could afford to be so awkward.

Another silence fell between us.

‘I was in it once,’ I said, indicating the magazine.

‘Were you?’ he said, and it was genuine interest too.

I believe I then spoke for about ten minutes continuously. I began by telling Shepherd of how I was a railway detective by profession, having been deflected from a career on the footplate by an accident involving an unwarmed engine brake and the wall of an engine shed in Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax. (On the basis of this data, I realised, he must be wondering how I came to be a commissioned officer, for I assumed he did credit me with being an officer of some sort.)

I told him how the police office I had worked in was situated at York station . . .

‘On platform four,’ he cut in, ‘I know it.’

I then started in about how a journalist had come from The Railway Magazine and written us all up, giving prominence to my governor, Chief Inspector Weatherill, and giving me second billing in a way designed to cause maximum embarrassment: ‘The sharpers and dodgers of York station have learnt not to run too close a risk in the immediate vicinity of Chief Inspector Weatherill, and his close associate Detective Sergeant Stringer . . .’

At this, Shepherd smiled, but I believe he was smiling at the words of the journalist rather than at my own recollection of them. In other words, he was not laughing at me.

‘Go on to the war,’ said Shepherd.

I told him the North Eastern Railway had formed its own battalion . . .

‘The Seventeenth Northumberland,’ he again cut in. I nodded, and waited for him to say, ‘. . . known as “The Railway Pals”,’ and he got points with me when he didn’t. I told him that in the second half of the Somme campaign my unit had operated trains to the front from the railhead at Aveluy.

‘Little trains?’ he said, again with excitement.

‘The two-foot railways,’ I said. ‘They’re everywhere now.’

‘Were you running the Simplex twenty-horsepower units?’

I shook my head.

‘Never touched the Simplex tractors. Never saw one, or any petrol engine for the matter of that. We were riding the Baldwins.’

Blowing out smoke, he said the one word, ‘Steam,’ and sat back. He eyed me for a while, sat forward. ‘Are they good runners, the Baldwins?’

‘They’re good steamers,’ I said, ‘but the boilers are set too high.’

‘So they’re unstable.’

I drained my glass of brandy.