Travels With My Aunt

  ‘No one too old for jig-jig,’ Wordsworth said. ‘You tell her she come back here to Paris. Wordsworth wait long long time for her. You speak her sweet. You tell her she still my bebi gel. Wordsworth no slip good when she gone.’

  The conductor asked me to get on to the train, for we were about to leave, and Wordsworth unwillingly released me. I stood on the top of the steps as the train began to move out from the Gare de Lyon in short jerks, and Wordsworth followed it down the platform, wading through the steam. He was crying, and I was reminded of a suicide walking out fully dressed into the surf. Suddenly, staring at a window beyond me, he began to sing:

  ‘Slip gud-o, bebi gel:

  An luk me wan minit

  Befo yu slip.’

  The train gathered momentum and with a final jerk and strain it had left him behind.

  I squeezed down the corridor to my aunt’s couchette which was number 72. The bed was made up, but there was a strange girl in a mini-skirt sitting on it, while my aunt leant out of the window waving and blowing kisses. The girl and I looked at each other with embarrassment. We could hardly speak and interrupt this ceremony of separation. She was very young, perhaps eighteen, and she was elaborately made up with a chalk-white face, dark shadowed eyes and long auburn hair falling over her shoulders. With the strokes of a pencil she had continued her eyelashes below and above the lids, so that the real eyelashes, standing out, had a false effect like a stereoscopic photograph. Her shirt had two buttons missing at the top as though they had popped off with the tension of her puppy fat and her eyes bulged like a pekinese dog’s, but they were pretty nonetheless. They had in them what used to be called by my generation a sexy look, but this might have been caused by short sight or constipation. Her smile, when she realized that I was not a stranger intruding into my aunt’s compartment, was oddly timid for someone who looked so flagrant. It was as though someone else had dolled her up to attract. She was like a kid tethered to a tree to draw a tiger out of the jungle.

  My aunt pulled in her head; her face was smeared with smuts and tears. ‘Dear man,’ she said. ‘I had to take a last look. At my age one never knows.’

  I said with disapproval, ‘I thought that chapter was closed,’ and added for the sake of the girl, ‘Aunt Augusta.’

  ‘One can never be quite sure,’ my aunt said. ‘This is 71,’ she added, indicating the girl.

  ‘71?’

  ‘The next-door couchette. What’s your name, dear?’

  ‘Tooley,’ the girl replied. It might have been a pet name or a family name – one couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Tooley is going to Istanbul too. Aren’t you, dear?’

  ‘En passant,’ she said with an American accent.

  ‘She’s going to Katmandu,’ my aunt explained.

  ‘I thought that was in Nepal.’

  ‘I guess that’s where it is,’ the girl said. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘She and I got talking,’ my aunt told me, ‘because – what’s your name again, dear?’

  ‘Tooley,’ the girl said.

  ‘Tooley has brought a sack of provisions with her. Do you realize, Henry, that the Orient Express has no restaurant-car? How times have changed. No restaurant-car till after the Turkish frontier. We face two days of starvation.’

  ‘I’ve got a lot of milk chocolate,’ the girl said, ‘and a little sliced ham.’

  ‘And thirst,’ Aunt Augusta said.

  ‘I’ve got a dozen bottles of coke, but it’s getting pretty warm now.’

  ‘When I think of the party I once had on this very train,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘with Mr Visconti and General Abdul, caviar and champagne. We practically lived in the dining-car. One meal ran into another and night into day.’

  ‘You are very welcome to share my coke,’ Tooley said. ‘And the milk chocolate. The ham too, of course, but there’s not much of that.’

  ‘At least the conductor has promised us coffee and croissants,’ I said, ‘in the morning.’

  ‘I shall sleep as late as I can,’ my aunt said, ‘and we shall be able to get a bite at Milan station. With Mario,’ she added.

  ‘Who’s Mario?’ I asked.

  ‘We stop at Lausanne and St Maurice,’ said the well-informed girl.

  ‘Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘like some people are only bearable under a sheet. Now I shall go to bed. You two young people are old enough to be left alone.’

