Trains and Lovers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  I imagined the hosts of those who yearned to own a Nicholas Poussin but who could only aspire to Gaspard; dissatisfied, restless, feeling bad about themselves because they would never have a real Poussin …

  “Why are you smiling?” asked Eleanor.

  “I was thinking of the Poussinless,” I said.

  Eleanor grinned. “They are always with us,” she muttered. “Isn’t that how the saying goes?”

  Geoffrey looked at her blankly. Then it dawned on him. “Like the poor?”

  She nodded. “Like the poor, Geoffrey.”

  “Nobody says that any more, my dear. So I would suggest it’s a said—past tense—rather than a saying.”

  He was pleased with this joke. Eleanor glanced at me, and I could tell what her glance meant.

  THE AUCTION HOUSE HAD A LIBRARY AT THE BACK of their building. It was not a large room, but by covering every inch of wall space with shelves the firm had managed to contain a collection of books and journals that was adequate for much of the research we needed to do. I used the library in preference to the desk I was given in a room shared with the other interns and one of two of the more recently appointed junior staff. I did this because I found it disconcerting to work in the same room as Hermione; I simply could not concentrate if she was there. I think that she felt the same about sharing a room with me, and by tacit consent we fell into a system of my working in the library if she needed to be in our shared office, and if she needed to be in the library I would resume my place in the office.

  That afternoon I sat in the library and stared at the photograph of the Dughet I had taken that morning. I had transferred the picture to my laptop, and this enabled me to blow up sections in order to examine them in much greater detail than would have been possible with the naked eye. I started with the figure of the shepherd, and then progressed to the sky. There was nothing exceptional in any of this, but then I looked at the picture in its entirety. It was at this point that I realised what it was that was troubling me: something was happening in the background, in a small section of landscape below the hillside. There was something there: not just trees and the shining surface of a lake, but a puff of white smoke, tiny but unmistakeable. And beneath it, the source of the smoke, a minuscule black pipe that on closer examination revealed itself as being the funnel of a steam train.

  For a few moments I stared at this in disbelief. This was impossible. This was a painting executed in the first half of the seventeenth century by an artist who had never seen a steam train. Yes, Leonardo da Vinci drew helicopters, but he was an exception, and his helicopters were never more than an idea.

  I looked again. Was I imagining it? No, whichever way I peered, I reached the same conclusion. There was a steam train in this picture of Italian arcadia.

  I walked briskly from the library—almost ran. Hermione was alone in our shared office, and I thrust my laptop in front of her. “Do you mind!” She pushed the computer away from the papers she had in front of her.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but you have to take a look.”

  She peered at the enlarged section on the screen. “So?” she said. “A train. So?”

  I reduced the magnification so that the rest of the painting came into focus.

  She frowned. “Poussin?”

  “Gaspard Dughet—brother-in-law of Nicholas Poussin. But that’s not the point.”

  She looked puzzled. “What is the point then?”

  “The seventeenth century. Seventeenth. And this is a train. A steam train.”

  She smiled. “Sorry, my mind was elsewhere. It’s a mistake, then. This can’t be Dughet, or whatever you call him.”

  I sat down next to her. Her leg touched mine briefly, and for a moment I stopped thinking about Dughet and steam trains. We would go out for dinner that night, I decided. I would dip into my dwindling funds and take her out to dinner.

  I came back to the picture. “I think they’re wrong. They said it was definitely Dughet—I was at the meeting. It was Eleanor—you know, that nice woman—and that Geoffrey character.”

  “Can’t stand him,” said Hermione.

  “They both said it was Dughet. There seemed to be no doubt in their minds.”

  Hermione looked again at the picture on the screen. “It’s easy enough to miss it, I suppose. It’s a very small part of the overall picture and …”

  “Yes,” I said. “I agree. We can all miss things. But Geoffrey jumped down my throat for missing over-painting in another painting. Now here he is doing the same thing himself.”

  “He’s not going to like it.”

  She was right. I could imagine Eleanor being amused to discover that she had missed something so obvious, but Geoffrey’s likely response was another matter altogether.

  Hermione looked at me quizzically. “You are going to tell them, aren’t you?”

  I wanted to say no. I wanted to say that the last thing I wished to do was to challenge my employers. But I realised what she would think of me if I said that, and so I plucked up my courage. “Of course.”

  She seemed relieved. “Good. You couldn’t let them be shown up. What if somebody spotted it at the viewing—and they’re bound to. It would be very embarrassing for the firm.”

  I swallowed hard. “I suppose I should go and speak to them straight away.” I paused. “And dinner tonight?”

  She shook her head. “I’d love to but …” She tailed off.

  I waited for her to complete the sentence.

  “But my father has asked me to meet him at the Savoy.”

  “Oh.” I could not think of anything else to say, and so I said, “For dinner?”

  “Yes. And I really feel that I should.”

  “Of course you should.” I tried to conceal my disappointment, but it must have showed.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’d far rather have dinner with you.”

  I did mind. I was not included in the invitation, and I remembered what she had said. He’ll try to get rid of you.

  “Please don’t talk about me,” I blurted out.

