Collected Stories

Going Home

‘Mulligatawny soup,’ Carruthers said in the dining-car. ‘Roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, mixed vegetables.’

‘And madam?’ murmured the waiter.

Miss Fanshawe said she’d have the same. The waiter thanked her. Carruthers said:

‘Miss Fanshawe’ll take a medium dry sherry. Pale ale for me, please.’

The waiter paused. He glanced at Miss Fanshawe, shaping his lips.

‘I’m sixteen and a half,’ Carruthers said. ‘Oh, and a bottle of Beaune. 1962.’

It was the highlight of every term and every holiday for Carruthers, coming like a no man’s land between the two: the journey with Miss Fanshawe to their different homes. Not once had she officially complained, either to his mother or to the school. She wouldn’t do that; it wasn’t in Miss Fanshawe to complain officially. And as for him, he couldn’t help himself.

‘Always Beaune on a train,’ he said now, ‘because of all the burgundies it travels happiest.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the waiter said.

‘Thank you, old chap.’

The waiter went, moving swiftly in the empty dining-car. The train slowed and then gathered speed again. The fields it passed through were bright with sunshine; the water of a stream glittered in the distance.

‘You shouldn’t lie about your age,’ Miss Fanshawe reproved, smiling to show she hadn’t been upset by the lie. But lies like that, she explained, could get a waiter into trouble.

Carruthers, a sharp-faced boy of thirteen, laughed a familiar harsh laugh. He said he didn’t like the waiter, a remark that Miss Fanshawe ignored.

‘What weather!’ she remarked instead. ‘Just look at those weeping willows!’ She hadn’t ever noticed them before, she added, but Carruthers contradicted that, reminding her that she had often before remarked on those weeping willows. She smiled, with false vagueness in her face, slightly shaking her head. ‘Perhaps it’s just that everything looks so different this lovely summer. What will you do, Carruthers? Your mother took you to Greece last year, didn’t she? It’s almost a shame to leave England, I always think, when the weather’s like this. So green in the long warm days –’

‘Miss Fanshawe, why are you pretending nothing has happened?’

‘Happened? My dear, what has happened?’

Carruthers laughed again, and looked through the window at cows resting in the shade of an oak tree. He said, still watching the cows, craning his neck to keep them in view:

‘Your mind is thinking about what has happened and all the time you’re attempting to make ridiculous conversation about the long warm days. Your heart is beating fast, Miss Fanshawe; your hands are trembling. There are two little dabs of red high up on your cheeks, just beneath your spectacles. There’s a pink flush all over your neck. If you were alone, Miss Fanshawe, you’d be crying your heart out.’

Miss Fanshawe, who was thirty-eight, fair-haired and untouched by beauty, said that she hadn’t the foggiest idea what Carruthers was talking about. He shook his head, implying that she lied. He said:

‘Why are we being served by a man whom neither of us likes when we should be served by someone else? Just look at those weeping willows, you say.’

‘Don’t be silly, Carruthers.’

‘What has become, Miss Fanshawe, of the other waiter?’

‘Now please don’t start any nonsense. I’m tired and –’

‘It was he who gave me a taste for pale ale, d’you remember that? In your company, Miss Fanshawe, on this train. It was he who told us that Beaune travels best. Have a cig, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘No, and I wish you wouldn’t either.’

‘Actually Mrs Carruthers allows me the odd smoke these days. Ever since my thirteenth birthday, May the 26th. How can she stop me, she says, when day and night she’s at it like a factory chimney herself?’

‘Your birthday’s May the 26th? I never knew. Mine’s two days later.’ She spoke hastily, and with an eagerness that was as false as the vague expression her face had borne a moment ago.

‘Gemini, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Yes: Gemini. Queen Victoria –’

‘The sign of passion. Here comes the interloper.’

The waiter placed sherry before Miss Fanshawe and beer in front of Carruthers. He murmured deferentially, inclining his head.

‘We’ve just been saying,’ Carruthers remarked, ‘that you’re a new one on this line.’

‘Newish, sir. A month – no, tell a lie, three weeks yesterday.’

‘We knew your predecessor.’

‘Oh yes, sir.?’

‘He used to say this line was as dead as a doornail. Actually, he enjoyed not having anything to do. Remember, Miss Fanshawe?’

Miss Fanshawe shook her head. She sipped her sherry, hoping the waiter would have the sense to go away. Carruthers said:

‘In all the time Miss Fanshawe and I have been travelling together there hasn’t been a solitary soul besides ourselves in this dining-car.’

