The Baghdad Railway Club(81)

The Royal Engineer called down to Ferry: ‘Ready for your second?’

Ferry glanced upwards, and in doing so, he saw me: ‘I . . . am,’ he said.

The water came down, and all the hairs were straight again. Ferry had closed his eyes to take the deluge. He opened them again to see me still staring at him. He must think me a queer, but I didn’t care. What had Captain Boyd’s Arab servant, the amiable but half-witted Farhan, said? That the British soldier who’d visited Boyd on the day before his last day had had ‘religion in his heart’ – the Christian religion. Farhan had also disclosed that Boyd had made frequent visits to ‘the home of the British’ – surely the British Residency. Surely, also, he had gone there to send telegrams.

Ferry stepped forward to where his uniform was neatly folded on top of his kit bag together with Colt revolver, belt and holster.

I had seen the carbon copy, albeit too faint to read, of one of Boyd’s messages, or one of his attempted messages. A line had been put through it. Was it that Ferry had refused to send it? Was it that the message constituted what Ferry had called ‘tittle-tattle’? Or did he have some deeper reason for disapproving? Ferry was religious. He had the crucifix, and was therefore most likely Catholic. If you were Church of England, you didn’t go in for jewellery. Not if you were a man, anyhow. He had been first to arrive at both the club meetings I’d attended, and the Church of the Saviour’s Mother was just around the corner from the clubhouse. Catholics – keen ones – would go to a service held on a Saturday evening as well as the Sunday ones. They went on a Saturday evening because it was nearly Sunday.

Ferry put on his shorts first, and no wonder, the way I was looking at him. He said, ‘Are you . . . ?’

He buckled up his gun next, and I could see the logic of that, too, given that I still stared.

‘Am I what?’ I said.

Ferry put on his shirt. As he sat down ready to put on his socks, puttees and boots, he leant forwards and I could easily see the crucifix between the buttons of his shirt. It would be in plain sight every time he leant over. It was a wonder I hadn’t noticed it before. The point was that he wouldn’t have had to strip off for Ahmad to notice it.

‘The peculiar . . . code you employ,’ he said, and the rest came with horrific fluency: ‘Are you working for Manners at the War Office?’

He was lacing the first of his boots. It seemed to me he’d set himself the task of doing it in not more than half a dozen precise movements. It made me feel sick to watch him, for I knew I was not up to that sort of effort.

Ferry said, ‘Are you . . .’

Sock, boot, puttee. Ferry had completed his left leg; he now turned his attention to the right one. He was horribly in control of himself. He began by making an inspection of his long left foot, pulling apart the toes. Beyond the smoke box of The Elephant, the sun was going down, but not without protest, not without having started a great many other fires in the sky around it. I wanted to say to Ferry, ‘You had a run-in with Boyd. What happened?’ But I was too hot to speak, so Ferry did instead:

‘Are you . . . on a secret job?’

It was the cool cheek of the question that I found distressing. Ferry was not turning out how I expected. But this was my fault, for I had seen the steeliness in him.

Fifty yards off, Wallace King and Wilson were filming the sunset. King was a little way in advance of Wilson, perhaps taking a closer look at the sunset. ‘It’s not up to much!’ I could hear him calling. ‘We’ve got plenty of sunsets anyway! What we need is a good sunrise!’

It made no difference of course, the going down of the sun, and I thought of the one day of my childhood when I’d been overwhelmed by the heat. Baytown, the place of my birth, stood on the Yorkshire coast, not too far from Jarvis’s Scarborough. It wasn’t easy to be overwhelmed by heat on the Yorkshire coast. Knocked over by the east wind, yes. I was six years old or so; the sun was raying down on the beach, and I was screaming. My father held my hand. Being only a man – a widower – he did not quite understand young children, and I believe my distress had been increased by the woman who had come up and shouted at him, ordering him to take me indoors. He had immediately removed me into the lifeboat house, which was always dark, and smelt of paint, for they were always painting the lifeboat. There was a bench you could sit on to watch them do it. I had been placed on the bench and given a penny lick . . .

Ferry was asking another question: ‘Are you quite . . .’

An expression came to me all the way from Yorkshire, and I believed that I said out loud, ‘I feel like I don’t know what.’