Trains and Lovers: A Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Homesickness, too, played its part. Every two weeks there was a letter from his mother. She wrote several pages, on plain paper on which she had drawn the pencil lines herself. She told him of the latest doings of his younger brothers. Jack had been in a fight and had a cut above his left eye. It was that same boy who had done it; he was trouble, that Maclaren boy, and would go too far one of these days. Jack said it wasn’t his fault, and she believed him, but he should learn to stay away from situations in which that sort of thing happened.

  He sent her money, and she always acknowledged the postal orders and told him what she had used the money for. There had been new shoes for both of the younger boys—they would be writing to him to thank him, she said. They never did.

  Money was tight at home, but there were signs that things were getting better. Some food was coming off the ration and that made a difference. There were signs that summer would be warm this year, which was a blessing, although she could imagine how hot it must be out there for him and how he might be pleased to get a bit of Scotland’s cool weather for a change.

  He read each of her letters several times, folding them carefully and putting them back in their envelopes. People kept letters then, filing them away in shoe boxes or drawers, tying them in bundles with string or tape. Whole lives had their record in those bundles, which might be kept until well after anybody remembered who the correspondents were. He put her letters in the suitcase he kept on top of his wardrobe. He marked each envelope with the date that it had been received, so that he could keep track of the time taken by the mail-boats to complete the journey. Scotland was so far away: thirty-six days on the mail-boats, although there was talk of that coming down by a week. He would never see it again—he was sure of that. This was his home now, this vast land with singing empty skies and its impossible distances. This was his landscape: this expanse of ochres and reds, of dust and rock and eucalyptus-scented forests. In this emptiness he must find his place, and somebody who might share it with him.

  AFTER THREE YEARS IN FREMANTLE HE WAS approached by a man in a bar who said to him that he worked on the railway in South Australia. They were looking for men, he said, and the opportunities were good.

  “The pay’s better than what you’re getting—I guarantee that. Holidays good too. Three weeks in your first year; four in the second. Then you get a long leave every other year: two months. That’s because you have to be prepared to live in places where there’s not much going on. But so what? Who cares what’s going on—I don’t.

  “Here’s the address. You write to this Mr. Tomlinson, see, and you tell him what you’ve been doing—don’t bother to give too much detail—he just wants to know that you’re not the sort who goes from job to job every few months. This isn’t work for somebody who wants to flit about. This is work for men who want a career. There’s a difference, you know. Two different sorts of men: those who are never going to settle to anything, and those who want a career. Chalk and cheese, if you ask me.”

  He took the piece of paper with Mr. Tomlinson’s address on it and he wrote to him that same evening. He wanted a change from what he was doing. There was no chance of promotion in the company for which he worked, and he did not particularly like his immediate boss, a mean-spirited man with a pencil-thin moustache who enjoyed finding fault with his work, no matter how hard he tried. He would hand in his notice and go to South Australia.

  The widow said: “Oh, Alec, how am I going to get by without you? No, I shouldn’t say that. I shouldn’t stand in your way. But you’ve been a bit of a son to me these last couple of years, and when you’ve been by yourself you appreciate having somebody about the place. Oh dear, I’m going to start crying at this rate and I shouldn’t because this is a big opportunity for you and you must always seize opportunities with both hands. With both hands.”

  He bought her a present of a bowl, which he wrapped carefully and presented on the morning of his departure.

  “It’s French, I think,” he said. “Least, that’s what the lady who sold it to me said. She said this was a French bowl.”

  “French! Oh, Alec, you honey, I’m going to treasure this, you know. It’s going straight in the cabinet, make no mistake about that.”

  She saw him off on the train. She stood on the platform and waved as the train pulled out. He would never see her again, he knew that, and was silent as the train drew out of the station and started its long haul across the wheat-belt of Western Australia to Kalgoorlie and the wastes of the Nullarbor Plain beyond.

  HE KNEW IMMEDIATELY THAT THE DECISION TO take the job in Adelaide was the right one. The railway provided him with a single-bedroomed flat of his own and gave him a job in the freight office. For the first time he had real responsibility, and he responded well to the trust. The people with whom he worked were friendly, and he realised that he was becoming part of a family of railway workers. “It’s not like other jobs,” one of them said to him. “With other jobs, you’re an employee—you work for somebody. On the railway, you’re a member of a family. And the family will see you right, you know. You play fair with the family and the family plays fair with you.”

  He now felt more at home. He thought of Scotland less frequently, and gradually the memories of Ayrshire started to fade. In his dreams, he noticed, though, he might still be back in Scotland more often than he was in Australia. On occasion, the setting of a dream was in a world that was half Scotland and half Australia: a street might be a street from his home town in Ayrshire, built of Scottish stone and washed by Scottish rain, but it might turn a corner and become quite suddenly a dry plain dotted with houses with red tin roofs.

