The woman took their order for morning tea, which would be served, she said, just before they drew in to Glasgow. Then it would be on to Fort William, where they would arrive shortly after ten. Then, with a smile, she left them.
Barbara put her case on the rack, and then raised the window blind. As she did so, she caught sight of her blurred reflection in the blank glass of the window. I am on a train with my fiancé, she thought. I am going to Scotland. I am with the most beautiful man I have ever met – yes, he really is that – and it is I, Barbara Ragg, who has him. He is mine. Mine.
It was an unexpected thought, a form of stocktaking in which we all engage from time to time. We contemplate our situation and say to ourselves, Here am I, doing this; me, of all people, doing this – who would have thought? We ask ourselves how we got what we have got and why Nemesis does not yet appear to have noticed. It is not a matter of desert. It was not that now, at least in Barbara’s case; for her it was more of a feeling of wonder that it had happened at all. It had not been in her script. It was not meant to be like this.
She turned round. Hugh was standing behind her.
“My darling, beautiful, wonderful Barbie,” he whispered.
The first part of this was fine; the latter not quite. He had never called her Barbie before.
She made light of it. She smiled. “Barbie™?”
He put his arms around her. “Barbie. Well, its short for Barbara, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But … But do you know who Barbie™ is?”
Hugh looked puzzled. He planted a kiss on her brow. He was wearing some sort of cologne; there was the scent of sandalwood. “No.”
“She’s a doll.”
Hugh smiled. “I knew somebody who called his girlfriend ‘doll’. She seemed to like it. She was one of those blondes, you know, not a great intellectual. Doll seemed to suit her.”
The train gave a sudden shudder.
“We’re on our way,” said Hugh. Then he whispered, “To be in love and to be on the sleeper. Bliss.”
Barbara closed her eyes. “Oh, Hugh …” And then she thought: Barbie. Few mistakes were genuinely without meaning – Professor Freud had told us that, and the lesson still stood. So was Barbie Barbie or another Barbie? Or even her? Or was she Barbie? It was enough to confuse even a semiotician.
“I have a surprise for you,” said Hugh.
Chapter 31: The Cool Kindliness of Sheets
The surprise that Hugh had for Barbara was revealed shortly after the sleeper train slipped out of Euston, rocking through the somnolent suburbs of London, headed for Scotland and the Great Glen. The surprise was a demonstration – nothing more than that – of a special way of keeping the interconnecting door between their two compartments open during the journey. This was done by attaching one end of a leather belt to a coat hook in one compartment and the other end to a second coat hook in the other.
Barbara watched, and if her smile seemed rueful, it was. What had she expected? When a devastatingly handsome man, one whom one can – with complete pride – call one’s fiancé, says that he has a surprise in store, what is one entitled to expect? A present of some sort, perhaps? Something one would never buy oneself – an item of jewellery, a brooch, a set of earrings. Or, more imaginatively, and perhaps even more romantically, a concealed miniature picnic basket, produced and opened to reveal a tiny pack of delicate sandwiches – translucent cucumber slices on slivers of bread – a half-bottle of champagne, kept chilled in a tight-fitting ice-filled life-vest, and flecked quails’ eggs, as neat and beautiful as the tiny birds that had laid them. Such a picnic could be eaten in the half-light of the sleeper compartment, the two of them perched companionably on the one bunk, like two children enjoying a midnight feast in the far-fetched pages of some schooldays story. One would not expect merely this, a mundane way of keeping a door from opening and closing with the movement of the train.
“Now we’ll be able to talk,” said Hugh, pointing at his vaguely Heath Robinson arrangement.
She looked down, a look tinged with regret. “Of course.”
“Talking in the darkness is very special,” said Hugh. “You hear your words going out into the night, almost like a prayer – because you can’t see the person you’re addressing them to.”
He took off his jacket. She saw that a button was missing from his shirt; there was a glimpse of brown beneath. He was one of these people who did not need the sun to look tanned. He took off his shoes. There was a hole in one of his socks exposing the tip of a toe; it made her smile. He looked so vulnerable.
“What’s funny?”
She pointed to his holed sock. “Your poor toe.”
He wiggled the toe. “This little piggy,” he said, “went …”
“If you do that,” she said, “you’ll enlarge the hole.”
Hugh finished the line – the pig’s destination should not remain unclear – “Went to market. What do you think that means? All those nursery rhymes have a hidden meaning, you know. Often quite sinister.”
“They can be dreadful,” agreed Barbara. “They’re full of violence and cruelty.” She paused. “Why do you think we feel the need to scare our children?”
Hugh thought for a moment. He wiggled his exposed toe again. “Bettelheim?” he asked.
“Oh. The Uses of …” The uses of something.
“Of enchantment. The Uses of Enchantment.”
“Of course.”
Hugh bent down and started to remove a sock. She watched him; the simple act of getting undressed in a confined space brought home the intimacy of the relationship into which she had entered. This was not occasional, which had been the nature of her relationship with Oedipus, and the boyfriend who, some years previously, had preceded him. It was quotidian, diurnal–nocturnal. She averted her eyes lest he see her looking upon him, as biblical language would have it; one would not want to be found looking upon another.
