Out of the Shelter

by David Lodge

  The afternoon passed slowly. He ate the remainder of his sandwiches, then got out the current number of Cycling, which he had kept unread for this purpose. His subscription to this magazine dated from two years ago, when he had suddenly developed an enthusiasm for cycling. He had pestered his parents into buying him a sports bike which he had gradually equipped with all the approved accessories – water flasks, bored alloy hubs, 4-speed derailleur gear, etc., and which he rode to school, striving to cut seconds off his best time by such dangerous expedients as using buses for pacemakers. With Jonesy and Blinker he had sometimes attended the cycle races at Herne Hill, and gloried in the triumphs of Reg Harris, the only British athlete who seemed to be able to win anything against foreign competition. His enthusiasm for the sport had gradually ebbed away – not quite to the point, however, where he felt impelled to cancel his subscription to Cycling. Its appearance on the doormat every Wednesday still lit a feeble flicker of interest in him, and the very predictability and monotony of its articles, blurred photographs and pages of small ads, soothed his study-wearied brain. But this afternoon the spell seemed finally broken. He realized he was deeply bored with Cycling, and would not be sorry if he never saw another copy again.

  Then there was nothing much to do except watch the other passengers. The party of schoolgirls was much in evidence, jumping up and down restlessly, brushing back their hair and holding down their skirts in the breeze, leaning over the rails and pestering their teachers with questions. There was one girl among them whom he thought was rather attractive, a girl with a long black pony-tail and a pale oval face, but she sat next to one of the teachers most of the time and did not join in the general skirmishing. Then someone called her to the side of the ship, and she rose to her feet and threaded her way gracefully through the crowd. He stood up himself and saw, with a shock of surprise and excitement – land! He pushed his way to the rail and stared at the long, low shoreline that divided sea and sky. Was it Belgium already, or France? It was Europe, anyway, his first sight of it, palpably foreign even at this distance, low and yellowy-brown, very different from the grass-topped white cliffs of England.

  He stayed there for the rest of the voyage, elbows on the rail and hands cupping his chin, gazing pensively at the foreign shore, trying to extract from its indistinct outline some clue or guide for comporting himself upon it. As they entered Ostend harbour he could see the people on the jetty clearly, bathed in the yellow light of the slanting sun, their elongated shadows stretching towards the ship as they smiled and waved. They seemed very friendly; but the Belgians were, after all, our allies in the war, he thought, gazing over their heads at the foreign-looking streets and squares, the gaily-striped umbrellas on the pavements outside the cafés, the advertisements for Martini and Belge cigarettes. Nothing could happen to you in Belgium.

  The water churned and the boat vibrated as the propellers brought it to a halt. They were about to dock. With a spasm of panic he realized that he had forgotten all about his bag. But, pushing through the crowd, he found it safe where he had left it. There was, on reflection, little chance that anyone would try to steal it. The staircases were jammed tight with people waiting to get off the boat.

  Muffled shouts rose from the bowels of the ship, and the throng at the head of the stairs began to heave and sway as a group of Belgian porters, dressed in coarse blue denim, forced their way through. Porteur! Porteur! they cried, with an elongated vowel that hovered between French and English. A high, confident voice called:

  – Yes, these two here, please!

  Timothy, curious to observe the transaction, turned his head, but a squat porter with a bristly chin interposed himself

  – Porteur? he demanded.

  – Er . . .

  Timothy hesitated. The man snatched his bag, heaved it on to his shoulder with what sounded like a curse, and forced his badge under Timothy’s nose.

  – Dirty Floor, he appeared to say, and disappeared into the crowd.

  – Hey! Timothy protested weakly. Helplessly he watched his bag receding over the heads of the other passengers, until a sudden movement of the crowd pitched him down the staircase. As he shuffled in line off the boat he wondered miserably how and where and even whether he would recover his bag. For all its inconvenient bulk, it was a comforting presence. Its labels were proof that he had come from somewhere definite and was going somewhere definite – as long as he hung on to it he felt that he would eventually end up, like a parcel, either at Heidelberg or back home. Dirty floor must have meant thirty-four, for that was the number on the man’s badge – but where was he supposed to meet him?

