Chapter 13: Divergence

Albion was standing a little way down the carriage, out of the wind, with an enamel cup in his hand.

He had the look of a man who had been standing there for some time and had not minded, and would not have mentioned it if he had. Plain uniform. No insignia. Behind him the carriage ran forward in a long hush of carpet and glass, and somebody’s good shoes went by on the upper floor, and the noise of the gap came in round the folded doors and stopped at the edge of the carpet as if it knew it was not wanted there.

He held out the cup.

“Please,” said Albion.

Elliot took it. His hand was shaking, which it had not done on the gangway, because on the gangway there had not been a spare hand to do it with. The tea was Birdie’s. He knew it at the first mouthful, strong enough to stand a spoon in, and he knew a moment later that it was stone cold, and had been hot once, a long way aft, at a counter in the tea car, before somebody had carried it forward through forty-odd carriages and then stood holding it by an open door while the bell went.

He drank all of it.

Behind him the deckhand finished his rope and began to fold the doors shut. The wind narrowed, and narrowed, and went out, and the white 1 came round on its hinge and lay flat against the carriage wall, and there was nothing at the sill any more but wall. Elliot found that his back knew exactly where the Calloway was, and how far, and that the distance was getting longer, and that it would go on getting longer for seven years. He kept his eyes on the cup.

He gave it back. Albion took it.

“Toll’s dead,” said Elliot.

Albion looked at him for a moment, and then at a point some way above his head.

“Thought so,” he said. “When you weren’t back early.”

Elliot put his hand into his inside pocket. The grey notebook, and a folded strip of paper, and the token, warm and heavy, the blank face up. He took it out and held it on his palm.

“You said come back, then ask.”

Albion looked at the token. His own hand went to his own pocket, by itself, as it must have gone a dozen times that morning, and found nothing there to turn, and came out again.

“Keep it,” said Albion.

The oak door was four carriages aft, at the end of the First, and the administrative carriage was on the far side of it, and the way there was all carpet. Albion went down it as he went down everything. Elliot went behind him and found that his legs had opinions about the run through the red, and about the crawl under Berth 7 before that, and were only now getting round to expressing them.

Ivy Gell had a fresh stack of cream slips at her elbow and the stamp in her hand. She looked up as they came through.

“Gangway returns,” she said. Thump. “Two hundred and ninety-one.” Thump. “Seventeen short.” Her ears went pink. “Morning, Mr Marsh. Afternoon. Whichever it is.”

“I’ve no idea,” said Elliot, quite truthfully.

In the outer office, on the small table under the window, four cups stood in a row, each with a ring of tea gone dry at the bottom, and beside them a chair that had been sat in all morning and had been pushed back square, very neatly, by somebody leaving in a hurry who had been brought up to push his chair back. Elliot looked at it. Albion saw him look.

“Went back,” said Albion. “Before the bell.”

He knocked once on the dark door, and opened it, and stood aside.

The office was as it had been at twenty to eight that morning. Small, warm, bare. The lamp that did not flicker. Two chairs. The desk with nothing on it, not even a folder now; whatever had been on it this morning had been put away, and the wood had gone back to being an empty dark field with the lamp’s reflection lying in it.

The Conductor looked up.

They did not say anything. They did not say Mr Marsh, or ask him to sit, or ask him anything at all. They looked at him from his boots to his face, once, as if checking that the right number of him had come back. Albion found him the chair. He sat in it.

“He’s dead,” said Elliot. “Mr Toll. He’d been dead an hour, or a bit more, when I found him. In his sleep. Somebody came up through the floor.”

The Conductor’s hands lay on the edge of the desk, one over the other, and did not move.

He told the rest of it in the order he had found it, which was not the order in which it had happened, and he kept it short, because he had been told this morning to be brief with Sable and he assumed it applied at home as well. The berth. The hatch. The Hall and its cut pages. The court. He did not tell it well. He told it as he would have told a steering meeting what had gone wrong with a project, flat and in sequence, because that was the only way he knew to get to the end of a thing without stopping in the middle to look at it.

“Her name’s Calver,” he said. “Madame Calver. Sable’s inner office. Forty-two years. She said she acted on the authority of the office.” He found that he remembered every word, and that he did not want to, and said them anyway. “I asked whether the office was an office of that train. She said it sits on that train. It keeps the books. But the thing it answers to is older than the train, and doesn’t use a name.”

The lamp burned without moving.

“She started to say one,” said Elliot. “And didn’t.”

The Conductor said nothing. Elliot waited, and the nothing went on, and he understood that it was going to go on, and he said the rest of it into it.

“It’s done to us. The forgetting. Everybody who comes through. It isn’t the dying. Something does it, on purpose, and when it doesn’t work—” He stopped, because he had got to the edge of a thing he had not decided yet whether to give, and the Conductor had once told him what to do in that case. He went round it. “Mr Toll had worked that out. That’s why he’s dead.”

