I moved straight to the window, but checked myself, for there was glass all over the tab rug we kept beneath the sill, and I was bare-footed. Hill Street – where the stone had been pitched from – had the look of a place somebody had just left. The warm air rolled up and in through the broken window.
I moved to the bedroom door and saw across the corridor that George's door was half open. He was peering round the edge of it. 'What the blazes was that, old man?' he said. He had on a nightshirt, and his hair looked wild, which made me think he must wear something on it by day.
'Stone,' I said. 'Came through the window.'
'Christ on a bike' said George. 'Drunks, was it?'
'Happen,' I said.
'Anything I can do, old man?'
I shook my head, and George closed his door.
I walked downstairs but thought better of going out.
Instead, I caught up the brush and pan and a couple of old Couriers. When I got back upstairs, the wife was already picking up glass. She gave me a look, and it was one big question.
What to do in emergencies.
'It was two fellows,' I said. 'They were canned. I just got a glimpse as they scarpered.'
'Did you?' she said.
'Yes,' I said, and I reckoned she didn't believe it any more than I did, but she wanted to.
We picked up the glass together, wrapped it up like fried fish.
'What did they look like?' asked the wife presently.
'Two swells,' I said, and I began to see them in my mind's eye: a pair of Champagne Charlies like in the music halls. 'They were a pair of proper chumps,' I said. 'One fell as he ran off, and had to be helped up by the other… The trouble is, you see, we had the gas up, and we've no curtains…'
The wife was back in bed now. There were little particles of glass in my hands from picking the splinters out of the tab rug. I walked over to the gas and looked at my finger ends: it was like a kind of frost. I climbed up next to the wife. I couldn't touch her because of the glass in my hands.
We sat back on the bed, both wide-eyed and not saying much, but listening to the sounds of Halifax that came in through the burst window.
At five we heard the clattering of the milk cart, then came the rattle of clogs – a sliding, shuffling, slithering – as the weavers of Back Hill Street set off to their mills, which was followed by a noise of metal fighting against stone: the first tram of the day coming down Horton Street.
'It's odd that anybody should be drunk at four in the morning,' said the wife at one particular moment. 'I mean, midnight, yes. But not four.'
'It's quite possible to be drunk all night,' I said.
'Well you'd know,' said the wife, and gave a grin. She didn't seem too downhearted. Perhaps my story had taken, after all.
'We'll pay for the new glass out of the tea caddy' she said, as I thought: if this is the work of Paul, why does he not go off and smash a boss's window instead. Old Hind's would do – any one of the hundreds he had to his name.
Presently, the sunshine came spreading, and then, when all the cobbles were quiet and the hands were inside the mills and fit to be baked or roasted, came the heat, which sent the wife off to sleep for a little while. She woke at seven to go off to Hind's Mill, very sadly removing a ten-shilling note from the tea caddy and saying, 'This puts Hemingway's Piano further off than ever.'
She said she knew of a glazier up on the Beacon near the mill, and she would call in on her way to work. She said she would be back from work at the usual time in the evening, and I told her that I would be late back because of the evening run I had coming up. I told her it wouldn't hurt to lock the door from the inside when she got back; she asked why, and I couldn't think of a way of putting it. Then I gave her an extra special goodbye kiss, for I knew I was about to come a cropper on the Blackpool line.
Chapter Fourteen
Beginning shortly after dinnertime, I spent a lonely three hours in the shed fettling up 044 tank engine No. 7 (not one of Aspinall's but one of Mr Barton Wright's) for an evening cruise to Blackpool. It would be the first Blackpool Special from Halifax Joint since the occasion of the stone on the line.
As I bundled the paraffin rags into the firehole and afterwards the baulks of timber, the same thoughts revolved endlessly. The stone could only have been thrown by Paul. He'd followed me home on the night after we'd first spoken, so he knew where I lived. He wanted to make news over the stone on the line, whether he'd put it there or not, and the stone through the window was another push to get the whole matter in the papers. Then again, the poster advertising 'a meeting to discuss questions' was still in place on the wall of the old warehouse. That was pretty brass-necked of them, if they really had turned terrorists. You either fought or you held meetings. You didn't go in for both.
Why didn't I tell the papers? Then the Socialist Mission might leave me alone. And why didn't I tell the coppers, which would come to the same thing? But what was there to tell?
As I lit the fire, my mind moved on to the bigger matter, the question of wrecking.
The odds were that any engine man would meet no more than one attempt at wrecking in his life. But what good were the odds? One out of thirty million had been killed on the railways in the previous year, 1904, but what good was that to you if, like Margaret Dyson, you happened to be the one?
I thought of her again. It was crazy to go through your life without seeing the sea: seeing it only in photographs. Margaret Dyson was not down-to-date. She had not caught up with the railway world. But then it had caught up with her.
Question after question came as I lit the fire, and one of the big ones was this: Where had Clive disappeared to beyond the Valley Bridge at Scarborough?
That gentry swung his snap-bag, followed by himself, up onto the footplate at 3 p.m. He just grinned at me, and began checking the oil pots as I fettled the fire.
We came rolling out of the shed in the bitter blackness of our own smoke, which broke and cleared as we came into the light like blackbirds appearing one after another out of nowhere and rising off our chimney top. I looked up into the little valley town of Sowerby Bridge, at the blue shining sign: van houten's cocoa. It should have been a sign for seltzer or dandelion and burdock; better still, ice. Some fellows were skylarking in the open-air water tank on top of the coal stage as we took on coal. It was strange to be in an engine underneath men swimming. They were getting cleaner by the second, and we were getting filthier as the coal smashed into the bunker. The coal would always come in like an accident; I could never get over the din.
As we rolled on, readying to go off shed and make for the Joint, I knew why Clive had been swimming in Scarborough. He'd done it to get clean.
Just then, I looked back and saw John Ellerton coming towards us from the shed, waving his hands. He wanted to see us in his office, so Clive braked the engine and we climbed down.
John Ellerton's office was full of light and full of paper. It was built onto the front of the middle of the shed, like a sort of toll booth. The engines went in and out on the roads either side, and the office was three-quarters glass, so John could see all the comings and goings. He stood behind his desk and passed papers to Clive and me. It was the draft report into the smash by Major Harrison, sub-inspector of the Board of Trade. It started: 'I have pleasure to report…' Then the facts of what had happened were set down. Next came the write- ups of the interviews with Reuben Booth, Clive and me, and finally the conclusion, which I jumped straight to. Skimming it over, I read: 'It is found that no want of caution was shown in the operation of the engine. The fireman is a young man of twenty-two, only recently put up to the job, but the driver is experienced, and appears to me deserving of commendation for preventing a far worse disaster.' And this was the last word of Major Harrison: 'It is not possible to say how the obstruction came to be placed on the line.'