Trains and Lovers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Her reply came rather more quickly than he had expected. She had been very pleased to get his letter, she wrote. She enjoyed getting letters and had been writing for two years to a pen-friend in England, a young woman of her own age, whose dream it was to come to Australia one day. This young woman worked in a shop in Bournemouth, but was planning to move to London when she had saved up enough to do so. “I really like getting her letters and hearing about her life, which is very different from the life I lead in Paramatta. I have never worked in a shop, but I have a job as a secretary in a municipal office. I type the reports that building inspectors make when they go to inspect new houses. They look at the foundations etc. and have to check that everything meets the right standards. You’d be surprised, you really would, by some of the things that builders try to get away with. Sometimes I can hardly believe what the inspectors say about builders’ tricks.”

  He wrote back the day he received her letter. He told her about his job and about his time in Fremantle. He said that he was thinking of getting a ham radio operator’s licence, as it would be useful to talk to people all over the place. He said that he had heard ham radio enthusiasts sent each other cards after their contacts and that some people had thousands of these cards, from places as far off as Russia. “I think they keep a close eye on radio sets in Russia,” he wrote.

  She sent him cuttings from a newspaper feature called “Cooking Tips for Blokes.” This was for bachelors who had to cook for themselves, and it gave instructions on the preparation of simple dishes, suitable for men. “I know that some men are quite good cooks,” she wrote, “but a lot of them aren’t. My brother, Russell, can hardly boil an egg! I had to show him! I’m not exaggerating.”

  He wrote back: “Thanks a lot for ‘Cooking Tips for Blokes.’ It looks like an excellent series and I look forward to the next one. I tried that recipe for soda bread and I think it was okay, but the bread was a bit heavy. Do you think they left something out when they printed the recipe? Don’t you have to have yeast to make bread?”

  She replied to his question with another recipe for ordinary bread, and he reported success with that. “I wouldn’t have to go to the bakery any more,” he wrote, “if there was one here, which there isn’t. In fact, the nearest proper store is at Marree, which is eighty-three miles away.”

  He wondered whether this picture of his life would put her off. If you lived where she did, you could get into the city in no time at all. You could go to dances and to the beach. You could read the newspapers on the day they were printed. You could buy fresh bread baked by other people.

  But she gave no sign of thinking that his life was difficult or dull. “It must be very nice to have the time to sit and think,” she wrote. “I seem to have no time and often ask myself: Where has the day gone? I envy you having time to look about you and to think about things.”

  Emboldened, he wrote, “One of these days you should come and see this place. You might even like it! Who knows?”

  To which she replied: “I’d love to come out there some time. I’ve never been to the Outback, but of course I’ve seen plenty of pictures of it. But pictures don’t show the wind, do they? Or the smell of the trees and shrubs.”

  He thought: No, they don’t. And he went outside and closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the wind from the north, which was a dry wind that carried the smell of emptiness upon it, and of the trees that clustered around the water hole, and of the salt pans beyond that, white, shimmering, brittle under the sun.

  WHILE HE WAS IN SYDNEY HE STAYED IN A SMALL hotel in the Rocks. The hotel had a bar that sold the beer brewed in the brewery next door, and a rather dingy dining room that claimed on the menu to be “one of Sydney’s most highly regarded dining experiences.” The menu, though, did not seem to support this. Brown Windsor Soup was the only choice of first course, and for the second one could choose macaroni cheese, Irish stew or baked fish.

  They had exchanged photographs by now, and so he had no difficulty in recognising her. He felt, though, that she was markedly more attractive than she had appeared in the picture she had sent him; it was something to do with her eyes, he thought; there was a quality in them that drew him in. He was nervous. He had never been much good with attractive women; he was convinced that any woman like that would be bound to find somebody else more exciting than he was, and that made him hold back. He could not imagine that any woman, let alone an attractive one, could fall in love with him. After all, who was he? He was a Scotsman who worked for the railways in a very remote spot. He had nothing to offer anybody—no money, no experience of the world, no dashing good looks.

  She said to him: “You’re just as I imagined you. Thanks for being the same as you are in your letters.”

  This took him by surprise. “And you,” he stuttered. “You’re even better.”

  He showed her the menu. “It says that they’re pretty good. I thought it was just an ordinary hotel, but you see what it says? One of Sydney’s most highly regarded dining experiences. See it there?”

  “Sometimes the really good places are very straightforward,” she said. “They don’t have to be flashy.” She ran her eye down the menu. “Macaroni cheese. One of my favourites. I think there was a recipe for that in ‘Cooking Tips for Blokes,’ wasn’t there?”

  He remembered it well. “I tried that one. I make it once a week, sometimes more.”

  “It must be hard for you,” she said. “Having to do all your own cooking like that. And run a railway siding. I don’t know how you do it.”

  There was silence. In that moment, both of them understood what the purpose of this meeting was and how it would end.

  HE PROPOSED TO HER FOUR DAYS LATER, IN A café beside the cinema in which they had just seen a film together. He said, “I know this is a bit sudden—I know that. But I can’t bear the thought of going back without saying something that I’ve been trying to pluck up the courage to say for a long time.”