He took off the other sock. “Bettelheim said that violence in fairy stories and the like has a very important function. It enables us to experience it as children, and to deal with it. If you look something in the face, then you are no longer frightened of it.”
He turned away from her and switched out the main light in the compartment. The bunk reading-light, though, was still on, giving out a low, reassuring glow. The train rocked, and he had to reach out to steady himself by holding onto Barbara’s shoulder; she was already seated on the edge of the bed. Once steadied, he sat down.
“I’m very glad that you’re coming to Scotland,” he said.
She said that she was glad too. But she hardly knew Scotland, she added; it seemed very far away, particularly places with names like Fort William. “It makes it sound like a distant outpost.”
“It is.”
“But a fort. Were the locals so unfriendly?”
“At one time, yes. Remember that it was in the heart of Jacobite territory. It was occupied. Our culture was suppressed. Our national dress interdicted.”
He shifted round and lay back on the bunk, his shirt riding up over the flat of his stomach.
“ ‘How many miles to Babylon?’” he recited. “ ‘Three score and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.’”
Barbara turned and lay beside him on the bunk; there was not enough room, and had the train stopped suddenly she would undoubtedly have fallen off.
“I should get to my bunk,” Hugh said. “There really isn’t enough room for two.”
She wanted him to stay, but it was impractical. “I wish you could stay,” she said. “Then we could lie here, carried sideways through the night, just as that poet didn’t like. What was his name?”
“Norman McCaig.”
“Yes, like him.”
“Unlike him. We’d like it.”
She sat up in order to allow him to get off the bunk. As she watched him move past her and cross to the narrow door into his own compartment, she felt a sudden pang of sorrow. It was a premonition of loss, she decid
ed; she would lose him, this beautiful stranger. For that was what he was to her still, a stranger who had come into her life, a gift from somewhere else altogether. What if he died? People did, even the young; people died.
Barbara prepared herself for bed, and then slipped between the sheets. Trains were scruffy places usually, but the sleepers had clean, beautifully ironed sheets, slightly rough to the touch as good linen and cotton can be. Rupert Brooke wrote of the “rough male kiss of blankets”; and what did he say of sheets? “The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble.” That was it.
She reached up and turned out her reading-light. Through the interconnecting door she saw that Hugh had done the same. She felt safe; the morbid thoughts of a few moments earlier, when she had imagined that she might lose him, had dissipated. She was safe.
He was saying something, muttering, and it suddenly occurred to Barbara that it was a prayer. It occurred to her, too, that she had never actually asked him whether he believed in God. Who asked such a question of a lover, even of a fiancé, these days?
She strained to hear the words. It was in fact not a prayer, but a poem.
Travelling northwards through the night
Heading to a Scotland
Of forbidding mountains, and poetry,
And sea; home to me, of course,
But to one whom I love
A place of unknown and unpronounceable names;
May the rain that will surely greet us
Be gentle; may the sky over Ardnamurchan
Allow a glimpse of islands, of Coll, perhaps,
Or Tiree; may she encounter kindness
And the things that kindness brings;
My wishes for her, now, the one I love,
As we are travel northwards through the night.
Barbara lay in complete silence. She could have slipped out of bed and embraced Hugh, hugged him, showered him with kisses of gratitude. But she did not do this, because she was awed by the moment. “My wishes for her, now, the one I love.” That’s me, she thought. That’s me.
Chapter 32: A Homeopathic Joke
Dee had discovered from experience that opening the Pimlico Vitamin and Supplement Agency on a Sunday brought particularly good results. She had made this lucrative discovery a couple of years earlier when she had gone into the shop on a rather dreary Sunday to do a stocktaking and had inadvertently turned the Closed sign to Open. This had resulted in a stream of customers, most of whom spent considerably more than the average. The average spend of her customers on weekdays was £6.38; on that Sunday it reached £18.76. A subsequent trial Sunday opening had resulted in an even higher spend of £23.43. That clinched matters, and from then on the Vitamin and Supplement Agency opened its doors at eleven on a Sunday morning and remained open until five in the afternoon.
She had tried to work out why Sunday should be so successful. It was not the case for every business – a nearby commercial neighbour who ran a small card shop sold practically nothing on a Sunday, and spent her Sundays tackling the more difficult weekend crosswords. Another trader at the end of the street, a dress shop for thirty-somethings, did a certain amount of business round about eleven in the morning, only to have these purchases almost invariably returned by five o’clock the same afternoon. The owner was puzzled, until the realisation dawned: her customers were buying the dresses purely in order to wear them to Sunday brunches and lunches at friends’ houses before returning them for specious reasons later in the afternoon. It was a radical solution to the complaint of having nothing to wear, or at least nothing that one’s friends had not seen several times before. Fashion for free, as one offender so honestly put it; one can, after all, be honest about dishonesty.
“We have become a thoroughly unscrupulous nation,” said the shopkeeper to Dee one day.
“Have we?” asked Dee.
