Trains and Lovers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And each marry one of those Irish girls with clear skin and dark hair,” said Bruce.

  David said nothing.

  Bruce stopped. “If that’s what you wanted to do,” he muttered. “You don’t have to, you know.”

  David looked away. “Marry an Irish girl? I don’t know.”

  “It’s not for everybody,” said Bruce. And then he said, affecting an Irish accent. “Look at the moon up there, would you? What’s that line in the play you were telling me about—Juno and …”

  “Juno and the Paycock. Sean O’Casey. It’s: What is the moon, Captain? That’s the question. What is the moon? It’s said by a character called Joxer Daly.”

  Bruce burst out laughing. “What is the moon, David? That’s the question. What is the moon?”

  David looked up at the sky. Above the outline of roofs with chimneys, a church spire, the moon hung over Ireland, an almost full moon, benign, it seemed to him, tolerant of so much …

  “The moon is all about love,” he said. “The moon is about how we love others. About how we just want the best for those we love. We want them to be happy. We want everything to work out for them. The moon wants that for us, you know. That’s what the moon is.”

  “The moon!” exclaimed Bruce. “That’s lovely, David. That’s lovely poetry. And you made it up right here, just because I asked some stupid question about what the moon was. You knew all along! You knew what the moon was about!”

  “I made it up for you,” muttered David. He spoke quietly, half hoping that his friend would not hear.

  But he did. “That’s what I said. You made it up for me.”

  WHEN THEY REACHED SCOTLAND, THEY MADE FOR Skye and the islands of the Outer Hebrides. They hitched a lift to South Uist and stayed in a farmhouse that offered accommodation. They stayed six days, taking up most of the time they had allocated for their Scottish journey. But neither wanted to move, just as they had felt that they wanted to stay in Ireland forever. The island was part of a small archipelago that was the last bastion of Scotland against the cold green waves of the Atlantic. They walked its length and breadth. Their host showed them the machair, the strip of land that separated the beach from the pasture behind: a delicate ribbon of grass and flowers, resistant to the salt that sprayed across it, its soil whitened by tiny fragments of shells.

  “Machair,” said Bruce, savouring the word. “Machair. You know, if I ever have a daughter, I’ll call her Machair. How about that?”

  “A good name,” agreed David.

  It was midsummer, and the nights of the north of Scotland did not get dark until just before midnight, and then, a few hours later, lightened again. They went fishing on a loch with rods borrowed from their host.

  “You boys have fitted in pretty well,” said the farmer.

  “Scottish blood,” said Bruce. “It tells, doesn’t it?”

  “You must come back some day. You’re always welcome.”

  AT THE END OF THEIR TRIP, WHEN THEY LANDED at JFK, they went their separate ways. They stood for a few moments outside the terminal, their backpacks at their feet. They were tired from the journey.

  “Well, I guess it’s goodbye,” said Bruce.

  David looked down at his hands. They had caught the sun, and the wind, in the Hebrides. They were like the hands of one of those fishermen, he suddenly thought. “Yes. Thanks for everything.”

  Bruce stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. “Yes. Thank you, too, for coming with me. And …”

  David looked up, and met his friend’s gaze. You don’t have to say it, he thought.

  “And I want you to know that it meant a lot to me—that trip, having you there as a friend. That night in Dingle …”

  “What is the moon, Captain?” said David, smiling. I can smile through this, he thought. I can still smile through it.

  “Yes, what is the moon, Captain? You gave the answer, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t really remember.”

  “Well you did. And I remember it.”

  “Well then, I did.”

  THAT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. DURING THAT time, they saw one another occasionally, but not very often. Sometimes a year or two would pass between meetings, which were usually in New York, when Bruce was passing through the city for some reason. He lived in Washington, where he worked for an organisation that promoted conservation. He had specialised in environmental science and was full of worrying statistics on the consequences of pollution and deforestation. He had married a biologist who worked for the federal government. They had two children. Both were boys, and so there was no opportunity to use the name Machair, which he had never forgotten.

  David eventually left New York and took a job at a college in Buffalo. He kept the family apartment in New York, though, and was often down in the city. His father had left him a surprisingly large inheritance that he could have lived on if he had wished. But he enjoyed teaching philosophy and ran a popular course entitled “The Examined Life.”

  “Don’t expect me to teach you how to live your lives,” he said to his students at the beginning of each year. “I can’t provide you with the answers to that. But I can teach you how to ask questions, even if these questions may strike you as unanswerable.” Such as: What is the moon? he thought.

  David married too. She taught English at the same college. He was a kind and considerate husband, and he loved his wife, and she loved him. There was nothing wrong with the marriage; nothing. They had a daughter whom he could not call Machair. That was Bruce’s name for the daughter he had never had, and it would have been an act of expropriation.

  “Your friend, Bruce,” she said. “We should get them up here some time.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Nobody knew about what he felt; and why should they be told? There is no reason why we should not have our secrets, as long as those secrets do not harm anybody else. His harmed nobody, although sometimes he thought that it would help him if he were able to tell somebody about it. Perhaps it would bring him some sort of catharsis; perhaps it would not. It was safer, he thought, to keep it to himself; because there are many ways of loving, and anyway, nothing had ever happened between the two of them; it had been innocent, unsullied. Everything is possible in love. In the heart of each of us there can be many rooms, and sometimes there are.