  Tooley looked at me askance as though after all I might be the tiger type. ‘Oh, I’ll sleep too,’ she said, ‘I love sleep.’ She looked at a huge wrist-watch on a strap an inch wide with only four numerals, coloured scarlet. ‘It’s not one yet,’ she said doubtfully, ‘I’d better take a pill.’

  ‘You’ll sleep,’ my aunt said in a tone not to be denied.

  12

  WE were just pulling out of Lausanne when I awoke. I could see the lake between two tall grey apartment buildings and there was a tasteful advertisement for chocolates and then another for watches. It was the conductor who had woken me, bringing me coffee and brioches (I had asked for croissants). ‘Is the lady in 72 awake?’ I asked.

  ‘She did not wish to be disturbed before Milan,’ he replied.

  ‘Is it true that there’s no restaurant-car?’

  ‘Yes, monsieur.’

  ‘At least you will give us breakfast tomorrow?’

  ‘No, monsieur. I leave the train at Milan. There is another conductor.’

  ‘Italian?’

  ‘Yugoslav, monsieur.’

  ‘Does he speak English or French?’

  ‘It is not likely.’ I felt hopelessly abroad.

  I drank my coffee, and then from the corridor I watched the small Swiss towns roll smoothly by: the Montreux Palace in baroque Edwardian like the home of a Ruritanian king, and rising behind it, out of a bank of morning mist, pale mountains like an under-exposed negative: Aigle, Bex, Visp … We stopped at nearly every station, but it was seldom that anyone either got in or out. Like my aunt foreign passengers were not interested in Switzerland without snow, and yet it was here that I was seriously tempted to leave her. I had fifty pounds of travellers’ cheques and I had no interest at all in Turkey. I caught glimpses of meadows running down to water, of old castles on hills spiked with vines and of girls on bicycles; everything seemed clean and arranged and safe, as my life had been before my mother’s funeral. I thought of my garden. I missed my dahlias, and at some small station, where a postman was delivering letters from a bicycle, there was a bed of mauve and red flowers. I think I might really have got off if the girl called Tooley hadn’t at that moment touched my arm. Was there anything so wrong with the love of peace that I had to be forcibly drawn away from it by Aunt Augusta?

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ Tooley asked.

  ‘Oh yes, and you?’

  ‘I hardly slept a wink.’ Her pekinese eyes stared up at me, as though she were waiting for something from my plate. I offered her a brioche, but she refused it.

  ‘Oh no, thanks a lot. I’ve had a chocolate bar.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you sleep?’

  ‘I’m sort of worried.’

  I remembered, from my cashier days, faces just as timid as hers, peering through a hygienic barrier where a notice directed them to speak through a slot placed inconveniently low. I almost asked her whether she had an overdraft.

  ‘Anything I can do?’

  ‘I just want to talk,’ she said.

  What could I do but invite her in? My bed had been made into a sofa while I stood in the corridor, and we sat down side by side. I offered her a cigarette. It was an ordinary Senior Service, but she turned it over as though it were something special she had never seen before.

  ‘English?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does Senior Service mean?’

  ‘The Navy.’

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, if I smoke one of my own?’ She took a tin marked Eucalyptus-and-Menthol Lozenges out of her bag
and picked from it an anonymous cigarette which looked as though it had been home-rolled. On second thoughts she offered me one, and I thought it would be a little unkind of me to refuse. It was a very small cigarette, and it looked rather grubby. It had an odd herbal flavour, not disagreeable.

  ‘I’ve never smoked an American cigarette before,’ I said.

  ‘I got these in Paris – from a friend.’

  ‘Or French ones.’

  ‘He was a terribly nice man. Groovy.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘This man I met in Paris. I told him my trouble too.’

  ‘What is your trouble?’

  ‘I had a quarrel – with my boy-friend, I mean. He wanted to go third-class to Istanbul. I said it’s crazy, we couldn’t sleep together in the third-class, and I’ve got the money, haven’t I? “Your stinking allowance,” he said. “Sell all you have and give it to the poor” – that’s a quotation, isn’t it, from somewhere? I said, “It wouldn’t be any use. Father would pay me back.” “He need never know,” he said. “He has sources of information,” I said, “he’s very high up, I mean, in the CIA.” He said, “You can stick your money up your arse” – that’s an English expression, isn’t it? He’s English. We met when we were sitting down in Trafalgar Square.’