  The porter wasn’t at Passport Control. He wasn’t in the Customs shed, where passengers were being quickly waved through – it seemed to be a formality. Timothy moved on and found himself in the station. It was very big and crowded, and looked more like a street into which railway engines had strayed, with lots of shops and cafés with tables outside them, and a rich foreign smell in the air. Impossible to find anyone here. Perhaps the porter had read the labels on his bag and was waiting for him at the platform. But which platform? He spotted a large indicator board and, after struggling with the twenty-four-hour timetable, identified his train, which was leaving from number seven platform. Pleased with this feat, he hurried to platform seven. The train was filling up, but there was no sign of his porter.

  He was suddenly conscious of a very full bladder, and cursed himself for not having gone to the lavatory on the boat. To go now would increase the risk of missing his porter, but he didn’t think he could last for another twenty-five minutes, when his train was due to depart. He looked around desperately for a Gents, remembered that it wouldn’t be called that, and picked out a sign saying Hommes above a stone staircase. He ran down, came face to face with a woman in a white coat sitting at a table, and retreated rapidly up the stairs. He inspected the sign again. It indubitably said Hommes. He went round to the other side, where there was another staircase marked Dames. Was there some perverse Belgium custom of calling Gents, Ladies, and Ladies, Gents? He peered cautiously down the stairs and glimpsed the same woman in the white coat. He gave up the mystery, and the attempt to relieve himself, for time was running short. His train would be leaving soon, without him, or without his bag, or both.

  It was the nightmare he had always feared, from the moment the journey had been decided upon. He took out his school cap and put it on, as though raising a distress signal. He had to get someone’s help, somebody who spoke English, for his confidence in his French, never strong, had melted away in the crisis. He stopped a man in the uniform of a Cook’s courier.

  – Excuse me, but have you seen a porter, number thirty-floor, anywhere? With a blue bag?

  The man regarded him haughtily.

  – Are you a Cook’s tourist, sir?

  – No, but I’m English, he pleaded.

  At that moment he heard the sweet, the indescribably sweet cry of Dirty Floor! Dirty Floor! just behind him. The porter threw up his hands and gave vent to a rapid stream of French. Timothy could guess what the gist of it was.

  – Pardon, he said, je ne sais pas.

  – Bruxelles? the man demanded.

  – Mannheim. The porter looked at Timothy as if he doubted whether he would get so far.

  – Wagon-lit?

  – No. Non.

  The porter shook his head and set off, muttering under his breath, Timothy following humbly behind. He gave the man his smallest-denomination Belgian note, worth about ten shillings, and waited hopefully for change. The man pocketed the note expressionlessly and marched away. There were no seats left on the train and he had to stand in the corridor. But at least he was aboard, and probably lots of people would get out at Brussels.

  The train stopped three times in Brussels, but nobody got out. On the contrary, hundreds more people got in. The corridor filled up. His bag disappeared under a mountain of other people’s baggage, and he was unable even to reach it. The air was thick with pungent cig
arette smoke, the odours of cheese, garlic and perspiration, and a mixture of foreign accents – French, German and something in between which he thought was probably Flemish. The prospect of the night’s journey looked increasingly grim. On the way to Brussels there had at least been something to look at – the long, flat flelds, where people were still working in the fading light, straightening up to wave as the train rushed past, and the neat little farmhouses, white-walled and red-roofed; but when they emerged from the tunnels of Brussels, it was quite dark. Now and again the lights of a town flashed past, and at Liège the sky was dramatically lit by the red glare of factory furnaces, reminding him of the docks burning in the Blitz. But for the most part he could see nothing but his own wan reflection in the windows.

