8. 1117 a.m. Depart Briouze
11:17 a.m. DEPART brIOUZE
Watch the curves, the fills, and tunnels,
Never falter, never quail,
Keep your hand upon the throttle,
And your eye upon the rail.
MASON ELLIS ABBEY,
“LIFE’S RAILWAY TO HEAVEN” (1890)
On we go.
This is not the first time Engine 721 has encountered one of those rare humans who are careless of their own lives or even positively eager to throw them away.
The jumpers, the crews call them, since that’s usually how they do it. Every year a few—generally men, the sex more given to violent methods—make use of the massive momentum of a train. They stand waiting rather too near the track as if merely curious but with the hectic eyes of lovers. At the last moment they dash madly—or walk calmly—under the wheels and force the train to paint the shining rails with their blood.
It’s an awful trick to play on the rollers standing on the footplate. Sometimes a jumper will even look the driver or stoker in the eye when stepping forward, as if to put it on him.
After each such incident, the Company has the engine hosed down and polished, then sends it back out, gleaming, the next morning because the circulation must not, cannot, stop or the whole system could seize up. Newspapers sometimes blame the railways for the rising rate of self-murder, but a train never commands or lures a man to throw himself down. In every age, ways have been devised to unseal a bag of skin, and if not by train, a determined person will find another means.
So Engine 721 has been involved in suicides, yes. But today is her first bomb.
Such a makeshift, primitive apparatus Mado Pelletier’s lunch bucket holds in contrast to this train’s vast and exquisite mechanics—yet potentially just as powerful. Death on a grand scale, carried like a terrible secret inside the Express today.
And Engine 721 can do nothing to stop it. She’s not indifferent to the prospect of annihilation. She’d spare her frail passengers terror and pain if she could. But she has no means of saving them any more than she does of saving herself.
The American painter, oddly, rushed out of the carriage, so when the Express rattles away from Briouze, Alice Guy and her boss are alone.
So awkward. She’s remembering a Maupassant story about a cruel husband separated from his wife who happens to encounter her on a night train to the south. The twist is that the wife has engineered the meeting because she’s become pregnant by her lover, and being seen disembarking with her husband at Nice is all she needs to pass the baby off as legitimate when it’s born. As if carriage-sharing is a form of copulation!
Well, Alice might as well seize the opportunity she’s been looking for. “Monsieur,” she begins. Too rapidly, urgently; she wants this so much that she can’t control her excitement.
Gaumont pulls at his moustache.
“There’s a topic that’s been on my mind for some time, one I’ve hesitated to broach, though you may have guessed it from hints I’ve dropped.”
Uneasily: “I’m going to stop you there.”
“No, no, please let me—”
“Really, mademoiselle, I’m a married man.”
The groan bursts out of Alice, as loud as a horn.
Gaumont looks appalled. “My dear young lady.”
Can he imagine this is the frustration of a spinster longing for his touch? Christ, the vanity of men. Or the vanity of Alice, for deluding herself that the men at work think of her as a colleague rather than as a bit of skirt. Gaumont’s out of his seat now, rearing up, looming, wobbling, as the train rattles on. About to lurch towards her or away? Why, oh, why did Alice agree to accompany him on this wretched trip? This is going to end in mortification and Alice losing her job.
She tries a courteous voice with just a hint of steel. “Pardon, monsieur, you misunderstand me entirely .”
He stares, blinks.
At such moments do men, like women, feel like actors handed scripts they have no time to read before being nudged onto the stage? “What I wanted to ask about is strictly a work matter.”
“Business of the firm?”
“Quite so.”
“Ah. Very good.” His tone now flatter. Disappointment? Or possibly relief? It doesn’t matter, because either way, Gaumont drops back down heavily onto the bench.
Alice presses on. “What I was saying earlier, about demonstration films.”
He squints as if he doesn’t recall. Then nods. “Yes, yes, I’ll give that some thought when I have time.”
But Paris is still more than four hours away. “While you’re considering the question, perhaps I could borrow this camera of Demen?’s?” Her fingers settle on its polished lid.
Gaumont tilts his head to one side. “To make one of these little films?”
No, to bake tarte tatin in , Alice almost snaps. “Yes, and more than one—half a dozen trial runs, perhaps. Entirely on my own time, you see, outside business hours.” But wouldn’t I need daylight? At the weekend, then. “To show you and your partners the possibilities.”
“What kind of possibilities?”
Alice fumbles for the right words: “Stories. But told only through pictures.”
“Like ABC books for children? Or comics in the daily paper?” Gaumont’s tone is verging on scorn.
