Inglorious (20 page)

When the bus came to a halt outside Euston, Rosa was staring up at the sky. Then she stood. Pulling her bags along, she moved towards the exit. It is almost too late, she thought, as she saw the glass doors of Euston Station. She passed the police with their guns, and arrived at a big clock telling her the
time. If you were ever so slightly out of synch these clocks and the people beneath them quite confused you. You weren’t sure what might happen but you were fearful all the same. She was uncertain on the forecourt and then, with minutes to go, she remembered the drill. Thinking only of the task at hand, she rushed for a ticket, fumbling with her purse, dropping her credit card, stuffing it into the machine again, seeing the price and cursing faintly, receiving a delayed then spewed out ticket, running for the platform. She was trying to keep her thoughts clean and practical. She saw a train and ran towards it. But her hurry was superfluous; the train was delayed. Everyone was queuing at the doors. A man in uniform was holding a whistle, ready to blow. Was it a race? thought Rosa. They were all poised for the off. She saw some ruddy, fat families, and kids smiling, and a host of the elderly. Daytime travellers from London. A few business types in suits, men and women, holding their phones and palms and computer cases. Most of that crowd filed off to first class, while Rosa set her bags down on the floor and waited with the rest. The atmosphere was good-tempered. Everyone fidgeted and raised their eyes to each other. There was a strict sense of protocol – you had to be stoical and expectant. The train stood on the platform and the clock ticked past the hour. ‘Not too bad,’ said one old man when the carriage doors opened, and the clock said they were fifteen minutes late.

When the doors opened they streamed into the carriage, in search of the perfect seat. Within seconds, the seats were full of people. Still, Rosa was confused and couldn’t understand. She was constantly surprised by density, the sheer quantity of things around her. She wondered why they were heading north, all these people with their bags and coats. Entire families, squashed in with their cases and sandwiches and piles of crisps. Rustling away, feeding sandwiches to their young. If the train crashed, or was blown to pieces, dynasties would be wiped out. The children were already on the squawk, beginning their small symphony of need, trilling up the octaves. Rosa was a solitary passenger and this detail made her relatively desirable. Soon she was surrounded by the old in search of silence. She was joined by a woman with a Bible, a headscarf and a stringy neck, and an ancient man who edged slowly into the seat opposite her, kicking her foot and apologising. He apologised for so long that Rosa could see they were in danger of having a conversation. Really what she mostly wanted to do was sleep, but though she closed her eyes the sound of voices kept her conscious. Everyone was arranging plastic bags and bottles of water. There was a constant low-level rustling of bags and food and papers. A man was guarding an empty seat beside him. Earlier he had eaten a sandwich and left cream cheese and crumbs around his mouth. In his hand he held a piece of paper with PRODUCTION QUOTA
written on it. The rest Rosa couldn’t read. His wrist was covered with threaded scars, as if he had once smashed his fist through a window. She wondered if he had done it as a child. And now he was a fat-cheeked man of fifty or so, one hand in his salted hair.

Days were passing, time’s limitless express-train was speeding onwards, hurtling everyone towards their own personal tunnel. Time’s TGV was breaking the sound barrier, though her real-time InterCity slugtrain was moving more slowly. She thought of a slogan for the railways in Britain, like an old slogan she had heard as a child, ‘We’re getting there’, only more applicable to the present day: ‘Our Trains are Slower than Time Itself.’ Yet, having queued patiently outside the carriage, nervous and worrying about her bags, Rosa had her own little seat, and her legs fitted snugly against the ancient legs of her opposite neighbour. The train had a welcoming smell, a homely aroma of coffee and chips. The windows were clean and through the glass she saw the girders of the station. ‘Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,’ said an automated voice. ‘Please remember that you are required to travel with a valid ticket. This train will call at Luton, Birmingham International, Birmingham New Street, Wolverhampton, Crewe, Preston, Manchester Piccadilly, Kendal, Oxenholme and Glasgow Central. There is a buffet service selling a wide variety of sandwiches, crisps, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, cakes and biscuits. First-class accommodation is at the front of the train. We hope you enjoy your journey.’

