Chapter 12

We were just pulling out of Lausanne when I awoke. I could see the lake between two tall grey apartment buildings and there was a tasteful advertisement for chocolates and then another for watches. It was the conductor who had woken me, bringing me coffee and brioches (I had asked for croissants). “Is the lady in Seventy-two awake?” I asked.

“She did not wish to be disturbed before Milan,” he replied.

“Is it true that there’s no restaurant car?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“At least you will give us breakfast tomorrow?”

“No, monsieur, I leave the train at Milan. There is another conductor.”

“Italian?”

“Yugoslav, monsieur.”

“Does he speak English or French?”

“It is not likely.”

I felt hopelessly abroad.

I drank my coffee, and then from the corridor I watched the small Swiss towns roll smoothly by: the Montreux Palace in baroque Edwardian like the home of a Ruritanian king, and rising behind it, out of a bank of morning mist, pale mountains like an underexposed negative: Aigle, Bex, Visp… We stopped at nearly every station, but it was seldom that anyone either got in or out. Like my aunt, foreign passengers were not interested in Switzerland without snow, and yet it was here that I was seriously tempted to leave her. I had fifty pounds of travellers’ cheques and I had no interest at all in Turkey. I caught glimpses of meadows running down to water, of old castles on hills spiked with vines and of girls on bicycles; everything seemed clean and arranged and safe, as my life had been before my mother’s funeral. I thought of my garden. I missed my dahlias, and at some small station beyond Mürren, where a postman was delivering letters from a bicycle, there was a bed of mauve and red flowers. I think I might really have got off if the girl called Tooley hadn’t at that moment touched my arm. Was there anything so wrong with the love of peace that I had to be forcibly drawn away from it by Aunt Augusta?

“Did you sleep well?” Tooley asked.

“Oh yes, and you?”

“I hardly slept a wink.” Her Pekinese eyes stared up at me, as though she were waiting for something from my plate. I offered her a brioche, but she refused it.

“Oh no, thanks a lot. I’ve had a chocolate bar.”

“Why couldn’t you sleep?”

“I’m sort of worried.”

I remembered, from my cashier days, faces just as timid as hers, peering through a hygienic barrier where a notice directed them to speak through a slot placed inconveniently low. I almost asked her whether she had an overdraft.

“Anything I can do?”

“I just want to talk,” she said.

What could I do but invite her in? My bed had been made into a sofa while I stood in the corridor, and we sat down side by side. I offered her a cigarette. It was an ordinary Senior Service, but she turned it over as though it were something special she had never seen before.

“English?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What does Senior Service mean?”

“The Navy.”

“You don’t mind, do you, if I smoke one of my own?”

She took a tin marked EUCALYPTUS-AND-MENTHOL LOZENGES out of her bag and picked from it an anonymous cigarette which looked as though it had been home-rolled. On second thoughts she offered me one, and I thought it would be a little unkind of me to refuse.

It was a very small cigarette, and it looked rather grubby.

It had an odd herbal flavour, not disagreeable.

“I’ve never smoked an American cigarette before,” I said.

“I got these in Paris – from a friend.”

“Or French ones.”

“He was a terribly nice man. Groovy.”

“Who was?”

“This man I met in Paris. I told him my trouble too.” “What is your trouble?”

“I had a quarrel – with my boy-friend, I mean. He wanted to go third-class to Istanbul. I said it’s crazy, we couldn’t sleep together in the third-class, and I’ve got the money, haven’t I? ‘Your stinking allowance,’ he said. ‘Sell all you have and give it to the poor’ – that’s a quotation, isn’t it, from somewhere? I said, ‘It wouldn’t be any use. Father would pay me back.’ ‘He need never know,’ he said. ‘He has sources of information,’ I said, ‘he’s very high up, I mean, in the CIA’. He said, ‘You can stick your money up your arse’ – that’s an English expression, isn’t it? He’s English. We met when we were sitting down in Trafalgar Square.”

“Feeding the pigeons?” I asked.

She gave a bubble of a laugh and choked on the smoke. “You are ironic,” she said. “I like men who are ironic. My father’s ironic too. You are a bit like him when I come to think of it. Irony is a very valuable literary quality too, isn’t it, like passion?”

“You mustn’t ask me about literature, Miss Tooley,” I said. “I’m very ignorant.”

“Don’t call me Miss Tooley. Tooley’s what my friends call me.”

