Trains and Lovers: A Novel (9 page)

“Yes,” said his father. “There are other places—sure there are. Plenty of places to go and get sick because the water’s rotten and there’s malaria and cholera and so on. There are plenty of places like that.”

ON HIS FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY, WHICH FELL IN
mid-July, when they were always in Maine, he was given a boat. It was delivered to the house at night, when he was asleep, and so it was there as a surprise for him when he woke up. It was a small dinghy, twelve feet in length, made of welded aluminium, and came with a set of varnished pine oars. His heart gave a leap; he had dreamed of possessing a boat, but had always had to make do with the occasional use of boats belonging to neighbours. Now that he had his own, the river and the estuary were his to explore.

“Watch the tides,” said his father. “Don’t forget how powerful they are. Be careful.”

He launched the boat immediately. It sat well in the water and was easy to row, although it had a high freeboard, and was sensitive to the wind. He quickly became used to that, though, and felt safe even when the river was swollen by heavy rains. He used it for fishing, or simply
for rowing down towards the estuary, riding the current, and then back up. He liked the sensations involved: the feeling of being borne by the tide, the sound made by the oars as they cut into the water, the thumping sound of wavelets against the curve of the bow, a sound that was like tiny, muffled explosions.

A few weeks after he had first used it, he rowed down the river one afternoon, intending to fish at the point where the fresh water met the salt. Fish seemed to like that confluence, and he might return home with a catch that his mother would use for the evening meal, freshly grilled and served with new potatoes bought from neighbours who had a large vegetable patch.

He rowed out. Rains inland had swollen the river and this, combined with a high tide, made for a broad expanse of water. The sky above was cloudy, and the surface of the water was like milky glass. There would be fish, he thought; they liked such conditions.

He stopped rowing and started to prepare his line. This was absorbing work, and he did not notice that one of the oars had slipped out of its rowlock and fallen into the water. Caught in the current, it drifted away, sufficiently quickly that when he turned and saw what had happened it was well away from the boat.

He put aside the fishing rod and started to use the remaining oar as a paddle. But it was slow work, as the boat swung round with each stroke and made little progress. It was on the edge of the estuary now, and he realised that it would soon be carried out into the sea itself. A gull swooped low to investigate, mewing, curious and hungry.

There was another boat not far away. This had an outboard, and he could see that it was heading for an object in the water—an object that must be his oar. He waved, and the figure crouched in the boat waved back. The engine note changed, and the other boat stopped as the oar was retrieved; then there was a high-pitched buzzing as it turned and headed for him. There was a boy in the boat.

“Here it is,” shouted the other boy, throttling back. “Do you need a tow?”

He could have rowed back, but thought that he would accept. A line was thrown and secured to a cleat on the boat’s bow.

“Climb in here,” said his rescuer. “The engine pulls better if we’re low in the water.”

He stepped into the other boat and said thank you. This boy, he saw, was about the same age as he was. He was wearing jeans and a red tee-shirt; he was barefoot. He introduced himself as Bruce.

“I’ve seen you in your boat,” he said. “I wondered if you were catching anything.”

“It depends,” he said. “Sometimes I do. Sometimes not. Like all fishing.”

Bruce smiled. “Yes. Like all fishing.”

The outboard motor drowned conversation, and they made the rest of the journey without saying anything to one another. When they reached the jetty where David tied his boat, Bruce tied up too.

“I’ll come with you to your place,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”

They went home. He introduced his new friend to his parents. Then they drank a soda sitting on the porch, and Bruce told him about how his parents had bought a house nearby but seemed not to get many opportunities to use it.

“They’re always busy,” he said. “They work all the time.”

His father was a professor at Princeton, he explained. He was a mathematician. “He makes mathematical models all the time. He’s obsessed. There’s only one word for it—obsessed.”

David laughed. He said: “Parents need help.”

Bruce stayed for an hour, and then announced that he
would have to go as he was meeting a girl. He was not sure whether he really liked her, but he thought he did.

“She’s obsessed too,” he said.

“Obsessed with what?”

Bruce shrugged. “I haven’t found out yet.”

David looked at him, puzzled.

“I’m kidding,” said Bruce. “Half of what I say means nothing. You need to know that.”

“Perhaps you’re obsessed,” said David.

THE NEXT DAY HE TOOK THE BOAT OUT AGAIN. THE
river had abated, and the water seemed sluggish. There were no fish, and he turned back after an hour or so on the water. He had hoped that he would see Bruce’s boat, but there was no sign of it. After he had tied up at the jetty, he wheeled his bicycle out of the shed and rode it along the main street. There was nowhere to go in the town, apart from a diner that was usually deserted except for at lunchtime and for a brief period in the early evening. He looked in the window of this, wondering whether he might see Bruce with the obsessive girl. He did not.

