nd crunching; and what was more, the party of four directly opposite her, who were among the loudest, had already started dealing a deck of cards — till only she was left, solitary, sitting even more stiffly among the increasingly loud human hubbub, silent, her head determinedly turned to the window, her fur coat protected from the seat by a sheet of newspaper, clutching her clipped handbag to her with such terrified and resolute suspicion that she hardly noticed the engine up ahead, its two red lights probing the frozen darkness, drawing uncertainly out into the winter evening. A discreet sigh was her only contribution to the noises of general relief (grunts of satisfaction, whoops of joy) that after such a long and chilly period of waiting something at last was happening; though this did not last long, since, having travelled barely a hundred metres from the now silent village platform and after a few clumsy jerks — as if the order permitting them to start had been unexpectedly revoked — the train came judderingly to a stop; and though the cries of frustration soon gave way to puzzled and angry laughter, once people realized that this state of affairs was likely to continue and were forced to admit that their journey — possibly because of the extended chaos owing to the employment of an off-timetable train — was sadly destined to vacillate between lurching forward and lurching to a halt, they all relapsed into a jokey indifference, the dull insensibility that ensues when one has been forced to accept certain facts, which simply goes to show how people behave when, having failed, infuriatingly, to understand something, they try to suppress the fear caused by genuine shock to a system which seems to have been overtaken by chaos, the nerve-rackingly repeated instances of which may be met with nothing but withering sarcasm. Although their crude incessant joking (‘I should take so much care when I’m in bed with the missus …!’) naturally outraged her delicate sensibilities, the stream of ever ruder cracks with which each hoped to trump the one before — jokes, in any case, now dying away — had a relaxing effect, even on Mrs Plauf, and, every so often, on hearing one of the better ones — and there was no real escape from the coarse laughter that followed in each case — she herself couldn’t entirely suppress a shy little smile. Slyly and carefully, she even ventured a few momentary glances, not at her immediate neighbours but at those who were sitting further off, and in the peculiar atmosphere of daft good humour — since, while the occupants of the carriage (those men slapping their thighs, those women of nondescript age cackling with their mouths full) remained rather fearsome, they seemed less threatening than they had been — she tried to keep her anxious imagination in check and tell herself that she might not actually have to face the lurking terrors of the ugly and unfriendly mob by which, her instincts told her, she was surrounded, and that it might only be because of her keen susceptibility to omens of ill-fortune and her exaggerated sense of isolation in such a cold and alien environment, that she might arrive home, unharmed it may be, but exhausted by her state of constant vigilance. To tell the truth, there was very little real basis for hope of such a happy resolution but Mrs Plauf simply couldn’t resist the false enticements of optimism: though the train was once again stalled nowhere, waiting minutes on end for a signal, she calmly concluded that they were making ‘some kind of progress’, and she controlled the nervous impatience occasioned by the regular — alas too frequent — squealing of brakes and periods of unavoidable immobility, since the pleasant warmth that had resulted from the heating being switched on when the engine started had encouraged her to divest herself of her coat, so she no longer had to fear that she might catch a cold on stepping out into the icy wind on arrival home. She adjusted the creases in the stole behind her, spread the fake-fur wrap over her legs, locked her fingers round the handbag swollen by the woollen scarf she had stuffed inside it, and, with an unchangingly straight back, was just looking out again through the window when there, in the filthy glass, she suddenly found herself face to face with a ‘peculiarly silent’ unshaven man, swigging from a bottle of stinking brandy, who, now that she was clad only in a blouse and the little jacket of her suit, was staring (‘Lustfully!!’) at her perhaps too prominent, powerful breasts. ‘I knew it!’—quick as lightning, despite a hot flush running right through her, she turned her head away, pretending she hadn’t noticed. For several minutes she didn’t move a muscle, but stared blindly into the darkness outside, and tried, vainly, to recall the man’s appearance (conjuring up only the unshaven face, the ‘somehow so dirty’ broadcloth coat and the uncouth, sly yet shameless gaze which she was to find so disturbing …), then, very slowly, trusting that she ran no risk in doing so, she allowed her eyes to slide across the glass, withdrawing immediately when she discovered not only that ‘the creature in question’ was persisting in his ‘impudence’, but that their eyes had met. Her shoulders, neck and nape were all aching because of the rigid posture of her head, but by now she couldn’t have torn her eyes away even if she had wanted to, because she felt that whichever way she turned beyond the narrow darkness of the window, his terrifyingly steady gaze would easily commandeer every nook of the carriage and ‘snap her up’. ‘How long has he been looking at me?’—the question cut Mrs Plauf like a knife, and the possibility that the man’s dirty raking eye had been ‘on her’ from the very start of the journey made the gaze, whose meaning she had understood in a flash in the very second of contact, appear even more terrifying than before. These two eyes, after all, spoke of sickeningly ‘foul desires’—‘worse still!’ she trembled — it was as if some sort of dry contempt burned within them. While she couldn’t think of herself as an old woman, not precisely, she knew she was past the age when this kind of attention — not uncommon when paid to others — was still natural, and so, as well as regarding the man with a certain horror (what kind of person is it, after all, who is capable of lusting after elderly women?), she was frightened to realize that this fellow stinking of cheap brandy wanted nothing more perhaps than to make her ridiculous, to mock and humiliate her, then laughingly toss her aside ‘like an old rag’. After a few violent jolts the train now began to pick up speed, wheels clattered furiously on rails, and a long-forgotten feeling of confusion and acute embarrassment took hold of her as her full, heavy breasts started to throb and burn under the man’s fixed, uncontrollable and threatening gaze. Her arms, with which she could at least have covered them, simply refused to obey her: it was as if she had been specially selected, helpless to cover the shame of her exposure, and as a consequence she felt ever more vulnerable, ever more naked, ever more conscious of the fact that the more she yearned to conceal her thrusting womanhood the more it drew attention to itself. The card players ended another round with an outburst of crude bickering which broke across the hostile and paralysing hum — cutting, as it were, the bands that tightly bound her and prevented her escaping — and she would almost certainly have succeeded in overcoming her unfortunate torpor had not something even worse suddenly happened, the sole purpose of which, she realized in despair, was to crown her suffering. Driven as she was by her instinctive embarrassment and in an act of unconscious defiance, she was just trying to hide her breasts by tactfully inclining her head, when her back bent awkwardly, her shoulders slumped forward and she realized in a moment of terror that her bra — perhaps due to her unusual physical exertion — had come unclipped behind her. She looked up aghast, and was not at all surprised to see the two male eyes still fixed steadily on her, eyes that winked at her with an air of complicity, as if aware of her ridiculous ill-fortune. Mrs Plauf knew all too well what would happen next, but this almost fatal accident so disturbed her that she only sat stiffer than ever in the accelerating train, helpless once more, her cheeks burning with embarrassment, having to suffer the malicious look of glee in those contemptuously self-confident eyes which were now glued to her breasts, breasts which, freed from the encumbrance of the bra, jogged merrily up and down with the jolting of the carriage. She didn’t dare look up again in order to check this, but she was sure it was the case: it was no longer just the man but all those ‘loathsome peasants’ staring at her discomfort; she could practically see their ugly, greedy, grinning faces encircling her, and this humiliating torture might have gone on for ever had not the conductor — an adolescent lout with a bad case of acne — entered the carriage from the rear compartment; his harsh, recently broken voice (Tickets please!’) finally freed her from the grip of shame, she snatched her ticket from the handbag and folded her arms below her breasts. The train stopped again, this time where it was supposed to, and — even if only to avoid having to contemplate the genuinely frightening expressions about her — she mechanically read the name of the village on the faintly illuminated signboard above the platform, and could have cried out with relief at recognizing it from the familiar because exhaustively perused timetables she endlessly consulted before any journey, knowing that only a few minutes from now they would be arriving at the county town where (‘He’ll get off! He must get off!’) she would almost certainly be free of her pursuer. Tense with excitement, she watched the slow approach of the conductor through the derisive clamouring of those who wished to know why the train was so late, and though she had intended to ask for help as soon as he came to her, his baby-face wore an expression of such helplessness in the surrounding racket, an expression so unlikely to offer her the assurance of official protection, that by the time he was standing next to her she felt so rattled it was all she could do to ask him where the washroom was. ‘Where else should it be?’ the boy answered nervously as he punched her ticket. ‘Where it’s always been. One at the front, one at the back.’ ‘Ah yes, of course,’ mumbled Mrs Plauf with an apologetic gesture and leapt from her seat clutching her handbag to her, scuttling back down the carriage, swaying now left now right as the train lurched off again, and it was only once she had reached the place of desolation masquerading as a WC and leaned gasping against the locked door that she realized she had left her fur coat hanging on the hook by the window. She knew she had to move as fast as possible and yet it took her a full minute before — surrendering all thought of dashing back for her expensive fur — she could pull herself together and, rocked to and fro by the juddering of the train, divest herself of her jacket, quickly pull the blouse over her head and, holding coat, blouse and handbag under her arm, tug her pink slip right up to her shoulders. Her hands trembling with nervous haste, she brought her bra round and, seeing (‘Thank heaven!’) that the clip was not broken, sighed in relief; she had just begun clumsily to dress when she heard behind her the tentative but clearly audible sound of someone outside knocking at the door. There was about this knocking some peculiar quality of intimacy which, naturally enough in the light of all that had happened so far, succeeded in scaring her, but then, on reflecting that the fear was probably no more than a monstrous product of her own imagination, she grew indignant at being hurried like this; and so she continued her half-finished movement, taking a perfunctory glance in the mirror, and was just about to reach for the handle when there came another burst of impatient knocking, quickly succeeded by a voice announcing: ‘It’s me.’ She drew her hand back aghast, and by the time she had formed an idea of who it was, she was overtaken less by a sense of entrapment than by desperate incomprehension as to why this croaky strangled male voice should bear no trace of aggression or low threat but sound vaguely bored and anxious that she, Mrs Plauf, should at last open the door. For a few moments neither stirred a muscle, each waiting for some word of explanation from the other, and Mrs Plauf only grasped the monstrous misunderstanding of which she had become the victim when her pursuer lost patience and tugged furiously at the handle, bellowing at her, ‘Well! What is it to be?! All tease, no nookie?!’ She stared at the door, terrified. Not wanting to believe it, she bitterly shook her head and felt a constriction at her throat, startled, like all those attacked from an unexpected quarter, to find that she had ‘fallen into some infernal snare’. Reeling at the thought of the sheer unfairness, the naked obscenity of her situation, it took her some time to comprehend that — however incredible, since as a matter of fact she had always resisted the idea — the unshaven man had from the very start believed that it was she who was propositioning