Chapter 25
The Portrait
The Midnight Train was going at quite a pace now.
It was hurtling towards its top speed. Although there was no rail track to speak of, there were the continual and ascending sounds any other steam train would make. The whistle, the mechanical chugging, and the brutal clatter of wheels.
Inside the carriage, though, it was quite refined. The green velvet and varnished wood panelling. The elegant carriage signs. There was even, between two of the windows, a framed portrait. A traditional kind of oil painting. Wilbur stood up now to go over for a closer inspection.
Up close, he realised it was a boy. A teenager’s face. His own face. The same face he had just seen, sitting on his doorstep, talking to Maggie. A studious, slightly troubled expression.
It took him a second or two to realise that this was no ordinary portrait. As the train kept moving, so did the portrait. His hair grew slowly and suddenly shortened and grew again. His face broadened and hardened a little.
It was ageing, in line with the journey through time.
He sat down opposite it to get a longer look.
‘It’s a good likeness, Old Bean.’
He jumped and turned to see Agnes, sitting there beside him on the seat.
She smiled. ‘Really captures you.’
She caught a glimpse of him outside the window, on his doorstep, reading Oscar Wilde.
‘But I should probably point out it’s not a portrait-in-the-attic situation.
Quite the opposite. You are getting older in line with the painting.
It tells you precisely where – forgive me, when – you are.
What is that shoddy miracle from the twenty-first century?
Satellite navigation. Consider it like that …
But more beautiful. Because you really are a handsome chap.
Or you were, once upon a time. Even if you never realised it.
So many young women dreamed of you … Even if, really, you only used to dream of one … ’
The wheels started to clatter with more urgency and Wilbur grasped the seat, feeling a hollow kind of nausea only the dead can feel. ‘Why is everything speeding up?’
‘That’s what life does. Listen, Wilbur, I’d keep your focus out of the window. You don’t want to miss too much. These are your young years.’
‘Well, there will be some things I very much want to miss.’
‘Ah, but the more you pull away from something, the more it finds you.’
He nodded. ‘But what if it is something you could never really face? Something that pushed you off the rails every time you were near it?’
Agnes smiled, kindly. ‘The Midnight Train doesn’t have rails. Not once it is up and running. That’s the brilliance of it. It goes where you need to go, whenever that may be. Time is not even.’
Wilbur understood what she was saying. He had lived long enough to know that time and meaning were not shared out equally.
Some personal eras were relatively empty.
The temporal equivalent of air. And then you would come across a day – or even a minute – and it would have a whole decade’s worth of weight.
It would be everything. It would have the power to change an entire life.
‘The Midnight Train,’ continued Agnes, ‘goes to the places that, together, at the end, will give you the truest assessment of your existence. That way, when you enter eternity, you will understand yourself completely. The deeper that understanding, the better. That’s what it is all about.
It’s like that Kierkegaard quote. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” And this train offers a solution. Life relived forwards.’
She smiled again and her eyes shone like a new morning. A kind smile, garnished with equal parts warmth and worry. She was complicated, he realised. More complicated, possibly, than she had been in life. Maybe that was what death did, or eternity. Maybe it complicated a person.
He was going to ask about eternity, for her to tell him more. But she seemed to understand the question before he had spoken it, as though she could see the thoughts crossing his mind as easily as you could see clouds crossing a sky.
‘As I have told you,’ she said, ‘eternity is a movable concept. It is what you make it. To get the most out of it, you need to know yourself. And that is what these windows are for.’ She looked a little sad for a moment.
But then put on a brisk and professional smile. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Toodle-pip.’
And it was then that she disappeared right before his eyes.