Stranger on a Train (4 page)

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There is never perfect solitude, a person is a fool to set out in search of it. A fool, at any rate, if they are disappointed by not finding it.

There were two couples apart from me travelling as passengers. Fogey and Roz were in their seventies, returning home after taking a holiday from a farm in Arizona. She was neat as a button, a large easy-care American matron; Fogey was silent most of the time, though he was known to ask for the peanut butter sometimes when it was out of reach at breakfast. Neither was talkative, but they weren't unfriendly. They were insular Americans, had taken a peek at Europe, but were uneasy at finding themselves in a strange world, in strange company. At breakfast, lunch and supper, we sat with the officers and after a decent interval of polite conversation – the weather, how they had slept, where we were – they slipped into silence.

The German couple, Stan and Dora, from Lake Constance, were also in their seventies, and they weren't silent. They were travelling with their brand-new, super-equipped, bells-and-whistles mobile home lashed to the top deck. They were planning to spend a year travelling around the States. They talked without stopping, without thinking, it came to seem. They were determined to speak as much English as possible before they disembarked for their New World adventure. What they talked about and how their audience responded appeared irrelevant. They lived in a bubble of their own perceived needs, like children. They were also a neat pair. Spruce, rather. Stan and Dora were several sizes down from the American couple, with well-nurtured bodies and immaculately cut, short white hair. They were turned out for a cruise: she wore silk scarves with naval emblems on them, he wore studiedly casual slacks, well-ironed polo shirts sporting an anchor or a knot on the breast pocket, and rope-soled deck shoes. These two had no idea of how to coexist with strangers. They buzzed like flies across all the careful boundaries. It seemed to me that they stalked me, so that no matter which secluded corner I discovered for myself, they found me there sooner or later.

‘Ah, you are here.'

Dora babbled. She spoke entirely inconsequentially, staring at me as she talked with intensely blue, intensely vacant eyes. ‘I brush my teeth after every meal. We must all brush our teeth after every meal.' ‘I love all kinds of potatoes. Boiled, roasted, fried, chipped…' ‘You were not at breakfast. Where were you? I said to Stan, “Where is she?”' ‘You are reading a book. I like to read books.' ‘Ah, you cannot change the past.' ‘My mother always said that Hitler would be bad for us.' All of it was spoken in a monotone, with that staring look in her eyes, as if she were trying to recall and practise phrases she had worked up the evening before from her English book. Perhaps that's exactly what it was, but her eyes were uncanny. Behind her glasses they dragged downwards at the outside corners, as blue and dead as standing pools. Nothing lit them up. She watched Stan, who liked to think he spoke better English than Dora, make his declarations about the world – ‘It is good', ‘It is not good' – with her unchanging cold fishy eyes, while the rest of her face expressed devoted interest. Stan talked as much as she, mostly with reminiscences of his travels around Europe thirty years ago. He told the Croatians everything he knew (and they certainly did) about Dubrovnik, and me everything he knew about London, as if he remained familiar with these places he hadn't set foot in for a generation. At mealtimes he would complain about the state of Europe. Germany in particular. It was being overrun with ‘Arabs. Not trust Arabs.' He rubbed his well-manicured fingers against each other. ‘Money. Only money. And now they live in our cities with their minarets and their
wawawa.
'

I left the table at that point, but Roz told me that he had continued unperturbed and gone on to complain of Berlin being overrun by Russians, to which the usually uncommunicative Fogey had quietly murmured, ‘Well, that makes a change.'

One morning Dora found me sitting on deck, reading, and after admonishing me for not eating fruit at breakfast (‘You must have fruit. Fruit is good for you.') asked me my age.

‘Ah, you are one year older than my daughter. I could be your mother,' she announced in a blue-eyed monotone. While this was chronologically possible, it was, aside from being inane, so historically and geographically inaccurate that I had to fight the gasp that rose in my throat. She then placed a firm hand on my right cheek, and bending down planted a brisk kiss on my other cheek. I froze through the maternal moment. Eventually, I managed a coldly polite and somewhat inappropriate ‘Thank you'. But the panic stayed with me. The next afternoon I was in the wash room, wondering why the hell I was ironing a shirt in the blistering heat of the day. Dora found me again.

‘Ah, you iron.'