  “I won’t. I promise you.” She looked concerned. “So what will you do?”

  I said the first thing that came into my mind. “Read.”

  “What are you reading?”

  My hesitation made it clear that I had not been intending to read.

  “You’re angry with me,” she said.

  “Of course I’m not angry. Why should I be angry?”

  “Because I’m having dinner with him. And you’ll be all alone.”

  I became brisk. “With only ten million people in London, or whatever it is? No, I’ll meet up with a friend. We can go to the pub.”

  She looked at me. I think that she was about to ask me which friend I had in mind, but then she realised that would be as tactless as asking which author I had been reading.

  I looked at my watch. Eleanor had said something about being in a meeting until about three that afternoon but that I could get back to her thereafter with any questions about the catalogue entries. It was not long after three; I would go to see her and tell her, rather than Geoffrey, about my discovery.

  SHE LISTENED ATTENTIVELY. THEN SHE SAID, “Let’s take a look. I’ll get somebody to bring the painting up straight away.”

  I was anxious to apologise for bringing the matter up. “Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, “but it just looks so like a train to me. I don’t see what else it could be.”

  She laughed, pointing to the photograph I had shown her. “Neither do I. It’s a train. I think so too—in which case you’ve saved us considerable embarrassment.”

  She called through to the porters’ office and asked for the Dughet to be brought up. Then she made another call. “I’ll get Geoffrey in.”

  I tried not to wince, but she noticed my reaction.

  “He’s all right,” she reassured me. “He’s very good at his job, you know, but I can see how junior staff find him a little bit … how should we put it? Daunting? But you sho
uldn’t really. He can teach you a lot.”

  She made the call, and Geoffrey was summoned. The painting, though, arrived before he did, and we had a chance to examine it together.

  “You’re absolutely right,” Eleanor said. “It’s a train. And that makes this a nineteenth-century painting by a follower of Dughet, I’d say. A follower, perhaps, with a sense of humour …”

  Geoffrey came into the room. He seemed surprised to see me there and he threw an enquiring glance at Eleanor.

  “Andrew has discovered something rather interesting,” she said. “He’s found out that we might be wrong about that Dughet.”

  Geoffrey frowned. “Oh?”

  Eleanor looked at me. “You show him, Andrew.”

  Geoffrey came and stood next to me, beside the painting. I was strongly aware of his physical presence; I heard his breathing, which was slightly raspy. He was overweight, and obviously unfit. It suddenly occurred to me that he might have a heart attack. I would point out the train and he would have a heart attack in response.

  “There’s a train here,” I said. “Look.”

  He bent down to examine the painting. The breathing became more audible.

  He stared at the painting for a few minutes. Then he shifted his position and looked at it from a slightly different angle. He touched the canvas gently, as a doctor might touch a patient. Then he stood up.

  “Obviously over-painted,” he said. “Some enthusiastic owner in the nineteenth century decided that a train would improve matters.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “Yes,” he said. “You should mention that in your note, Andrew. It might add to the interest.” He paused. “It’s still Dughet, Eleanor.”

  His tone was firm, but Eleanor looked doubtful.

  “Are you sure?” She leaned forward and then moved to look at the painting from a different angle. “It seems quite smooth. I can’t see anything from this side …”

  “Well, I can,” he said. “Look from here. Come and stand here and then look across the surface. See the change in shade of black. No doubt about it. None at all.”

  She frowned, and then straightened up again. She looked unhappy. “Yes, I see what you mean.”

  I could tell that he was irritated, and had been only slightly mollified by Eleanor’s acceptance of his view. He turned to me. “You didn’t doubt the attribution, did you?”

  I held his gaze. “Actually, I wondered …”

  “Well, you were wrong.”

  Eleanor came to my rescue. “Andrew did the right thing to raise it.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  I left the two of them in her office. They would be discussing me. That evening, Hermione’s father would also be discussing me—or would want to do so, even if Hermione objected. I suddenly felt homesick. I wanted to be back in Scotland. I wanted to go home. But then I thought of Hermione, and I decided that I would ask her to marry me. I had not known her for very long—I accepted that—but that was not the point. The point was that I could think of nothing I wanted more than to be with her for the rest of my life. Nothing else counted.

  I went back to the library and took a piece of headed paper from a drawer. I love you more than I can say, I wrote. I love you so much. Let’s go off somewhere together. Anywhere. Why not? Please say yes. Say yes. Just yes. Not maybe. Just say yes. That’s all you have to do. And then I added: Go on, marry me!

  I put the letter in an envelope and wrote Hermione across the front. Then I went back to our shared office. She was not there, but was obviously going to return shortly, as there was a half-finished cup of coffee on the desk. A tiny whisper of steam arose from the still-warm surface of the liquid like the smoke of a miniature steam train—as insubstantial, as transient as that.

  I left the envelope on her desk, propped up against a box-file. Then, ten minutes later I ran back into the office, brushing past a secretary who was walking along the corridor. She looked at me venomously. “Don’t be so rude,” she muttered. She was right—it was rude, but I had to get the letter back.

