6. 1049 a.m. Depart Flers
10:49 a.m. DEPART FLERS
To save time is to lengthen life.
REMINGTON TYPEWRITER
MOTTO (C. 1902)
Ticktock, how effortlessly, unrelentingly, the minutes of this journey are clicking by. Engine 721 knows that the wheel of the earth always turns in the same direction, and time likewise. Human memory can spool it backwards, but that’s just a magic trick.
A bird flies alongside, matching the train’s speed. Will it blunder into her path and wind up smashed?
Engine 721 is not unfamiliar with death. The Company uses accident on the tracks to cover a variety of unfortunate incidents. If a blower gets blocked, flames may roar out of the firebox door, or sparks and cinders can set a field of stubble on fire. If a boiler’s pressure climbs above seventy, it can burst. A wheel can overheat, a pump can clog, a connecting rod can pop off, two carriages can uncouple without warning and jump apart.
To evade a guard inspecting tickets, panicking passengers have been known to open doors and fling themselves into ditches; not all of them survive to stumble to their feet. At a crossing, a curious child or tired labourer is unable to move fast enough to escape a glancing blow from a carriage’s armoured side. A drunk conks out between two of the wooden sleepers that prop up the rails, and an oncoming engine erases him.
Such deaths of civilians are rare and always reported, whereas those of railway workers happen ten times as often but are hardly ever mentioned in the press. There is a silent consensus among the six companies that occasional manglings on the job are to be expected. Surgeons are kept on retainer, to come quickly with their rolls of knives. Railwaymen have been snared between carriages during the shunting and been decapitated, cut in two, or burst like tomatoes.
Many years ago, circumstances obliged Engine 721 to halt in a tunnel for ten minutes, and her pent-up fumes asphyxiated the driver and stoker waiting on her footplate. She never meant them any harm; this is simply how she was made.
In Front Third, Mado seeps on. The rags in her drawers must be soaked half through now. She’s too exhilarated to care. From what the guard said, it seems her plan to snare a member of parliament has worked.
A tiny, plump woman in a straw hat with hair so blond it’s almost transparent squeezed in beside her back at Flers. It’s so crowded in here, Mado has her lunch bucket clamped between her boots on the floor to make sure no sway of the train or clumsy movement by a fellow passenger knocks it over before she’s ready. Briouze is the next stop, and Briouze is when the deputy for Orne gets on and this train becomes (in a world where a hundred working folk are valued less highly than one of their betters ) a prime target. Think how the government—all the governments of the world—will quake if Mado manages to kill one of their own!
Her stomach makes a long, loud growl.
The blonde half laughs. “Looks heavy.” She nods at Mado’s lunch bucket to show what she means. “Bet you like your grub.”
You’re fat is what she means, and she should talk. Mado gives her a stare.
The man with the bowler hat asks: “Not eating yet?”
“It’s not even eleven,” Mado replies without looking at him.
“Always famished hours before noon myself.”
“It’ll taste better later,” she mutters.
The Russian—Blonska, that’s the name—quotes drily, “There’s no sauce like hunger.”
The blonde swallows uncomfortably. “I’m so bedevilled by heartburn, I don’t dare have a bite.”
“Due soon, are you?” That’s Blonska.
The blonde’s eyes drop—she’s a little embarrassed—and she nods.
Ah, not just plump but pregnant. Mado should have spotted that, but in her mother’s case, it was always quite clear—the ball of flesh stood out from the skin-and-bones frame. She catches herself checking the woman’s left hand, which does indeed have a thin band of gold. These leftover conventional judgements are hard to shed. It doesn’t matter now , Mado reminds herself. None of these people matter as individuals, including me.
In a low voice, Blonska—who sounds like some kind of charity worker?—is drawing out the blonde. Madame Langlois, takes in sewing and ironing, constant heartburn since the summer…
Mado wishes she could shut her ears. She has to sit tight only till Briouze. All of us in this carriage, maybe all of us on this train, our stories end today.
Second Class is a little shabby, Marcelle de Heredia is finding, and only part of the back divider is padded, but what does decor matter? Just five hours to go till Paris, and having even a shabby carriage all to herself is luxury.
Forget the Levassors , Marcelle orders herself. That poor sick girl. And the mother had every reason to lose her temper with me. Marcelle is better at the certainties of science than the ambiguities of social intercourse.
The Express is running alongside a stream now. There’s a skinny fellow with rolled-up trousers crouching at the edge—frog-catching, maybe? And two red-armed laundresses farther along, twisting a bedcover to wring it out, sheets already spread on bushes.
To work. Marcelle lifts her machine out of its wooden casket and places it onto the tiny table. She adds a fresh ink roll and feeds in a sheet of paper. Only concentrated effort on her studies will be able to wipe the whole mortifying conversation with Madame Sarazin-Levassor from her mind. She turns up the half-lamp overhead, but the oil smells, and the feeble light has a slight flicker to it, so she decides she’s better off relying on daylight and turns it down again. She sits very upright on the uncomfortable bench and starts rat-a-tat-tatting loudly enough to put off anyone who might glance into the carriage at the next stop and think of joining her.
