Chapter 11: Loose Ends

The enforcer at the oak door wrote Marsh, E. before Elliot had reached the sill, and then, after a glance at the man waiting on the far side, added w. Albion in smaller letters, so as to be fair to everybody.

“The log covers the corridor,” Elliot said, before Albion could say anything, which was not difficult. He had been putting it together since the laundry. “That book covers the door. Nobody covers the passage, and nobody covers the night. So who’s on this side of the door at five in the morning, working, before anybody they work for is awake?”

Albion looked at him for a moment.

“Cleaners.”

“Who does the passages behind Twelve?”

They had walked most of a carriage before the answer came. Elliot had learned not to fill the space; Albion did not search for things so much as wait for them to arrive.

“Portis,” he said. “Seven.”

Carriage 7 was two carriages further forward than Elliot had ever been, and quieter again by the same amount, as if the train had found that it could go lower after all. Nobody sat in the armchairs here. Nobody needed to be seen sitting in them. The stair-keeper at the foot of the stair was reading a book of her own instead of the stair’s, and turned a page as they passed with the air of someone who had been told about them in advance and had not been impressed by the telling.

The door was in the panelling near the aft end, with a brass plate on it that said STAFF in letters small enough to be ignored by the people it was meant for. Behind it, three steps went down — the floor here was lower than the corridor’s, Elliot noticed, by exactly the amount a carriage-builder could steal without anyone upstairs feeling the difference — and then they were in a long, low room with the upper storey sitting on top of it. The ceiling was a hand above Albion’s head. Grey overalls hung on a row of hooks like a queue of tired people. Buckets stood nested in towers. A copper for hot water ticked to itself in the corner as it cooled, and the air smelled of soda and wet wool and, faintly, of somebody’s breakfast kipper, which had not been invited.

There was a long table down the middle, and at the far end of it, with her hands folded on the wood in front of her, sat a woman of about fifty in a grey dress with the sleeves pinned back. Her hands were red to the wrist from the soda. She was sitting so upright that the chair seemed to be an afterthought, and when she saw them she stood, and Elliot had the strong impression of a woman about to sit an examination she had revised for.

“Lena Portis,” she said. “Early turn. Twelve to Fourteen, corridor and passages, five till nine.” She paused for exactly as long as a comma. “On the three nights preceding the run-through I was in my bed in these quarters from the evening bell. Mrs Ashby, who has the bed beside mine, will confirm it.”

Nobody had asked her anything.

Albion let a moment go by. “The storeroom corridor.”

“I clean it each morning at a quarter past five. I did not observe anyone in the vicinity of the storeroom who should not have been there. I did not observe anything unusual about the door.” Another comma. “I am not in a position to speculate.”

Albion asked about the keys. She had never held one, and had never been asked to. He asked whether the passage behind the storeroom was swept daily. It was, by her, at twenty to six, after the corridor and before the dining saloon. He asked whether she had spoken to anyone about the theft, and she said that she had not discussed the matter outside the proper channels, and Elliot, who had been listening less to the answers than to the way they arrived, felt something go quiet in the back of his head.

In the vicinity. Nobody on the train had said in the vicinity to him in twelve days. Mr Fixer would have died first. Birdie would have watched him die and then said it was his own fault. Not in a position to speculate. He knew that one. He knew it the way you know the hymns from school assemblies: not because you ever believed them, but because you stood in rows and sang them until they were part of the furniture of your head. He had written it himself, once, for a press office, at eleven at night, during a week when a council’s entire payroll system had stopped paying anybody and the council had been anxious that nobody should say so in those words.

Memory was untidy. A person asked about a morning a week old went looking for it, and came back with the wrong day first, and corrected it, and remembered the soap had been late. The truth sounded like somebody thinking, because that was what it was.

Portis wasn’t thinking. Portis was reciting.

“Mrs Portis,” Elliot said. “When you come in at five. Before the corridor. What do you do first?”

She opened her mouth for the answer, and it was not there. He watched her look for it on the inside of her head, in the place where the others had been, and not find it, and then, with visible reluctance, go and look somewhere else.

