Barbara Cleverly (2 page)

‘Was she,’ said Alice, ‘do you think, a demi-mondaine?’

She wasn’t entirely sure what the words meant but had an image of risk, danger and glamour and at that moment she very much wanted to be associated with it and dissociated from the world of Maud Benson with its careful checks and counterbalances.

‘Demi-mondaine! Huh! Fully-mondaine, I shouldn’t wonder,’ sniffed Maud. ‘Most Frenchwomen are, you’ll find. Now, come along!’

On arrival at the train they saw their luggage under the eye of the Cook’s man and in the charge of porters in peaked caps and blue smocks loaded into the luggage compartment. They also saw Madame de Neuville and her maid no longer in altercation watching expensive luggage being loaded likewise. Alice made her way in Maud’s wake, chirruping happily at the sight of the sleek and gleaming blue painted coachwork of the train, and they were handed by their agent into their reserved seats in the Pullman train under the management of the wagons-lits company. Alice was astonished by the elegance. She thought the attentive liveried stewards with their cream and umber kepis the most glamorous thing she had ever seen.

Their carriage was well padded and comfortable. Bobbled curtains hung at the windows, the luggage racks were tasselled. A cushion behind each head had a removable cover. Footrests could be pulled out from under the carriage seats of which there were four. Water-colour views of distant destinations hung on the partitions, a voice tube was connected to the steward.

The Cook’s agent settled them in, explaining the hour of arrival and informing them that luncheon would be served from twelve o’clock onwards and that the dining car was immediately adjoining. He spent an unnecessarily long time wishing them a good journey but Maud, fully conversant with the company’s advice to travellers that employees should be offered no ‘douceur’, made no move to reach into her bag. In a mood of increasing defiance and mischief, Alice, with flushed cheeks, extracted from her purse what she believed to be about a shilling’s worth of francs and pressed them into, the man’s hand. He bowed and withdrew.

‘I wonder,’ said Alice innocently, ’who’s going to have the other two seats? They are both reserved, you see. Perhaps it will be that nice French lady and her maid.’

‘I sincerely hope it will not!’ said Maud, scandalized. ‘At the very least, though she may have little sense of decorum, it is to be supposed her maid will travel second class.’

Hardly had Maud spoken before, to her dismay, the carriage door clashed open admitting a cacophony of station noises, a cloud of steam and Isabelle de Neuville. She turned, shut the carriage door, lowered the window and leaned out to where her maid, hostile and skittish, stood on the platform. She handed her an envelope. The maid tore it open and inspected the contents with indignation. Maud strained to hear what was being said, deploying her small store of French as best she could. Two or three times she caught the word ‘troisičme’. Third! What could this mean? Evidently it caused much dissatisfaction on the part of the maid and icy and hostile resolution on the part of Isabelle. Third class! Of course! Isabelle had consigned her maid to third class.

Maud could understand the girl’s indignation. On their way down the platform they had passed the third class carriages. Wreathed in tobacco smoke of a particularly virulent French kind, noisy with loud conversation and shouts of laughter, crowded with large and doubtless garlic-scented men in bleu de travail. Not the place for an elegant personal maid from Paris. Second class would have been appropriate. But such it seemed was the case and the maid, with a final imprecation (Maud hoped that the word ‘merde’ did not enter Alice’s vocabulary), turned and marched away down the platform, heels clicking indignantly.

‘Florence! Elle s’offense pour un rien!’ said Isabelle by way of explanation. ‘Very touchy, you know.’

If Alice had met Maud’s eye she would have read the message, ‘There! I told you so!’

Isabelle de Neuville rallied and turned with polite interest to Alice. ‘You are going,’ she said, ‘to Bombay? For the first time? That is quite an adventure! May I ask what takes you to distant Bombay?’

Before Alice could reply, the door opened again to admit the fourth passenger to their carriage. He was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties, leaning heavily on a stick and wearing dark glasses. He needed the help of a porter to climb the step and find his seat. Any time in the last four years a wounded soldier was a common enough sight but of late there had been fewer as the hospitals discharged their last patients and, such few as there were, they once again received special attention.

