Times and Places

by Keith Anthony

  “Are you listening to me Fergus?”

  “Oh yes, of course Mrs Huffington, it sounds like you had to be very courageous.” Having lost track of the conversation, the first half of his answer had been a lie and the second half a guess, but he felt the former a kind one and the latter a safe one.

  “Well Lawrence, you can’t keep me here all evening I’m afraid, I had to eat early as they are showing ‘Brief Encounter’ in the Oceans Gallery and it will take me an age to get there! See you again soon.”

  “Goodbye Mrs Huffington, enjoy the film.” She raised her hand in the simplest of waves as, with her back already to him, she began to trundle away. Fergus didn’t know if it was her slow determination to get about the ship, or the fact that she had unconsciously called him by her dead husband’s name, but he once again felt a surge of compassion for this old lady, her salad days far behind her, travelling the oceans, not as a single handed sailor perhaps, but somehow no less alone.

  “Hi there,” said a half dressed Sylvie as he entered the cabin, “Did I hear you talking to your friend out there?”

  “Mrs Huffington? Yes, it was rather hard to get away.”

  “I could hear you, you were very sweet.” She kissed him proudly on the cheek.

  Fergus, despite having arrived back in the cabin long after Sylvie, was ready for dinner before her and he sat waiting patiently on the bed while she put on the small amount of make-up she ever chose to wear.

  “Ready Freddie?” She asked, putting her lipstick away. She stopped like a statue and they both stood in silence for a moment as it dawned on them what she had just said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” he answered, and this time it was his turn to kiss her.

  Dinner would have been eaten through gritted teeth were that physically possible, as the large arachnid lady, oiled they suspected with aperitifs, held court across their half of the dining room. Fergus actually began meditating at one stage, with his eyes closed and his hands held together on the table in front of him, between his knives and forks… Angelo arrived with his starter and stood next to him, unsure quite what to do.

  “Don’t worry, he’s having a little Fergus time!” his wife whispered, causing her husband to open his eyes and apologise, embarrassed, to the waiter.

  “Only 277 breakfasts, 277 lunches and 277 dinners to go!” he smiled, continuing the countdown to his distant leave, and Fergus and Sylvie couldn’t help but smile back.

  “Perhapths you could say gwace for us all Fergus?” Henry enquired tentatively from the next table.

  “I’m afraid I’m really not…” but somehow Fergus didn’t have the heart to argue, instead, reclasping his hands, he softly recited a little prayer.

  “That was marvellouth,” said Henry, “thank you.” Tabitha looked across at Fergus gratefully and with a knowing little smile.

  Somehow, these incidents broke the earlier tension and they were able to rise above the noise from further up the dining room, enjoying the rest of their meal and the accompanying wine. They even found themselves happily chatting again to Richard and Cressida, who were once more keen to be diverted from the drama playing out on their other side.

  “I saw her still on the island at three o’clock, I was rather hoping she had forgotten the ship was leaving early!”

  “Richard!” said Cressida in mock outrage.

  “Can’t you use your lengthy diplomatic experience and skills on her, to tame her a bit?” asked Sylvie.

  “Alas, it’s diplomacy, not sorcery, it can only do so much!” Richard replied. Another loud cackle came from behind them. “Believe me, wars have been declared for less!”

  “Some of the bloodiest, I suspect,” added Fergus and the couples felt a certain bonhomie in a trial shared.

  “Would you like to go to the show tonight?” Sylvie suggested to her husband as they left the restaurant an hour or so later, but the idea did not appeal:

  “It’s the comedian. I bet he’ll be crude and embarrassing, but we’ll feel obliged to laugh… I’d much rather do something else.”

  And so, instead, they made their way to the mellow lighting and soothing music of the Conservatory Bar where they ordered their Pimm’s, which to their initial disappointment were delivered without ice. Their waitress, however, returned just a few moments later holding a small silver bucket from which she used tongs to pluck cubes. Taking her time, she dropped them one by one into their drinks, each cracking audibly as she did, a sound Fergus had always found somehow satisfying and which tonight added to the already peaceful mood.