“The buckets,” she said. “I fill the buckets. At the copper.” Her hands unfolded. “Hot for the brass and cold for the floors, and two of each, and one more for Mrs Ashby because of her knee, only she won’t have me carry it so I leave it by the steps where she can say she found it.” She stopped. Her face had gone pink at the edges. It was the first thing she had said that sounded like her.

“Thank you,” said Elliot. Then, because there did not seem to be any kinder way to do it: “Who gave you the questions?”

She did not answer. But her eyes went, before she could stop them, past his shoulder to the wall by the door.

There was a board there. Elliot had walked past it coming in. It held the rota, in pencil, much corrected; a notice that said WICKS ARE TO BE TRIMMED, NOT PULLED; and, pinned squarely between them, a sheet of good paper printed in two neat columns, which did not belong in that room any more than Elliot did.

THE AUTUMN CONCERT
A Note for All Staff
Questions You May Be Asked, with Suggested Answers, to Save Time

1. Where were you on the three nights preceding the run-through?
”In my bed, from the evening bell.” (Please amend as appropriate.)

2. Did you observe anyone in the vicinity of the storeroom who should not have been there?
”No.” (If YES, kindly inform Mr Hartley-Voss before informing anyone else.)

There were nine. The seventh was Will the concert go ahead?, and the suggested answer was “I am not in a position to speculate.” At the foot, above a signature that had been printed along with everything else, it said J. Hartley-Voss, Organiser (Eleven Seasons), and beneath that, in smaller type, Distribution: Hall; Kitchens; Patisserie; Cleaning Staff (7); Maintenance; Stair-keepers, 9–14; the Office (for information), and beneath that, smaller still, Printed by courtesy of the Meridian Gazette. 60 copies.

Elliot read it twice. He was aware of Albion reading it over his shoulder, and of the copper ticking, and of a feeling he had not had since Bristol, which was the particular dread of finding a document you would have been proud of, in the wrong hands.

“Sixty,” said Albion.

He took the pin out of the board, folded the sheet once along a line that was already there, and put it inside his coat.

“Hartley-Voss,” he said, and then, at the door, to Elliot: “Five minutes.”

When he had gone, Portis sat down. She did it all at once, as if her legs had been waiting for permission.

“Is that all it is?” she said. “The paper?”

“I think so. Everyone had it. Voss had it.” Elliot sat down on the bench opposite, because standing over her felt like a thing Albion did and not a thing he wanted to. “Nobody’s in trouble for reading a notice.”

“He said learn it.” She looked at her red hands. “Mr Hartley-Voss. He sent it round with a girl from the hall, and she said he said it would save everybody time if we learned it, and I did, because I thought if I said it right you’d go away.” A breath. “Will they search the passages? At night?”

It was not the question of a woman who was frightened of a gramophone.

“Why?” Elliot said.

She looked at him for a long moment, a square, unhappy look, the look of somebody adding up a column for the second time in the hope that it would come out different.

“The day girls have children,” she said. “Four of them do. Seven children between them. And you can’t keep children forward of the door overnight, not on a cleaner’s ticket — it’s in the terms. They’re meant to go aft at the evening bell to a minder in Forty-two, and the minder charges, and it’s half an hour each way, and what’s a girl of six to do in Forty-two all night with nobody she knows.” She was speaking faster now, and lower. “The shelves behind the kitchen ranges are the warmest place on this train. The wall’s hot right through. I put them there after the last service and I fetch them off at a quarter to five, before the porters, and they’re back in here with their mothers before anybody upstairs has rung for anything. Nobody knows.” She stopped. “Mrs Ashby knows. Mr Voss, I think, and he’s never said.”

Elliot thought of a boy asleep on a shelf in a passage at eleven in the morning, under a coat, with his mouth open.

“There’s a boy who sleeps in the daytime,” he said.

“Tobin.” Something in her face gave way slightly. “Tobin sleeps wherever it’s warm. He’d sleep on the range if you let him.”

“I didn’t see him,” said Elliot.

She looked at him again, and this time it took her less time to add up.