The young man muttered an apology in English and repeated it in clumsy French then, obviously overcome by shyness, relapsed into silence and Alice was able to pick up Isabelle’s question and reply.

‘I’m going to Bombay,’ she said importantly, ‘because I have business there — ’

‘That’ll do, Alice,’ said Maud repressively.

‘In fact I have a business there.’

‘You make it sound very intriguing,’ said Isabelle, laughing.

‘Not really intriguing. There’s a family business and after my grandfather’s death it was left to me. To me and to a cousin, that is. My parents died of the influenza last year and though the business should have gone to my older brother, Lionel was killed in France. A month before the war ended.’ Alice sighed and for a moment, reminded of her loss, she looked forlorn and vulnerable and her eyes filled with tears.

Maud Benson thought, not for the first time, that Alice’s eyes were just a little too large, a little too expressive and far too blue for her own good.

Alice brightened. ‘This cousin of mine, well, second cousin really – I’m going out to meet him. I’ve never met him before!’

‘That sounds intriguing too!’

‘There are lots of second cousins in the business and I’ve never met them either.’ And Alice went on to describe as best she understood it herself the nature of the family business now, in part at least, hers. ‘I don’t really understand who they all are. But I’ve been sent a sort of “Who’s Who” telling me who are the – er – dramatis personae,’ (Alice was pleased with the phrase) ‘and who’ll meet me and where I’m supposed to go and where to buy clothes.’ She tapped a slim leather folder in her lap. ‘It’s all in here and I’m supposed to read all this. But, really! There’s just too much to look at!’ And then, naively, ‘I’m ever so excited!’

Isabelle received an impression of considerable opulence. She had never been to India but even she had heard of ICTC, the Imperial and Colonial Trading Corporation. She smiled at the excited and, she had to think, slightly inebriated English girl talking with such hope and enthusiasm of her future. So innocent. So vulnerable.

‘

and there’ll be elephants and rajahs, tigers and Bengal Lancers! Indian princes dripping with diamonds! Perhaps I might marry one of them!’ Alice chattered on.

Maud began to nod off and was unsure how many miles they had covered when she was awoken by a waiter passing through announcing that luncheon was served. The young soldier shook himself and remembering his manners managed to say shyly that he would be delighted to escort the ladies to the dining car if they wished to go. He was smiling to himself as though at a private joke. ‘Colin Simpson,’ he introduced himself, ‘Captain in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Rejoining my regiment. For a month or so, prior to demobilization. Silly sort of business but if His Majesty’s Government are prepared to pay my fare out and back, I’m not going to complain!’ He smiled again. ‘My regiment’s in India at the moment actually. I too am bound for Bombay.’

Maud Benson could hardly remember a time when she had been so resentful. Her carriage companions had, quite unnecessarily, requested to be seated at the same table and had proceeded cheerfully in a babble of French and English to order every course on the menu. They had even insisted that she drink a glass of wine with the fish and another with the lamb. With predictable results. Two hours after they had sat down they were still at table talking fifty to the dozen while Maud could hardly keep her eyes open. Though unwilling to leave her protégée behind, Maud concluded that, though flushed and clearly over-stimulated, she was safe enough in the company of the rather dull and unglamorous young captain. And his presence would cancel out any attempt on Isabelle’s part to engage Alice in

what? Maud was not quite sure but thought it might amount at its imaginable worst to – gaming or drinking. And that was most unlikely in the circumstances. In a few hours Madame de Neuville would be out of their lives anyway. Satisfied, Maud made her apologies and reeled back to their carriage to take, as she put it, ‘her postprandial forty winks’.

She did not hear the sigh of relief from the three remaining at the table. She did hear the conversation resume at once and with increased animation. Three glasses of wine appeared to have loosened the captain’s tongue to a point where he could boast of leopards and tigers, of shikari, of romance and danger to be found in the foothills of the Himalayas.

At the end of the meal, Colin Simpson excused himself and went to smoke a cigar in the corridor. Draining her glass of brandy, Isabelle de Neuville rose to her feet and with a gracious smile made towards the ladies’ compartment at the end of the carriage. As she moved carefully along the dining car, it lurched suddenly and she had to steady herself on the arm of a waiter. Thanking him prettily, she turned, laughing, to Alice and called, ‘There I told you! Sixteen-year-old train driver!’