  He began to understand what it was that held this new society together. He appreciated the rough equality, the resolute cheerfulness, the attitude of dogged acceptance of the harshness of nature, of dust, of flies, of drought. Scotland was soft and feminine: all greenery and diffused light; Australia was stark, the sun chiselling out hard contrasts of light and shade. Scotland was forgiving; Australia was uncompromising, and yet everywhere there was a sense of being untrammelled, unconstrained. Nobody could tell you what to do in Australia. Nobody was better than the next man down under. Or so the official version went. Of course there were the blackfellers, as his workmates called them, and he was still enough of a Scot to feel for them in their plight. “It’s not right,” he wrote home. “I can’t tell you all that much about it, but I just feel it’s not right. And nobody wants to talk about it because they don’t see anything wrong in it. But it is wrong, isn’t it? Robert Burns would have said that it’s wrong, wouldn’t he?”

  He worked in Adelaide for three years before the railway said that he could now be offered a siding of his own. “In the Outback, of course, you understand,” his supervisor explained. “But it’ll be your own show and you’ll be in charge of a lot of track. Give me your decision by next week.”

  It did not take him that long. “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “Good. It’s not everyone who can do that sort of job, but we think that you’ve got what it takes, even if you’re still a bit young.”

  He was twenty-five.

  The supervisor looked at him thoughtfully. “You’ll need a wife,” he said. “Do you want to pick one up before you go, or wait until you’re there? The advantage of getting one out there is that she’ll know what it’s like. It’s when they don’t know what it’s like that you run into trouble.”

  “It can wait,” he said.

  The supervisor nodded. “Fine. But remember that any honeymoon is going to have to depend on our having somebody to relieve you for the duration. So the job comes first, understand. Then the honeymoon.”

  ANDREW LOOKED INCREDULOUS. WHAT DID PEOPLE marry for in those days? To have somebody to cook for them, if they were men? To have somebody to pay the bills, if they were women? Bizarre. It was so different now. You married for love. You married because it was comfortable for two people to live together—on terms of equality—and share everything. O
f course they didn’t have the internet then and you had to go off somewhere to meet people. You had to write to them. How strange life must have been. Unwired. Cut off. Lonely. Off-line.

  There would never be loneliness again, he thought—it was simply unnecessary. We had eradicated smallpox and polio and a whole lot of other diseases, and now we were eradicating loneliness. Except that was simply not true. The more we spoke to one another electronically, the more information we bombarded one another with, the easier we made it to move from place to place—vast distances sometimes—the more detached from one another we seemed to become. Loneliness had a long future ahead of it, after all.

  HIS SIDING WAS ON THE GHAN LINE THAT IN THOSE days went from Adelaide in South Australia up as far as Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. Hope Springs was not far from a point of confluence of two major Outback tracks—rough dirt roads that were the only route through the vast dry plains of the continent’s parched heart. The Oodnadatta Track came down from the north-west, skirting the western side of Lake Eyre, while the Birdsville Track struck north-east towards Southern Queensland. These roads could trap cars in sand or, if it rained, in mud. Great ingenuity was required to get out once trapped, and people could be stuck for days. Travellers also had to stick carefully to the track; any straying off the route was potentially fatal; a wrong turning, a loss of a reference point, and one would quickly perish under the unrelenting sun. Tales were common of cars and trucks being found just a few hundred yards off the track, their drivers dead from thirst and heat; told to warn people of the dangers of thinking they could flout the rules of survival in the Outback. “A few hours and it’ll have you,” people said. “Just a few hours is all you’ve got.”

  The pastoral properties scattered along these tracks were immense. It was common for one house to preside over a stretch of land that ran fifty or sixty miles across. Such land supported cattle, but only just, and each animal needed a vast area of grazing to survive. Here and there, marked by patches of green in the predominantly brown landscape, artesian springs brought water to the surface, allowing the cattle and dingoes to slake their thirst.

  There were occasional isolated towns—collections of simple houses, a country pub and store, a police post. Then there were the sidings, which were one step down from the towns. These consisted of a railway office, a water tower for the replenishing of the steam locomotives, a station-master’s house and a bunkhouse for railway staff passing through. The bunkhouse might also be used for people from the big cattle stations who might for some reason arrive to catch a train a day before it was due in. It might also occasionally shelter the men who drifted through the Outback in search of work: stockmen or shearers, mechanics, men who had tried everything else and who were now prepared to take on any job in the most inhospitable of surroundings.

  Hope Springs had the benefit of ample water. There was an old well, dug in the eighteen-nineties, not far from the railway siding, and a rough bathing pool had been fashioned out of railway sleepers. The water, he had been told, was ancient water—it had fallen tens of thousands of years ago in the wet north of Australia and had percolated down over time into the vast reservoir that lay beneath the central Australian depression. It would never dry up; it would always force its way to just below the surface, and once pumped up it would quickly evaporate in the glare of the sun. But not before some of it had been piped to the station-master’s house and to the high tank from which the dangling canvas elephant’s trunk filled the engines.

