The Edge (10 page)

Some of the murmurers were putting on coats, yawning, switching off computers, taking cans of cold drinks out of the large refrigerator and opening them with the carbonation hissing. Someone put out a light or two. The green plants looked exhausted. Friday night; all commercial passion spent. Thank God for Fridays.

‘I have to come in here tomorrow,’ Nell said with resignation, catching my thought. ‘And why I ever said I’d have dinner with you tonight I cannot imagine.’

‘You promised.’

‘I must have been mad.’

I’d asked her after she’d shown me the train’s sleeping arrangements (which perhaps had been my subconscious making jumps unbeknown to me), and she’d said, ‘Yes, all right, I have to eat,’ and that had seemed a firm enough commitment.

‘Are you ready?’ I asked.

‘No, there are two more people I positively must talk to. Can you … er … wait?’

‘I’m quite good at it,’ I said equably.

A few more lights went out. Some of those remaining shone on Nell’s fair hair, made shadows of her eyes and put hollows in her cheeks. I wondered about her, as one does. An attractive stranger; an’ unread book; a beginning, perhaps. But there had been other beginnings, in other cities, and I’d long outgrown the need to hurry. I might never yet have come to the conventional ending, but the present was greatly OK, and as for the future … we would see.

I listened without concentration to her talking to someone called Lorrimore. ‘Yes, Mr Lorrimore, your flowers and your bar bottles will already be on the train when it comes into the station.… And the fruit, yes, that too.… The passengers are gathering at ten-thirty for the reception at the station …. Yes, we board at eleven-thirty and leave at twelve.… We’re looking forward to meeting you too … goodbye Mr Lorrimore.’ She glanced over at me as she began to dial her next number, and said, ‘The Lorrimores have the private car, the last car on the train. Hello, is that Vancouver racecourse …?’

I listened to her discussing entry arrangements for the owners. ‘Yes, we’re issuing them all with the special club passes … and yes, the other passengers from the train will be paying for themselves individually, but we’re offering them group transport.…’ She put down the
receiver eventually and sighed. ‘We’ve been asked to fix moderate price hotels and bus transport for so many of the racegoers that it’s like duplicating the whole tour. Could you wait for just one more call … or two?’

We left the darkened office almost an hour later and even then she was still checking things off in her mind and muttering vaguely about not forgetting scissors and clips to go with the bandages for Ricky. We walked not very far to a restaurant called the Fluted Point People that she’d been to before and whose menu I had prospected earlier. Not very large, it had tables crammed into every cranny, each dimly lit by a candle lantern.

‘Who are the Fluted Point People,’ I asked, ‘in general?’

‘Heaven knows,’ Nell said.

The waiter, who must have been asked a thousand times, said the fluted point people had lived on this land ten thousand years ago. Let’s not worry about them, he said.

Nell laughed and I thought of ten thousand years and wondered who would be living on this land ten thousand years ahead. Fluted points, it transpired, described the stone tools in use over most of the continent: would our descendents call us the knife and fork people?

‘I don’t honestly care,’ Nell said, to those questions. ‘I’m hungry right now in Toronto today.’

We did something about that in the shape of devilled smoked salmon followed by roast quail. ‘I hope this is all on your expense account,’ she said without anxiety as I ordered some wine, and I said, ‘Yes, of course’ untruthfully and thought there was no point in having money if one didn’t enjoy it. ‘Hamburgers tomorrow,’ I said, ‘to make up for it.’

Nell nodded as if that were a normal bargain she well understood and said with a galvanic jump that she had forgotten to order a special limousine to drive the Lorrimores around at Winnipeg.

‘Do it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘They won’t run away.’

She looked at me with a worried frown of indecision, and then round the comfortable little candlelit restaurant, and then at the shining glass and silver on the table and then back to me, and the frown dissolved into a smile of self-amusement.

‘All right. Tomorrow. The Lorrimores may be the icing on this cake but they’ve meant a lot of extra work.’

‘Who are the Lorrimores?’ I asked.

She looked at me blankly and answered obliquely, ‘Where do you live?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘If I lived here, I would know the Lorrimores?’

‘You certainly wouldn’t ask who they are.’

‘I live in London,’ I said. ‘So please tell me.’

