The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Twenty-Five

Friday 25 December – Tuesday 29 December

At midnight the trains started up, and it was as though the world started turning again, although I just kicked my heels in the lodge for the next three days, my only excursions being across the road to the dining rooms. What requests had Stanley made? What, if anything at all, did they have to do with the deaths that came hard upon those meetings to which the requests had been put? And were the questions in some way connected to the men of the half-link? There was only one way to find out, and that was to wait for the following Tuesday and ask.

At six in the evening on 28 December, the Monday, I walked from Hercules Court to the Necropolis station – by the usual route, this time – and there I saw the poster on the board propped outside the front: 'Extramural Interment: An Address'. It was to happen the next day at 8 p.m. Who wants to hear of cemetery schemes at Christmas? I thought, as I scurried back to my lodge, but it did not matter. I would be there, for one.

The Tuesday ought to have been the day I went back to work, but I did not return, for fear of more meetings with the half-link, and I kept to my room at nine o'clock when there came an awful pounding on the front door of the lodge, in which I had been alone, with no sight of my landlady, since Christmas Eve. The call boy had been sent. He was certainly a great hand at knocking, and it was queer to think that the sound would have once represented to me the greatest nightmare of all.

I took two pints at the Citadel before setting off to the address. They were meant to boost me, like the engine brake handle that was in my coat sleeve once again. It was just before eight, and the rain was coming down hard on my best suit as I walked once again to the Necropolis station. As I came within sight of the place, a black funeral van came swirling out through the gates and away – light and fast and free, having, I guessed, left a body behind. The traps and cabs were all rattling past at a great rate, and throwing out mud onto my suit as they went.

Passing Mr Stanley's sign, I walked through the gates and stood looking into the courtyard, lit by its gas jets, some trembling high up on the walls, some low down, like fireflies that had settled themselves in any old way. I turned towards the door in the arch and saw the board where the forthcoming funerals were posted up. Underneath large black letters spelling out 'In Memoriam' were the details of the burials at Brookwood on the following day – the last ones of the year, I supposed – of a Mrs Lampard and a Mrs Davidson-Hill. Both were to ride out in 'first', as were their mourners, and it struck me that this was why Twenty-Nine had been standing ready on Christmas Day.

I climbed the stairs, passing the trapped flowers, and walked through the double doors on the fourth floor marked 'Address'. Mr Stanley was there under an electric light, sitting at a table upon which were some papers, his bowler hat, a tumbler and a glass jug of water. His big head was dangling down and there was a gap in the black hair on the top of it -but it was not as if his hair had fallen out; it was just as though some of it had been worn away as part of the overall sadness of his life. Before him was a cluster of chairs – every one empty. There was a palm in the corner this time, fluttering in the wind and rain that was flying in through an open window. Stanley looked up as I entered, and I saw the long brown face and wide golden eyes. I took a chair at the front.

Stanley sat still for the next ten minutes while he waited, or pretended to wait, for a crowd to come in. I sat there and did the same, looking, I hoped, like a man without a care; but it was only those two pints and the brake handle that enabled me to pull it off. (I'll take two more besides, I thought, when this business is over.)

It was ten minutes, then, as I say, before I called out: 'Will you carry on with the meeting?'

Stanley made no answer, but rose to his feet and immediately commenced booming in that very unexpected voice: 'As it is appointed unto "all men once to die,'" he began, 'the subject of interment is one of universal interest.'

He looked at all the empty chairs for a while, and I looked at him, gladder than ever of the Red Lion inside me.

'It comes home to every human breast, not only with a solemn but an emphatic closeness,' Stanley continued in his surging voice. 'Whatever, or whosoever, the head of a family in this vast population of London may be – whether high or low, rich or poor, young or old – he knows that sooner or later himself, his wife, his children, his domestics, his associates, must each in rotation pay the great debt of nature and descend into the silent mansions of the tomb.'

He paused here, seeming to shrink rapidly as he did so, and when he next spoke it was in that fast, pernickety mutter he came out with when not speechifying; this mingled with the clattering of the jug against the glass as he poured himself some water.

"These words were written by the founder of our Necropolis Movement some sixty years ago.'

(Stanley might have given out a name for this founder, but I had not caught it.) 'In the same year he also wrote the following…' He breathed in and came out with the big voice again: 'Within numerous and loathsome decomposing troughs, for centuries past in the heart of the capital of a great Christian nation, the most depraved system of sepulture has existed that has ever disgraced the annals of civilisation.'