The train eased northwards, passing under a steel canopy into the dim light of day. They passed rusted tracks, faded grass sprouting between them, and Victorian bridges reinforced with steel. PRIZE she saw painted on the brick arch of a bridge. PRIZE. And the prize was what?
TEMP TEMP
TEMP
she saw, and nodded. They passed a depot made of corrugated iron. She saw the blurred front of a carriage inside. They passed metal grilles and the red steel of a bridge. Cameras and lights suspended above the tracks and an interlocking
network of wires. Metal railings merged into a grey wall as the train picked up speed. Now the sloped sides of the cuttings were covered in foliage, dry shrubs. ‘I’m on the train,’ said a man to her left. ‘Did Ed get the report done? On the way back I’ll get a taxi.’

‘You can’t worry about it,’ said another to his phone. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.’

‘Tell Ed to sort out the report. I’m back in the office tomorrow.’

Outside the clouds were heavy above the long lines of trees. There were broad-brushed green fields and rows of post-war houses with bay windows and long thin gardens. Out of town debris, business parks and warehouses and building sites with planks stacked in piles. As the train climbed to its top speed, objects outside were flung backwards before she could fully describe them to herself. ASIA’S FINEST FOODS, she saw, on the edge of a warehouse. ‘The buffet car is now open’ said the tannoy. ‘The buffet car is selling a wide variety of sandwiches, crisps, tea, coffee, hot chocolate, cakes and biscuits as well as an assortment of narcotics and bandages, soma, hemlock, and gold, pure gold.’ She kicked off her shoes and slept, head on the window, arms on the table, and woke with a start to discover that the train was running even later. Something had failed, some rusty old signal, but she found she accepted it all, every minute tacked onto the journey, she reclined into it, watching the green and grey of Britain pass outside the window. The view was made up of contrasts: the soft moss on the bridges, the variegated textures of trees and fields and the primary colours of the stations. As they moved slowly through one station she saw FOOD TO GO in orange neon and turned her head away.

She put her hand above her eyes and stared out at fleeting buildings, factories and clouds of smoke and the compressed shapes of city centres. There was a thick smell of hops for a while, and then a sweet coil of sugar as they passed another factory. She saw rows of cars, parked at a station, but the train
passed through with a shudder. BLUE written on a bridge, and something else she couldn’t read. The train moved through stretching ranks of suburbs, past the shabby backs of interwar houses, walls covered with peeling plaster, brickwork crumbling. Sand and gravel, litter at the side of the tracks, mingled with weeds. Then there were places so steeped in tranquillity that she envied their occupants: long low fields, pale lakes and careful gardens. In places the tracks cut a furrow through the land, and the train barely lifted its head above the fields. Then she only saw the outline of trees against the sky.

When the train slid into Birmingham New Street, the carriage partly emptied. The old man opposite edged slowly out of his seat, hitting her feet and smiling apologetically. She nodded goodbye. With a bank of vacant seats around her, Rosa found she could read in peace. She read slowly through the leftover newspapers, noting the by-lines of her former colleagues, and felt no sense of regret at all. She liked the fact they were all still there, working hard, advancing every day. At least poor old Peter hadn’t been let down by everyone else. She was glad about that, Peter with his worried way of looking and his tempered charisma. It was all too far away now, as the train moved through an old brick tunnel into a flush of countryside. The last suburbs receded, and the crumbling warehouses and chimneys gave way to fields. She saw rubbish and dust at the edges of the tracks. Beyond was a garden and she saw a child running on the lawn. As the train drew northwards there were long grey-backed ridges, sprawling under the sky. Then she smiled. Years and years, she thought, feeling a retrospective urge coming on. The train was taking her through the secondary scenery of her childhood, the provincial towns with their flyovers and whitewashed shopping centres and the long lines of the hills. She remembered their family journeys to the north. She travelled with her parents on the train. Oh lovely, the past, she thought, sinking idly into thoughts of when she was a child, and her family had gone on holiday to the Lakes, year after year. Those were comforting memories, purely happy,
though she felt a jolt as she summoned them. They had rented the same cottage almost every time, near Lake Windermere, in the grounds of a farmhouse. Rosa’s mother grew up in the Lakes, near Barrow, and when grandmother Lily and grandfather Tom were still alive they used to come to visit. She was thinking about these summers, and she remembered the cottage they rented: slate slabs, a large fireplace with a bread oven, window seats in the bedrooms. The doors had latches, exotic to a child. The farmhouse was larger and more terrifying than the cottage, and the old professor who lived there said the cellar was haunted. It was a friendly ghost, he added, but after that Rosa could hardly bring herself to cross in front of the big house, and she only played in the small garden of the cottage. She wondered if the old professor was still there, still anywhere this side of silence. But he had been ancient when she was a child. He must be long vanished, he and his wife. Still, she thought she would find out what had happened to him while she was there. She wondered why she had never written to him. That would have been a gesture, kind at least.
Dear Professor, I wanted to let you know that I was there,
years ago, at your house. I was small and I remember the
woods seemed like immeasurable forests. Your orchards were
abundant with apples and – I confess! – I sometimes ate the
windfalls. I remember the smell of wet ferns, and the ferns
stuck to my legs as I went down to the lake to swim. In the
mornings I woke to the sound of birds in the trees. When we
arrived the cottage was often cold, and yet you had always left
wood for a fire. My parents would light it and I would sit there
looking at the flames. I remember placing my hands on the big
cold stones of the walls, the slate stones. One night I slept in a
tent in the garden. I remember my father had to stay there with
me because I was so small. When it rained we played
Monopoly. My mother always won. It drove my father mad. I
don’t know why I never wrote before.
She should write to him while she was there! But then she thought she wouldn’t after all. There would be the need to add,
Recently, my mother died.
Very abrupt, no pain.
It was absurd, but it had stopped her writing to so many people: old friends from school, teachers, kids she had grown up with.
Dear Mrs Morton, Thanks for
teaching me about Hamlet. It helped me greatly when my
mother died.
Yet it hadn’t in the end.

