Trains and Lovers: A Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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 c
orrectly to the grave; where the water came dosed with chemicals and the food was cleanly wrapped. He wanted to go somewhere else.

  “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.