She’s typing out her handwritten notes from a week ago and getting them in better order as she goes. This is an important study; she’s helping her doctoral supervisor analyse the rate of nerve response in different types of muscle. How Marcelle loves her Dactyle’s carapace, each letter hoisted on its little white pedestal in the familiar sequence—UIJAS ETONR. Also the way this model lets you see what you’ve just written. She works the muscles of her fingers; her oval nails tap out a staccato tune. If she types fast enough, immerses herself deeply enough, she won’t feel the time passing any more than a fish feels the water.
On this third leg of the journey, Léon Mariette rides in the Post Van, which smells of Camembert. As a Norman, he should be proud of the cheese—it’s this very train line that has allowed the great white wheels in wicker baskets to cross the globe in weeks and win enduring fame—but sometimes the sweaty whiff is too much for him.
He checks each box and package against its papers to make sure it’s been correctly identified, weighed, ticketed, and registered. You never know what people will try to send by parcel post: snakes, parrots, pickaxes… Even if a parcel has its origin station and destination written legibly on the correct colour card, labels can come ungummed and peel off or get stuck to other items and transfer themselves like ticks in long grass. Léon’s world is one of bothersome objects: goods lost, delayed, in bad order; undercharges; overcharges. Natural vice covers the inherent tendency of barrel hoops to rust and soft fruits to go mouldy, say, which can’t be considered the Company’s fault, not to be confused with negligence (clumsy handling or violent shunting), which can result in tins dented or jars cracked and for which the Company and Senior Guard Mariette in particular may be held liable.
He reads a circular about a valuable bundle of fabrics that failed to turn up at Granville yesterday and writes out orders to the staff of each of this route’s four stops to look for it. Even large, cumbersome objects can be found in dark corners if sought with sufficient zeal. Not that railwaymen are known for that trait. In Léon’s view, the Company hires too many barely qualified brothers, sons, and nephews, and the union is protective of even its most undeserving members. When Léon catches a railwayman standing around smoking, he always quotes Procrastination is the thief of time.
Harm can be done to parcels, but greater harm can come from them; any one of these could be death delivered in a box. Baggage doesn’t make Léon nearly as nervous, because each owner travels on the same train as his own valise, and who’d blow himself up? But packages can be set by clockwork to go off at a precise moment days after the senders have made their getaway. Paris is said to have two thousand revolutionaries now, groups called the Starving and the Hatred and Revolver in Hand, each with its own paper, cabaret, and soup kitchen. Some newspapers now run a dedicated column headed, with facetious brevity, Dynamite.
Last month Léon found a large hamper that smelled like boiled eggs and rattled oddly. Being unwilling to risk the lives of the train’s passengers, he tossed it out the window into some bulrushes. Its owner never complained to HQ that it hadn’t turned up, which went some way towards confirming Léon’s suspicions.
He lets out an almighty yawn and knuckles his lower back. His made-to-measure corset helps the aching only somewhat. Léon hasn’t been sleeping well. In recent dreams he’s been struggling through bewildering paperwork, and on waking in the middle of the night, he lies there for hours in the dark.
Forty-two. Until this year, crews could cash out at fifty and still get a third of their salary every year for as long as they lasted. But now that some people are living so long, the Company’s told the union it needs to squeeze more service out of each man on the books, so no one’s allowed to go till the age of fifty-five. Which means Léon has at least another thirteen years of intermittent backache before he can take his pension. Out in suburban Malakoff, Marie’s already talking to the neighbours about that golden era when my husband retires , though how she intends to stretch a third of his pay to cover all their needs is far from clear. Anyway, Léon fears he wouldn’t know himself without his job—like a goat used to the tug of his tether.
He checks the next parcel. Tedious work, but as he always says, Safety takes no holidays.
One Train Can Hide Another . This baffling line has become stuck in Maurice Marland’s head. He thinks of a crowd of grown-ups, each one blocking the one behind from view. Are the thoughts in his mind like that too? Do the things he knows cover up the ones he doesn’t?
He’s reading Around the World in Eighty Days —which starts at a train station with the funny name of Charing Cross—but he’s distracted by a man in the corner whistling a tune that Maurice nearly recognises. The sound is shrill, but nobody objects; passengers seem to pretty much make themselves at home here in Rear Third. The nurse is complaining to anyone who’ll listen about the noise and stink of the railways. Monsters, she calls the great engines, insisting that she’d have delivered her charge back to Paris by stagecoach if her town still had one.
Maurice cranes his head over his shoulder to look at the tiny dolled-up girl, the package the nurse must hand over now. His eyes prickle. To think she’s known only one home for four or five years and one (hired) mother, and now she’s going to be deposited with the strangers who are her parents. Maurice never thought to be grateful that Maman and Papa weren’t well-off enough to foster him out. Will the child ever see her nurse again? he wonders.
“A great big octopus, with tentacles going in all directions.”
Maurice blinks. Where?
“It sucks up the young,” the nurse rants on. “They come back to visit in fancy boots just to tell us we’re behind the times .”
“Don’t know about that,” the brick-brown labourer woman objects. “Young folk can stay home these days, send lace and butter off to market by train. Half these towns have only survived thanks to the railway.”
The nurse clears her throat furiously. “But what about the quiet places that aren’t on the line? They’re dying all the faster.”
In the rectangle of the window, Maurice sees a distant bridge flash like a knife.
He remembers a diagram his teacher drew on the blackboard of how the earth is always spinning like a top. How strange to think that this train and all who ride in her are dashing along eastwards, and so is the ground under her wheels—so does that mean they’re really going twice as fast?