“ So much more gripping, though, monsieur, because these images would be moving. Performers acting, dancing, doing acrobatics, tricks.” Alice remembers his banal suggestion of a baby crawling in a garden and tries to liven it up. “What about… a fairy plucking infants out of cabbages?”
Gaumont squints as if she’s gone mad.
“It could be charming,” Alice says weakly. “Hilarious.”
“A man’s not going to pay hundreds of francs for a piece of scientific equipment to look at fairies. At actors pretending to be fairies,” he corrects himself in a withering tone.
The hypothetical customer’s wife might persuade him, though, since that’s how half the goods in Paris get sold—but this is an argument for another day. “Forget the fairy, then. It could be… soldiers duelling or revolutionaries storming a barricade.”
“Too political.”
“A ship in a storm?”
“How on earth would you—”
“I don’t know! I don’t know yet , I mean, but I’m sure it could be done.” Alice improvises wildly. “A burglar sneaking through a house. A man jumping off a speeding train!”
“Why is he jumping off a speeding train?”
“Well, exactly, you’re curious.” She flails on. “Salome asking for the head of John the Baptist? A dog stealing sausages?”
The corner of Gaumont’s mouth crinkles.
“Something to keep them watching our film to the last frame to see how it turns out.”
He narrows his eyes. “You’re very… passionate.”
It sounds like a rebuke. Is he expecting an apology for her excess of enthusiasm?
“I’m not quite convinced, Mademoiselle Guy.”
“Of course you’re not—not yet,” she murmurs. “Wait till you see what I can make.” Should she dare bring up the fact that Gaumont began his career as a secretary himself? He might be offended by the comparison. She hints: “You must know that a secretary can have a good idea once in a while?”
A short laugh. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”
Gaumont’s only teasing, which men love to do to pretty women. He hasn’t said no. Alice smiles through set teeth.
As Blonska knits on, she’s getting the full story out of the pregnant blonde, Cécile Langlois. She can’t help herself; impossible to take a holiday from being concerned about people.
The problem turns out to be that the man who put that ring on her finger, Langlois, has been dead two years. The fellow responsible (as Blonska refers to him, though irresponsible might fit better) for the infant who on its way is only twenty. He had no chance to marry Cécile before beginning his military service.
Blonska privately scoffs at that; a wedding takes ten minutes. “Will he acknowledge it, at least, so you can put his name on the birth certificate?”
Cécile swallows a sob and pushes tendrils of light gold off her face. “Too late—he’s been sent off to Madagascar. I’ve been staying with my parents—keeping indoors so no one in town will know my state. I’m going to stay with my married sister in Paris, then bring the baby back with me and pretend it’s hers and needs country air.”
Blonska sighs at the complicated scheme, doubting the blonde’s neighbours in Flers will be so easy to fool. She and Cécile are speaking low, out of discretion, but nobody else in Front Third seems to be paying much attention. Two are reading papers; one is chewing on a saucisson sec ; one is refilling his pipe; and several have nodded off, as is common at this point in a train journey. The weary maid, Madame Baudin, has her head back and rolling as if her neck’s been snapped.
“This is what’s wrong with the world.” The short-haired girl, Mado Pelletier, opens her eyes reluctantly.
“Beg your pardon, mademoiselle?” Cécile Langlois says.
Mado speaks as if the words are fighting their way out of her mouth. “Armies and governments and churches and bosses all keep men down, and men keep us down—our sex gets the worst of it.”
She’s oversimplifying, as the very young tend to do, but Blonska can’t disagree. “I’ve never had any time for religion myself.”
That surprises a smile out of Mado. “Yes! This fairy tale about the immortal soul—”
“People seem more like penny candles to me,” Blonska says. “When the wax melts away, the flame’s snuffed out.”
“That’s why I left school—those harping nuns.”
Blonska demurs: “Education’s useful, though.”
The girl’s lip curls. “I can educate myself.”
Well, only to an extent. “ Knowledge is power .” Was it Bacon who wrote that?
“But knowledge is not the only kind of power.”
As Mado goes off on a rant about oppressions of all varieties, Blonska nods along. The girl is indeed well-read—a testament to the free libraries provided by the state she so scorns, Blonska could point out if she were able to get a word in—and well-versed in the forces that have shaped her impoverished childhood.
The jargon’s familiar to Blonska from her days in left-wing émigré circles, and so is the mood of electric resentment. When Blonska first grew tired of ladies in frills proposing teas and bazaars to raise funds, she used to go to soup-and-speeches evenings thronged with unemployed workers and radical artists. She liked to drink in the atmosphere of burning zeal flavoured with rage. One night she heard the old Communard Louise Michel, a grey-haired woman back from a decade of exile in the South Seas, speak of revolution as a flood tide, an avalanche, an earthquake that would turn the world upside down. It made sense, but only in the same way as a nocturne by Debussy made sense, in the language of pure, irrefutable emotion.
