Dorothy Eden (4 page)

Once more he had to run for the train. It very nearly left without him. Cursing the way Continental trains deliberately sneaked out of stations as if trying to leave passengers stranded, he sprinted after it and just hauled himself on board.

Kate left Francesca for a few minutes to go and wash and try to revive herself. Her enthusiasm and expended energy had caught up on her, and now she was very tired. She hoped Francesca would sleep when she finally got her bedded down in the Paris train, because she herself was going to sleep like a log.

Her face, pale with fatigue, looked back at her from the blurred mirror. Only a trickle of water came from the tap into the not-particularly-inviting basin. She would have to make do with a little coolness on her temples and a freshening of her lipstick. After all, did it matter, with only Francesca’s hooded eyes to look at her?

Certainly she would have dinner in the restaurant car at Basle. But even then, all alone, with Francesca safely tucked in bed, travel stains could not matter less.

Francesca was sitting bolt upright when she returned to the compartment.

“Man,” she said succinctly.

“A man?” Kate looked at the other unoccupied seats. They had been lucky so far, having a compartment to themselves. Not many people seemed to be travelling first-class on this train.

“That’s all right,” she said. “Other people can sit in here if they wish to.”

The child’s eyes looked burningly at her, and she spoke in her rapid, incomprehensible Italian.

“Did he talk to you?” Kate said. The child did not seem frightened, only wide awake and interested. Someone apparently had had a conversation with her in her own language, and it had cheered her up. Perhaps this stranger would come back and talk in English, too. In the meantime the barrier of their different languages was between them again. Francesca, rocking her doll in her arms, had found someone she had liked. Perhaps, taking after her mother, she responded more to men than to women. At least it had made her find her tongue for she said something else, ending with “Londre.”

“London?” said Kate sharply. “Did he ask if you were going to London?”

“Londre,” said Francesca again, and held up two fingers.

“Two,” said Kate, puzzled. “Twice?”

But did she mean the stranger had been to London twice, or that Francesca herself had?

Surely this rather comic-opera journey with the doll, the organdie dress and the Eiffel Tower looming ahead, as a lure, had not happened previously!

At Basle there was slight pandemonium, for a party of schoolgirls from the ages of seven to twelve boarded the train, and there seemed to be confusion about their seats. There was a great deal of arguing and chattering going on, and the two mistresses in charge of them, after talking emphatically to an ever-growing group of railway officials, at last shrugged their shoulders fatalistically and herded the children on board.

Kate, with her passports, baggage and her small travelling companion safely passed by the Customs, found their two-berth sleeping compartment and went into it thankfully. Francesca by this time was more than three parts asleep. Kate produced the bread and the cheese she had bought at Milan, anticipating the child’s inability to stay awake for late dinner in the restaurant car, but even these Francesca was too tired to cope with. She gnawed at the bread for a while, then yawned widely and clambered into her bunk.

“Oh, not in your dress!” exclaimed Kate. “If you sleep in that it will be quite ruined.”

But her endeavours to make the sleep-drunk child sit up and be divested of the now sadly crushed organdie were useless. She did not intend to have her dress removed. Either she was genuinely asleep or she was foxing, and Kate was even less able to cope with her stubbornness than the absent Gianetta had been.

Actually, she didn’t think Francesca was foxing, for her doll, Pepita, lay forgotten beside her, and she had the gnawed piece of bread still clutched in her hand. She was just worn out, poor little thing. After all, although she hadn’t responded to any friendliness, neither had she complained. There had been no tears or whimpering, which represented rather astonishing self-control for a seven-year-old. One had to remember that.

But that dress was going to be a travesty by morning. Kate opened the shabby little suitcase to see what Gianetta would have considered Francesca’s requirements on the journey. To her relief she found a blouse and skirt and a light tweed coat. Somehow the blouse and skirt would have to be forced on to the child in the morning, or, as a last resort, the coat could cover the crumpled dress.

So all would be well. The worst part of the journey was over. By morning they would be in Paris and by evening in London. Kate pulled the blanket high around Francesca’s sleeping face, and switched off the light over her bunk. Now she would relax with some food and a glass of wine in the restaurant car, and then get some much-needed sleep herself.

It was quite a journey to reach the restaurant car, and she was thankful the train had not yet left the station. For she had to step over little clumps of schoolgirls who, apparently just as weary as Francesca, had bedded down in the corridors, anxiously supervised by the two harassed mistresses.

