Trains and Lovers: A Novel (12 page)

The pastoral properties scattered along these tracks were immense. It was common for one house to preside over a stretch of land that ran fifty or sixty miles across. Such land supported cattle, but only just, and each animal needed a vast area of grazing to survive. Here and there, marked by patches of green in the predominantly brown landscape, artesian springs brought water to the surface, allowing the cattle and dingoes to slake their thirst.

There were occasional isolated towns—collections of simple houses, a country pub and store, a police post. Then there were the sidings, which were one step down from the towns. These consisted of a railway office, a water tower for the replenishing of the steam locomotives, a station-master’s house and a bunkhouse for railway staff passing through. The bunkhouse might also be used for people from the big cattle stations who might for some reason arrive to catch a train a day before it was due in. It might also occasionally shelter the men who drifted through the Outback in search of work: stockmen or shearers, mechanics, men who had tried everything else and who were now prepared to take on any job in the most inhospitable of surroundings.

Hope Springs had the benefit of ample water. There was an old well, dug in the eighteen-nineties, not far from the railway siding, and a rough bathing pool had been fashioned out of railway sleepers. The water, he had been told, was ancient water—it had fallen tens of thousands of years ago in the wet north of Australia and had percolated down over time into the vast reservoir that lay beneath the central Australian depression. It would never dry up; it would always force its way to just below the surface, and once pumped up it would quickly evaporate in
the glare of the sun. But not before some of it had been piped to the station-master’s house and to the high tank from which the dangling canvas elephant’s trunk filled the engines.

The previous station-master was retiring. He and his wife had been there for eighteen years and were going back to the small town on the coast from which they had come. Their time in the Outback was written on their faces—in the lines, the texture of the skin, in the weathered look that came from all that time in an atmosphere of dryness and baking heat.

They were hospitable in the week they spent together on the hand-over. The down train would take their effects away just as the up train had brought his. He helped them pack it into the wagons—the standing lamps, the Morris chairs, the photographs in their frames, wrapped in several thicknesses of brown paper, the bed-linen tied in bundles. His baggage was simpler: several suitcases of clothing, some kitchen items, his small collection of books. “A bachelor’s possessions,” the station-master’s wife said, smiling.

They left, and he was in control of the siding. It would be two days before the next train came, and so he busied himself with such paperwork as the job entailed.
He waited for somebody to come along the track and call in for water, but on that first day there was nobody. He retired that night and looked out of the window of the bedroom from his bed, up at a sky that was almost white with stars. He got up and went onto the veranda, where it was cooler. Looking south, he saw the Southern Cross, suspended in the velvet sky. It gave him comfort, located him in this vast emptiness. At least there would be other human eyes that were looking up at that at that precise moment.

He thought: I shall not be able to bear this loneliness. I should have stayed in Adelaide; I should not have come out here. I should not have done this.

A YEAR AFTER HIS APPOINTMENT AS STATIONMASTER
at Hope Springs, he took his first annual leave of three weeks and travelled to Sydney. The rail journey there was not a quick one, and precious days of holiday were spent on it, but he had never seen Sydney and was keen to do so. There was another reason, too, why he wanted to go there: his pen-friend lived in the city and after six months of correspondence he had suggested they meet.

He had started writing to her on a whim. One of the passengers on the up train to Alice Springs had come into his office during a stop and asked to send a telegram. This was something he could do, sending the message down the wire that followed the line back to Adelaide. He enjoyed sending telegrams, in fact, as it provided some variety in his work and the messages often amused him. HAVE CHANGED MY MIND was a message that he had been asked to send on more than one occasion; a long train journey is a time for reflection, perhaps, and the mind might easily
change in such circumstances. Another simply read, FORGIVEN STOP COMPLETELY STOP, while, in contrast, yet another had said THIS IS WAR. He had the power to decline messages of a hostile or improper nature and had hesitated on this wording; forgiveness was one thing, war another, but he eventually let it through. WILL YOU MARRY ME? had at least the attraction of simplicity and unambiguity, and he hoped that the answer might be yes. On rare occasions, he received telegrams to await passengers passing through in either direction and had once received a telegram that read YES STOP. He had delivered that without any indication of having read the message—the rules stated that you were not to pay attention to or use what was said in any telegram—but he had tried to work out, from the reaction of the recipient, what the question had been. He had been a man in his mid-forties somewhere and he had opened the envelope and read the telegram without giving anything away—at least at first. Then he had stared glumly out of the window and Alec had understood that yes could be bad news as easily as it could be good.

The passenger who asked to send a telegram that day was a mining engineer. He had something technical to say in his message—something to do with ore samples—but he had stayed for a chat and had left behind a week-old
copy of the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “Stale news, I’m afraid, but there’s a bit in there about the cricket that you may like to read.”

He had thanked him and set the paper to the side. That evening he had read it from cover to cover, including the advertisements. One had been for an agency that provided pen-friends; for a small fee one would be given the names of up to three people who were keen to exchange letters with you—every one of them screened for suitability, the advertisers claimed. On impulse he had written a request for a woman correspondent between twenty and twenty-five, living anywhere in Australia. He almost did not post the letter, but remembered just in time to give it to the driver of the next train down to Adelaide.

He was sent the name of a young woman called Alison Morsby, who lived just outside Sydney. She was interested in the cinema, dancing and flowers. She also read the novels of Nevil Shute, her profile revealed, and Charles Dickens. She was not very good at tennis, but she liked swimming.

