Stamboul Train (6 page)

‘Oh, for God's sake, come on, Mabel,' Janet said.

Miss Warren's mood changed. She straightened herself and barred the way. ‘You say I'm drunk. I am drunk. But I'm going to be drunker.'

‘Oh, come on.'

‘You are going to have one more drink with me or I shan't let you on the platform.'

Janet Pardoe gave way. ‘One. Only one, mind.' She guided Mabel Warren across a vast black shining hall into a room where a few tired men and women were snatching cups of coffee. ‘Another gin,' said Miss Warren, and Janet ordered it.

In a mirror on the opposite wall Miss Warren saw her own image, red, tousled, very shoddy, sitting beside another and far more familiar image, slim, dark, and beautiful. What do I matter? she thought, with the melancholy of drink. I've made her, I'm responsible for her, and with bitterness, I've paid for her. There's nothing she's wearing that I haven't paid for; sweated for, she thought (although the bitter cold defied the radiators in the restaurant), getting up at all hours, interviewing brothel-keepers in their cells, the mothers of murdered children, ‘covering' this and ‘covering' that. She knew with a certain pride that they said in the London office: ‘When you want sob-stuff, send Dizzy Mabel.' All the way down the Rhine was her province; there wasn't a town of any size between Cologne and Mainz where she hadn't sought out human interest, forcing dramatic phrases onto the lips of sullen men, pathos into the mouths of women too overcome with grief to speak at all. There wasn't a suicide, a murdered woman, a raped child who had stirred her to the smallest emotion; she was an artist to examine critically, to watch, to listen; the tears were for paper. But now she sat and wept with ugly grunts because Janet Pardoe was leaving her for a week.

‘Who is it you are interviewing?' Janet Pardoe asked. She was not at all interested, but she wanted to distract Mabel Warren from thoughts of separation; her tears were too conspicuous. ‘You ought to comb your hair,' she added. Miss Warren wore no hat and her black hair, cut short like a man's, was hopelessly dishevelled.

‘Savory,' said Miss Warren.

‘Who's he?'

‘Sold a hundred thousand copies.
The Great Gay Round.
Half a million words. Two hundred characters. The Cockney Genius. Drops his aitches when he can remember to.'

‘What's he doing on the train?'

‘Going East to collect material. It's not my job, but as I was seeing you off, I took it on. They've asked me for a quarter of a column, but they'll cut it down to a couple of sticks in London. He's chosen the wrong time. In the silly season he'd have got half a column among the mermaids and sea-horses.' The flare of professional interest guttered as she looked again at Janet Pardoe: no more of a morning would she see Janet in pyjamas pouring out coffee, no more of an evening come in to the flat and find Janet in pyjamas mixing a cocktail. She said huskily, ‘Darling, which pair will you be wearing tonight?' The feminine question sounded oddly in Miss Warren's deep masculine voice.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Pyjamas, darling. I want to think of you tonight just as you are.'

‘I don't suppose I shall even undress. Look, it's a quarter past one. We must go. You'll never get your interview.'

Miss Warren's professional pride was touched. ‘You don't think I need to ask him questions?' she said. ‘Just a look at him and I'll put the right words in his mouth. And he won't complain either. It's publicity.'

‘But I must find the porter with my bags.' Everyone was leaving the restaurant. As the door opened and closed the cries of porters, the whistle of steam, came faintly down to where they sat. Janet Pardoe appealed again to Miss Warren. ‘We must go. If you want any more gin I shall leave you to it.' But Miss Warren said nothing, Miss Warren ignored her; Janet Pardoe found herself attending one of the regular rites of Mabel Warren's journalistic career, the visible shedding of her drunkenness. First a hand put the hair into order, then a powdered handkerchief, her compromise with femininity, disguised the redness of her cheeks and lids. All the while she was focusing her eyes, using whatever lay before her, cups, waiter, glasses and so to the distant mirrors and her own image, as a kind of optician's alphabetic scroll. On this occasion the first letter of the alphabet, the great black A, was an elderly man in a mackintosh, who was standing beside a table brushing away his crumbs before leaving to catch the train.

