Lost baggage porter

Chapter Sixteen

'What are you reading?' asked the wife. 'Police Gazette,' I said. 'Deserters and Absentees from His Majesty's Service.' We were in the living room, waiting for the knock that would signify the arrival of my father for his Sunday visit. I turned the page and it came. Just as I stood up to open the door, I noticed, on the very top of the scrap papers in the fire basket, the words 'LADIES' COLUMN by "Lucy"'. It was one of the ones sent by dad to the wife in the hopes of turning her into the more common run of housewife, but it was too late to do anything about it now. I had the door open and Dad was stepping in, removing his brown bowler. 'Harry,' said the wife, and she rose from the sofa and they kissed. 'Now you mustn't stand up, dear,' said Dad. Leaving aside his being forty years older, he looked like an indoor version of me: pinker and more rounded, better maintained. 'Well, you know, I like standing up, Harry,' said the wife. 'It is one of my favourite activities.' 'But in your condition, Lydia' said Dad. He was standing at the fireplace now, in his Sunday-best suit, boots gleaming. 'You do look well on it, though, I must say. Absolutely blooming, isn't she, James?' He was looking about the room – searching for the sewing machine. I'd forgotten to put it out. 'Journey all right, Dad?' I said. 'Yes, all right, lad,' he said. 'A bit blowy coming along the cliffs.' The wife was watching him very carefully as he folded his gloves and placed them inside his bowler hat. He knew she was doing this, and he coloured up a little. A good deal of his gentlemanliness was new, a luxury afforded by a comfortable retirement, and he was liable to be embarrassed over it. He said: 'The waiting room at Ravenscar blew clean away, last month, you know.' 'But how could it?' said the wife, evidently fascinated. 'Well, it was made of wood, for one thing,' said Dad. 'They built it out of wood with the gales they get up there?' said the wife. 'Has nobody in that company read The Three Little Pigs?' Dad didn't know what to make of this, and went a little redder. 'I don't know I'm sure, dear. You must take it up with your husband… Oh, before I forget,' he said, and he took out from his inside pocket a pen which he handed over to me. 'Now you're working at a desk,' he said, and he handed me a pen. I recognised it. This was Dad's Swan fountain pen, his best one. Receipts to the gentry were always written with it – and I'd often tried to puzzle out the secret of its smoky green and black decoration. 'I can't take this, Dad.' 'Look after it,' he said, 'and it'll be a lifelong friend. I always meant to give you it when you started work, but first you were portering, then on the engines. There was no call for a pen.' 'I'm not always at a desk' I said, looking at the wife. 'A fair amount of the work is outdoors.' 'But it's not as if you're patrolling a beat… Is it?' he added, rather anxiously. 'I'm a detective, Dad, in the plainclothes section. I've told you this before.' 'Detective?' he said. 'That sounds a rather superior grade.' 'It is the very lowest grade on the plainclothes side'1 said. 'The lowest grade in a superior division' said Dad, who was now removing another article from his pockets. It was small and squarish, and wrapped in brown paper. He handed it to the wife, saying: 'This is for you, Lydia, love.' 'Thank you, Harry,' she said. 'Whatever is it?' 'Cheese' he said, 'best cheddar.' 'I'll go and put it in the pantry straight away' said the wife. 'No, no, let me, dear. I need to go to the little room as well. That's…' 'Out in the garden' I said. Dad took the cheese back from the wife, and handed over a slip of paper to her as he did so. 'Brought you another of these, love' he said. He turned and walked through to the kitchen, and I looked at the wife. It was another 'LADIES' COLUMN by "Lucy"' snipped from the Whitby Gazette. She read out loud: 'There are many dishes which are much improved in richness and flavour by the addition of a sprinkling of grated cheese.' 'Well that's the mystery of the present solved' she said, putting the cutting into the fire basket, from where I retrieved it and placed it on the table next to the typewriter. The wife was now putting on her cape and gloves, while I took my cap off the hook on the front door. We had a plan for the day, and it was now being put into effect.

'We thought we'd go off to church,' said the wife, when Dad came back from the privy. 'Oh good,' said Dad.