  ‘Feeding the pigeons?’ I asked.

  She gave a bubble of a laugh and choked on the smoke. ‘You are ironic,’ she said. ‘I like men who are ironic. My father’s ironic too. You are a bit like him when I come to think of it. Irony is a very valuable literary quality too, isn’t it, like passion?’

  ‘You mustn’t ask me about literature, Miss Tooley,’ I said. ‘I’m very ignorant.’

  ‘Don’t call me Miss Tooley. Tooley’s what my friends call me.’

  At St Maurice a gang of schoolgirls passed down the platform. They were nice-looking schoolgirls; not one of them wore a mini-skirt or visible make-up and they carried neat little satchels.

  ‘How can such a beautiful country be so dull?’ Tooley thought aloud.

  ‘Why dull?’

  ‘They aren’t turned on here,’ she said. ‘None of them will ever be turned on. Would you like another cigarette?’

  ‘Thank you. They are very mild. Agreeable flavour too. They don’t rasp the throat.’

  ‘I do like the expressions you use. They really are groovy.’

  I felt more awake than I usually do at that hour of the morning, and I found Tooley’s company something of a novelty. I was glad that my aunt was sleeping late and giving me an opportunity to get better acquainted. I felt protective. I would have liked a daughter, though I had never been able to imagine Miss Keene as a mother. A mother should not be in need of protection herself.

  ‘This friend of yours in Paris,’ I said, ‘was a very good judge of cigarettes.’

  ‘He was fabulous,’ she said. ‘I mean, he’s really together.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘Oh no, he came from darkest Africa.’

  ‘A negro?’

  ‘We don’t call them that,’ she said reprovingly. ‘We call them coloured or black – whichever they prefer.’

  A sudden suspicion struck me. ‘Was he called Wordsworth?’

  ‘I only knew him as Zach.’

  ‘That’s the man. Was it you he came to see off at the station?’

  ‘Sure. Who else? I never expected him, but there he was at the gate to say goodbye. I bought him a platform ticket, but I think he was scared. He wouldn’t come any further.’

  ‘He knows my aunt too,’ I said. I didn’t tell her that he had used her ticket for another purpose.

  ‘Now isn’t that the wildest sort of coincidence? Like something in Thomas Hardy.’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about literature.’

  ‘I’m majoring in English Literature,’ she said. ‘My father wanted me to take Social Science because he wanted me to serve a while in the Peace Corps, but I guess our ideas didn’t coincide in that and other things.’

  ‘What does your father do?’

  ‘I told you – he has a very secret job in the CIA.’

  ‘That must be interesting,’ I said.

  ‘He travels about a terrible lot. I haven’t seen him more than once since Mum divorced him last fall. I tell him he sees the world horizontally, I mean that’s superficial, isn’t it? I want to see the world vertically.’

  ‘In depth,’ I said. I was rather proud of catching up with her ideas.

  ‘These help,’ she said, waving her cigarette. ‘I feel a bit turned on already. It’s your fabulous way of talking. I feel I sort of met you in the English Literature course. As a character. We did Dickens in depth.’

  ‘Vertically,’ I said, and we laughed together.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Henry.’ She laughed again and I followed suit though I was not sure why.

  ‘They didn’t even call you Harry?’ she asked.

  ‘Harry is the diminutive. One cannot be baptized Harry. There was never a Saint Harry.’

  ‘Is that what they call Canon Law?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Because I knew a fabulous guy once who was baptized Knock-Me-Down.’

  ‘I doubt if he was really baptized that.’

  ‘Are you a Roman Catholic?’

  ‘No, but I believe my aunt is one. I’m not quite sure though.’

  ‘I nearly became a Roman Catholic once. Because of the Kennedys. But then when two of them got shot – I mean I’m superstitious. Was Macbeth a Catholic?’

  ‘It’s not a question that’s ever occurred to me … I suppose … well, I mean I don’t really know.’ It seemed to me that I was picking up her phrases.

