The Last Train to Scarborough Read Free

the account lay on the table between us. Mary Richardson, feminist and
suffragette, had gone at the painting so named with an axe. Earlier in the day,
Robert Henderson, who was the son of Colonel Robert Henderson, whose smooth
looks and smooth name I did not like, had stopped the wife in the high street of
Thorpe - stopped the wife, I stress. I, walking alongside her, he had quite
ignored.
    'I
do not know the female equivalent of the word "confederate", Mrs
Stringer,' he had said.
    'Nor
do I,' Lydia had said.
    'But
your confederate, Miss Mary Richardson, has destroyed one of our greatest
paintings.'
    'Has
she?' the wife had said, not yet having seen the Press.
    'The
report was in The Times this morning,' said Henderson.
    'Which
painting was it?' enquired the wife. 'Just out of interest.'
    'You
seem pretty sanguine about the whole business,' he'd replied. 'But then you are
part of the women's Co-operative Movement and you agitate on behalf of the
suffragettes.'
    'Agitate!'
said the wife. 'I wouldn't know how to agitate if you paid me.'
    'Oh,
I think you would,' he said, at which I had to cut in.
    'We're
just off actually, Mr Henderson,' I said.
    He
tipped his derby hat at me, but continued to address the wife: 'I do believe
you are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country, Mrs Stringer.'
    And
then of course he'd given a grin.
    'You
are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country,' I said to Lydia as we
walked on down the dusty road, in the light rain, making for the boot maker and
mender's with the lamps overdue for lighting but old man Shannon nowhere in
sight. 'What do you make of that?'
    'I'm
rather flattered,' she said, as we turned in at the gate of the boot maker's
long front yard.
    'Yes,'
I said, 'I could see. You coloured up.'
    'I
certainly did not,' she said.
    But
she had done, and the colour was up in her face still as she lay on the sofa in
our new front parlour, in the new (and also very old) house a little way
outside the village, the house that had been practically given us by that same
Robert Henderson: seven shillings a week for a place three times the size of
our earlier one, and with a contract giving us the option to buy at some
equally favourable rate.
    It
was nine o'clock, as I knew by my watch rather than by the clock of St Andrew's
church, which did not now reach us, we being so far out.
    'I
mentioned the business about the Venus to Peter in the Fortune earlier on,' I
said.
    'Oh
yes?' said the wife, who was not in the least interested in the sayings and
doings of Peter Backhouse, who was the verger of St Andrew's, even though she
counted his wife, Lillian, amongst her best friends.
    'He
said, "Somebody did what, you say? To the Rokeby what?"'
    The
wife sighed.
    'And
to think it was done for publicity,' she said.
    She
sat back down. The law books were on the tab rug between us.
    'I
don't know about all this business,' I said, indicating them. 'All I wanted was
to be an engine man, and when that came to nothing, I settled for being a
railway copper.'
    'Don't
fib, Jim,' said the wife, and we listened to the ticking of the clock, the
ticking of the fire, and then the mooing of a cow, of which we heard a good
deal in our new house, along with wood pigeons.
    We
were more thrown together, living so far out, and that was good and bad. The wife's aim was to set us up with our own little
empire, and her work for the women's cause was starting to take second place to
that, although she would never have admitted it. She'd gone all out for the
country life, stealing a march on me, for I was the Yorkshireman. I was the
one who'd taken her north, having struck that bad business while apprenticed
for the footplate with the London and South Western Railway. For me, life in
the North Eastern Railway police was next best thing to life on the footplate.
I'd been promoted detective sergeant in double quick time, and I now made fair
wages. But the wife wanted to make me a sort of gentleman
farmer-cum-solicitor, and