The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Chapter 31: The Cool Kindliness of Sheets

The surprise that Hugh had for Barbara was revealed shortly after the sleeper train slipped out of Euston, rocking through the somnolent suburbs of London, headed for Scotland and the Great Glen. The surprise was a demonstration – nothing more than that – of a special way of keeping the interconnecting door between their two compartments open during the journey. This was done by attaching one end of a leather belt to a coat hook in one compartment and the other end to a second coat hook in the other.

Barbara watched, and if her smile seemed rueful, it was. What had she expected? When a devastatingly handsome man, one whom one can – with complete pride – call one’s fiancé, says that he has a surprise in store, what is one entitled to expect? A present of some sort, perhaps? Something one would never buy oneself – an item of jewellery, a brooch, a set of earrings. Or, more imaginatively, and perhaps even more romantically, a concealed miniature picnic basket, produced and opened to reveal a tiny pack of delicate sandwiches – translucent cucumber slices on slivers of bread – a half-bottle of champagne, kept chilled in a tight-fitting ice-filled life-vest, and flecked quails’ eggs, as neat and beautiful as the tiny birds that had laid them. Such a picnic could be eaten in the half-light of the sleeper compartment, the two of them perched companionably on the one bunk, like two children enjoying a midnight feast in the far-fetched pages of some schooldays story. One would not expect merely this, a mundane way of keeping a door from opening and closing with the movement of the train.

“Now we’ll be able to talk,” said Hugh, pointing at his vaguely Heath Robinson arrangement.

She looked down, a look tinged with regret. “Of course.”

“Talking in the darkness is very special,” said Hugh. “You hear your words going out into the night, almost like a prayer – because you can’t see the person you’re addressing them to.”

He took off his jacket. She saw that a button was missing from his shirt; there was a glimpse of brown beneath. He was one of these people who did not need the sun to look tanned. He took off his shoes. There was a hole in one of his socks exposing the tip of a toe; it made her smile. He looked so vulnerable.

“What’s funny?”

She pointed to his holed sock. “Your poor toe.”

He wiggled the toe. “This little piggy,” he said, “went …”

“If you do that,” she said, “you’ll enlarge the hole.”

Hugh finished the line – the pig’s destination should not remain unclear – “Went to market. What do you think that means? All those nursery rhymes have a hidden meaning, you know. Often quite sinister.”

“They can be dreadful,” agreed Barbara. “They’re full of violence and cruelty.” She paused. “Why do you think we feel the need to scare our children?”

Hugh thought for a moment. He wiggled his exposed toe again. “Bettelheim?” he asked.

“Oh. The Uses of …” The uses of something.

“Of enchantment. The Uses of Enchantment.”

“Of course.”

Hugh bent down and started to remove a sock. She watched him; the simple act of getting undressed in a confined space brought home the intimacy of the relationship into which she had entered. This was not occasional, which had been the nature of her relationship with Oedipus, and the boyfriend who, some years previously, had preceded him. It was quotidian, diurnal–nocturnal. She averted her eyes lest he see her looking upon him, as biblical language would have it; one would not want to be found looking upon another.

He took off the other sock. “Bettelheim said that violence in fairy stories and the like has a very important function. It enables us to experience it as children, and to deal with it. If you look something in the face, then you are no longer frightened of it.”

He turned away from her and switched out the main light in the compartment. The bunk reading-light, though, was still on, giving out a low, reassuring glow. The train rocked, and he had to reach out to steady himself by holding onto Barbara’s shoulder; she was already seated on the edge of the bed. Once steadied, he sat down.

“I’m very glad that you’re coming to Scotland,” he said.

She said that she was glad too. But she hardly knew Scotland, she added; it seemed very far away, particularly places with names like Fort William. “It makes it sound like a distant outpost.”

“It is.”

“But a fort. Were the locals so unfriendly?”

“At one time, yes. Remember that it was in the heart of Jacobite territory. It was occupied. Our culture was suppressed. Our national dress interdicted.”

He shifted round and lay back on the bunk, his shirt riding up over the flat of his stomach.

“ ‘How many miles to Babylon?’” he recited. “ ‘Three score and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.’”

Barbara turned and lay beside him on the bunk; there was not enough room, and had the train stopped suddenly she would undoubtedly have fallen off.

“I should get to my bunk,” Hugh said. “There really isn’t enough room for two.”

She wanted him to stay, but it was impractical. “I wish you could stay,” she said. “Then we could lie here, carried sideways through the night, just as that poet didn’t like. What was his name?”

“Norman McCaig.”

“Yes, like him.”

“Unlike him. We’d like it.”

She sat up in order to allow him to get off the bunk. As she watched him move past her and cross to the narrow door into his own compartment, she felt a sudden pang of sorrow. It was a premonition of loss, she decided; she would lose him, this beautiful stranger. For that was what he was to her still, a stranger who had come into her life, a gift from somewhere else altogether. What if he died? People did, even the young; people died.

Barbara prepared herself for bed, and then slipped between the sheets. Trains were scruffy places usually, but the sleepers had clean, beautifully ironed sheets, slightly rough to the touch as good linen and cotton can be. Rupert Brooke wrote of the “rough male kiss of blankets”; and what did he say of sheets? “The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble.” That was it.

She reached up and turned out her reading-light. Through the interconnecting door she saw that Hugh had done the same. She felt safe; the morbid thoughts of a few moments earlier, when she had imagined that she might lose him, had dissipated. She was safe.

He was saying something, muttering, and it suddenly occurred to Barbara that it was a prayer. It occurred to her, too, that she had never actually asked him whether he believed in God. Who asked such a question of a lover, even of a fiancé, these days?

She strained to hear the words. It was in fact not a prayer, but a poem.

Barbara lay in complete silence. She could have slipped out of bed and embraced Hugh, hugged him, showered him with kisses of gratitude. But she did not do this, because she was awed by the moment. “My wishes for her, now, the one I love.” That’s me, she thought. That’s me.