Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  He went to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. Then he changed his mind and came back in again. He could see himself in the mirror over the fireplace, biting his lip. If only he were sure. But then he heard the high laughter of a girl in the corridor outside, and he thought, to hell with it. I’ve upset her before, and if I upset her again, it’s too bad. I actually love the woman.

  Downstairs, outside of room 304, he tugged his coat-tails straight, ran his hand through his hair, and knocked. A stately woman with silver hair and ropes of silvery pearls came gliding past him with all the magnificence of a China clipper, and he gave her a quick and uneasy good evening.

  At last, he heard the latch on Hannah’s door unfastened. The door opened two or three inches, as if the wind had blown it, and Collis hesitated for a moment. Then he heard Hannah’s soft, Boston-accented voice say, ‘Come in, my darling.’

  He stepped in and closed the door behind him. Hannah’s room was smaller than his, lit by a single frosted-glass lamp. Hannah herself was sitting on the edge of the veneered bed, her long blonde hair brushed and brushed, her eyes bright. She wore a long white nightdress of layered lace, with wide sleeves and decorated cuffs, and she looked as pretty and sad as a seraph.

  ‘I, er – I came down,’ said Collis, uncertainly.

  She smiled and held out her hand. ‘I was waiting for you,’ she said.

  He came across the room and took her hand between his. ‘You’re not feeling any regrets, are you?’ he asked her.

  ‘I regret having to hurt Walter,’ she told him. ‘And as the days go by, I will probably have other regrets. But as long as you understand what I am feeling – as long as you don’t expect me to go through the rest of my life without a single backward look – then I am sure everything will be perfect.’

  Collis bent forward and kissed the gleaming parting of her hair. ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘But don’t expect perfection of me. I have never been perfect, and I never shall be.’

  She raised her face to him, and he kissed her forehead, her closed eyelids, and then her lips. ‘I don’t really want perfection,’ she whispered. ‘I want you …’ Then she touched him with her left hand, tentatively, cautiously, like a blind girl reaching up to touch someone she thought she recognised from years and years gone by.

  He sat down on the bed beside her and held her in his arms, feeling the warmth and softness of her body through tiers of lace. They were posed like lovers in an illustrated romance, and all they needed was cherubs, with ribbons and posies, and a frame of summer flowers.

  ‘You frighten me,’ she said softly into his ear. ‘I have dreams about you that I can’t understand. And yet in the hour I first saw you I knew somehow that I would be compelled to love you.’

  He kissed her on the lips, again and again, so that she couldn’t tell him any more. He didn’t want to hear her doubts, or how she felt about the nature of their love affair. At first he kissed her gently, but as his feelings were aroused, he kissed her more deeply, and more hungrily.

  ‘Hannah,’ he said, winding her blonde hair around his fingers. ‘Why the hell did you ever marry?’

  ‘Sshh,’ she told him.

  ‘Why didn’t you keep yourself wrapped up in tissue paper?’ he persisted. ‘Why did you ever feel the need to walk up the aisle with a man like Walter?’

  Hannah pressed her finger against his lips. ‘Walter’s a good man. Kind, and considerate. And we can’t turn the clock around backwards. If it hadn’t been for Walter, I never would have met you, and so you have that to be thankful for.’

  ‘I would have met you somehow. I’d lay money on it.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t let’s bet on love.’

  He kissed her again – a long, lingering kiss that neither of them could bear to finish. But when their lips did part, and they stared at each other so close that the pupils of their eyes were dark and unfocused, they knew what would happen next. Collis stood up, went to the door, and turned the brass key in the lock. Then, standing with his back to the lamp, he took off his evening coat and unfastened his cufflinks. In the subdued light, in his spotless white shirt and his white evening vest, he looked more handsome than Hannah could ever remember. Something had changed him since he had been in California – experience, maybe; or the discovery of what he really wanted out of his life. But whatever it was, it had given him far more poise and maturity than before, and she knew she could love him now as a man of character, and not just as a good-looking adventurer. She had recognised this subtle and attractive new quality in him at the store yesterday, and perhaps if Collis had known how much it had tipped the balance against Walter, he would have thought about Hannah more cautiously.

