'What is his name?' We were on the bed by now, and my trousers were over the stool. 'Now, I'm not going to tell you that, am I?'
I was always more comfortable asking questions though. 'Is it a fellow called White-Chester?'
There was a very, very long pause while she started with her manualising. 'No,' she said eventually.
As she carried on with her work, I thought of my father and felt bad. Then I thought of my landlady and felt much worse. My thoughts were anywhere but where they should have been and now, strange to say, they settled on White-Chester himself, and I wondered about his name. What did it mean? It brought to mind a man – very like a circus strongman -who was in the habit of showing off his chest, which would have been very muscular but also, and more to the point, very white. 'I can't bring anything about,' said Jacqueline after a while. 'Do you want to try a suck?' 'All right,' I said. 'It'll be another sixpence.'
With a heavy heart I counted out the coppers for this. She blew her nose very hard, and then rolled around on the bed so that I was looking down on her hair. Better than her mouth was the feel of her breasts, which was almost like nothing at all. Still nothing happened, and, the effects of the drink having completely worn off, I said thank you, but could she stop, which she immediately did, saying, 'You're slow as a wet week.'
I walked downstairs, past the woman with the voice, which I didn't hear this time, and out through the front door of the night-house. Church bells were ringing for the midnight services, and cabs were racing across the mouth of the street on their way to happy places far beyond my reach. The night-girl had been feeling blue, and her blues were catching. Looking again towards the mouth of Signal Street, I saw a Christmas crowd walking across it – church-goers, I was certain. The youngest and oldest were at the rear: a man so bent over that I marvelled at the way his stove-pipe hat remained on his head, and beside him a beautiful woman. Well, it was my landlady, of course.
Her father looked a very infirm gentleman indeed but she seemed happy, talking with wide gestures, loud exclamations and laughter. Whether the old man was laughing back I could not have said, for he was shaking all the time in any case. I could not let her see me, and I was glad of the darkness around the night-house. My dad wasn't church and he wasn't chapel, but as my landlady and her father gradually disappeared from view, I wished he had been one or the other because then I might not have been where I was presently standing, pressed into that black corner between the night-house and the sleeping viaduct, feeling cold, powerfully ashamed and six shillings and sixpence to the worse.
As I began to walk out of Signal Street, a fellow walked into it along the same pavement. He was small and wide and had a beard; he looked quite well set-up, but I knew there was something wrong. I wanted the brake handle about me. Seeing that we were on a collision course, I moved to my left, but on seeing me do this he moved to his right, so that we were still destined to meet in a smash, but I did not care. I tried moving the other way at the last, but so did he. Finally he walked into me, and I swung a punch at him directly. All the built-up fury of the past weeks went into that swing, but he stepped away from it easily, saying in a put-upon voice, 'Let a fellow by, would you.'
He continued on his way, and I watched after him as he gradually started to run, streaking finally through the one exit from the top of Signal Street, that one bit of viaduct arch.
I had Signal Street to myself once again, but the man had done his work, because when I checked over my jacket my pocket book had gone, and with it the ten shilling note I'd had left over. It was fair payment for what I had done, I thought, which left me about square with my landlady and my conscience.
When I returned to my lodge half an hour later, through frosty streets full of racing cabs and the broken-down human remnants of Christmas Eve, there was a package from Dad containing a letter from him and a Christmas card that had been sent to the two of us from Captain Fairclough. There was no note inside the card, just the letter 'F', and, using this 'F', my father had leapt to all sorts of conclusions: that we were much in Captain Fairclough's thoughts, that Captain Fairclough wished me success in my railway work, that the trade of butchery was not to be so looked down on after all. In his letter, Dad also said he had found Christmas very hard on his own. He now had thoughts of retirement, and asked whether I would like to have the shop. He was sure I would say no, such was my keenness on my present employment, but could not help thinking it was a shame that, once established in business, a family should go back to the common run of wage slaving. I thought of my landlady: she would never come with me to Bay for it would mean leaving behind her father.
I was all done up. I climbed into my truckle bed and slept soundly for a while, but woke at around four, when something made me walk over to the back window and look out into the yard. It was full of steam, swirling and somersaulting, coming in from the soap works, pouring silently over the wall on either side of the lamp and mixing with falling snow. I walked over to the mantelshelf and looked at the Lett's diary, at the facts as I understood them.
I stared again at the gas lamp, the only thing steady against the steam and the snow, and then in my mind's eye there came a picture of a locomotive revolving on one of the turntables at Nine Elms; I thought of Hunt telling me that 'an engine man is an Adonis in mind and body', and saw the Governor reaching for those tall books of his, and close upon this, in the silence of that night with no trains, there came to me again the idea that my notion was a pretty good one. Certainly it was my last and best hope of saving my job, my hopes of making my landlady my girl, perhaps even saving my life, such as it was. And Christmas Day was the time to try it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Friday 25 December
On Christmas Day, the snow lay thinly, making the world black and white. The trains were still not running, so that the mighty viaduct of Lower Marsh just looked like a giant waste of brick.
I walked over the road to the dining rooms and had a late breakfast at the table nearest the fire, which I had never been able to get to on any previous occasion. There were two policemen in there besides myself, and I waited until they'd cleared off before I came out of the dining rooms. I ran to the viaduct, climbed the metal ladder that was fixed to the side, and in a trice I was on the tracks. Then, with a heart beating fast for fear of meeting railway police, I walked into Waterloo, which was locked at all of its normal public entrances, so there was not a soul to be seen.
I could not believe that at least one of the men who worked there – either in building the new platforms or serving those already existing – had not come back on this special day just so as to have the place to himself for a little while, but the station was different not just on account of its quietness: the snow on the glass roofs had changed the light. As I looked at all the silent signs, swinging in the cold air – 'Refreshments', 'Lost Property', 'Station Master's Office' – I felt as though I had entered into a secret with the station, and would never look at it in the same way again.
All down Platform Four was a line of handcarts; I walked along beside it, and when I got to the end I looked out to see all the signals were at stop, which checked me for a second, but I leapt down nonetheless. Soon I was marching as if to Bournemouth, with no sound in my ears but the crunching of my boots in the snow and all the crows of London, or so it seemed. Every time I passed a sign saying 'Beware of Trains!' I laughed inside, for the men who had written those had forgotten about Christmas Day.
I turned left after a while, and hit the spot where the Necropolis branch went off the main line, then I walked along it towards the Necropolis station, so I had come in a big upside-down 'V.