Night Train to Lisbon (4 page)

Through the gray plumes, Carson could make out the faces of three other young men. “Hello,” said one, extending a hand. “Michael Morling.”

“Thomas Brandon.”

“Frederick Hunt,” said the third. “But everyone who knows me calls me Freddy sooner or later.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Carson.

“Hey, what do you know, the lady's a Yank,” said Freddy Hunt. He was a redhead with bright eyes, an impish-looking man, small and compact, who seemed like he'd be a great deal of fun as a traveling companion. Though Michael and Thomas looked the part of young scientists, Carson thought, Freddy was more like the younger brother of a scientist—a little too playful, actually, to possess a serious scientific mind.

Carson had never been called a Yank before. She was in the minority here, both as a female and as an American, and the attention was pleasurable, she realized. The game got under way, with all the men piping in to teach her the rules of play. Carson was a poor player in the beginning, but quickly caught on, and eventually she found herself winning the hand.

“What did I say?” said Alec proudly. “Didn't I tell you she'd be good?”

The men chimed in with admiration or mock anger. There were jokes and laughter, and even a
few sentimental old school songs, including one that Freddy, in particular, sang with gusto and irony at the top of his lungs, while his friends egged him on:

“Oh, Freddy,” said Thomas, “you make me want to cry.”

“Yes, we're all going to weep into our ale,” added Michael. “We're going to have
paroxysms
of sorrow.”

Alec rolled his eyes and turned to Carson to explain. “You'll have to forgive them,” he said. “You see, we've all known one another since we were first-years at Cambridge, all of us studying physics. Now, each of us thought we were simply brilliant, having been told that when we were schoolboys. But upon arriving at Cambridge, we received the shock of our lives to learn that there were actually
other
men out there who were possibly as brilliant as we were—maybe even more so. Believe me, Carson, it was a comeuppance. And the most galling fact of it all was that this…this”—he gestured toward Freddy—“this
infant,
who looked like someone's younger tagalong brother, was, in fact, the most brilliant one among
us. He'd come out of nowhere. A Yorkshire lad. No pedigree whatsoever, and he was at Cambridge on a full scholarship. Saved from a life spent in the coal mines, having been rescued by a kindly geology tutor visiting Yorkshire on an expedition who happened upon the lad with the thick accent and the head full of astonishing ideas. Soon Freddy was a first-year along with the rest of us, and fairly soon afterward, the four of us were rooming together at college.”

“It was an extraordinary time,” said Michael wistfully. “We stayed up as late as we could, just talking, playing cards—”

“Drinking,” put in Freddy.

“Yes, drinking,” said Michael, “but also figuring things out. Scientific problems, that sort of thing. Ever since then, we've been a sort of team. An unofficial think tank, if you will. And all of us have been given posts at dear old Cambridge, and we've got a big, rambling bachelor's flat in town, away from college life, where we can drink and carouse to our hearts' content and not be bad influences on the young.”

“Except during tutorials,” said Thomas. “At which point we can't help but be a terrible influence.”

Carson looked from one to the other during this conversation. They were so vibrant, these men, so full of intelligence and playfulness. She scarcely knew which one of them she liked best. Well, no, that wasn't quite true. She liked Alec best, for in addition to being playful, he was
handsome and considerate and genuinely interested in what she had to say. But there was something about the energy of the entire group that was exciting to be around.
Compare this,
she thought, maybe a little meanly,
with life back in Connecticut.

The thought of Connecticut reminded Carson of money, and the subject of money reminded her that Alec had almost none of it himself. True, he and his friends were traveling first-class, but Alec had made it clear during dinner that Cambridge was footing the bill for their train travel and their accommodations once they arrived in Portugal. He himself came from modest circumstances; his father had died long ago, and his mother, who had died last year, had been a “charwoman,” a term that was new to Carson but which, he quickly explained when met with her puzzled expression, meant she had cleaned other people's houses.

But it was strange, Carson realized, the way Alec didn't seem to care very much about money. Again, Connecticut came to mind. How much everyone Carson knew in Connecticut cared about money. How much
she
cared.

Or, actually, how much she
didn't
care. How much she didn't think about it, didn't
need
to think about it, except to assume that it would be there to furnish an entire life for those like herself who were lucky enough to have it. Having money was a given for someone in Carson's world. The money was always flowing, as if from some invisible underground well. In the fairy
tales that her mother told before bed, in which the princess married the prince, money was naturally assumed to be present, and in her own idle thoughts about falling in love one day, it never occurred to Carson that money wouldn't be part of the equation. Never, not even once.

But here, in this smoky sleeper car, Carson found herself among men whose lives were not in any way devoted to the pursuit of money. Maybe it was the smoke, or an aftereffect of the food poisoning, or the sudden feeling of dislocation, as though she were a million miles away from the values and concerns of her Connecticut world, but Carson suddenly needed air and needed it now. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, as though summoned by her thoughts, Alec was standing above her.

“You know, I think I need some air,” he said. “Want to come?”

Carson nodded and stood, and Alec slid the compartment door open.

“This way,” he said, and he led her down the aisle. They passed nighttime compartments in which porters were turning down berths, getting them ready for sleep, tucking white sheets into the red crushed velvet. Little lights were on inside the compartments, casting soft yellow glows like fireflies, while through the train windows the night sky rushed by in a blur, that French sky that would imperceptibly become a Spanish one, and then eventually a Portuguese one.

