'A very good sort,' said the boy.
I looked at the dog, and all in a moment the sun coming into the carriage had turned its eyes to glass circles.
'He's an Irish terrier,' I said.
'If you knew,' said the boy, 'why did you ask?'
'I wanted to see if you knew.'
By turning his face about an inch away from me the boy made it plain that he thought this a low trick, but he said nothing.
'Oh, she looks a little brighter now,' the woman with the shawl was saying.
'My dad had one when I was a young lad,' I said to the boy. 'He was a butcher. All butchers have got dogs.'
'I know two that don't,' said the boy.
'Well…'I said.
'I can think of three that don't,' said the boy, and he added, with a look of fury, 'Most butchers don't have dogs.'
I turned back towards the woman lying down.
'First thing,' I said. 'Let's give her some air.'
At this, one of the women told the boy to get down, and with such meaningful force that he obeyed, taking the dog with him.
'Now' I said, putting down the ambulance box and the book, 'let's help the lady sit up a little.'
And I heard a word from the one who'd come to collect me: 'No,' she said. But she said it quietly and I paid her no mind.
I leant forwards and helped the woman into a half-sitting position. Nobody moved to stop me. Directly I touched her head, my hand was both wet and dry: blood. There was a deeper red stain on the red cushion on which she'd been lying too. There was a sort of bony rumble and the woman with the shawl had fainted. I turned back to my patient. She opened her eyes, and the beautiful, surprising green-ness of them came and went all in a moment. The eyeballs had rolled up and she was white as paper. No human should ever look like that.
One of the women shouted: 'May God rest her soul.'
All was confusion after that, with everyone fighting to get to the woman and to bring her back to life, but it could not be done.
At the end of this scramble, with the compartment filled with the sound of screaming, the elderly fairy, the woman who had come to collect me from the cab and who by rights ought to have had a happy face, looked at me: 'What is your name, Mister?'
'Stringer,' I said. 'Jim Stringer.'
'Well, Mr Stringer,' she said. 'You've just killed the sweet- est-natured, most beautiful lass I've ever known, and you've left her boy an orphan.'
Chapter Four
The Halifax Parish Church clock was striking six when I stepped out of the Joint station and lit a small cigar. Clive smoked small cigars. They fitted the bill for a fellow of the right sort. A cigarette was too dainty and fashionable, and a big cigar was for semi-swells: the smaller the man the bigger the cigar, my dad – who did not smoke at all – had once told me.
My way home was along Horton Street, which climbed up from the Joint, and there were many temptations on that cobbled hill, starting with the Crown Hotel that gave 'meals any hour', for although my wife had many virtues, cooking was not one.
I carried on up. Sugden's ice-cream cart was over the road, with the little white pony that looked as if it was made of ice cream. I hadn't seen him for a few days, for he would often get a lad to hold the horse's head when he went into the Crown for a glass of beer. The lad would get a penny lick for his trouble.
Sugden saw me coming and called out: 'Weather suiting you?'
'Champion,' I called back, for that's what I always said to Sugden.
Next came the works where Brearley and Sons made boots; then the moving crane, which had stopped, then the old warehouse where they posted the bills. There was a new one up there: 'a meeting to discuss questions', I read, just as though I didn't have enough questions on my mind to be going on with. But I read the ones set out: 'Blackpooclass="underline" A Health Resort?', 'Wakes: Curse or Blessing?', 'The Co-operator… Does He Help?' At the bottom, the poster said: 'Mr Alan
Cowan, founder of the Socialist Mission, has the Answers', and I wondered what sort of crackerjack he was. The meeting was fixed for 18 July – which would be the Tuesday following Wakes Week – at the Drill Hall in Trinity Street.
I walked on, past a grand pub called the Imperial. This I had never been in, but you sometimes got the most wonderful prospect if the two front doors happened to be open as you went by. The saloon was jungly inside with twisted metal lights and big plants moving under electric fans. All seemed to go on very smoothly and quietly in the Imperial Saloon, where the waiters crept about in their patent-leather shoes. One pull on the beer pump, it was said, would give a pint of bitter in an instant.
But I didn't bother to look inside this time.
Alongside the Imperial was my own haunt, a pub called the Evening Star. There was one room, with barrels on stools behind the bar and sawdust on the floor. Most of this room was taken up with a handsome billiard table with red baize – it was as if one day the shavings on the floor had miraculously flown together to create this marvellous article. I was no great hand at billiards so I never played a game on it, and the queer thing was that nor did anyone else.
I walked into the Evening Star and asked for a pint of Ramsden's. It was three days after the stone on the line, and we'd been on the Rishworth branch ever since, but late that afternoon some bit of business with a broken ejector end had kept me back in the shed. Try breathing kerosene and oil inside an engine shed with fires being lit all around you, and the glass rising towards eighty – it's the only thing for discomfort and sick imagination, and puts you in sore need of a pint.
On the billiard table was a folded Courier, left behind. I picked it up, and there at last was the report. It was very short. 'Railway Outrage' in big print, then 'Lady Passenger Killed' in smaller, and 'Who is the wrecker?' smaller still.
A special Whitsuntide train to Blackpool, which left Halifax Joint station on Whit Sunday, had a narrow escape from utter disaster near Kirkham. With admirable speed the driver applied his brakes on seeing the obstruction, which proved to be a grindstone placed squarely between the rails. Some minutes after the train was brought to a halt, a woman was found to be suffering a concussion after a fall in her compartment. At first she seemed to be merely shaken, with bruises about her forehead, but she fell into unconsciousness and died within a short time of the train coming to a halt. A reward of?5 for information leading to the apprehension of the culprits is being offered by the railway.
To speak of a 'narrow escape' was wrong – that would have been something else altogether. Clive had been going too fast.
Then again, was it right to blame Clive for the way things had come out? I knew that I had not shone myself on that day. I took from my pocket the note I had made from the book, What to Do in an Emergency, for I had found the right page half an hour after the woman had passed away, and while waiting for the engineers to come out from Blackpool Central had copied down the important part. It came under the heading: 'About Unconsciousness and Fits', and Dr N. Kenrick had not minced words. 'If the head is not getting its full supply of blood, as you see by the pale face, surely it is only a matter of common sense to keep the head low… I will go further, and say that if it is a delicate person you are dealing with, to put him or her suddenly upright may cost your patient his or her life.'
That's what I'd found, having looked in the book for reassurance. The woman who'd come to collect me from the engine had been right, and that was all about it. I'd read the passage time and again as the engineers had jacked up the front of 1418 and got it back on the rails, hoping that somehow the words would change, and the meaning bend the more I read it over.
There was to be a Board of Trade inquiry, and the smash had set the police on the move after a fashion. A constable had come to Sowerby Bridge Shed and questioned Clive and myself. Clive had kept pretty quiet, but I'd spoken up to the copper, talking about how the grindstone might have been got to the line, mentioning the motorcar flying past. I wanted salt put on those who had done it. But I had the notion that the constable wanted as little information as possible, because information meant hard graft for him.