  “BY THE TIME WE LEFT PARIS,” SAID HUGH, “I had more or less forgotten about Johnny Bates. I knew that there were some people who couldn’t let go when a relationship came to an end, and I assumed that he was just one of those. I knew that some of these people could grow into full-blown stalkers, but it seemed to me that he was confining himself to spreading ridiculous rumours about Jenny. That was bad enough, but at least he wasn’t actively pursuing her, which would have been much more worrying for her.”

  WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THAT INCIDENT WITH Johnny, the Paris trip had gone well. I know that the romantic Parisian get-away can be a bit of a cliché, but it worked for both of us. I got to know Jenny much better, and appreciated her qualities. She was fun to be with. She was amusing. She took pleasure in small, ridiculous things, just as I did. For example, when we saw a fussily clipped white poodle being taken for a walk along a boulevard by its owner, a woman dressed up to the nines, neither of us could keep a straight face. Then we witnessed a wonderful, sparky Gallic row involving a taxi driver and a pedestrian, which drew an appreciative and demonstrative crowd. We saw a vain policeman admiring and adjusting his uniform in the reflective window of a glove shop. We saw children carrying baguettes back home. All of these were small things, but somehow it seemed wonderful to be experiencing them in Paris and to be able to share them with somebody who looked on the world in the same way. I had the occasional doubt—yes—but they were just passing thoughts, really, and I made an effort to dismiss them. It is not always easy to put things out of your mind, but I succeeded—for the most part. It just seemed so implausible; possible—just—but pretty unlikely.

  Yo
u might have imagined that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and unkempt; the streets seemed run-down and dirty, the people sour-faced. But that, I suspect, is how coming home is for everyone; Parisians probably felt the same when they returned from elsewhere.

  I returned to Edinburgh, and Jenny caught a train back to the West Country. She saw me off at Kings Cross station before she went off to Paddington. We kissed at the ticket barrier, interrupting the flow of people onto the platform.

  “Perform fond farewells elsewhere, if you don’t mind,” said the man at the barrier.

  “That wouldn’t have happened in Paris,” muttered Jenny.

  Back in Edinburgh, I telephoned her every evening, as we planned our next meeting. I was determined now to get to London, and to get her there, too, if I could manage it. In pursuit of this, I applied to the company for a temporary transfer that had been advertised internally. One of the company’s London employees was going to be away for a year doing an MBA, and the post needed to be filled. I think that I must have fitted the requirements exactly, as the personnel department telephoned me immediately and said that if I wanted the posting it was mine. I accepted.

  “Now we can see one another every weekend,” I said to Jenny. “Maybe even more often.”

  She said she was pleased. She had been thinking of applying for a job herself in London, but felt that we should wait and see how the new arrangement worked out. She enjoyed her job in Gloucestershire, and would prefer it, she felt, to teaching in London, which was more stressful. I agreed.

  So I left Edinburgh and moved to a flat in Notting Hill. It was a more expensive flat than I could ever have afforded myself, but it belonged to a friend who had taken a job in the City and had done well. He had a spare room that he was keen to let out, and we knew that we got on well enough to share. It was the perfect solution from my point of view as Colin, my friend, spent most weekends with his girlfriend in Canterbury, and that would mean that Jenny and I would have the flat to ourselves.

  Our lives settled into a pattern. She arrived in London at five on Friday afternoons. That evening we would go out to dinner, and then on Saturday we would enjoy what London had to offer, going to exhibitions, to the cinema or theatre, browsing in Portobello Market, which was just a few blocks away from where I lived. We built up a new circle of friends, too, and would have these friends round to dinner on Saturday night, or go out with them to a gastro-pub or Indian restaurant. Life was very enjoyable, and I was already trying to work out a means of prolonging the year, even if it meant switching to a new company.

  From time to time, rather than Jenny coming to London, I would go to stay with her. This was generally more difficult, as the house she shared with the other two teachers was minuscule, and there was barely room for a fourth person. But it was a change from our London routine, and we both enjoyed it. Shopping and theatre were replaced by country walks and the occasional meal at The Lamb and Flag, where it all began.

  It was on one of these weekends in Gloucestershire that I made my discovery. Jenny had gone out to buy something that she needed for the meal she was making and had left me in the house, reading the newspaper. I decided to tackle the crossword, which I occasionally do, although not very successfully. I needed a pencil to do this, and I thought I had seen one on the small writing desk that Jenny had in her room. I crossed the room to this desk.

  The top drawer had been left open. This contained envelopes, a box of paper clips, and a bottle of correcting fluid of the sort that people used before the invention of printers. I picked up the bottle—it was an ancient relic, encrusted round the top with the white powder of its dried contents. I put it back. I found the pencil I was looking for, but then I noticed something that was half hidden by an envelope. It was a passport that had been cancelled and had the top right hand corner of its cover clipped off to signify the cancellation.

