The Last Train to Scarborough

'I don't know,' I said to the Captain.

The Mate smoked a cigar from the tin with the picture of the church on it. He also had before him a plain glass bottle containing a brown spirit of some sort – whisky or rum, not Spanish sherry – and a small glass, which he filled from the bottle pretty regularly. It seemed to be his reward for the ship having reached its destination. But the Captain did not take a drink.

'It was the first obvious connection,' I said. 'The two follow on, do you not see? Why and then because. It proved he wasn't such a blockhead as all that.'

'You thought that he had been making a show?' the Dutchman put in, but it was the Captain who came up with the right word:

'Shamming?' he said.

'I'm not sure.'

'What happened next?'

'I went to down to the kitchen.'

'And?'

Chapter Thirty-Four

In the kitchen, Amanda Rickerby had her hair down (which made her a different kind of beauty) and was brushing it while she sat at the kitchen table, which was crowded with new- bought groceries. Instead of 'hello', she said, 'Mr Fielding is very chivalrously peeling the potatoes,' and he was most unexpectedly working at the sink with his suit-coat off and shirt sleeves very carefully rolled.

'It is extremely unhygienic of me to brush my hair in the kitchen,' Miss Rickerby added, and I saw there was pen and paper in front of her.

'Don't worry on my account,' I said.

'I'm most awfully sorry. I'll stop just as soon as I've finished.'

Vaughan was not present. Adam Rickerby stood by the range, and paid me no mind. He was gazing at his boots, as he was being quizzed by a round, jolly looking woman – evidently Mrs Dawson the daily help.

'How are we off for tinned rhubarb?' she was asking him.

'We've none in,' said Rickerby.

'Prunes?'

'None in.'

'Vanilla essence.'

'Eh?'

'Never mind. Rice?'

'We've none in… I reckon.'

'Ah now, I detected a flicker of hope there, Mrs Dawson,' Howard Fielding said from the sink, moving a quantity of peeled potatoes onto the draining board.

'There,' said Amanda Rickerby, who'd finished brushing her hair, and was putting it up. 'What do you think, Mr Stringer?'

Being so curly, it didn't look much different; but it did look beautiful.

'Good,' I said, thinking: As you know very well.

'Good,' she repeated. 'But I wish there was a looking glass in here.'

'It's not your boudoir, love,' said Mrs Dawson, who was now in the larder. 'And I wish you wouldn't move everything about from one week to the next. I know it's you and not Adam. He's perfectly neat-handed.'

'We should put up a notice,' said Fielding from the sink. '"A place for everything, and everything in its place.'"

He'd turned around now, and was smiling at me, drying his hands on a tea towel and giving me that questioning look of his.

'Yes,' said Amanda Rickerby, 'but where would we put it?'

It was then that I saw the glass of wine – white this time – at her elbow, and not only the glass but the bottle. 'But where would we put it?' she repeated, in a dreamy sort of way. Looking at me, she picked up her pen, and said, 'How about "excellent in quality"?'

But it seemed that she was speaking to Fielding, even though she had her back to him, for he replied,' Superior in quality,' and Amanda Rickerby wrote that down. 'No tinned meat,' he added. 'You have that down?'

Miss Rickerby nodded, more or less to herself. She then said, 'Tariff furnished on application,' and she gave me a lovely, mysterious smile at that. She'd seen that I'd noticed the bottle. It said 'Chablis' on the label, and I could not have pronounced that word but I knew it signified good wine.

'Now I need fresh cheese,' said Mrs Dawson.

'Can you have fresh cheese?' asked Amanda Rickerby. 'Mr Fielding's special reserve,' she said to me, indicating the bottle.

'Help yourself to a glass of wine, Mr Stringer,' Fielding called out from the sink. 'It's a rare event to find the Burgundy whites in Scarborough.'

'And he should know,' put in Miss Rickerby.

She found a glass, and poured me some wine.

'It's been standing in cold water since breakfast time,' she said, regaining her seat, 'and what do you think? Mr Fielding sent Adam with a sovereign to buy some lovely fish from the harbour.'

Vaughan now entered in his cape, looking flushed and damp but in good spirits. I wondered where he'd been since the women's pub. Seeing the fish lying in white paper on the kitchen table, he said: 'Good-o, I like a bit of cod.'

'It's haddock,' Fielding called out. He had now acquired his own glass of the Chablis, and it appeared that a regular party was in the making.

'We're going to have it with cheese sauce,' said Amanda Rickerby,'… and creamed potatoes.'

But of course she was not lifting a finger to help her brother, who was doing all the work with some assistance from Mrs Dawson.

'Is this normal?' I said. 'For a Monday in Paradise?'

'It is not, Jim,' said Vaughan. 'Potted shrimps and stewed fruit would be near the mark for normal. What are we having for pudding, Mrs Dawson? I fancy treacle tart.'

'All right, Mr Vaughan,' she said, 'I'll just immediately make that for you.'

'Hang about,' he said, 'I'll give you a hand.'

And he walked into the larder and came out with a tin of Golden Syrup, which he passed to Mrs Dawson before sitting back down again and taking a copy of Sporting Life from the pocket of his cape. Mrs Dawson took the lid off the tin, saying, 'That's no earthly use,' and passed it to Amanda Rickerby, who peered in before handing it in turn back to Vaughan.

'It's more like olden syrup,' she said, but the crack was for my benefit. She seemed most anxious for my approval of all her remarks, and so I grinned back at her – but were the smiles of a woman who was half cut worth the same as those from a sober one? And whenever I see someone drinking heavily in the daytime I wonder why they're about it, whereas evening drinking is only to be expected and quite above board.

'Seems all right to me,' said Vaughan, inspecting the treacle and receiving a glass of wine from Fielding. He dipped his finger into the tin, and started licking the stuff.

'It's just because we're all always so blue on Monday,' said Amanda Rickerby, 'and today we're going to be different, and you and I are going to have a lovely long talk, Mr Stringer.'

I thought: At this rate, we're going to have a fuck, and that's all there is to it. All I had to do was let on I was married and that'd put an end to it, and I knew I should do it because if you fucked one woman who wasn't your wife, then where would it end? You might as well fuck hundreds, or at least try, and your whole life would be taken up with it.

I saw that Fielding was eyeing me from his post at the sink.

'Just at present, Miss Rickerby is composing an advertisement for the Yorkshire Evening Press! he said.

'You mean you're composing it,' Vaughan interrupted. 'Old Howard's a great hand at writing adverts,' he added, turning to me. 'He advertised in the Leeds paper for a promising young man interested in post cards, and I thought: That's me on both counts! You see, I'd worked for a while on one of the travelling post offices, Jim.'

'Which ones?' I enquired.

'The Night Mail "Down".'

I was impressed, for the Night Mail 'Down', with carriages supplied by the Great Northern and staff by the General Post Office, was the TPO.

'You must have lived in London at that time,' I said, 'since you'd have worked out of Euston?'

'Born in London, Jim,' said Vaughan, and I wondered whether that alone accounted for his appearing to be of a slightly superior class. I tried to picture him walking every morning through the great arch in front of Euston station.