Enoch's Folly

By Giovanni Torre

“You know what the old timers say about Comely? They say the Devil is afraid of him.”

Aldous Comely; entrepreneur, philanthropist, bon vivant, crime lord. He has his finger on every conceivable pulse, but his grip is starting to slip.

Chance encounters and unexpected friendships force him to remember what it's like to be a human being - at the worst possible time: An old enemy is back in town.

As Comely prepares for the oncoming storm, he asks himself if a man with no past can hope for a future.

Enoch's Folly is a unique period piece. Set in New York City in 1939, it weaves the stories of real figures and fictional characters in a complex narrative exploring identity, loyalty, big ideas, loss, greed, and the ever-mystifying human condition.

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Review from Nate Briggs, The Kindle Book Review:

Nate Briggs rated it 3 of 5 stars

The book's synopsis suggests a hard-hitting, period crime novel.

In fact, this is a wide-ranging narrative of romance, regret, hope, and a distant taste of crime in the New York City of 1939. There’s trouble in Europe, but Aldous Comely is thinking much more about his life outside the law: wondering if there is a graceful exit toward a day-to-day routine that’s more sustainable.

In the mean time, people meet—people strive—and life goes on.

If this were a movie, the narrative would be described as “character-driven”: since the focus is more on interaction than on events, and emotions more than explosions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giovanni Torre
• Release date: Aug 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311581730

Giovanni Torre

Giovanni Torre is a union organiser and journalist.If he writes anything interesting he will post a link on Twitter - @GiovanniTorreHe supports the greatest sporting organisation in the history of human kind - Swan Districts Football Club.

Book preview

Enoch’s Folly

Giovanni Torre

Some of the characters and events in Enoch’s Folly are based on real people and actual events. Certain elements of their stories presented here are based on fact; the rest, that is to say the vast majority, is the product of the author’s imagination.

The proper noun ‘Comely’ rhymes with homely.

G. Torre

2015

The first time Aldous Comely was killed he found the experience disappointing.

The motive was base, the method unimaginative and the consequences predictable. Comely was certain he would never have embarked on such a banal and brutish exercise, but, having on some reflection conceded it was possible, had he – it would have been executed with a little more panache.

Gambling was a childish pastime, and certainly not worth one’s life, but a point of principle was an entirely different matter. He rarely lost at cards and never lost significantly, so he knew the catastrophe was nothing more or less than the outcome of a rigged match. Beyond that, he knew his opponents were the worst and most cynically amoral degenerates in the city. So he, perhaps immaturely, refused to pay.

One week after he went down in what the newspaper men are addicted to calling a hail of bullets, he was asked why he had played against them in the first place.

I usually win, he had answered.

Asked why he hadn’t stopped when his game was so clearly in free-fall;

I thought I could fight my way back to the top.

He was that kind of man, if he was a man at all, and he wouldn’t learn enough from the first lesson, which in turn made subsequent episodes necessary that someone with better sense – or indeed better taste – would have avoided. In time the lessons became few and far between as he honed his skills, and his being, into Aldous Comely as we find him today.

Death proved to be more of an inconvenience than he had anticipated, but a wealthy man can get around just about any trouble one can imagine. Money had not been the issue behind his refusal to pay his debt, but, as established, a point of principle. He knew he was crooked, everyone knew – at some level, at least, but his word was his bond and he never cheated anybody out of anything. He understood if he let go of principle he was just an animal walking on two legs, and that would keep him awake at night. And Comely was a man who valued his sleep.

Of course he wasn’t Comely then, not to suggest he is necessarily Comely now. The story, as he explained it to Robert, was a simple fable and the moral: don’t dice with the Devil, came before the end of the story, which he left out. Robert, Bob to almost everyone else, was an upstanding young man, more upstanding than seemed possible at first, and had met Comely while making plans to travel to Mexico for some holy mission. So he paused in Comely’s company, as so many had and did and would, because the light of the great man was, while not exactly warm, undeniably entreating.

Robert was a firm believer in the importance of a firm handshake, but while he found Comely’s handshake unpleasant, he could not resist his conversation and the dynamism of any evening, and often subsequent mornings, spent with him and his coterie of misfits, geniuses and charlatans.

Comely was not quite a colossus, Robert thought, but he certainly had a foot on either shore.

