Trains and Lovers: A Novel (2 page)

The journey on which these people met, the journey from Scotland to England, is not a particularly long one—four or five hours, depending on how many stations are stopped at. But four hours is long enough for conversations
to develop and for people to reveal to others something of themselves. A friendship may be conceived in four hours; a short book finished and put away; a life remembered.

The train links Edinburgh with London. It leaves Edinburgh behind it and begins its journey over the rich farmland of East Lothian. Then there is a coast, which brings the sight of cliffs and sea-birds; and the North Sea, which was still and smooth that day under the clear morning light. Andrew, seated at the window, looked out and saw a boat ploughing across the field of blue, and he said to the woman seated next to him, the first thing that any of them said that day: “I think that’s a fishing boat.”

She looked at him, and saw a young man in his mid-twenties, not much more than that, rather slender, but not slight. She noticed his eyes, which were that striking shade of green that some people are blessed with and that in some lights could appear almost grey. She thought that she had once met somebody who looked like him, but she could not remember where or when it was. It was unlikely that it was this particular young man, as she was in Scotland, so far away from home, which was in Perth in Western Australia. And Andrew, from the way he spoke, was Scottish.

“Yes,” she said. “A fishing boat.” And then she added, “I suppose there are still some fish left. Enough for a few boats here and there.”

He nodded and then he looked at her. He was never sure with people who sounded like that. They might be Australian, but they might equally well be New Zealanders, and he had been told that New Zealanders were sensitive about being taken for Australians. He was not sure if it worked the other way round; he could not think of why the big should be put out by being taken for the small. It was easy, of course, to understand how the small might feel that way.

“You’re …,” he began.

“My name is Kay.”

“Andrew.”

“I’m from Perth. Not the Perth here in Scotland, but the one in Australia. Our Perth.”

He smiled. “The one that’s nearer Singapore than it is to Sydney?”

She said, “Yes. We can get to Singapore very quickly. Bali too.”

This incipient conversation, still at the level of the sort of small talk that travellers engage in—and rarely get beyond—was listened to by the two others in the group
of four seats. David noticed, as had Kay, the colour of the young man’s eyes. He looked at them again. He said, “I’ve been in Singapore.”

Andrew turned to look at him. He sounded American, but then he remembered what he had thought about Australians and New Zealanders. Canadians did not like to be taken for Americans; disparity in size, of course—it was the same sensitivity.

So he said, “You must be Canadian.”

David shook his head. “American. But close enough, I suppose—at least in my part of the world, New York State. We’re almost in Canada up in Buffalo.”

And this was the signal for the other young man, sitting opposite Andrew, to say, “I’ve always thought that Buffalo is a wonderful name for a place.”

“Have you?” said David. “For us, it’s just our place. You get used to names, don’t you?” This young man, Hugh, who was English, smiled. “I’m sure you do,” he said. He paused, and then began, “You’ve been …”

“At a conference,” said David. “A conference in Edinburgh. And now I have to go home. A night in London, and then the flight home.”

Now Kay turned to Andrew, “Are you going to London?” The train stopped at Newcastle and York, and
sometimes stations in between. People went to these places too.

“Yes.”

She hesitated. “May I ask why?”

Andrew did not mind the question. “I’m going to start a job.”

She waited for him to say more, but he did not. Yet he did not seem to be discouraging her, and so she asked, “What is it?”

“I’ll tell you,” he said.

I DON’T COME FROM ANYWHERE YOU’D KNOW, SAID
Andrew. Just Scotland. Just a place on the west coast, a place called Oban. It’s a harbour town. There used to be fishing boats, and I think there are one or two still going out, but nowadays it’s mostly ferries. You can go by ferry from Oban to the Hebridean islands—to Colonsay, to Mull, to the islands beyond, places like South Uist and Lewis. There are hills and rivers and sea lochs. It’s beautiful, I suppose, but you get used to that and you don’t notice it when you live there.

My father was one of the local doctors. He died five years ago, and I miss him a lot, you know. I never thought I would. You take your parents for granted, don’t you? My mother remarried after not much more than a year. I found that hard; I know I shouldn’t have done, but I did. That’s another thing about your parents: you don’t want them to have anybody else in their lives. Why should they need that? They have you, don’t they? That’s the way I thought.

My mother remarried, to a man called Alastair, who owns a company that builds golf courses. Or he owns most of it. He thinks about golf all the time and talks about nothing else. Does she notice it? If she does, then she gives no sign of it and certainly never looks bored. You can always detect boredom, can’t you? It’s there in the eyes, in that rather glazed, unfocused look. You can always tell; and she never looks like that when Alastair talks about who’s playing at St. Andrews or Troon or wherever. I imagine that she’s just very grateful that she found somebody else when there are so few men around—or eligible men, I should say. The moment any man becomes available—through divorce or because his wife has died—he’ll be snapped up immediately. Women plot that, I think. They have lists of available men and then match-make. Don’t smile; it’s true, it really is.

Alastair did his best. I don’t think he liked me very much—I have absolutely no interest in golf—but he was marrying my mother, after all, and he had to make an effort.

“Andrew,” he said. “I want you to know that you are always welcome under my roof. You know that, don’t you? It’s your home now, and so any time—any time at all—that you want to come and stay for a few days, just do so.”

He said
a few days
, and I noticed that. How can a home be your home if it’s only for a few days?

My mother had been listening, and understood my response. “Alastair means it, darling,” she whispered. “Sometimes he doesn’t put it quite as he might. He hasn’t got a way with words, as you have.”

I nodded, but looked away.

“And I’m sure you can see how important this is for me,” she went on. “We don’t have many chances of happiness in our lives, you know. One or two, perhaps. And so I could hardly turn down his offer, could I? I know that you might feel a little bit … how shall we put it? Possessive?” She looked at me, as if for confirmation of my possessiveness.