The waiter said it hardly surprised him. You didn’t get many, he agreed, and added, smoothing the tablecloth, that it would just be a minute before the soup was ready.

‘Your predecessor,’ Carruthers said, ‘was a most extraordinary man.’

‘Oh yes, sir?’

‘He had the gift of tongues. He was covered in freckles.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘Miss Fanshawe here had a passion for him.’

The waiter laughed. He lingered for a moment and then, since Carruthers was silent, went away.

‘Now look here, Carruthers,’ Miss Fanshawe began.

‘Don’t you think Mrs Carruthers is the most vulgar woman you’ve ever met?’

‘I wasn’t thinking of your mother. I will not have you talk like this to the waiter. Please now.’

‘She wears a scent called “In Love”, by Norman Hartnell. A woman of fifty, as thin as fuse wire. My God!’

‘Your mother –’

‘My mother doesn’t concern you – oh, I agree. Still you don’t want to deliver me to the female smelling of drink and tobacco smoke. I always brush my teeth in the lavatory, you know. For your sake, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Please don’t engage the waiter in conversation. And please don’t tell lies about the waiter who was here before. It’s ridiculous the way you go on –’

‘You’re tired, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘I’m always tired at the end of term.’

‘That waiter used to say –’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop about that waiter!’

‘I’m sorry.’ He seemed to mean it, but she knew he didn’t. And even when he spoke again, when his voice was softer, she knew that he was still pretending. ‘What shall we talk about?’ he asked, and with a weary cheerfulness she reminded him that she’d wondered what he was going to do in the holidays. He didn’t reply. His head was bent. She knew that he was smiling.

‘I’ll walk beside her,’ he said. ‘In Rimini and Venice. In Zürich maybe. By Lake Lugano. Or the Black Sea. New faces will greet her in an American Bar in Copenhagen. Or near the Spanish Steps – in Babbington’s English Tea-Rooms. Or in Bandol or Cassis, the Ritz, the Hotel Excelsior in old Madrid. What shall we talk about, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘You could tell me more. Last year in Greece –’

‘I remember once we talked about guinea-pigs. I told you how I killed a guinea-pig that Mrs Carruthers gave me. Another time we talked about Rider Minor. D’you remember that?’

‘Yes, but let’s not –’

‘McGullam was unpleasant to Rider Minor in the changing-room. McGullam and Travers went after Rider Minor with a little piece of wood.’

‘You told me, Carruthers.’

He laughed.

‘When I first arrived at Ashleigh Court the only person who spoke to me was Rider Minor. And of course the Sergeant-Major. The Sergeant-Major told me never to take to cigs. He described the lungs of a friend of his.’

‘He was quite right.’

‘Yes, he was. Cigs can give you a nasty disease.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke.’

‘I like your hat.’

‘Soup, madam,’ the waiter murmured. ‘Sir.’

‘Don’t you like Miss Fanshawe’s hat?’ Carruthers smiled, pointing at Miss Fanshawe, and when the waiter said that the hat was very nice Carruthers asked him his name.

Miss Fanshawe dipped a spoon into her soup. The waiter offered her a roll. His name, he said, was Atkins.

‘Are you wondering about us, Mr Atkins?’

‘Sir?’

‘Everyone has a natural curiosity, you know.’

‘I see a lot of people in my work, sir.’

‘Miss Fanshawe’s an undermatron at Ashleigh Court Preparatory School for Boys. They use her disgracefully at the end of term – patching up clothes so that the mothers won’t complain, packing trunks, sorting out laundry. From dawn till midnight Miss Fanshawe’s on the trot. That’s why she’s tired.’

Miss Fanshawe laughed. ‘Take no notice of him,’ she said. She broke her roll and buttered a piece of it. She pointed at wheat ripening in a field. The harvest would be good this year, she said.

‘At the end of each term,’ Carruthers went on, ‘she has to sit with me on this train because we travel in the same direction. I’m out of her authority really, since the term is over. Still, she has to keep an eye.’

The waiter, busy with the wine, said he understood. He raised his eyebrows at Miss Fanshawe and winked, but she did not encourage this, pretending not to notice it.