If Blonska weren’t such a doubting Thomas, she might have been won over years ago. She’s not proud of the cynicism that’s kept her from joining any lost cause. She jumps in: “But we can’t delude ourselves into thinking that tearing down this society will make a better one.”
“It’s not delusion. It’s the only hope left,” Mado counters.
“Come, now! Slogans and songs, marches and riots, never yet stopped a child crying.”
The other women’s discussion seems to be too abstract for Cécile Langlois, who’s mopping her sweaty face and has undone two buttons to loosen the strings of her maternity stays.
Mado’s now going on about the appalling unfairness of privilege being doled out according to the accident of birth.
“Unless there’s no such thing,” Blonska mutters.
That brings the young woman up short. “What?”
“ No accidents, only fate misnamed . That’s what Schiller said.”
Mado’s dry lips purse. “How defeatist.”
“On the contrary, Schiller was known for his loud resistance to tyrants.”
“But to take refuge in this mystical notion of destiny—”
“Is it mystical?” Blonska shrugs. “To me, it describes the way things work. A train can run only on the tracks laid down for it.”
“So we’re powerless to do anything about the way things work ?”
“I didn’t say that at all,” Blonska says a little crisply. “Perhaps it’s our destiny to try. The attempt to right wrongs is all the braver for its difficulty, no?”
“Its impossibility,” Mado corrects her.
Blonska’s been wrestling with this problem three times as long as this youngster. “Life is long,” she tells her. “If you’re lucky, that is.”
Mado produces a hollow laugh at the word lucky .
Blonska searches her memory for an example. She drops her voice: “I recently met a journalist convinced that Captain Dreyfus is the victim of a conspiracy.”
“Dreyfus the spy?” Mado asks, incredulous.
“Evidence was forged, he told me, anti-Semites gave false statements—” Blonska holds up her hand to forestall the girl’s objections. “I can’t say if there’s anything to it myself. But when I pointed out to this fellow, Lazare, that clearing Dreyfus’s name seemed a hopeless task, since the Jews always get the blame and magical reversals happen only in the theatre, what he said was Blonska, justice is a long game .”
“Not just long,” Mado says hotly, “more like never-ending.”
“Well.” Blonska is a little impatient with the girl’s impatience. (She recognises the irony in that.) “At least we can resolve to leave the dirty world a little cleaner than we found it.”
“You’re talking about charity?”
The scorn with which Mado pronounces the word! Blonska quotes levelly, “ From each according to his ability , and this is mine.”
“You do-gooders are always coming around holding your noses, telling us to say our prayers, wait for things to improve , and, in the meantime, somehow better ourselves !”
“I’ve never made any such idiotic remark.”
“Well. Even so. Charity just papers over the cracks. Oils the rustiest cogs of the machine.”
The girl’s not exactly wrong. “But ask a rusty cog if it would like to be oiled,” Blonska urges. “Ask a hungry child if a loaf might be better than nothing.”
Mado stares into space, her pupils like bottomless wells.
Mado Pelletier was that hungry child , Blonska thinks. Did no one ever offer her a loaf without a homily? “You grew up in Paris?” Guessing from the accent.
A nod. Then one detail: “In a greengrocery.”
That surprises Blonska. “Lots of fruit, then?”
A snort. “Baskets full of pears and carrots and such but forbidden to us in the back room until they were overripe or wrinkled or mouldy. Once I punched an apple hoping I’d get to eat it when the bruise showed. But my mother somehow knew what I’d done and slapped my hands raw.”
Blonska’s face wrinkles with sympathy. “I suppose she was trying to teach you the way things work .”
Mado’s jaw grinds. “There was no need for extra lessons. How things worked for her was, every year she’d be having another baby.”
“So you have dozens of brothers and sisters?”
A violent shake of the head. “I’d be sent to fetch the midwife and make preparations …”
“Why you?”
“The only daughter.” Mado pronounces the word with disgust. “I’d do whatever the midwife said—I was a great help . But every time, my mother would lose the baby.”
“Oh, ma chère .” Blonska almost whispers it.
In the Christophle carriage, Albert lets his eyes unfocus to blur the newspaper’s fine print about the fiery speech expected from the socialist deputy for Tarn. He’s so very bored.
Really , he chivvies himself, you have no cause for complaint .
