I was disturbed from watching the smoke of my morning cigar drift through the fitful sunshine by the ticket collector standing at the door. The passenger opposite gave his ticket to be punched.
‘Thank you, sir.’
He then went back to his vacant gaze out of the window, continuing his manic manicure. I noticed how startled he was on hearing the collector say to me: ‘You can’t travel on a second class ticket in here, mate.’
I had set out that morning determined not to cheat, lie or commit any action while in London which would offend those principles which Bridgitte had tried to instil in me. She had taught me how much better it was not to lie or cheat, even if it meant, she said, losing all idea of your own identity. I realised how much she had gleaned from her former psychologist husband and — too late — that she wasn’t as dreamy as she looked.
‘Is this a first class compartment?’ I asked, as if it was no better than a pigsty that had been used by humans for far too long. He was a middle-aged man, and fair ringlety hair fell to his shoulders from beneath a Wehrmacht-style hat. He pointed to the window. ‘It says first class, don’t it?’
I wanted to pull his earring. ‘I suppose it would have to before somebody like me would notice.’
He leaned against the door, and yawned. ‘That’s the way it is, mate.’
Under the circumstances he couldn’t be anything but honest, and do his job. The nail-filing man opposite, for all his preoccupation with the landscape flying by outside, took in every shade of the situation. And I, if nothing else, had my pride, which was all that ten years of peace had left me with. I took a twenty-pound note from my wallet. ‘How much extra?’
He looked at the few foreign coins, plastic tokens, luncheon vouchers and Monopoly notes from his pockets. ‘Can’t change that.’
I reached for my executive-style briefcase. ‘I’ll write you a cheque.’
‘It’d be more than my job’s worth to take a cheque.’
‘You’d better see what you can do about changing this legal tender, then.’ I crumpled the note into my waistcoat pocket and went back to reading a report in the newspaper about a woman of eighty-six who had murdered her ninety-eight-year-old husband with a knife. ‘He got on at me once too often,’ she said in court, hoping the beak would be lenient. Then she spoiled it: ‘Anyway, I’d always wanted to kill the swine.’
The judge sentenced her to fourteen years in jail. ‘A worse case of premeditated murder I’ve never come across.’
‘I’ll get you when I come out,’ she screamed as they dragged her down to the cells.
The ticket collector, reluctant to move, took a packet of chewing gum from his trouser pocket and put two capsules into his mouth. He lounged as if he had no work to go to, changing weight from foot to foot, happy enough to look at himself in the mirror above the seats. He swayed with the train, as if he’d not been long on the job and didn’t care whether he had it much longer. I took a whisky flask from my briefcase and held it towards him. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘No thanks. Not that as well. It’d blow my mind. A train trip’s enough for me.’
I wondered if he wasn’t one of those scoundrels who, after buying a cap and clipper in Woollie’s, hopped the train near a station, collected excess fares, then jumped off in time for the up-train. He did it every day for six months, and spent the rest of the year in Barbados. The millionaires there wondered where he got his money. He told them he was a plumber, but some of the snooty British thought he was only a window cleaner.
Yet he looked too genuine to be an impostor. His eyes, blue in white, spun like catherine wheels. With an effort he stood upright. ‘I’ll see what I can do about your change.’
We heard him dance his way along the corridor. ‘Stoned out of his damned mind,’ Nail-filer said. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Even public servants. At least they’re still changing the guard at Buckingham Palace.’
‘For the moment,’ I said, not wanting to be unsociable. He didn’t turn his gaze from the window, and I noticed in the reflection that he held a map inside his newspaper on which he made pencil marks when a bridge, a cutting, a level crossing and, on one occasion, a pub swung close to the line. ‘Are you planning another Great Train Robbery?’
Even in the glass I saw him turn white. The porcelain flash spread to the back of his neck, and to the knuckles of both hands. It was his business, not mine. Probably no one else would have cottoned on. He smiled as if I must be loony to say such a thing, but he wasn’t reading that map for nothing, and that was a fact. Maybe he was doing a correspondence course from the Train Robbery Polytechnic, several of which must have opened in the last few years.
I don’t know why I had been so awkward with the ticket collector. I had the right change, and could only put it down to the fact that I hadn’t been to bed with another woman since before I married Bridgitte. I had banged a few on rugs and carpets, and behind summer hedges (and even on one occasion an aunt of Bridgitte’s had had me in Holland), but never actually in bed. No other explanation seemed possible or desirable, except that such unnecessarily bloody-minded conduct helped to pass a few minutes on an otherwise boring journey. Or maybe it was those little flashes of grey hair which made me act the way I did. Cheating made me feel young.
He put a folded map sheet away, and took another from his large sheer-leather hundred-quid briefcase, which was a far cry from the black plastic executive mock-up with a tin lock that I carried. I marvelled at his concentration. Sweat stood on his forehead. He wiped his cheeks, mopping the flood rather than the source. Anyone capable of such assiduous observation would certainly command a job whose salary allowed the purchase of such a briefcase.
The sun gleamed on factories as the train clawed its way closer to London. Well-kept houses reminded me that England was still wealthy, in spite of what the newspapers and the government wailed on about. Evidence of rich people made me feel better, though whenever I was on my way out of London the same fact depressed me.
The pin-headed, short-haired, well-shaven man sitting opposite put away his newspaper. ‘Of course, it’s entirely up to you, and I don’t want to interfere, but what’s the point of having a ticket which doesn’t entitle you to the proper seat? You must know it’s impossible to avoid paying.’
Just as I had whiled away a few minutes during my teasing of the ticket collector, so this nail-scraping fop was trying to pass the last half hour of our journey by a bout of moral finger-wagging, especially now that he had solved his calculations on the map. Having guessed his game, I could be courteous in reply. ‘You might think so, old man, but I haven’t coughed up yet.’
He laughed, as if he couldn’t wait to see me do so. The fact that I failed to place him irritated me so much that I wanted to smash his mug to pulp. Then I twigged that beneath the old veneer he was ineradicably working class. He couldn’t fool me, who was neither ashamed nor proud of having come from the mob, though my father was said to be descended from a long line of impoverished landowning wankers.
A lid of dark cloud stretched across the sky, a luminous mixture of blue up top and white below, which could only mean that it would rain the whole day over London. Such a prospect made the present conversation unimportant, but I played up to his need for chit-chat. ‘I’ve no intention of not paying the extra, though it’s true that by the time the ticket collector returns, if he ever does get back from the sort of trip he’s gone on, we could be at Liverpool Street.’
I stubbed my cigar out too violently on the window, and had to brush ash and sparks from my newly cleaned suit. I looked at the half-hunter gold watch in my waistcoat pocket, as if anxious about a business appointment in town. He was interested in seeing how I would manoeuvre myself out of the predicament, and because I was in a good mood I decided to fall in with his expectations as a way of discovering something about him. Most of all, it was as if I was a candidate for a job and he was testing my suitability.