She was wearing, as so many women in business tended to, a navy suit and white blouse of such stark simplicity as to raise questions about the warmth of the soul. Women who dressed more softly, I thought inconsequentially, must feel more secure in themselves, perhaps.

‘The Lorrimores,’ Nell said, showing no insecurity, ‘are one of the very richest families of Toronto. Of Ontario. Of Canada, in fact. They are the society magazines’ staple diet. They are into banking and good works. They own mansions, endow art museums, open charity balls and entertain heads of state. There are quite a few of them, brothers, sisters and so on, and I’m told that in certain circles, if Mercer Lorrimore accepts an invitation and comes to your house, you are made for life.’ She paused, smiling. ‘Also he owns great racehorses, is naturally a pillar of the Ontario Jockey Club and has this private rail car which used to be borrowed regularly by campaigning politicians.’ She paused again for breath. ‘That’s who’s honouring our train – Mercer Lorrimore, the big chief of the whole clan, also Bambi, his wife, and their son Sheridan and their daughter Xanthe. What have I left out?’

I laughed. ‘Do you curtsey?’

‘Pretty nearly. Well, to be honest, Mercer Lorrimore sounds quite nice on the telephone but I haven’t met him yet or any of the others. And he phones me himself. No secretaries.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘if Mercer Lorrimore is on the train, it will be even more in the news from coast to coast?’

She nodded. ‘He’s going For the Benefit of Canadian Racing in capital letters on the Jockey Club’s PR handout.’

‘And is he eating in the dining car?’ I asked.

‘Don’t!’ She rolled her eyes in mock horror. ‘He is supposed to be. They all are. But we don’t know if they’ll retreat into privacy. If they stay in their own car, there might just be enough room for everyone else to sit down. It’s a shambles in the making though, and it was made by my boss selling extra tickets himself when he knew we were full.’ She shook her head over it, but with definite indulgence. The boss, it appeared, ranked high in her liking.

‘Who did he sell them to?’ I asked.

‘Just people. Two friends of his. And a Mr Filmer, who offered to pay double when he found there was no room. No one turns down an
extra profit of that sort.’ She broke open a roll with the energy of frustration. ‘If only there was more room in the dining car, we could have sold at least six more tickets.’

‘David … er … Zak was saying the forty-eight seater was already stretching the actors’ vocal cords to the limit against the noise of the wheels on the rails.’

‘It’s always a problem.’ She considered me over the candle flame. ‘Are you married?’ she said.

‘No. Are you?’

‘Actually, no.’ Her voice was faintly defensive, but her mouth was smiling. ‘I invested in a relationship which didn’t work out.’

‘And which was some time ago?’

‘Long enough for me to be over it.’

The exchange cleared the ground, I thought, and maybe set the rules. She wasn’t looking for another relationship that was going nowhere. But dalliance? Have to see …

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.

‘About life in general.’

She gave me a dry look of disbelief but changed the subject back to the almost as compelling matter of trains, and after a while I asked her the question I’d had vaguely in mind all day.

‘Besides the special passes for the races, and so on,’ I said, ‘is there anything else an owner of a horse is entitled to? An owner, that is to say, of one of the horses travelling on the train?’

She was puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Are they entitled to any privileges that the other people in the special dining car don’t have?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Her brow wrinkled briefly. ‘Only that they can visit the horse car, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Yes, I know about that. So there’s nothing else?’

‘Well, the racecourse at Winnipeg is planning a group photograph of owners only, and there’s television coverage of that.’ She pondered. ‘They’re each getting a commemorative plaque from the Jockey Club when we get back on the train at Banff after the days in the mountains.’ She paused again. ‘And if a horse that’s actually on the train wins one of the special races, the owner gets free life membership of the clubs at all three racecourses.’

The last was a sizeable carrot to a Canadian, perhaps, but not enough on its own, surely, to attract Filmer. I sighed briefly. Another good idea down the drain. So I was left with the two basic questions, why was Filmer on the train, and why had he worked so hard to be an
owner. And the answers were still I don’t know and I don’t know. Highly helpful.

We drank coffee, dawdling, easy together, and she said she had wanted to be a writer and had found a job with a publisher (‘which real writers never do, I found out’) but was very much happier with Merry & Co, arranging mysteries.