One of the mistresses, a young girl with a round, freckled, hot face, said indignantly to Kate, “There’s been a mistake over our reservations, so we have no seats at all. Can you imagine? And we’ve been travelling all day. The children are worn out.”

“They look it,” said Kate sympathetically. “Can’t you find any empty seats?”

“Oh, we’ve parked a few of them here and there. There are thirty of them, and only two of us to look after them.” She pushed the damp hair off her forehead and sighed. “Oh, well, as long as no one falls over them. Kids sleep anywhere. But I do think these Continental trains are the end!”

Kate thought of the turmoil in the morning when everyone wanted to get into the toilet at once. She picked her way down the narrow corridors, over the children, over stacked luggage, past standing passengers, and the bitterly harassed official with the list of couchettes, past crowded compartments packed with weary tourists already trying to find welcoming spots for their heads, even if it were their neighbour’s reluctant shoulder. Twenty guineas, she was beginning to think, was not such a generous fee after all. Someone struggling on to the train dug the corner of a suitcase into her shin, and behind her the sorely tried official said in tones of the greatest entreaty to an importuning woman, “
S’il vous plâit, madame…
”

Then a man, leaning against the window, suddenly smiled at Kate.

His eyes were dark and intense. “Some scrimmage,” he said.

She assented wearily. Then suddenly she laughed back at him. It was funny, after all, and they were both English being amused at the ways of foreigners.

The fragmentary encounter cheered her up. Also a savoury smell indicated the nearness of the restaurant car. She came into its comparative emptiness and quiet, and, shown to a seat by a courteous waiter, she sat down and relaxed with pleasure.

She had only glimpsed the man’s face. But she was quick at faces. Almost now she could have sketched it. It had been dark and narrow and, for he did not seem old, surprisingly deeply lined. In repose, she guessed, it would be aloof and withdrawn, but his smile brought it to life.

If the sitter for Titian’s “Head of a Man” in the Louvre had suddenly smiled, he would have looked like that, she thought.

She fumbled in her bag for her pencil, and began sketching on the menu the waiter had given her.

Soup was brought, and when she looked up the young man was sitting opposite her.

He smiled. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

The train was moving now. Suddenly she was aware of the strain the day had been, and the deep relief she felt now that the journey was so far accomplished. The lights swayed a little to the rocking of the train, and it seemed to her that the face of the man sitting opposite her swayed a little, too, blurring and becoming clear again. She was very tired indeed.

“You’re travelling to England?”

“Yes. By ferry tomorrow.”

“So am I. We may see one another again.”

Was he going to be the “romantic interest” of her trip? But it was a little too late in the journey to have this happen, and there was all day tomorrow to be occupied with shepherding the silent Francesca about Paris. Besides, it was a pity she was so tired.

“You’ve been on holiday?” went on his pleasant, polite voice.

“No, on a job. Well, a sort of job. It gave me an excuse to get to Rome again.”

“Tell me your favourite part of Rome.”

“The Colosseum, I think. On a sunny, windy day, when the wild flowers are blooming in the cracks of the walls.”

“And you don’t hear the lions roaring any more.”

She nodded. “Just silence and peace.”

“Everything’s the same in a thousand years. It doesn’t really matter much if you missed your chariot in A.D. 80 or your train in this year of grace.”

His eyes were dark and sparkling, but his mouth had a definite line, and there was a certain grimness to the deeply-scored lines in his cheeks. He could be anything, anybody, a philosopher or a buccaneer.

“That’s a rather dangerous philosophy,” Kate said.

“Is it? Would you care to share a bottle of wine with me?”

“Thank you. I’ll probably go to sleep, but I suppose that will be the same in a thousand years, too.”

“Even Helen fell asleep.” His eyes on her were frankly admiring. More wide awake, she might have felt a little embarrassed. Now it was mildly pleasant to toss the conversational ball to such an entertaining stranger.

“My name’s Lucian Cray,” he said.

“I’m Kate Tempest. Not so romantic.”

“Romantic?”

“Yours is a little, isn’t it. Actually it sounds like a stage name. You don’t mind my saying so?”

“Not in the least. After all, Shakespeare could have known you and called you Miranda.”

