To the Ends of the Earth (3 page)

The sky was old. Schoolboys in dark blue blazers, carrying cricket bats and schoolbags, their socks falling down, were smirking on the platform at Tonbridge. We raced by them, taking their smirks away. We didn’t stop, not even at the larger stations. These I contemplated from the dining car over a sloshing carton of tea, while Mr. Duffill, similarly hunched, kept an eye on his parcels and stirred his tea with a doctor’s tongue depressor. He had that uneasy look of a man who has left his parcels elsewhere, which is also the look of a man who thinks he’s being followed. His oversized clothes made him seem frail. A mouse-gray gabardine coat slumped in folds from his shoulders, the cuffs so long they reached to his fingertips and answered the length of his trampled trousers. He smelled of bread crusts. He still wore his tweed cap, and like me was fighting a cold. His shoes were interesting, the all-purpose brogans country people wear. Although I could not place his accent—he was asking the barman for cider—there was something else of the provinces about him, a stubborn frugality in his serviceable clothes, which is shabbiness in a Londoner’s. He could tell you where he bought that cap and coat, and for how much, and how long those shoes had
lasted. A few minutes later I passed by him in a corner of the lounge and saw that he had opened one of his parcels. A knife, a length of French bread, a tube of mustard, and disks of bright red salami were spread before him. Lost in thought, he slowly chewed his sandwich.

At the Gare du Nord my car was shunted onto a different engine. Duffill and I watched this being done from the platform and then we boarded. It took him a long time to heave himself up, and he panted with effort on the landing. He was still standing there, gasping, as we pulled out of the station for our twenty-minute trip to the Gare de Lyon to meet the rest of the Direct-Orient Express. It was after eleven, and most of the apartment blocks were in darkness. Duffill, on boarding the Direct-Orient Express, had put on a pair of glasses, wire-framed and with enough Scotch tape on the lenses to prevent his seeing the Blue Mosque. He assembled his parcels and, grunting, produced a suitcase, bound with a selection of leather and canvas belts as an added guarantee against its bursting open. A few cars down we met again to read the sign on the side of the wagon-lit:
DIRECT-ORIENT
and its itinerary,
PARIS-LAUSANNE-MILANO-TRIESTE-ZAGREB-BEOGRAD-SOFIYA-ISTANBUL
. We stood there, staring at this sign; Duffill worked his glasses like binoculars. Finally he said, “I took this train in 1929.”

It seemed to call for a reply, but by the time a reply occurred to me (“Judging from its condition, it was probably this very train!”) Duffill had gathered up his parcels and his strapped suitcase and moved down the platform. It was a great train in 1929, and it goes without saying that the Orient Express is the most famous train in the world. Like the Trans-Siberian it links Europe with Asia, which accounts for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself (“As I couldn’t take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was buy a record of Honegger’s Pacific 231,” Greene writes in the introduction to
Stamboul Train)
. The fictional source of the romance is
La Madone des Sleepings
(1925) by Maurice Dekobra. Dekobra’s heroine, Lady Diana (“the
type of woman who would have brought tears to the eyes of John Ruskin”), is completely sold on the Orient Express: “I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may step off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the color of the eyes of my neighbor in the compartment.”

My compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. I swung my suitcase in and, when I had done this, there was no room for me. The conductor showed me how to kick my suitcase under the lower berth. He hesitated, hoping to be tipped.

“Anybody else in here?” It had not occurred to me that I would have company; the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

The conductor shrugged, perhaps yes, perhaps no. His vagueness made me withhold my tip. I took a stroll down the car: a Japanese couple in a double couchette—it was the first and last time I saw them; an elderly American couple next to them; a fat French mother breathing suspicion on her lovely daughter; a Belgian girl of extraordinary size—well over six feet tall, wearing enormous shoes—traveling with a chic French woman; and (the door was shutting) either a nun or a plump diabolist. At the far end of the car a man wearing a turtleneck, a seaman’s cap, and a monocle was setting up bottles on the windowsill: three wine bottles, Perrier water, a broad-shouldered bottle of gin—he was obviously going some distance.

