Chapter 16: The Night Before

All day the card hung on the patisserie door.

SUGAR SETTING, it said, in pencil, on its loop of string, and Lotz, passing it with a tray, told Elliot without being asked that she had a cold piece going for the interval, and that nobody opened that door while sugar set, not him, not the Conductor, not the Conductor’s people, and certainly not anybody in open-carriage boots. Elliot stood in front of it twice, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon, close enough to hear somebody moving on the other side of the partition. Both times he put his hand up to knock. Both times he put it down again and went away, and both times he could not have said whether that was patience or cowardice, and suspected it was the kind of thing you only found out afterwards, from how it came out.

The centrepiece stood under its glass at the front of the stage, beside its empty table. Hartley-Voss had had a small card printed for the second half and kept a stack of them under his clipboard, face down, as if they might go off: In place of the item advertised, Madame Courcier will play—. Elliot did not read the rest. Albion said that the Conductor had a card as well, written in the Conductor’s own hand, for the Conductor to read out at the interval if it came to that.

“Will it?”

“Ask me at the interval.”

At the oak door, going aft at the evening bell, the enforcer wrote Marsh, E. and the hour, and then looked up and said, as if it had only just occurred to him, “Big night tomorrow.” Elliot agreed that it was. He walked the rest of it alone, through the bare carriage and past the dark door and on down the long outer room, where the clerks were covering their desks for the night, and he thought the whole way about a glass bell the size of a hip bath, and how little it would take to lift it, and how much.

The tea car was closing. The chairs were up on half the tables and the urn had been turned down to a mutter, and Birdie was counting chits into a tin by the light of the one lamp still lit.

She did not stop counting when he sat down. She finished the column, and wrote the number on the lid of the tin in pencil, and put the lid on. Then she poured him what was left in the pot, which had been stewing since supper and was very nearly black, and put it in front of him, and poured the dregs into a second cup for herself, and leaned on the counter.

“Tomorrow, then,” she said.

“Tomorrow.”

“And you’ve not got it.”

He had not told her that. He had not told anybody but Albion and a closed door with a card on it. He looked at her, and she looked back at him, with her dark, quick eyes, and he saw that it had not needed telling.

“Not yet,” he said.

Birdie turned her cup round on the counter, a half-turn, and back.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said, “and then you can drink that and go home. You remember my footman. The one in Three, with the clock.”

“It struck for him.”

“It struck for him. And they moved him to the kitchens.” She looked into her cup. “I asked after him, after I’d told you. I don’t know why. It got under my skin. And the laundry says he never got to the kitchens. He’s in service now. For a lady in Four who collects clocks.” She let that sit, in the empty car, with the urn muttering to itself. “Well kept, the laundry says. Good collars. She doesn’t let him out much.”

Elliot found he had put his cup down.

“There’s people up there who collect, young man,” said Birdie. “You’ve met one. Him with his empty case. He’s the harmless sort, the kind that stands in corridors. There’s others who don’t stand anywhere, and you’ll not meet them, because they don’t come down this far. They send.” She drew a breath. “I don’t know what you are. I haven’t asked and I’m not asking. That’s yours. But I hear things at this counter, and lately some of what I hear has a man from Seventy-four in it. A man who found a stamp in an afternoon, and walks about the First Carriages with the Conductor’s own shadow, and picked a thing up off a tray at Vetch’s that the whole shop heard.”

“How do you—”

“I don’t. That’s what I’m telling you. I’ve heard it, and I don’t know anybody, and if it’s got as far as me it’s got further.” She put her hand flat on the counter, near his, and did not touch it. “If you get your ticket tomorrow, it’ll protect you from being put off the train. It won’t protect you from being noticed.”

The urn ticked. Somewhere down the car a chair settled on its table with a small creak.

“And if I don’t get it?”

“Then you’ll not have to worry about the second thing,” said Birdie, “will you.”

She took his cup, though it was not empty, and turned it upside down on the drainer.

“Go home,” she said. “Your Fixer’s been up the Strand and down it all evening like a dog that’s heard a bell.”

He found Mr Fixer in the vestibule between Seventy-three and Seventy-four.

It was not much of a place. It was a short iron box with a door at each end and the noise of the wheels coming up through the floor plates, where the two carriages leaned against one another and argued about it on the curves, and it was cold, because the seals were bad and had been reported, and the report was presumably sitting in a pile somewhere forward, received at last. Somebody kept a stack of grain sacks there, for reasons nobody had ever explained. Mr Fixer was sitting on them with his back to the wall and his hat on his knee and nothing in his hands, which Elliot had not seen before.

“There he is,” he said. “Pull up a sack.”

Elliot pulled up a sack. The floor plate shifted under his boots, and shifted back.

“I had a word with Birdie,” said Mr Fixer, “round about teatime. Well. Birdie had a word with me. And I gather tomorrow’s the day, and I gather it’s not in your pocket.” He turned his hat round once on his knee. “So I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing, and you can be cross, and then we’ll go in, because Plum’s waiting up and he’ll not go to sleep till we do.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Arranging.” Mr Fixer said it to the opposite wall. “There’s a man at the next station town owes me for a saddle. He’s got a cart, and a sister with a spare room over a forge, and he knows a man who knows the road out to somewhere with work in it. It’s all fixed. If they put you off, you’ll not be stood on the platform with nothing in your pockets watching the back of this train go. You’ll be met.” He stopped. “That’s what I’ve been doing. Since the day you came back from the Office. Every chit I had and a few I hadn’t.”