He was a respected entrepreneur with a love for the community around him, best known for his ability and inclination to extend a hand to someone down on their luck. With his strange agelessness, he was the well-connected uncle, the savvy friend, the devoted son. At the same time, there were questions, and there were whispers. Some of his friends seemed unseemly, some of his habits inexplicable. And there was the troubling fact that matter how much business was (or wasn’t) coming through the gate, there was never a rainy day. Not once.

The two men made their way along familiar ground, ducking the rain-filled potholes and slipping between the trams and buses and rattling motorcars that sounded their crazed hooting klaxons for no reason other than the opportunity. The shoe shine boys huddled under the awnings as it was a bad day for business but the newspaper boys knew bad days were the best and shouted louder than when it was fine. A burly man with a mop of grey curls under a cap stood by a fruit stall and nodded at Comely and the end of his cigar glowed. Comely smiled warmly and nodded back and called out How’s Maureen? and the man just smiled, a broad toothy smile between which he kept the cigarillo firmly clasped. The rain ran slowly on the sides of buildings with unstraight edges, working around each brick, then through the moss and mould between them and down around another. Puddles formed slowly as so much was unsealed still in that end of town, the black water catching what little electric lights adorning the outsides of the most successful, or most desperate, businesses.

They took their usual table at Greco’s; a Greek coffee for Comely and a glass of hot milk for Robert. Greco never laughed at Robert’s choice, no one who knew him did. This was not simply because he had the country edge about him, that look of a man who’d worked enough years on a farm to know how to lay someone out without much trouble, but because his good-heartedness was so earnest, so infectious, that everything he did simply enhanced people’s fondness for him. Thinking he had some idea of what Comely was, Greco would have been excused for being surprised by his friendship with Robert, but Greco had survived long enough to not be surprised by anything. Beyond that, he appreciated just how much fun Comely could be ninety-nine times out of a hundred. That remaining one time, however, is best left undiscussed.

Comely was not a big man – but he looked dangerous enough to avoid being small. Exquisitely dressed at any hour of the day, his suits fit to perfection, disguising the short legs he had grown as the result of a malformation of his ankles. He could move fast, that much was clear, and people whispered he was good with a knife when he was young. But he still seemed young, and it was hard to nail down the details in stories about his past. In the cold world of mathematics Robert was no less than six inches taller than Comely, but it was not readily apparent behind the film of character.

How’s the milk? Comely asked his companion with a genuine smile.

Same as always. Robert looked into the endless depth of the other man’s coffee. I don’t know how you can drink that tar.

I don’t think I could go without it, he paused. I’m glad you came through this part of town, I needed a fellow like you at the yard. The others tell me you’re a born leader.

I wouldn’t say that. I just do my best and I try to help the others do theirs. It beats working in a slaughterhouse.

Comely stirred his tar. But nothing beats writing for a living, right?

Robert smiled.

Who could ask for more?

"Quite right. But you are looking for more. What’s in Mexico?"

A job.

You have a job here.

And I’m grateful for it, but we’ve been over this and I have said already that Mexico is something I need to do.

Greco had moved through the kitchen and the storeroom and beyond the rear door to the alley behind the café. He rolled a cigarette knowing no one would get into the till in his absence, that he could take his time and a reliable customer would let him know if someone new came in, because the regulars were his friends and that’s what friends are for. The rain had stopped suddenly and without warning and already the sun was starting to celebrate its victory. The smoke alternated between white-blue and black-blue as the slats of a fading fence cast stripes across most of what Greco could see. He drew long, it was good tobacco and no one appreciated good tobacco more than a former smoker, which is what Greco was at heart. Twenty years earlier, the day they signed Versailles – in fact – so Greco could tell you the exact date, a gypsy woman told him smoking would eat him from the inside out and he’d perhaps had one cigarette a week since that day. He had always been skinny, so he didn’t want to take many chances.

Inside Robert told Comely of life on the farm, of his romance with books that bloomed fast and hard under the wary gaze of fellow American peasants. Comely knew the basics of the story already, he knew the spine of the plot, but each rendition had variations and every single one of them was true. He never grew tired of listening to Robert and Robert was always delighted to listen to him. They complemented one another in a way people with a shallow understanding of human relationships would not understand. Their union represented a challenge to the way such people understood the world, and once people have finally, painstakingly established their understanding of the world, the last thing they want is anything improving it.

Comely asked Robert many questions and Robert returned the favour. Today had been a good one, and the two men parted ways moments before Greco flipped the sign on his door to ‘closed’. It was a weekday and he was closing at sundown. Outside the chill was already on and Robert flipped up the off-white wool collar of his checked heavy jacket. Comely buttoned up his flawless cashmere trench-coat before saluting his friend and turning away and off into the next stage of the evening. Robert returned to his little flat, a tiny yellowing place he had no intention of staying in much longer than the four weeks for which the party paid in advance.