And we all stood there looking at each other. The day was darkish, drizzly. A grey cloud sat squarely over Thorpe-on-Ouse like an island in the sky. On the long path cut diagonally through the churchyard, we fell in with a thin stream of churchgoers, as the sound of a distant train filled the sky: a Leeds train or London train. It rattled away, leaving the cold, old sound of church bells. The wife had spied Lillian Backhouse, and, having made her excuses to Dad, had dashed on ahead. Lillian Backhouse, I knew, did not believe in God but went to church only because her husband was the verger. As far as I knew, most of the suffragists were like Lillian: non-believers. But Lydia did believe, and I went to church – sometimes – because she went, whereas Dad went to church because he thought it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

St Andrew's Church smelt of damp kneelers and old flags and banners. These hung down dead from the roof. They were set in rows above the pews, and reminded me somehow of the moving cranes in a locomotive erecting shop. The wife had re-joined us at our regular pew, which was at the back. Major Turnbull's pew, of course, was at the front, and when he walked in, making along the aisle towards it, I pointed him out to Dad, who was not in the least interested, which knocked me rather.

'No fresh meat to be seen in your kitchen, James,' he whispered, so that the wife would not hear. 'Do you not have a joint on Sundays?' 'Not every Sunday' I said. 'In your larder' he said, 'the emphasis is rather on the can. A young lady in Lydia's condition,' he continued, lowering his voice yet further, 'needs a regular supply of good, fresh meat.' 'Well' I said, 'she's living on raspberry-leaf tea and humbugs just now.' 'The baby will be small' he said. 'They generally are, aren't they?' He ignored that, but turned into a different channel: 'Where does Lydia wash the clothes, James?' he asked. 'In the bathtub,' I said. It was the wrong answer. After the service, I reflected that Dad was bringing out the suffragist even in me. He'd never done a hand's turn about the house. As a widower he'd always had help: a half-time maid when I was a boy, and now Mrs Barrett, his housekeeper. Afterwards, the three of us stood in the churchyard, and the wife said: 'Lillian's going to look in later.' Then the wife said, 'The river's just nearby, you know, Harry.' 'We thought we might have a swing out there,' I said, for this was the second part of the plan. Dad said: 'Are you sure you're able, my love?' 'Quite sure' said the wife, shortly. 'How are things in Baytown, Dad?' I asked as we set off past the front of the Archbishop's Palace. 'I'm kept pretty busy with the meetings of the Conservative Club. It was our annual meeting on Monday. Very good attendance, considering…' 'Considering that you lost,' I put in, which I'd done because I'd feared the wife might, and it would come much worse from her. Dad already knew me for a Labour man, his own son a lost cause. 'I consider it a blessing in disguise that the Liberals got in, James. It'll give us the chance to put our house in order.' He turned to the wife. 'You're still campaigning, are you, dear?' We're in for bother now, I thought, as the wife nodded, saying: 'Church League for Women's Suffrage and Women's Social and Political Union.' 'Well, that sounds enough to be going on with,' said Dad, as the wife strode on ahead, opening up a little ground between herself and Dad and me. We were walking past the old, ruined church on the riverbank now, and the few gravestones that stood at crazy angles around it. 'You know,' said Dad, to the back of the wife's hat, 'women have got along perfectly well up to now without the vote. Why should they want it now all of a sudden?' "This is a new century,' said the wife, striding on, as though about to walk into the river, 'and women want new things.' 'They want the vote,' said Dad. 'And other things besides,' said the wife. 'Such as what?' said dad. 'Sexual liberation,' said the wife, without looking back, and Dad turned to me with his mouth open and a look of panic on his face. We are unbalanced, I thought, as we came to a wet, slippery sty, and Dad helped the wife over, neither of them saying anything; there ought to have been another female in the picture, but there again perhaps there would be in a little under a month's time. We were right by the river now. It was wide and cold, carrying more brightness in its golden colour than the sky, and hard to look at, somehow. To our left were the private riverside grounds of the Archbishop's Palace, to the right the muddy path that lead towards Naburn Locks. We walked on in silence for a while, then Dad said to me: 'Hodgson has a new shed down on the front.'

