by Dick Francis
By the end I had a great admiration for Emil, Oliver and Cathy, who had neatly served and cleared three full courses with the floor swaying beneath their feet and who normally would have taken my few jobs also in their stride.
When nearly all the passengers (including Filmer) had left, heading for their own rooms or the observation car, we cleared the tables, spread fresh cloths and began thinking of food for ourselves. At least, I did. The others made for the kitchen with me following, but once there Oliver took off his waistcoat, donned an apron and long yellow gloves, and began washing dishes. A deep endless sinkful of three courses for forty-eight people.
I watched him in horror. ‘Do you always do this?’ I asked.
‘Who else?’
Cathy took a cloth to do some drying.
‘No machines?’ I protested.
‘We’re the machines,’ she said.
Catch me, I thought ruefully, washing dishes. I picked up one of the cloths and helped her.
‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘But thanks.’
Angus the chef was cleaning up his realm at the far end of the long hot kitchen and Simone was unpacking fat beef sandwiches which we all ate standing up while working. There was an odd sort of camaraderie about it all, as if we were the front line troops in battle. They were entitled to eat after the last sitting in the central dining car, Emil said, rinsing glasses, but usually they went only for dinner, if then; I could see why, as after the sandwiches on that first day we ate the all-too-few left-over portions of the Lucullan lunch we had served. ‘There’s never anything thrown away,’ Cathy said, ‘when we do trips like this.’
The dishes finally finished and stowed in their racks, it appeared that we were free for a blessed couple of hours: reassembly on the dot of five-thirty.
I don’t know what the others did but I made straight towards the front of the packed train, threading an unsteady way through seemingly endless sleeping cars (passing my own berth), through the still busy central dining car, the full and raucous open-seat dayniter, three more sleeping cars, the crowded dome car (dining room, kitchen, lounge, observation deck), another sleeping car, and finally reaching the horses. In all, a little less than a quarter of a mile’s walk, though it felt like a marathon.
I was stopped at the horse car entrance by a locked door and, in response to my repeated knocking, by a determined female who told me I wasn’t welcome.
‘You can’t come in,’ she said bluntly, physically barring my way. ‘The train crew aren’t allowed in here.’
‘I’m working for Merry & Co,’ I said.
She looked me up and down. ‘You’re an attendant,’ she said flatly. ‘You’re not coming in.’
She was quivering with authority, the resolute governess guarding the pass. Maybe forty, I judged, with regular features, no make-up and a slim wiry figure in shirt, sweater and jeans. I knew an immovable object when I saw it, and I retreated through the first sleeping car, where grooms in T-shirts lolled in open day compartments (shut off by heavy felt curtains for sleeping), on my way to consult with the Chinese chef in the forward dome car’s kitchen.
‘The Conductor?’ he said in answer to my question. ‘He is here.’ He pointed along the corridor towards the dining section. ‘You’re lucky.’
The Conductor, in his grey suit with gold bars of long service on his left sleeve, was sitting at the first table past the kitchen, finishing his lunch. There were other diners at other tables, but he was alone, using his lunch break to fill in papers laid out on the cloth. I slid into one of the seats opposite him and he raised his eyes enquiringly.
‘I’m from Merry & Co,’ I said. ‘I believe you know about me.’
‘Tommy?’ he said, after thought.
‘Yes.’
He put a hand across the table, which I shook.
‘George Burley,’ he said. ‘Call me George.’
He was middle-aged, bulky, close cropped as to hair and moustache and with, I discovered, a nice line in irony.
I explained about the impasse at the door of the horse car.
His eyes twinkled, ‘You’ve met the dragon-lady, eh? Ms Leslie Brown. They sent her to keep the grooms in order. Now she tries to rule the train, eh?’
He had the widespread Canadian habit of turning the most ordinary statement into a question. It’s a nice day, eh?
‘I hope,’ I said politely, ‘that your authority outranks hers.’
‘You bet your life,’ he said. ‘Let me finish these papers and my lunch and we’ll go along there, eh?’
I sat for a while watching the scenery slide by, wild uninhabited stretches of green and autumn-blazing trees, grey rocks and blue lakes punctuated by tiny hamlets and lonely houses, all vivid in the afternoon sunshine, a panorama impression of the vastnesses of Canada and the smallness of her population.
‘Right,’ George said, shuffling his papers together. ‘I’ll just finish my coffee, eh?’
‘Is there,’ I asked, ‘a telephone on the train?’
He chuckled. ‘You bet your life. But it’s a radio phone, eh? It only works near cities where they have receiver/transmitters. At small stations, we have to get off and use the regular phones on the ground, like the passengers do at longer stops.’
‘But can anyone use the train telephone?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘It’s a pay phone by credit card, eh? Much more expensive. Most people stretch their legs and go into the stations. It’s in my office.’ He anticipated my question. ‘My office is in the first sleeping car aft of the central dining car.’
‘My roomette is there,’ I said, working it out.
‘There you are, then. Look for my name on the door.’
He finished his coffee, slid his papers into a folder and took me forward again to the horse car. The dragon answered belligerently to his knock and stared at me disapprovingly.
