Trains and Lovers: A Novel (21 page)

Then Hugh cleared his throat. “Oh,” he said.

“I WAS FIVE,” SAID KAY, “WHEN MY BROTHER WAS
born. Like me, he was born in Adelaide. I went down with my mother about four weeks before he was due and there was one point on the train when we thought things might be starting. I was excited: it would have been wonderful, I thought, to have a baby brother born on a train, and they told me I was bitterly disappointed when it did not happen.”

My father was overjoyed. His son was called Stewart, which had been the name of his own father back in Scotland. He was a bright-eyed little boy, with his father’s fair hair. I shared my father’s pride in him. I wrote stories for him and laughed at his antics. As he grew older, he looked up to me more and more, joining me in the games I played with imaginary friends—there were no other children for many miles and we made up by inventing them. I had a friend called Jessie, who was good at finding things and had a cat called Frankie. He conjured up a boy called
Danny who was immensely strong and had a small red aeroplane. We believed in them and spent long hours in their company.

My mother watched all this bemused. “What does Frankie like to eat?” she asked.

“Sardines,” I answered. “Sardines and sometimes Vegemite sandwiches.”

“And does Frankie catch mice?”

“No, Frankie catches kangaroos. He’s the only cat in Australia who can catch a full-size kangaroo. He’s very strong.”

“And Danny’s aeroplane—where does he keep it?”

“He keeps it in Sydney when he doesn’t need it. It flies here by itself when he calls it.”

We had a wonderful childhood in that place, so far from everything else. Schooling was by radio—we followed the school of the air and I still remember those hot mornings, sitting around the radio transmitter, the generator thumping away in the background, listening to our teacher call the roll and be answered by children from hundreds of miles away.

Then, when I was ten and my brother was five I was sent off to boarding school in Adelaide. This was a place run by nuns, and I was terrified. I had heard that nuns
could be strict and that if you misbehaved they hit you with a ruler on the back of your knees. Not all nuns are like that, of course. I know there are plenty who are kind and gentle but these ones, I’m afraid, were not. One day I shall pluck up the courage to go back to that school and confront the past. There are no nuns left there, I’m told, and the school is run by lay-teachers. But I need to make that journey before I can lay my education to rest.

My brother stayed at the siding. I wrote to him sometimes from the school boardinghouse and told him about some of the nuns.
I hate them. I hope that this place burns down one day and I can come back to Hope Springs and see you again. Jessie is here and she hates it too. Frankie is with her and he’s going to get even with the nuns one day. Cats are good at that, you know. Those nuns should look out, the cows. Love from your sister
.

One of my letters was intercepted by the nun in charge of the boardinghouse. She called me to her study and said, “You are a wicked child, and you have let Jesus and the Holy Virgin down. You’ve let them down very badly.” She then hit me with her ruler and told me to go to confession and tell the priest about how I had written wicked things in a letter. “And may God forgive you,” she added. “Because I won’t be doing so in a hurry.”

SHORTLY BEFORE MY BROTHER’S SEVENTH BIRTHDAY
he was bitten by a king brown snake. He was playing near the water tower—a favourite place of his—and he lifted up an old wooden box that somebody had left at the base of the structure. The snake was underneath the box and it bit him on the wrist. Unfortunately, a fang penetrated the veins that run there and so the venom was very quickly carried through his system.

My father heard his cries and came to the scene very quickly. The snake had moved, but he was able to identify it. He knew how serious it was and he immediately went on the radio to the Flying Doctor service in Port Augusta. They promised that they would come up right away and that the best thing would be for him to get Stewart to the nearest town. There was a nurse there who could administer serum and they would then get him to hospital.

He and my mother started the car, but at that point Stewart was already very badly affected. They contacted the Flying Doctor again, and they revised their advice. They should keep him immobile if possible and not subject him to the car journey. Their plane would be taking off in a matter of minutes.

Stewart died forty minutes after the bite. It was unusual for a bite from that type of snake to be lethal quite so quickly, but they thought that the snake had injected a
particularly large amount of venom. They also said that because Stewart was so young the effect of the bite was more dramatic.

He was already buried when I came up from Adelaide on the next train. His grave was by a stand of eucalyptus trees, a small mound on which flowers had been laid. These were flowers from the beds that my mother had tended so carefully. She could not have imagined that the flowers she nursed would be on the grave of her child.