The Christophles have come up fast. Albert’s grandfather was a ploughman but made a lawyer of his son, and Albert himself wears the red rosette of the Legion of Honour on his lapel, and so does his own son, Georges; see how the family line advances upwards across the page of history. A son and daughter grown, four grandchildren already. Albert and Anna have never lost a child either—she was healthy and vigorous right through her fifties.
This tedium is simply how it is to age alongside the woman he chose, the one who’s now an invalid. Most likely she feels the same way about Albert, for all his vigour. He has no complaints, then, or no legitimate ones, only the restless gloom of a man of sixty-five. Only a yearning for something to happen that hasn’t happened a million times before.
Framed briefly in the window, a castle like a chess piece discarded by giants. A minute later, a shrine—a miniature church, no wider than a metre, to house a statue of the Virgin, gaudy in blue and white. Albert’s lip twists into an automatic sneer. Then he scolds himself for forgetting that many of those who elected him still hold to these soothing old beliefs.
The itch (as Albert calls his particular private craving) is bad today. Or strong —that might be a better word, because the desire doesn’t pain or distress him; more like a dog pricking up its ears at sounds its owner can’t hear. (But is Anna his dog owner in this analogy? Or is Albert’s mind the hapless owner of his doggish body?) He’s been in a slightly roused state all morning, perhaps because he’s been released from the obligations of a host after the Gévelots’ visit, but he’s not yet back in the city. It’s an in-between day, in transit; on a train, all one has to do is pass time.
So Albert lets himself consider certain spots on his mental map of the capital. Even the slimmest chance of an encounter this evening feels delicious, the friction of longing against possibility. He won’t have enough time to go for a wander in his favourite wooded expanses of the Jardin du Luxembourg. But there are many smaller crannies to try, tucked away and out of the scrutiny of polite society. The chalet de nécessité with the gingerbread roof on Place de la Madeleine, for instance. The urinals off Les Halles have pierced patterns in the metal that let the sunshine through. The six-box one on Place de la Bourse with modesty screens that come down almost to the ankles. The very best—the eight-staller in the Champs-élysées Garden encircled by a thick screen of evergreen bushes. Spots where no one’s going to see this important bank governor cum politician. (Not that what two men get up to is a crime, technically, not since the revolution, but being caught with trousers down would risk a charge of public indecency, which would be a humiliating end to the glorious career of Albert Silas Christophle.) That two-booth steel pissoir outside the Santé Prison—Albert’s had a quick and glorious suck-off there, and no passersby counted feet, or if they did, they didn’t call the gendarmes. Generally the plain people of Paris are too busy earning their bread to give a hoot how others take their pleasure, which is one reason why it’s the most civilized city on earth.
Albert enjoys this kind of slow anticipation so much that he almost prefers it to the blinding excitement of an actual coupling. If he had a choice between a whole day of thinking about it and two minutes of unexpectedly doing it, he’d probably choose the former. (Depending on the man, of course.) But the best is to have both: to want it for hours, daydream about a grope or a suck, then get it… now, that would be bliss. That would fit him to take up the mantle of silver-whiskered statesman and family man once more.
“Albert!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I asked you for a little water,” says his wife faintly.
“Right away, ma chère .”
The carriage sways. Holding on to the table as he fills a glass from the jug, Albert finds himself wishing he had a bit of privacy to rub himself off. But for all the invalid carriage’s luxurious fittings, there’s no discreet corner out of view of woman and child. So he sits down and crosses his legs the other way.
Ever since he switched to the young lady’s carriage at Briouze, Henry Tanner hasn’t managed to say a word. Craven chicken-heart , he tells himself. Gutless mouse. Spineless jellyfish. If he fails to say so much as Good day , how will he ever know whether she’s open to making his acquaintance? How can he ever expect to find a female friend, a companion to soften the rigours of this rootless artistic life? If not this lovely person with her air of calm intelligence, who is he waiting for?
A cluster of squat towers flashes by. A blue signboard: écouché-les-Vallées . How beautiful French place-names are, even those of the ugliest towns.
Tap, tap ; the deft pecking of a hungry bird. Whatever the dark young lady is typewriting, it seems marked by precision and purpose. Is that a name neatly inked on the side of the mechanism’s case? Henry squints without moving his head. De Heredia —a Spanish name, perhaps?
Next up should be Argentan. Yes, here’s the massive Plantagenet keep and then the slim spires of two Gothic churches, awfully paintable. Henry’s spirits sometimes quail at the sheer number of his competitors, but most have clung to the coast, so there must remain some out-of-the-way inland spots that haven’t been painted yet, surely?