'What for?'

'Boils crabs in it.'

The wife looked back at us, pulling a face.

'He doesn't do it for fun, you know,' I called ahead to her. 'He's a fisherman.'

The Hodgsons were one of the three or four big fishing families in Baytown. Dad didn't hold with them. They were vulgar sorts, he thought, stinking at all times of fish or foul cigars. Also, anybody eating fish was not eating meat, and Dad had been a butcher most of his life. Thinking on, it was a wonder he stayed put in that spot for so long. If he could have, he would have taken a rope and dragged the whole of Baytown up the cliff and away from the sea.

We began to hear the noise of the weir, and presently we stood before it, the water racing over the smooth stone slopes. It was not possible to speak in that stream of din. The swing bridge that carried the London trains over the river lay beyond. It looked like a steel tower that had over-toppled.

We turned about, and were back home for two o'clock. It was dinner time but there was no dinner, only tea, which the wife had half-prepared, so I put off the subject of food, made up the fire and lit the gas (for it was already dark outside). Dad looked at the pocket knife on the mantelshelf, saying:

'This is a handsome one, James, where did you get it?'

I don't recall answering, but poured him out a bottle of beer, and sat him on the chair near the fire, where he went to sleep in short order. I suggested that the wife have a lie- down, but she went off to the kitchen to finish the tea, and I picked up the Police Gazette once more. At first, I didn't read, but thought of Baytown, stacked up on its cliff – not so much streets as steps. If you let fall a marble anywhere in the town, it would be on the beach within a minute. I thought of the fishing families, and how they carved model ships and sailed them in the rock pools, which proved they liked the sea in some way. It wasn't just something they were stuck with. Anybody could join in too, even the butcher's son, so I liked the fishermen… But the railway ran around the headland, high and free, and timetables had held more fascination for me than tide-tables.

I looked down at the Police Gazette, and, without thinking, turned over the page reading 'Deserters and Absentees from His Majesty's Service' to that reading 'Portraits of Persons Wanted'.

I read the by-now familiar words: 'Apprehensions Sought.' 'Metropolitan Police District,' I read, lighting on the top one on the page. 'Joseph Howard Vincent, whose arrest is sought for the murder of two police detectives at Victoria on August 23rd, 1902.' There was a bad picture. The fellow was blurred, and further away than the usual Police Gazette lot, as if he'd already started making his escape at the moment the picture was taken. He looked to be on a gangway of a ship. The sky was very large behind him, and half of it might have been sea, when I looked closer. 'Complexion fresh,' I read, 'rather high cheekbones, carries head rather forward, beard, dark grey mixture jacket suit, silk hat. Eyes small and shifty. Blue. Erect bearing; has a habit of biting his nails. Until the date of the murder he lived on the prostitution of a murdered woman. Two days after the murder he is said to have been at Great Grimsby. Sentenced at Durham Assizes, 21st April 1890, to seven years' penal servitude for burglary at a pawnbroker's and shooting at police. Will probably be found in hotels. Warrant issued. Information to be forwarded to the Metropolitan Police Office, New Scotland Yard, S.W.' It was Valentine Sampson. Dad moved suddenly in his chair. I looked slowly across at him, thinking: it should have been me giving a jolt like that. 'I wasn't asleep was I, James?' I said nothing; my mind was elsewhere, but he really wanted to know. The wife was setting out the tea things. 'I wasn't asleep, was I, son?' There was a loud pounding on the door. The wife stepped across, opened it, and in walked Lillian Backhouse. The wife was introducing her to Dad. I was distantly aware of things starting badly, when Lillian handed a package to the wife, saying: 'Here's the scented oil. Now you are to rub it on here.' She was pointing with two hands down towards her cunny. Dad was looking across at me, his face red from the fire, looking like a man trapped in his seat. Was it Valentine Sampson? That was just the kind of name you might make up if you were swell-headed… He did have a fresh complexion, but did he carry his head forwards? I couldn't have said. Dad was now talking to Lillian; or the other way about. He was saying, 'You have children yourself, Mrs Backhouse?' 'I was continually pregnant for eleven years,' she replied. 'Eyes small and shifty.' Valentine Sampson's eyes were not small. They were large and shifty. Dad was looking puzzled. He was turning to Lillian Backhouse. 'But you must have had a child at the end of all that time?' The wife was laughing, trying to steer the sound of it in the direction of politeness, but not quite succeeding. Lillian Backhouse was standing in the centre of the room, hair down like a girl, her legs set further apart than is generally considered ladylike. She was swaying her middle back and forth, moving her thin dress, and saying her piece:

'Eleven children, eight survivors; two miscarriages, and not once under the doctor, and never once with chloroform either.'

Valentine Sampson's eyes were large sometimes, at any rate. Small at others? Maybe.

'… And that was when I felt my membranes go,' Lillian Backhouse was saying.

The wife was remarking upon something.

'My first?' Lillian Backhouse was saying, evidently in reply. 'With my first I had a straight labour but I flooded afterwards.'

'Flooded what?' I thought. Dad was on the edge of his chair, wanting to go but unable. Tea had to be eaten first, apart from anything else. Meanwhile, his object was to shift the talk away from Lillian Backhouse's insides.

'What did you find was the best diet for building up your strength, Mrs Backhouse?'

'Oatmeal and bacon,' said Lillian Backhouse.

'Ah now, bacon,' said Dad in a firmer voice – at last he had something to hold on to.

They were not blue – Valentine Sampson's eyes – so much as blue-ish. But the Police Gazette didn't run to 'blue-ish'.

'The second and third,' Lillian Backhouse was saying,'… things ran along smoothly.'

Valentine Sampson at Victoria Station… I could just picture him there, sweeping towards the trains of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. I saw him in Brighton, looking nobly out to sea while dreaming up villainy. The man haunted railways; railways and hotels, it now seemed. Very well then: railway hotels too. He would have a gun about him at all times, of that I was now sure, and the Camerons, I was equally certain, had taken lead because Sampson had brought his gun to York. The wife was still bringing out the tea things. Lillian Backhouse was watching her, saying, 'A mother should have nothing to do with heavy labour for three months before or after.' 'It's only a few potted meat sandwiches' I heard myself saying. I could send a message to the Chief straightaway, and he could telegraph the Metropolitan Police, South Western Division. We had run their man to ground after all. Why, this might be the end of the matter! Dad was up and out of his chair at last, as Lillian Backhouse was saying, 'With the baby always writhing and turning like a…' And now Dad was in front of me, with his gloves, cane and bowler collected up. 'His lungs were not inflated by the midwife,' Lillian Backhouse was saying, as Dad said: 'The three o'clock train'll suit, James, if you don't mind.' And so, with a kiss, and apologies, for the wife, and a bow of a very peculiar sort to Lillian Backhouse, he was out the door with me following along behind. 'Who's her husband?' Dad was saying as we crossed the front garden. 'A man of a rather delicate constitution' I said. 'I'm not bloody surprised,' said Dad. Kettlewell, the carrier, did a three o'clock run into York on Sundays, and we waited for him at the Palace end of the main street, just outside the ill-feted, never-occupied cottage with the wild garden. Dad was saying something about a Middlesborough ship, lost off Filey the week before, and I made a few comments here and there, but I was wondering all the time at the near identity of Valentine Sampson and Joseph Howard Vincent of the Police Gazette.

As I stepped back in through the door of 16A, the ladies were obviously talking about me, because they stopped talking at just that moment.

'Well, shame on me for saying the father ought to be present,' Lillian Backhouse muttered after a short pause.

She looked directly at me, saying: 'We'd all have fewer bairns if fathers attended births, I'll tell you that for nothing, Jim Stringer.'

'I shall be here, Lillian,' I said, sitting on the sofa,'… only downstairs.'

'Lydia will be downstairs, for the hot water,' said Lillian Backhouse. 'That kitchen,' she added, pointing, 'is going to be a hot water factory.'

'Then I will be upstairs,' I said, but with Valentine Sampson to settle, another thought was beginning to cross my mind: would I be here at all?