  “Do you think many couples are as relaxed as we are in each other’s company?” he asked, leaning back in his chair after the waitress had left.

  “Only the lucky ones!” she observed.

  Until ten and a half years ago Fergus had thought himself lucky and, for the first time since then – looking at his wife and perfectly relaxed in the easy surroundings, the ice clinking against the side of his full glass in response to the motion of the ship – he considered himself that way again. He felt a deep and quiet happiness in the moment and, for once, it was too well rooted to be chased away by the guilt of feeling good in a world where his daughter no longer existed.

  12

  Cornwall bound – May 1993

  Fergus, like Sylvie of course, had infinite recollections of his daughter, and that memory of her dancing professionally on stage in the holiday camp was certainly a special one, but there were others that were equally treasured.

  There were the big memories, the ones that came to mind frequently, kept fresh by the photos displayed around the house or in countless albums: summer holidays, family occasions, Justine’s graduation from university, her first day at school. But there were also those surprisingly small, long filed away memories which bubbled up unexpectedly out of nowhere, sometimes when Fergus was relaxing quietly, other times when he was concentrating hard on something completely unrelated: Justine at a childhood party perhaps; or, when she was around eight, fascinated by an enormous house spider crawling across the living room floor; or, as little more than a toddler in his own parents’ garden, laughing happily as she was chased around and around by her grandmother; or falling over while roller skating and requiring the biggest of fatherly hugs before the pain would go away; or as a young teenager teaching him to bake biscuits and excitedly showering him with praise as they emerged perfectly from the oven.

  One of his favourite memories, however, lay somewhere in scale between those milestone events and those cameo moments of her short life: it was the briefest of breaks away, just the two of them, stealing a day from work and school, to enjoy a long weekend together in the most extreme south westerly corner of the country, while Sylvie was away visiting a sick friend.

  Justine had been an unusual mixture: quite girlish in her love of dance, working her way effortlessly through the grades; but, in a gamine-like manner, quite boyish as well, not worrying too much about clothes and make-up, but preferring to be outdoors, enjoying nature and the fresh Chiltern air. She also loved trains, not the nostalgic love the elderly might have for steam engines, but a fascination for fast, super-sleek, modern, long distance, express trains. It wasn’t that she was actually a train spotter, she wouldn’t collect numbers or anything like that, but she was spellbound by the idea of trains travelling across the country to far off places at what, then at least, were considered great speeds.

  Fergus lost track of the number of times he had taken her to one London terminus or another, her favourites being Euston, King’s Cross and Paddington, because it was from these that trains travelled the furthest distances up and across the country. She loved the bustle, the announcements, the various sandwich and coffee outlets. It seemed to her that these big stations were almost towns in their own right. She marvelled at Euston and the prospect of trains going to Liverpool and Manchester, Glasgow even, wha
t could be more exotic, she thought? From King’s Cross trains went all the way to Edinburgh and then once, when she was about nine, they even noticed a train leaving at precisely noon and destined for Inverness.

  “Where is that?” she had asked.

  “It’s pretty much at the very top of Scotland, I think about five hundred and fifty miles away,” he had replied. To her, this was extraordinarily distant and may as well have been on the far side of the moon. Then of course there were buffet and restaurant cars: yes, people ate meals on trains! It was a world Justine longed to sample, but there was never a need for them to take a long distance train anywhere, and so she had to make the most of very occasional trips on the local commuter services from home to London and back.