She said, ‘My parents always told me practically from birth that I’d be a writer, that it ran in the family, and I grew up expecting it, but they were wrong, though I tried for a long time, and then I was also living with this man who sort of bullied me to write. But, you know, it was such a
relief
the day I said to myself, some time after we’d parted and I’d dried my eyes, that I was not really a writer and never would be and I’d much rather do something else. And suddenly I was liberated and happier than I could remember. It seems so stupid, looking back, that it took me so long to know myself. I was in a way brainwashed into writing, and I thought I wanted it myself, but I wasn’t good enough when it came to the point, and it was such hard work, and I was depressed so much of the time.’ She half laughed. ‘You must think I’m crazy.’

‘Of course not. What did you write?’

‘I was writing for a women’s weekly magazine for a while, going to interview people and writing up their lives, and making up lives altogether sometimes if I couldn’t find anyone interesting or lurid enough that week. Don’t let’s talk about it. It was awful.’

‘I’m glad you escaped.’

‘Yes, so am I,’ she said with feeling. ‘I look different, I feel different, and I’m much healthier. I was always getting colds and flu and feeling ill, and now I don’t.’ Her eyes sparkled in the light, proving her right. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘you’re the same. Lighthearted. It shows all over you.’

‘Does it, indeed?’

‘Am I right?’

‘On the button, I suppose.’

And we were lucky, I thought soberly, paying the bill. Light-heartedness was a treasure in a world too full of sorrows, a treasure little regarded and widely forfeited to aggression, greed and horrendous tribal rituals. I wondered if the Fluted Point People had been lighthearted ten thousand years ago. But probably not.

Nell and I walked back to where she had parked her car near the office: she lived twenty minutes’ drive away, she said, in a very small apartment by the lake.

To say goodnight we kissed cheeks and she thanked me for the evening, saying cheerfully that she would see me on Sunday if she didn’t sink without trace under all the things she still had to do on the next day, Saturday. I watched her tail lights recede until she turned a corner, then I walked back to the hotel, slept an untroubled night, and presented myself next morning at ten sharp in the Public Affairs office, at Union Station.

The Public Affairs officer, a formidably efficient lady, had gathered from Nell that I was one of the actors, as they had helped with actors before, and I didn’t change that understanding. She wheeled me back into the cavernous Great Hall of the station (which she briskly said was 250 feet long, 84 feet wide and had a tiled arched ceiling 88 feet above the floor) and led me through a heavy door into an undecorated downstairs duplication of the grandeur upstairs, a seemingly endless basic domain where the food and laundry and odd jobs of the trains got seen to. There was a mini power station also, and painting and carpentering going on all over the place.

‘This way,’ she said, clattering ahead on snapping heels. ‘Here is the uniform centre. They’ll see to you.’ She pushed open a door to let me through, said briefly, ‘Here’s the actor’ to the staff inside, and with a nod abandoned me to fate.

The staff inside were good natured and equally efficient. One was working a sewing machine, another a computer, and a third asked me what collar size I took.

There were shelves all round the room bearing hundreds of folded shirts of fine light grey and white vertical stripes, with striped collars, long striped sleeves and buttoned cuffs. ‘The cuffs must remain buttoned at all times unless you are washing dishes.’

Catch me, I thought mildly, washing dishes.

There were two racks of the harvest gold waistcoats on hangers. ‘All the buttons must be fastened at all times.’

There were row on row of mid-grey trousers and mid-grey jackets tidily hung, and boxes galore of grey, yellow and maroon striped ties.

My helper was careful that everything he gave me should fit perfectly. ‘VIA Rail staff at all times are well turned out and spotlessly clean. We give everyone tips on how to care for the clothes.’

He gave me a grey jacket, two pairs of grey trousers, five shirts, two waistcoats (which he called vests), two ties and a grey raincoat to go over all, and as he passed each garment as suitable he called out the size to the man with the computer. ‘We know the sizes of every VIA employee right across Canada.’

I looked at myself in the glass in my shirtsleeves and yellow waistcoat, and the waiter Tommy looked back. I smiled at my reflection. Tommy looked altogether too pleased with himself, I thought.