‘Imagine, Mr Atkins,’ Carruthers said, ‘a country house in the mock Tudor style, with bits built on to it: a rackety old gymn and an art-room, and changing-rooms that smell of perspiration. There are a hundred and three boys at Ashleigh Court, in narrow iron beds with blue rugs on them, which Miss Fanshawe has to see are all kept tidy. She does other things as well: she wears a white overall and gives out medicines. She pours out cocoa in the dining-hall and at eleven o’clock every morning she hands each boy four petit beurre biscuits. She isn’t allowed to say Grace. It has to be a master who says Grace: “For what we’re about to receive…” Or the Reverend T. L. Edwards, who owns and runs the place, T.L.E., known to generations as a pervert. He pays boys, actually.’

The waiter, having meticulously removed a covering of red foil from the top of the wine bottle, wiped the cork with a napkin before attempting to draw it. He glanced quickly at Miss Fanshawe to see if he could catch her eye in order to put her at her ease with an understanding gesture, but she appeared to be wholly engaged with her soup.

‘The Reverend Edwards is a law unto himself,’ Carruthers said. ‘Your predecessor was intrigued by him.’

‘Please take no notice of him.’ She tried to sound bracing, looking up suddenly and smiling at the waiter.

‘The headmaster accompanied you on the train, did he, sir?’

‘No, no, no, no. The Reverend Edwards was never on this train in his life. No, it was simply that your predecessor was interested in life at Ashleigh Court. He would stand there happily listening while we told him the details: you could say he was fascinated.’

At this Miss Fanshawe made a noise that was somewhere between a laugh and a denial.

‘You could pour the Beaune now, Mr Atkins,’ Carruthers suggested.

The waiter did so, pausing for a moment, in doubt as to which of the two he should offer a little of the wine to taste. Carruthers nodded to him, indicating that it should be he. The waiter complied and when Carruthers had given his approval he filled both their glasses and lifted from before them their empty soup-plates.

‘I’ve asked you not to behave like that,’ she said when the waiter had gone.

‘Like what, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘You know, Carruthers.’

‘The waiter and I were having a general conversation. As before, Miss Fanshawe, with the other waiter. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember my telling him how I took forty of Hornsby’s football cards? And drank the Communion wine in the Reverend’s cupboard?’

‘I don’t believe –’

‘And I’ll tell you another thing. I excused myself into Rider Minor’s gum-boots.’

‘Please leave the waiter alone. Please let’s have no scenes this time, Carruthers.’

‘There weren’t scenes with the other waiter. He enjoyed everything we said to him. You could see him quite clearly trying to visualize Ashleigh Court, and Mrs Carruthers in her awful clothes.’

‘He visualized nothing of the sort. You gave him drink that I had to pay for. He was obliged to listen to your fantasies.’

‘He enjoyed our conversation, Miss Fanshawe. Why is it that people like you and I are so unpopular?’

She didn’t answer, but sighed instead. He would go on and on, she knew; and there was nothing she could do. She always meant not to protest, but when it came to the point she found it hard to sit silent, mile after mile.

‘You know what I mean, Miss Fanshawe? At Ashleigh Court they say you have an awkward way of walking. And I’ve got no charm: I think that’s why they don’t much like me. But how for God’s sake could any child of Mrs Carruthers have charm?’

‘Please don’t speak of your mother like that –’

‘And yet men fancy her. Awful men arrive at weekends, as keen for sex as the Reverend Edwards is. “Your mother’s a most elegant woman,” a hard-eyed lecher remarked to me last summer, in the Palm Court of a Greek hotel.’

‘Don’t drink too much of that wine. The last time –’

‘ “You’re staggering,” she said the last time. I told her I had flu. She’s beautiful, I dare say, in her thin way. D’you think she’s beautiful?’

‘Yes, she is.’

‘She has men all over the place. Love flows like honey while you make do with waiters on a train.’

‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Carruthers.’

‘She snaps her fingers and people come to comfort her with lust. A woman like that’s never alone. While you –’

‘Will you please stop talking about me!’

‘You have a heart in your breast like anyone else, Miss Fanshawe.’

The waiter, arriving again, coughed. He leaned across the table and placed a warmed plate in front of Miss Fanshawe and a similar one in front of Carruthers. There was a silence while he offered Miss Fanshawe a silver-plated platter with slices of roast beef on it and square pieces of Yorkshire pudding. In the silence she selected what she wanted, a small portion, for her appetite on journeys with Carruthers was never great. Carruthers took the rest. The waiter offered vegetables.

‘Miss Fanshawe ironed that blouse at a quarter to five this morning,’ Carruthers said. ‘She’d have ironed it last night if she hadn’t been so tired.’

‘A taste more carrots, sir?’

‘I don’t like carrots, Mr Atkins.’

‘Peas, sir?’

