Chapter 5: The Conductor’s Visit

It was Tuesday, according to Mr Fixer.

It was Thursday according to Doss, and according to the woman who sold thread, and according to the notches Gran Marl kept on her bunk post, which nobody had ever successfully disputed. But Mr Fixer owed a man in Sixty-eight a pair of boots on Thursday, and did not yet have the boots, and so in the bunk above Mr Plum’s it was going to go on being Tuesday for as long as it reasonably could.

“Carriages keep their own days,” he told Elliot. “Everybody knows that.”

“This is one bunk.”

“A bunk is a very small carriage.”

By Elliot’s own count, which he kept in his head and tied to the Tesco because there was nothing else to tie it to, it was the seventh day. He was sitting on the end of his bunk with his boots in his hand, wondering whether there was any point putting them on before Greer’s detail wanted him, when the noise of Carriage 74 began to go down.

It went down from the forward end, a block of bunks at a time. Card games stopped mid-hand. An argument at the third stove broke off in the middle of a word and did not pick up again. The children, whom Elliot had not believed could be stopped by anything short of food, stopped, and the smallest of them went behind Doss’s barricade at speed. The dog lifted its head, considered the situation, and put it down again.

Mr Fixer was at Elliot’s elbow. The grin was nowhere.

“Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,” he said, very low. “Don’t look clever. And whatever you do, don’t lie. The Conductor always knows.”

“How—”

“Always.”

A man was coming down the long aisle. He was of no particular height and no particular build, in a plain uniform the colour of nothing much, with no insignia on it at all, and he walked with his hands clasped behind his back; and Carriage 74, which in Elliot’s experience got out of nobody’s way, got out of his.

He stopped at the end of their row.

“Elliot Marsh,” he said.

It was the first time Elliot had heard his whole name said aloud on the train. He had not given it to anybody but Ivy Gell’s notebook.

“The Conductor would like to see you.”

Mr Fixer stepped forward half a pace. “He’s in my section. Anything he’s done, I’ve had a hand in.”

The man looked at Mr Fixer for about as long as it takes to read a short label.

“Then walk,” he said.

Elliot put his boots on. As he went past the flowered curtain, a hand came out from behind it, straightened his collar, and went back.

His name was Albion. Mr Fixer supplied this in a murmur at the forward door of Seventy-four, and after that supplied a great deal more, at a steady conversational volume, apparently to Albion’s back: the state of the vestibule seals in the low seventies; a dispute over a stove plate in Seventy-one that the Office might like to know about, or might not; the price of boots. Albion did not answer any of it. Mr Fixer did not seem to need him to.

Elliot counted vestibules. It gave his feet something to do besides carry the rest of him towards whatever was waiting.

The open carriages went by first, one after another, each a hall of bunks and laundry and smoke, each with its own dog. People looked up as Albion came through, and then looked carefully at something else, and then, once he had passed, looked at Elliot — and Elliot could feel the looks gathering behind him and going on ahead, carriage to carriage, faster than anyone was walking.

At the tea car Birdie was at the urn. She saw Albion, and then Elliot, and then Mr Fixer, and her hand stopped on the tap and the tea ran over the cup and on to the counter and she did not look down. She said nothing. Her mouth went thin. Elliot was past her before he could decide what his own face should do about it.

Forward of the tea car the noise of the wheels came up through each vestibule and fell away behind it, and the carriages filled with work. A market carriage twice the size of the one he had seen before, where a man sold eggs by argument and a woman with a tray of pastries lowered her prices when she saw who Elliot was walking behind. A carriage of cobblers and menders, each in a booth the width of a door, and a man asleep in one of them with his head on a last. Then the laundry, which was three carriages long and so hot and wet that Elliot’s shirt stuck to him by the second, and the air was soap and scorched cotton and the warm damp of what must have been every sock on the train. Somewhere in the steam a woman at a mangle called “Fixer!” and Mr Fixer called “Nora!” back without breaking stride, and Elliot thought of Tullis.

Then the kitchens. They began before he saw them, as a smell that arrived a carriage early — onions, bread, fat, something sweet — and then as a noise, and then all at once as a whole carriage and the halves of the carriages either side of it given over to coppers the size of bunks and ovens like walk-in cupboards and forty or fifty cooks shouting at each other over the din, none of them looking up. It was not a galley. It was a factory that happened to make soup.

Somewhere around the kitchens, Elliot noticed that Mr Fixer had stopped talking.

