Stranger on a Train (28 page)

‘It's a pretty quiet town,' the stationmaster told us. We nodded grim agreement. ‘But there's Bertha's Tea Rooms.'

People fanned themselves like eighteenth-century courtiers who had inexplicably found themselves in the wilderness. They decided it was safer to keep still than venture into the blank unknown of Bertha's Tea Rooms in Ra
tone.
I more or less agreed, but Bertha sounded European enough to allow smoking in her tea room, and I really fancied sitting at a table, drinking tea and smoking in a public place. I hadn't done that since I left the UK, so I asked for directions. A young woman in jeans and a T-shirt with a large backpack strapped on to her said she would join me. We collected orders for doughnuts and Danish from several of our less intrepid fellow travellers, then we trudged off into town. It turned out that the shops were more shut down than just shut. It was a hopeless sort of place. We passed a cinema, but it was closed, and had been for a while by the look of it. It seemed that people in Raton had better things to do than go to the movies, though what those things might be was hard to imagine.

Bertha's Tea Rooms, however, were open, though there was only the one room, with plastic tables and chairs, and a handful of customers who seemed to have been specially sent from a Hollywood agency to play the role of regulars hanging out in a smalltown café, reading the local paper, throwing the occasional comment back and forth, and raising their heads in unison as my new friend and I opened the door. Bertha was behind a counter piled not just with regulation jelly doughnuts but with pastries and biscuits that would have been at home in any tea room in southern Germany.

‘We've found the jewel of Raton,' I murmured to my companion as we ordered a plateful of delicious home-baked goodies and coffees.

Caroline was nineteen, and, she told me, had just finished college and was on her way home to a small town in Illinois. I asked what she had studied and she looked a little cagey.

‘It was a theological college.'

We both waited to see how I would react.

‘Are you going to be a priest?'

‘No. I trained for missionary work. I'm planning to go overseas to work as a missionary after I've spent some time back with my parents.'

‘Where will you be going?'

I wondered what part of which dark continent still welcomed missionaries.

‘France.'

That
dark continent.

‘France?' I spoke too loud, and too astonished. She was startled. ‘France, Europe?'

‘Yes. That's where they want to send me.' Caroline looked nervous now. I tried to get the surprise off my face.

‘I didn't realise there was much call for missionaries in France.'

‘Yes,' Caroline said dubiously. ‘I was sort of surprised when they told me. But I guess there must be a need or they wouldn't send me.'

I wasn't at all sure that she knew where France was, but I suppose that just the fact of it not being in America justified the sending of a mission. She was from a fundamentalist family, who were pleased that she had followed in their footsteps. This was a new encounter for me.

‘So you believe in the whole creation thing?'

She nodded.

‘And evolution? And genetics?' I felt weary as I said it.

‘It's wrong. God made the world just as it says in the Bible.'

Caroline was nineteen. I know I've said that already, but I had to repeat it to myself.

‘Seven days? The whole shebang? What about fossils?'

‘Well, we're taught that God put fossils on the earth when he made it.'

‘For what? For fun? To tease? To trick us?'

‘No, I think the idea is,' she thought hard, back to her lectures, ‘that God made the world already old, with all its history already made. That's what accounts for the apparent age of the world.'

‘But why would God do that?'

‘Well, you have to have history, don't you?'

We finished our coffee and cakes and began to walk back to the station with the doughnuts for the others.

‘You don't have any qualms about converting people to your beliefs?'

‘I shouldn't. I'm sure what I believe is the truth. But, you know, I have been a bit worried about being a missionary. I don't know if it's right to go to other parts of the world and tell people what to think. Even if I believe it's the truth, I'm not sure I've got the right to tell people twice my age what they should be doing. I haven't really sorted my feelings out about it. It does seem odd for me to go to France and tell them to change their ideas.'