‘Thank you. She got up from her small bed, Mr Atkins, and her feet were chilly on the linoleum. She shivered, Mr Atkins, as she slipped her night-dress off. She stood there naked, thinking of another person. What became of your predecessor?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I never knew the man at all. All right for you, madam?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘He used to go back to the kitchen, Mr Atkins, and tell the cook that the couple from Ashleigh Court were on the train again. He’d lean against the sink while the cook poked about among his pieces of meat, trying to find us something to eat. Your predecessor would suck at the butt of a cig and occasionally he’d lift a can of beer to his lips. When the cook asked him what the matter was he’d say it was fascinating, a place like Ashleigh Court with boys running about in grey uniforms and an undermatron watching her life go by.’

‘Excuse me, sir.’

The waiter went. Carruthers said:

‘ “She makes her own clothes,” the other waiter told the cook. “She couldn’t give a dinner party the way the young lad’s mother could. She couldn’t chat to this person and that, moving about among décolletée women and outshining every one of them.” Why is she an undermatron at Ashleigh Court Preparatory School for Boys, owned and run by the Reverend T.L. Edwards, known to generations as a pervert?’

Miss Fanshawe, with an effort, laughed. ‘Because she’s qualified for nothing else,’ she lightly said.

‘I think that freckled waiter was sacked because he interfered with the passengers. “Vegetables?” he suggested, and before he could help himself he put the dish of cauliflowers on the table and put his arms around a woman. “All tickets please,” cried the ticket-collector and then he saw the waiter and the woman on the floor. You can’t run a railway company like that.’

‘Carruthers –’

‘Was it something like that, Miss Fanshawe? D’you think?’

‘Of course it wasn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’ve just made it up. The man was a perfectly ordinary waiter on this train.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘I love this train, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘It’s a perfectly ordinary –’

‘Of course it isn’t.’

Carruthers laughed gaily, waiting for the waiter to come back, eating in silence until it was time again for their plates to be cleared away.

‘Trifle, madam?’ the waiter said. ‘Cheese and biscuits?’

‘Just coffee, please.’

‘Sit down, why don’t you, Mr Atkins? Join us for a while.’

‘Ah no, sir, no.’

‘Miss Fanshawe and I don’t have to keep up appearances on your train. D’you understand that? We’ve been keeping up appearances for three long months at Ashleigh Court and it’s time we stopped. Shall I tell you about my mother, Mr Atkins?’

‘Your mother, sir?’

‘Carruthers –’

‘In 1960, when I was three, my father left her for another woman: she found it hard to bear. She had a lover at the time, a Mr Dalacourt, but even so she found it hard to forgive my father for taking himself off.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘It was my father’s intention that I should accompany him to his new life with the other woman, but when it came to the point the other woman decided against that. Why should she be burdened with my mother’s child? she wanted to know: you can see her argument, Mr Atkins.’

‘I must be getting on now, sir.’

‘So my father arranged to pay my mother an annual sum, in return for which she agreed to give me house room. I go with her when she goes on holiday to a smart resort. My father’s a thing of the past. What d’you think of all that, Mr Atkins? Can you visualize Mrs Carruthers at a resort? She’s not at all like Miss Fanshawe.’

‘I’m sure she’s not –’

‘Not at all.’

‘Please let go my sleeve, sir.’

‘We want you to sit down.’

‘It’s not my place, sir, to sit down with the passengers in the dining-car.’

‘We want to ask you if you think it’s fair that Mrs Carruthers should round up all the men she wants while Miss Fanshawe has only the furtive memory of a waiter on a train, a man who came to a sticky end, God knows.’

‘Stop it!’ cried Miss Fanshawe. ‘Stop it! Stop it! Let go his jacket and let him go away –’

‘I have things to do, sir.’

‘He smelt of fried eggs, a smell that still comes back to her at night.’

‘You’re damaging my jacket. I must ask you to release me at once.’

‘Are you married, Mr Atkins?’

‘Carruthers!’ Her face was crimson and her neck blotched with a flushing that Carruthers had seen before. ‘Carruthers, for heaven’s sake behave yourself!’

‘The Reverend Edwards isn’t married, as you might guess, Mr Atkins.’

The waiter tried to pull his sleeve out of Carruthers’ grasp, panting a little from embarrassment and from the effort. ‘Let go my jacket!’ he shouted. ‘Will you let me go!’

Carruthers laughed, but did not release his grasp. There was a sound of ripping as the jacket tore.

