‘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 though
t, 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? T
hey 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?’