'And is he eating in the dining car?' I asked.
'Don't!' She rolled her eyes in mock horror. 'He is supposed to be. They all are. But we don't know if they'll retreat into privacy. If they stay in their own car, there might just be enough room for everyone else to sit down. It's a shambles in the making though, and it was made by my boss selling extra tickets himself when he knew we were full.' She shook her head over it, but with definite indulgence. The boss, it appeared, ranked high in her liking.
'Who did he sell them to?' I asked.
'Just people. Two friends of his. And a Mr Filmer, who offered to pay double when he found there was no room. No one turns down an extra profit of that sort.' She broke open a roll with the energy of frustration. 'If only there was more room in the dining car, we could have sold at least six more tickets.'
'David… er… Zak was saying the forty-eight-seater was already stretching the actors' vocal cords to the limit against the noise of the wheels on the rails.'
'It's always a problem.' She considered me over the candle flame. 'Are you married?' she said.
'No. Are you?'
'Actually, no.' Her voice was faintly defensive, but her mouth was smiling. 'I invested in a relationship which didn't work out.'
'And which was some time ago?'
'Long enough for me to be over it.'
The exchange cleared the ground, I thought, and maybe set the rules. She wasn't looking for another relationship that was going nowhere. But dalliance? Have to see…
'What are you thinking?' she asked.
'About life in general '
She gave me a dry look of disbelief but changed the subject back to the almost as compelling matter of trains, and after a while I asked her the question I'd had vaguely in mind all day.
'Besides the special passes for the races, and so on,' I said, 'is there anything else an owner of a horse is entitled to? An owner, that is to say, of one of the horses travelling on the train?'
She was puzzled. 'How do you mean?'
'Are they entitled to any privileges that the other people in the special dining car don't have?'
'I don't think so.' Her brow wrinkled briefly. 'Only that they can visit the horse car, if that's what you mean.'
'Yes, I know about that. So there's nothing else?'
'Well, the racecourse at Winnipeg is planning a group photograph of owners only, and there's television coverage of that.' She pondered. 'They're each getting a commemorative plaque from the Jockey Club when we get back on the train at Banff after the days in the mountains.' She paused again. 'And if a horse that's actually on the train wins one of the special races, the owner gets free life membership of the clubs at all three racecourses.'
The last was a sizeable carrot to a Canadian, perhaps, but not enough on its own, surely, to attract Filmer. I sighed briefly. Another good idea down the drain. So I was left with the two basic questions, why was Filmer on the train, and why had he worked so hard to be an owner. And the answers were still I don't know and I don't know. Highly helpful.
We drank coffee, dawdling, easy together, and she said she had wanted to be a writer and had found a job with a publisher ('which real writers never do, I found out') but was very much happier with Merry amp; Co., arranging mysteries.
She said, 'My parents always told me practically from birth that I'd be a writer, that it ran in the family, and I grew up expecting it, but they were wrong, though I tried for a long time, and then I was also living with this man who sort of bullied me to write. But, you know, it was such a relief the day I said to myself, some time after we'd parted and I'd dried my eyes, that I was not really a writer and never would be and I'd much rather do something else. And suddenly I was liberated and happier than I could remember. It seems so stupid, looking back, that it took me so long to know myself. I was in a way brainwashed into writing, and I thought I wanted it myself, but I wasn't good enough when it came to the point, and it was such hard work, and I was depressed so much of the time.' She half laughed. 'You must think I'm crazy.'
'Of course not. What did you write?'
'I was writing for a women's weekly magazine for a while, going to interview people and writing up their lives, and making up lives altogether sometimes if I couldn't find anyone interesting or lurid enough that week. Don't let's talk about it. It was awful.'
'I'm glad you escaped.'
'Yes, so am I,' she said with feeling. 'I look different, I feel different, and I'm much healthier. I was always getting colds and flu and feeling ill, and now I don't.' Her eyes sparkled in the light, proving her right. 'And you,' she said, 'you're the same. Lighthearted. It shows all over you.'
'Does it, indeed?'
'Am I right?'
'On the button, I suppose.'
And we were lucky, I thought soberly, paying the bill. Lightheartedness was a treasure in a world too full of sorrows, a treasure little regarded and widely forfeited to aggression, greed and horrendous tribal rituals. I wondered if the Fluted Point People had been lighthearted ten thousand years ago. But probably not.
Nell and I walked back to where she had parked her car near the office: she lived twenty minutes' drive away, she said, in a very small apartment by the lake.
To say good night we kissed cheeks and she thanked me for the evening, saying cheerfully that she would see me on Sunday if she didn't sink without trace under all the things she still had to do on the next day, Saturday. I watched her tail lights recede until she turned a corner, then I walked back to the hotel, slept an untroubled night, and presented myself next morning at ten sharp in the Public Affairs office, at Union Station.
The Public Affairs officer, a formidably efficient lady, had gathered from Nell that I was one of the actors, as they had helped with actors before, and I didn't change that understanding. She wheeled me back into the cavernous Great Hall of the station (which she briskly said was 250 feet long, 84 feet wide and had a tiled arched ceiling 88 feet above the floor) and led me through a heavy door into an undecorated downstairs duplication of the grandeur upstairs, a seemingly endless basic domain where the food and laundry and odd jobs of the trains got seen to. There was a mini power station also, and painting and carpentering going on all over the place.
'This way,' she said, clattering ahead on snapping heels. 'Here is the uniform centre. They'll see to you.' She pushed open a door to let me through, said briefly, 'Here's the actor to the staff inside, and with a nod abandoned me to fate.
The staff inside were were good-natured and equally efficient. One was working a sewing machine, another a computer, and a third asked me what collar size I took.
There were shelves all round the room bearing hundreds of folded shirts of fine light grey and white vertical stripes, with striped collars, long striped sleeves and buttoned cuffs. 'The cuffs must remain buttoned at all times unless you are washing dishes.'
'Catch me, I thought mildly, washing dishes.
There were two racks of the harvest gold waistcoats on hangers. 'All the buttons must be fastened at all times.'
There were row on row of mid-grey trousers and mid-grey jackets tidily hung, and boxes galore of grey, yellow and maroon striped ties.
My helper was careful that everything he gave me should fit perfectly. 'VIA Rail staff at all times are well turned out and spotlessly clean. We give everyone tips on how to care for the clothes.'
He gave me a grey jacket, two pairs of grey trousers, five shirts, two waistcoats (which he called vests), two ties and a grey raincoat to go over all, and as he passed each garment as suitable he called out the size to the man with the computer. 'We know the sizes of every VIA employee right across Canada.'