  She looked down at the blue gingham tablecloth. He swallowed.

  “So what I really want to ask you is this: Will you marry me? I know that I haven’t got much to offer and that you’re probably going to turn me down, and I hope that you’re not angry at me for asking …”

  “No.”

  He caught his breath. Of course she would turn him down; of course she would.

  “I mean no, I’m not angry with you; how could I be? And the answer to your question is yes, of course I’ll marry you, Alec. I’ve been hoping you’d ask me and I … well, I couldn’t bear it either if you went back to Hope Springs without asking me. So the answer is yes.”

  He reached across the table and took her hand. “I think you can get a special licence if you have to go off somewhere like the Outback. You don’t have to give the same period of notice, you know, the banns …”

  “I’ve heard that too,” she said.

  “Of course I’ll have to ask your father.”

  She shook her head. “He’s dead. Italy. When they went across to Sicily and there was this big battle …”

  “Of course. Your mother then.”

  She smiled. “She’ll say yes. She’s been getting at me to get married for ages.”

  ANDREW SMILED. “IT WAS SO DIFFERENT THEN, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was,” said Kay. “People were more formal in the way they spoke to one another.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. I meant marriage—they made a bigger thing of it.”

  “And you don’t?”

  He thought for a moment. “Well, maybe … But anyway: there she was, happy to go off to a place where she’d have nothing to do, no company, apart from her husband … Who’d do that today?”

  “I’M GOING TO PLANT FLOWERS.”

  She was standing on the back veranda of the house at Hope Springs, looking out at the line of casuarina trees that provided some shelter for the house from the north.

  “Where? Near the trees?”

  “Yes. In between the
m, and maybe in a bed between this veranda and the water tank. Over there. What do you think?”

  “I would like flowers. Roses maybe.”

  “I’m not sure how roses would do. We could try, though. I thought, maybe, we could find some of the flowers that seem to like these dry conditions.”

  He said that he thought that would be sensible. For a brief period in the spring, the Outback blossomed, and there were wide expanses of native flowers, painting the land with yellow, blue, red.

  “There’s plenty of water,” he said. “At least there’s plenty right here.”

  She had plants and seeds sent up from Adelaide, and brought them on in a nursery she had created on the shady side of the house. He found it astonishing that the earth could be so bountiful in the face of all that dryness and dust, but she pointed out that it was always possible to create small corners of growth in the most unlikely of conditions.

  And she began to transform the house as well. The bare rooms of the station-master’s house saw the introduction of rugs and curtains. She painted the walls herself, and hung on them pictures and decorative china plates.

  He marvelled at the change. “I would never have imagined you could do so much with a place like this,” he complimented her. “Look at it!”

  She took satisfaction in his approbation. “It’s our home, Alec. I want it to be something special.”

  The garden became steadily larger. With the area immediately about the house now cultivated, she turned her attention to the ground around the siding platform itself. The name Hope Springs was spelled out in Namaqualand daisies and hardy thyme plants, and behind there was a rose bed. When the Alice Springs train stopped, the passengers got off and walked around the flower beds. Many of them took photographs of the Hope Springs floral sign, posing in front of it.

  There was a bed that she cultivated specially for passengers to pick a flower from to take with them when they boarded the train again. She received many compliments, some of which were written in a visitors’ book that she placed on a table in front of the office.

  “You’ve certainly made the desert bloom,” was the most common remark that people made.

  “I cried,” wrote one. “Why don’t more people do this? Why don’t more people bother to create beauty like you do?”

  A subsequent visitor had pencilled in an answer. “Because they don’t care,” he, or she, wrote. “That’s why.”

  SHE BECAME PREGNANT, ALTHOUGH IT WAS FOUR years before this happened. By then they had almost given up hope, and she hardly dared believe it when, on a visit to the clinic in the nearest town, this was confirmed.

  “You should go down to Adelaide,” said the doctor. “Anything could happen out there and if it did … well, I don’t see what could be done.”

  She reluctantly agreed, and a few weeks later she made the journey on the down train from Alice. He installed her in her compartment and they kissed before he left the carriage.

  “You’ll have to go now,” she said. “I’ll write the moment we get there.”

  “The train can’t go until I blow my whistle,” he said. “We have all the time in the world.”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t.”

  “Don’t speak like that,” he said.

  He got off the train and it began to move. She leaned out of the window, waving until he was out of sight and she could no longer see the colourful floral sign, nor the roses, nor the casuarina trees.

  In Adelaide she stayed with a distant cousin of her mother’s. This woman was pleased to have the company, and was almost too solicitous in looking after her. It was a relief when, after the birth of their daughter, she was able to go home again.

  “I’m happier than I can possibly say,” he remarked, as he rocked the infant in his arms. “You, me and the baby.”

  “In our home,” she said.

  “Yes, in our home.”

  He looked down at the child and touched her forehead gently with the tip of a finger. “Bless you,” he said. “Bless you, little darling.”