“There’s one other thing,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s anything.” She lowered her voice, though there was no one in the room but the copper. “Some nights there’s someone walks the passage. Late, after I’ve put them down. I’ve never seen her. The children say. Small, Tobin says, smaller than me, and no lamp. And she knows which boards talk. Not once does she step on the iron, and you can’t help but step on the iron in that passage, not in the dark, not unless you’ve walked it all your life.” She turned her hands over. “I think it’s one of the mothers. Come up to look at them sleeping, and not wanting me to know she fretted.”

“Which nights?”

“Some.” She shook her head. “They’re children. They don’t count nights. They count whether there was jam.”

The door opened. Albion stood in it, which was most of it.

Portis got up, and was Lena Portis, early turn, again.

“Anything?” said Albion, in the corridor.

“She was frightened of the memo,” said Elliot. They walked a little way. The carpet took his boots and gave nothing back. “And someone walks the passages at night. Behind the kitchens. Small. No light. Knows where the iron hatches are, well enough not to step on them in the dark.”

“Who says?”

“People who’d know.”

Albion walked for half a carriage. Then he said, “Hm,” which Elliot had not heard him say before, and did not ask again.

Hartley-Voss was in his office with the memo flat on the one clear patch of his desk, smoothing it with both hands as if it were a letter from a stranger that he had not yet finished reading. He did not stand when they came in. Elliot had never seen him not stand.

“It was to save time,” he said.

“I know.”

“Everyone was being asked the same things. I was being asked the same things. Albion asked me, and Madame Courcier, and then Madame Courcier asked me what Albion had asked me, and I thought —” He lifted his hands and put them down again. “If people simply had the answers ready. It seemed so inefficient otherwise. One wanted to be helpful.”

He had sent a copy to the Office, he said. For information. It had been in the folder he had taken to his appointment, with the others. He had made copies of everything. He had thought the Conductor would like to see that the matter was in hand.

He looked so stricken that Elliot found himself sitting down on the chair with the pile on it before he remembered the pile, and getting up again, and moving the pile on to another pile, very carefully.

“I used to write these,” he said.

Hartley-Voss looked up.

“In my — before. That was part of the job. When something went wrong you sent everyone a sheet. What to say if anyone asks. So that nobody said the wrong thing.” He thought of the council, and the payroll, and a junior officer from the press team crying quietly in a stairwell. “They’re very good at stopping people saying the wrong thing. They’re not good at anything else. Everyone ends up saying exactly the same thing, so you can’t tell who knows anything.”

“Did they work?” said Hartley-Voss. “Yours?”

Elliot considered lying, and found that he did not want to, not to this man, with his hair combed flat and his eleven seasons.

“Too well,” he said.

Hartley-Voss looked at the memo a moment longer. Then he uncapped his pen, and found a small clear space at the bottom of his clipboard, and wrote, in his square and careful hand, Recall note (60), and underlined the number, twice.

They went aft, past the kitchens, where the porters were coming through the aft door with the midday ice, and Lotz’s voice was explaining to somebody, at length, the difference between a reduction and a disgrace.

At the vestibule into Carriage 15, where the day before Albion had told him the junction was good thinking, Elliot asked about the Lender, because there was nobody else he could ask, and because he had been afraid to.

“A note came,” said Albion.

“From them?”

“From them.”

“Saying what?”

“Looking forward to the evening.”

Elliot waited.

“That’s all it says,” said Albion. “That’s all it needs to.”

“And if it isn’t there,” said Elliot. “On the night. What do they expect?”

“Payment.”

“In what?”

“Not chits.”

He did not say what in. Elliot had the impression, walking half a pace behind him, that he could have, and that the not saying was the kindest thing available.

They were nearly at the oak door before Elliot spoke again. He had not meant to. It came out on its own, the way his old life still did sometimes, at the stove plate or on the ladder, before the rest of him could stop it.

“I didn’t expect any of this. When I —” Died, his mouth wanted to say, and he shut it, and found the train’s word instead. “When I arrived.”

“Nobody expects anything here,” said Albion. “Expectation requires continuity. We have arrival and what follows.”

He said it without looking round, in exactly the voice he used for Early, and walked through the oak door ahead of him; and the enforcer wrote them both down.

The tea car in the evening was full of people who had heard about the chase.