‘Miss Fanshawe’ll stitch it for you,’ Carruthers said at once, and added more sharply when the waiter raised a hand to strike him: ‘Don’t do that, please. Don’t threaten a passenger, Mr Atkins.’

‘You’ve ruined this jacket. You bloody little –’

‘Don’t use language in front of the lady.’ He spoke quietly, and to a stranger entering the dining-car at that moment it might have seemed that the waiter was in the wrong, that the torn sleeve of his jacket was the just result of some attempted insolence on his part.

‘You’re mad,’ the waiter shouted at Carruthers, his face red and sweating in his anger. ‘That child’s a raving lunatic,’ he shouted as noisily at Miss Fanshawe.

Carruthers was humming a hymn. ‘Lord, dismiss us,’ he softly sang, ‘with Thy blessing.’

‘Put any expenses on my bill,’ whispered Miss Fanshawe. ‘I’m very sorry.’

‘Ashleigh Court’ll pay,’ Carruthers said, not smiling now, his face all of a sudden as sombre as the faces of the other two.

No one spoke again in the dining-car. The waiter brought coffee, and later presented a bill.

The train stopped at a small station. Three people got out as Miss Fanshawe and Carruthers moved down the corridor to their compartment. They walked in silence, Miss Fanshawe in front of Carruthers, he drawing his right hand along the glass of the windows. There’d been an elderly man in their compartment when they’d left it: to Miss Fanshawe’s relief he was no longer there. Carruthers slid the door across. She found her book and opened it at once.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she’d read a page.

She turned the page, not looking up, not speaking.

‘I’m sorry I tormented you,’ he said after another pause.

She still did not look up, but spoke while moving her eyes along a line of print. ‘You’re always sorry,’ she said.

Her face and neck were still hot. Her fingers tightly held the paperbacked volume. She felt taut and rigid, as though the unpleasantness in the dining-car had coiled some part of her up. On other journeys she’d experienced a similar feeling, though never as unnervingly as she experienced it now. He had never before torn a waiter’s clothing.

‘Miss Fanshawe?’

‘I want to read.’

‘I’m not going back to Ashleigh Court.’

She went on reading and then, when he’d repeated the statement, she slowly raised her head. She looked at him and thought, as she always did when she looked at him, that he was in need of care. There was a barrenness in his sharp face; his eyes reflected the tang of a bitter truth.

‘I took the Reverend Edwards’ cigarette-lighter. He’s told me he won’t have me back.’

‘That isn’t true, Carruthers –’

‘At half past eleven yesterday morning I walked into the Reverend’s study and lifted it from his desk. Unfortunately he met me on the way out. Ashleigh Court, he said, was no place for a thief.’

‘But why? Why did you do such a silly thing?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I do a lot of things. I don’t know why I pretend you were in love with a waiter. This is the last horrid journey for you, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘So you won’t be coming back –’

‘The first time I met you I was crying in a dormitory. D’you remember that? Do you, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘ “Are you missing your mummy?” you asked me, and I said no. I was crying because I’d thought I’d like Ashleigh Court. I’d thought it would be heaven, a place without Mrs Carruthers. I didn’t say that; not then.’

‘No.’

‘You brought me to your room and gave me liquorice allsorts. You made me blow my nose. You told me not to cry because the other boys would laugh at me. And yet I went on crying.’

In the fields men were making hay. Children in one field waved at the passing train. The last horrid journey, she thought; she would never see the sharp face again, nor the bitterness reflected in the eyes. He’d wept, as others occasionally had to; she’d been, for a moment, a mother to him. His own mother didn’t like him, he’d later said – on a journey – because his features reminded her of his father’s features.

‘I don’t know why I’m so unpleasant, Miss Fanshawe. The Reverend stared at me last night and said he had a feeling in his bones that I’d end up badly. He said I was a useless sort of person, a boy he couldn’t ever rely on. I’d let him down, he said, thieving and lying like a common criminal. “I’m chalking you up as a failure for Ashleigh,” he said. “I never had much faith in you, Carruthers.” ’

‘He’s a most revolting man.’ She said it without meaning to, and yet the words came easily from her. She said it because it didn’t matter any more, because he wasn’t going to return to Ashleigh Court to repeat her words.

‘You were kind to me that first day,’ Carruthers said. ‘I liked that holy picture in your room. You told me to look at it, I remember. Your white overall made a noise when you walked.’

She wanted to say that once she had told lies too, that at St Monica’s School for Girls she’d said the King, the late George VI, had spoken to her when she stood in the crowd. She wanted to say that she’d stolen two rubbers from Elsie Grantham and poured ink all over the face of a clock, and had never been found out.