I nodded my agreement, and sweat fell from my chin. She didn't rate my technique.

‘No, no, you must open the buttons to iron correctly.'

She approached the ironing board with her hand outstretched ready to correct my sloppy ways. Reality began to slow down for me as she started to open the top button. I had to make a physical effort not to slap her hand out of the way.

‘NO.' I actually bellowed at the harmless old woman as you might shout at a child to prevent yourself from lashing out. ‘Leave it alone. Don't touch it. Do. Not. Touch. It.'

My face must have matched my warning tone. Dora started and then backed away. She was alarmed and quite baffled by my excessive reaction to her helpfulness. I didn't care to discuss with her how much she couldn't have been my mother.

‘Yes. It is your ironing. Yes,' she soothed, leaving the room without turning her back on me. But her surprise was no greater than mine at the rage I'd expressed. My admiration for the crew's capacity to live together increased greatly.

Dora and Stan's blandness and blank insensitivity were monumental. They spoke regardless of who was listening or what anyone else was feeling or thinking. It was a rare, infantile quality that I should have relished having the chance to observe. But the brutality of not observing other people was too stark in these cloistered surroundings, and as it turned out,
nothing
that happened to other people had any real impact on them.

I appreciated the distant good manners of Roz and Fogey all the more as the days with the German couple passed. Fogey turned out to be a radio ham and had set up an aerial outside his cabin, and without my asking fixed one for me outside my window so I could catch the World Service. He spent most of his time listening in and talking to strangers on his short-wave while Roz sat and did crosswords. Roz had been widowed, and after two or three years had married her brother-in-law, Fogey. They seemed content together. We were three days away from Tampa when for the first time the two of them arrived late for breakfast, clearly distressed, looking grim and drained, although Roz, who sat next to me, was, as usual, carefully and neatly dressed.

‘Didn't you sleep? Was it the heat?' I asked, and then saw that it was more than that.

‘We had some bad news last night. Very bad news.'

At ten the previous evening Fogey had got a call on his radio from Arizona. Roz's 48-year-old son, Fogey's nephew and stepson, had died suddenly that morning, probably of a heart attack. Roz told me this in an undertone, her voice just making it to the end of the sentence and her eyes welling but managing to suppress the tears. There was nothing they could do but wait for the ship to get to Tampa and then fly to her son's home in California for the funeral. The luxury of distance became an agony of time. The vastness of the Atlantic, the immutable sea-ness of the sea, the perpetual horizon that promised more and more of nothing, all of which I was so relishing, transformed in an instant from the mile after mile to the minute after minute that had to be lived through by a woman stuck in the middle of nowhere, cut off from where she urgently needed to be, suffering an unimaginable loss, among strangers. Now the sea was just an intolerable inhuman space to be covered before Roz could get back to her family for the funeral of her eldest son.

‘I'm sorry,' Roz said with agonising politeness. ‘I'll try not to be morbid for the rest of the journey.'

Fogey was silent as usual, slowly chewing his toast and peanut butter, until Stan asked if anyone knew where we were.

‘We're in the Doldrums,' Fogey said with geographical accuracy, and fell quiet again.

Stan and Dora were exercised that morning about filling in their US immigration forms, something about which annoyed them. Throughout breakfast they complained loudly about the US authorities and not being allowed to depart in a year's time from any port that was convenient to them. They went on and on about American bureaucracy and how in Germany this sort of thing could never happen. And on and on, inviting the whole table to share in their exceptional troubles. Nothing about Roz's demeanour, or my reaction to her news, silenced them. Later on deck I told Dora what had happened.

‘Aha, I felt there was some sadness at breakfast. But how annoying is the immigration. Yes, it's a bad thing when a child is dead before the mother is dead. Well, that is life.' Her eyes as blank as ever. I had the impression that she was still quoting from her phrase book.

Roz told me before they left that while all the crew had offered their sympathy in words or with a silent handshake, Dora and Stan had said nothing to her about the death of her son. But Dora, about whom I felt so unreasonably angry, who, I have to say, I actually hated, was right about life. That was life. There had been another death during the journey.

