Chapter 12: What Plum Knows

By the time the chase reached Seventy-four it had acquired a second dining saloon and a waiter who wept.

Mr Fixer told it at the third stove, to Doss and Gran Marl and the Ambreys and anyone else who had a bowl, with the lid of a pan for the oak door and a spoon for Elliot. Elliot sat on the end of Mr Plum’s bunk and ate his lentils and listened to himself running six carriages with a ladle in his hand, which he had not had, and saying to Drummond on the bench, “I believe you’ll find that’s my seat,” which he had not said, and which he wished, a little, that he had.

“He never,” said Gran Marl, with her eyes shut.

“Word for word.”

“He never. Look at him. He couldn’t say that to a goat.”

“He’s very good with goats,” said Mr Fixer, wounded on Elliot’s behalf. “Ask Greer.”

Doss said nothing at all, and took a second helping, which from Doss was applause.

Behind the flowered curtain, the lamp on its jointed arm was lit, and Mr Plum was bent over something on a square of cloth. Elliot could see it only in pieces when the curtain moved: a little brass, a wire finer than thread, a turned wooden part no bigger than a thimble. It was not the clarinet. The clarinet had gone to the woman in Fifty-two, who had paid the whole price and then, unasked, a jar of honey on top. When Elliot went past to the ladder, Mr Plum laid a corner of the cloth over whatever it was, without hurry, the way you might cover a loaf to keep it, and went on with the tools as if nothing had happened, because nothing had.

Elliot did not ask. He was getting better at not asking. It did not feel like an improvement.

Somewhere in the dark the twelfth day turned into the thirteenth, and Elliot was awake for it.

He lay with the ceiling a foot from his face and the grey notebook inside his shirt, where it had been for three days, and felt the corner of it against his ribs every time the train leaned into a curve. He had not shown it to anybody. He had meant to, every night since the Office. He had lain here each night and listened to the small tap and click of tools behind the flowered curtain below, and thought about a mark in a column headed Work done by, and a man two bunks below who mended clocks and clarinets and tin birds with tools so fine they had to be used with the breath held, and whose bunk smelled of polish.

A man who mended things might know how menders signed their work. That was all. It was a reasonable question to put to an expert. In his old life he would have walked across the office and put it, and the expert would have been pleased to be asked.

But it was not his old life, and the question was not about what Mr Plum did. It was about what he had. Rule one. In the first week Elliot had watched Mr Plum hand a pan of porridge to Tullis, so as to carry a question away from him. He did not want to be the question.

Below him, the tools had stopped some time ago.

He climbed down, with his weight on the outside edges of the rungs so the ladder would not complain, as he had learned, and went along the row and round the end of Doss’s barricade to the rear door, where a single lamp was kept burning low all night for anybody who needed to find the farm in a hurry. The viewing slot was beside it, a foot wide and two high, with its three bars. The cold came through it in a thin, steady hiss. Outside there was the same flat dark as on his second night, going away under a sky with no lights in it to a horizon that was too far off, and the rails running back into it.

He did not look at the rails for long. He had done that.

He had been standing there perhaps five minutes when the boards behind him moved under a weight he knew, and Mr Plum came round the barricade with a blanket over his shoulders like a man in an old painting of a winter campaign, and stood beside him at the slot, and said nothing at all.

They stood for a while.

“It gets cold,” said Mr Plum eventually. “In the passes.”

“I know. You said.”

Mr Plum nodded, as if that was a fair point, and went on standing there.

“Do repairers sign their work?” said Elliot.

He said it to the slot. It seemed easier.

Mr Plum took his time over it, as he took his time over most things.

“Some,” he said.

“With their initials?”

“Mostly.”

“And the ones who don’t?”

“They have a mark.” A pause. “Or they don’t sign at all.”

Elliot took the notebook out of his shirt. It was warm from him. He turned to the page with the ledger line copied out on it, every word, the dash where the owner should have been; and beneath it, at the third attempt, the mark. He held it towards the lamp by the door, so the light fell across the page, and Mr Plum looked down at it.

His hands stopped.