Duffill was standing outside my compartment. He was out of breath; he had had trouble finding the right car, he said, because his French was rusty. He took a deep breath and slid off his gabardine coat and hung that and his cap on the hook next to mine.

“I’m up here,” he said, patting the upper berth. He was a small man, but I noticed that as soon as he stepped into the compartment he filled it.

“How far are you going?” I asked gamely, and even though I knew his reply, when I heard it I cringed. I had planned on studying him from a little distance; I was counting
on having the compartment to myself. This was unwelcome news. He saw I was taking it badly.

He said, “I won’t get in your way.” His parcels were on the floor. “I just have to find a home for these.”

A half hour later I returned to my compartment. The lights were blazing, and in his upper berth Duffill was sleeping; his face turned up to the overhead light gave him a gray corpse-like look, and his pajamas were buttoned to his neck. The expression on his face was one of agony; his features were fixed and his head moved as the train did. I turned out the lights and crawled into my berth. But I couldn’t sleep at first; my cold and all that I’d drunk—the fatigue itself—kept me awake. And then something else alarmed me: it was a glowing circle, the luminous dial of Duffill’s watch, for his arm had slipped down and was swinging back and forth as the train rocked, moving this glowing green dial past my face like a pendulum.

Then the dial disappeared. I heard Duffill climbing down the ladder, groaning on each rung. The dial moved sideways to the sink, and then the light came on. I rolled over against the wall and heard the clunk of Duffill dislodging the chamber pot from the cupboard under the sink; I waited, and after a long moment a warbling burble began, changing in pitch as the pot filled. There was a splash, like a sigh, and the light went out and the ladder creaked. Duffill groaned one last time and I slept.

I
N THE MORNING
D
UFFILL WAS GONE
. I
LAY IN BED AND
worked the window curtain up with my foot; after a few inches it shot up on its roller, revealing a sunny mountainside, the Alps dappled with light and moving past the window. It was the first time I had seen the sun for days, this first morning on the train, and I think this is the place to say that it continued to shine for the next two months. I traveled under clear skies all the way to southern India, and only then, two months later, did I see rain again, the late monsoon of Madras.

At Vevey I restored myself with a glass of fruit salts, and at Montreux felt well enough to shave. Duffill came back in time to admire my rechargeable electric razor. He said he
used a blade and on trains always cut himself to pieces. He showed me a nick on his throat, then told me his name. He’d be spending two months in Turkey, but he didn’t say what he’d be doing. In the bright sunlight he looked much older than he had in the grayness of Victoria. I guessed he was about seventy. But he was not in the least spry, and I could not imagine why anyone except a fleeing embezzler would spend two months in Turkey.

He looked out at the Alps and said, “They say if the Swiss had designed these mountains, um, they’d be rather flatter.”

Duffill ate the last of his salami. He offered me some, but I said I was planning to buy my breakfast at an Italian station. Duffill lifted the piece of salami and brought it to his mouth, but just as he bit into it we entered a tunnel and everything went black.

“Try the lights,” he said. “I can’t eat in the dark. I can’t taste it.”

I groped for the light switch and flicked it, but we stayed in darkness.

Duffill said, “Maybe they’re trying to save electricity.”

His voice in the darkness sounded very near to my face. I moved to the window and tried to see the tunnel walls, but I saw only blackness. The sound of the wheels’ drumming seemed louder in the dark and the train itself was gathering speed, the motion and the dark producing in me a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia and an acute awareness of the smell of the room, the salami, Duffill’s woolens, and bread crusts. Minutes had passed and we were still in the tunnel; we might be dropping down a well, a great sinkhole in the Alps that would land us in the clockwork interior of Switzerland, glacial cogs and ratchets and frostbitten cuckoos.

Duffill said, “This must be the Simplon.”

I said, “I wish they’d turn the lights on.”

I heard Duffill wrapping his uneaten salami and punching the parcel into a corner.

I said, “What do you aim to do in Turkey?”

“Me?” Duffill said, as if the compartment was crammed with old men bound for Turkey, each waiting to state a reason.
He paused, then said, “I’ll be in Istanbul for a while. After that I’ll be traveling around the country.”