As Stanley spoke he would rotate a few degrees in one direction then back, his whole huge body – too big for any work it was ever called on to do – rocking gently as he came to rest facing one way or the other. He reminded me of some seaside automaton that I had seen, but his eyes were alive – as beautiful and sad as any woman's.

He took a short drink, put the glass down hard. 'Our founder calculated,' Stanley went on, resuming his rocking, 'that within the first thirty years of his life, one and a half million corpses had been partly inhumed, partly entombed, within the metropolis. During that time the amount of poisonous gases evolved from putrefaction into the civic atmosphere, beyond that absorbed by the soil, exceeded seventy-five million cubic feet. And further, this system, which whether as regards public health, public morals or public decency, is the most gigantic abuse that has ever -'

'You needn't continue with the full address for my sake,' I said.

Stanley stopped and looked at the blackness beyond the windows for a while; then he took a step towards me. "The address, once begun,' he said, using his ordinary, smaller voice and facing towards the windows, 'has never been abandoned for any reason.' He shifted his head slightly so that he was looking at me from the sides of his eyes, and all of a sudden he looked like a slugger. "The first Mr Gladstone, when he came to hear the Tuesday Address, said that he had never heard the case for extramural inhumation put with such eloquence since the days of our founder.' "That is something,' I said, and I thought: he's off his onion.

'He is reputed to have written a letter to the board,' said Mr Stanley, still not looking at me, 'but they have never seen fit to give it any very wide circulation.'

'Where is the founder today?' I said after a while, as though the fellow had been a great pal of the two of us.

Mr Stanley's eyes flickered and then he put them on mine for the first time. 'He has gone beyond this world.' He continued to stare in a most unnerving way.

'You mean that he is in Surrey, I assume… in Brookwood… that he is dead?' Mr Stanley gave me a sharp nod, then his eyes left mine, and I felt very relieved.

'So they have you to speak up for the Necropolis, and speak this dead man's speeches?' I said after some little while.

With no expression in his voice or face, Mr Stanley, looking now slightly to my left, said, 'At a rate of nine shillings per address, fifteen shillings and travelling expenses for any address that takes place outside London.'

He turned around, and picked up the jug again. He filled the glass with his wide, shaking hands, and drank the water. 'Is there much call for addresses outside London?'

'There is no call for it whatsoever.' And he switched his eyes back onto mine; I did not like it. 'And within this city the interest is not great?'

'Not great.' Still the eyes were upon mine; and he had not put the jug down. 'You are speaking to one who has performed very great service on behalf of this company,' he said. 'You were speaking of all those poisonous gases.' 'Our founder did.'

'But since his time, very shortly after the creation of the Necropolis, I think, there was an act of some sort.' 'There have been many acts.' Still the eyes; his eyes were like fires.

'No, I mean an act – an Act of Parliament allowing the creation of cemeteries inside the city.'

As I spoke, he looked down at the jug. It was a well-made, big thing, but it looked small in his hands. 'That has been one of the acts, yes,' he said, looking up again, 'and yet somehow a hopeful spirit is maintained.'

Still staring at me, he now rapidly stood, and I thought: the death of Sir John Rickerby is where it starts; all else follows from that. With my right hand I felt the heaviness of the brake handle under my sleeve.

'It is by written contract that addresses are supplied,' said Stanley, stepping out from behind his table and beginning to pace before it. 'Do not think that any individual, let alone a barrister of twenty years' call, would be so blind as to get into this sort of work without making stipulations pertaining to, for example, the minimum number of addresses to be given over any given period. Naturally there are to be more in winter than summer. The call for the addresses is greater in winter if only because the rooms in which it is given are -' And here he stopped his pacing. 'The rooms are what?' I said.

'Warm,' said Stanley, and then he was off again, pacing back and forth.

'But you just speak for money,' I said. 'You have no personal interest in any of what you say.'

'Intramural burial is a grievous wrong, and one particular aspect of the company's operations is of special interest.' 'Which is what?'

His eyes were on me again; they were not like fires, I decided, but like flowers. 'Trains.' He took another step towards me.

'Trains?' I said. 'Oh, they're a bit of all right, aren't they? Quite exciting, you know.'

Stanley nodded. 'As a means of conveyance for the dead, yes.' 1 am on the railways myself, on the London and South Western Railway, to be exact. I clean the funeral engines.' 'I know,' he said.

