Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [32]
His thoughts were dreadfully tangled. The woman had been called Madame Humbert, or perhaps Hubert, and she’d climbed out of a moving train and crawled along its side to reach the next compartment where a wealthy man was having a heart attack–
‘Surely not Scurra?’ I said.
‘No, no, no. That was Crawley . . . Crawford . . . Cranley . . . Having saved his life he left her a fortune. In ’97 she spent two thousand dollars on flowers for a party she gave in her house on the Avenue de la Grande Armée.’
‘And that’s where you met Scurra?’
‘I never said that,’ he snapped. ‘It was in Madrid . . . later . . . when they arrested her. You’d know about that sort of thing . . . noises in the night . . . police . . . the dock. Always thought her account of the train was fishy . . . damned if she could have heard him above the noise of the track.’
I got nothing more out of him on the subject because he was now mumbling about some book on the shelves to do with the battle of Chickamauga in which the Confederates had routed the Union Army. According to him the author had got his facts wrong. ‘He should have consulted me,’ he muttered, ‘I was an eye witness,’ though only last Christmas he’d bored Hopper and me rigid with the story of how he’d spent the entire war in Europe, running the blockade single-handed and scuttling cruisers off Cherbourg.
Escorting him from the library I was fortunate enough to find a steward in the foyer who took him off my hands. As I descended the stairs who should I see stepping into the elevator one floor below but Wallis? She was with Ginsberg and I swear he had his hand on her waist.
THREE
Friday, 12th April
Too early the next morning I woke with the fragment of a dream still in my head. It wasn’t the one that had disturbed my childhood nights and brought Sissy running. I reckon I’d slept with my arm covering my face because my mouth felt swollen.
I had been walking down a cobbled alleyway between a row of little houses, making for the last one on the left pinned to the arch of a railway bridge. As is the way of dreams I was both in the road and walking up the path – there was a stunted tree, leaves black with soot, standing in a patch of earth near the broken gate. I saw a man on hands and knees, scrabbling at the soil, a piece of newspaper flapping on the sole of his boot. I was carrying a child whose cold, cold cheek was pressed to my own. At that instant a train rattled across the bridge and a belch of black smoke rolled down the street. The man leapt to his feet and with a terrible bellow of rage ran towards me; one moment he was visible, the next the smoke swallowed him up. The scrap of newspaper whirled through the air and masked the child’s face. The child turned into myself.
The damnedest thing was, going into the bathroom to shave I noticed my nails were rimmed with dirt. It gave me quite a turn until I remembered that following my trip into the hold I had fallen into bed without washing.
When the steward came in with the coffee pot he remarked I wasn’t the only early bird he’d visited that morning. But then, it was fairly usual, he maintained, for passengers to sleep poorly the second night on board. It was a question of getting accustomed to being on water, that and the appearance of the stoker coming up out of the funnel – quite a few people had been upset by that. The two elderly ladies in Stateroom 19 had complained of bad dreams and the middle-aged couple in the Jacobean suite had twice rung for the night steward.
‘I slept like a top,’ I told him. ‘I never dream.’ ‘Ah, well, sir,’ he said, ‘That’s thanks to youth and an easy conscience.’
It was not yet seven o’clock when I went below to call out the plumbers; I didn’t want to run the risk of being late for my appointment with Thomas Andrews. Luckily I was proved right in thinking the fault with the bath taps was nothing more serious than ill-fitting washers, and having selected new ones from the stores and insisted they be put in place right away I was able to go up for my breakfast.
Scurra was