Perhaps they were too unlike ever to part. Similar people repel each other, like brother and sister, and generate negative energy, whereas different people attract, and create a good – or at least positive – flow between them. She couldn’t think of a better reason why they were still together, and felt so relaxed that she didn’t want to. Maybe it was the drink, the sacred wine affecting the spine and brain.
Tom told Aubrey about his life at sea, and ordered another bottle. ‘An average of one each isn’t excessive,’ he said, but Pam drank little, and felt tipsy enough on that. They stayed till all others had gone, and the staff were impatient. They shook hands and exchanged addresses. Tom said he and Pam were touring around, with no definite itinerary. Maybe we’ll collide at the same night-spot in the next week or two. Aubrey staggered, and apologized for being drunk. ‘That second brandy,’ he admitted, ‘did for me.’ Pam thought him a nice, English sort of person.
Tom guided her along the swaying train. She confessed that she too felt pissed, but he laughed and said he would let her sleep it off tonight. The attendant had put down their beds, and they undressed in the small space. Naked, he reached out to kiss her. She still had her pants on, and wondered: What if I start in the night? A packet of tampons was under her pillow.
The train swayed at a hundred miles an hour, then stopped at a station, voices shouting up and down the line, white lights shining through slits in the blind. The carriages juddered, started to move, stopped, then rolled almost without noise so that her brain felt as if it had a steel ratchet fixed there for the whole train to go through. She slept, and did not sleep. It was impossible to say what was sleep and what wasn’t.
The attendant was to waken them at six, but she was dressed by half-past five, unable to get into even the shallowest layer of rest. Tom slept on the top bunk. Her bladder seemed about to burst. There was daylight behind the blinds, but she didn’t want to lift them and wake him. Her breath was vinous and foul.
She came back and cleaned her teeth, then went along the corridor to the door-window. Other people were awake. Aubrey whistled to himself, and didn’t notice her when he passed in his pyjamas. She flattened against the wall to let him by. The sky was clear. The train stopped, showed station buildings of beige walls and red roofs, and luminous vegetation. There was the overwhelming sound of birds. We’ll wake up in Lombardy, Tom had said. A package tour to Rimini had been nothing like this. She smiled with pleasure at travelling with a lover, instead of a husband who had always despised himself for liking her.
The wayside station was nondescript, yet exotic. If they stayed in the nearest village what would their life be like? Couldn’t imagine. An elderly man who stood on the platform some way from other people wore a grey suit, a panama hat, a flowered shirt and smart tie, and held a briefcase. He crossed the line to their train, but a station official called roughly that this was not the right one and that the train to Milan would be in soon. Or so she assumed. The man took the brusque words with dignity, and went back to where he had first stood. She wondered where he could be going at six on Sunday morning.
She let up the blinds. Tom’s voice was half-way between a growl and a moan. ‘Oh my God, where am I?’
‘You may well ask,’ she said. ‘But I’m not surprised you don’t know.’
He looked down, and reached for her stomach. ‘Is it true?’
‘I hope so, though I don’t think I’d hope so with anyone else but you.’
He let himself down from the bunk. ‘What a stupendous thing to happen!’
He didn’t know what he was in for, but she let him say it, because he had never been into that area of life. ‘Wait and see,’ she said with a smile.
She went out to make room while he dressed. He was there to look after her. She’d be safe with him, he said. But she felt bloody sick. What else could he say? She wanted to be by herself, get on to land and traipse across country she had never seen, walking and thinking, then walking but not thinking, to enjoy the flowers and trees, and watch the slowly changing view hour by hour and day by day, stopping when she liked, wandering like a mad woman between Alps and Lowlands, burned by sun and saturated by rain, but always alone, and when the first pains struck she would either live or die till she could be no more alone.
The train ran south through the shabby outskirts of Milan. He stood at the door with the overnight case between his feet. Red scrawl marks on walls were passed too quickly to be read. Hoardings and advertisements exhorted them to buy cars, sewing-machines, typewriters, essential goods and gewgaws that would save them time from the labours of life which, though they might not know what to do when they had saved such time, must nevertheless be saved. She thought of the labour-saving gadgets in her own long-gone house, and reflected that time thus conserved had in fact been all too often time lost in dreaming of what she would do with time saved if she had been really free. And now that she was, it didn’t matter any more.
They were given vouchers to get breakfast at the station restaurant. At half-past six the air was already hot as they walked with other passengers to the main hall. The restaurant was barred from within and picketed without by a line of waiters offering leaflets to explain their complaints. They were good-natured, even regretful at the inconvenience, and none of the travellers seemed particularly thwarted by their strike.
‘We’ll find a place to eat on the motorway,’ Tom said.
Some people walked to a kiosk on the pavement which was doing a trade in coffee and a sort of cake-bread. Tom elbowed his way forward. ‘Hit the capitalist system in one place,’ he observed, ‘and somebody else steps in to take advantage. It’s very resilient.’
She stood by the railway buffers while he went along the catwalk and got into the car. He came off and circled the yard, then stopped to rearrange luggage and bring a packet of maps to the glove box.
7
She was amused at his punctilious fastening of the safety belt. Did he expect to escape if the car turned into a ball of flame? He was sensible to take precautions. As a man he no doubt wanted to live for ever, but for herself – the next car coming either had her name on it or it hadn’t. If it did, her worries were over; if it didn’t, they were yet to come.
A grey flower passed, or a black flower pounced. Air heated her elbow at the open window. ‘Keep your arm in that position for half an hour,’ he warned, ‘and it’ll be cooked three layers down.’
She drew it in. Learn step by step and brick by brick. ‘Where do we go?’
‘Back.’
‘I’m never going back.’
He smiled. ‘But gradually. Home again.’
I have no home. ‘Why change our plans?’
He pointed out roads as if he had been on them before. He hadn’t. But the map was clear, and coloured, although signposts were more visible from her passenger seat. On the motorway insane drivers at their steering wheels were set to overtake, or die if they couldn’t. She had a near view of their faces. They had stumbled on to a Sunday morning hippodrome to rehearse the national sport for the bigger mayhem of midweek. She was beset by roars, revs, hooting, smoke and eye-bludgeoning from different shapes and colours of metal motor-cars that went by like rockets. Yet the faces of the drivers seemed remarkably relaxed.
‘I had a lovely scheme cooked up,’ he said, ‘to roam the Balkans for a couple of months, then go to Greece and visit one or two of the islands. But it’s got to be altered now.’
She hated being responsible for any disappointment. The land was flat, with too much haze to see the mountains which, indicated on the map, lay north and south.