guard was there to meet them, drawn over by Uncle Bob’s bellows. Behind him, a number of other passengers stood in a loose semicircle, all craning necks and questioning eyes. Sight of the president stopped the guard mid-query; he turned and attempted to contain the gathering crowd. This great giant of British business was laid there on the underground platform, parallel to the train, as respectfully as they could manage. Uncle Bob set down the legs, then came to help Merrill with the chest and head. Carlens was standing half out of the carriage, his posture slack, robbed of purpose; the black topper, rather dusty now, hung limply in his hands.
The crowd was growing steadily – a fellow lying dead, people were saying, right there by the train! Merrill moved back. Before long he heard Leyland’s name, a shiver of recognition passing through the station, further increasing the interest. They were at Blackfriars. The station was in an open trench, only one level below the street. Its platforms were under cover, but above the trains was the evening sky; the tops of buildings, touched with gaslight; and St Paul’s again, from the other side, glimpsed through the rising steam.
Someone was praying. Uncle Bob knelt by the body to put his ear to the president’s breastbone, but heard nothing. Merrill put his hands in his pockets, not knowing what else to do with them. He looked off to the platform’s end and found himself imagining a multitude – every enemy, living and dead, that Leyland had acquired during the course of his extraordinary, cold-hearted existence, filing down the double staircase. This ethereal company walked in procession between the wrought-iron pillars and drifting clouds of coal smoke, joining the circle pressing in around the dead man. Few showed any sign of grief. Indeed, most were well satisfied, and a few visibly glad; others positively frothed with fury, mouthing curses, ready to spit on the hated figure where it lay. There were the shipping partners from Liverpool, whom Leyland had knifed in the back; the ruined competitors, the discarded mistresses, the man in the blue sack coat from Cannon Street station; the unwanted wife standing quietly dignified, her face behind a veil; even the artist Whistler, who Merrill had once seen caricatured in Vanity Fair – a dapper little Yankee with a monocle and a bamboo cane, peering over with grim curiosity.
‘James,’ said Uncle Bob. ‘James, we need to fetch a doctor.’
Merrill blinked; the vision was dispelled. He stared down at the black legs, sticking out so rigidly. The disquieting whiteness of the face. ‘A doctor,’ he repeated.
‘An examination must be made,’ Uncle Bob explained, his voice hushed and urgent. ‘A declaration of death. Before we can have him removed from this place.’ He pointed towards the exit. ‘Quickly, boy. Go.’
The road outside the station ran between Ludgate Circus and the mouth of Blackfriars Bridge, and was as clogged with people and traffic as any in London. It was bitterly cold as well, a wintry breeze whipping in from the river. Merrill emerged from the concourse and began to work his way onto the packed pavement. He hadn’t the faintest idea where a doctor might be found in Blackfriars at that hour. Out there in the rawness of the open air, however, the last of the underground’s grimy heat leaving his clothes, he felt only relief. He looked around him a little dizzily, trying to get his bearings; then he straightened his hat and started off into the city.
Some people read on the underground. Others push buttons on telephones. I’ve always been more of a thinker. I’m not one for novels, and I only have a mobile telephone because someone in a shop once talked me into it. Cyril was with me and he went right along with the idea.
‘It’ll be good for emergencies, Margaret,’ he said. ‘Stop you from feeling alone.’
Except none of the emergencies I’ve encountered since has ever benefited from the presence of a telephone, and in all honesty I’m not sure I will ever feel alone again.
There are lots of us on tube trains – the thinkers. If you look hard enough, you can spot us amongst the paperbacks and the newspapers, and the quiet conversation of strangers. We stare at the floor, losing our thoughts in the clutter of other people’s feet. We hide our worries in the tired pattern of the seats. We wrap our feelings along the brightly coloured handrails. Nothing is demanded of you on the underground except to wait and stare, suspended in time and place, as life transfers you from one situation to the next. I have always thought a journey was the perfect opportunity to reflect. To think about what comes next. To wait for God to make a decision about why you’re there, I suppose.
I enjoy all the different underground services, but the Circle line has always been my favourite. More so now. There’s a strange comfort in circles. A reassurance. Although the Circle line isn’t a circle any more, of course. A tadpole, Cyril used to call it. ‘Look at its little tail,’ he’d say and laugh. Gone are the days when you could rotate around the bowels of London uninterrupted. Now, we are all tipped out at Edgware Road and forced to make a decision about ourselves.
Obviously, my decision is very easy.
I just catch the next train and travel all the way back again.
Everything began just after Cyril died. At least, I think it did. It might have been going on for the longest time before then and I didn’t notice. We knew Cyril was going to pass away. The consultant told us several times, and in no uncertain terms. Do you understand what I’m telling you? he’d say, after every third sentence. Yes, yes, we’d say, we understand. Perhaps we didn’t seem distressed enough. Not quite the right amount of sorrow. I hadn’t realized there were guidelines on how to behave when someone is told they are dying, but clearly, we had fallen outside their parameters. Getting upset shrinks a person though, doesn’t it? Because once you allow the misery to escape, it takes with it your resolution and your determination and your resilience, and it feeds them all to your problem. Until the problem grows big and fat, and you are left behind, emptied and almost disappeared. Much better to remain logical. To hold onto your strength.
‘Everyone dies,’ Cyril said, on the journey back from the hospital. ‘It’s not as though it comes as a surprise, is it? We’ve known it would happen since the day we were born.’
We were walking home from the tube station, along avenues the estate agent had once described as ‘leafy’, but which were now unburdened of their charm by an early December evening. Cyril was wearing his old brown lace-ups. Shoes I had begged him to replace for the past two years. I studied them as he walked in front of me along the pavement, and I said to myself, ‘He’ll never agree to replace them now, will he?’ The thought pierced my mind so suddenly, and so deeply, that for a few moments I couldn’t remember how to breathe. It’s not the big thing that tears you apart, is it? It’s all the smaller things that gather at its edges.
‘We’ll need to go through the box files,’ he said. ‘Sort out any paperwork.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we will.’
‘Tie up any loose ends.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Loose ends.’
I studied his silhouette in a smudge of orange street light. The angle of his trilby. The faint stoop of his shoulders. The way he crooked his left arm ever so slightly, as though he was always waiting for me to join him. I stared at all these things and as I stared, I wondered how long they would remain firm in my memory, and how long it would be before I had to start imagining them instead.
‘And of course, we need to make a decision about