He had not been doing anything with them. They had been holding the edges of the blanket together at his chest, loosely. But Elliot had lived above those hands for twelve nights and watched them do a hundred small things, and had never once seen them simply not move; and now they were not moving in a way that was different from being still. They had stopped as a clock stops — between one tick and the next, and staying there.

Mr Plum looked at the mark for a long time.

“Where did you get that?” he said.

“A ledger. In the Office.” Elliot kept his voice low. Somewhere down the carriage a child said something in its sleep and was answered by nobody. “The gramophone’s been aboard before. Once. Eleven loops ago, for repair. Restoration (First). Skilled work. Authorised by the Conductor. In on the third of the month, out on the twenty-second.” He looked at the spiral, three turns, closed at the tail with its short straight stroke. “Every other line in that column has initials. That one has that.”

Mr Plum did not say whose it was.

Elliot waited. He had learned, with Mr Plum, that you waited. But there was waiting and there was waiting, and this was the second kind, the kind in which you could feel somebody standing at a door with his hand on it, deciding.

“I worked there,” said Mr Plum.

The train went over a join in the rails, and then another, and the bars of the slot hummed very faintly with it.

“In the restoration workshop,” Elliot said. “In the First Carriages.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When I came.” Mr Plum’s eyes were on the dark outside now and not on the notebook. “Two years. A little more.”

“And then you came down here.”

“Eleven loops ago.”

Elliot did the sum, as he did every sum on the train, by translating it into the only calendar that would hold still for him: thirteen years, near enough. Eleven loops. The same number. He looked at the line he had copied — In: 3rd of the month — and back at the man beside him, and something cold went down the inside of him that had nothing to do with the hiss through the bars.

“Did you see it?” he said. “The gramophone.”

“No.”

It came at once, and flat, and Elliot believed it. Mr Plum had never told him anything that was not true, even if he had told him very little.

“I’d gone by then,” said Mr Plum. And then, after a moment, more quietly, as if correcting the record: “Just.”

“What happened?”

Mr Plum turned his head and looked at him. It was a look of great gentleness, and there was a door shut behind it, and the gentleness was there so that Elliot would not feel the door on his face.

“Something,” he said. “And I left.”

Elliot nodded. He found that he was not going to ask again. It was not a decision, exactly. It was more that he could feel the shape of the thing behind the door, the size of it, and he knew what it was to carry something of that size and have someone ask you to put it down in the middle of the floor so they could look at it.

He closed the notebook.

“Is that how Drummond knew?” said Elliot. “To send you the clarinet. Years ago.”

“Yes.” A pause. “He used to bring things to the workshop.”

“And then he came all the way down here to call it adequate.”

Something moved at the corner of Mr Plum’s mouth.

“He’d have said that upstairs as well,” he said.

They stood at the slot a while longer. The lamp by the door burned without moving. Elliot found he was not cold any more, or had stopped noticing, which was not the same thing but would do.

“You trained people,” he said. It was not quite a question. It was what he would have assumed of anyone who had run a workshop for two years: there would have been someone at the next bench, learning.

“Some.”

“How many?”

Mr Plum thought about it honestly, as if they might be counted.

“Five,” he said. “Six, if you count a boy who only swept.” He looked at the dark. “One’s still up there. Good work. Honest.”

“And the others?”

“Went where people go.” He was silent long enough that Elliot thought that was the end of it. Then: “I had an assistant.”

Elliot waited.

“Lira,” said Mr Plum.

It was the first time Elliot had heard him say a name that was not somebody’s in Seventy-four, and he said it carefully, the way you carry a full cup across a room.

“What happened to her?”

“She went.”

“Went where?”

“Nobody knew.”

“When?”

Mr Plum did not answer at once. The train leaned, and straightened, and a long way down the carriage someone turned over in a bunk with a long, complaining creak.

“About when I left,” he said.

He reached out, and for a moment Elliot thought it was for the notebook; but he was only steadying himself on the frame of the door as the train came off the curve. Elliot put the notebook back inside his shirt. Mr Plum did not look at it go. He had not said whose the mark was, and Elliot had not asked him a second time, and they both knew that, and neither of them said so.

“Can I ask you something else?” said Elliot. “Workshop things. Nothing about —” He made a small gesture that meant before.

