Trains and Lovers: A Novel (8 page)

He looked at his travelling companions and said to himself:
I would like to tell them about me
. But he felt that he could not, because it would be hard to do so; it was never easy to speak about this to complete strangers, which was what they were. And so he thought for a while about what he would say if he were able to speak. They would understand, he expected; people understood now, but not everybody did, and that sometimes made it difficult. The problem was that people
pretended
. It was not unlike the issue they were talking about earlier on—about the adequacy of effort and whether one could try to be brave. People tried to understand, and many did, but not everybody could make the imaginative leap that landed one in the position of another person, in their shoes, in their very garments, looking out on the world with their eyes, feeling what went on inside their hearts; being made to cry by the things that made them want to cry. That was easy in theory, but hard in practice. They pretended to understand, but when it came down to it, many simply did not. They simply did not understand because they
could not know—not really know—what it was like to be the other. That was because it was not them. That was why they could not think that. It had to be you.

He remembered that other journey, also by train, but a rather different one. You could not just hop on a train between Washington and New York, you had to have a ticket and stand in a waiting area before they allowed you access to the platform. It was more like waiting to board a plane—an ordered process so different from rail travel in other countries. He had been a regular visitor to India and had been on one of those trains where people sat on the roof or hung out of the windows of carriages. He had never got used to that, even if he had become inured to the many other indignities of poverty you witnessed there. Did these travellers pay for their perilous journey, he wondered? Was there some sort of ticket, some fourth or fifth class, that allowed you to take your chances on the outside of the train, hoping that you would not lose your grip or be swept off by some obstruction—a signal arm, a wire, a low-slung railway bridge? Perhaps now that air travel was more common, people would try it there, too, clinging on to the wings of planes just as they did to the roofs of trains. He pictured for a moment—absurd thought—a plane so laden, just managing to get airborne because of
the human burden on its wings and roof, limping through the sky, barely clearing the tree-tops below, until it eventually landed somewhere and the relieved survivors lowered themselves onto the tarmac and ran off before they could be asked for a fare …

At Union Station in Washington he had been early for his train back to New York and had stood for over half an hour in the line waiting for the platform to be readied. He had been standing behind a woman speaking loudly on her cell phone about business arrangements and had been obliged to listen to the details. He had turned his back on her, hoping to blot out the conversation, but had found that this only had the opposite effect. She was a distributor of olives, and was discussing a client’s requirements. It was very complicated because the olives came in cartons of twenty jars and there were customers who wanted to order in units other than twenty.

“Tell them they can have forty, sixty, eighty and so on. Multiples of twenty. Tell them that they should round the order up—if they want fifteen, order twenty. Sure, they’ll have to hold on to another five jars, but they can sell those. Five jars? You’ll always shift five jars. No, tell them we don’t split the cartons because then it’d be us with the spare five jars, and we don’t have anywhere to put them.
Tell them it’s not our warehouse—we don’t have guys down there to open the cartons and sort out the numbers. We just don’t. Those guys work for Edwards not for us. Tell them that.”

He tried to detach himself—he tried not to listen. But he found himself picturing the warehouse with its stacked crates of olives, and he could see her point. Of course they couldn’t open the crates because you couldn’t stack individual jars in a warehouse like that. They’d break, and there would be glass all over the floor, and Edwards’ men might slip and cut themselves and there would be litigation and … Tell them that, he thought. Tell them about the problems down at Edwards’ end. Tell them that some things come in units of twenty—they just do—and we should be grateful that they don’t come in units of one hundred. Tell them not to be so demanding …

The issue of the olives was resolved and his neighbour began to busy herself with a copy of
The Washington Post
, reading an article with a frown of disapproval; perhaps she was still cross about the unreasonableness of her customers—or at least of some of them. He looked about him, glancing at his fellow travellers, allowing himself to imagine why they were making this particular journey. Going home? Visiting children in New York? A few days
in the city: a show on Broadway, an opera at the Met, an over-priced dinner? A meeting? A wedding?

His attention was caught by two new arrivals. Two young men had arrived at the end of the line. One was to board the train, he thought; the other had come to see him off. A suitcase stood at the feet of one of them—a nondescript suitcase with an old baggage label attached to the handle.

He wondered about them. There was a similarity in appearance—both were in their early twenties, if that, perhaps slightly younger—two college boys then. One had shorter hair than the other; one had seen more of the sun than his friend. Their dress was similar, but the one who was travelling had made some effort to look smart.

A loudspeaker crackled into life and people picked up their impedimenta. The woman in front of him folded her newspaper and reached, with a sigh, for the bulging briefcase at her feet. A mother grabbed her son and started to pack away the toy with which the child had been playing; the boy protested loudly, began to cry.

He watched the two young men. They were both tall, but one was slightly taller than the other. They were shaking hands—the taller one was staying—it was the other who was travelling, the one who had been tanned by the
sun. The handshake continued, and then one moved forward and embraced the other, hands about shoulders.