At Saint Moritz a gang of schoolgirls passed down the platform. They were nice-looking schoolgirls; not one of them wore a miniskirt or visible make-up and they carried neat little satchels.

“How can such a beautiful country be so dull?” Tooley thought aloud.

“Why dull?”

“They aren’t turned on here,” she said. “None of them will ever be turned on. Would you like another cigarette?”

“Thank you. They are very mild. Agreeable flavour too. They don’t rasp the throat.”

“I do like the expressions you use. They really are groovy.”

I felt more awake than I usually do at that hour of the morning, and I found Tooley’s company something of a novelty. I was glad that my aunt was sleeping late and giving me an opportunity to get better acquainted. I felt protective. I would have liked a daughter, though I had never been able to imagine Miss Keene as a mother. A mother should not be in need of protection herself.

“This friend of yours in Paris,” I said, “was a very good judge of cigarettes.”

“He was fabulous,” she said. “I mean, he’s really together.”

“French?”

“Oh no, he came from darkest Africa.”

“A Negro?”

“We don’t call them that,” she said reprovingly. “We call them coloured or black – whichever they prefer.”

A sudden suspicion struck me. “Was he called Wordsworth?”

“I only knew him as Zach.”

“That’s the man. Was it you he came to see off at the station?”

“Sure. Who else? I never expected him, but there he was at the gate to say good-bye. I bought him a platform ticket, but I think he was scared. He wouldn’t come any further.”

“He knows my aunt too,” I said. I didn’t tell her that he had used her ticket for another purpose.

“Now isn’t that the wildest sort of coincidence? Like something in Thomas Hardy.”

“You seem to know a lot about literature.”

“I’m majoring in English literature,” she said. “My father wanted me to take social science because he wanted me to serve a while in the Peace Corps, but I guess our ideas didn’t coincide in that and other things.”

“What does your father do?”

“I told you – he has a very secret job in the CIA.”

“That must be interesting,” I said.

“He travels about a terrible lot. I haven’t seen him more than once since Mom divorced him last fall. I tell him he sees the world horizontally, I mean that’s superficial, isn’t it? I want to see the world vertically.”

“In depth,” I said. I was rather proud of catching up with her ideas.

“These help,” she said, waving her cigarette. “I feel a bit turned on already. It’s your fabulous way of talking.

I feel I sort of met you in the English literature course.

As a character. We did Dickens in depth.”

“Vertically,” I said, and we laughed together.

“What’s your name?”

“Henry.” She laughed again and I followed suit though I was not sure why.

“They didn’t even call you Harry?” she asked.

“Harry is the diminutive. One cannot be baptized Harry. There was never a Saint Harry.”

“Is that what they call Canon Law?”

“I believe so.”

“Because I knew a fabulous guy once who was baptized Knock-Me-Down.”

“I doubt if he was really baptized that.”

“Are you a Roman Catholic?”

“No, but I believe my aunt is one. I’m not quite sure though.”

“I nearly became a Roman Catholic once. Because of the Kennedys. But then when two of them got shot – I mean I’m superstitious. Was Macbeth a Catholic?”

“It’s not a question that’s ever occurred to me… I suppose… well, I mean I don’t really know.” It seemed to me that I was picking up her phrases.

“Maybe we ought to lock the door and open the window,” she said. “What country are we in now?”

“I think we must be coming near to the Italian frontier.”

“Then open the window quick.” I couldn’t follow her reasoning, but I obeyed. I had already finished my cigarette, and she tossed away her stump and then emptied the ash-tray on to the line. Then I remembered Wordsworth.

“What have we been smoking?” I said.

“Pot, of course. Why?”

“Do you realize we could be sent to prison? I don’t know the Swiss law or the Italian, but…”

“I wouldn’t be. I’m under age.”

“And me?”

“You could plead innocence,” she said and began to laugh: she was laughing when the door opened and the Italian police looked in.

“Passports,” they demanded, but they didn’t even open them; the draught of the open window blew off one man’s cap, and I could only hope the smell of Cannabis had dispersed down the corridor. They were followed closely by the customs men, who were equally considerate, except that one man wrinkled his nose. A few minutes later they were safely on the platform.

The sign read: DOMODOSSOLA.

“We’re in Italy,” I said.

“Then have another.”

“I’ll do no such thing, Tooley. I had no idea… For goodness’ sake get rid of them before night. Yugoslavia’s a Communist country, and they won’t hesitate to imprison someone under age.”