He read diligently on his stiff and sterile single bed in the sickly light of a solitary lantern. Knowing he could only afford to run the heater seven hours a week he decided that particular night was not quite cold enough and left it off. He dreamed of the revolution and the long hot blinding bright flats of the south, and he smiled, despite his fear.

*

Robert had been closer to his destination when he started his journey than he was now and this troubled him. He was needed in Mexico but had had to make a detour, just one stop for two days, before departing again. On the first night he’d met Comely and the two days were starting to spiral into a far longer time than permissible. Permissible to whom? To himself. Robert read voraciously and he believed as voraciously as he read. His cause was a desperate one and needed him along with everything it could get. Why had he stayed? He was sure a wire would arrive for him any moment now; that it was probably waiting for him as soon as he returned to his room. He disliked the room but already was starting to think of it as home, which troubled him some more.

Robert had never known anything like what he had seen in just a short time, and people like those Comely had drawn into his life. Or was he being drawn into theirs?

He had been walking around staring up at the buildings that seemed gigantic to him – because they were gigantic – mouth agape like the silliest cartoons of a country yokel in the big city. Robert had done his homework, knew the inner mechanics of the system better than most educated Americans, let alone most 24 year-old country boys, but couldn’t help but be awed by the city – already by then the greatest in the world. He was to be there for two weeks, two weeks and then expected at his final destination shortly there after… He’d met Comely that first day.

After devouring two packed lunches on his first night, Robert had emerged from a building in which he had an over-priced cheap apartment and wandered about, getting lost easily and finding Greco’s, fishing a few coins from his pocket and being startled to find they were more than enough for a decent feed. Greco had recognised in Robert a foreigner in a strange land, and had shown him the kindness he was sure his grandfather would have appreciated when he arrived on Ellis Isle. Robert remembered it clearly, though it now seemed almost like another life;

Greco’s was narrow but deep, bright at the front and dim at the rear with a counter running three quarter’s the length of one wall – to the patron’s left as they entered. Behind the counter was barely two feet of space and at the far end a doorway (the door removed from its hinges before living memory) to the kitchen. The counter was well served by bar stools and the wall behind it adorned with a framed daguerreotype of Greco’s grandfather – the only known photograph of the man – pictures (mostly paintings) of Greece and some prints of men Greco considered great American heroes… Lincoln, Lafayette, John Brown, Einstein, and Charles Ponzi. Ponzi was a conversation piece.

You know he never missed a payment, Greco would say with a straight face when someone asked about it.

Ponzi was the godfather of schemes that now carry the same name, but as a pioneer he was not sabotaged by any absence of confidence – people kept putting the money in, and as long as they did, the earlier investors never had a problem. Only when the state intervened did Ponzi and his supporters become unstuck.

Could it have gone on forever? Greco asked. Who knows!

He thought the story of Ponzi reminded everyone that in the end, money is ink on paper; The whole system is part bricks and mortar, part smoke and mirrors, he would say.

Robert sat at one of the tiny round tables, away from the front door to avoid the cold as much as possible, legs not quite fitting right, one knee pressed against the bottom of the table, the other leg to one side. Too transfixed by the food before him, he had not noticed Comely arrive… but, looking down, felt something change in the room. Chairs shifting, people bustling… the people who seemed to know Greco well, the regulars, Robert had gathered before his food arrived, were animated, crowding around someone and shaking his hand… but very briefly before returning to their seats. Robert stared openly… He didn’t recognise the man and looked down at the book he had pulled from his pocket. Robert was well-read but not surprised he didn’t know him; it was a big city and likely home to a million minor big shots.

He’d barely looked up at the sound of a chair being drawn back and Comely was already sitting next to him.

You’re the only guy in here I don’t know which means you’re new to the city. He was grinning. Now that says nothing about me and everything about Greco’s coffee. But you’re not drinking coffee. You will be. You’re from the mid-west?

I am, sir.

I’m not so much older than you, and this is America. At least, I am pretty sure it is. So call me Aldous. Or Comely. They both fit. And you are?

Robert wondered if the man was from the new federal bureau and simply said Robert. Holding back his family name was enough and Robert could not lie – not even in this situation. Telling the truth was a habit of a lifetime, one he’d been warned could be a lot of trouble.

