Chapter 14: The Underneath

“He’s with the Conductor,” said the enforcer at the oak door, before Elliot had asked. “All day. Said to tell you evening.” He wrote Marsh, E., and looked at the space after it, where for a week there had been w. Albion, and left it empty.

So Elliot went on by himself, to the knot in the panelling of Twelve, and through it into the back of everything; and then he walked it.

He walked it as he had once walked the route of a hospital’s new pharmacy trolley, from the stores to the wards, because the plans said nine minutes and the nurses said forty and both were telling the truth about different things. He started at the flush cream panel that was the back of the storeroom door and went aft with his arms held a little out in front of him, as if carrying a case. Behind the green room. Behind the office. Past the bell-board and its recess. Through the narrow door into the next passage, warmer, smelling of onions, running behind the dining saloon and the kitchens. Twice he met a porter and backed into a recess. Once he met a maid with a tray and backed the whole length of a carriage, and she did not look at what he was pretending to carry, because maids in the First Carriages did not look at anything in passages.

That was what he had half seen on the first day and been circling ever since. In daylight you could not carry a gramophone ten yards in here unseen. At night there was nobody. The corridor on the other side of the wall was never quite empty, even at night — there were bells, and maids answering them, and residents who kept late hours and liked to be seen keeping them. The passage, after the night shift went off, was nobody’s.

And somebody walked it, some nights, small, without a lamp, and never once stepped on the iron.

The hatches were let into the boards here and there, square and dull and worn bright at the edges. He had been stepping round them without thinking. He stepped on one now, on purpose, and it rang under his boot like a struck pan.

“If that’s somebody wanting hot water,” said a voice from low down ahead, “they can wait.”

Voss was on his back behind the kitchen wall with his head in a cupboard of pipes. He slid out and looked up at Elliot with the face of a man who had been proved innocent once and did not intend to make a habit of being grateful for it.

“What?”

Elliot told him. He did it the only way he knew, out loud and in order, to someone who would tell him where he was wrong.

“It came out through that door at night, in its case. Single file, in the dark. The ledger says twelve pounds, and that’s before the case. You can’t get it past the oak door at night, because they write everybody down. You can’t take it upstairs, because there’s a stair-keeper with a book —”

“Stairs are locked at the top at night anyhow,” said Voss.

”— and you wouldn’t take it into the corridor, not after going to the trouble of a painted door. So it stayed in the passage.” He heard how that sounded. “Or near it.”

“I’m in this passage every day. Every inch. Nine years.” Voss jerked his chin at the plaster, the shelves, the bell-boards. “There’s nowhere in it you could put a cat without I’d find it.”

“I know.” Elliot looked down. “Someone walks here at night. I’ve been told. Someone small, with no lamp, who knows which boards talk.”

Voss snorted. “Boards don’t talk. I’ve had every board in this passage up and down twice. Boards are quiet.” He struck the nearest hatch with the heel of his hand, and it rang, sullen and flat. “Them. Iron. Sing if you put a foot on them wrong. So if somebody’s walking this in the dark and not treading on the iron, they know where every hatch is without looking.”

“Where do they go?”

“Down. Pipes, mostly. Bell cables. Mine, as far as a man can reach with his arm. Below that’s not mine. Never met whose it is.”

“All of them?”

Voss opened his mouth, and shut it again.

Elliot was not thinking about the hatches any more. He was thinking about the chase: two porters crossing Lotz’s kitchen with a block of ice slung between them on iron hooks, sawdust sifting off it on to the tiles, and Drummond’s feet going two ways in it. He had seen that and seen nothing in it, because he had been running. And two days ago he had seen the porters come in through the aft door of the kitchen with the midday ice, and the aft door of the kitchen opened on to this passage, and ice did not come from nowhere.

“Where does Lotz keep his ice?”

Voss looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked down at the boards between his own boots.

“Under your feet,” he said.

It was at the aft end of Fourteen, Voss said, where the passage widened by a foot for the coal: a hatch twice the size of the others, with a ring in it, over a locker that ran under the kitchen floor. Block ice in sawdust, taken aboard at the station stops and packed down there to last. The porters went down first thing and after luncheon, and came up blue and swearing, and nobody else went down at all. Between the last service and four in the morning, when the bakers came in, the kitchen overhead was dark.

