Trains and Lovers: A Novel (11 page)

“No, of course you should have told me.”

Harry closed his eyes. “I’m still frightened, you know. Every day. I’m terrified. I wake up terrified. I go to bed terrified. The war’s over, but not in my head, Alec—things stop in the outside world, you know, but they carry on in people’s heads.”

KAY COULD SEE THAT DAVID WANTED TO SAY SOMETHING
. She waited for him.

“I’ve often thought about that,” he said. “I have a friend who’s a psychologist. She deals with people who have gone through traumatic events.”

“Post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Andrew. “My father talked to me about that. He helped lifeboat crews sometimes. He said some of them went to pieces after they
had pulled somebody out of the water—a body, that is. He said they could have nightmares.”

David nodded. “Who doesn’t?”

“Have nightmares?” asked Hugh.

“Yes.”

Hugh shook his head. “I don’t.”

“You don’t remember them. You probably have them.”

“I don’t think so.”

David turned back to Kay. “There are different views of all this, you know. There are people—psychologists and psychiatrists—who say that you should talk about traumatic experiences. Others say you shouldn’t—you should try to forget. You should just get on with your life, not dwell on what happened.”

She smiled. “You mean the ‘pull your socks up’ school?”

“Yes.”

She looked thoughtful. “Do you think that pulling your socks up, whistling a cheerful tune—that sort of thing—ever worked? Or did it just bury things for the time being? Put them away until they resurfaced later?”

“How did people get through the Second World War? They helped one another. They sang. They gritted their teeth. I don’t think they had therapists to help them.”

Kay looked out of the window. Was this the same country
they were travelling through? The country that sang and gritted its teeth and accepted its tiny rations? That drank tea while bombs rained down and sent its young men up into aerial combat after a few hours of learning how to fly? The same place?

AFTER HE HAD BEEN WITH HER FOR A YEAR, THE
widow said coyly: “You need to meet somebody, Alec. A fine boy like you should have a girl, and there are plenty of girls around who would jump at the chance of somebody like you. You don’t think so? Come on, Alec, it’s true, you know. Lots of young men have this odd notion that there’s nobody ever going to look twice at them, but they’re wrong, you know.”

He laughed at this. “Me, Mrs. Thomas? What do I want to get married for?”

She blushed. “Men have certain needs, Alec.”

He laughed again. “I’m fine as I am, Mrs. Thomas. Maybe some time in the future, but for now I’m happy by myself.”

She became brisk. “Well, you just let me know when you want me to introduce you to somebody and I can arrange it. There’s that girl down the way there—you know that man who owns the garage? Those people. Their
daughter. You’ve seen her, I should imagine. There’s her for starters. You could get your knees under the table with them, I think.”

He nodded, and the subject was dropped. He enjoyed female company, but he lacked the confidence to do anything about it. And he thought, anyway, that his life was full enough as it was. He had a warehouse job with a company that imported and sold agricultural machinery and it kept him busy. At the end of each day he found that he lacked the energy to go out very much, although he occasionally joined friends from work to go to the pub. He found it difficult, though, to join in their banter. They had spent their whole lives in Fremantle or Perth and he knew none of the characters or incidents they talked about. Who was Eddie Pencey, and why was he so funny? What exactly had Bill O’Connor done that landed him in trouble with Old Man Harris? Why was Mavis Edwards implacably angry with her brother’s friend?

Homesickness, too, played its part. Every two weeks there was a letter from his mother. She wrote several pages, on plain paper on which she had drawn the pencil lines herself. She told him of the latest doings of his younger brothers. Jack had been in a fight and had a cut above his left eye. It was that same boy who had done it;
he was trouble, that Maclaren boy, and would go too far one of these days. Jack said it wasn’t his fault, and she believed him, but he should learn to stay away from situations in which that sort of thing happened.

He sent her money, and she always acknowledged the postal orders and told him what she had used the money for. There had been new shoes for both of the younger boys—they would be writing to him to thank him, she said. They never did.

