5. 1044 a.m. Halt Flers
10:44 a.m. HALT FLERS
I don’t know where you’re fleeing to,
You don’t know where I’m going,
You I could have loved,
And didn’t you know it.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE,
“TO A PASSERBY” (1860)
The moment the train comes to a stop, Marcelle de Heredia gathers her hat, coat, and bag. Her face is still hot; she’s still cursing herself for having had the temerity to stick her nose in the Levassor family’s business.
“Oh, is Flers your destination, mademoiselle?” Monsieur Bienvenüe is oblivious to the tension between the ladies.
Madame Sarazin-Levassor’s silence is very loud.
Marcelle can’t say yes in case they bump into each other again on the platform in Montparnasse. So she tells a smaller lie: “Ah, I noticed there’s an empty carriage so I thought I’d get a little rest.”
“Very good,” Levassor says.
Everyone approves of women napping, Marcelle thinks crossly.
“ Figaro , twenty-five centimes,” a little girl pipes up from the platform.
Levassor fishes out a coin and leans out the window.
“There’ll be a copy waiting on your desk at home, darling,” his wife reminds him.
“But now’s when I have the time to read it,” he tells her.
With a stab of a hatpin through her hair, Marcelle’s ready. She reaches for her typewriter.
“Need a hand with that?” Levassor half rises.
“No, no.” Marcelle swings her Dactyle to prove its lightness and hurries down the carriage steps so fast, she almost turns her ankle.
Flers: Stumpy church towers, a covered market, what looks like a cotton mill, and a dye works spilling its stain into the river, which is the price of progress, she supposes. The platform’s clogged with passengers getting off or on; some are just nipping out to buy a quiche or a bottle of cheap cider. Still hot-cheeked, Marcelle hurries along the train’s length to find somewhere else to sit, almost colliding with a woman who can’t be more than three feet tall, then having to steer around a man with an incongruously huge tank attached to his back. The next door is blue—Second Class—and Marcelle can see several heads in the window, so she keeps moving.
The camera salesman has been going on about the possibilities of colour photography, but Henry Tanner stopped listening when he noticed a young lady in navy blue pause on the platform outside and look up at his window almost as if she were trying to communicate with him. Tight black curls, dark eyes. She interests him somehow. He’d like to paint her, although he knows that models come in only two varieties: vain, wealthy ladies who hire painters and stone-broke girls whom painters hire. Her face is brown enough for her to have at least some African blood, like himself, unless that’s wishful thinking. (Sometimes Henry lets himself dream of a kindred spirit who understands from experience the way he has to manoeuvre through an unpredictably hostile world.) Could that be one of the new portable typewriters she’s carrying? Henry’s summoning his nerve to bow to the intriguing young lady when she suddenly moves on.
“Don’t you think Nadar’s photographic portraits verge on art?” Gaumont asks now.
“Ah, possibly.” If only she’d chosen this carriage! Henry could have gazed at her up close, exchanged a few remarks, even. He presses his cheekbone to the glass till it hurts. No sign of her; it’s almost as if she were a figment of his imagination.
On impulse Henry stands, lowers the sash, and puts his head out. There’s the back of her fishtailed blue skirt disappearing through the very next Second-Class door.
Funny how you feel the fatigue more when the train’s standing still. But Guillaume can’t really be tired yet, not after just over two hours of driving and only four into his ten-hour shift.
He opens the drain cocks at his feet to let the condensation run out, and the cylinders release a blast of steam. Two more minutes left here at Flers, or maybe only one… frankly, once a trip’s begun, he considers every moment his spirited engine isn’t in motion to be a waste.
“I should oil those connecting rods.” Victor’s hoarse voice is loud in the quiet of the country station.
“Already?”
“She’s been whining for a greasing this last quarter hour.”
“Thirsty slut.” Of course he and Victor wouldn’t let anyone else speak of Engine 721 so.
“If she were to throw a rod…”
Guillaume nods; that could pierce the side of the crankcase like a bayonet through a man’s ribs.
His mate grabs the oilcan and the grease jar and clambers around the side. For a man in his forties, Victor’s quite the chimpanzee.
Here’s a watery-eyed red-haired Cinderella standing below the footplate with her sack over her shoulder, shy of asking.
“For soapmaking?” Guillaume calls down.
“If you please, monsieur.”
“Go on, then, help yourself.”
The ash collector has her scoop out already and she reaches into Engine 721’s ashpan eagerly.
Jean Le Goff appears beside her, waves a piece of paper at him.
Guillaume bends down to snatch it. Three neat words in a clerk’s hand: Halt at Briouze. He sighs, a punctured balloon.
Victor’s wooden clogs clang on the footplate. “Francoise dumping you at last, is she? Can’t stand the smell of those feet for one more night?”
Guillaume breaks it to him: “They’ve added Briouze. That’s our chance of making four o’clock out the window.”
Victor groans. “Who the hell could need to board at Briouze? Not a soul lives there.”
Guillaume tries to summon some humour. “HQ must be trying to make us late.”
Victor nods vehemently. “It’s a game to them. Or to whatever moneyed connard telegraphed to demand we make a special stop today. And since he must have his own coach-and-four to get him as far as Briouze, why couldn’t he drive another, what, eighteen measly kilometres and board here at Flers with the rest of humanity?”
Guillaume shrugs, which sets something in his right shoulder twinging. He blasts the steam whistle, meaning Can we bloody well get going?
“Second Class, blue, at the back.” Jean Le Goff’s hands direct the human traffic as if he’s the ringmaster in a circus. Two new passengers have just been sprung from the fenced-off Second-Class waiting area under a huge poster offering trips to Mont Saint-Michel. Sportsmen, he’d guess, from their marsh waders and binoculars, though no guns, so the peculiar modern breed who bag the birds only in a manner of speaking, by recording them in their notebooks.
Jean charms and glad-hands, passes parcels and tosses cases; his pockets are getting heavy with coin already. A gent with two black eyes who smells of soap and fresh sweat asks permission, in an awful English accent, to put his bicycle in the baggage van.
Junior Guard Le Goff regrets to say that will cost one franc.
The Brit drops two like biscuit crumbs in his palm and urges him to be gentle with her.
“All aboard now ,” Mariette roars, hoarsely reproachful. The senior guard has been known to turn down tips on the grounds that they’re for whores or beggars, a scruple that Jean finds comical.
Jean puts the bicycle into Rear Baggage with a show of care and directs the Anglo to squeeze into Front First.
“Anyone distinguished, is he?”
He turns his head to find that mannish girl with her metal lunch bucket. “Just a posh tourist.”
She looks disappointed, like one of those fans who hang around stage doors. “Why’s there no one in here?” she asks, jerking her thumb at Rear First.
Her curiosity tickles Jean. He counters with a question: “Something tasty in your bucket?”
She stares.
He angles a finger at her lunch. “Didn’t dare leave it in Third while you stepped out in case they scoffed it?” She purses her lips. As she turns away, Jean murmurs: “We are making an extra stop at Briouze for a deputy for Orne, if that’s distinguished enough for you?”
The young woman’s not so plain when her face lights up with a grin from ear to ear.
Jean toots on his whistle. “Take your seats, mesdames, messieurs, the Paris Express is about to depart.”