Elliot did not say anything. The vestibule rocked on a curve, and the two doors rattled in their frames.

“Plum knew,” said Mr Fixer. “I told him the first week, because I can’t keep a thing from him in a bunk that size. And he said I was wasting my chits. He said he’ll find it.” He did the voice, not unkindly, three flat words. “Just like that. And I said that’s lovely, Plum, and what if he doesn’t? And he said he would, and turned over.” He looked at his hat. “So I’ve been betting against you. Not betting. Hedging. A man in my line hedges, it’s not personal, it’s—” He gave that up. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s all. I should have had more faith. Plum had more faith.”

“You were looking after me.”

“I was looking after you in case you were going to fail. It’s not the same as believing you won’t.” He put his hat on, and took it off again. “Plum’s always been the smart one. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“He knows.”

Mr Fixer looked at him, and then laughed, short and surprised, the first real laugh Elliot had heard from him in days, and it went away into the noise of the wheels.

“He does, doesn’t he,” he said. “He always bloody does.”

They sat for a while. Elliot thought of a cart at a station town, and a spare room over a forge, and somebody he had never met standing on a platform with his hands in his pockets, looking out for a man from Seventy-four. It was a better plan than any he had. It had cost every chit Mr Fixer owned and some he didn’t, and Mr Fixer had made it for somebody he had known for sixteen days, and had told nobody but the man in the bunk below.

“Don’t cancel it,” he said.

Mr Fixer turned his head.

“The cart,” said Elliot. “Not yet. Not till tomorrow.”

Something went across Mr Fixer’s face and was gone.

“Wasn’t going to,” he said. “I’m not a fool.” He stood, and put his hat on, properly this time, and opened the door into Seventy-four, and the noise and the warmth and the stove smoke came out round him. “Come on. He’ll have the kettle on. Jem’s given it back.”

Mr Plum had not got the kettle on. He was sitting on the edge of his bunk with the flowered curtain drawn back and the lamp on its jointed arm lit low, and on the square of cloth on the bench beside him was the small shape that had been there, under a corner of the cloth, for some days.

He looked up when they came down the row. He looked at Mr Fixer first, and some question went between them and was answered without either of them saying anything, and Mr Fixer went and sat on his crate by the rear wall and found something urgent to do with his bootlace.

Mr Plum turned back the cloth.

It was a gramophone. It stood about as high as a teacup. The cabinet was a block of dark wood no bigger than a matchbox, with a grain to it that ran the right way, and on the top was a turntable the size of a coin, and an arm of brass wire with a needle at the end of it finer than a pin. The horn came up out of the back and flared, a bell of thin beaten brass not much wider than a thimble at its mouth, polished until the lamp sat inside it. There was a crank on the side, the length of a fingernail.

Elliot looked at it for a long time. He had not known, until then, that he had wanted to see the real one.

“It works,” said Mr Plum.

He turned the crank. It took four turns, very small, and something inside the cabinet took them up with a tiny ratcheting sound, like a watch being wound in another room. Then he let it go.

The note came out of the horn clean and clear and a good deal bigger than the thing it came out of. It was one note, held, a little higher than a man would sing it, and it went out across the row and the aisle and the sleeping bunks, and three rows away somebody who had been talking stopped. It held for as long as a breath. Then it thinned, and was gone, and the little turntable ran down and stopped.

Mr Plum put it into his hands.

“It’s for you,” he said.

Elliot held it. It weighed almost nothing, and it was still warm from the lamp. He tried to say thank you and found that the words had got stuck somewhere further down than words usually were, and he stood there in the aisle in his sawdusty boots holding a gramophone the size of a teacup, and his eyes stung, and he let them.

Mr Plum did not say anything else. He did not need to. He reached up and turned the lamp down a little further, and drew the flowered curtain halfway across, and lay back on his bunk.

From his crate, without looking up from the bootlace, Mr Fixer said, “He’s been at that since you came.”

“Since the second week,” said Mr Plum, behind the curtain.

“Since the second week,” Mr Fixer allowed.

He climbed up with it held against his chest in one hand, which on that ladder was not a thing he would have recommended to anyone, and put it on the narrow shelf by the head of his bunk, where until then there had been nothing but a candle-end and the grey notebook. It stood there in the last of the lamplight, very small, its horn turned towards him.

He lay down. The ceiling was a foot from his face.

Tomorrow there would be the hall, and three hundred people in red plush, and two guests from Carriage 8 in the middle of the second row, and a card in the Conductor’s hand to be read out or not. There would be a young woman somewhere behind a door with a card on it, and a question he had not yet asked her, and no reason on earth for her to answer it. He had a plan for none of that. He had a cart at a station town, which was somebody else’s.

Below him, Mr Fixer’s frame creaked as he got into it, and then Mr Plum’s, and the carriage went down into its night a block of bunks at a time.

Across the aisle, Old Satterly had opened his eyes. He was looking up at the shelf by Elliot’s head, at the little brass horn with the lamplight in it, and he looked at it for some time, as if it were a thing he had once known the name of. Then he looked at Elliot, and nodded once, and closed his eyes again.