‘He is Tommy,’ George said. ‘He is a security guard for Merry & Co, eh? He has the run of the whole train under my authority.’
She bowed in her turn to an irresistible force and let us in with raised eyebrows and an air of power suspended, not abdicated. She produced a clipboard with a sheet of ruled paper attached. ‘Sign here,’ she said. ‘Everyone who comes in here has to sign. Put the date and time.’
I signed Tommy Titmouse in a scrawl and put the time. Filmer, I was interested to see, had been to see his horse before departure.
We walked forward into the horse car with George pointing things out.
‘There are eleven stalls, see? In the old days they carried twenty-four horses in a car, but there was no centre aisle, eh? No passage for anyone between stops. They don’t carry horses by train much now. This car was built in 1958, eh? One of the last, one of the best.’
There was a single stall lengthwise against the wall on each side of the entrance door, then a space, then two more box-stalls, one on each side, then a space where big sliding doors gave access to the outer world for loading and unloading. Next came a wider central space with a single box on one side only. Then two more boxes and another space for loading, then two more boxes and a space, and finally another box on each side of the far forward door. Eleven boxes, as promised, with a central aisle.
The boxes were made of heavy green-painted panels of metal slotted and bolted together; dismantleable. In the wide centre space, where one box alone stood along one wall, there was a comfortable chair for the redoubtable Ms Brown, along with a table, equipment lockers, a refrigerator and a heavy plastic water tank with a tap low-down for the filling of buckets. George opened the top lid of the tank and showed me a small plank floating on the surface.
‘It stops the water sloshing about so much, eh?’
Eh indeed, I thought.
There were dozens of bales of hay everywhere possible, and a filled hay-net swinging gently above each horse’s head. A couple of grooms sat around on bales while their charges nibbled their plain fare and thought mysterious equine thoughts.
Each box had
the name of its occupant thoughtfully provided on a typewritten card slotted into a holder on the door. I peered at a few of them, identifying Filmer and Daffodil’s Laurentide Ice as a light grey colt with brittle-looking bones, the Lorrimores’ Voting Right as an unremarkable bay, and the Youngs’ Sparrowgrass as a bright chestnut with a white star and sock.
‘Come on,’ George said. ‘Meet the engineers, eh?’ He wasn’t a horse man, himself.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
He opened the forward door of the horse van with a key, and with a key also let us through into the baggage car.
‘The doors are kept locked, eh?’
I nodded. We swayed down the long baggage car, which was half empty of freight and very noisy, and George, having told me to remove and lay aside my waistcoat in case I got oil on it, unlocked the door at the far end. If I’d thought it noisy where we were, where we went made talking impossible.
George beckoned and I followed through a door into the heat of the rear section of the engines, the section containing among other things the boiler which provided steam to heat the whole train. George pointed wordlessly to an immense tank of water and with amusement showed me the system for telling the quantity of the contents. At intervals up the huge cylinder there were normal taps, the sort found over sinks. George pointed to the figures beside each, which were in hundreds of gallons, and made tap-turning motions with his hands. One turned on the taps, I understood with incredulity, to discover the level of the contents. Supremely logical, I supposed, if one had never heard of gauges.
We went on forward into a narrow passsage beside yards of hot hammering engine of more than head height, throbbingly painful to the senses, and then passed over a coupling into another engine, even longer, even noisier, even hotter, the very stuff of hell. At the forward end of that we came to a glass panelled door, which needed no key, and suddenly we were in the comparative quietness of the drivers’ cab, right at the front of the train.
There was fresh cool air there, as the right-hand window, next to the bank of controls in front of the engineer’s seat, was wide open. When I commented on it, George said that that window was open always except in blizzards, eh?
Through the wide forward unopening windows there was a riveting view of the rails stretching ahead, signals shining green in the distance, trees flashing back at a useful seventy miles an hour. I’d never been in the cab of a moving train before, and I felt I could have stayed there all day.
At the controls sat a youngish man in no sort of uniform, and beside him sat an older man in cleanish overalls with grease on his fingers.
George made introductions. ‘Robert’, that was the younger, and ‘Mike’, the elder. They nodded and shook hands when George explained my position. ‘Give him help, if he asks for it.’
They said they would. George patted Robert on the shoulder and pointed out to me a small white flag blowing stiffly outside to the right of the front windows.
‘That flag shows this is a special train. Not in the timetable. It’s so all railwaymen along the way don’t think the Canadian is running thirty minutes early.’
They all thought it a great joke. Trains never ran early the world over. Late was routine.
Still chuckling, George led the way back through the glass door into the inferno. We inched again past the thundering monster and its second string to the rear, and emerged at last into the clattering reverberating peace of the baggage car where I was reunited with my waistcoat. My suitcase, I was interested to see, stood in a quiet row of others, accessible enough if I wanted it.
George locked the baggage car door behind us and we stood again in the quiet horse car which looked homely and friendly with the horses’ heads poking forward over the doors. It was interesting, I thought, that as far as they were able in their maybe four-foot wide stalls, most of them were standing diagonally across the space, the better to deal with the motion; and they all looked alert and interested, sure signs of contentment.