His eyes stopped dancing and went dead. He seemed to be in the grip of a fever; he was sweating freely – and this with the coldness of the night coming through the open window.

'It is written in the minutes of the Necropolis that you sent requests to the directors at their meetings of August, November and December.'

He was looking down at the jug again; he was very intent on the place where the handle joined the body. Then he looked up to me and his eyes were full of orange flame.

'What was your request?' I asked, letting the brake handle slide a little way into my palm. 'I asked for an increase in pay.'

As he swung the water jug, I said, 'You're off your onion,' and the water and the glass exploded against my head as he said in his fast voice: 'I did not receive it on the first occasion, and nor did I receive it on the second or the third, by which time the company's indebtedness to myself for services provided had… oh, it had not decreased, oh, it had most certainly not decreased, and yet I was to be content merely with the restoration of the Tuesday Address as a weekly -'

I had sunk to the ground as Stanley raved, and that wasn't the end of the matter. I was sinking through the floor as my murderer spoke, and the blood in my eyes turned into the red flowers among those that the board of the North Eastern gave 'I. 'I. Crystal for his shows. No, the certificates. They gave him certificates for the flowers that were everywhere. You couldn't see out of the waiting room for them, and you couldn't properly see out of the signal box either – they were dangerous, those gardenias. On the platform you can see very well, though – the hills of Eskdale rising and rising, and here is the bird train coming down from Whitby at half-past eleven on a summer Saturday morning: 137, that silly little dock shunter that would have been better off banging cod waggons about at West Cliff, two waggons full of pigeons, and my old favourite, Mr Saul Whittaker, the pigeon conveyer, who tells no end of yarns, and is semi-drunk at all times.

Number 137 stops, and this time there is a flat-bed truck tagging along behind, with something under a tarp. In the first pigeon waggon, Mr Saul Whittaker rolls open the door and slides down onto the platform like a heap of brown sand. 'Bugger me!' he says – I don't know why, maybe it's the smell of Crystal's blooms hitting him – and then, squatting down against the truck, sweating Old Six and breathing hard, he says, 'Sporting challenge, lad?'

'I'm on for any mortal thing,' I say, while pulling the baskets for Grosmont out of the vans. I set them up in a dead straight line along the platform, having a look onto the footplate as I move towards the 'up' end. All is too dark inside, the firehole door being closed: just two pairs of boots, maybe, one fellow singing a Moody and Sankey hymn in a little voice.

'Ow do,' I say, but nothing comes back, and the singing doesn't even stop.

Behind me the station clock goes clunk, which is twenty-seven past eleven, which is no good because it is Whittaker's watch that counts, and this he is holding high in the air while tipping his head backwards, looking about ready to sneeze. The silence carries on as I watch old Father Whittaker, whose thin red head is tipping ever backwards… 'Go!' he shouts.

'Hold on, you rotter!' I shout back, but I'm pelting along that platform in any case, lifting the lids, with the birds flapping and crashing straight up into the air like bombs going off behind me. At the end of the line I stop, gasping in front of Whittaker and his watch, with the birds in a cloud above us. He's nodding, grinning all around his head, and I am blowing my nose on my sleeve, even though it is a North Eastern Railway coat and I'm proud to wear it. I've let the birds go within one minute. The two of us look up and see them, still hanging over the platform like a Piccadilly Circus in the sky. As we watch they make a bigger circle, turning fast before beginning to go off in all directions like sparks from a Catherine wheel at a bonfire carnival.

I start to load the boxes, and when I've finished Whittaker seems to be sucked rapidly backwards into his van; he doesn't exactly stand up. I move along to the back waggon, where I see, underneath the tarpaulin, the shafts of a yellow gig rocking on its blocks in the sunlight. As 137 starts barking and pulling away from Grosmont, I say goodbye to that old gig, because very soon there will be no more of its kind. I am seventeen years old, and it is a very special time. High-speed is coming. But then I somehow moved my head again. There was a shortage of secondary air; people were appearing and disappearing at a great rate all around Nine Elms, and I was dragging my feet, which sounded like rain. But then I had to go on a railway journey in Portugal to meet a man who wrote an article in The Railway Magazine, and if only the wind had died down I might have been in with a chance. I was staring into the firebox on Thirty-One, closing my eyes but it was still light. Every time I closed my eyes the music hall began, for I had that damn firebox leaping in my head.