He looked at the Conductor across the bare desk, at the long still hands and the dark eyes, and saw nothing in them change. Not the stillness of somebody keeping their face. He had seen that on Sable, and on Petris, and on a woman in a flour store. This was something else. It was the stillness of somebody being told the price of a thing they had already bought.

“You’re not surprised,” he said.

“No,” said the Conductor.

He found that it did not make him angry. He had expected to be angry, if it came to this, and instead he felt something nearer to the opposite, the odd lowering of the shoulders that comes from finding out that the person in charge has known all along about the noise in the walls. You had not been imagining it. Somebody else had heard it too.

“Go on,” said the Conductor.

“Conductor Sable said to tell you something.”

The hands did not move. But Albion, at the door, shifted his weight, which in two hundred and three days Elliot had seen him do once before.

“She said greetings.”

The Conductor was quiet. It was a different quiet from the one before. Elliot could not have said how he knew; the face did nothing, the hands did nothing, the lamp did nothing. But the room seemed for a moment to have more air in it, as a room does when a window has been opened somewhere further down the corridor.

“Only that?” said the Conductor.

“Only that. And this.”

He took the folded strip out of his inside pocket and laid it on the desk, and pushed it across the dark wood with two fingers, and took his hand away. He had not unfolded it. He had carried it from Sable’s fingers to here without once looking at it, because she had watched him not look, and because it had seemed, somewhere on the gangway, that it was the only courtesy he had left to pay her.

The Conductor unfolded it.

Three lines, in a hand Elliot could see upside down was not Toll’s: Sable’s, quick and slanting, a hand that had signed a great many things it had not read and a few it had. From where he sat they were only numbers. 14 · 9. 3 · 13. 58 · 19. Carriage before loop, as the Office wrote them, in the count that had started again at the transition.

The Conductor read them, and was still.

It was not long. He counted it without meaning to, because he could not help counting things today, and got to five. Then the Conductor folded the strip along its crease, exactly, and put it away inside the dark coat, somewhere over the heart, and laid the hand back on the desk on top of the other one.

“Did she say where these came from?” said the Conductor.

“Mr Toll had a list. Fifteen. Three of them were ours. She said they’d been written down where they shouldn’t have been, and now they were written down somewhere they should.” He thought about it. “She said your hand and nobody else’s.”

“Then it has been.” The Conductor looked at him. “Thank you.”

“You spoke to a baker,” said the Conductor.

Elliot did not ask how they knew. There was no point; there never had been. A flour store the size of a cupboard came back to him, and a woman with her back to the door and her hands kneading each other, and the line at the foot of a page that would not be struck tomorrow.

“I spoke to a lot of people,” he said.

The Conductor waited.

“I told someone I wouldn’t put her name to any of it. Not to anybody.” He met the dark eyes and held them, which he did not often manage. “That includes here.”

The lamp burned. Albion, at the door, did not move at all, in a way that was very nearly a movement.

“That is the right answer,” said the Conductor. A pause, no longer than it needed to be. “I would have given the same one.”

There was nothing to say to that, and Elliot did not try. After a moment the Conductor’s eyes went down, very briefly, to the empty desk where the folder had lain that morning, thin as a single sheet that had been given ideas.

“Mr Toll’s account,” they said.

“He can’t pay it.”

“It is closed.” The voice did not change. “It was not the debt I sent you for.”

“I know. I worked that out. About two hours too late to be any use to him.”

“Two hours too late is earlier than anybody else has worked anything out on this train for some years.” The Conductor let that settle. “Albion will tell you when you are next wanted. Not today.”

He stood up. His knees told him about the crawl again, at length. He went to the door, and Albion opened it for him, and he had his hand on the frame when the Conductor spoke again.

“Mr Marsh.”

He turned.

The Conductor was sitting exactly as before, the hands on the desk, the lamp steady, the room bare. There was no change in the face at all.

“Welcome back,” said the Conductor.

The walk aft took most of an hour, and for once he let it.

He did not count the vestibules. He let the carpet go to linoleum and the linoleum to boards, and the glass go out of the windows, and the hush go out of the air, carriage by carriage, so gradually that he could not have said where any one change happened and could not possibly have missed that it had. The train came back to its own noise around him the way a room comes back to you after a long sleep. Somewhere about the high thirties a man was singing the song about the girl on the Calloway who had promised to wait, worse than in the morning, and more cheerfully, because the Calloway had gone now and could not hear him. The kitchens arrived as a smell a carriage early, and then as a din, and he went through it with forty cooks shouting over his head about onions.

Then the laundry.