  The window ledge had on it a small notice in three languages:

  Ne pas se pencher au dehors

  Nicht hinauslehnen

  Do not lean out of the window

  But he heard no English voice in the corridor, except when the brown-and-gold-blazered schoolgirls (they were still dogging his tracks) emerged from their reserved compartments and squeezed past on their way to the W.C. They came in pairs, usually, lifting their brown-stockinged legs over the luggage like ponies, nervously tossing back their manes of hair, and giggling inanely. They seemed to spend hours in the W.C.

  The girl with the black pony-tail made her visit alone. She was carrying a small tartan toilet bag. As she passed, the train swerved across some points and she was thrown against him.

  – Oh! Sorry! she exclaimed. But she looked more vexed than sorry.

  – It’s all right, he said, and then wished he had said something more gallant, like, Are you all right? He might even have steadied her with a deftly placed hand. Perhaps she would say something to him on her way back.

  Using the window as a mirror, he combed back his long forelock; it fell forward across his brow almost immediately. He straightened his school tie, but little could be done to improve its appearance, for the fabric was strained and creased just under the knot. His shirt collar was grimy and curling up at the points. He pushed his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose – they had always been a little too big – and fingered the pimple at the corner of his mouth exploratively. Even in the poor reflection of the window he could see the dark shadow on his upper lip where a downy moustache was beginning to grow. He heard the door of the W.C. open and shut, and straightened himself to his full height against the wall of the corridor.

  The girl passed him without a glance.

  Timothy went into the W.C. There was a faint smell of scent in the air, soap or perfume, and a long black hair in the washbasin. He urinated and washed his hands. The receptacle for used paper towels was already overflowing, but there was a white enamel bin low down on one wall. He flipped up the lid with his foot and, as he tossed in his towel, glimpsed at the bottom what looked like a bloody bandage. It was a strange, disturbing sight. Was somebody ill on the train, he wondered – or injured? Some criminal on the run, staunching his wounds and biting his lip until he reached safety? Anything, he felt, could happen on this train.

  He sat down on the seat of the W.C. to ease his aching legs, and wondered how long he could stay there before people began knocking on the door. Someone knocked on the door.

  It was the ticket collector. Timothy yielded the W.C. to another pair of schoolgirls, and presented his ticket for inspection. He felt very thirsty. There was an apple left in his bag, but the bag was at this moment crushed irretrievably under the weight of two large suitcases and an even larger woman. He glanced at his watch. Six hours still to go, and he already felt exhausted. He leaned against the wall of the corridor and closed his eyes, letting his head roll with the swaying motion of the train. He thought about the girl with the black pony-tail, and the soft concussion of her body against his when the movement of the train threw her against him. He rehearsed the incident a hundred times in his mind, varying and perfecting his responses each time, until gradually he invented a whole relationship springing from the encounter, that turned on the girl somehow having a reserved compartment entirely to herself, which she invited him to share, where they talked and talked through the night until she dropped asleep with her head resting on his shoulder and the train broke down at Mannheim and her school party went to Heidelberg instead of Innsbruck and . . .

  A sudden deceleration of the train threw him off balance. When it stopped they did not appear to be in a station, for there were no lights to be seen outside the windows. Then a door opened and two uniformed men climbed into the carriage and called out something in thick, guttural accents. The passengers standing in the corridor began to fumble in their pockets and handbags for passports. They must be at the German border.

  As he watched the two men, who were dressed like soldiers, moving slowly towards him under the dim lights of the corridor, thumbing through the documents offered to them with, it seemed to Timothy, an unduly suspicious scrutiny, the ghosts of old half-remembered films about Nazi-occupied Europe, the Gestapo and the S.S., escaping prisoners of war and the Resistance, walked across his heart. The corridor was hushed, apart from the curt questions and replies. It seemed to him that the passengers were cowed and anxious, as if any of them might expect to be dragged off the train for some irregularity in their papers. He felt a twinge of anxiety about the poor likeness of his passport photograph, and looked again at the visa for which he had queued two weary hours outside the German Embassy in Kensington: a smudgy black imprint of ugly, unpronounceable words, like Grenzübergangsstelle and einschlieblich, stamped with the insignia of a scrawny eagle that seemed to be flexing its wings menacingly and squawking in spiteful rage. A fitting, if sinister emblem for Germany, he thought. Now it was his turn.