Elliot knew this before he had sat down, because two different men told him about it on his way along the counter, and neither of them had the details right, and both versions were better than his. In one of them he had vaulted a dining table. In the other he had stood at the oak door with his arms folded for a full hour, having known since morning which way the man would come. He did not correct either of them. He was not sure he could have improved on the second.

Birdie put a cup in front of him and looked at him over it.

“Sixty copies,” she said.

“How do you —”

“Gedge’s nephew was in at four. He’s had one pinned up over his bunk since the day they came round. He thinks it’s a programme.” She wiped the counter. “So that’s your leak. A man with a clipboard and a printing press and the best will in the world.”

“He’s mortified.”

“He would be. He’s a decent man. They’re the ones who do the worst damage, because nobody ever stops them in time.” She poured herself half a cup, which had happened once before, and leaned on the counter. “And your collector. The one who ran.”

“He didn’t take it. He just wanted it.” Elliot turned his cup round. “He heard it play once, from behind a curtain. Two minutes. And then he had a case made for it, and stood outside its door for forty minutes, and couldn’t try the handle.” He did not know quite how to say the next part. “It’s like it got into him.”

Birdie was quiet for a moment.

“They say that about some of the old things,” she said.

“Who does?”

“People. Upstairs. Downstairs, when upstairs isn’t listening.” She looked at the urn, and her reflection looked back at her, stretched long. “There was a footman in Three, years back. The laundry told me, and the laundry gets everything in the end, because everything gets dirty. There was a clock in the room he did, a great tall thing, very old, nobody knew where from. And it struck whenever he walked past it. Not the hour. Just — whenever. As if it had seen someone it knew.” She drank. “Struck thirteen for him once, the laundry said. They moved him to the kitchens.”

“Why?”

“Upstairs doesn’t care for a clock with favourites.” She set the cup down. “And there’s people who’d pay a good deal to know about a footman like that, so I’m told. Who they are, I couldn’t say. I hear a lot. I don’t hear everything.” She looked at him with her dark, quick eyes, a moment longer than the conversation strictly needed. “Mind, it’s only laundry.”

Elliot thought about Drummond’s empty case, in the window-light, with its nap all going one way. He thought he would like very much to change the subject, and was saved from it by the door.

Mr Fixer came in with his hat in his hand and a look of great innocence, which in Elliot’s experience was the most expensive look he owned.

“There he is,” he said. “The man who outran the First Carriages. On foot. In those boots.” He sat down on the next stool. “I’ve had it told to me four times on the way up. Gets better every carriage. By the time it reaches Seventy-four you’ll have done it backwards.” He put a chit on the counter, and Birdie took it and gave him nothing for it, and he did not seem to expect anything. “Thought I’d walk you home.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know I don’t.” He looked about the car with satisfaction. “Man in Sixty-eight’s been telling the chase all afternoon. I sold it him this morning. Two chits and the boots off the Thursday arrangement.” He tipped his head at Elliot. “Wasn’t going to give it away, was I. Not a story like that.”

“You sold my —”

“Somebody was going to. Better me than Doss.” He beamed. “I’ve told it right, mind. You come out of it very well. You’re taller.”

He got up to see a man at the far end about a crate of something, and was gone into the crowd before Elliot could find the end of his indignation, which turned out, when he looked for it, to be shorter than he had expected.

Birdie was watching him.

“He’s been up and down since the first bell,” she said. “Asking after you in every carriage between here and yours. Seen my man? Is he back through the door yet?” She took Elliot’s cup and filled it, though it was not empty. “And selling the chase to anybody with a chit at the same time. You’ll be wondering which one it is.”

“I was, a bit.”

“Stop wondering.” She put the cup down in front of him. “With Fixer it’s one thing, young man. The angle and the caring. You keep waiting for them to come apart, and they don’t, and that’s the whole of him.”

Elliot drank his tea. Down at the end of the car, Mr Fixer was telling the man with the crate about a dining saloon, with his hands, and the man was laughing, and Mr Fixer glanced up the counter once, quickly, to see that Elliot was still on his stool, and went on with the story.

They walked home together through the dark carriages. In Sixty-eight a man Elliot had never met stopped them to shake his hand, and told him, with real feeling, about the moment he had leapt the soup.