The Necropolis Railway

Chapter Nine

Tuesday 24 November continued

I could not stop thinking about what Rowland Smith had in mind for me in his flat in the Northern Division of London, but if anything could have taken my mind off it, the little Necropolis Station was the thing. It certainly was a very interesting show.

I walked around the buffer stops to the second platform, where there was another row of low, dull buildings. I had been given permission to look about, so I opened one of the doors and there was a coffin. Above it, an electric light swayed on a chain that had a black cable entwined in its links. The coffin lid was off and, stepping forward, I saw a white face -1 could not say whether a man's or a woman's – with a mass of blackness below. There were chairs like thrones on either side, and I marvelled to think that this place was a waiting room of sorts. I looked again at the mighty electric light, thinking: all this modernity for the dead. But I longed for the roaring of gas, and I stepped out of there in double-quick time.

I walked around the block of buildings on that platform and saw what from my side looked like a low wall but was in fact the top of a twenty-foot drop. At the bottom was a dazzling white courtyard with, on the far side, a fancy pink-brick building with a big arch cut through it. As I looked down, a black coach-and-four shot through the arch into the courtyard. The driver got down, and when he removed his black top hat I expected more blackness, but there was no hair there at all. It was as if he was letting me know: just between you and I, my unknown friend above, I am completely bald. He put the hat back on, left the carriage in the middle of the courtyard, and everything went still again save for the hot horses, stomping now and again in the shafts.

Two minutes later a door on the right-hand side of the court opened, and two men in black came through it. Three more men in black came out from the tunnel, and one of these was talking all the time, but I couldn't see which one. The men stood still for a second; but their shadows, which were like the hands of clocks, kept growing. Then the bald fellow led the horses into stables at one side, and a coffin was taken out of the back of the carriage by the other four, who put it onto their shoulders and carried it quickly through a doorway in the bottom of the wall of which I was on top. I seemed to be watching a funeral taken at a running pace, but with all proper dignity preserved.

The door below me closed, and then I heard a muffled, buried groaning getting louder and louder. This groaning changed to more of an open-air scream for a second, before the four men and the coffin burst out of a door right behind me that was in some part of the platform buildings. They'd come out of a rising room – in America they call them elevators. The coffin men turned and aimed towards me. For a second it was as if they were bringing their casket to me, asking me if I'd like to try it for size, and I was glad when they continued down the path towards the buffer bars. I now spotted an iron ladder coming up from the floor of the courtyard to where I was standing, and I thought: I'll go down.

This place spoke of mystery, and it needed to be got to the bottom of, and so did that ladder.

The courtyard was white and empty, except for horse droppings. I thought: for neatness and cleanness you must have up-to-date transport, but then I remembered Nine Elms. I went across the courtyard, through the arch, and out into the street. I couldn't quite get my bearings. I knew by the noise and the pickle-and-beer smell and the train thumping across the viaduct to one side that I must be in the same territory as my lodge. The front of the Necropolis building was straight out of the Arabian Nights – all domes and swirls and bricks of pink, as though it was embarrassed, for the street it stood in was plain enough. I tried to get the place straight in my head. It was like a castle with a courtyard, and this pink part with the arch running through it was where the portcullis would be. Yes, a castle with a portcullis, a courtyard – and a small railway station running along the top of its back wall.

'Excuse me,' said a pleasant sort of voice at that moment. 'Is today Tuesday?'

I turned around and saw another man in black – no undertaker this time, but a parson.

'I am looking for the Tuesday Address on Interment,' he said. 'Do you know where it is held?'

'Upstairs in there, I suppose,' I said, pointing at some of the lighted top windows of the pink part. 'It is Tuesday, isn't it?' said the parson.

'Do you mean today?' I said, because I was learning to be cautious with all remarks.

"The last time I came it wasn't on,' he said, 'or at least it wasn't on here, but perhaps it sometimes happens elsewhere.'

This parson, who was a very vague gentleman indeed, now walked under the arch and through a doorway in its side. I followed, and saw that he had entered a kind of vestibule with electric lights burning. It was all good wood; there was a triangle pattern everywhere in the panels, which meant something – the sign of a secret society – and on the wall just to the left of the door was a glass case with funeral notices inside. There was a smell of carbolic and old flowers.

I walked in, and up the wide wooden staircase. There was nothing on the first floor save closed double doors and a great fan of flowers trapped in a glass globe. If they could have had black flowers, I am sure they would. The sprays were perfect but I didn't like the way they didn't move, and I began to think more favourably of old Crystal and his fluttering blooms on the 'up' and 'down'.