He did not move. A guard was preparing to remove the barrier to the platform. He felt somebody’s back-pack against his leg. “Sorry. I think that’s our train.” He paid no attention. The young men still held one another, and then one took a step back and raised a hand in farewell. He watched. There was something strangely moving in this. A line came to him from a poem he had once read:
It is a long disease this separation of brothers …
He had forgotten that, but there were words that haunted us and came back out of context, for no particular reason: lines of poetry, of song, of childhood prayer could do that.
Dear Matthew, Mark, Luke and John: Please bless this bed I lie upon;
the childish request so deeply embedded in the recesses of memory, and now emerging unbidden. Or the line from a poem he had once read—words that had stuck in his mind and kept returning:
It is the onion, memory, that makes me cry …

The queue started to move. He picked up his own bag, and then glanced back at the two young men. The one saying goodbye had started to leave, but turned round at that precise moment and waved. But his friend, caught up in the crowd, did not see him.

He looked up at the vaulted ceiling of the great railway station. It was indifferent to parting, he thought. And then he thought: the architecture of farewell. The architecture of love. The architecture of loss.

THE TRAIN MOVED SLOWLY AT FIRST. PEOPLE
settled in their places, began the activities that would divert them during the few hours to New York. Books were opened, computers switched on, eyes were shut, with relief, for sleep. He sat unmoving—and stared out of the window. He was thinking of the scene he had just witnessed. People talked of the wrench of parting, and that, he felt, was exactly what it was. Take a metal object off a magnet and one would experience that—there was the draw, the tug, the flow of the bond even through the air, and then the sudden detaching as separation occurred. That was what it was like. That was human parting. You felt it; you felt the separation, just as you would feel the rending of tissue being pulled apart.

He closed his eyes, but did not want to sleep. He wanted to think. He wanted to allow memory to make its own journey, just as he was doing now, travelling from one place to another. First meeting; the long friendship; parting: a journey with saliences and stations of its own.

It’s easy to be foolish, he thought. It’s dead simple, really. All you have to be is human and to allow yourself to do the human things, like fall in love with somebody when you know that there’s no point and when you know, too, that it’s just going to make you unhappy. It’s better to be stoic—to be one of those people who manage to keep themselves to themselves, who manage to avoid letting go and becoming entangled in something that they know from experience is going to cause unhappiness. Or is it? There were people who chose that, and seemed to do it successfully, but weren’t they filled with regret? Inside, where nobody could see, didn’t it hurt them to think about what they never had? He thought there were, and that was one thing that he had never suffered from. He had no regrets about this, because what he had had was so important to him that he would never have wished that it had not happened.

WHEN HE WAS YOUNG THEY USED TO GO FOR SIX
weeks in the summer to a small town in Maine. It was not one of those fashionable places, popular with politicians and the wealthy, places that could be reached from New York within a couple of hours. This took much longer to reach, and was, as a result, less sought-after as a place for retreat. There was a bigger town nearby that had an airfield, served by a daily plane from Boston, but most people who went there in the summer drove long distances up the coast until they reached the harbour village with its single street of shops and its deserted canning works. There was nothing much else, really, apart from a rickety sawmill that still employed three men and that whined and coughed its way through the lumber that was brought down from the forests in the hinterland.

Their house was one of the last houses in town. Beyond them was an orchard, left to decline and now overgrown with rioting Boyne brambles, a home for
scurrying wild creatures. A little way further away was a river, on the banks of which were flat expanses of rock, covered when the water was in spate, but exposed when it was low. Further down, where the river broadened out into an estuary, there were two houses lived in by fishermen and their families. Their boats, white and wooden, bobbed about on moorings in front of their owners’ houses. He would watch them set off on the ebb tide and then see them again when they returned from the inspection of their pots. They often caught crabs, a writhing mass of waving claws, but their real quarry was something different. His mother sent him to collect lobster from the fishermen once a week, and he would be given a couple of large specimens, their claws firmly secured by the heavy-duty rubber bands they used for this purpose.

“You don’t let one of these fellows get your fingers,” said one of the fishermen, showing him a bent index finger on his left hand. “See this? A lobster did that years ago. Snap. Didn’t even have to exert himself.”

He stared at the lobsters and they stared back, their unreadable black eyes fixed on him. He did not like the way they were killed. He heard their screams and thought that no creature would make that sound if it did not experience pain.

“They don’t feel it,” said his father. “Lobsters don’t feel things.”

Adults lie, he thought. They lie about lobsters and a whole lot of other things.

THEY SPENT SIX WEEKS OF EACH SUMMER THERE
. His father owned a small property business in New York that looked after itself—or so he claimed. In reality, the business was carefully nurtured by its long-term manager, who did all the work and who was given a small share of the profits as a reward. This manager never went away, apparently having no interest in taking a holiday.

“Why leave New York?” he said. “New York’s got everything. If you go some place else, you’ll end up missing things you have in New York. Better stay where you are. Far better.”

The business did well, and funded a large apartment on the Upper East Side as well as this house in Maine. The family did not live extravagantly, money being invested rather than spent. In due course all this went to David. But that was a long way ahead.

His father, he realised, was grateful for this good fortune. “Look at this,” he once said to him. “This house. This place. We wake up to the sound of birds. We look
out our window at an orchard. If we want fish, we go out and catch them.”

This gave him pause for thought. Yes, he understood that this was a good place to be, but he wanted to be elsewhere. He wanted to see the world beyond the boundaries of New England; beyond the boundaries of the United States itself. Africa. India. Australia. There were all these places where the houses were not made of neat white board and shingle; where there was colour and movement and danger. There was no danger in that small town, where people’s lives led neatly and correctly to the grave; where the water came dosed with chemicals and the food was cleanly wrapped. He wanted to go somewhere else.