There were families inside compartments get
ting ready for the night, and Carson took notice of mothers with daughters, the little well-dressed girls of first class clutching their beloved dolls tightly. She recalled her own beloved doll when she was a girl, a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed rag doll named Emmeline. What had become of her? She was probably put away into a box somewhere, forgotten, the way all childhood treasures eventually are. And now, as Alec led Carson down the aisle, she went past her own compartment, and there inside were Uncle Lawrence and Aunt Jane. They were deep in conversation, she saw, something serious and humorless. Uncle Lawrence looked up at exactly that moment and saw Carson and Alec through the glass. His expression was impassive, and Carson felt strangely guilty, as though she'd done something wrong.

What
had
she done? Nothing, truly nothing at all. It was as though Uncle Lawrence could read her thoughts, and as though he knew that she felt an unusual rush of excitement walking through a train in Europe with a young physics tutor at Cambridge. She looked back at her uncle for an extended moment, their eyes meeting, and as this happened, Aunt Jane looked out at Carson, too. Her aunt and uncle were staring out at her just as Alec had stared out earlier from his compartment, and she was staring back just as she'd stared back at Alec earlier, only now it was
this
scene, the one inside the compartment where she supposedly belonged, that felt foreign.

Alec took Carson's arm and led her past.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “Let's get that much-needed air.”

They walked through the remainder of first class, and then into second class, where the passengers shifted and did their best to make themselves comfortable in the seats of cramped compartments that did not open into sleeping berths. And then finally Alec opened a very heavy door and led her out onto a railed platform in the open air. The night was warm, but because the train was traveling so quickly, the rush of wind made it feel as though it was the middle of winter.

“You're shivering,” said Alec.

“It's all right.”

“Here,” he insisted, and swiftly he removed his tweed jacket and draped it around her shoulders. She could feel the silky lining against her neck, and it was a pleasurable sensation.

“Now
you're
the one who's shivering,” said Carson.

“It's all right,” said Alec. “I've been a lot colder than this, believe me.”

“When?” she asked.

He shrugged, making light of it. “When I was a very little boy, we didn't have much heat,” he said. “Oh, we weren't penniless—I didn't have a boyhood quite like Freddy Hunt's. But my father, inasmuch as I can remember him, drank a great deal—well, he drank like a fish, as you Americans say—and there wasn't too much money left for wood to stoke the fire with, or food to eat. After he died, Mum and I made the best of it that we
could. Often, Mum would take me to Mrs. Bertram's house, and it would be warm there. I'd stay inside and do my schoolwork.”

“Who's Mrs. Bertram?”

Alec's face seemed to light up at the question. “Oh, she's the very wealthy lady my mum cleaned house for. Has a grand place in Bloomsbury, right near the British Museum. She's very old now, but when I was a boy she was just medium old, and I'd keep warm in her house and do my homework and she'd always tell my mum what a wonderful, hardworking lad I was.” He shook his head. “All my hard work paid off, I guess, because when it came time for me to apply to college, Mrs. Bertram announced that she was planning to pay for my entire education, provided that I ‘made something' with my life. My mum and I couldn't believe it! But the thing is, it changed my life. I'd never really thought about what I was going to do with myself. I was just a boy whose father was dead. Just bumming around aimlessly with my friends. But now I saw that choices
mattered.
And that I wasn't going to be a drunkard like my old man had been, or clean other people's houses like my poor mum, but that I was going to do something that made a difference in the world. So I studied physics at Cambridge, and gradually found I had a certain aptitude.”

“And are you making a difference?” Carson asked.

Alec narrowed his eyes now, as if he knew exactly what he wanted out of life, as if he could see
it out there in the darkness. After all the booming declarations of modesty Carson had heard back in the compartment where she'd played cards with Alec and his friends, this quiet display of certainty, of decisiveness, somehow touched her.

“I like to think I will,” said Alec. Then he shook his head, and the look was gone. “But it's hard to know, so soon.”

Carson wanted to reach out to him, to touch his shoulder, to tell him everything was going to be all right, that he was going to get what he wanted out of life, that he would make a difference, she was sure of it. But she felt such a gesture would be too forward, and so she turned instead and joined Alec in gazing out over the rail, as everything receded in the black night. There were distant lights belonging to houses, farms, rural people they would never meet. It all went by so quickly, Carson thought. Sights seen from a train. Life itself.

She saw now where this evening was heading. It was heading where everything always headed: toward the end. The evening would end, and Carson felt suddenly that she couldn't bear that thought. That fact of life.
This
was where she wanted to be; this was
who
she wanted to be: not a young girl, back in her bed in Connecticut, but this person in this moment now: sharing a platform with a mysterious stranger named Alec on the night train to Lisbon. A mysterious stranger herself.

“And what about you?” she heard him ask.
“I've only been talking about myself. I haven't asked you a single question, and I feel terribly rude. Because the truth is that I do want to know about you, about who you are.”

Carson looked away from him; she hardly knew what to say. Her own story had none of the drama that his did, and none of the dreams. “I'm not really anybody,” she said softly.

“That can't be true,” said Alec.

“But it is. I grew up very privileged. We had no Mrs. Bertram. My mother essentially
is
Mrs. Bertram,” she said with a small laugh. “I've wanted for nothing.”

“Oh, I don't believe that,” said Alec.

Carson realized he was looking at her intently. What did he see in her eyes, she wondered, to cause him to make such a statement? What was missing from her gaze? She was a young woman traveling through Europe, as countless young women had done before her, and she appeared happy enough, didn't she?

“Everyone wants for something,” said Alec. “Everyone has something that can't be fulfilled. It may not be money. It may be something else. Companionship. A soul mate. Friendship. Love.” He spoke these words lightly, tossing them off like playing cards, making it seem as though he wasn't applying them specifically to
her
. But, of course, he was. And strangely enough, they did apply to her.