It was three carriages long, and the steam came out to meet him at the first vestibule, hot and wet and smelling of soap and scorched cotton. Sheets hung from the cords overhead in long white aisles that went on into a fog he could not see the end of. Mangles turned. Coppers boiled. Somewhere in it a woman was calling out numbers to another woman, who was calling different numbers back, and the steam took the edges off both of them so that it sounded like a hymn somebody had forgotten the words to. He was wet through his shirt in a dozen steps. Nora at her mangle by the first copper looked up as he went by, and nodded, and went on turning.

Halfway along the second carriage, Mr Plum was standing among the sheets.

He was standing quite still in the aisle between two rows of them, with his hands at his sides, in his waistcoat, and the steam had settled on his shoulders and on his grey hair in a fine silver dust, which it would not have done if he had only just arrived. His face was the colour it always was. He did not look as though he had been waiting. He looked, Elliot thought, like a man who had been standing in one place for a long time so that he would not have to stand anywhere else.

Mr Plum did not come forward. In two hundred and three days Elliot had never once known him come forward of the tea car, and he had come forward of it now, through the market and the cobblers and into the steam, and had stopped exactly here, in the middle of the laundry, where the noise was loudest and nobody could hear anybody, and no further.

Elliot stopped in front of him.

He had thought, on the gangway and in the office and all the long way aft, about how to say it. He had thought about whether to say who had given it to him, and where, and what she had said about the flour being late and the old sack. In the end there was only the message, and it had been given to him to carry, not to improve.

“For Mr Plum, of the Meridian,” he said. “The bell has rung.”

Mr Plum closed his eyes.

He stood like that while a sheet behind him lifted on a draught from somewhere and settled again. When he opened them, he looked at Elliot for a long moment, and his mouth moved, as if there were a great deal more on the other side of it, years of it, and he had come up to the edge of all that and was stepping carefully back.

“I was afraid,” said Mr Plum.

That was all he said. He put out one large hand and laid it on Elliot’s shoulder, on the wet shirt, and left it there, and after a while he turned them both round, gently, by the shoulder, so that they were facing aft. They walked out of the steam together.

Carriage 74 closed over them at the forward door, as it always did: the noise of a sports hall full of people being alive at slightly different volumes, the stoves going, the washing up on the cords, a child somewhere demanding to know why, and somebody explaining at length, and the child asking why again.

Mr Fixer was sitting on his crate at the end of the row with his hat on and his knife out and something in his other hand that might once have been an apple. He saw them coming down the Strand. He saw both of them. He put the knife down.

“Two of you?” he said.

“Two of us,” said Mr Plum.

“Gone off forward, the pair of you. Without so much as a word. Without me.”

“Without you,” said Elliot. “Briefly.”

Mr Fixer looked from one of them to the other. Something went across his face very fast, and was got rid of, and he picked up the knife again as if it had been calling him.

“You ate?”

“I had tea.”

“I can see the tea. You’ve got it all down your front, and it was cold, by the look of you.” He pointed with the knife at the stove at the end of the row, where a small pot sat on the plate with a lid on it, ticking. “That’s not eating. There’s stew. Jem made it, so don’t ask what’s in it, because he’ll tell you. Eat first. Talk after.”

“Fixer—”

“After,” said Mr Fixer. He took his hat off, and looked into it, and put it back on. “There’s no hurry now. Jem had it from the tea car, and the tea car had it from forward. Next one’s seven years and four months.” He began to peel the not-apple, and the peel came away in one long curl. “Seven years and four months. You’ll be sick of the sight of me.”

Elliot ate the stew standing up in the aisle. It was mostly turnip, and something that had probably been a bird, and it was the best thing he had eaten in his life, and Mr Fixer watched every mouthful without seeming to and said nothing at all, which for Mr Fixer was a kind of speech. Across the aisle, in his bottom bunk, Old Satterly opened his eyes, looked at the two of them, and closed them again, like a man checking a count and finding it correct.

He climbed the ladder, which he had stopped noticing some months ago, and noticed it tonight, every rung.

The ceiling was a foot from his face. On the shelf beside him the little gramophone stood where it had stood at dawn, its horn turned towards the top bunk, where he was; and beside it the square tin labelled BOLTS, with his ticket in it, which nobody had stolen, because nobody steals bolts. He lay on his back with his boots still on and the token in his fingers, turning it over, the seal and then the blank face and the seal again, his thumb going round in the shallow dip somebody else’s thumb had made.

It was still the two hundred and third day. That seemed unreasonable. He would have said, if anybody had asked, that it had been at least a week.

Below him, behind the flowered curtain, the jointed lamp came on. He heard the roll of tools being opened on the bench, cloth unwinding off cloth, and a long breath let out, and a pause.

Then, small and steady, the tap and click began again.