Mr Plum inclined his head.

“If you had something in the workshop overnight. Something worth a great deal. Something people knew was there.” He was thinking of the storeroom, the shelf, the label in Hartley-Voss’s square hand: GRAMOPHONE (ON LOAN). “Would you lock it up?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“A lock tells people where to look.”

“So what would you do?”

Mr Plum considered the question as though it were a pad that needed cutting to shape.

“Put it with the things nobody wants,” he said.

Elliot thought about that. He thought about it with the part of his head that had spent fifteen years asking where the thing had broken, and found that it fitted into him somewhere and stayed there, quietly, without telling him yet what it was for.

“Drummond had a case made,” he said. “For the gramophone. Glass, lined, the right size. Before it ever went missing. In case.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand what it is about that thing. It’s a gramophone. It plays one record.”

“Some people think the old things are more than things.”

“Do you?”

“Some think it’s money, and superstition.” Mr Plum looked out at the dark. “That last group tends to be poorer and happier.”

“Which one are you in?”

Mr Plum gave the question the same honest attention he had given the others.

“Poorer,” he said.

Elliot laughed before he could stop it, a short noise that the hiss through the bars took away. Mr Plum looked pleased, in the small, private way he looked pleased when a key turned that had not turned for years.

“Do you miss it?” said Elliot. “Up there.”

He thought it might be one question too many. Mr Plum was quiet for long enough that he was sure of it.

“The light,” said Mr Plum. “The windows were good.”

Elliot thought of Seventy-four’s slots high in the walls, and the light coming down through them on to the roof and moving slowly over it as the train curved, so that morning had to be put together a piece at a time. He thought of a workbench under a real window, with glass in it, and the whole day falling on your hands.

“I miss light switches,” he said.

Mr Plum turned his head.

“You press a thing on the wall,” said Elliot. “And it’s light. And then you press it again, and it isn’t.” He heard how it sounded, out loud, in the dark, to a man who had never seen one. “It doesn’t sound like much.”

“No,” Mr Plum agreed. He looked at the lamp by the door for a while, as if trying the idea on it. “It sounds very convenient.”

They went back together, round the barricade and along the row, Mr Plum first, so that his weight on the boards covered Elliot’s. The stoves had gone to embers. The laundry hung still between the bunks like a forest with no wind in it. Old Satterly was asleep across the aisle with his mouth open, breathing as if he had been asked to do it on behalf of the whole carriage and had accepted.

Mr Plum stopped at the foot of the ladder to let Elliot go up first.

“Eleven loops,” said Mr Fixer.

He was lying on his back in the middle bunk with his eyes open and his hands folded on his chest. He had not, as far as Elliot could tell, moved since they had left. There was no telling how long he had been awake. The rear door was not far, and Mr Fixer had spent a lifetime hearing things through laundry.

Mr Plum stood at the foot of the ladder and did not move.

“Eleven loops I’ve slept on top of you,” said Mr Fixer, to the bunk above him, which was Elliot’s, and therefore to nobody. “I asked you. The first week. I asked where you’d come down from and you said forward, and now you were here.”

“That was true.”

“That’s the shape of an answer with nothing in it.” Mr Fixer’s voice was quite level and very quiet, which was wrong; Elliot had never heard it quiet without a reason, and had never heard it level at all. “I know it is. I know exactly what it is. I do that to other people.”

Nobody said anything. Elliot stood on the second rung of the ladder with his hands on the third, and did not go up, and did not come down, because either would have been a noise.

“I know,” said Mr Plum.

That was all he said. He did not explain, and he did not apologise, and after a moment he lowered himself on to his own bunk, slowly, the frame taking his weight one joint at a time, and drew the flowered curtain across.

Elliot climbed the rest of the way. He lay down under both blankets. Below him, Mr Fixer did not turn over, and did not say anything else, and the not saying went on for a long time, long enough for the embers in the stove to go from red to grey, and for the child down the carriage to talk in its sleep again, and for Elliot to begin, very slowly, to think that this was how the night would end.

The frame creaked once below him.

“Goodnight, Plum,” said Mr Fixer.

There was a pause behind the flowered curtain.

“Goodnight.”