  Hannah could scent more than lavender cologne when she came near to Collis. She could scent that he had ambition, and a hunger for success. Unlike poor Walter, who would have walked a hundred yards on hot bricks just to keep her; and yet who had sat in his shop while she told him she had to leave, and wept, unable to say even a single word which might have persuaded her to stay, or even delayed her for five more minutes at the door.

  Collis sat on the end of the bed and prised off his glossy black evening pumps. Then, as he stood up to unbutton his shirt, Hannah leaned over to the lamp, turned the wick down, and blew into the glass bowl to extinguish it. The room was crowded with darkness, perfume, and the rustle of clothes.

  Naked, Collis climbed on to the bed. The faintest smudge of light penetrated the heavy brown drapes, and he could just distinguish her blonde hair spread across the pillow, and her face, although it was too dark for him to make out her expression.

  He lay next to her, and kissed her, and this time she responded to him with an urgency that startled him and aroused him even more.

  ‘You’re like a dream,’ he breathed. ‘You’re like somebody sent from somewhere mythical to tempt me.’

  She said nothing, but kissed and nipped at his lips.

  His hand traced the warmth of her body through her nightdress, downwards, until he reached her thigh. Then, as if he were slowly crumpling up a love letter, he gathered up the lace tiers of her nightdress in his fingers and lifted them, above her knees, above her thighs, above her waist. She shivered, not so much from cold, but from being exposed to him, her thighs slightly parted.

  ‘Hannah …’ Collis whispered, and his fingertips traced a pattern around her bare stomach, galvanising her nerve endings. Involuntarily, she opened her thighs a little more, longing with uncontrollable immodesty for him to touch her there, to trespass with his fingers on the very last preserve that her marriage had kept for Walter and for nobody else.

  It would take her months before she could tell Collis about Walter’s fumbling in bed, about his awkward and untimely attempts at sex. Perhaps she never would. But right now she wanted what by holy or unholy intention was hers by right.

  She could feel Collis arched above her now, a crossbow of muscle and desire. She held one hand against his firm muscular chest. With her other hand she caressed his side, the ridges of his ribs, the muscles around his hips and back. And with a daring that almost frightened her, she reached into the hollow inside his thigh, and caressed him without a bit of shyness.

  She heard him mumble something. She felt his kisses on her cheeks and eyes. Then, with a sharp inhalation of breath, he began to fall towards her, surrendering to his desire no less than she to hers.

  She squeezed her eyes tight shut. The sin of adultery was already committed. This wasn’t going to make it any worse. Yet to refuse Collis now – right on the very point of penetration – wouldn’t that at least show God that she earnestly repented, that she was truly sorry for what she was doing? Wouldn’t it show that she could be strong at the moment of greatest temptation?’

  But she heard herself breathing, ‘Now … oh, please, Collis, now …’ and she felt him slide inside her, so deeply it seemed as if gravity had turned itself inside out, as if the whole room had swayed and tipped in an earth tremor.

  She c
lutched him, for balance as well as for passion. He half withdrew from her, and then pushed himself inside her again, even deeper this time, into the secrecy of her body. And he didn’t stop. He didn’t suddenly shudder and roll off her, as Walter had always done. He kept pushing into her, rhythmic and forceful, again and again and again, until she began to wonder if she was going to be able to stand it. Her senses seemed to jumble up. She heard him panting. She heard the odd crunching sound of the horse-hair mattress. She thought she heard laughter, too, but it wasn’t his, it came from a faraway world of propriety and trifling flirtations.

  Most of all, though, she felt the tingling in her body, as effervescent as soda, as fresh as snow. And Collis kept on pushing and pushing and pushing, arousing her far beyond anything she had imagined possible, so that she no longer cared about adultery or decorum or God, or even who she was, or why, and so that she no longer knew where she was or what was happening to her.

  She might have screamed. She might have imagined screaming. She could feel a miraculous pressure building up, and she didn’t know whether she wanted it to break or not, for it would surely overwhelm her, and even bury her like a violent earthquake. Yet how could she hold it back, with that taut, tight touching that wouldn’t stop?