“Has anyone looked? Since it went?”

“Searched the ice?” Voss laughed, and then stopped. “Who’d put a gramophone in the ice?”

“Somebody who wanted it somewhere nobody searches.”

Voss did not like the taste of that. “You want to go down there, you ask Lotz. It’s his hole. He counts the blocks.” He slid back into his cupboard, so that the rest came out of it. “And I didn’t tell you where it was.”

Elliot did not ask Lotz. He went over it twice and it came out the same way both times. If the gramophone was under Lotz’s floor and Lotz did not know, asking him would tell the whole kitchen by teatime. If Lotz did know, it would tell the one person who most needed not to be told. He could wait for Albion, and give whoever minded the locker the afternoon and the evening to mind it somewhere else. He could go down now, with porters in the passage every ten minutes. Or he could go when the kitchen was dark and the passage was nobody’s, and look. Only look.

He had known, in his old life, a good many men who went to look at something on their own on a Friday night, so as to have something to say on Monday. Most of them came back. The ones who did not, he had noticed afterwards, had told nobody where they were going.

Ivy Gell’s towers of paper were gone. In their place were a tray marked IN and a tray marked OUT, and the receiving book open between them, and Ivy, who looked like someone who had been carrying a piano for three months and had just been told she could put it down.

She gave him a sheet of paper, and he wrote standing at the end of her desk, in square capitals, because a facilities manager in Swindon had once told him that nobody ever misread capitals:

ALBION — Gone to look in Lotz’s ice locker. Under the kitchen floor, 13/14. Hatch in the service passage, aft end of 14, where it widens for the coal. Going after the last service. Back through the oak door by the second bell of the night. If I’m not, that’s where I am. — E. M.

He had sent a thousand of these, in a thousand slightly different words: where I’m going, when I’ll be back, what to do if I’m not. Status: amber. Nobody had ever once read one in time to matter, and he had sent them every time anyway, because the time you didn’t was the time somebody needed it.

Ivy took it, and read it, and then, without asking him, drew the violet pad towards her and picked up the stamp.

“You don’t have to —”

“It has a column,” said Ivy.

Thump, on the note; thump, in the book, beside Note for Albion, of E. Marsh, and the date, and the hour. She put it in the tray marked OUT, squarely in the middle.

“He collects at the evening bell,” she said. “It won’t get lost.”

The last service ended a little after ten. At a quarter past, when the oak door had been swung shut and barred, Elliot asked to go through, and the enforcer looked at him, and at the clock, and wrote Marsh, E. and the hour, and drew the bar.

The First Carriages at night were lamplit and empty and not quite asleep. A bell rang upstairs somewhere and was answered by feet he never saw. In the passage behind Twelve a hand-lamp hung on a hook by the bell-board, for whoever needed one. He took it, and turned the wick up, and went aft.

The shelves behind the kitchens were warm right through; he could feel the wall on his arm. There were children asleep on them, five or six — it was hard to tell where one coat ended and the next began — in a row along the plaster with their knees drawn up, like loaves on a rack. A boy with his hair stuck up at the back was very nearly on the floor, and had evidently decided this was acceptable. Elliot went past them a step at a time, with the lamp held low.

He stepped on no iron. He had counted the hatches that afternoon.

At the aft end of Fourteen, beside a heap of coal behind a board and an iron-bound crate stencilled KITCHEN — SALT — ICE, was the big hatch, with sawdust pale in the cracks round it and cold coming up through the seams. He took the ring in both hands and pulled. It came up with a groan he felt in his teeth, and leaned back against the wall, and stayed.

Iron rungs went down. He went down them.

It was four feet high, if that.

He was on his hands and knees within a yard of the ladder, because there was no other shape the space allowed, and his breath hung in front of him in the lamplight and did not want to leave. On either side of a narrow channel the ice was stacked in blocks the size of bread bins, packed round with sawdust in long bays, running away under the kitchen floor further than the lamp could reach. A thin dark runnel of meltwater went down the middle of the channel and soaked through his knees in the first ten yards.

And the train was loud. There was nothing between him and the wheels but the planks he knelt on, and the sound came up through them into his hands and his chest, so enormous and regular that he could not have heard himself speak.