‘My God,' said Miss Warren, covering her eyes with her hand, ‘I'm drunk. I can't see properly. Who's that there?'

‘The man with the moustache?'

‘Yes.'

‘I've never seen him before.'

‘I have,' said Miss Warren, ‘I have. But where?' Something had diverted her effectually from the thought of separation; her nose was on a scent and leaving half a finger of gin in the bottom of her glass, she strode in the man's wake to the door. He was out and walking quickly across the black shining hall to a flight of stairs before Miss Warren could extricate herself from the swing door. She crashed into a porter and fell on her knees, swaying her head, trying to free it from the benevolence, the melancholy, the vagueness of drink. He stopped to help her and she seized his arm and stayed him until she could control her tongue. ‘What train leaves platform five?' she asked. ‘Vienna,' the man said.

‘Belgrade?' ‘Yes.'

It had been pure chance that she had said Belgrade and not Constantinople, but the sound of her own voice brought her light. She called out to Janet Pardoe: ‘Take two seats. I'm coming with you as far as Vienna.'

‘Your ticket?'

‘I've got my reporter's pass.' It was she who was now impatient. ‘Hurry. Platform five. It's twenty-eight past. Only five minutes.' She still kept the porter to her side with a muscular grip. ‘Listen. I want you to take a message for me. Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse 33.'

‘I can't leave the station,' he told her.

‘What time do you come off duty?'

‘Six.'

‘That's no good. You must slip out. You can do that, can't you? No one will notice.'

‘I'd get the sack.'

‘Risk it,' said Miss Warren. ‘Twenty marks.'

The man shook his head. ‘The foreman would notice.'

‘I'll give you another twenty for him.'

The foreman wouldn't do it, he said; there was too much to lose; the head foreman might find out. Miss Warren opened her bag and began to count her money. Above her head a clock struck the half-hour. The train left in three minutes, but not for a moment did she allow her desperation to show; any emotion would frighten the man. ‘Eighty marks,' she said, ‘and give the foreman what you like. You'll only be away ten minutes.'

‘It's a big risk,' the porter said, but he allowed her to press the notes into his hand, ‘Listen carefully. Go to Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse 33. You'll find the offices of the London
Clarion
. Somebody's sure to be there. Tell him that Miss Warren has taken the Orient Express for Vienna. She won't be letting him have the interview tonight: she'll telephone it from Vienna tomorrow. Tell him she's on to a bill page lead. Now repeat that.' While he stumbled slowly through the message she kept an eye on the clock. One-thirty-one. One thirty-one and a half. ‘Right. Off with it. If you don't get it to them by one-fifty I'll report you for taking bribes.' She grinned at him with malicious playfulness, showing great square teeth, and then ran for the stairs. One-thirty-two. She thought that she heard a whistle blown and took the last three steps in one stride. The train was moving, a ticket-collector tried to block her way but she knocked him to one side and roared ‘Pass' at him over her shoulder. The last third-class coaches were slipping by with increasing speed. My God, she thought, I'll give up drink. She got her hand on the bar of the last coach, while a porter shouted and ran at her. For a long ten seconds, with pain shooting up her arm, she thought that she would be dragged off the platform against the wheels of the guard's van. The high step daunted her. I can't make it. Another moment and her shoulder would give. Better drop on the platform and risk concussion than break both legs. But what a story to lose, she thought with bitterness, and jumped. She landed on her knees on the step just in time as the edge of the platform fell away. The last lamp vanished, the door under the pressure of her body opened inwards, and she fell on her back into the corridor. She propped herself up against the wall with care for her aching shoulder and thought with a wry triumph, Dizzy Mabel comes on board.

Morning light came through the slit in the blind and touched the opposite seat. When Coral Musker woke it was the seat and a leather suitcase that she first saw. She felt listless and apprehensive, thinking of the train which had to be caught at Victoria, the dry egg and the slices of the day before yesterday's loaf awaiting her downstairs. I wish I'd never taken the job, she thought, preferring now when the moment of departure was upon her the queue on the stairs of Shaftesbury Avenue, the forced cheerfulness of long waits outside the agent's door. She lifted the blind and was for a moment astonished by a telegraph-pole flashing past, a green river running by, touched with orange by the early sun, and wooded hills. Then she remembered.