Money was tight at home, but there were signs that things were getting better. Some food was coming off the ration and that made a difference. There were signs that summer would be warm this year, which was a blessing, although she could imagine how hot it must be out there for him and how he might be pleased to get a bit of Scotland’s cool weather for a change.

He read each of her letters several times, folding them carefully and putting them back in their envelopes. People kept letters then, filing them away in shoe boxes or drawers, tying them in bundles with string or tape. Whole lives had their record in those bundles, which might be kept until well after anybody remembered who the correspondents were. He put her letters in the suitcase he kept on top of his wardrobe. He marked each envelope with
the date that it had been received, so that he could keep track of the time taken by the mail-boats to complete the journey. Scotland was so far away: thirty-six days on the mail-boats, although there was talk of that coming down by a week. He would never see it again—he was sure of that. This was his home now, this vast land with singing empty skies and its impossible distances. This was his landscape: this expanse of ochres and reds, of dust and rock and eucalyptus-scented forests. In this emptiness he must find his place, and somebody who might share it with him.

AFTER THREE YEARS IN FREMANTLE HE WAS
approached by a man in a bar who said to him that he worked on the railway in South Australia. They were looking for men, he said, and the opportunities were good.

“The pay’s better than what you’re getting—I guarantee that. Holidays good too. Three weeks in your first year; four in the second. Then you get a long leave every other year: two months. That’s because you have to be prepared to live in places where there’s not much going on. But so what? Who cares what’s going on—I don’t.

“Here’s the address. You write to this Mr. Tomlinson, see, and you tell him what you’ve been doing—don’t
bother to give too much detail—he just wants to know that you’re not the sort who goes from job to job every few months. This isn’t work for somebody who wants to flit about. This is work for men who want a career. There’s a difference, you know. Two different sorts of men: those who are never going to settle to anything, and those who want a career. Chalk and cheese, if you ask me.”

He took the piece of paper with Mr. Tomlinson’s address on it and he wrote to him that same evening. He wanted a change from what he was doing. There was no chance of promotion in the company for which he worked, and he did not particularly like his immediate boss, a mean-spirited man with a pencil-thin moustache who enjoyed finding fault with his work, no matter how hard he tried. He would hand in his notice and go to South Australia.

The widow said: “Oh, Alec, how am I going to get by without you? No, I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t stand in your way. But you’ve been a bit of a son to me these last couple of years, and when you’ve been by yourself you appreciate having somebody about the place. Oh dear, I’m going to start crying at this rate and I shouldn’t because this is a big opportunity for you and you must always seize opportunities with both hands. With both hands.”

He bought her a present of a bowl, which he wrapped carefully and presented on the morning of his departure.

“It’s French, I think,” he said. “Least, that’s what the lady who sold it to me said. She said this was a French bowl.”

“French! Oh, Alec, you honey, I’m going to treasure this, you know. It’s going straight in the cabinet, make no mistake about that.”

She saw him off on the train. She stood on the platform and waved as the train pulled out. He would never see her again, he knew that, and was silent as the train drew out of the station and started its long haul across the wheat-belt of Western Australia to Kalgoorlie and the wastes of the Nullarbor Plain beyond.

HE KNEW IMMEDIATELY THAT THE DECISION TO
take the job in Adelaide was the right one. The railway provided him with a single-bedroomed flat of his own and gave him a job in the freight office. For the first time he had real responsibility, and he responded well to the trust. The people with whom he worked were friendly, and he realised that he was becoming part of a family of railway workers. “It’s not like other jobs,” one of them said to him. “With other jobs, you’re an employee—you work for somebody. On the railway, you’re a member of a family. And the family will see you right, you know. You play fair with the family and the family plays fair with you.”