  It was still there, unopened. I was tearing it up when Hermione came into the room. Her eyes went straight to the fragments of paper that slipped from my hand and fluttered to the ground.

  “Nothing,” I blurted out, in an attempt to forestall her question.

  She smiled. “I didn’t say anything.” But then she added, “Second thoughts?”

  DAVID HAD BEEN LISTENING INTENTLY TO Andrew’s story; he would have liked Hermione to say yes to Andrew—had she seen the letter, which was not at all clear—but thought, on balance, she would not have done. She would have been more sensible than that, he imagined—how long had they known one another? A few weeks? You did not accept a proposal after a few weeks; not if you had any sense. But of course there were plenty of people with very little sense when it came to these matters—judgement deserted them as they persuaded themselves the discouraging statistics somehow did not apply to them. This was a summer romance, and summer romances by definition never lasted beyond September. It was touching, but that was all it was: two young people meeting one another and falling in love for a few months; it happened all the time. At the end of the summer they would have to go back to Edinburgh and to Oxford, two different worlds. And then there was the father. He wondered about him. Hermione would be loyal to him, he suspected, but only to a point: there would come a time at which she would choose a lover rather than a parent. Biology dictated that.

  He looked at his travelling companions and said to himself: I would like to tell them about me. But he felt that he could not, because it would be hard to do so; it was never easy to speak about this to complete strangers, which was what they were. And so he thought for a while about what he would say if he were able to speak. They would understand, he expected; people understood now, but not everybody did, and that sometimes made it difficult. The problem was that people pretended. It was not unlike the issue they were talking about earlier on—about the adequacy of effort and whether one could try to be brave. People tried to understand, and many did, but not everybody could make the imaginative leap that landed one in the position of another person, in their shoes, in their very garments, looking out on the world with their eyes, feeling what went on inside their hearts; being made to cry by the things that made them want to cry. That was easy in theory, but hard in practice. They pretended to understand, but when it came down to it, many simply did not. They simply did not understand because they could not know—not really know—what it was like to be the other. That was because it was not them. That was why they could not think that. It had to be you.

  He remembered that other journey, also by train, but a rather different one. You could not just hop on a train between Washington and New York, you had to have a ticket and stand in a waiting area before they allowed you access to the platform. It was more like waiting to board a plane—an ordered process so different from rail travel in other countries. He had been a regular visitor to India and had been on one of those trains where people sat on the roof or hung out of the windows of carriages. He had never got used to that, even if he had become inured to the many other indignities of poverty you witnessed there. Did these travellers pay for their perilous journey, he wondered? Was there some sort of ticket, some fourth or fifth class, that allowed you to take your chances on the outside of the train, hoping that you would not lose your grip or be swept off by some obstruction—a signal arm, a wire, a low-slung railway bridge? Perhaps now that air travel was more common, people would try it there, too, clinging on to the wings of planes just as they did to the roofs of trains. He pictured for a moment—absurd thought—a plane so laden, just managing to get airborne because of the human burden on its wings and roof, limping through the sky, barely clearing the tree-tops below, until it eventually landed somewhere and the relieved survivors lowered themselves onto the tarmac and ran off before they could be asked for a fare …

  At Union Station in Washington he had been early for
his train back to New York and had stood for over half an hour in the line waiting for the platform to be readied. He had been standing behind a woman speaking loudly on her cell phone about business arrangements and had been obliged to listen to the details. He had turned his back on her, hoping to blot out the conversation, but had found that this only had the opposite effect. She was a distributor of olives, and was discussing a client’s requirements. It was very complicated because the olives came in cartons of twenty jars and there were customers who wanted to order in units other than twenty.

  “Tell them they can have forty, sixty, eighty and so on. Multiples of twenty. Tell them that they should round the order up—if they want fifteen, order twenty. Sure, they’ll have to hold on to another five jars, but they can sell those. Five jars? You’ll always shift five jars. No, tell them we don’t split the cartons because then it’d be us with the spare five jars, and we don’t have anywhere to put them. Tell them it’s not our warehouse—we don’t have guys down there to open the cartons and sort out the numbers. We just don’t. Those guys work for Edwards not for us. Tell them that.”

  He tried to detach himself—he tried not to listen. But he found himself picturing the warehouse with its stacked crates of olives, and he could see her point. Of course they couldn’t open the crates because you couldn’t stack individual jars in a warehouse like that. They’d break, and there would be glass all over the floor, and Edwards’ men might slip and cut themselves and there would be litigation and … Tell them that, he thought. Tell them about the problems down at Edwards’ end. Tell them that some things come in units of twenty—they just do—and we should be grateful that they don’t come in units of one hundred. Tell them not to be so demanding …

  The issue of the olives was resolved and his neighbour began to busy herself with a copy of The Washington Post, reading an article with a frown of disapproval; perhaps she was still cross about the unreasonableness of her customers—or at least of some of them. He looked about him, glancing at his fellow travellers, allowing himself to imagine why they were making this particular journey. Going home? Visiting children in New York? A few days in the city: a show on Broadway, an opera at the Met, an over-priced dinner? A meeting? A wedding?