§tandby - The Carriage

The gray pressed at the window and did not change. The floor shuddered under his slippers with the weight of the train, and still the gray outside stayed where it was, level and unchanging at the height of a man's eye. It had stood like that at the bottom of his street. He waited for it to give onto something. Fields, a cutting, the backs of houses, the lit boxes of other people's kitchens going by. It gave onto nothing. It was only itself.

The compartment was an ordinary one, or had been built to look ordinary, the seats facing each other in worn moquette, the string luggage rack overhead empty above every head, and screwed to the wall opposite, behind glass, a faded photograph of a seaside place, a prom and a pier under a sky gone sepia, somewhere a man might take his family in a good year. The bulb in the roof flickered and held. It was cold like a waiting room late at night, a cold that had given up on being warm. He knew a railway carriage. He had ridden them to Blackpool and to the one interview in Leeds he never got. He knew this was one, and knew it was wrong, and could not have said how, wrong like the seaside photograph was wrong, a summer kept behind glass with the standing gray pressing at the real window beside it.

He waited for someone to come.

He had the question ready, where are you taking me and how long and when will I be back, and he held it in his mouth like a coin he meant to spend, and no one came down the carriage to be asked. The coin taste was still under his tongue. It had not gone with the getting-on; it had stayed, faint, like a filling worked loose, and when he pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth to find it the whole left side of his jaw felt thick and far away, and then it passed, and his jaw was his own again, and he forgot to be frightened of it because there were people in the carriage with him and he had not seen them come either.

There was a woman across from him in a good coat with a handbag held on her knees in both hands. There was an older man further down with his cap still on, by the window, his face turned to the gray. Nearer the door a young man in shirtsleeves and no coat kept getting up and sitting down, asking the carriage where they stopped, asking did anyone have the time, his voice climbing at the end of it, and no one answered him, and the handbag woman's good smile stayed on Stanley as though the young man were weather, something going on outside that wanted no remark. There were others past him, more of them than the carriage looked as if it should hold, going away down the length of it into a part of the light he could not fix his eye on. He could not have said how many. Every time he counted along the seats the number came out different, and after the third try he left it, because counting had got him here, or he thought it had, the counting on the step, and a man learned.

"Cold for it," the woman said.

"It is that," Stanley said, glad of her, glad of anyone. "Do you know where we're stopping? Only nobody's been round, and I've a..." The word for the thing he had at home would not come. The meal kept warm under a plate. The reason to be back. It sat just out of reach. Then it came. "...a dinner kept," he said. "My wife's keeping my dinner."

"They come round," the woman said. "You're not to worry. They know what they're about." She smiled at him, and it was a good smile, warm and level and certain, and it did not reach up into the rest of her face, which stayed where it was, pleasant and smooth and shut, the drawn blind of a face with a lamp lit behind it. "It's a long line. You sit and you'll be looked after."

"Aye, but where to, love. Where's the line go."

"They know what they're about," she said again. Word for word. The same breath catching at the front of about, the same place, exactly, a thing a living mouth could not do twice. Stanley felt the old snag rise in him, the thing he'd said all his life. You said that before, missus. Word for word. He felt it come up his throat with his mouth already opening on it.

The taste flooded back, coin and cold, and the side of his face went thick.

And the saying of it died. It went out in him like a match pinched. His mouth was open and there was nothing to put through it, no want to, the snag gone smooth under his tongue with the taste, and he shut his mouth and looked at his hands in his lap and could not for a moment think what it was he had been going to say, only that it had been important to him once, the kind of thing he said, and that he had not said it, and that not saying it had been easy. The not-saying had cost him nothing. He sat with that, the easiness of it, and did not like it, and could not have told you why he did not like it.

The older man by the window said, to the glass, "Service normal. Normal service is resumed." He said it pleasantly, to no one. After a time he said it again.

The woman across from Stanley did not look at the man. She kept her good smile on Stanley, and her hands on the bag, and the train went on through the standing gray, and the older man had been on the train longer than the woman, Stanley thought, and the woman longer than him, and there was an order to it, a wearing. He looked down the carriage at the ones he could not fix his eye on, the smooth far ones who did not speak at all, and he took his own hands off his knees and held them together, because they had begun to shake. The young man at the door stood up again and asked the time, and got nothing, and sat. Stanley did not stand up. He had stopped wanting to stand up somewhere back there and could not say when, and that frightened him worse than the cold.

The train stopped.

There was no station. There was a door in the side of the carriage that he had not marked before, and it stood open, and past it, where the gray should have been, was a room, a small back scullery with a stone sink and a deal table and a window with a yellow blind half down against a light that did not match the dark outside the train. There was a smell of washing soda and cold fat. A woman stood at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, not the handbag woman, a younger one, and she turned to him as the door opened with no surprise in her at all.

"There you are," she said. "I've been calling you. Bring the bucket up, it's full."

And his feet took him in off the train and into the room, because she was expecting him, because there was a bucket by the sink that was full and wanted carrying, because it was easier to carry a bucket than to stand in a doorway with the gray at your back and a strange room in front of you and not know which was the dream. He carried the bucket up. His arms knew the weight of it. The woman said something about the coalman and the cold and a name that he understood after a moment was meant to be his name, and it was not Stanley, and he answered to it, he said aye to it, and a part of him stood off and watched himself say aye to a name that was not his in a room he had never been in, and did not stop himself, because she was watching him, pleasant and certain, to see whether he fit, and he fit.

Then he was back on the seat with his hands together and the door gone, no door there, only the wall of the carriage and the gray going by, and the handbag woman saying, "There. That wasn't so bad," and the taste in his mouth, and a thing missing that he reached for and could not bring up, the name of the town he had lived in all his life, the one with the works in it and the street and the corner shop with old Sykes who did not age. He had the street. He had the shop. He had the shape of the word for the town and he could not get the word, and he turned it over and over with his thick tongue and it would not come. His hand had gone, without him, to his coat, feeling for nothing, for the warmth of a room he could see and not name, the cards on the cloth, the little blue ring of flame, and found cold cloth and the cold of the carriage and came back empty. The handbag woman watched him hunt for it with her good warm shut smile, and did not help him, and the older man told the window that normal service was resumed.

"It's the travelling," the woman said kindly. "It takes them all like that. You'll not miss it once it's gone."

Stanley looked at her. He wanted to say that you did not lose the name of your own town, that a man carried that to his grave, that there was something wrong with a train you got on with your town in your head and rode until the town fell out of you. The whole of it rose in him to be said. It was the truest thing he had ever needed to say.

He felt for it and the taste came and it died in his throat, gentle, like a child put down to sleep, and he turned his face to the window as the older man had, to the gray that did not end, and he held his shaking hands together in his lap and was quiet. Somewhere down the carriage, in the part he could not look at, someone said nothing at all. And the train did not slow and did not arrive, and carried them on into the standing light at the edge of everything.

§§ : https://www.abctales.com/collection/period-pieces