All Quiet on the Orient Express Read online

  “Trouble is,” I said, “it’d take weeks to do all seven of them.”

  “But you could have them done by Christmas, could you?” asked Mr Parker.

  “Well, probably, yes. But I really should get going very soon.”

  He ignored my weak protest. “We’ve got a bothy you could stay in, if you wished.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Er…have you?”

  “Across the yard there. Quite cosy in the winter, it is. And we’d give you breakfast every day.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Cooked by Gail, of course.”

  I considered his proposition and realized my resistance was running quite low. To tell the truth I felt exhausted. The waterproofs I’d been wearing for hours were now dry again, but the thought of repeating this morning’s journey was unappealing. On the other hand the offer of a place to stay with a cooked breakfast each morning seemed very attractive.

  “Can I keep the bike in here for the time being?” I asked.

  “Of course you can,” he replied.

  “Alright,” I said. “I’ll stay.”

  ♦

  A few minutes later he took me across the yard to see the bothy. It was a tiny place, with a tiny bathroom. As we walked in it felt a bit chilly, but as Mr Parker demonstrated with the flick of an electric switch, it could warm up quite quickly. From one of the windows there was a good view of his house. The lake, though, was out of sight. After he’d left me to settle in I realized with a shock that I hadn’t eaten all day. No wonder I felt so weak and tired. I decided the best course of action was to get down to Hodge’s shop and stock up on a few things, so I went and gave the bike another try. With a mixed feeling of relief and disappointment I discovered it still wouldn’t start. I then set off walking to Millfold.

  There was a little bell attached to the door of Hodge’s shop. It rang as I went in, but for several minutes he pretended not to have heard. I knew he was there though. I could, hear him moving about in a back room behind a sort of plastic curtain made from multi-coloured strips. It sounded as if he was brewing tea, judging by the spooning, stirring and clinking noises he was producing. Eventually I went to the door and opened it for a second time, so that the bell rang again. Only then did Hodge appear amidst the plastic strips.

  “Baked beans, is it?” he asked.

  “You are open then, are you?”

  “Open every day,” he said. “Early closing Wednesdays.”

  “Oh, I see. Right. Yes please, baked beans.”

  He went to the appropriate shelf. “You’re lucky. These are the last two cans.”

  “Oh,” I said. “You’ll be getting some more in though, won’t you?”

  Hodge smiled in a cheery way and clapped his hands together. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “No demand once the season’s over. Not worth opening another box.”

  “But I’ll be staying for a while now, so I’ll definitely be buying them.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Who?”

  “People who come in here asking for things.”

  “You mean customers?”

  “Call them what you like,” said Hodge. “There’ll be no more beans this year.”

  “So that’s your final decision, is it?”

  “I believe it is.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  At this point I’d liked to have walked out of the shop without buying anything at all, but unfortunately there was nowhere else to go. I had no choice but to purchase the two cans of beans plus a few other essential items, but I left determined not to give him my custom again. When I got home I remembered an advert I’d noticed in a copy of the Trader’s Gazette. It took a while to track down as there were a lot of pages and I kept being distracted by other items, but eventually I found what I was looking for.

  GROCERIES DELIVERED BY VAN it said. NO ORDER TOO SMALL.

  There was a local phone number, so that evening I made a list and called in at the phone box on my way to the pub. It rang about twenty times before a man answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Is that the van delivery service?”

  “Might be,” he said. “Who wants it?”

  “Well, I’m staying in the bothy up at Mr Parker’s place.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “And I was wondering if I could order some groceries?”

  “We go in that direction Tuesdays and Thursdays only.”

  “That’s OK,” I said.

  “And you’ve got to have your order ready two days in advance.”

  “Fine.”

  “Alright,” he said. “I suppose we can fit you in.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Wait a minute, will you? I’ll just go and find something to write it down on.”

  While I waited it struck me that this person had a similar approach to his customers as Hodge. I’d practically had to persuade him to deliver my groceries, and now it turned out he didn’t even have a proper order book at the ready. When he eventually came back to the phone I heard him give a long, heavy sigh.

  “Alright,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Right,” I began. “Er … sliced bread.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is that ‘sliced bread’, or ‘er…sliced bread’?”

  “Sliced bread.”

  There was another pause as he wrote it down. “Yes. What else?”

  “Twelve cans of baked beans.”

  A long pause. “Yes. What else?”

  “Tea.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sugar.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you got any of those Fray Bentos individual cook-in-the-oven steak and kidney pies with gravy?”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “Three of those, please.”

  He sighed again, then several seconds passed during which I could hear a pencil scribbling.

  “Yes,” he said at length.

  “Three pounds of potatoes.”

  At this point the pips went. After I’d put another coin in there was a long silence.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello.”

