The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin

Author:Andrew Martin [Andrew Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780571252220
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2002-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

Tuesday 8 December

continued

I stood at the side wall of Hercules Court looking up at ‘Stower’s Lime Juice, No Musty Flavour’. I did not now believe that it had no musty flavour. Upon opening the door I saw in the hall a package and a letter, both addressed to me. I could see that the package was from Dad, but the letter was more mysterious. It was from Rowland Smith, and carried yesterday’s date. I read it with a galloping heartbeat: he was anxious to speak to me concerning the exploits of the half-link, for, although he did not want to alarm me, he had some grave anxieties on that score. Would I reply directly, giving a time and place to meet? He knew that I, being a young man of good sense out of the common, would regard this as a matter of strictest confidentiality.

Well, I nearly laughed at it. I was in a nightmare without end, for would there not be the greatest danger in talking to him over this? Anyway, it would not come to it: I was going home.

I stood in the hall for a while re-reading the letter, wondering how I could quit my lodge with my landlady not about. I walked up to my room and paced about with the package of Dad’s under my arm. There was no coal for a fire. I put my clothes and my Railway Magazines into my box, and then took the magazines out again. Why take them back? They were part of my past. I threw them onto the truckle bed.

I looked through the window giving onto the street. There were girls down there as usual, laughing outside the Vianola Soap Pharmacy, and they looked quite a proper lot this time. I wanted a fuck, and I believe I said the word out loud, which I was not in the habit of doing in any circumstances. It seemed a very London answer to agitation. Another one was drink, and all at once there seemed nothing else for it but to walk down the road to the Citadel.

I took three pints before opening the package from Dad, which contained a letter and the latest number of The Railway Magazine. In his letter, Dad spoke of a fearful storm the previous month that had sent a schooner crashing through the window of the Bay Hotel – which had happened once before, so it was as if things were going on pretty much as usual up there.

He commended to me a gentlemanly course in all things, hoping I was lacquering my boots and wearing collars on Sundays at least. He reminded me that though he himself was in quite a humble way of business, that I was not of the factory or service class, and should be mindful of that in all my dealings. He said I should speak of having taken ‘rooms’, and not being in a ‘lodge’. He said it was all right to have a bottle of beer in doors, but that he hoped I had not become a frequenter of public houses.

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