  But it wasn’t an earthquake that overwhelmed her at the end. It was an abrupt awareness of reality, that what was happening wasn’t an earthquake at all. It was the vivid understanding that she was in a dark and unfamiliar hotel room, and that she was making love with a man who wasn’t her husband. A young, virile man who was already deep inside her, and whom she craved to have even deeper inside her, so much that she was lifting her hips towards him in a way that was outrageous for a woman of any decency.

  Finally her fears and inhibitions began to teeter around her like a building on the verge of collapse, swaying on the uncertain foundations of guilt, and duty, and wifely fortitude, dropping cornices and window ledges and showers of roof tiles, until Collis gasped, and she felt a sudden bulge and pulse, and the whole edifice of Hannah’s life seemed to come thundering down in a tumult of days and years and months, of smashed photographs and broken friendships, of ripped-away responsibilities and torn hearts.

  ‘At last you’re mine,’ said Collis softly, and kissed her.

  She opened her eyes, trying to see him in the darkness. He smelled of cologne, and bourbon, and tobacco; but of soap, too, a clean smell. She felt very warm and languid, and she stretched. ‘Perhaps it would be better to arrange for a divorce sooner, rather than later, after all,’ she said.

  She felt him turn towards her, interrogatively.

  ‘Well,’ she said, as if to justify her change of heart, ‘you want to take me back to Sacramento with you, don’t you? And your Jane McCormick wouldn’t really approve if we were living in sin.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Collis said carefully.

  There was another pause, and then she said, ‘You sound as if you’re not sure you want me to get divorced. Do you?’

  ‘Of course I do. As long as it’s something you’ve considered with care. I don’t want you to do anything you’re going to feel sorry about afterwards.’

  She kissed him, so lightly that he scarcely felt it.

  ‘Do you feel sorry about what we did just now?’

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘Well, then. That’s the way I feel about divorcing Walter.’

  There was a rap at the door. A woman’s voice drawled, ‘Can I turn your sheets down, ma’am?’

  Hannah kissed Collis again. Then she called back, ‘Later, please, if you don’t mind. I’m occupied at the moment.’

  Collis gave an amused snort and sat up. ‘When will you talk to Walter?’ he asked her.

  She reached out and touched his bare back, tracing invisible tattooes. ‘I was hoping that you would,’ she said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, man-to-man. You know the kind of thing.’

  Collis peered at her through the gloom. ‘I’m not entirely sure that I do.’

  He decided to stay in San Francisco until the weekend. The weather was clear, but bitingly cold. Hannah spent most of her time at the International, in her room, or taking tea in the lounge, but on those afternoons when Collis wasn’t organising shipments of guncotton and screws for Tucker, McCormick & Edmonds, he took her for walks along the grey Pacific shore, or into Chinatown, to look at the shops and the restaurants.

  He found that, almost mysteriously, he was widely known along Sacramento Street, and Chinese silversmiths and shoe menders would nod to him as he went past. He was unsettled, in a way, by the strange trust which the Chinese people seemed to have invested in him, as if they saw his future far more clearly than he did.

  On Wednesday, he talked to Mr Yee again, who recommended that he should approach the leader of the On Leong Tong, a certain Mr Kwang, who had staying in his house a nineteen-year-old cousin whose entrepreneurial abilities might make him a suitable replacement for Wang-Pu. Although the name, in English, meant ‘Chamber of Tranquil Conscientiousness’, the On Leong Tong was Chinatown’s principal trafficker in slave girls, and Mr Kwang was said to be concerned at the amount of attention his young cousin was lavishing on the merchandise. He might agree to let him go.

  Collis and Mr Kwang met on the second-floor balcony of Mr Kwang’s lavish house on Jackson Street, overlooking a private garden of fountains and palms. Brilliantly coloured parrots squawked and chirped in bamboo cages all around them, and as they sat over musky-smelling tea and platefuls of tiny Chinese savouries, girls as pretty and brilliant as the parrots brought them fresh napkins, and sweetmeats, and tobacco.