  When Justine was eleven, Fergus had decided to use the weekend when Sylvie was visiting her sick friend to correct this, secretly booking himself and Justine the sleeper train from Paddington to Penzance for the Friday night and the Scillonian Ferry on to the Isles of Scilly the next morning. He arranged a night there on St Mary’s in a Bed and Breakfast, giving them around thirty hours on the islands in total, before taking the ship back to Penzance late on the Sunday afternoon. He thought about the night train home, but he suspected Justine would have been too tired for school the next day. Anyway, he was keen she should also experience the journey back in the daytime, with England rushing past the window, and, in particular, he wanted her to witness the dramatic and beautiful run along the South Devon coast by Dawlish. So, he booked the Sunday night in Penzance before a direct train back to London at half past ten the following morning. He wished the trip to be perfect, and, fearing disillusion at finding herself in an overcrowded standard carriage, reserved seats in first class. In so doing he also knew they would be served food on board and, in this way, he hoped the romantic imaginings of his daughter about long distance rail travel could be preserved a little longer.

  This was the master plan anyway and he prayed hard that the real world wouldn’t intervene, perhaps in the form of points failures, cancelled ferries, heavy rain or anything else that could foil the dream. The missed day at school on the Monday was a complication and Fergus was nervous to ask permission, in case he were turned down. Instead he decided he would simply phone from Penzance, when it was too late for the school to object, offering to come in to see the headmistress if it was a problem. As Justine was doing well and her attendance until now had been flawless, he hoped they might be tolerant about this one father and daughter adventure.

  He didn’t actually tell Justine about it until they were driving back from the friend’s house where, in her mother’s absence, she had gone after school on the Friday they were due to leave.

  “You’d better pack a small bag Just, we are going on a trip!”

  “Where to?” she asked. Had he said they were going around the world she could not have been more excited by what she heard and, fleetingly, his own delight at her reaction was punctured by a sadness that she would not be a young girl for much longer. Would she still be pleased to spend time with her father when she became a teenager? He needn’t have worried.

  So, at eleven o’clock in the evening, they arrived at Paddington station. Justine soaked up the atmosphere: all the commuters had long gone and it felt to her as if she had entered a secret world of late night activity which few were privileged to see. Their train didn’t leave for fifty minutes, but it was already alongside at platform one and they looked at the sleeper carriages in wonder… by morning these would have taken them three hundred miles south west, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. They resisted the temptation to board immediately, wandering the station a while longer, taking it all in, before finally clambering aboard and being shown to their cabin in Coach D by a particularly jovial attendant, with a strong west country accent.

  Their little home from home was going to be a tight squeeze, but if there had been a world prize for cosiness it would surely have won. There were bunk beds running along the left side of the cabin, so their heads would be at the door end and their feet by the window, which was hidden by a blind. Beneath that was a table which, upon lifting its lid, revealed a basin. Between the bunk beds and the right hand wall there was insufficient space for the two of them to pass, but, as long as one of them sat out of the way, all problems were solved. A little step ladder, christened the ‘stairway to heaven’ by Fergus, led up to the top bunk and Justine quickly climbed it to claim her more adventurous bed.

  Fergus made sure she knew how to operate the cabin door and then left her to change in private, while he did the same in one of the uncharacteristically spacious train toilets at the end of the sleeper carriage. Walking back down the corridor in his pyjamas, he knocked on the cabin door.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Nearly,” she replied. Not for the last time in his life, Fergus found himself in a public place in his nightwear, as he muttered ‘Good evening’ to fellow travellers being guided towards their own berths. Eventually the cabin door opened and he could retreat inside to safety.

  It was nearly time for the train to depart and Fergus had an idea. He turned the lights off and then opened the blind. Through the window they could see the empty adjacent platform and a train pulling into another beyond that. Then, on the dot of ten to midnight, and so smoothly it took them a second or two to notice, they started moving. They watched Paddington station slip away and then the city pass before their eyes – the sidings, the flyovers, the tall blocks of flats, the warehouses and factories – as the train tore contemptuously through anonymous local stations and faster and faster out into both the suburbs and the night.

  “Come on,” Fergus said, pulling the blind back down, “if we want to make the most of tomorrow we should try to get some sleep.” She hugged him and scrambled back up the ladder.

  “Dad, this is so great,” he heard a voice say quietly in the darkness just a few moments later.