“Business or pleasure?” I was dying to know and in the confessional darkness did not feel so bad about badgering him; he could not see the eagerness on my face. On the other hand, I could hear the tremulous hesitation in his replies.

“A little of both,” he said.

This was not helpful. I waited for him to say more, but when he added nothing further, I said, “What exactly do you do, Mr. Duffill?”

“Me?” he said again, but before I could reply with the sarcasm he was pleading for, the train left the tunnel and the compartment filled with sunlight and Duffill said, “This must be Italy.”

Duffill put on his tweed cap. He saw me staring at it and said, “I’ve had this cap for years—eleven years. You dry-clean it. Bought it in Barrow-on-Humber.” And he dug out his parcel of salami and resumed the meal the Simplon tunnel had interrupted.

At nine thirty-five we stopped at the Italian station of Domodossola, where a man poured cups of coffee from a jug and sold food from a heavily laden pushcart. He had fruit, loaves of bread and rolls, various kinds of salami, and lunch bags that, he said, contained,
“tante belle cose.”
He also had a stock of wine. An Englishman, introducing himself as Molesworth, bought a Bardolino and (“just in case”) three bottles of Chianti; I bought an Orvieto and a Chianti; and Duffill had his hand on a bottle of claret.

Molesworth said, “I’ll take these back to my compartment. Get me a lunch bag, will you?”

I bought two lunch bags and some apples.

Duffill said, “English money, I only have English money.”

The Italian snatched a pound from the old man and gave him change in lire.

Molesworth came back and said, “Those apples want washing. There’s cholera here.” He looked again at the pushcart and said, “I think
two
lunch bags, just to be safe.”

While Molesworth bought more food and another bottle of Bardolino, Duffill said, “I took this train in 1929.”

“It was worth taking then,” said Molesworth. “Yes, she used to be quite a train.”

“How long are we staying here?” I asked.

No one knew. Molesworth called out to the train guard, “I say, George, how long are we stopping for?”

The guard shrugged, and as he did so the train began to back up.

“Do you think we should board?” I asked.

“It’s going backward,” said Molesworth. “I expect they’re shunting.”

The train guard said,
“Andiamo.”

“The Italians love wearing uniforms,” said Molesworth. “Look at him, will you? And the uniforms are always so wretched. They really are like overgrown schoolboys. Are you talking to us, George?”

“I think he wants us to board,” I said. The train stopped going backward. I hopped aboard and looked down. Moles worth and Duffill were at the bottom of the stairs.

“You’ve got parcels,” said Duffill. “You go first.”

“I’m quite all right,” said Molesworth. “Up you go.”

“But you’ve got parcels,” said Duffill. He produced a pipe from his coat and began sucking on the stem. “Carry on.” He moved back and gave Molesworth room.

Molesworth said, “Are you sure?”

Duffill said, “I didn’t go all the way, then, in 1929. I didn’t do that until after the second war.” He put his pipe in his mouth and smiled.

Molesworth stepped aboard and climbed up—slowly, because he was carrying a bottle of wine and his second lunch bag. Duffill grasped the rails beside the door and as he did so the train began to move and he let go. He dropped his arms. Two train guards rushed behind him and held his arms and hustled him along the platform to the moving stairs of Car 99. Duffill, feeling the Italians’ hands, resisted the embrace, went feeble, and stepped back; he made a half-turn to smile wanly at the fugitive door. He looked a hundred years old. The train was moving swiftly past his face.

I never saw Mr. Duffill again. When we were buying more food on the platform at Milan, Molesworth said, “We’d better get aboard. I don’t want to be duffilled.” I left his suitcase and his paper bags at Venice with a note, and I wondered whether he caught up with them and continued to Istanbul.

One of the few things Mr. Duffill had told me was that he lived in Barrow-on-Humber, in Lincolnshire.

It was a tiny place—a church, a narrow High Street, a manor house, and a few shops. It had an air of rural monotony that was like the drone of a bee as it bumbled slowly from flower to flower. No one ever came here; people just went away from it and never returned.