  I picked it up and looked at it. The front pages bore a number of border stamps, and there was also an Indian visa. I turned to the back, where the personal details of the holder are set out. The passport belonged, it seemed, to one Mary Broughton. The photograph had been cut out of the page.

  I was about to replace it, thinking that it must have belonged to some friend of Jenny’s, when I happened to turn to the page that gave the details of relatives who might be contacted in the event of accident. This part is filled in by the passport-holder and in this case it gave two names, with addresses and phone numbers. One of these was of somebody who lived in Leeds, another was … I stopped. Johnny Bates, with an address in London.

  Then I noticed something else. These names were written in handwriting that clearly belonged to Jenny.

  Fumbling from the shock, I picked up the pencil and wrote down Johnny Bates’ address and phone numbers on a piece of paper. Then I replaced the passport, slipped the piece of paper into my pocket, and closed the drawer. Returning to the crossword, I tried to apply my mind to it, but could not. What I had seen had shocked me so much that I could not concentrate. So I got up and returned to the desk to take another look at the passport.

  “What are you doing?”

  I spun round. Jenny had come back from the shops and was standing in the doorway of her room, carrying a large plastic bag. At moments of crisis, one notices odd little details, and I noticed that peeping out of the bulging shopping bag was a bulb of fennel.

  “Fennel,” I said. “I love fennel.”

  “But what are you doing?” repeated Jenny.

  Fortunately I did not have the passport in my hands …

  “A pencil,” I said. “I was looking for a pencil.” And then, in an innocent tone, “Are we having fennel tonight?”

  She put the bag down, glancing at the desk as she did so. I moved away. “I’m not going to bother,” I said. “I was going to do the crossword, but now that you’re back I don’t think I will.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “I’m going to take this stuff to the kitchen.”

  I did not make the mistake of returning to the drawer once she had left the room, and just as well, for she came back a few seconds later. It struck me that she was testing me, that she had returned to see what I was doing, but I cannot be sure of that.

  For the rest of that weekend I tried to put the incident out of my mind. When I did think of it, I said to myself that it was absurd to think that the passport told a sinister story. And yet there was the evidence of her handwriting, as well as the name of Johnny Bates. That pointed, surely, to the fact that Johnny had been right—that Jenny was really Mary Broughton.

  I told myself that there must be an innocent explanation, even if I could not readily think of one. I reminded myself, too, that I had noticed Jenny’s own name, written in her handwriting, in some of the books she kept in her room. She was Jenny—she had to be. No school employed anybody without proper checks on their qualifications and identity—had she been hiding anything, then surely the school authorities would have discovered it. Unless … unless she had assumed the identity of somebody else altogether, had stolen it. Such things happened. We were always being warned about identity theft, and although those warnings were mostly about credit cards, there were surely other, more dramatic, instances in which one person claimed to be another.

  I tried to act normally, but I found it hard, and I think she noticed that there was something wrong.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked. “You seem to be distracted.”

  I shrugged. “I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. I think that it might be some sort of mild bug I’ve picked up in London. Travelling in the Tube you get everything, I imagine.”

  She offered me a couple of aspirin, which I took. She watched me as I swallowed the pills, and it crossed my mind that she was watching to make sure that I actually took them and that I had not been bluffing. And then, no sooner had I swallowed them, the thought occurred to m
e: What if they weren’t aspirin?

  I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. Putting my finger down my throat, I tried to make myself sick. I retched—not too loudly I hoped—but the pills remained down. Then I saw on the basin a small bottle of pills. The label clearly said aspirin, and so I calmed down. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said to myself. “Don’t become like Johnny Bates—paranoid.”

  I returned to London a little earlier than I had originally planned. I had a genuine excuse for this—I had some work to finish before my first meeting at work the next morning, and Jenny said that she understood. At the same time, when we said goodbye, I think she sensed that something was wrong.

  “I think you’re feeling a bit down,” she said. “Maybe it’s a result of some virus you picked up. They can leave you feeling a bit weak, a bit depressed, I think.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s probably it.”

  IN LONDON I TOOK OUT THE SLIP OF PAPER ON which I had written Johnny Bates’ contact address and phone numbers. I dialled his mobile first, but it quickly switched to answering mode. I left a brief message, asking him to phone me, and then I tried the other number on the card, a land-line.

  The phone rang at the other end but was soon answered. A man’s voice answered: a Liverpool accent. It was not Johnny. I assumed it was a flatmate, perhaps one of the other two men we had seen him with in Paris.

  “I’d like to speak to Johnny,” I said. “Johnny Bates.”

  “So would I,” said the voice.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’d like to speak to him too. Johnny’s gone off somewhere without telling us.”

  For a few moments I said nothing.

  The nasal voice sounded irritated. “Are you still there?”

  “Sorry. Yes, I’m still here. Is Johnny all right?”

  “How do we know?” said the voice, peevishly. “We’re on the point of reporting him missing. If he’s not back by tomorrow morning we’re going to do that.”