  “Yes it is, isn’t it?” he replied, “and tomorrow we’ll see the sea.” But he could tell that, at the end of a long day and with the rocking of the train and the rhythm of the tracks, she was already asleep. He lay awake a while longer, feeling a mixture of satisfaction at a job well done so far, anxiety as to whether he could maintain this success and happiness at the prospect of a weekend away with his daughter. Gradually these feelings blurred and merged as the clickerty clack, clickerty clack of the train overpowered him and he too was overcome by sleep.

  Justine didn’t wake until Truro at seven the next morning, Fergus, unfortunately, enjoyed a less good night, spending it sometimes dreaming he was on a train, sometimes conscious he really was on one, and often residing in a twilight world somewhere in between. It was fitful rest at best and he was wide awake again by Plymouth, but he still felt topped up with sufficient sleep to get through an exciting day ahead. He opened the door when the jovial attendant knocked with a breakfast tray of coffee for him, orange juice for Justine and croissants for them both:

  “Good moornin’, we’ll be arrivin’ ’n Penzaance in an ’ower.”

  After they had eaten, they repeated the previous night’s changing arrangements, but at least this time Fergus was fully dressed as he waited patiently for his daughter to re-open the cabin door to let him back in. Their window looked out on the right hand side of the train but Fergus, who had travelled this route previously many years ago, knew that the approach into Penzance was best seen from the left. With just ten minutes to go he said:

  “Come, I’d like you to see something.”

  They went into the corridor outside their cabin and stood watching the scenery until, between the bushes flashing by, they spied St Michael’s Mount in the distance. After a few moments, the countryside fell away entirely and the bay opened out before them, shimmering in the morning light, the castle perched high on its island, which was linked to the shore by a causeway, half submerged beneath an ebbing or flowing tide.

  “Wow!” said J
ustine, turning and looking excitedly into her father’s face, and he felt he could burst at his daughter’s happiness.

  Five minutes later, they pulled into Penzance station, packed up their stuff, disembarked on to the platform and walked to the concourse, Justine admiring the locomotive at the front of their train which had hauled them valiantly through the night, all the way from London. Penzance in the morning had a very different feel from Paddington late in the evening: different worlds positioned at either extreme of the day and either end of a very long railway track. The laments of the seagulls added to the distinction.

  “Very end of the line,” remarked Fergus.

  “Very,” agreed Justine, seeking to take in what, for her, was the beauty of an exotic and distant railway terminus. What other station had its signs, proudly telling passengers where they had finally arrived, rising out of lush beds of greenery and palms, to the backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean? Surely they had arrived at the very end of England, perhaps even the edge of the world itself.

  From the station Fergus and Justine walked, rucksacks on backs, the half mile or so to where the Scillonian ferry was docked. They breathed in deep lungfuls of fresh sea air as they marched, tasting the salt on the light ocean wind blowing against their faces, and on whose currents the gulls above wheeled, crying in joy or despair, or perhaps simply hunger. Carried on the same breeze was the unmistakable smell of old seaweed that had been abandoned by a high tide on the stony beach ahead. Meanwhile, two enormous buoys, which had once upon a time been hauled out of the ocean, lay as decorations against a cottage wall, nostalgic for the waters from which they had long ago been dragged. These were the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of the Atlantic and they were everywhere: Fergus and Justine felt high on them.

  The Scillonian sailed at nine o’clock, so the timing was perfect and soon they were on board waiting to cast off. The ship was small, with two levels of deck outside and three in, though the lowest was little more than a space for weary or nauseous passengers to crash out and sleep. The other two levels comprised lounges, a shop and a small café. Fergus and Justine found places on the starboard side of the upper outside deck, figuring that from there they would see the best views of the Cornish coastline, as they headed even further south west. Fergus had been worried that sea sickness, caused by an untimely storm, could ruin the whole trip and booking the ferry had therefore been a gamble, but by now it was clear it was one that had paid off: it was going to be a gorgeous spring day and the forecast for tomorrow was just as promising.