The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Thirteen

Saturday 5 December

On the Saturday, I booked off at four-thirty and turned my back on Nine Elms, which was full of rumours and coppers, and walked back to my lodge along the riverside. Along the Embankment, which was as busy as any road, I watched the black water sliding up and down the hulls of the rolling, smoking boats. Waterloo was a stranger place than Nine Elms, with a stranger smell, and the god of it all was the stone lion watching the black river from the top of the Red Lion brewery. The sun was going down, but that smoke was still going up, and the traffic and the people were all still going strong as the sky turned pink.

I turned away from the river into York Road: hundreds and hundreds of people were coming at me under hats. I stopped under my coffee viaduct and there was yet another new person – a young woman – standing behind the stall. 'Money in the tin?' I said. "That's it, love,' she said.

Her eyes were very blue, and very white around the blue-ness. When I'd paid she tipped her head and stretched out her arms like a dancer, pushing her bosoms to the front of her semi-clean white dress. It's not often, I thought, that you see anyone so very beautiful do anything so strange. I moved along Lower Marsh with my coffee feeling ashamed of my thoughts. I bought some Vianola soap from the Vianola Soap Pharmacy over the road from my lodge, because I had planned an extra good wash for myself before taking a pint down at the Citadel. I had found myself quite galvanised by my drink at the Turnstile, despite the difficult circumstances; several things had become clearer in my mind, although I had found, when I came to put them in my Lett's diary, that they amounted to nothing much. The thoughts were along the following lines: that although Barney Rose was under the gun at Nine Elms, he had a better friend in Arthur Hunt than I had first thought.

At any rate, I resolved that there would be no harm in taking a drink more often after my turns. I was moving away from Dad by degrees, but that was only right. He would not stop being my dad by any of this.

I looked up at the wall of my lodge, and saw that an advertisement for 'Go West Cheese' had been put on top of some of the 'Smoke Duke of Wellington Cigars'. 'Stower's Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour' was still there.

My lodge was dark and hot. Instead of going straight up the narrow stairs to my room, I went into the kitchen for a bowl of washing water. My landlady was there, folding clothes. The boiler was bubbling away in the corner giving the place the drowsy air of a Monday morning. The place was more like a factory than a kitchen, with no decoration apart from a line of tins on the mantelshelf and a framed bit of embroidery above the tins reading 'Commit Thy Way Unto The Lord'.

I gave my 'good evening' and paid my rent; then, in keeping with my new idea of boldness, said, 'It's quite all right either way, but did you manage to get any cocoa in?'

My landlady looked up at the tins on the mantelshelf, and I did the same: Bird's Eye Custard, Marigold Hake, somebody's candied peel, Goddard's Plate Powder, raisins, currants. 'No,' she said.

'Oh, well,' I said. 'I would like to collect a bowl of hot water to have a wash, if that's all right.'

She put the kettle on, then leant up against the table, saying, 'And how is life on the railways?' She looked very grave; very beautiful, too, in a strange way. Every one of her expressions seemed to contain a lifetime of meaning. She said again, 'How is life on the railways?' 'Well, it's not all honey'1 said.

Two racks full of airing clothes were swinging slowly above our heads. She went over to the boiler, moving the clothes inside around with the stick, watching me. She laid the stick on the side of the boiler before walking over to the table. This was covered in blue cloth. There were two piles of folded towels on it, and a red book. My landlady touched one of the piles of towels and let it tumble on top of the book. Then she looked at me and nearly smiled, which was more thrilling than if she really had smiled. Suddenly she whirled around and started moving the tins on the mantelpiece. I could see the tops of her gypsy boots, and, being embarrassed, I embarked on one of my Gladstone speeches, for which I cursed myself even as the words were coming from my mouth.

'I am endeavouring to rise in the estimation of my mates, not by boasting of my accomplishments but by being at all times civil and obliging, ensuring that when my driver comes to collect the engine on which I have been working, not only are the motion and boiler thoroughly cleaned, but also that the footplate is swept up and the boiler front plate -' 'Mr Stringer,' said my landlady, 'you are very boring.' 'Oh,' I said.

'How would you feel if I told you all the details of my working day?' 'I would be very interested.'

'Right,' she said, with considerable force. 'Today I started at six, when I realised that you had left out your laundry for me to wash.'

'But you told me to do that!' I protested. 'And there were only two shirts and two undershirts.'

(My long Johns I had been too embarrassed to put out, and I had been endeavouring to clean them myself when my landlady was absent.)

'I collected it from upstairs,' she went on, 'and put it together with the household load. Then I sorted the whites from the coloureds, and gave everything a good scrub with the brush on the washboards. I broke off to start the fire under the boiler, before boiling up the whites, giving them a good poke about all the time with the stick, and using plenty of soap, which I cut off the big block. After that I rinsed and blued to bring the whites up to white. Next the coloureds had to be done, and after that everything was rinsed and put through the mangle. Some went out on the line to dry, and some were put up here.' She pointed to the swinging airers. 'Next, I cleaned out the copper and scrubbed it for next time.' 'But it's still going -'

'When I had finished,' she said, cutting me off, 'I looked again at all your clothes, and realised they were still in a terrible state, so I did them all again.' 'It's because I'm cleaning engines,' I said.

'By transferring all the dirt to yourself,' she said. 'Why do they not give you something to wear other than ordinary clothes?' 'I don't know,' I said. 'In America, footplate men do have uniforms.' She looked at me very curiously.