She closed her eyes, longing to speak, longing above all things in the world to fill the compartment with the words that had begun, since he’d told her, to pound in her brain. All he’d ever done on the train was to speak a kind of truth about his mother and the school, to speak in their no man’s land, as now and then he’d called it. Tormenting her was incidental; she knew it was. Tormenting her was just by chance, a thing that happened.

His face was like a flint. No love had ever smoothed his face, and while she looked at it she felt, unbearably now, the urge to speak as he had spoken, so many times. He smiled at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Reverend’s a most revolting man.’

‘I’m thirty-eight,’ she said and saw him nod as though, precisely, he’d guessed her age a long time ago. ‘Tonight we’ll sit together in the bungalow by the sea where my parents live and they’ll ask me about the term at Ashleigh. “Begin at the beginning, Dora,” my mother’ll say and my father’ll set his deaf-aid. “The first day? What happened the first day, Dora?” And I shall tell them. “Speak up,” they’ll say, and in a louder voice I’ll tell them about the new boys, and the new members of staff. Tomorrow night I’ll tell some more, and on and on until the holidays and the term are over. “Wherever are you going?” my mother’ll say when I want to go out for a walk. “Funny time,” she’ll say, “to go for a walk.” No matter what time it is.’

He turned his head away, gazing through the window as earlier she had gazed through the window of the dining-car, in awkwardness.

‘I didn’t fall in love with a freckled waiter,’ he heard her say, ‘but God knows the freckled waiter would have done.’

He looked at her again. ‘I didn’t mean, Miss Fanshawe –’

‘If he had suddenly murmured while offering me the vegetables I’d have closed my eyes with joy. To be desired, to be desired in any way at all…’

‘Miss Fanshawe –’

‘Born beneath Gemini, the sign of passion, you said. Yet who wants to know about passion in the heart of an ugly undermatron? Different for your mother, Carruthers: your mother might weep and tear away her hair, and others would weep in pity because of all her beauty. D’you see, Carruthers? D’you understand me?’

‘No, Miss Fanshawe. No, I don’t think I do. I’m not as –’

‘There was a time one Christmas, after a party in the staff-room, when a man who taught algebra took me up to a loft, the place where the Wolf Cubs meet. We lay down on an old tent, and then suddenly this man was sick. That was in 1954. I didn’t tell them that in the bungalow: I’ve never told them the truth. I’ll not say tonight, eating cooked ham and salad, that the boy I travelled with created a scene in the dining-car, or that I was obliged to pay for damage to a waiter’s clothes.’

‘Shall we read now, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘How can we read, for God’s sake, when we have other things to say? What was it like, d’you think, on all the journeys to see you so unhappy? Yes, you’ll probably go to the bad. He’s right: you have the look of a boy who’ll end like that. The unhappy often do.’

‘Unhappy, Miss Fanshawe? Do I seem unhappy?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, tell the truth! The truth’s been there between us on all our journeys. We’ve looked at one another and seen it, over and over again.’

‘Miss Fanshawe, I don’t understand you. I promise you, I don’t understand –’

‘How could I ever say in that bungalow that the algebra teacher laid me down on a tent and then was sick? Yet I can say it now to you, a thing I’ve never told another soul.’

The door slid open and a woman wearing a blue hat, a smiling, red-faced woman, asked if the vacant seats were taken. In a voice that amazed Carruthers further Miss Fanshawe told her to go away.

‘Well, really!’ said the woman.

‘Leave us in peace, for God’s sake!’ shrieked Miss Fanshawe, and the woman, her smile all gone, backed into the corridor. Miss Fanshawe rose and shut the door again.

‘It’s different in that bungalow by the sea,’ she then quite quietly remarked, as though no red-faced woman had backed away astonished. ‘Not like an American Bar in Copenhagen or the Hotel Excelsior in Madrid. Along the walls the coloured geese stretch out their necks, the brass is polished and in its place. Inch by inch oppression fills the air. On the chintz covers in the sitting-room there’s a pattern of small wild roses, the stair-carpet’s full of fading lupins. To W.J. Fanshawe on the occasion of his retirement, says the plaque on the clock on the sitting-room mantelpiece, from his friends in the Prudential. The clock has a gold-coloured face and four black pillars of ersatz material: it hasn’t chimed since 1958. At night, not far away, the sea tumbles about, seeming too real to be true. The seagulls shriek when I walk on the beach, and when I look at them I think they’re crying out with happiness.’