I was both dismayed and encouraged by Caroline. Not the world's most independent thinker, but still, perhaps because she's young, perhaps because ideas can still impinge on belief systems in the young, she's wondering about the nature of what she's planning to do, of the notion of one group of people having a truth that they are entitled to impose on others. It wasn't much, but it was something. Or better than nothing. And anyway, I figured that France would be able to withstand the persuasions of Caroline, and even, possibly, teach her a thing or two of its own.

*   *   *

Bet, Mikey and her hero lived in a small, four-roomed one-storey adobe house in a suburb of Albuquerque. I immediately gave up hope of seeing Albuquerque itself, which might have been Jacksonville the way Bet shuddered, ‘We never go into the city. It's all drugs and young people, these days,' as the hero drove us rapidly through it in his big blue Dodge four-wheel-drive on the way home from the train station. This wasn't the immaculate suburb of exquisitely green front lawns I'd seen in Phoenix. It was less uniform, less affluent, more utilised, with the front spaces of the houses serving more practical storage functions for the extra trucks or cars that wouldn't fit in the garages. Bet's space was gravelled. A trailer stood in front of the garage.

‘There's your new home,' Bet said, pointing to it as we drove up. ‘We're real proud of it. We just bought it this summer.'

‘Huh,' grunted Hero.

‘Ah, take no notice of him.'

‘Sure, don't worry. But if you wake up one morning in the woods, ma'am, don't be concerned. It's just me taking advantage of the hunting season. Which is why I bought it.'

‘Ignore him.'

‘Hey, Jenny, you won't mind being surrounded by bears and cougar. Don't worry, I've got plenty of guns. Just give a yell and I'll come running. I'm only kidding.' Hero smiled broadly. ‘You make yourself real comfortable. Just make sure you're gone before the hunting season's over.'

‘I thought I'd stay for four or five days,' I said nervously. ‘But if it's difficult…'

‘No, I'm pulling your leg. You don't want to take me too serious. You're real welcome. I'll head off for a few days after you leave.'

He didn't mind my coming to stay, but he had been genuinely worried that I would be around for a month or so and wreck his hunting plans. The trailer was new: his treasure, his hunting lodge and his den. But my promise of staying just five days reassured him. Perhaps he was also worried about how things would go with Mikey.

The single-storey house was cramped and dark. All the curtains were drawn, and they stayed drawn when we went in. Jim, Bet's hero, went straight to an old armchair in the living room and turned on the TV. Bet showed me into the cluttered kitchen, which was the real communal room. Only Hero and sometimes Mikey used the front room where the TV was always on and the curtains always closed the better to see it.

There was nothing ambivalent about Bet's pleasure in having a visitor.

‘This is so
great.
Can't you stay for longer? I thought you'd be staying a month.' No wonder the hero was anxious. ‘Well, what about making it a couple of weeks? He can still go off with his pals on a hunting trip if you stay a couple of weeks. He's only kidding you, really.'

Actually, he wasn't, and I was glad enough to have a reason not to stay longer.

The floor and the shelves of the eating area of the kitchen were piled high with the overflow of Bet's train memorabilia, which also lined the walls of the hallway and snaked into a tiny room at the back which Bet called her study. Bits of track, old train and station signs, timetables, model engines, postcards and other mementoes were piled precariously on top of each other. In the dim light the dusty disorder made the place look like a junk shop. A small circular dining table in the kitchen provided a slightly less chaotic island in the middle of it all. There were three kitchen chairs and one wheelchair set around it.

‘Never mind his hunting lodge. This is my guest bedroom,' Bet said, showing me to my sleeping quarters in the all-purpose everyone's-dream-come-true trailer. ‘I've never had a real guest. You're the first. Well, the kids come, and the grandchildren, though not to stay, but I've never had my very own guest before.' She was as excited as a schoolgirl. She clutched me on my shoulder and gave me a little shake. ‘Hey it's so
great
you've come to stay.'