  “Did you get that?”

  “What?”

  “Three pounds of potatoes.”

  “Yes,” he said with impatience. “What else?”

  “I need some biscuits as well.”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort have you got?”

  “All sorts.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Two packets of fig rolls, please.”

  “No, we haven’t got those.”

  “How about custard creams?”

  “No.”

  “Malted milk?”

  Now the pips went again. I put another coin in the slot and heard the same silence as before.

  “Hello?” I said.

  Silence.

  After a long wait I hung up and redialled, but this time he didn’t answer.

  ♦

  Over in the Packhorse they had a new consignment of Topham’s Excelsior Bitter. After the frustrations of my phone call this came as welcome news, although I found it slightly surprising.

  “Pint of Ex?” asked Tony, the moment I walked into the bottom bar.

  “Please,” I said. “But I thought you weren’t getting any more.”

  “We weren’t,” he replied. “There wasn’t enough demand for it.”

  “But now there is?”

  “Now that you’re back, yes,” he said. “You’ve tipped the balance.”

  “Oh well. That’s good.”

  Tony had already placed a glass under the tap and begun pulling the handle.

  “Only thing is, we’ve had to mark the price up a bit.”

  “Have you?”

  “Just enough to cover costs.”

  “How much do I owe you then?” I enquired.

  He finished pulling the beer and placed a completed pint on the counter. �
�This one’s on the house actually.”

  “Thanks,” I smiled. “Any particular reason?”

  “We want to enlist you in the darts team as a regular. We were quite impressed by your performance the other night, and so was the visiting captain.”

  “Was he?”

  “She.”

  “She?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You know – Lesley.”

  “Oh…yeah, right.”

  “Very impressed, she was.”

  “Well, I was just lucky really. Having a good night.”

  “So you’re prepared to sign up with us, are you?”

  “If you’d like me to, yes.”

  “Of course we’d like you to.”

  “Right then,” I said. “I will.”

  I had more beer than I planned to on that first night back at the Packhorse, mainly because Tony wouldn’t accept any money. The first pint was ‘on the house’, I knew that, but when I followed it with a second, and then a third, he kept insisting that it was OK to run up a slate. I didn’t want to cause offence by refusing his trust, so I went along with it and ended up having five pints. On my way home later that night I made a mental note not to allow the tally to get out of hand.

  ♦

  The first sound I heard the following morning was the ‘clunk’ of a milk bottle on my doorstep. Peering out of the bedroom window I saw Deakin retreating across the yard towards his truck before driving off. I thought it was a bit cheeky of him to start making deliveries without seeing me first, but I wasn’t bothered really as I was going to ask him anyway. Actually I was grateful he’d woken me up, because otherwise I’d have been too late for breakfast. I got up quickly and went across to the house, where Gail let me in. She seemed quite pleased to see me.

  Mr Parker was already at the table when I sat down.

  “You’ll be getting started on the boats today, will you?” he asked.

  “Hope so,” I said. “Of course, there’ll be quite a bit of preparation to do before any paint goes on.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “We don’t want any sort of slapdash job.”

  “No.”

  “There’s an electric sander over there in the big shed if you need it. And a blowlamp.”

  “Right.”

  “So you’ll be able to get them done by Christmas then?”

  “Oh yes. No problem.”

  “Good.”

  Gail placed my breakfast in front of me before sitting down herself.

  “Settling into your new home alright?” continued her father.

  “Yes, thanks,” I replied.

  “Enough room for you?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “Plenty.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You’re a bit like the three little pigs,” remarked Gail.

  “Am I?” I asked, glancing down at my sausages.

  “Yes,” she said. “Your tent was your house of straw. Then you had a caravan, which was your house of sticks. And now you’ve got a house of stone.”

  At that moment the Post Office van pulled up in the yard, and the driver went through the same routine as the last time I’d seen him. After bobbing up the steps he again opened the kitchen door by four inches, slipped the post onto the shelf inside, said ‘Thank you’, in a sing-song voice, and was gone again.

  Mr Parker glanced across to the shelf. “Ah good,” he said. “Here’s the Gazette.”

  He stepped across the kitchen and picked up the only item of mail, a new edition of the Trader’s Gazette, rolled up and specially labelled for postal delivery. He unwrapped it and began studying its pages with interest. In the silence that followed I remembered a question I’d been meaning to ask.

  “You know those sheep?” I said.

  Mr Parker looked up momentarily. “Which sheep?”

  “The ones up on the fell behind here.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Have they got anything to do with you?”

  “You mean do I own them?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Who does then?”

  “They belong to Bryan Webb mostly. He keeps his hay in our loft here.”

  “Oh.”