He thought about this. There was no cinema there, of course, and no dancing, except for the annual ball held at another siding sixty miles away. That attracted every bachelor and spinster within a radius of several hundred
miles, but was more about drinking, he had heard, than dancing. There were flowers, of course, but only for a brief spell in the year, and they had to be resistant to the harsh climate of the Outback. There was no tennis, and the only swimming was in the water hole at the spring, where there was room for one or two strokes in the tank made of old railway sleepers. He had heard about Nevil Shute’s
A Town Like Alice
—everybody had, as it had just been published and was much discussed in the papers; he could talk about that, he supposed, even if he had not yet read it. But Charles Dickens was another matter.

He wrote a brief and rather formal letter, introducing himself. He wondered whether he should send a picture, but decided against it. He was not sure about the etiquette of that, and felt that it would be better to wait. If a correspondence developed, then pictures could be exchanged.

Her reply came rather more quickly than he had expected. She had been very pleased to get his letter, she wrote. She enjoyed getting letters and had been writing for two years to a pen-friend in England, a young woman of her own age, whose dream it was to come to Australia one day. This young woman worked in a shop in Bournemouth, but was planning to move to London when she had saved up enough to do so. “I really like getting her
letters and hearing about her life, which is very different from the life I lead in Paramatta. I have never worked in a shop, but I have a job as a secretary in a municipal office. I type the reports that building inspectors make when they go to inspect new houses. They look at the foundations etc. and have to check that everything meets the right standards. You’d be surprised, you really would, by some of the things that builders try to get away with. Sometimes I can hardly believe what the inspectors say about builders’ tricks.”

He wrote back the day he received her letter. He told her about his job and about his time in Fremantle. He said that he was thinking of getting a ham radio operator’s licence, as it would be useful to talk to people all over the place. He said that he had heard ham radio enthusiasts sent each other cards after their contacts and that some people had thousands of these cards, from places as far off as Russia. “I think they keep a close eye on radio sets in Russia,” he wrote.

She sent him cuttings from a newspaper feature called “Cooking Tips for Blokes.” This was for bachelors who had to cook for themselves, and it gave instructions on the preparation of simple dishes,
suitable for men
. “I know that some men are quite good cooks,” she wrote, “but a
lot of them aren’t. My brother, Russell, can hardly boil an egg! I had to show him! I’m not exaggerating.”

He wrote back: “Thanks a lot for ‘Cooking Tips for Blokes.’ It looks like an excellent series and I look forward to the next one. I tried that recipe for soda bread and I think it was okay, but the bread was a bit heavy. Do you think they left something out when they printed the recipe? Don’t you have to have yeast to make bread?”

She replied to his question with another recipe for ordinary bread, and he reported success with that. “I wouldn’t have to go to the bakery any more,” he wrote, “if there was one here, which there isn’t. In fact, the nearest proper store is at Marree, which is eighty-three miles away.”

He wondered whether this picture of his life would put her off. If you lived where she did, you could get into the city in no time at all. You could go to dances and to the beach. You could read the newspapers on the day they were printed. You could buy fresh bread baked by other people.

But she gave no sign of thinking that his life was difficult or dull. “It must be very nice to have the time to sit and think,” she wrote. “I seem to have no time and often ask myself: Where has the day gone? I envy
you having time to look about you and to think about things.”

Emboldened, he wrote, “One of these days you should come and see this place. You might even like it! Who knows?”

To which she replied: “I’d love to come out there some time. I’ve never been to the Outback, but of course I’ve seen plenty of pictures of it. But pictures don’t show the wind, do they? Or the smell of the trees and shrubs.”

He thought: No, they don’t. And he went outside and closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the wind from the north, which was a dry wind that carried the smell of emptiness upon it, and of the trees that clustered around the water hole, and of the salt pans beyond that, white, shimmering, brittle under the sun.

WHILE HE WAS IN SYDNEY HE STAYED IN A SMALL
hotel in the Rocks. The hotel had a bar that sold the beer brewed in the brewery next door, and a rather dingy dining room that claimed on the menu to be “one of Sydney’s most highly regarded dining experiences.” The menu, though, did not seem to support this. Brown Windsor Soup was the only choice of first course, and for the second one could choose macaroni cheese, Irish stew or baked fish.

They had exchanged photographs by now, and so he had no difficulty in recognising her. He felt, though, that she was markedly more attractive than she had appeared in the picture she had sent him; it was something to do with her eyes, he thought; there was a quality in them that drew him in. He was nervous. He had never been much good with attractive women; he was convinced that any woman like that would be bound to find somebody else more exciting than he was, and that made him hold back. He could not imagine that any woman, let alone an attractive one, could fall in love with him. After all, who was he? He was a Scotsman who worked for the railways in a very remote spot. He had nothing to offer anybody—no money, no experience of the world, no dashing good looks.

She said to him: “You’re just as I imagined you. Thanks for being the same as you are in your letters.”

This took him by surprise. “And you,” he stuttered. “You’re even better.”

He showed her the menu. “It says that they’re pretty good. I thought it was just an ordinary hotel, but you see what it says? One of Sydney’s most highly regarded dining experiences. See it there?”

“Sometimes the really good places are very straightforward,” she said. “They don’t have to be flashy.” She
ran her eye down the menu. “Macaroni cheese. One of my favourites. I think there was a recipe for that in ‘Cooking Tips for Blokes,’ wasn’t there?”