New in town, any contacts here? Never mind, don’t answer that – it’s a boring question. The real question is what do you hope to get out of this city? Maybe you’ll take a look at the Fair. Everyone talks about the Futurama, but I haven’t seen it. If you’ve come for an education you’ve come to the right place, though I don’t doubt you already have one.

Robert started a little, wondering – is this guy a fed, or a nut?

Comely leaned in.

Look, sorry if that was a somewhat supercilious comment. I run a yard near here – wholesale stock; household goods, hardware – basically it’s a big general store for retailers. I employ people; men and women, coloured and white, Hessian and Mexican, who are new to the city and needing work. If they find something better – I wish them well and write them a reference.

Alright, he said, barely believing the word as it came out. What do you think I could do, based on the vast amount of intelligence you’ve gathered so far?

Comely grinned.

You’re a big guy, big enough for trouble makers to stay away from – but you’re no guard. My foreman is leaving shortly. It’s a tough job and hardly more pay then anything else, so I don’t know who would put their hand up for it.

Robert looked at Comely more closely now. The accent was almost North American, but definitely not local, nor recognisable in any other way. He seemed unlike any kind of civil servant or cop, or any businessman. He was more like a talented cadre, Robert recognised quickly, quick on his feet – dynamic, a believer of some kind. Robert understood people, in simple and easy ways. It had set him aside from a very early age, made him too sensitive as a child – but gave him advantages as a young man.

Are you kidding me?

Not at all. Why would I? Look – come down and do some work. You’re not staying near here are you? Where are you staying?

What makes you think I’m not staying near here?

You walked a while to get here, Comely said easily, without any kind of self-consciousness. He turned in his seat and look back toward the front of Greco’s café. If you need to take the subway, I’ll cover that. You like to walk, but it might be far.

He handed Robert an address. Come and see what we do. If you like it, try a week in the yard. If you’re good – try being foreman. Like I said, it’s a lot of responsibility.

I can’t do it. I am very busy this week and next week, then I am leaving.

Comely looked surprised. Why would you do a thing like that? This is the last stop – there’s no place anywhere better than this. You must have something special waiting for you – and not a lady, otherwise you’d go now and not wait two weeks.

Robert couldn’t help but smile.

Comely continued.

Well come down if you need a hand, or a bit of income while you’re here. This can be an expensive place to live, even for just two weeks.

Comely’s coffee arrived and he downed it in a split second. His eyes darted to the clock and he smiled genuinely at Robert.

Alright?

Robert wouldn’t commit so far as a second ‘alright’, but when Comely left he had kept the address in his hand and his hand in his pocket, even as he walked past a trashcan just outside Greco’s. Interesting, Robert considered later, that Comely had walked in to a place full of people who knew him and had spoken to no one but the only stranger.

He threw open his small window to listen to the hum and rattle of the city below. What he once found jarring had become a comfort, a torch against the darkness of silence. Looking down he watched people mill and squawk and soon spotted a woman, perhaps in her late 20s, carrying a large crate. She held it with both hands in front of her but did not place any support under the crate. It’s empty – or carrying pillows, he thought to himself. He’d learned a little more about observation from Comely. People tell you a hell of a lot without opening their mouths. She was beautiful, olive and healthy, her face framed by dark curls falling behind her ears where the four clips ended and freedom began. Her eyes were bright but not wide. From the front the shoulders of her dress could be seen, it was knee length, white with red thin vertical stripes. It wasn’t warm and she was wearing just the dress, and for a moment he wondered if he was hallucinating. Robert longed to charge down the stairs and meet her but knew it was a foolish idea for a number of reasons. She passed by directly under his window and he followed her to the end of the street, her dress brilliant in the light, tight against her waist and firing a dull ache in his heart and a jangling in his hands that made him forget the strange fact she was hauling a huge and apparently empty crate despite being dressed for the pictures, not the dockyard.