  “As a matter of fact he’ll be bringing a lot of ewes through the yard sometime soon, and he may need some help directing them. I’ve told him you’ll be around to lend a hand.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “But you don’t keep sheep yourself?”

  “Not any more, no,” he replied. “We lost a flock one winter years ago and decided to give it up.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “They’re no longer a safe bet, sheep aren’t, what with man-made fibres and everything.”

  “No, suppose not.”

  “So we went into buying and selling instead.”

  “Yes, I noticed you do a lot of that.”

  “Best way to make a living these days.”

  “What about the boats?” I asked.

  “What about them?”

  “Aren’t they a good way to make a living?”

  “No,” he said. “Practically a liability, to tell the truth.”

  During this conversation Mr Parker had been going through the Gazette with a biro, putting marks and crosses beside certain items. Now he rose from his seat and went into the next room where the telephone was.

  After he’d gone Gail said, “What are you like at geography?”

  “Well, I know east from west,” I replied. “Why, have you got some more homework?”

  She smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Alright, bring it over sometime and I’ll have a look at it.”

  “You can have it now if you want.” She reached under the table and produced an exercise book from her bag.

  I glanced through the questions. “OK. Should be no problem.”

  “Could you get a couple wrong this time, please?” she asked.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, you got twenty out of twenty for the geometry, and they might start getting suspicious.”

  “Suppose so.”

  “By the way,” she added. “Your essay got read out in class.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Did it?”

  “The teacher said it was the best work I’d ever done. So, thanks.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She smiled again and looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Yes,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’d better get started too. Thanks for the breakfast.”

  I took my leave and went across to the big shed. Someone had already been over and undone the padlock, so I slid the door back and went in, closing it behind me. Then I examined the place that was going to be my workshop for the next few weeks. Several transparent panels in the roof helped make it quite light inside, and I noticed there were a good few electric lamps as well. The sander and blowlamp Mr Parker had mentioned were lying on a shelf to one side, along with some other useful-looking equipment. Despite all the stuff crammed into the building enough space remained between each boat to allow plenty of room to work. There was even a stove and chimney in one of the corners, to keep the shed warm when the weather turned cold. All in all I was quite encouraged by what I saw, and decided I could be quite at-home here. Before I began work I wanted to find out what it was I’d seen glinting over at the back of the shed the first time I came in. This meant clambering over a number of packing cases and scaffolding tubes, and round the back of a large metal frame that seemed to house some kind of weighing apparatus. After a lot of squeezing through gaps I finally saw the object of my curiosity. It was a row of motorcycles. There were half a dozen of them altogether. Some were brand new, preserved in a layer of grease and still bearing the manufacturers’ shipping labels written in Japanese. Others were second hand, vintage models similar to mine, and one of them even had a pre-unit gear box. I was just wondering what Mr Parker planned to do with them all when I heard the shed door being slid back.

  Th
en I heard his voice. “Where are you?”

  “Over here,” I said quickly. “I think there’s a panel loose somewhere. I was just trying to find it.”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I heard it banging the other night. We ought to get it fixed soon.”

  He climbed over the packing cases and joined me.

  “Nice bikes,” I remarked.

  He nodded. “Thought I’d hold on to them, see how the prices go.”

  He was already examining the walls of the shed, searching for the loose panel. “Looks like we need a few new rivets along here.”

  I pressed at random against a corrugated sheet and it moved outwards.

  “Here we are,” I said. “The next one’s a bit loose too.”

  “So it is,” said Mr Parker. Then he turned to me and asked, “Have you ever done any riveting?”

  ∨ All Quiet on the Orient Express ∧

  Six

  Three days it took me to replace all the rivets in that shed. No sooner had Mr Parker seen the loose panels for himself than he decided this was the only suitable course of action.

  “A chain is only as good as its weakest link,” he announced. “And the same goes for rivets.”

  Accordingly he produced a riveting gun and showed me how to use it. I was also given a drill to remove the old rivets, and a ladder to get at them.

  “Be careful when you’re up there, won’t you?” he said.

  I had to admit that the view from the top of the shed was spectacular. I could see a good part of the lake, as well as a long section of the road from Millfold. It gave me an idea of how much Mr Parker could observe from the front window of his house. I never seemed to get invited past the kitchen, but even there I always had the feeling of being very high up. Here on top of the shed I was higher still, so I made the most of the scenery on offer. The weather wasn’t particularly pleasant though. The promise of sunshine after the rain had come to nothing, and the sky remained grey and cold. Clambering about on that ladder in the wind wasn’t easy and the pace of work was very slow. Nevertheless, by the time I got towards the end of the job I had become an accomplished riveter. Occasionally Mr Parker would appear at the bottom of the ladder and ask how I was getting on, but mostly he just left me to it. Which presumably meant he was quite satisfied with what I’d done.