THEY STAYED AT HOPE SPRINGS IN SPITE OF THE
tragedy. My father became depressed, I was told later, and had to be sent off to hospital in Adelaide for four months. He was grieving for his son, of course. While he was away in hospital, my mother ran the siding. She continued to cultivate her flowers, she continued to bake the scones that she sold to passengers on their way to Alice, she still kept the house spotless. She did everything, as such women did. They never complained. They did everything.

I had become too old for imaginary friends, but somehow I felt that I should keep Danny going. I made a small place for him on a windowsill where he could land his red aeroplane and I sometimes left a glass of lemonade there for him to drink before he took off in his plane. Ants would discover it and crawl up the side of the glass, delighted at the find of sugary drink.

“Why is there lemonade on the window?” my mother asked. “It’ll just attract those ants.”

“It’s there for Danny.”

She looked away. Children, being naturally optimistic and cheerful, cannot begin to guess at the sadness of the adult heart.

In due course they took me out of the convent school and sent me to a government school, also in Adelaide. I did well there, away from the nuns, and ended up going to the University of Western Australia in Perth. I met my husband there. He’s a geologist. He couldn’t come on this trip to Scotland because he was sent up to a place near Broome for three months and he wanted me to treat myself to something while he was up there.

I think of my parents and Hope Springs. They are both dead now—they retired to Perth so that they could be near me. They had a short retirement—life works out like that for some people. They work hard all their lives and then their health doesn’t hold out for long once they retire. They would never have complained about that, because complaining was not part of their nature.

I went back to Hope Springs a few years ago—I wanted to show my husband what it was like. The railway line was moved and the Ghan now follows a different route to Alice Springs, and Darwin, too, of course. But the siding is still there because things remain in the dry
climate of the Outback. Things don’t rot out there—the ants may get them, the red earth may cover them, they may get blown away, but they don’t really rot.

The station-master’s house is there. It still has its roof although there are no doors. I found my room—there it was, and there was the windowsill on which I had left the glass of lemonade for Danny. And outside, near the trees, was the mound of my brother’s grave. The edges of it had softened with the action of the wind, but it was still recognisable as a child’s grave.

My husband held my hand. I wept.

Then, going back to the house, he said, “They must have loved one another a lot, your parents. For your mother to come out here—all the way from Sydney—and live this lonely, lonely life. They must have loved one another very deeply.”

“They did,” I said.

And I thought of the life they had led. I loved them very much, you see, my father and my mother, who didn’t ever get anywhere very much or achieve great things. Other than
a well-kept station and some flowers in the desert. Is that enough? I like to think that it is.

OF COURSE IT IS, THOUGHT DAVID. OF COURSE IT IS
. And now the London station—King’s Cross; into darkness first and then above them, high and silver-grey, the glass sky that arches over the platforms—a whole scurrying world. He smiled goodbye to Andrew and Hugh and to Kay, these people whom he would never see again. And they smiled back and they shook hands, surprised, touched by the intimacy of the conversation, and by the lives laid bare. Kay thought:
Each of us has his or her reasons, for making this journey, for being as we are, for continuing with the lives we lead; ordinary lives, of course, but touched here and there with moments of understanding and insight, and sheer marvel. She reached up for her bag from the shelf above the seats, but Andrew had already done that for her and gave it to her, and she thanked him without saying anything; one can do that, one can thank another with one’s eyes, one’s hands, with any of a thousand gestures.

She moved towards the door. She stopped. Loving others, she thought, is the good thing we do in our lives.

A Pantheon Reading Group Guide for
Alexander McCall Smith’s
TRAINS AND LOVERS

About the Guide:

The questions contained in this guide are designed to enhance your reading group’s discussion of
Trains and Lovers
. A stand-alone novel from one of the today’s most endearing and prolific authors, this newest gem studies the way strangers thrown together may briefly, unexpectedly, open up their lives.

Questions for Discussion:

1.  What is the importance of poetry in this novel, and in life? Which poets are discussed and why does Alexander McCall Smith choose these particular poets? Do you agree with the narrator that trains are poetic? How?

2.  “Trains are everyday, prosaic things, but they can be involved in, be the agents of, so much else” (
this page
). What is the narrator referring to here about trains and life?

3.  Do you agree with the statement that our need for love is “that part of our human life that for so many far outweighs any other” (
this page
)? Is love our most basic need?

4.  Describe the four people on the train into whose lives we get a glimpse. Why do you think McCall Smith has chosen this particular assortment of four? Why not two men and two women? Why not all older characters who might have more stories and more experience with love? With which of the characters do you most identify? Whose story did you like the best? Why?