He began to speak, only to speak her name, for there was nothing else he could think of to say. He changed his mind and said nothing at all.

‘Who would take me from it now? Who, Carruthers? What freckled waiter or teacher of algebra? What assistant in a shop, what bank-clerk, postman, salesman of cosmetics? They see a figure walking in the wind, discs of thick glass on her eyes, breasts as flat as paper. Her movement’s awkward, they say, and when she’s close enough they raise their hats and turn away: they mean no harm.’

‘I see,’ he said.

‘In the bungalow I’m frightened of both of them: all my life I’ve been afraid of them. When I was small and wasn’t pretty they made the best of things, and longed that I should be clever instead. “Read to us, Dora,” my father would say, rubbing his hands together when he came in from his office. And I would try to read. “Spell merchant” my father would urge as though his life depended upon it, and the letters would become jumbled in my mind. Can you see it, Carruthers, a child with glasses and an awkward way of walking and two angry figures, like vultures, unforgiving? They’d exchange a glance, turning their eyes away from me as though in shame. “Not bright,” they’d think. “Not bright, to make up for the other.” ’

‘How horrid, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘No, no. After all, was it nice for them that their single child should be a gawky creature who blushed when people spoke? How could they help themselves, any more than your mother can?’

‘Still, my mother –’

‘ “Going to the pictures?” he said the last time I was home. “What on earth are you doing that for?” And then she got the newspaper which gave the programme that was showing. “Tarzan and the Apemen”, she read out. “My dear, at your age!” I wanted to sit in the dark for an hour or two, not having to talk about the term at Ashleigh Court. But how could I say that to them? I felt the redness coming in my face. “For children surely,” my father said, “a film like that.” And then he laughed. “Dora’s made a mistake,” my mother explained, and she laughed too.’

‘And did you go, Miss Fanshawe?’

‘Go?’

‘To Tarzan and the Apemen?’

‘No, I didn’t go. I don’t possess courage like that: as soon as I enter the door of the bungalow I can feel their disappointment and I’m terrified all over again. I’ve thought of not going back but I haven’t even the courage for that: they’ve sucked everything out of me. D’you understand?’

‘Well –’

‘Why is God so cruel that we leave the ugly school and travel together to a greater ugliness when we could travel to something nice?’

‘Nice, Miss Fanshawe? Nice?’

‘You know what I mean, Carruthers.’

He shook his head. Again he turned it away from her, looking at the window, wretchedly now.

‘Of course you do,’ her voice said, ‘if you think about it.’

‘I really –’

‘Funny our birthdays being close together!’ Her mood was gayer suddenly. He turned to look at her and saw she was smiling. He smiled also.

‘I’ve dreamed this train went on for ever,’ she said, ‘on and on until at last you stopped engaging passengers and waiters in fantastic conversation. “I’m better now,” you said, and then you went to sleep. And when you woke I gave you liquorice allsorts. “I understand,” I said: “it doesn’t matter.” ’

‘I know I’ve been very bad to you, Miss Fanshawe. I’m sorry –’

‘I’ve dreamed of us together in my parents’ bungalow, of my parents dead and buried and your thin mother gone too, and Ashleigh Court a thing of the nightmare past. I’ve seen us walking over the beaches together, you growing up, me cooking for you and mending your clothes and knitting you pullovers. I’ve brought you fresh brown eggs and made you apple dumplings. I’ve watched you smile over crispy chops.’

‘Miss Fanshawe –’

‘I’m telling you about a dream in which ordinary things are marvellous. Tea tastes nicer and the green of the grass is a fresher green than you’ve ever noticed before, and the air is rosy, and happiness runs about. I would take you to a cinema on a Saturday afternoon and we would buy chips on the way home and no one would mind. We’d sit by the fire and say whatever we liked to one another. And you would no longer steal things or tell lies, because you’d have no need to. Nor would you mock an unpretty undermatron.’

‘Miss Fanshawe, I – I’m feeling tired. I think I’d like to read.’

‘Why should they have a child and then destroy it? Why should your mother not love you because your face is like your father’s face?’

‘My mother –’

‘Your mother’s a disgrace,’ she cried in sudden, new emotion. ‘What life is it for a child to drag around hotels and lovers, a piece of extra luggage, alone, unloved?’

‘It’s not too bad. I get quite used to it –’

‘Why can He not strike them dead?’ she whispered. ‘Why can’t He make it possible? By some small miracle, surely to God?’