Udi had been dying for several months before I left for Hamburg to join the
MV Christiane.
We were quite recent friends, although I'd known him for several years. I would see him at the table of mutual friends; once or twice I went to dinner parties at his house. But out of the blue, so it seemed to me, from time to time, he would phone to tell me he liked something I'd written and why. I received his compliments awkwardly. I was reserved. Udi was not. He had a flair, an insistence even, for friendship which made me nervous. Once or twice he called simply to say that he liked me. That excruciated me because I had no idea how to respond to such a statement. As when Dora kissed me, I could only manage a polite thank-you. Udi was fully married to and in love with his wife, but he was innately a seducer of people. His flirtation wasn't a demand for an actual sexual relationship, but part of a general campaign: a refusal to allow anyone he decided he wanted as a friend to escape into reticence. His forthright offers of friendship were, as I said, uncomfortable for me, but they were appealing too. He made liking someone and wanting them in his life seem easy, whereas it was what I found most uncannily difficult. I've rarely made relationships of any kind with anyone who didn't make more effort than I, who didn't in some way or other, insist. It's a safety feature of my psyche. I am paralysed by the idea of being said no to. If there are compulsive seducers in this world, there are also compulsive seductees. On the scale of things I wouldn't take an emotional risk for, friendship comes higher than a sexual relationship. It is more mysterious, more dangerous to me than a sexual affair, which I can easily relegate to a game and walk away from with a shrug. I am perhaps a child of the sixties. Or something. Sex can be serious, but it doesn't have to be. Friendship feels like a much weightier matter, but something I haven't ever quite got the knack of. Whenever I have most felt the dizzying deranging vertigo of betrayal (or of betraying), it has been in the context of friendship.

Ten months before my sea journey Udi and Judy came to my birthday party, all dressed up, bearing gifts and celebration smiles, and found me flopped in an ancient T-shirt and threadbare jeans on my sofa in front of the TV.

‘Are we early?'

‘By a week.'

We went to the local Indian, overdressed and underdressed; all of us delighted somehow by the discomfort of their mistake and the disruption of my idle solitude. The friendship started properly that evening. A week later, Judy came to the actual party alone. Udi wasn't feeling well. He was going to see the doctor in the morning. It was cancer. An investigative operation discovered a large tumour in his stomach. He checked with doctor friends and with anything he could find on the internet on his particular cancer and the stage it had reached, and concluded that he would certainly die of it, but had perhaps another three to five years. He was fifty-six. First thing back from hospital, he bought a Harley.

His wife took the emotional brunt of his death sentence. With his friends, Udi discussed the matter. We talked, he and I, about his absolute conviction that the end was the end. The terror of that, and the comfort, too. There was nothing to fear but nothingness; all the sadness was about the abrupt end of life, the interruption of his marriage, the awful fact of not being able to watch his youngest son grow up, the effect on his family. But the blankness of after the end came up often between us. He was unwavering about the reality of his dying and in refusing to fantasise about anything beyond it. Perhaps – almost certainly – his acceptance was not as complete as it seemed. It was as if he was trying on its reality for size, adjusting himself to its monumental dimensions. Our conversations were quiet testings of feelings of what was, or was not, to come, for him sooner, for me later to one degree or other. I found myself thinking a good deal about the condition of not yet having been born. Hardly a condition, but a state of non-existence which we had all already not-experienced. The nonsense of language reaching towards the void it was not equipped for, developed as it was by the living for the living, made us laugh.

‘So you've already not been. How was it for you?' I asked.

‘It didn't bother me at the time.'

Of course, there was time in that non-existence, or there would be. The beginning would come. The other nonexistence abolished time for ever. But the more I thought about it, the more I tried to use the time before my birth as an idea to make death more tolerable, the angrier I became at having been excluded from the events that occurred in history, which is what we call the period before our personal arrival on the planet. I felt the same kind of panic and personal betrayal at having not been born for all that time, as I experienced at the idea of the world going on without me after I died. I hated the idea of those who would be part of my life getting on with their lives before I arrived, just as I didn't much care to think about people getting on with things, individuals, or great social and political forces, after I have died. I felt the rage of the not-yet-born along with the rage of the dying at being extinguished. We may try to console ourselves that death is not the end of the world, but it's the fact that it isn't the end of the world that is so blindingly difficult to cope with. I didn't do much more than mention these thoughts to Udi, whose perspective on the subject was at that moment more practical than mine.