He did not start again. Forward of the kitchens the train grew warmer and quieter, a little at a time, so that it was hard to say where any one change happened and impossible to miss that it had. The boards gave way to linoleum and the linoleum to a runner of red carpet down the middle of the aisle, worn pink along its spine. The windows had glass in them now, real glass, and the light came through them clean. Berths had curtains, and then doors, and then little brass numbers on the doors. Each vestibule was better made than the last, until the doors closed behind them with a hush instead of a bang. People’s clothes got heavier and their voices lighter. There were fewer children, and then none. The lamps stopped swinging. The air stopped smelling of anything at all, which Elliot found, after a week at the back, faintly alarming.

Nobody here looked at Albion, or at anybody. It was a different kind of not looking from the kind at the back. At the back people had looked away from him. Here they seemed never to have looked in the first place.

Fifty-one vestibules. Most of an hour. His feet hurt, and his shirt had dried stiff on him after the laundry, and he was walking on carpet for the first time since Bristol and could not enjoy it.

The administrative carriage was the quietest place he had been since dying.

It was long and orderly and smelled of ink and old paper. Wooden cabinets lined both walls to the ceiling, and their drawers rattled gently in their runners with the motion of the train, like a roomful of people who had been asked not to talk and could not quite manage it. Clerks sat at desks between them. They looked up when Albion came in, and then down again, all at once, as if on a signal.

On the wall above the nearest desk was a clock.

Elliot stopped and stared at it. It was a plain round clock with a white face, and it said twenty past ten, and he looked at it with the naked hunger of a man who has been lost in the woods for a week and has just found a signpost. He had not known until that moment how much he had missed being told what time it was by something that did not have an opinion.

Further down the carriage something went thump. Then a pause, and then thump again, and under it a voice, low and steady, counting.

“…four hundred and ten. Four hundred and eleven.”

Ivy Gell sat at a desk halfway along with a tower of paper on her left and a smaller one on her right, and the stamp in her hand, and the violet pad open in front of her. She looked up as they passed. She went pink to the ears. She did not stop.

“Four hundred and twelve,” she said, and brought the stamp down on a form headed TRANSFER — LAUNDRY, and moved it to the right-hand pile, and gave Elliot the smallest nod he had ever seen.

The Conductor’s office was at the end of the carriage, behind a door of dark wood with no name on it.

Albion knocked once, opened it, and stood aside. The room beyond was small and warm and bare. There was a lamp that did not flicker. There were two chairs. And there was a desk with nothing on it at all, behind which sat the Conductor — tall even sitting, in a dark coat buttoned to the throat — giving the impression that the desk was empty because everything that might once have been on it had already been dealt with.

The Conductor looked at Elliot.

“This is new,” they said.

Mr Fixer was in the doorway behind him. “Station-stop intake, Conductor. Came in at the last stop. Paperwork’s in the system.”

The Conductor did not look at him.

“And your ticket, Mr Marsh?”

“It’s pending,” said Mr Fixer.

“I didn’t ask you.”

The Conductor’s voice was soft and perfectly level, and Mr Fixer, who always had another sentence, did not have one. Elliot had not known that was possible. He felt it behind him, the silence, like a door that had been closed without anyone touching it.

Don’t lie.

“I don’t have one,” said Elliot.

“No,” the Conductor agreed. “Thank you, Mr Fixer. Albion will find you a chair.”

Mr Fixer looked at Elliot — one look, quick, with a good deal in it — and went. Albion closed the door on him and stayed on the inside of it, hands behind his back, looking at nothing.

The Conductor indicated the other chair. Elliot took it. It was, he could not help noticing, the most comfortable thing he had sat on since he died, and he felt slightly guilty about this, as if the chair might be part of the test.

“The last station stop was eight days ago,” said the Conductor. “Mr Fixer is useful to me in a number of ways, which is why I tolerate the others. Lying to me is not one of the useful ones.” They let that settle. “Two days ago, a junior clerk in the next room wrote a line in the receiving book. Received of: Elliot Marsh, Carriage 74. Ticket: pending.” A pause, no longer than it needed to be. “Nothing on this train is pending, Mr Marsh, unless I am the one waiting for it.”

Elliot said nothing. It seemed safest.

“Eleven clerks searched for that stamp for three months. Every one of them asked who had it last. Miss Gell tells me that you asked her what it had done.” The Conductor’s eyes were dark and steady and did not seem to blink as often as eyes should. “Nobody on this train asks what people do. They ask what people had.”

“It just seemed—” Elliot stopped. His voice sounded thin in the small room. “It was the obvious question. Where it stopped. That’s what I used to—” And he heard rule two coming out of his mouth, and shut it.

“I did not ask,” said the Conductor.

It was said quite gently, and it closed the subject the way a hand closes a book.

“Something has been taken from me,” the Conductor said.