He wasn’t looking at her. He heard her weeping and listened to the sound, not knowing what to do.

‘You’re a sorrowful mess, Carruthers,’ she whispered. ‘Yet you need not be.’

‘Please. Please, Miss Fanshawe –’

‘You’d be a different kind of person and so would I. You’d have my love, I’d care about the damage that’s been done to you. You wouldn’t come to a bad end: I’d see to that.’

He didn’t want to turn his head again. He didn’t want to see her, but in spite of that he found himself looking at her. She, too, was gazing at him, tears streaming on her cheeks. He spoke slowly and with as much firmness as he could gather together.

‘What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘The waiter said that you were mad. Am I crazy too? Can people go mad like that, for a little while, on a train? Out of loneliness and locked-up love? Or desperation?’

‘I’m sure it has nothing to do with madness, Miss Fanshawe –’

‘The sand blows on to my face, and sometimes into my eyes. In my bedroom I shake it from my sandals. I murmur in the sitting-room. “Really, Dora,” my mother says, and my father sucks his breath in. On Sunday mornings we walk to church, all three of us. I go again, on my own, to Evensong: I find that nice. And yet I’m glad when it’s time to go back to Ashleigh Court. Are you ever glad, Carruthers?’

‘Sometimes I have been. But not always. Not always at all. I –’

‘ “Let’s go for a stroll,” the algebra teacher said. His clothes were stained with beer. “Let’s go up there,” he said. “It’s nice up there.” And in the pitch dark we climbed to the loft where the Wolf Cubs meet. He lit his cigarette-lighter and spread the tent out. I don’t mind what happens, I thought. Anything is better than nothing happening all my life. And then the man was sick.’

‘You told me that, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘ “You’re getting fat,” my mother might have said. “Look at Dora, Dad, getting fat.” And I would try to laugh. “A drunk has made me pregnant,” I might have whispered in the bungalow, suddenly finding the courage for it. And they would look at me and see that I was happy, and I would kneel by my bed and pour my thanks out to God, every night of my life, while waiting for my child.’ She paused and gave a little laugh. ‘They are waiting for us, those people, Carruthers.’

‘Yes.’

‘The clock on the mantelpiece still will not chime. “Cocoa,” my mother’ll say at half past nine. And when they die it’ll be too late.’

He could feel the train slowing, and sighed within him, a gesture of thanksgiving. In a moment he would walk away from her: he would never see her again. It didn’t matter what had taken place, because he wouldn’t ever see her again. It didn’t matter, all she had said, or all he had earlier said himself.

He felt sick in his stomach after the beer and the wine and the images she’d created of a life with her in a seaside bungalow. The food she’d raved about would be appalling; she’d never let him smoke. And yet, in the compartment now, while they were still alone, he was unable to prevent himself from feeling sorry for her. She was right when she spoke of her craziness: she wasn’t quite sane beneath the surface, she was all twisted up and unwell.

‘I’d better go and brush my teeth,’ he said. He rose and lifted his overnight case from the rack.

‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.

His hand, within the suitcase, had already grasped a blue sponge-bag. He released it and closed the case. He stood, not wishing to sit down again. She didn’t speak. She wasn’t looking at him now.

‘Will you be all right, Miss Fanshawe?’ he said at last, and repeated the question when she didn’t reply. ‘Miss Fanshawe?’

‘I’m sorry you’re not coming back to Ashleigh, Carruthers. I hope you have a pleasant holiday abroad.’

‘Miss Fanshawe, will you –’

‘I’ll stay in England, as I always do.’

‘We’ll be there in a moment,’ he said.

‘I hope you won’t go to the bad, Carruthers.’

They passed by houses now; the backs of houses, suburban gardens. Posters advertised beer and cigarettes and furniture. Geo. Small. Seeds, one said.

‘I hope not, too,’ he said.

‘Your mother’s on the platform. Where she always stands.’

‘Goodbye, Miss Fanshawe.’

‘Goodbye, Carruthers. Goodbye.’

Porters stood waiting. Mail-bags were on a trolley. A voice called out, speaking of the train they were on.

She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t lift her head: he knew the tears were pouring on her cheeks now, more than before, and he wanted to say, again, that he was sorry. He shivered standing in the doorway, looking at her, and then he closed the door and went away.

She saw his mother greet him, smiling, in red as always she was. They went together to collect his luggage from the van, out of her sight, and when the train pulled away from the station she saw them once again, the mother speaking and Carruthers just as he always was, laughing his harsh laugh.