He had worked out which house it was Bruce’s parents had bought, and he rode past this, slowly, snatching a glance at it, again hoping that his new friend might just happen to be coming out of the front door or the driveway, but there was no sign of anybody. There was a large grey car parked under a tree, but nothing else to show the house was occupied.

He imagined the professor of mathematics sitting at his desk at one of the windows creating mathematical models. He imagined Bruce waiting for his father to pay some attention to him.
Parents need help
. He had no idea why he had said that, but it seemed to be the right sort of witty remark to make. There was something about Bruce’s company that had made him feel livelier, more perceptive. He had only been with him for an hour or two, but during that brief time it seemed to him that the world had been in some inexplicable way more intense. It was as if the brightness had been turned up.

He went home.

His father said, “That friend of yours came round.”

His heart leapt. “Who?”

“Bruce? Is that his name?”

“Yes.” He waited. Time had slowed down. It felt buttery. It was strange—he knew that—but that was how it felt to him. Buttery. “What did he say?”

His father shrugged. “Nothing much. He asked where you were and I said that you were off on your bike somewhere.”

“And?”

“He didn’t say anything. Or he just said,
I have to go
. Yes, I think he said something about having to go.”

He nodded and went to his room. He did not want his father to see him, in case he could tell that there was something wrong. He wanted to appear casual—as if a visit by Bruce was nothing to be excited about. But inside, he experienced a joyful, soaring feeling that made him feel dizzy.

He waited an hour before he left. He did not want Bruce to think that he had come round straight away on hearing that he had missed him; rather, he wanted him to think that he had been doing other things and had then decided to repay the call.

He rode round to the house. The large grey car was no longer under the tree, but Bruce answered the door when he rang the bell. He seemed surprised to see him.

“You came round to my place?”

Bruce nodded. “I wondered what you were doing.”

“Nothing. I was doing nothing really.”

Bruce smiled. He had a wide smile—one that seemed to split the whole lower part of his face. He would try to smile like that himself, because it was the sort of smile that made you feel warm inside. You had to have the right sort of mouth, of course—which Bruce did.

“That’s all there is to do here,” said Bruce. “Nothing.”

“Yes, that’s right.” He felt disloyal to the village. He
had never before thought that there was nothing to do there, but now that Bruce had made the observation, he wanted to agree.

“That’s why we’re going back to Princeton tomorrow,” said Bruce. “My parents get frustrated. They’re so obsessive, you see. They need to be doing things.”

The words seemed to end his world. “Tomorrow?”

“Yes. We’re driving back.”

He looked out onto the yard, beyond Bruce’s shoulder. There were trees, framed by the casing of the window. The branches were moving slightly, and beyond them was cloud.

KAY WAS WONDERING WHETHER DAVID WAS GOING
to say something. He was clearly thinking—the expression of a person deep in thought betrays the fact—but his thoughts, it seemed, were to be private because he had chosen to keep them so. Which is how it should be, she decided, if that was what he wanted; the disclosure of something as intimate as love should not be a matter about which one should feel obliged to speak simply because others were doing so. And yet she herself wished to speak, because what she had to say had a lot to do—everything, in fact—with the reason why she was on that particular train journey. Her father had been Scottish … 
had been:
his Scottishness had been replaced by another identity altogether. One could do that in Australia, just as one could do that in America or Canada—each of them a place that offered an identity that could be put on, like a new jacket. Her father had stopped referring to himself as a Scotsman and had begun to call himself Australian; such an important
step, like putting aside a maiden name, or taking on, as one does in some religious conversion, a name given by the new faith, the name of some saint or prophet.

“My father was Scottish,” she said.

David looked at her. Whatever he had been thinking about had been interrupted. “Oh yes?”

“He left Scotland in 1946. That sounds so long ago now, doesn’t it, and it was, I suppose. Imagine what the world was like then: a year after the end of the nightmare, after the dropping of those two atomic bombs and the liberation of the camps and, well, all that suffering. The world must have been like a hospital ward, with the wounded and the confused standing around and waiting to find out what was going to happen to them. But perhaps it was a good time to start a new life, particularly if you were nineteen, as he was, and impatient.”

David said to her: “Yes, of course. At that time people could just decide where they wanted to go, couldn’t they? There was very little red tape. If you wanted to go and live somewhere, you just did. You didn’t have to worry about visas and permits and all the rest. You moved. If you had the right citizenship, that is.”

She smiled at that. “There was more than red tape for some. There were fences and gates.”

“Yes, I suppose there were. But not for your father, I imagine. Half the map was coloured red then. Or was it pink?”