The Blackpool Highflyer

'There' said Grace, 'you are into the very crannies of a mystery.'

'Could be money' said Marie; 'thirteen consecutive fronts paid for in the Era don't hurt.'

'Special New Year's card to every manager in the country' added Grace.

'Sounds a good notion,' said Clive, trying to cut in again.

'No,' said Grace, 'we send telegrams.'

'Wire best offer!' Marie suddenly shouted. 'We're coming!' and she looked at us all with wide eyes. I did like her, but I had a feeling Clive would fare better alone.

I found a wobbly pair of legs and walked over to the bar. Monsieur Maurice was standing by the billiard table, shaking the new man's hand and saying: 'You were quite a favourite tonight.'

The new man – who was the ventriloquist that had been on first, Henry Clarke – was thanking him. Off stage, he looked an amiable sort: brown eyes and silky hair parted down the middle like a church roof.

'Let me stand you supper' Monsieur Maurice said to Henry Clarke. 'The fish pie's rather good here.'

'That's awfully kind,' said Henry Clarke. 'Only they will put cayenne pepper in, and I don't care for it.'

'Nothing easier in the world than getting a helping without' said Monsieur Maurice.

'Well, I did ask yesterday' said Clarke, 'but in the end I had to go for the mutton instead.'

'Oh I think we'll be able to manage,' said Monsieur Maurice.

I looked over to where Clive was sitting with Grace and Marie. More drinks had come from somewhere onto their table, but I wasn't keeping track of my own let alone anyone else's. Clive was laughing, looking only at the two women, especially Grace, so odds-on she was his favourite. You could watch Clive for ages in a room, and he would only ever look at the women, no matter what the men were up to.

I thought I might go back over to Marie later. It wouldn't hurt to talk a little longer.

Next to me at the bar, Monsieur Maurice was shouting at the serving girclass="underline" 'What do you mean by "It can't be taken out once in"? I insist on having a fish pie without cayenne pepper!'

The serving girl went away into the kitchen and came back, and something along the right lines was worked out, for Monsieur Maurice ordered Champagne in a friendly voice and not only paid for Henry Clarke's fish pie, but stood him a glass of beer into the bargain. So he wasn't such a tightwad after all.

I stood in the middle of the room for a while, thinking of ventriloquists, Blackpool, trains and the wife – a hundred things and nothing at all.

As I wandered across to the Gentlemen's a moment later, I could hear Monsieur Maurice saying to Henry Clarke: 'Do you know the words that frighten me most in all the world? "Wanted: for children's party, a ventriloquist".'

They didn't seem very frightening to me.

Henry Clarke was smiling in a shy way, eating and trying to be polite.

'Second only', Monsieur Maurice was saying, 'to "unexpectedly vacant all season".'

Henry Clarke smiled again.

I looked out through the window. The moon was there above the sea, the last entertainment of the evening laid on for the trippers. The room became like a boat in rough water as I started crossing it. Then I struck the billiard table, which I looked at long and hard: the long green gaslit field, against the storminess of the sea – telling the sea how to behave.

'He's a dear old pal of mine,' the Elasticated Man was saying to somebody while staring at his picked-over chop; 'helped me when I was down.' Looking again at the Elasticated Man, I could see that he was old himself – sixty or so. Yet still elasticated.

When I returned to the table where Clive and the two girls were sitting, I heard Grace saying:'… because I don't want to be a step girl, stuck down some warren with two kids, and expecting again.' She looked all about the room before adding with a sigh: 'This is a jungle sort of life though.' She turned back to Clive and sighed again. I had never seen Clive spooning at close quarters, and had little experience of the art myself, having married very young, but I somehow knew that with all this sighing, things were progressing for him.

Marie said to me, 'You look all-in.'

Clive was saying something in my ear that I couldn't catch. Now he was standing up, taking Grace by the hand, but my eyes were on Monsieur Maurice, who was sitting and watching Henry Clarke eat fish pie. Clarke looked pretty uncomfortable, as well he might, and the drunken thought came to me: if for whatever reason it was Monsieur Maurice who'd thrown the stone through my window, then the wife was sitting pretty at the present moment, for she was in Halifax, and he was here.

A little while later Marie was also standing up, saying to me, 'Will you stroll on the beach?'

There was a shivering mini-sea on the beach, left over from the tide going out. The electric lights on the North Pier were reflected in it. Two figures were walking under the North Pier: Clive and Grace. As I watched, they stopped and kissed. For all that Clive was due his medal, this was his true business: not driving engines but kissing. And the next lot.

'Well!' I said to Marie, who was very surprisingly nearby.

I turned and saw a tram coming along the Prom, all lit up like a theatre. Its lights took away from the moonlight. I watched it stop at the North Pier, then move on.

'You've missed that one,' said Marie, 'but you must get the next.'

'That's right,' I said, 'I certainly must.'

I gave a small wave, which was returned, and as I began walking, thinking of the wife in Back Hill Street reading her

Pitman's Shorthand manuals by the bad light of the gas mantel, plotting and planning for the two of us (and, as I sometimes thought, for the whole of the world) I felt glad to have said goodnight to Marie.

I hurried back along the Prom, for I knew it was close to midnight. The trams kept coming by, and they were noisier in the night. Or perhaps it was the Prom that was quieter, with just the odd lonely person looking out to sea. You'd get these lonely sea watchers even in Blackpool, but only ever late at night. The lights went along the Prom, up one side of the Tower, down the other, then continued along.

Central station, right under the Tower, was nearly but not quite dead. You can feel it when there's just one engine left in steam, but that locomotive was somewhere out of sight, and the stationmaster must have booked off, for the ticket collector had a bottle of Bass in his hand. How did he get on the railway, and once on, how did he stay on? He was very thin, and his hair was white and shaggy. He looked like a cornstalk but dangerous with it. His coat was too big for him, and there were egg stains down the front of it clear as day. He was talking to a fellow who had his back to me, and wore a tiny jacket, narrow-go-wide trousers, big shiny boots and a cap pushed right back – not a railway man. He had a big head but a little nose, tilted up like the cap. I put him down as one of those reverse swells, an underminer.

This big-headed kid was saying to Cornstalk: 'It's a job though, Don, and tha needs brass.'

'That's fair do's, Max, that is,' said Cornstalk. The voice was high, and it carried. It was Lancashire… Lancashire or Yorkshire, but light.

'Every ticket with its little triangle clipped out,' Cornstalk was saying, 'and after a while, you know, I get so I can't look at that triangle or any fucking triangle. It's wrong, like, I know, but I don't like fucking triangles any more, and when I see a bottle of this stuff with the fucking triangle on the label…' He stood back, and the bottle of Bass was in the air, and when it came down the pieces of brown glass raced to all parts of the empty station.

'Will you look out?' I said, as I came up to the two of them.

'Sorry about that, mate,' said Big Head, but Cornstalk himself said nothing, never looked at me either as I walked through the gates.

The last Preston train was on platform five. It was a clumsy, late-night sort of tank engine of the kind I didn't know; the kind of beast that wakes you up at midnight as it crashes through your town with its driver cursing at the controls.