Mademoiselle de Heredia, then. (Not Madame , Henry hopes; she doesn’t look married, somehow, and wears no ring.) Maybe she’s not of mixed origins at all, just Spanish or Italian or Greek. Also, he might have misread her manner when he let himself into her carriage back at Briouze; instead of politely resigned, she might be rigid with suspicion of the intruder. How little we know about the strangers we sit beside.
After another long stretch, it strikes Henry that the Express must be almost at Surdon, where other passengers might very well barge in just as he did. But still he can’t seem to speak. He feels too much; he’s cast his most feverish hopes on this quiet, intent person like a magic lantern show on a blank wall.
It’s the silence that finally rouses him. Well, not silence—it’s always noisy on a train—but the cessation of tapping. She fits her machine into its case, slides her papers into the compartment, snaps everything shut.
Apology unlocks his tongue at last. He pauses for a split second to translate his thoughts. “Pardon me, mademoiselle, I’ve disturbed you.”
“You haven’t.” She sounds perfectly Parisian. “I’ve finished.”
Still Henry hesitates. He squeezes out some inoffensive remark about the loveliness of Normandy. He tries a follow-up: This is a region of France he could imagine making a home in.
She says her work is always likely to keep her in the capital.
To force an introduction, he ventures to ask about the name on her case.
Mademoiselle de Heredia says her father is Cuban in origin, though her mother, like her, is French-born.
Lots of African ancestry in Cuba; Henry catches himself grinning. He gestures at the typewriter. “You’re a journalist, perhaps?”
She shakes her head. “I’m… well, the fact is”—she switches to excellent English—“I’m training to be a physiologist.”
Can she tell from Henry’s vacant look that he has no real idea what that is, even though she’s speaking his native tongue as a kindness to him?
“I study living organisms,” she explains, “their components, their interactions with their environments. Specifically their nerve responses.”
His eyebrows go up. He hasn’t met many scientists and never a lady one. “How, if I may ask, did you come to take up that…” Business? Profession? “Line of work?”
A little shrug. “I suppose it began with an interest in life in all its variety.”
Life in all its variety ; Henry likes the phrase.
“When I was very small, my father showed me a drop of water under a microscope magnified a thousand times.”
“Was it so wonderful?”
“Horrifying,” Mademoiselle de Heredia corrects him. “Paris water—the things swarming in every drop!”
That makes Henry chuckle. “Is he a scientist too?”
“A politician, retired now. He was once president of the municipal council.”
Again, Henry knows his face must look blank.
“Like the mayor of your New York or Chicago?”
“Ah!” Remarkable; how did a Cuban of colour end up running Paris?
She seems to read his mind, and her face tightens. “Bigots used to call Papa ‘the Chocolate Deputy.’?”
Henry winces. This is the moment when he can match her candour, gift for gift: “American journalists sometimes dub me ‘the Darkie Painter.’?” Oh, but he omitted to tell her he was a painter in the first place.
“Ugh!”
With a single syllable, a childish expression of disgust, she’s cleared the air. He smiles back at her, suddenly at ease. “Black newspapers call me ‘the Hope of the Race,’ which I dislike for the opposite reason.”
“The pressure to excel?”
She understands exactly. “Your father—I hope he persisted in the face of the scoffers?”
“Of course.” Mademoiselle de Heredia makes a gesture as if to swat away a swarm of mosquitoes. “He’s fought for votes for women, limits on the working day for children—”
“How marvellous.”
“He always says, Marcelle, don’t let their foolishness get in the way of the work .”
She’s let slip her first name, or perhaps dropped it like a handkerchief for Henry to pick up: Marcelle. “My father is a bishop.” But now Marcelle may be picturing someone very grand. “In the African Methodist Episcopal Church,” he explains. “He was a barber before that. He tried to apprentice me in the flour trade.”
“As a florist?”
She’s heard him wrong, and he snorts at the misunderstanding. “No, wheat flour, milling. It made me wheeze.”
Marcelle covers her musical laugh. “Your father hadn’t noticed your artistic talent?”
Henry sighs. “He just didn’t think it any way for a grown man to make a living.”
“Ah. How shortsighted of him.”
Well, that remains to be seen. “Last time I was home in the States, he grilled me about my sales in France—whether I’ll ever earn enough to buy a house or support a wife.” You sound feeble, Henry. Woebegone. You’ve seized this chance to talk to a charming woman scientist, and all you can tell her is what a failure your daddy thinks you are?
Henry feels a tugging, a pressure in his body, as the train slows. They’re on a windswept plateau, a nowhere that a lone sign identifies as Surdon .