He now felt more at home. He thought of Scotland less frequently, and gradually the memories of Ayrshire started to fade. In his dreams, he noticed, though, he might still be back in Scotland more often than he was in Australia. On occasion, the setting of a dream was in a world that was half Scotland and half Australia: a street might be a
street from his home town in Ayrshire, built of Scottish stone and washed by Scottish rain, but it might turn a corner and become quite suddenly a dry plain dotted with houses with red tin roofs.

He began to understand what it was that held this new society together. He appreciated the rough equality, the resolute cheerfulness, the attitude of dogged acceptance of the harshness of nature, of dust, of flies, of drought. Scotland was soft and feminine: all greenery and diffused light; Australia was stark, the sun chiselling out hard contrasts of light and shade. Scotland was forgiving; Australia was uncompromising, and yet everywhere there was a sense of being untrammelled, unconstrained. Nobody could tell you what to do in Australia. Nobody was better than the next man down under. Or so the official version went. Of course there were the blackfellers, as his workmates called them, and he was still enough of a Scot to feel for them in their plight. “It’s not right,” he wrote home. “I can’t tell you all that much about it, but I just feel it’s not right. And nobody wants to talk about it because they don’t see anything wrong in it. But it is wrong, isn’t it? Robert Burns would have said that it’s wrong, wouldn’t he?”

He worked in Adelaide for three years before the
railway said that he could now be offered a siding of his own. “In the Outback, of course, you understand,” his supervisor explained. “But it’ll be your own show and you’ll be in charge of a lot of track. Give me your decision by next week.”

It did not take him that long. “I’ll take it,” he said.

“Good. It’s not everyone who can do that sort of job, but we think that you’ve got what it takes, even if you’re still a bit young.”

He was twenty-five.

The supervisor looked at him thoughtfully. “You’ll need a wife,” he said. “Do you want to pick one up before you go, or wait until you’re there? The advantage of getting one out there is that she’ll know what it’s like. It’s when they don’t know what it’s like that you run into trouble.”

“It can wait,” he said.

The supervisor nodded. “Fine. But remember that any honeymoon is going to have to depend on our having somebody to relieve you for the duration. So the job comes first, understand. Then the honeymoon.”

ANDREW LOOKED INCREDULOUS. WHAT DID PEOPLE
marry for in those days? To have somebody to cook for
them, if they were men? To have somebody to pay the bills, if they were women? Bizarre. It was so different now. You married for love. You married because it was comfortable for two people to live together—on terms of equality—and share everything. Of course they didn’t have the internet then and you had to go off somewhere to meet people. You had to write to them. How strange life must have been. Unwired. Cut off. Lonely. Off-line.

There would never be loneliness again, he thought—it was simply unnecessary. We had eradicated smallpox and polio and a whole lot of other diseases, and now we were eradicating loneliness. Except that was simply not true. The more we spoke to one another electronically, the more information we bombarded one another with, the easier we made it to move from place to place—vast distances sometimes—the more detached from one another we seemed to become. Loneliness had a long future ahead of it, after all.

HIS SIDING WAS ON THE GHAN LINE THAT IN THOSE
days went from Adelaide in South Australia up as far as Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Hope Springs was not far from a point of confluence of two major Outback tracks—rough dirt roads that were the only route through
the vast dry plains of the continent’s parched heart. The Oodnadatta Track came down from the north-west, skirting the western side of Lake Eyre, while the Birdsville Track struck north-east towards Southern Queensland. These roads could trap cars in sand or, if it rained, in mud. Great ingenuity was required to get out once trapped, and people could be stuck for days. Travellers also had to stick carefully to the track; any straying off the route was potentially fatal; a wrong turning, a loss of a reference point, and one would quickly perish under the unrelenting sun. Tales were common of cars and trucks being found just a few hundred yards off the track, their drivers dead from thirst and heat; told to warn people of the dangers of thinking they could flout the rules of survival in the Outback. “A few hours and it’ll have you,” people said. “Just a few hours is all you’ve got.”