  ‘Maybe we ought to lock the door and open the window,’ she said. ‘What country are we in now?’

  ‘I think we must be coming near to the Italian frontier.’

  ‘Then open the window quick.’ I couldn’t follow her reasoning, but I obeyed. I had already finished my cigarette, and she tossed away her stump and then emptied the ashtray on to the line. Then I remembered Wordsworth.

  ‘What have we been smoking?’ I said.

  ‘Pot, of course. Why?’

  ‘Do you realize we could be sent to prison? I don’t know the Swiss law or the Italian, but …’

  ‘I wouldn’t be. I’m under age.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘You could plead innocence,’ she said and began to laugh: she was laughing when the door opened and the Italian police looked in.

  ‘Passports,’ they demanded, but they didn’t even open them; the draught of the open window blew off one man’s cap, and I could only hope the smell of cannabis had dispersed down the corridor. They were followed closely by the customs men who were equally considerate, except that one man wrinkled his nose. A few minutes later they were safely on the platform. The sign read Domodossola.

  ‘We’re in Italy,’ I said.

  ‘Then have another.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing, Tooley. I had no idea … For goodness’ sake get rid of them before night. Yugoslavia’s a Communist country, and they won’t hesitate to imprison someone under age.’

  ‘I was always taught that Yugoslavs were good Communists. We sell them strategic material, don’t we?’

  ‘But not drugs,’ I said.

  ‘Now you’re being ironical again. I mean I wanted to tell you my great trouble, but how can I do it if you’re ironical?’

  ‘You said just now that irony was a valuable literary quality.’

  ‘But you aren’t a novel,’ she said and began to cry as Italy went by outside. The cannabis had caused the laughter and now I suppose it caused the tears. I felt a little unhappy myself watching her. My head swam. I shut the window and saw through the pane a hill-village all yellow and ochre, like something grown of itself out of rain and earth, and beside the line a factory and a red housing estate and an autostrada and an advertisement for Perugina and all the wires and grids of a smokeless age.

&n
bsp; ‘What’s your trouble, Tooley?’ I asked.

  ‘I forgot the damn pill and I haven’t had the curse for six weeks. I nearly talked to your mother last night …’

  ‘My aunt,’ I corrected her. ‘You ought to speak to her. I don’t really know about these things.’

  ‘But I want to talk to a man,’ Tooley said. ‘I mean I’m sort of shy of women. I don’t get on terms with them fast the way I do with men. The trouble is men are so ignorant now. In the old days a girl never knew what to do, and now it’s the men who don’t know. Julian said it was my fault – he trusted me.’

  ‘Julian is the boy-friend?’ I asked.

  ‘He was angry because I forgot the pill. He wanted to hitchhike to Istanbul. He said it might do the trick.’

  ‘I thought he wanted to go third-class.’

  ‘That was before I told him. And before he met a man with a truck going to Vienna. Then he gave me an ultimatum. We were in this café in the Place St Michel and he said, “We’ve got to leave now or never,” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Find your own fucking way then.”’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Somewhere between here and Istanbul.’

  ‘How will you find him?’

  ‘They’ll know at the Gulhane.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s near the Blue Mosque. Everyone knows where everyone is at the Gulhane.’ She began to remove carefully the traces of tears. Then she looked at her huge watch with the four numbers and said, ‘It’s nearly lunchtime. I’m as hungry as a dog. I hope I’m not feeding two. Want some chocolate?’

  ‘I’ll wait until Milan,’ I said.

  ‘Have another cigarette?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘I will. It might do the trick.’ She began to smile again. ‘It’s funny the ideas I get, I mean I think almost anything might do the trick. I drank brandy and ginger ale in Paris because at school they said ginger did the trick. And I had sauna baths too. It’s funny when all you really need is a curetage. Words worth said he’d find me a doctor, but he said he’d need a few days to find him, and then I’d have to lay up a little, and it wouldn’t be much good getting to the Gulhane and finding Julian gone. Gone where? I ask you. I met a boy in Paris who said they were turning us all out of Katmandu and Vientiane was the place now. Not for Americans of course because of the draft.’