“Oh yes. There’s been a survey, you know. And they – the scientists or whatever – found that fewer than half the men asked about this phenomenon of pretending to buy a dress thought that it was dishonest.”
“And women?” asked Dee.
“I remember the figure exactly. Eighty-eight-point-five per cent thought it was dishonest.”
“Well, there you are,” said Dee. “It shows that we aren’t all bad.”
The other woman disagreed. “Not at all. The fact that eighty-eight-point-five per cent of women thought it was a dishonest thing to do wouldn’t necessarily stop them doing it. They all do it – or most of them – even if they think it’s dishonest. They just don’t care.”
Dee sighed. She would never do it herself, but she suspected that the shopkeeper was right, most people now would do this sort of thing without hesitation. Look at the way people treat insurance companies, she thought; look at the way they think nothing of claiming for things that they haven’t lost. Fiddler nation, she thought.
It was all very interesting, if depressing, but it did not address the issue of why Sunday should be such a good day for selling vitamins. The answer, she suspected, had to do with what some people got up to on Saturdays. If people behaved in a virtuous way on a Sunday – and Dee was firm in her conviction that the buying and taking of vitamins was an entirely virtuous activity –it was entirely possible that they were compensating for having behaved in a vicious way on the Saturday night. And to a large extent, people did. They drank too much; they ate to excess; they stayed up too late. With the result that on Sunday, if they walked past a vitamin shop, their consciences pricked them like a thorn.
Now, sitting at the till of her shop, reading the latest copy of Anti-oxidant News, she kept half an eye on a couple of customers huddled at the back of the shop in the flower remedies section. In general, her customers did not steal; on Sundays at least, they were clean-living types, with consciences as clear as their lower intestines (or that was the case for those who underwent regular colonic irrigation, anyway). No, she need not worry too much about shoplifting.
But there was something that did worry her. She was reading a report in Anti-oxidant News to the effect that a new study purported to show that homeopathic remedies achieved no better results than placebos. This worried Dee. Principally, she doubted it were true; everything in her rebelled against the thought that mere evidence-based medicine should seek to debunk an entire section of her shop, for that, indeed, was what she had, half a wall of homeopathic remedies, designed to deal with a wide range of those ills to which the mortal flesh was heir.
She read on. “The authors of this so-called study” – that was fighting talk, thought Dee, with approval – “argue that the very small dilutions of the active ingredient cannot possibly have an effect on the human body. They forget succussing, of course. So many critics of homeopathy forget about succussing.”
“Exactly,” muttered Dee. “Succussing changes everything.”
“There is ample proof,” continued the article, “that the act of striking the container of the dilution ten times or more on a firm surface makes all the difference to the molecular properties of the water. So why do these allegedly dispassionate scientists ignore something as significant as that?”
Why indeed, thought Dee. Because they don’t want to find out the truth? Because they don’t want homeopathy to work? Talk about homeophobia!
Succussing: it was a most peculiar thing, but she was convinced of its efficacy. Only last night, a friend had given her a gin and tonic as a treat, and Dee had found herself succussing the glass against the arm of her chair. The drink had been delicious, and she was sure that it had been much more potent as a result of the succussing. Perhaps that was why James Bond called for his martini to be shaken, not stirred. It was for homeopathic reasons.
She was reflecting on the so-called study, her outrage growing, when she saw a tall man in his early thirties enter the shop. Many of her customers she already knew, but not this one; she was sure she would have noticed him before now.
He came to the cash desk. “You telephoned me,” he said. “Ric
hard Eadeston.”
She looked at him blankly. “Did I?” And then she remembered. Of course she had. This was Richard Eadeston, the man who described himself as a venture capitalist. She looked at him with renewed interest. So this was what a venture capitalist looked like. Rather dishy. An adventure capitalist, perhaps!
“Can I make you a cup of tea?” she offered. “Peppermint? Ginger? Mixed fruit?”
“I rather like peppermint,” he said. “It’s so refreshing. Thank you.”
“10x dilution?” said Dee, and then laughed. “Just a little homeopathic joke. Nothing serious.”
Chapter 33: Further Examination
“Delicious,” said Richard Eadeston, savouring his peppermint tea. “So delicate.”
“And it helps you concentrate,” said Dee. “You could take it when juggling figures, or whatever it is that you do.”
“Indeed.”
He looked at her over the rim of his teacup. She was not in the usual mould of his clients but she had an interesting face, he thought. Plucky. A risk-taker – in a rather fuzzy Age of Aquarius way, of course. There had been lots of girls like her when he had been an undergraduate at the University of Sussex. It was something to do with the air down there – Brighton and Glastonbury and places like that attracted these people.
“You weren’t at Sussex, were you?” he asked. “At university there, I mean.”
Dee showed her surprise. “Yes, I was, as it happens. How did …?”
“Oh, I just wondered,” said Richard. “There’s a Sussex look. I was there too, you know.”
They sized one another up wordlessly, discreetly computing ages. Yes, they might have been contemporaries.
He broke the silence. “Remember that pub? What was it called again?”
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