She reached out to touch me. “Boys can feel that way about their mothers,” she said.

I resolutely avoided her eye. I thought of my father; he would not have liked Alastair. He would not have approved of the golf, nor of the political sentiments he expounded. My father came from a different culture; he had spoken Gaelic as a boy; he believed in equality; he understood what it was to be poor and on the edge of things, as many of his patients were.

“I’m happy for you,” I said, forcing out the words.

She sighed. You can’t deceive your own mother, I thought. That’s the one person, the only one, to whom you will always be transparent.

“Can one try to be happy?” she now said, looking at me with a discomforting intensity. “You’re the one who thinks about these things, aren’t you? I can’t cope with such questions, but it’s an interesting one, isn’t it? If you have to try to be happy, the seed of happiness simply isn’t there. It’s like trying to be brave, maybe. You can’t be brave if you have to try. Brave people just
are
.”

LISTENING TO WHAT ANDREW SAID TO KAY, DAVID
thought: Hold on, hold on—you
can
try to be brave, just as you can try to be anything else you decide to be. You can try to be modest; you can try to be tolerant; you can try to be forgiving, when in your heart of hearts you are none of these things. You can be selfish by inclination and yet be generous when the time comes to give; lots of people are like that. They force themselves to be charitable. Look at all those wealthy types who set up charitable foundations when they suddenly realise they’re getting old and will not be able to take it with them. Are they being generous, or are they simply
acting
the part? And then he thought: Does it really matter if people think you are something
you’re not? No, he decided, it did not. We don’t owe others a duty of sincerity: Why should we?

ANDREW CONTINUED: THEY WENT AWAY TO GET
married, to Portugal, to the Algarve, where Alastair had a house beside a golf course. My mother asked me if I wanted to come, and of course I accepted. But the date they had settled upon was shortly before my university exams, and I would have had to make both the journey out and the return within three days.

“Naturally, we’ll understand if it’s just too difficult,” she said. “These exams of yours are important, aren’t they?”

I nodded. We both saw our way out.

“I think perhaps you should stay in Scotland,” she said. “It would be awful if there were some problem with the flight home and you missed the exams, wouldn’t it?”

I agreed that it would. My relief, I think, was as evident as hers.

“There’ll be photographs,” she said. “You can imagine that you were there.”

“Yes. That’s right. Photographs.”

In the photographs they were both smiling with what seemed to me to be relief. Both of them had lost their
first spouses, and both had obviously experienced what I understand is the strangeness of not having anybody about the house when one has been married for years. Something is missing; something is incomplete. Now they had found one another and their reaction was sheer relief. Normality had been restored.

With an inheritance from my father I had paid the deposit on a flat in Edinburgh. It had three bedrooms and I let these to fellow students, which paid half the mortgage. Alastair offered me help with the repayments, but I declined.

“There’s no shame in accepting money,” he said. “I did. I accepted a lot, actually.”

I wondered who had offered him money, and when this had happened. I looked at him in a new light. This was not a man who had built a golf course with his own resources; this was a man who had accepted a lot of money.

“I can get by,” I said. “I’ve got a part-time job in a coffee bar. I get the rent from the others.”

“So you’re a
rentier
,” he said, smiling at the jibe. “Just like the rest of us.”

I said nothing. He was watching me.

“You know something?” he said at last. “The best advice I can give you: marry money.”

I stared at him. “Why?”

“Because money makes money.” His tone was patient, as if he were explaining the facts of economic existence to one who knew nothing about them.

“What about love?”

He laughed. “Marriage and love have nothing to do with one another.” He seemed pleased with this observation, as if he had just minted a memorable aphorism.

I wanted to ask him: Do you love my mother? Or is the fact that you married her nothing to do with love?

He must have anticipated the objection, as he soon corrected himself. “Perhaps I shouldn’t say that. Perhaps not so firmly. There’s a sort of love that comes with being married to somebody, but it’s different, you know, to the love that makes your heart do a somersault. That’s infatuation, or whatever they call it. It’s not love.”

“So what is this love that comes with being married?”

He shrugged. “Being fond of somebody? Being nice? Wanting them not to go away?”

Wanting them not to go away
 … Alastair was far from poetic, but the line struck me with its poetic force.
I didn’t want you to go away
 … It was certainly powerful, and perhaps it was as good a definition of love as any other. He, of course, did not agree with what I was doing at university.
We discussed it only once, and then I changed the subject. You can do that by simply looking at people when they bring something up; you look at them and they know—or should know—that you don’t value their opinion on the matter. He saw that, and smiled; he smiled because he thought that he was right and that I knew it, and therefore the moral victory was his. He gave me a look that told me all of that, and more.

“I don’t know why you’re bothering to study—what is it you’re doing?” he said. “History of art? Where exactly does that lead?”

There was a sense in which he was right; studying accountancy or law, or medicine for that matter, leads to a career doing what you’ve spent time learning at university, but this is not the case with studying the history of art. In another sense, though, he was as wrong about that as he was about so much else. Learning about art led me everywhere, and had I wanted to argue with Alastair I could have told him. In my case it
led me out of the narrow world of my life in a small Scottish town and into a world of light and intellectual passion. I suppose I was a bit naïve about it, but it seemed to me that in immersing myself in art history I was becoming a member of a world of connoisseurship and understanding. So while
other students might concern themselves with economics or engineering, those of us who were studying art history were somehow above all that. We concerned ourselves with truth and beauty and myth and things of that nature. And if we talked about Giotto and Bernini and Titian, it was with the sense that these were the people with whom we belonged. We
understood
.