  Mr Kwang must have been all of seventy, but his face was unnaturally smooth, and his hair was still black. He had no teeth at all, but ate his food by pursuing it around his mouth with his tongue. He wore a robe of pure silk and gold thread that must have cost thousands of dollars. A few feet behind him, staying respectfully quiet, sat his young cousin, Kwang Lee, and an alluring half-breed girl in a tight peacock-coloured silk dress. Collis guessed her age at eleven or twelve, even when Mr Kwang told him that she was the finest hummingbird he had ever known. A hummingbird, Wang-Pu had once told him, was a girl who was proficient in oral sex, a fellatrice.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Kwang, after they had finished eating, ‘I hear that you seek an assistant at your store.’

  ‘A buyer, to be more accurate,’ Collis told him. ‘Someone to come down to San Francisco on a regular basis and keep our supplies flowing through.’ He tapped his head with his forefinger. ‘Someone with his head screwed on, who won’t get gypped.’

  Mr Kwang nodded and smiled. ‘Kwang Lee is such a fellow. He is not trustworthy when there are girls around, but in every other way he is most hardworking and shrewd. Perhaps a year or two with you and your colleagues in Sacramento might be good for him.’

  ‘From what Mr Yee told me, he sounds ideal.’

  ‘You wish to employ him on trial, then?’ asked Mr Kwang.

  ‘Twenty-five dollars a month, with board and food provided in Sacramento, and all expenses paid when he’s away.’

  Without even looking over his shoulder, Mr Kwang said to Kwang Lee, ‘That’s settled, then. You’ll pack your belongings, Kwang Lee, and go to Sacramento with Mr Edmonds when he leaves on Saturday.’

  Kwang Lee inclined his head.

  ‘You won’t regret it, Kwang Lee,’ Collis told him loudly. ‘Mr McCormick and Mr Tucker and I, we’re all going places. If you get into the business now, you’ll be a big shot in a few years’ time.’

  Kwang Lee nodded again, but said nothing.

  Mr Kwang raised his hand, and a girl shuffled in from the house to bring him two carved-ivory pipes, and tobacco.

  ‘These are opium pipes from the T’ang dynasty,’ said Mr Kwang. ‘But I myself never smoke opium. Only fools need dreams.’

  ‘I have a dream,’ said Collis carefully.

  ‘I know,’ Mr Kwang replied. ‘But your dream will one day become a comm
onplace reality, unlike the dreams that come with opium. Your dream will one day seem so ordinary that people will not even remark on it.’

  ‘I wish I had your confidence,’ said Collis.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Kwang. ‘You wish you had my tranquillity.’

  Collis frowned. He wasn’t at all sure what the Chinaman meant.

  ‘You allow obstacles to stand in your way,’ continued Mr Kwang, carefully thumbing tobacco into the tiny bowl of his pipe. ‘You do not look at them the way I do, and simply say, “Begone”.’

  ‘I see your philosophical point,’ said Collis. ‘But there isn’t any hope the Sierra Nevada is going to vanish, just because I want it to.’

  ‘The Sierra Nevada isn’t your only obstacle,’ said Mr Kwang expressionlessly.

  Collis looked at him closely. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You are a well-known personality in San Francisco, Mr Edmonds. Your comings and goings are noted. I understand that a certain storekeeper is an obstacle for you these days.’

  ‘You mean –?’

  Mr Kwang raised his hand. ‘It is best not to say too much, even in the privacy of one’s own house. Servants, like parrots, can learn to talk – and not always in the most discreet of places.’

  ‘The lady in question is going to seek a divorce,’ said Collis. He took a melon seed from the small porcelain dish in front of him, split it with his teeth the way Wang-Pu had taught him, and ate the kernel.

  Mr Kwang lit a match and sucked gently at the long stem of his pipe. ‘Divorce is not always the most honourable way, is it? And to marry a lady who is divorced, well, that is not always good for face, is it?’

  ‘Face?’

  ‘You understand, Mr Edmonds. You were a friend of Wang-Pu’s.’

  Collis felt uncomfortable. ‘I’m not sure what you want me to do, Mr Kwang.’

  ‘Do?’ asked Mr Kwang, his face as smooth as a blanched almond. ‘I don’t want you to do anything. That is the whole point of what I have been telling you. Be tranquil, do nothing, and your obstacle will disappear.’