She laughed. “Don’t be absurd. Not with my nose!”

The waiter had come with the wine list. They both discovered they preferred vin rouge, and somehow this seemed another bond between them. Another one? Kate puckered her brows. What was the other bond? That somehow she knew intuitively Rome affected him in the same way as it did her. The settled dust of long ago pandemonium, and the peace of old stones…

She realized that he had taken the menu from her and was studying her sketch.

“Do I look such a haggard individual?”

“That wasn’t intended for you to see.”

“Clever. If this is a habit of yours, you could become a menace.”

“I know. But faces fascinate me. If I don’t put them on paper they seem to stay graven on my mind.”

“So that’s what you’ve been doing in Rome, looking for faces of gladiators.”

“And the ones Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci used to discover. They’re still there, you know. If you sit in the via Vittorio Veneto, they all pass by, the beggars and the misers, the corrupt and the crafty. If you changed their clothes you’d find the Pharisees in the Temple and the Caesars and the Judas’s, the hungry and the lonely and the good.”

He poured wine into her glass.

“I’ve travelled for nearly three days,” she said. “I’m beginning to talk nonsense.”

“On the contrary, I wish you’d go on.”

“No, my job is drawing, not talking. Have you been on holiday?”

“I had to see some people in Rome,” he said, with what seemed to her deliberate vagueness. “Ah, well, Paris tomorrow, then London. Perhaps I’ll see you in London?”

“Aren’t we getting on a little fast?”

He smiled, with that sudden, disconcerting look of rakishness. His eyes were brilliant and bent only on her, but there was a certain coldness, almost a calculated look to them.

“Yesterday the Roman gladiators were only just around the corner, today the twenty-first century looms over us. Too fast? My dear Kate!”

She began to laugh. The wine and her tiredness and the movement of the train made her feel as if she were on a merry-go-round, a very gay, fast one whirling her towards some inevitable destiny. He began to laugh too, touching her hand, and suddenly she was light-heartedly, unquestioningly happy.

She did not think of William at all.

She left him at last. She had to get some sleep in order to cope with Francesca the next day. But she knew she would see him again, perhaps at breakfast, perhaps on the Channel boat, perhaps in London… He still hadn’t told her anything more about himself except that slightly unlikely name. But that didn’t matter. She would find out. There was plenty of time.

People and luggage still cluttered the corridors of the train. Kate made her way back to her compartment, carefully picking her way among the piled bags, the weary passengers, and, in her own carriage, two knots of sleeping schoolchildren.

The jolting of the train bumped her against a man standing near the door to her compartment. He turned to say “Pardon!” He was smoking a large cigar. He looked at her with bold, dark eyes. She frowned a little, knowing she would have to pass him again, with her sponge bag, on her way to wash—if one could pick one’s way over sleeping bodies to the toilet. There would be the squeezing past again, the murmured apology.

But she was wrong. When she came out again he had gone. She had to stand in the rocking corridor in a dispirited little queue for fifteen minutes, and was thankful all the time that Francesca was fast asleep. She had not stirred when Kate had entered the compartment. There was the unmoving plump hump of her beneath the bedclothes in the shadow. She’d probably wake frightfully early, and, sleep-dazed and out of temper, Kate would have to cope with her objections to wearing anything but the crumpled white organdie.

Well, no use in anticipating trouble. Live in the moment—in this particular moment of watching the miserly trickle of water coming from the faucets, and seeing in the swaying speckled mirror not her own face but that of her dinner companion, dark-eyed, sombre Lucian Cray. It was not a name one would forget. Or a face…

In spite of her extreme tiredness, she did not sleep well. She dozed, and woke with a start every time the train jolted to a stop. Somewhere behind these drawn blinds and this stuffy little room a world existed. One heard it in the shouted names of the stations, ringing through the abruptly still night, like battle honours. Then the more mundane chattering of late travellers, the slamming of doors, the sliding forward and the increasing rhythm of the wheels again, lulling her to uneasy sleep until the next jolt came, and the voices from another world shouted. Once there was scuffling outside her door, and one of the schoolgirls whimpering. The soothing voice of the mistress calmed her. Thank goodness her own charge was much too stolid and placid for upsets. She slept like a log. Once Kate leaned over from her bunk to see the tuft of hair unmoving on the pillow. If only she could sleep as soundly herself.