It was still early, for the sun was low, only just emerging above the hills. A village on the opposite bank glittered with little lights; a few thin streams of smoke lay in the windless air above the small wooden houses, where early fires were being lit, breakfasts for labourers prepared. The village was so far from the line that it remained still, to be stared at, while the trees and cottages on the near bank, the tethered boats, fled backwards. She raised the other blind and in the corridor saw Myatt sleeping with his back against the wall. Her first instinct was to wake him; her second to let him sleep and lie back herself in the luxury of another's sacrifice. She felt tender towards him, as though he had given her new hope of a life which was not a continuous struggle for one's own hand; perhaps the world, she thought, was not so hard. She remembered how the purser had spoken to her kindly and called to her, ‘Remember me'; it seemed not unlikely now, with the young man sleeping outside the door, ready to suffer some hours' discomfort for a stranger, that the purser might still remember her. She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to. She looked out of the window again, but the village was gone, and the particular green hills she had stared at; only the river was the same. She fell asleep.

Miss Warren staggered down the train. She could not bear to hold the rail with her right hand, for her shoulder pained her still, although she had sat for nearly two hours in the third-class corridor. She felt battered, faint and drunk, and with difficulty arranged her thoughts, but her nose held yet the genuine aroma of the hunt. Never before in ten years of reporting, ten years of women's rights, rapes, and murders, had she come so close to an exclusive bill page story, not a story which only the penny papers would trouble to print, but a story which
The Times
correspondent himself would give a year of life to know. It was not everyone, she thought with pride, who would have been capable of seizing the moment as she had done when drunk. As she lurched along the line of first-class compartments triumph sat oddly on her brow like a tip-tilted crown.

Luck favoured her. A man came out of a compartment and made his way towards the lavatory and, as she leant back against a window to let him by, she saw the man in the mackintosh dozing in a corner, for the moment alone. He looked up to see Miss Warren swaying a little forward and back in the doorway. ‘Can I come in?' she asked. ‘I got on the train at Cologne, and I can't find a seat.' Her voice was low, almost tender; she might have been urging a loved dog towards a lethal chamber.

‘The seat's taken.'

‘Only for a moment,' said Miss Warren. ‘Just to rest my legs. I am so glad that you speak English. I am always so afraid of travelling on a train with nothing but a lot of foreigners. One might want anything almost in the night, mightn't one?' She grinned at him playfully. ‘I believe that you are a doctor.'

‘I was once a doctor,' the man admitted.

‘And you are travelling out to Belgrade?' He looked at her sharply with a sense of uneasiness, and he caught her unawares, the square tweeded form leaned a little forward, the flash of the signet ring, the flushed hungry face. ‘No,' he said, ‘no. Not so far.'

‘I am only going to Vienna,' said Miss Warren.

He said slowly, ‘What made you think—?' wondering whether he did right to question her, he was unused to danger in the form of an English spinster a little drunk with gin: he could smell her all across the carriage. The risks he had faced before required only the ducked head, the quick finger, the plain lie. Miss Warren also hesitated, and her hesitation was like a breath of flame to an imprisoned man. She said, ‘I thought I had seen you in Belgrade.'

‘I have never been there.'

She came roughly into the open, tossing subterfuge aside. ‘I was at Belgrade,' she said, ‘for my paper at the Kamnetz trial.' But she had given him all the warning he needed and he faced her with a complete lack of interest.

‘The Kamnetz trial?'

‘When General Kamnetz was charged with rape. Czinner was the chief evidence for the prosecution. But of course the general was acquitted. The jury was packed. The Government would never have allowed a conviction. It was sheer stupidity on Czinner's part to give evidence.'

‘Stupidity?' His polite interest angered her. ‘Of course you've heard of Czinner. They had tried to shoot him a week before while he sat in a café. He was the head of the Social Democrats. He played into their hands by giving evidence against Kamnetz; they had a warrant out for his arrest for perjury twelve hours before the trial ended. They simply sat and waited for the acquittal.'