“Those dining-cars! There was romance for you! Rushing through the landscape; that fierce country north of Lake Superior, and the marvellous steppes of the prairies, in an elegant, rather too hot, curiously shaped dining-room, full of light, glittering with tablecloths and napkins so white they looked blue, shining silver (or something very close), and all those clean, courteous, friendly black waiters — if that wasn’t romance you don’t know the real thing when you see it! And the food! Nothing hotted up or melted out in those days, but splendid stuff that came on fresh at every big stop; cooked brilliantly in the galley by a real chef; fresh fish, tremendous meat, real fruit — don’t you remember what their baked apples were like? With thick cream! Where does one get thick cream now? I remember every detail. The cube sugar was wrapped in pretty white paper with Castor printed on it, and every time we put it in our coffee I suppose we enriched our dear friend Boy Staunton, so clear in the memory of Dunny and myself, because he came from our town, though I didn’t know that at the time…” (My ears pricked up: I swear my scalp tingled. Magnus had mentioned Boy Staunton, the Canadian tycoon, and also my lifelong friend, whom I was pretty sure Magnus had murdered. Or, if not murdered, had given a good push on a path that looked like suicide. This was what I wanted for my document. Had Magnus, who withheld death cruelly from Willard, given it almost as a benefaction to Boy Staunton? Would his present headlong, confessional mood carry him to the point where he would admit to murder, or at least give a hint that I, who knew so much but not enough, would be able to interpret?. . . But I must miss nothing, and Magnus was still rhapsodizing about C.P.R. food as once it was.) “. . . And the sauces; real sauces, made by the chef — exquisite!
“There were bottled sauces, too. Commercial stuff I learned to hate because at every meal that dreary utility actor Jim Hailey asked for Garton’s; then he would wave it about saying, ‘Anybody want any of the Handkerchief?’ because, as he laboriously pointed out, if you spelled Garton’s backward it came out Snotrag; poor Hailey was that depressing creature, a man of one joke. Only his wife laughed and blushed because he was being ‘awful’, and she never failed to tell him so. But I suppose you didn’t see because you always tried to sit at the table with Sevenhowes and Charlton and Woulds; if she was cruel and asked Eric Foss to sit with them instead, you sat as near as you could and hankered and glowered as they laughed at jokes you couldn’t hear.
“Oh, the trains, the trains! I gloried in them because with Wanless’s I had done so much train travel and it was wretched. I began my train travel, you remember, in darkness and fear, hungry, with my poor little bum aching desperately. But here I was, unmistakably a first-class passenger, in the full blaze of that piercing, enveloping, cleansing Canadian light. I was quite content to sit at a table with some of the technical staff, or sometimes with old Mac and Holroyd, and now and then with that Scheherazade of the railways, Morton W. Penfold, when he was making a hop with us.
“Penfold knew all the railway staff; I think he knew all the waiters. There was one conductor we sometimes encountered on a transcontinental, who was a special delight to him, a gloomy man who carried a real railway watch — one of those gigantic nickel-plated turnips that kept very accurate time. Penfold would hail him: ‘Lester, when do you think we’ll be in Sault Ste Marie?’ Then Lester would pull up the watch out of the well of his waistcoat, and look sadly at it, and say, ‘Six fifty-two, Mort, if we’re spared.’ He was gloomy-religious, and everything was conditional on our being spared; he didn’t seem to have much confidence in either God or the C.P.R.
“Penfold knew the men on the locomotives, too, and whenever we came to a long, straight stretch of track, he would say, ‘I wonder if Fred is dipping his piles.’ This was because one of the oldest and best of the engineers was a martyr to haemorrhoids, and Penfold swore that whenever we came to an easy piece of track, Fred drew off some warm water from the boiler into a basin, and sat in it for a few minutes, to ease himself. Penfold never laughed; he was a man of deep, private humour, and his solemn, hypnotist’s face never softened, but the liquid on his lower eyelid glittered and occasionally spilled over, and his head shook; that was his laugh.
“Now and then, on long hauls, the train carried a private car for Sir John and Milady; these luxuries could not be hired — or only by the very rich — but sometimes a magnate who owned one, or a politician who had the use of one, would put it at the disposal of the Tresizes, who had armies of friends in Canada. Sir John, and Milady especially, were not stingy about their private car, and always asked a few of the company in, and now and then, on very long hauls, they asked us all in and we had a picnic meal from the dining-car. Now surely that was romance, Roly? Or didn’t you find it so? All of us perched around one of those splendid old relics, most of which had been built not later than the reign of Edward the Seventh, full of marquetry woodwork (there was usually a little plaque somewhere that told you where all the woods came from) and filigree doodads around the ceiling, and armchairs with a fringe made of velvet bobbles everywhere that fringe could be imagined. In a sort of altar-like affair at one end of the drawing-room area were magazines in thick leather folders — and what magazines! Always The Sketch and The Tatler and Punch and The Illustrated London News — it was like a club on wheels. And lashings of drink for everybody — that was Penfold’s craft at work — but it wasn’t at all the thing for anybody to guzzle and get drunk, because Sir John and Milady didn’t like that.”
“He was a great one to talk,” said Ingestree. “He could drink any amount without showing it, and it was believed everywhere that he drank a bottle of brandy a day just to keep his voice mellow.”
“Believed, but simply not true. It’s always believed that star actors drink heavily, or beat their wives, or deflower a virgin starlet every day to slake their lust. But Sir John drank pretty moderately. He had to. Gout. He never spoke about it, but he suffered a lot with it. I remember one of those parties when the train lurched and Felicity Larcombe stumbled and stepped on his gouty foot, and he turned dead white, but all he said was, ‘Don’t speak of it, my dear,’ when she apologized.”
“Yes, of course you’d have seen that. You saw everything. Obviously, or you couldn’t tell us so much about it now. But we saw you seeing everything, you know. You weren’t very good at disguising it, even if you tried. Audrey Sevenhowes and Charlton and Woulds had a name for you — the Phantom of the Opera. You were always somewhere with your back against a wall, looking intently at everything and everybody. ‘There’s the Phantom, at it again,’ Audrey used to say. It wasn’t a very nice kind of observation. It had what I can only call a wolfish quality about it, as if you were devouring everything. Especially devouring Sir John. I don’t suppose he made a move without you following him with your eyes. No wonder you knew about the gout. None of the rest of us did.”
“None of the rest of you cared, if you mean the little clique you travelled with. But the older members of the company knew, and certainly Morton W. Penfold knew, because it was one of his jobs to see that the same kind of special bottled water was always available for Sir John on every train and in every hotel. Gout’s very serious for an actor. Any suggestion that a man who is playing the Master of Ballantrae is hobbling is bad for publicity. It was clear enough that Sir John wasn’t young, but it was of the uttermost importance that on the stage he should seem young. To do that he had to be able to walk slowly; it’s not too hard to seem youthful when you’re leaping about the stage in a duel, but it’s a very different thing to walk as slowly as he had to when he appeared as his own ghost at the end of The Corsican Brothers. Detail, my dear Roly; without detail there can be no illusion. And one of the odd things about Sir John’s kind of illusion (and my own, when later on I became a master illusionist) is that the showiest things are quite simply arranged, but anything that looks like simplicity is extremely difficult.