I wanted three more on the right side, three more on the night side. 'It's Welsh coal,' said a voice in my head: 'damned slow to ignite.' The voice went and I found that half of my face was my face and the other half was joined on to something else. When I tried to move, my mouth was dragged into a kind of smile. All was darkness and there was again a shortage of secondary air. I moved my hand up and something at the same time hard and soft came quickly down upon it. I lifted my hand again but not so high, then higher again and the thing came down swiftly once more. So I slid one of my hands up towards the half of my face that was still there, moving my fingers until they touched a rock, which was what joined me to the hard and soft. The voice came back again and this time gave me three words in the softness and the darkness: dart, pricker, paddle. Well, they were the fire irons to be found on any engine. I was grateful for the words because I liked them, but did not know why they had been given to me.

In a funny sort of way I went back to sleep and in a funny sort of way I woke up – I did both, I mean, without really doing either. All was the same as before, but I was being shaken in a way that I had been shaken before.

'I am on a train,' I said, and I realised that the whispering voice had been mine all along. The rest of it came to me quickly: I was now in Mrs Davidson-Hill's coffin, or Mrs Lampard's, and heading for the grave of the one or the other in Brookwood, and when this knowledge came to me I found I could not suck in enough air to keep alive, and sweat began rolling off me in an instant. I jerked and there was a tearing in the rock, and a great boiling of the blood underneath it. I thrashed at the solid darkness, only I could not thrash. And yet I was not blind, at least, for there was a very thin line of light going all around me like a halo, happily around and around and around like a song being sung. The sight calmed me somewhat, and I started on smaller breaths, which seemed to serve, and with them came a return to the state of semi-sleep into which I let myself go gladly, until I heard my own voice speaking. 'First class,' it said, and I felt the water from my mouth that those two words had produced trickling across my cheek towards the rock, where I stopped being able to feel it.

First class. Saturday Night Mack could be standing guard over me. For a second I could not recall whether he was a bad man or a good man, and then it came to me that he was good, that he was off the hook like the men of the half-link. If I carried on living they could be my friends and my landlady could be my best girl, for this all made my mistake in visiting the night-house seem a very small matter. It was the sort of thing a fellow might do because he was alive, and being alive was good.

I slid my hand under my coat and into my waistcoat pocket. My landlady's advertisement was in there. I wanted to go back to the summer pictures of Grosmont in my head, but Saul Whittaker had gone, and the whole of the North Eastern Railway with him. I was alive until I died, and stuck with it.

The journey to the Necropolis – and the hole in the ground waiting for me there – was one of forty minutes, and I must have had most of those. My one hope was Saturday Night Mack. I slid the advertisement from my pocket, then through the crack of light, and waited. But as the minutes passed a terrible picture came before my mind's eye: of Saturday Night Mack reading Hoity Toity Bits with the paper so close up to his face that all was quite blocked out but 'PRIZE OF AN EIGHT-ROOMED HOUSE: ANYONE CAN WIN IT AND LIVE RENT-FREE FOR LIFE'. I felt myself sinking into the softness of the velvet, and becoming rather velvety myself. My head was going away again and I did not mind. I seemed only to be able to breathe out, as though in small soft gasps. I felt a change in the heartbeat of the train, and we came to a stop, and it seemed as though I too had come to a stop. I did not breathe, and I could not tell what was me and what was not me in the world of the coffin.

The train started again, but I was beyond thinking why, or wondering which signal had halted us. Was it the trains that were scared of the horses or the horses that were scared of the trains? The question kept going round and around, and I could not answer it, and it did not matter. There was a train somewhere, far away on the cliffs, but I was down on the beach with a crazy person and the tide coming in. Sometimes I was under it and sometimes on top, but the crazy person it did not affect. After a while I began to be more under it than on top, and I seemed to become uncoupled from the train because it went on its own way, and the question stopped being a question but became just words, before long becoming only sounds, after a while becoming not even that.

The noises slowly returned, becoming words again, but this time they were the words of Saturday Night Mack, muttered between panting breaths, 'Diamonds… diamonds… big as beans!' he was gasping, but then in a different voice, a worried whisper, he said, 'Half a mo,' and it was with the wrenching cry of a rooster and a great upward surging feeling that I seemed to shoot out of the coffin when the lid came off.

In fact, it was not at all like that: I remained exactly where I was, stuck by blood, watching Saturday Night Mack with his screwdriver in his hand swerve and fall across me before rolling away onto the carriage floor.

The head of Mack came back up after a while, and looked very ill indeed. 'No diamonds,' I said, but I believe it did not sound like that to Mack because of the way that my mouth was.