He went aft along the channel. The near bays were dug out and trodden where the porters had been at them. Further on the blocks were old and cloudy at the edges and stacked to the planking overhead. And at the far end, in the corner of the last bay, a sack had been laid over something square.

He knew it was not ice before he touched it; the corners were too sharp. He pulled the sack away, and the sawdust ran off it.

A case. Dark leather on wood, gone pale at the edges where hands had carried it, brass at the corners, a brass handle, two brass catches on the front. Both catches were fastened.

He undid them with fingers that had already begun not to work properly, and lifted the lid.

The inside was lined in green baize, cut and shaped to hold one thing only, and the shape of that thing was still pressed into it: the square of a cabinet and, above it, in a long soft curve, the place where a horn had lain on its side. Where it had stood, the nap was pressed flat. Everywhere else it stood up, soft and dark.

The case was empty.

He knelt over it with his breath going white across it. Under the cold and the sawdust and the wet-wood smell of the locker there was something else, very faint, coming up off the baize: a warm, clean smell. Beeswax. Somebody had cared for this case. Somebody had rubbed the leather and the brass with polish until they shone, and fastened both catches, and laid a sack over it, and gone away, and taken what was inside it with them.

It’s been moved, he thought. It was here, and it’s been moved.

He had just begun to think when when the hatch came down.

He did not hear anyone. That was what he would go back to afterwards, for a long time. No tread on the boards overhead, no voice, no ring of iron. There was the train and the cold, and then a single enormous clang that came through the planking as if the train were not there at all, and the faint grey square at the top of the ladder was gone.

Then, through the boards, a scrape. Something heavy, dragged a short way and set down.

He went back along the channel on his hands and knees through the meltwater, with the lamp swinging and throwing the ice about the walls, and up the rungs, and put his shoulder to the hatch, and pushed. It lifted a quarter of an inch. He saw a line of light. Then the weight settled, and the hatch came down on his shoulder, and the line was gone.

He pushed until something in his back told him it would not be pushed any more. He shouted Hello and I’m down here and Albion, and then nothing that was a word, and the iron gave back every one of them, and under him the train went on with its vast regular rolling, louder than he was, louder than anything, and nobody came.

He came down and sat on the bottom rung, and held the lamp, and was frightened.

There did not seem to be any way not to be. It was a large, simple, animal fear, and it was not interested in anything he thought. It sat in his chest where the heart attack had been, and squeezed, and he sat with it in the cold with his breath smoking, and let it.

Then, because there was nothing else to do with it, he began to think.

The kitchen was dark until four. The porters came down first thing, six hours away, perhaps seven. The children on the shelves were ten yards off and asleep. A man shouting down here might as well have been shouting into his own coat.

The note. It had been stamped twice and entered in a book with the hour and put square in the middle of a tray marked OUT, by a woman who did not lose things. Albion collected at the evening bell. Back through the oak door by the second bell of the night. At the second bell the enforcers’ book would say Marsh, E., going forward, and nothing coming back.

That was the whole of it. That was the plan, and he had made it standing at a desk that afternoon without knowing it was a plan. It depended on a man reading a note, and then minding that the man who had written it was late. He could not decide whether that was a great deal to depend on, or nothing at all.

He did what there was to do.

He turned the lamp down to a bead. He dragged the case to the foot of the ladder and sat on it, because it was wood and leather and the only thing down there that was not ice. He scooped the drier sawdust off the top of the nearest bay and packed it round his legs and over his boots, because he had read once, in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room in Clifton, that the people who survived the cold were the ones who got off the ground and stopped moving and kept their heads. He put his hands under his arms. He stopped moving.

Every so often he took a hand out and knocked on the underside of the hatch with the base of the lamp, three times and then three times again, and the train ate the knocks. He did it anyway. A thing done at intervals was a way of knowing that time was passing.

The cold came in by stages. His knees and feet first, where the wet was. Then his hands, which ached, and then stopped aching, which was worse. Then his back and the long muscles of his legs, and he began to shiver in great hard shudders that rattled the lamp against the rung and would not stop when he told them to.