“A gramophone. A brass horn and a walnut cabinet, about so high.” One long hand measured a space above the bare desk and withdrew. “It is lent to me for a concert in the First Carriages, ten days from now. It was in a locked room in Carriage 12, and this week it ceased to be. The person who lent it to me is the Lender. Their people will come aboard for it after the concert. If it is not there for them, I will be in default to someone who does not accept apology as payment, and the cost of that will not fall on me alone.”

“The Lender,” Elliot said.

“Yes.”

Nothing else came. It was clear that nothing else was going to.

Elliot looked at the desk. The grain of the wood ran in long dark lines, and he followed one of them with his eyes while his mind, which had spent fifteen years being handed problems by people who did not want to explain them, went quietly to work in spite of him.

“You can’t send enforcers,” he said slowly. “Can you. I mean — if enforcers start turning out the First Carriages, people will talk. And then the Lender hears that something’s wrong before you’ve found it.”

“Yes.”

“So you’d need someone nobody knows. Someone who can ask questions and it doesn’t mean anything.” He heard where the sentence was going and went with it anyway. “Someone — expendable.”

“I would not have chosen that word.”

“Is it the wrong one?”

The Conductor considered it, honestly, which was worse than a denial.

“It is close enough,” they said. “But I can find people nobody knows in any carriage behind the tea car, Mr Marsh. I sent for you because of the stamp.”

The lamp burned without a flicker. Somewhere outside the door, faint through the wood, the stamp came down again, and again.

“Find the gramophone before the concert, and you will have a ticket. Fail, and you will be put off at the next station town.” The Conductor said both halves in exactly the same voice. “Albion will go with you. He will give you access where you need it. You will report to him, and he to me.”

Elliot looked at Albion. Albion looked at a point some way above Elliot’s head.

“Is he going to talk?”

“When he has something to say.”

There was no real choice, and both of them knew it, and Elliot found that he minded the not-choosing less than he would have expected. It was a project. It had a deadline and a stakeholder and no budget. He had run worse.

“All right,” he said.

The Conductor inclined their head. It might have been the end. Elliot had half risen from the chair when they spoke again, in the same soft voice, as if continuing a conversation that had been going on underneath the first one.

“Do you dream of music, Mr Marsh?”

He sat down again without meaning to. “Sorry?”

The Conductor waited.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I don’t really dream.” He thought of the grey, and the pulling, and put them to one side. “Not of anything.”

The Conductor looked at him a moment longer. Nothing in the long, still face changed at all, and yet Elliot had the distinct impression of having given an answer that was being put somewhere for later.

“You are not the first person to arrive on this train carrying more than they should,” said the Conductor. “You are, however, the first I have decided to use rather than remove.”

Albion opened the door. Mr Fixer was outside on a hard chair, sitting very upright, with his hat on his knees, and he stood as they came out.

At the threshold Albion stopped and looked at Elliot directly, for the first time. It was not a comfortable experience. It was like being measured for something by a man who had measured a great many people and had never once needed to write the numbers down.

“Tomorrow,” Albion said. “Early.”

“How early?”

Albion considered him.

“Early,” he said, and went back inside, and shut the door.

The walk back took the same hour and felt longer, because it went downhill: louder at every vestibule, colder, cheaper, more like home. Mr Fixer said nothing at all until the laundry, and nothing of consequence after it.

Birdie was wiping down the counter of the tea car when they reached it. She looked at Elliot over the urn.

“You look like you’ve been to the office,” she said.

“How did you—”

“Everyone does. It’s the eyes. You go in with two and you come back with the same two, but they’re doing different things.” She wrung out the cloth. “How bad?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

She nodded slowly, as if he had given the right answer to a harder question than the one she had asked.

“When you are sure,” said Birdie, “come back. I’ll put the good leaves on.”

In Seventy-four the midday stoves were going. Mr Fixer sat down on his crate by the rear wall, and Elliot sat down on the end of Mr Plum’s bunk because it was nearer than his own, and for a while neither of them said anything.

“The stamp,” said Mr Fixer at last.

“Birdie told you.”

“Birdie. Ossie Venn. Half the farm. A goat, very nearly.” He turned his hat round in his hands. “I asked you for one thing.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Mr Fixer looked at him for a long moment. Whatever he was doing behind his eyes, he did it thoroughly, and Elliot did not interrupt.

“And if you don’t find it?”

“Next station town.”

Mr Fixer’s face went through several things in quick order, and then the grin arrived and covered them all, the one with the edge on it.

“Well,” he said. “You’d better find it, then.”

Behind the flowered curtain, the small tap and click of Mr Plum’s tools had stopped some time ago. Elliot had not noticed when.

“He’s coming for me tomorrow,” he said, to the curtain. “Albion. Early.”

There was a pause, and then the click of a tin lid going on.

“I’ll wake you,” said Mr Plum.