Alice laughed back and settled to wait for Isabelle to return.

Whether it was the two unaccustomed glasses of wine taken over lunch on top of the mysterious Campari-soda which was causing the train to sway or whether there really was a sixteen-year-old engine driver at the controls, Alice couldn’t decide but the condition was getting worse. Noises were getting louder as the train approached a bend before the viaduct crossing of a deep valley. Swaying and staggering and hardly able to keep her balance, Maud Benson emerged blear-eyed from the carriage.

‘What on earth’s going on? These French railways!’

Alice passionately wished that Isabelle would return and she took a few paces towards the ladies’ cloakroom at the end of the carriage but a sudden lurch threw her on to her knees.

It was clear that something was seriously wrong. The train was bumping and banging against the parapet of the viaduct. It was worse than that. The train had smashed the parapet from which masonry blocks were, one by one, in a percussive series of deafening machine-gun explosions detached to fall many feet below into the ravine.

‘Isabelle!’ Alice called desperately but the floor came up and hit her. Broken glass shattered round her. A jagged splinter gashed her cheek. The ceiling of the carriage was beneath her and this was the last thing she saw before she lost consciousness.

She was spared the sickening plunge as the Blue Train – the pride of the SNCF – tumbled three hundred feet into the ravine. With an explosion of sound, the engine, pistons still racing, crashed, for a moment to be suspended between the sides of the ravine. But only for a moment. One by one the falling carriages, with a long roll of murderous noise, piled on top and as further sections of the parapet gave way further carriages fell. A despairing shriek from the train whistle continued to mark the death of the Blue Train.

In her carriage, Maud Benson struggled to regain her seat, wondering, as Alice had done, why the walls of the carriage were beneath her, becoming vaguely aware that the luggage rack opposite had buckled but never aware that it was sections of this, snapping with catapult force, that had hit her under the chin, almost severing her head.

Luggage compartments burst open, trunks and cases were spewed on to the ground. The first and second class carriages at the head of the train were little more now than an unidentifiable tangle of wrecked steel. Seat cushions, light fittings, dining-car tables and tablecloths, wine bottles even from the pantry, soon to disappear in a sheet of flame as the galley exploded. The third class carriages at the rear of the train were at first seemingly undamaged until these too were finally pulled by their own weight from the track, through the parapet and into the ravine.

As the flames died and the clanking carcass settled, the deathly silence was broken only by the hysterical crying of a baby.

It was an hour and a half before the rescue train creaked its way cautiously from St Vincent through the Burgundy hills and came to a stop a careful hundred yards down the line from the collapsed viaduct. The employees of the SNCF, the fire brigade, the doctors and stretcher bearers hastily assembled on the train stood for a moment aghast, looking down on the disaster in the remote wooded ravine below. The Blue Train lay crushed and mangled under the weight of the iron girders and masonry which spilled under, around and above it.

Pierre Bernard, casualty officer, aged sixty-five and overdue for retirement, spoke for all. ‘Maintenance! No bloody maintenance! Been going on for years! I warned them! Bloody war!’

The men stared in horror at the smouldering remains of the burnt-out carriages and crossed themselves, unable to speak. They had come prepared to save lives and tend the injured but the deep silence below was warning enough that their task was to be of a more sinister character.

An urgent message was sent back down the line for heavy lifting gear (none nearer than Lyons) and with silent determination they collected picks, spades and stretchers and set off to climb down into the ravine.

After an hour of toil, one baby still alive and unhurt had been recovered along with eighty bodies only from a death toll estimated variously at two hundred and four hundred, and the search for survivors still went on. Coming at last to wreckage which had fallen further than the rest and was untouched by the fire, the searchers caught sight of a lisle-stocking-clad leg sticking out from under a first class carriage. With picks they forced the metal seams apart and extracted the body of a middle-aged woman. Thoughtfully they pulled down her tweed skirt, put her bag and her crochet work beside her on the stretcher and covered her up. The bearers set off to make another slow trek back up to the railway line.