He counted the beats of the wheels, in hundreds, and lost count in the third hundred, and started again. He counted the stacks of ice he could see by the bead of the lamp, and there were nine, and then there were seven, because the lamp was lower.

He thought about Bristol. He had not meant to. His mother’s kitchen on a Sunday, with the radio too loud and the windows steamed, and her telling him off for something — for being late, probably; he was always late — and the smell of gravy. The street outside the flat, stepping down the hill. The bus that went past the end of the road at seven minutes past the hour, and never at seven minutes past the hour. Her ringing his phone, and the phone ringing in a drawer somewhere, and her being furious, and then not being furious.

The lamp went out.

He sat in a dark that was complete, on the case, with the train going under him. After a while he stopped thinking about Bristol. After a while he stopped thinking about very much. There was the shivering and there was the noise, and somewhere a long way off there was a small, clear part of his mind, standing a little apart like a man on a platform, which noted that the shivering had begun to come less often, and that this was not a good sign, and that it would like to do something about it, and could not think what.

He knocked on the hatch, three times. He thought he did. He was no longer sure where his hand was.

He thought about nothing.

The light came as a sound first: a scrape overhead, close, and the grind of something heavy dragged across boards. Then a line of light round the hatch, thin and very bright. Then the whole square of it at once, the hatch swinging back to bang against the wall, and warm air falling on his face.

There was a shape in the square, broad, bent nearly double because the passage had not been built for it, holding a lamp down into the hole.

“Elliot,” said Albion.

Elliot tried to answer, and his jaw would not do it. He tried again.

“You left a note,” said Albion.

“I always leave a note.” It came out through teeth that would not stay still, in a voice he hardly knew.

Albion looked down at him a moment longer.

“Most people don’t,” he said.

Then he reached down and took Elliot under the arms and lifted him out of the locker like a sack out of a cart, and set him on the boards of the passage with his back to the warm wall; and went down the ladder himself, which in that hatch took some arranging, and came up again with the case.

The salt crate stood on the boards beside the hatch, where Albion had dragged it off. It would have taken two porters to lift. Nobody had lifted it. Somebody had dragged it a yard from beside the coal and set it square on the hatch, over the ring, without treading on any iron to get there, and had gone away again without a sound.

The children on the shelves were awake: six faces in a row over the edges of their coats, watching with the enormous silent interest of children woken in the night by something better than a dream. Albion looked at them for a moment. Then he looked at the coal, with great attention, as if it were the only thing in the passage, and went on looking at it until the faces had slid back down behind their coats.

A light came swinging along the passage from the forward end, and behind it a voice saying “What?” at intervals, and then Lotz, sideways, in an apron over a nightshirt, with a candle. He looked at the open hatch, and the case, and at Elliot against the wall with sawdust to the knees and his teeth going. He looked, last and longest, at the crate.

“My salt,” said Lotz. “Who has moved my salt?”

Nobody answered. Albion turned and looked at him, and went on looking; and Lotz — who had been in his bed, and whose locker it was, and whose salt, and whose hatch, and who kept a key to the storeroom on a loop of red string — began to look like a man working all of that out for himself, item by item, and liking it less each time.

They sat him by the range in the dark kitchen. It had been banked for the night and its iron front was warm right through, and Albion put him on an upturned crate with his back to it and wrapped him in what turned out later to be three aprons. Lotz, without a word and without being asked, put a bowl of stock into his hands, and then took it back when it was clear his hands could not hold it, and held it for him, scowling, while he drank.

The case stood on the tiles between Albion’s boots, its catches fastened again.

“Moved,” said Albion.

“Yes.”

“When?”

Elliot shook his head. It went on shaking a little after he had stopped.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

Albion asked nothing else. Lotz went back to his bed, muttering about salt, and the kitchen was dark and enormous around them, coppers and pans and the long scrubbed table going away into shadow.

The warmth came back into Elliot from the outside in, and hurt all the way. His hands came back first, and burned. The shivering came back too, which he understood was good, and went on long after he had stopped being cold, as if some part of him had been frightened in a place he could not reach and was not yet willing to believe it was over.

He did not say anything. He sat by the range with the aprons round him and the empty case at Albion’s feet and the smell of beeswax still faint on his fingers from the catches, and waited, for a long time, for his hands to be his own again.