There were two lots of double doors on the next two landings, and two more on the fourth floor, which was the top one. On one of this pair was a card fitted into a slot, reading: 'Extramural Interment: An Address by Mr S. Stanley'. From within, I could hear what I felt certain was the voice of the sad busybody I had glimpsed earlier scolding the fat boy, but this time he sounded slower, and lower and grander. He was saying, 'As it is appointed unto all men once to die, the subject of interment is one of universal interest. It comes home to every human breast, not only with a solemn but an emphatic closeness. Whatever, or whosoever, the head of a family in this vast city may be – whether high or low, rich or poor, young or old or in the prime of his days, he must…'

I knew what was going on: this was the company crying its wares. I put my eye to the chink in the door, and although I could not see the speaker, I could count the number in his audience. There were four, including the parson I had spoken to in the street.

I turned to the second door and, opening it, came upon a room in which were one loud clock and a lot of large books. Screwing my boldness up to the highest pitch, I entered this little library, which seemed more out of bounds, than any other part of the premises so far. The volumes were marked with every year from 1852 to the present. I picked out 1888, and opened it. 'On Tuesday 19th of March,' I read, 'at a meeting of the directors -' Just then I heard a voice.

I looked up from the book, but what I had heard was only the voice of Stanley coming through from the next room. He was in high force now. 'Within these numerous and loathsome decomposing troughs, for centuries past in the heart of the capital of a great Christian nation, the most depraved system of sepulture has existed that has ever disgraced the annals of civilisation…' (His speech being very old fashioned, I couldn't properly follow the meaning.) 'During which time the amount of poisonous gases evolved from putrefaction into the civic atmosphere, beyond that absorbed by the soil, exceeded…' Here there was a short pause, before Stanley continued with a dismal booming, 'some seventy-five million cubic feet.'

I read the book as long as I dared, and could not make sense of it. It was all lawyer's talk. But it wasn't all books, this room. The clock was on the mantel, which was very grand, and there was one black pot to the left of it and another to the right. Over the mantel were pictures of swells, five in all, with dates underneath. The first picture was titled 'Colonel Tidey', and he was dated 1799-1862. Well, that was his life, but there was another line, stating that he had been 'Chairman of the London Necropolis Company from 1854 to 1861'. Colonel Tidey was a bearded gentleman, as were the next three. The fifth only had moustaches, and had been photographed, not painted. His name was Sir John Rickerby, and he had gone from life, and of being chairman, in the same year, 1903, the only one to have done the two in one. Well, I thought, it's 1903 now, so he could have died this very morning, although that would have needed quick work by the picture framers.

I thought of the worrit I had seen eating a chop and talking of poles to Mr Smith, the fellow called Erskine; he was the present chairman – he'd felt the need to remind Smith of it – so he would take the next spot on this chimney breast. I stood and looked at the pictures, deciding at length that each of the five seemed more down-hearted than the last.

'Nothing more or less than to remove the sepulture of the dead from the homeseats of the living!' the voice from the next room was booming, in a desperate sort of way. I stepped out of the room with the pictures and the books, returning to the top of the stairs. 'Be assured, madam' Stanley was saying – and he was back to his fast, busybody voice now – 'that a hopeful spirit is somehow maintained. By liberal expenditure of printer's ink has it been made known…'

When, five minutes later, I walked back along the first platform at the Necropolis station, I was amazed to see, beyond Thirty-One, the Bug sailing away from the station, with White-Chester leaning out from one side, holding onto his topper and looking back towards the Necropolis station, and Rowland Smith doing the same from the other side. Smith wore no hat, and his curly hair was flying.

On Thirty-One, Barney Rose and Mike were waiting with steam up. They were not talking and Rose, I fancied, looked pinker and more crumpled than usual, perhaps because he was sitting on the sandbox and staring silently into the fire. 'Saw you talking to your Mr Smith, there,' he said, looking up at me. 'Most amiable, he seemed to be.' He was smiling, but more from habit than happiness, I thought. 'He works here, now,' he continued, "but he's still great mates with White-Chester.' "The two of them have just gone off in the Bug,' I said.

Rose nodded, then he looked up and grinned. 'Dapper gentleman, ain't he?' he said, as some of his former cheeriness seemed to return. 'Yes, I'll say that for him, quite the masher, is that young chap.'

Rose was suddenly speaking to me as a man and I made an effort to answer in kind: 'Quite the ladies' man, too, I should guess' I said.

'Oh, well,' he said, looking back up at me, 'I don't know about that, but I'll tell you this: he's tough as a bulldog under all those fine coats of his, a very good fellow to have batting on your side.' He nodded at me as if to say 'congratulations on that, at any rate', before slowly standing up and walking back over to the regulator.

As we pulled away, I leant out of the cab and watched the Bug disappearing into the complications of the down-main with a great sense of desolation in me; of being a very small person in a very great city, where everything hurtled at too great a rate, and people moved from station to station, life to death, all in the blinking of an eye, with nobody to notice or care, or say that the world had been lost to madness, because the madness had by degrees become the normal thing. And nor could you step aside from it. You kept up with the game or you got flattened, as surely as if you'd stood on the tracks before one of Mr Ivatt's mighty Atlantics. And so I would try to keep up with the game.