By now I was beginning to panic. What was I doing in the home of these strangers, just one of whom I'd met on a train journey? Why had I put myself in such a situation? I couldn't remember why I thought it would be all right to do it. It could only be because I had completely forgotten who I really was. The coming five days loomed ahead and stretched out, elongating like a dark unfriendly cat settling down for the day.
Five days.
I imagined each night, each day, the hours, the minutes, and my heart rose into my throat, making my breath come in short gasps.

‘Are you OK? Look, here's your bed. Jim made it up this morning for you. He's really pleased you're here. He's glad I've got someone to spend time with. Now let me show you where everything is. And Mikey's really excited. He'll be back soon. He can't wait to meet you.'

I was soothed by the interior of the trailer, which was another version of my cabin on the freighter and the sleeping compartment on the train. A small, highly ordered, shipshape living space, where everything could be done that needed to be done, life could be lived, but with not an inch of space to spare. The double bed was built-in to the width of the trailer at the back. At the foot of the bed to the right was the kitchen – a sink, a fridge and a gas cooker, an electric kettle and cupboards above and below stacked full of cleaning equipment and dry food.

‘We keep it ready to go. You help yourself to anything.'

Bet opened canisters and we peered in to admire the contents: biscuits, breakfast cereals, Ryvita, tea, coffee, sugar, and she pointed to tins of pilchards, pot noodles, luncheon meat, corned beef and soup.

‘You just take whatever you want. Treat the place like home.'

Opposite the kitchen was a table with benches on either side where I could sit and work, and at the front was a diminutive bathroom with chemical loo, a basin and a shower.

‘Jim's hooked it up to the mains water and electricity. Everything's working. It's your very own palace.'

And it was. My doll's house home for the next few days delighted me. I'd once written a novel about a wild old woman, presumably a forward projection of myself, who took to life in a mobile home, and, until I learned about the trouble and expense of caring for the hull, I entertained serious fantasies in my late twenties of living in a narrow boat on the Regent's Canal. The precisely formulated, limited space attracted me just as when I was a child I loved diminutive dolls' houses, farmyards and play houses, or that dark triangular space of my childhood behind the two armchairs in the corner, where I spent so many hours, keeping away from the raging fights between my parents, being what they called ‘moody' and reading or playing out dramas of my own devising. And the trailer was, of course, outside Bet's house, a separate space, a retreat, just like ships' cabins and train sleeping compartments, a place away from everyone. Bet was the best and most enthusiastic of hosts. I was the worst of guests, wanting, before it even started, to hide away in my trailer against the conviviality and the talk, the addition of me to the family, quite unable to make the move from amiable stranger in control of my own sociability, to the responsibilities of a guest in the family house.

Bet was completely herself, but lighter-hearted than when we met on the
Sunset Limited.
She wanted to talk. She drew me back to the kitchen table, settled down with a large gin and tonic and told me about her life, her difficult childhood with her alcoholic mother, her youthful wildness, settling down with Jim and making a family which, when it was young, she herded from army base to army base all over the world – Germany and Japan – without ever setting foot outside the American-ness offered by the enclosing camps. She didn't consider herself well travelled, or travelled at all. Like Jim, she had gone because America had sent her to make war or keep peace. Now, the three older children were married – no divorces in Bet's family – and earning livings as clerks and tree surgeons, and all lived quite nearby. She told me about the youngest, Mikey, who in his late twenties, not having found what he wanted to do, had finally settled on being a policeman and was in the middle of training when his accident happened. A pure accident, if that is possible. Bet, at any rate, accepted it as such. The woman who ran into Mikey's stationary car couldn't have avoided it, and Bet felt no resentment that she was hurt not at all. Mikey was in a coma for weeks and it was more or less accepted that he was going to die, even by Bet, when he suddenly came round, his right arm and leg paralysed, his speech profoundly slurred, his short-term memory all but destroyed, his mental age retarded to a nine-year-old. But he was alive.

‘Oh, Jenny, it just broke my heart, but we got our baby boy back, and now he's going to stay a baby for ever. You could say we were lucky.'