* * *

Mrs Hatfield arrived in town to no fanfare. Indeed, she arrived to no town. Paradise, named as such by way of an accidental cruel joke, had been a booming town before the mine bummed out. In the glory days you could reach into a river bed and pull out your destiny, and the speed with which success turned to ash took just about everyone by surprise. First the pan men either learned to dig or learned to run, then the pits and shafts started to turn up nothing but anger. The hotels and the prostitutes called it a day and the banker followed suit. The school held out until the last child decamped and a town without children is just a prison without bars. The buildings were stripped for timber and fixtures where it was worthwhile, and a few relics and skeletons clustered around the train station. The station, now a mere stop, and the rail repair depot had been opened just days before the first prospector quietly slipped out of town, and it quickly became what some would call a white elephant. Nothing makes less sense than an angry bureaucrat so the Paradise rail repair depot continued to operate. As a result, the manager and now sole employee of the depot, Mr Rosti, established a small coffee house for the benefit of engine drivers and associated rail workers, where he in turn employed a man he called Mr Watson. Watson liked to talk and Rosti liked hearing stories, so they made a good pair, which was just as well given they also lived together on the premises.

As Mrs Hatfield stepped off her carriage, and a number of passengers held their heads out of the windows like turtles, Rosti smiled. He broke off his conversation with the driver mid-sentence and called out to her;

Ma’am, if you’d like a hot drink of any kind, or a cold one, speak to Mr Watson just through there.

Rosti pointed to a double door wide open under an already faded sign: Rail Café.

Mrs Hatfield curtsied in a way Rosti found slightly confusing and took his advice.

The small bell on the door alerted Watson, who smiled in the direction of the door and waited to hear the footsteps before offering;

Hello ma’am.

Hello sir, Mrs Hatfield replied with a smile that made her feel foolish once she realised no one was around the see it.

Watson’s glorious face beamed as he had heard the smile in her voice. He was nearly 80, but had an indestructible face, Ivory Coast black; lined and striking but never decrepit. He was genetically bald but shaved the last of his hair every two days, and with his strong, rumbling voice, could pass for as young as 55.

Black or white ma’am? Sugar?

Black with a half please.

As Watson made his way easily around the small kitchen, Mrs Hatfield walked to the back of the coffee house and pulled out a chair so her back would face the wall furthest from the door. The legs left four definite canals of clean wood through the dust and she doubted this place saw many full houses.

The room was Spartan but the abundant natural light gave it a kind of beauty Mrs Hatfield appreciated after hours in a cramped carriage. The tables were immaculately clean, which is what counts, small dark and round, five of them arranged like the side of a dice, those closer to the wall of windows facing the train line somewhat warped, those further seemingly new. A rail company bill was pinned to one wall and by the kitchen door a framed portrait of Joe Hill caught her eye. Rosti was a brave man, she thought, and clasped her hands together until they went white.

Listening for the whistle of the coffee pot Mrs Hatfield swept up to the kitchen counter to collect her brew.

Ma’am, Watson admonished. I would have been more than happy to bring your coffee to you.

I am sorry if you feel I’ve made assumptions about your dedication Mr Watson, but I can assure you I only wished to improve my circulation after a long journey seated.

Watson smiled and held out the cup and saucer for her, as she took it they both noticed the rough hands of the other. Watson pondered this. She sounded like an educated woman, perhaps 40, but had clearly worked hard with her hands for years. He wondered if she had married well after a childhood in poverty.

Rosti busied himself with the engine and its driver. Assured the stop was a brief one, the few other passengers remained on the train while Mrs Hatfield drank her coffee in silence. Watson remained in the kitchen, and she could not see from where she sat that he was standing mostly upright, his fingertips dancing across the page of a book he was reading. She would have been happy to talk with him had he wished to, but was in no mind to initiate conversation for conversation’s sake – as she rarely was. Mrs Hatfield had always been quiet, and as Mrs Testerman she had been quiet too and, before that, an impossibly long time ago, she had been the liveliest and prettiest of a brood of ten lively and pretty children. That was before her family and her town had sunk deep below the ground where liveliness and prettiness were not to be found, and suddenly almost everyone awoke to find they owned nothing but a pile of debt.

This is good coffee, she said to the unattended kitchen counter.

Thank you ma’am, it answered.

Mrs Hatfield bid a temporary farewell to Watson and walked outside the coffee shop. Rosti was in his office hunched over something she soon realised with shock was a telegraph machine. Surely the railways had the money and sense to provide the repair stop and mail room with a telephone. Mrs Hatfield kept walking, past debris, the junk not worth salvaging and all else that was left of Paradise. The overgrown dirt roads went on for some time, and she soon found Paradise must have been a well-sized place. She saw the evidence that gas lamp posts once lined the main thoroughfares. They too were gone and with them the names of streets. A handful of empty buildings were scattered among miles of now-vacant lots. All the good timber gone, the newer brick buildings, the glass and wood stripped from their windows and doors, gaped into the dusty lanes and in some cases bore the only detailed indicators of a once grand ancient civilisation; the drug store, the general store, an almost brand-new real estate agent, R.J Sloan & Company; Proprietors of Excavation Goods… Mrs Hatfield stopped and gasped. Looking back she could no longer see the rail repair depot. She had been walking for some time and saw the first hint of twilight coming.