"They're blue,' I added, wanting to keep my explanation to a minimum so as to avoid being called boring once again.

'Blue would be a good colour for it,' she said, 'and pitch black would be better still. I see no reason why the trains cannot be electrical, and they will be in time. They will be quicker, cleaner, less noisy, and we will not ail be living in this hell.'

I was knocked for six by all this. I said, 'In Baytown, where I come from, they do the washing on a Monday.' 'They,' she said. "That is exactly it.'

'We had a part-time slavey to do ours,' I said, adding: 'You object to the work, I suppose?'

'What else is open to me? Sweating at the pickle factory or the rag shop.' I said, 'You could go into an office and be a typewriter.' 'I don't mind it so much,' she said, ignoring me. 'My father is rather old-fashioned, but a good man, and I will come into his two houses. Then what a difference you'll see.' 'Gas upstairs?' I said. 'Do leave off' she said. 'Electric light!'

'You are very up-to-date, a modern woman!' I said, for I had heard that expression somewhere.

'I hope to be when I come into the houses; and then I'll be free, too,' she said, at which she gave me a big, sudden smile that was as shocking as if the lion had toppled off the top of the brewery.

'I have heard of free women' I said, 'but never met one before.' She was still giving me that really big smile. I said, 'Shall I tell you something that isn't boring?' 'If you can,' she said, still smiling. 'A man was killed at the shed this week.' That did for the smile; but it was not boring. 'Killed accidentally?' 'No. If you ask me, somebody crowned him.'

As I said this she carried on with her work, but she must have let her eye linger on the book that was on the table, half underneath the towels. Nothing but a matter of weeks in London, and I was looking for strangeness all about me. I picked up the towels, and my landlady said with a sigh, 'Hawk eyes.' It was Continuous Engine Brakes by M. Reynolds. But the important words were written by hand on the first page: 'H. Taylor, April XII1902.'

'He wasn't here for above two months' said my landlady, 'and then he…' 'What?' She shrugged. 'You might have told me'1 said. She said nothing to this; she did not seem greatly distressed by whatever had happened to Henry Taylor. 'I suppose he owes you money' I said. 'Oh, no. It was a pound down for him as well.' 'What happened to his things?' 'His father came for the box – a gentleman from Dorset.'

I imagined Henry Taylor sitting on the platform of a halt in the Dorset hills with the SM's flowers behind and Rowland Smith walking up. In my mind's eye, I could not make Dorset any different from Yorkshire, and I could not make Henry Taylor any different from myself at Grosmont.

'The worst of it is,' I said, 'I think he was done in too – just like Mike.' 'The one who was crowned this week?' I nodded.

'This is Waterloo,' said my landlady, 'and it is a very bad place. Men are the slaves of the factories and the railways, and the women are the slaves of the men – whether in the homes or the night-houses. There is drunkenness, opium, cramped quarters and all that goes along with it.' 'But you live here.'

'I have no choice, and have my church and my god, Mr Stringer,' she said.

As, by that most unexpected remark, my prospects of making her my girl disappeared, she seemed to become still more beautiful.

"The book was left under the bed,' my landlady went on, and she handed it to me. 'What did you know about Henry Taylor?' 'He was handsome enough.' I did not like to hear that. 'When did he die?' I said, quite harshly. 'It is not known that he did.' 'When did he go from here, then?' She was back at the boiler now, poking at the clothes very lazily. 'August.' 'When in August?'

'He was last in this house on the twentieth of August – a Wednesday. I happened to be here the night before, and I heard him leave for work.' 'At what time?' 'Six. Two hours later they sent a man around – a very young man.' "The call boy.' She said nothing. 'Do you mean the call boy?' 'I suppose so. He was a boy, and he called.' 'Do you know which way Taylor went to work?' 'Along the river, I think.'

She had gradually turned away from me as she spoke, and I saw she was no longer stirring but simply holding the stick in the boiling water. Then she sniffed mightily, or so I thought, but at the same time she dragged one of my undershirts out of the water and held it in the air with a waterfall coming off it. She could have been crying but it might have been the steam on her face; her eyes, at any rate, were prettier and more full of light and darkness than ever. She let the undershirt fall back and, turning around to face me, said, 'You are like a detective.'

For the first time I felt that I had the upper hand with her. 'You've talked to detectives?' I said.

"Three times,' she said, and then, being sure she was about to cry but hating the thought of it, I felt that this was enough.

I slapped the table with my cap, and said, 'The pharmacy over the road has been telling me, by a dozen adverts all across its front, to "Buy Vianola Soap".'

'And you have finally given in,' she said, smiling somewhat again. I nodded. 'Now I am going to have a wash.'

'Good,' she said, and with her mystery smile returning we were back on equal terms.

She pushed one of the towels towards me with the book now on top instead of underneath. She reached up to a shelf, took down a bowl and filled it with hot water. I walked upstairs and unwrapped my soap, which was rather on the small side but took away the stink of Nine Elms Loco Shed in an instant. I lay down on the bed and slept for half an hour. When I woke up the sky was a smokier red, and the banging and the crashing were still going on but further out in the distance. I looked at my room – at all the things that Henry Taylor had looked at from the same truckle bed. It was a lonely spot in a crowded place, but when I thought of my landlady downstairs I felt that, whatever lay in store for me, I wouldn't mind for having been here with her for a while.