  With a thumping heart, he offered his passport. The man glanced at his photograph, flipped to the visa and stamped the opposite page. Timothy felt a surge of relief. Then the other uniformed man addressed him in German. Timothy stared blankly. Was there something wrong with his passport after all? The other man showed it to his colleague.

  – Englisch? said the latter.

  – Yes, said Timothy. Ja, he added helpfully. This was a mistake, for another long, incomprehensible question in German followed. His knowledge of the language was limited to a few words derived from comics and war-films – Achtung, Schweinhund, Dummkopf, kaput – none of which seemed useful at the moment.

  – I’m sorry, he said. I don’t speak German.

  A man standing beside him leaned over and said:

  – They want to know vat smuggle you haf.

  – No smuggle, said Timothy.

  After a few more questions, interpreted by the man, the two officials moved on. Half an hour later, the train rolled into a large, bleak station.

  – Aachen . . . Aachen . . . Aachen! blared the loudspeakers. The harsh, catarrhal syllables were a violence to the ears and the spirit. The signs, for some reason, said Bad Aachen, and it seemed appropriate. Bad Aachen. Bad Germany.

  His last hope of getting a seat vanished. More crowds besieged the train and surged aboard, pushing and struggling, impeding the few passengers who wanted to alight. Then, when the carriages and corridors were packed tight, and the platforms empty, the train stood stationary for another half-hour.

  They moved off at last. The lights of Aachen fell away. Conversation in the corridor became muted as the passengers began to compose themselves for the night, squatting on suitcases, or on the floor, cradling their heads on their knees. Soon Timothy and a young man further along the corridor, who was reading, holding up his book to catch the dim light of the corridor lamps, were the only passengers who were upright and awake. Some instinct restrained Timothy from sliding to the floor. As long as he remained upright, he felt, he resisted the nightmare of this journey, held it precariously at a distance, as some threatening spell or ordeal which would presently pass, restoring him to the ordered, English-speaking daylight world to which he belonged, where journeys were not a l
ong struggle for suvival. His fellow-passengers evidently had lower expectations. He had a sense that, in Europe, life had always been like this, like an endless train journey through the night, across frontiers, loudspeakers blaring harshly over bleak platforms, uniformed men waking you up to examine your papers, no more immediate end in view than to make a little space for yourself and snatch a little sleep. He wondered if the young man reading the book was English too.

  Then gradually weariness overcame his resistance. He sank to the floor, folding his raincoat to make a cushion. His head rested against someone’s canvas grip. With a final abandonment of reserve, he loosened the shoelaces on his swollen feet and stretched out his legs. He closed his eyes and dozed.

  The train picked up speed. The percussion of its wheels drummed in his ears, shifting in rhythm and resonance as it clattered over points and rumbled across bridges. He rolled and swayed unresistingly with its motion. He was dimly conscious that people were stepping over him, but he did not bother to move. It was the schoolgirls, going to the lavatory again. They stepped over him in a steady procession and he was looking up under their skirts, at their dark blue knickers, with handkerchiefs tucked under the elastic. The girl with the black pony-tail had no knickers on. Unable to move forward, she straddled him, and he saw all the smooth pearl-pink fissured wedge of flesh between her thighs and a delicious warmth welled up inside him and spilled over.

  He woke, feeling wet and sticky at his crotch, but couldn’t be bothered to go to the W.C. to clean up. In his present state, the extra discomfort was negligible. After a time his skin dried and he fell into a deep sleep.

  He woke again with a pain in his back. His arm was twisted under his body and, as he sat up, tingled painfully with pins and needles. He struggled stiffly to his feet and staggered in the swaying corridor. He yawned, rubbed his eyes and checked his watch: 4.15. That was all right, then – he hadn’t gone past Mannheim.