Rosti frantically burst into the coffee shop and asked Watson for a second time if he knew where Mrs Hatfield was.

I haven’t seen her, the old man said.

Rosti missed it and darted out. The engineer cried out from the locomotive that he couldn’t keep waiting for one woman. A stoker laughed - some people wait their whole lives for one woman, chief – but, like Rosti, the driver was in no mood for jokes.

Rosti charged around the remnants of Paradise, but despite the sorry state the former town had reached there were still enough upright buildings, trees and piles of junk to make finding Mrs Hatfield quite an undertaking, particularly if she didn’t want to be found. He wasn’t a young man and drank far too much of Watson’s coffee and before long he was hot with panic and exertion. Wiping his brow with his fading red handkerchief he paused and shouted again – Mrs Hatfield! – but was drowned out by the train’s whistle. Frustrated, he more screamed than shouted the second time.

Mrs Hatfield, who turned for the depot on noticing the low sun, had stopped when she noticed an abandoned store that, unlike anything else in the town beyond the depot and café, seemed decked out for business. The door was in place and the windows intact, even adorned with curtains. She was startled by the narrow, two storey bluestone building. For someone to have built in bluestone here seemed bizarre enough, but for the stone to have survived the salvage crews was utterly inexplicable. The sign on the awning seemed relatively fresh.

S. NEY AND DAUGHTER

Nowhere at the front of the store was any further explanation visible. As Mrs Hatfield first reached for the door handle, she heard Rosti cry out. By the time he had finished saying her name her fingers were already on the strangely warm brass and Rosti’s cry was in vain. The door opened easily, without a groan or creak but instead a gentle ding of a small bell. Mrs Hatfield gasped, freezing on the spot, half expecting someone to emerge from the door behind the bare wooden counter. She waited, heard no further distant desperate cries – or anything at all – and pulled the door shut behind her. The store, if indeed it was a store, was sparse but for two stools before a long counter that ran the entire width of the room. The floor was dusty and footprint-free. To her left was a wall entirely of closed cabinets, to her right a wall adorned with two maps, one of Paradise and the surrounding area, the other – much older – of a town she had not heard of before. On closer inspection she saw it was entirely in French. Behind the counter were more closed cabinets and a portrait of a fierce looking man with grey eyes and incandescent cheeks. Mrs Hatfield ignored the cabinets to her left, lifting the counter trapdoor – again, with ease – and making her way with some urgency to the next door. Behind it lay a small storeroom, empty, and stairs which she flew up without a second thought. At the landing she found two doors and she halted. ‘What am I doing?’ she whispered and considered leaving and sprinting back to find Rosti, but instead she stared at one of the doors, unable to break away. Her heart pounded in her ears and she knocked on the door firmly, almost mechanically, not anticipating a response. She waited, stopped breathing for a moment and focussed hard, closing her eyes. Silence. Silence.

Rosti;

Mrs Hatfield!

He was much closer now and she considered crying out to him. She knocked on the door a second time and waited. There was a gentle shuffling somewhere – behind the door she was sure – and Mrs Hatfield tightly gripped her own mouth to stop herself from screaming. Rosti screamed instead;

Mrs Hatfield!

And the spell was broken – she ran down the stairs, through the still-open trapdoor and out onto the porch of S. Ney And Daughter.

Mr Rosti – I, I was lost.

He stopped, sweaty and red-faced, and turned to her; half not believing his luck and half not believing her words.

"You were lost, in there?"

For this, she had no explanation. The brief but already awkward silence was broken as both of them clearly heard the train pulling out of the station; a development that troubled Rosti far more than it did Mrs Hatfield.

Ten minutes later Mrs Hatfield sat at the same table again in Rosti and Watson’s café.

Watson seemed delighted with the company, but Rosti was noticeably less pleased. It was nothing against Mrs Hatfield, who seemed perfectly agreeable; he was furious at the inconsideration so starkly demonstrated by the engine driver and crew, and also fearful of how this debacle would reflect on him.

It wouldn’t take much to get us closed down, he thought aloud and briefly spoiled Watson’s ebullient mood.

Mrs Hatfield fixed her eyes on Rosti.

"I can assure you there will