Rosa thought that her mother had been an elegant and frugal woman, and it was a shame she couldn’t ask her advice. It would have been nice to be able to talk to her. Rosa had been idle and had never asked enough questions. Her mother – and now Rosa felt despair and yearning like a kick in the stomach. It was impossible to accept. And yet she had to. It had to be. Still, she despised it and wanted to cry out loud, protest. It was iniquitous! If she was undisciplined, it started, and she hated the way it made her feel, abandoned and unkempt. She remembered a tall woman, almost as tall as her daughter, with bobbed brown hair, vivacious and outspoken. Rosa’s mother had so many friends that when she died the church was heaving with mourners and some had to stand outside and listen to the service. Everyone was shocked, absurdly. ‘It was so sudden.’ ‘At least she didn’t suffer’ – dozens said that, and it was perhaps true, though Rosa was surprised by their certainty. Still, they took Rosa’s hand at the door, and said, ‘I’m so sorry. Look after your father, and yourself, dear Rosa’, and she smiled and thanked them for coming.

Bristol was hazy under a misty winter, which Rosa later remembered as pale and frigid. Her father was faint-hearted in the service. He couldn’t speak, so after the vicar (‘Oh Lord, we come here today to celebrate the life of Harriet Lane, loving wife and mother, who died recently after a short illness’ – a very short and despicable illness, a shock to the head, a haemorrhage which swept her out before she could say goodbye – ‘Oh Lord, thank you for smashing up Harriet Lane, so impressively …’) Rosa had to address the church. That was the worst of it, looking out at a sea of sympathetic faces, wanting to cast herself on the coffin and scream. The Ancients had it better. You could ululate as much as you liked. Wailing was positively expected,
scrabbling in the sand quite allowed. The modern British funeral was all wrong, Rosa decided, as she said a few terse words and tried to imagine she was talking about a remote acquaintance. She read a poem, Larkin’s ‘For Sidney Bechet’, which had been one of her mother’s favourites. For a while she wanted to fall into a faint, she had never really noticed how long that poem was, but it coursed on, verse after verse and Rosa’s voice breaking with every word.
On me your voice falls as they say love
should/ Like an enormous yes.
That messed the congregation up; they all started snivelling and rubbing their eyes. She kept on with it, though she saw her father had his head in his hands.
My
crescent City/ Is where your speech alone is understood/ And
greeted as the natural noise of good/ Scattering long-haired grief
and scored pity.
She got to the end, bitterly and with a sense of mounting disbelief. The poem didn’t reflect her mood at all. She didn’t find anything natural or good at the time; she found her grief quite bewildering and devastating. Not only had she produced a dreadful reading but, more importantly, she had committed perjury over her mother’s coffin. She dropped the book on the floor as she walked back to her seat. When the music started playing her father had to be helped from the church. She was angry with him at the time, thinking he was weak.