I rubbed the noses of one or two under the frowning suspicious gaze of Ms Brown who was not pleased to be told that she should let me in whenever I asked, eh?
George chuckled his way out of the horse car and we meandered back down the train together, George stopping to check for news with each sleeping car attendant and to solve any problems. There was a sing-song in progress in the dome car and the racegoers in the dayniter had formed about four separate card schools with cash passing briskly.
The overworked and gloomy chef in the main dining car had not lost his temper altogether and only a few passengers had grumbled that the roomettes were too cramped; the most usual disgruntlement, George said.
No one was ill, no one was drunk, no one was fighting. Things, George said eventually, were going so smoothly that one should expect disaster any time now, eh?
We came at last to his office which was basically a roomette like my own: that is to say, it was a seven-by-four-foot space on one side of a central corridor, containing a washbasin, a folding table and two seats, one of which concealed what the timetable coyly called ‘facilities’. One could either leave the sliding door open and see the world go by down the corridor, or close oneself into a private cocoon; and at night, one’s bed descended from the ceiling and onto the seat of the facilities which effectively put them out of use.
George invited me in and left the door open.
‘This train,’ he said, settling himself into the armchair and indicating the facilities for me, ‘is a triumph of diplomacy, eh?’
He had a permanent smile in his eyes, I thought, much as if he found the whole of life a joke. I learned later that he thought stupidity the norm for human behaviour, and that no one was as stupid as passengers, politicians, pressmen and the people who employed him.
‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is it a triumph?’
‘Common sense has broken out.’
I waited. He beamed and in a while went on, ‘Except for the engineers, the same crew will stay with the train to Vancouver!’
I didn’t to his eyes appear sufficiently impressed.
‘It’s unheard of, eh?’ he said. ‘The unions won’t allow it.’
‘Oh.’
‘Also the horse car belongs to Canadian Pacific.’
I looked even blanker.
He chuckled. ‘The Canadian Pacific and VIA Rail, who work so closely together, get along like sandpaper, good at friction. Canadian Pacific trains are freight trains, eh?, and VIA trains carry passengers, and never the two shall mix. This train is a mix. A miracle, eh?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said encouragingly.
He looked at me with twinkling pity for my lack of understanding of the really serious things in life.
I asked if his telephone would work at the next big stop which came under the heading of serious to me.
‘Sudbury?’ he said. ‘Certainly. But we will be there for an hour. It’s much cheaper from the station. A fraction of the price.’
‘But more private here.’
He nodded philosophically. ‘Come here as soon as we slow down coming to Sudbury, eh? I’ll leave you here. I have to be busy in the station.’
I thanked him for everything and left the orbit of his beaming smile knowing that I was included in the universality of stupid behaviour. I could see a lot more of George, I thought, before I tired of him.
My own door, I found, was only two doors along from his, on the right-hand side of the train when facing forwards. I went past without stopping, noting that there were six roomettes altogether at the forward end of the car: three each side. Then the corridor bent to the side to accommodate four enclosed double bedrooms and bent back again through the centre of open seating with sleeping curtains, called sections. The six sections of that car were allocated to twelve assorted actors and crew, most of them at that point reading, talking or fast asleep.
‘How’s it going?’ Zak said, yawning.
‘All quiet on the western front.’
‘Pass, friend.’
&nb
sp; I smiled and went on down the train, getting the feel of it now, understanding the way it was put together, beginning to wonder about things like electricity, water supply and sewage. A small modern city on the move, I thought, with all the necessary infrastructure.
All the doors were closed in the owners’ sleeping cars (there were almost no open sections in those), the inhabitants there having the habit of privacy. The rooms could have been empty, it was impossible to tell, and in fact when I came to the special dining car I found a good number of the passengers sitting at the unlaid tables, just chatting. I went on through into the dome car where there were three more bedrooms before one came to the bar, which was furnished with tables, seating and barman. A few people sat there also, talking, and some again were sitting around in the long lower lounge to the rear.
From there a short staircase went up to the observation lounge, and I went up there briefly. The many seats there were almost full, the passengers enjoying their uninterrupted view of a million brilliant trees under blue skies and baking in the hot sunshine streaming through the glass roof.
Mr Young was up there, asleep. Julius Apollo wasn’t, nor anywhere else in public view.
I hadn’t seen Nell at all either. I didn’t know where she’d put herself finally on her often-revised allocation of sleeping space, but wherever she was, it was behind a closed door.
To the rear of the dome car there was only the Lorrimores’ private car, which I could hardly enter, so I retraced my steps, intending to retreat to my own roomette and watch the scenery do its stuff.
In the dining car I was stopped by Xanthe Lorrimore who was sitting alone at a table looking morose.
‘Bring me some coke,’ she said.
‘Yes, certainly,’ I said, and went to fetch some from the cold locker in the kitchen, thanking my stars that I’d happened to see where the soft-drink cans were kept. I put the can and a glass on one of the small trays (Emil’s voice in my ear saying, ‘Never ever carry the object. Carry the tray’) and returned to Xanthe.