“I was always taught that Yugoslavs were good Communists. We sell them strategic material, don’t we?”

“But not drugs,” I said.

“Now you’re being ironical again. I mean I wanted to tell you my great trouble, but how can I do it if you’re ironical?”

“You said just now that irony was a valuable literary quality.”

“But you aren’t a novel,” she said and began to cry as Italy went by outside. The Cannabis had caused the laughter and now, I suppose, it caused the tears. I felt a little unhappy myself, watching her. My head swam. I shut the window and saw through the pane a hill-village all yellow and ochre, like something grown of itself out of rain and earth, and beside the line a factory and a red housing estate and an autostrada and an advertisement for Perugina and all the wires and grids of a smokeless age.

“What’s your trouble, Tooley?” I asked.

“I forgot the damn pill and I haven’t had the curse for six weeks. I nearly talked to your mother last night…”

“My aunt,” I corrected her. “You ought to speak to her. I don’t really know about these things.”

“But I want to talk to a man,” Tooley said. “I mean I’m sort of shy of women. I don’t get on terms with them fast the way I do with men. The trouble is men are so ignorant now. In the old days a girl never knew what to do, and now it’s the men who don’t know, Julian said it was my fault – he trusted me.”

“Julian is the boy-friend?” I asked.

“He was angry because I forgot the pill. He wanted to hitch-hike to Istanbul. He said it might do the trick.”

“I thought he wanted to go third-class.”

“That was before I told him. And before he met a man with a truck going to Vienna. Then he gave me an ultimatum. We were in this café in the Place Saint Michel and he said, ‘We’ve got to leave now or never,’ and I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Find your own fucking way then.’”

“Where is he now?”

“Somewhere between here and Istanbul.”

“How will you find him?”

“They’ll know at the Gulhane.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s near the Blue Mosque. Everyone knows where everyone is at the Gulhane.” She began to remove carefully the traces of tears. Then she looked at her huge watch with the four numbers and said, “It’s nearly lunchtime. I’m as hungry as a dog. I hope I’m not feeding two. Want some chocolate?”

“I’ll wait until Milan,” I said.

“Have another cigarette?”

“No, thank you.”

“I will. It might do the trick.” She began to smile again. “It’s funny the ideas I get. 1 mean, I think almost anything might do the trick. I drank brandy and ginger ale in Paris because at school they said ginger did the trick. And I had sauna baths too. It’s funny when all you really need is a curettage. Wordsworth said he’d find me a doctor, but he said he’d need a few days to find him, and then I’d have to lay up a little, and it wouldn’t be much good getting to the Gulhane and finding Julian gone. Gone where? I ask you. I met a boy in Paris who said they were turning us all out of Katmandu and Vientiane was the place now. Not for Americans, of course, because of the draft.”

There were moments when she gave the impression that all the world was travelling.

Tooley said, “I slept with a boy in Paris when Julian walked out because I thought, well, it might stir things up a bit. I mean the curse comes that way sometimes right on top of the orgasm, but I didn’t get any orgasm. I guess I was worrying about Julian, because I don’t often have difficulty that way.”

“I think you ought to go straight back home and tell your parents.”

“In the singular,” she said. “I don’t count Mom, and I don’t exactly know where Father is. He travels an awful lot. Secret missions. He might be in Vientiane for all I know – they say it’s lousy with CIA.”

“Haven’t you anywhere you call home?” I asked her.

“Julian and me felt like home, but then he got angry about my forgetting the pill. He’s very quick-tempered. ‘If I have to remind you all the time,’ he said, ‘it takes away my spontaneity, don’t you understand that?’ He’s got a theory women want to castrate their men, and one way is to take away their spontaneity.”

“And you felt at home with him?”

“We could discuss just everything,” she said with a happy and reminiscent smile as the pot began to work again. “Art and sex and James Joyce and psychology”.

“You oughtn’t to smoke that stuff,” I protested.

“Pot? Why? There’s no harm in pot. Acid’s another thing. Julian wanted me to try acid, but I said no. I mean, I don’t want to warp my chromosomes.”

There were moments when I didn’t understand a word she said, and yet it seemed to me that I could listen to her for a long while without wearying. There was something gentle and sweet about her which reminded me of Miss Keene. It was an absurd comparison to make, of course, and perhaps this was what she meant by being turned on.