  She watched this. She loved the sight of gentleness in men. Why were they so reluctant to show this side of their nature, she wondered. Why did they have to be so tough, so in command of everything, so indifferent to the feelings that they must have, somewhere beneath that hard exterior of theirs?

  The baby, this tiny girl, was the woman in the train, making the journey from Scotland so many years later. Kay thought of her parents and of what they had been through. She thought of Hope Springs, which she had visited once as an adult, just to see whether the memories of childhood were accurate. There was a floral sign, was there not? She found the place where it had been. She found the rose beds behind the house. It was just as she remembered it, except it was somehow smaller. The world is like that; memory has the effect of a telescope, making bigger the things we see through its lens, making them bigger than they really are.

  She stood at the side of the flower beds that her mother had laid out and spent so much time working on. Their shapes were clear enough, but they were now merely shapes of bare earth, like skeletons entombed just below the surface of the ground. We change the earth and our changes may only be temporary; yet the signs of what we have done may persist, as these mounds did.

  HUGH LISTENED TO HER ACCOUNT OF HER PARENTS’ life and thought: Yes, there are people for whom love, like everything else in their lives, happens slowly. He thought, too, of moral luck.

  “Moral luck.”

  Kay looked at him enquiringly.

  “What exactly is moral luck?”

  Hugh smiled. “I only know what it means because I took a philosophy course at university; I had a gap to fill in, and I chose philosophy. We had a lecturer who was interested in moral luck and started to talk about it one day. He talked for a full hour. It had nothing to do with what we were meant to be studying, but we sat there transfixed as he explained what was meant by moral luck.”

  “Which is what?”

  “It’s not quite the same thing as fate, or chance, even if fate and chance play a part in it.” He paused. They were all looking at him now: David, Kay, Andrew.

  “Shall I give you an example?”

  Kay nodded. “Yes.”

  “Okay. There are two people: let’s call them Tom and Dick.”

  “What happened to Harry?”

  “He’s not in this example. He doesn’t matter. The point is this: Tom’s parents are nice people. They provide him with a good example and bring him up to help others and so on. Tom does well at school and gets a good job. Everything goes well for him. Now, on to poor Dick. Dick’s parents are dishonest. His father is violent and is in and out of prison; his mother drinks, shall we say. Maybe she sleeps around too. Dick gets into trouble himself when he’s sixteen and ends up being sent to reform school. Tom has good moral luck, Dick has bad.”

  They thought about it in silence.

  “So …”

  “The fact that Tom did well and stayed out of trouble is due to his good luck in being born to his particular parents. That was luck, and it had a big effect on how he led his life. Dick may not have been any worse a person inside—he may have had the capacity to be better than he was, but his bad moral luck meant that he was never able to develop any of that.” He paused. “Have you seen those photographs of war crimes trials? You see the judges sitting in a row and then the witnesses—the victims, or relatives of the victims—and then you see the prisoners on trial. Luck determines that the victims are on the right side of the barrier and the perpetrators on the wrong. Both could equally well have done or received what was done or received. Both would have been capable of it, had their moral luck been different and had they found themselves in the others’ shoes. So what happens to you in this life, particularly whether you are good or bad, is largely dependent on factors beyond your control—in other words, on the sort of luck you have.”

  “We aren’t responsible for our characters?” asked David.

  “No.”


  Kay frowned. “Really? Do you really think it’s that arbitrary?”

  Hugh did.

  “But we can decide to lead better lives. We can decide to make something of ourselves—surely that must be possible.”

  David intervened. “I see his point. There may be some room for us to change things for the better, but that depends on our having the luck to see the possibility of improvement. We might not have that luck and so we may never know that there’s something we can do—or should do, for that matter.”

  “Everything’s a matter of luck,” said Kay. “Our whole lives are affected by it—everything.”

  Kay thought: The newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald—it was luck, pure luck, that my father read the advertisement that day. And it was luck too that he happened to see Men needed for Western Australia. Luck.

  The thought that went through David’s mind was of a dropped oar. Had he not dropped that oar in that particular river at that particular time, then his life would have been different.

  “In my case,” said Hugh, “everything depended on getting off a train at the wrong station. It all flowed from that.”

  “THERE ARE VARIOUS WAYS IN WHICH YOU CAN get off at the wrong station. You can …”

  “… go to sleep,” said Kay. “That happened to me once. I went to sleep and when I awoke I was three stations down the line.”

  YES, YOU CAN GO TO SLEEP, AND THEN WAKE UP and think that the next station is yours when in fact you’ve just passed it. That’s easily done. Or you can misread the sign on the platform. You know how hard it is to make out letters when they’re flashing past—well, you might do that. Or you can get on the wrong train in the first place, and then get out at what you think is the right station only to find it’s the wrong line.

  I was reading at the time. I was sitting there reading a book that was so gripping that I had no idea where we were. Then, as the train drew into a station, I looked out of the window and saw a building that I thought I recognised. My destination was a town in the west of England—not an important place, but the company I worked for had clients there and I went there from time to time to deal with their issues, travelling all the way down from Edinburgh to London and then across England.