PART TWO THE MANOR

PART TWO THE MANOR

The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! He snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!. . (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.

HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK (1851)

LESSONS

They take a late-morning train. Thomas calculates they should get there well before nightfall, but they have to change twice and miss their connection at Rugby. The station is dreary and empty, the waiting room a row of wooden benches clustered around an oven without heat. A conductor tells them there will be a train within the hour, but three o’clock passes, then four, then five, before he reappears, buttoned up tight and smelling of Smoke and brandy, informing them there has been a delay.

It is eight by the time they board the train and they are frozen through. In their compartment a stack of blankets sits folded on the luggage rack. They fetch them down and wrap themselves in the plain brown wool which appears clean but gives off a bitter, funky smell, as of soiled sawdust.

Thomas and Charlie have spoken little in the past hour. The long day of waiting has exhausted their conversation and they are both busy with their hunger, having shared the last sandwich and the last apple not an hour after pulling out of Oxford, taking turns, bite for bite, each making sure he did not get the last. It left them nibbling at scraps in the end, laughing, passing the wretched piece of apple core back and forth, until Thomas swallowed it, seeds, stem, and all, and nearly choked himself with laughter. Now their silence sits with them in the compartment while, outside, high winds batter the train.

“You hungry?” Charlie asks at one point, his own stomach growling in the dark.

“No,” Thomas lies. “You?”

“No.”

“Tired?”

“Not a bit.”

“Same here.”

They both startle awake as the train comes to a stop. Mechanically they shake off the blankets and fetch their luggage down only to realise it isn’t yet their station. It is hard to say how much time has passed. Darkness presses in on them, seems confirmed rather than relieved by a single gas flame shivering in its glass cage on the station platform. The wind is like a living thing, searching their windows for purchase, pushing fingers, tongues in through the cracks.