  The previous station-master was retiring. He and his wife had been there for eighteen years and were going back to the small town on the coast from which they had come. Their time in the Outback was written on their faces—in the lines, the texture of the skin, in the weathered look that came from all that time in an atmosphere of dryness and baking heat.

  They were hospitable in the week they spent together on the hand-over. The down train would take their effects away just as the up train had brought his. He helped them pack it into the wagons—the standing lamps, the Morris chairs, the photographs in their frames, wrapped in several thicknesses of brown paper, the bed-linen tied in bundles. His baggage was simpler: several suitcases of clothing, some kitchen items, his small collection of books. “A bachelor’s possessions,” the station-master’s wife said, smiling.

  They left, and he was in control of the siding. It would be two days before the next train came, and so he busied himself with such paperwork as the job entailed. He waited for somebody to come along the track and call in for water, but on that first day there was nobody. He retired that night and looked out of the window of the bedroom from his bed, up at a sky that was almost white with stars. He got up and went onto the veranda, where it was cooler. Looking south, he saw the Southern Cross, suspended in the velvet sky. It gave him comfort, located him in this vast emptiness. At least there would be other human eyes that were looking up at that at that precise moment.

  He thought: I shall not be able to bear this loneliness. I should have stayed in Adelaide; I should not have come out here. I should not have done this.

  A YEAR AFTER HIS APPOINTMENT AS STATIONMASTER at Hope Springs, he took his first annual leave of three weeks and travelled to Sydney. The rail journey there was not a quick one, and precious days of holiday were spent on it, but he had never seen Sydney and was keen to do so. There was another reason, too, why he wanted to go there: his pen-friend lived in the city and after six months of correspondence he had suggested they meet.

  He had started writing to her on a whim. One of the passengers on the up train to Alice Springs had come into his office during a stop and asked to send a telegram. This was something he could do, sending the message down the wire that followed the line back to Adelaide. He enjoyed sending telegrams, in fact, as it provided some variety in his work and the messages often amused him. HAVE CHANGED MY MIND was a message that he had been asked to send on more than one occasion; a long train journey is a time for reflection, perhaps, and the mind might easily change in such circumstances. Another simply read, FORGIVEN STOP COMPLETELY STOP, while, in contrast, yet another had said THIS IS WAR. He had the power to decline messages of a hostile or improper nature and had hesitated on this wording; forgiveness was one thing, war another, but he eventually let it through. WILL YOU MARRY ME? had at least the attraction of simplicity and unambiguity, and he hoped that the answer might be yes. On rare occasions, he received telegrams to await passengers passing through in either direction and had once received a telegram that read YES STOP. He had delivered that without any indication of having read the message—the rules stated that you were not to pay attention to or use what was said in any telegram—but he had tried to work out, from the reaction of the recipient, what the question had been. He had been a man in his mid-forties somewhere and he had opened the envelope and read the telegram without giving anything away—at least at first. Then he had stared glumly out of the window and Alec had understood that yes could be bad news as easily as it could be good.

  The passenger who asked to send a telegram that day was a mining engineer. He had something technical to say in his message—something to do with ore samples—but he had stayed for a chat and had left behind a week-old copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. “Stale news, I’m afraid, but there’s a bit in there about the cricket that you may like to read.”

  He had thanked him and set the paper to the side. That evening he had read it from cover to cover, including the advertisements. One had been for an agency that provided pen-friends; for a small fee one would be given the names of up to three people who were keen to exchange letters with you—every one of them screened for suitability, the advertisers claimed. On impulse he had written a request for a woman correspondent between twenty and twenty-five, living anywhere in Australia. He almost did not post the letter, but remembered just in time to give it to the driver of the next train down to Adelaide.

  He was sent the name of a young woman called Alison Morsby, who lived just outside
Sydney. She was interested in the cinema, dancing and flowers. She also read the novels of Nevil Shute, her profile revealed, and Charles Dickens. She was not very good at tennis, but she liked swimming.

  He thought about this. There was no cinema there, of course, and no dancing, except for the annual ball held at another siding sixty miles away. That attracted every bachelor and spinster within a radius of several hundred miles, but was more about drinking, he had heard, than dancing. There were flowers, of course, but only for a brief spell in the year, and they had to be resistant to the harsh climate of the Outback. There was no tennis, and the only swimming was in the water hole at the spring, where there was room for one or two strokes in the tank made of old railway sleepers. He had heard about Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice—everybody had, as it had just been published and was much discussed in the papers; he could talk about that, he supposed, even if he had not yet read it. But Charles Dickens was another matter.

  He wrote a brief and rather formal letter, introducing himself. He wondered whether he should send a picture, but decided against it. He was not sure about the etiquette of that, and felt that it would be better to wait. If a correspondence developed, then pictures could be exchanged.