1. 2
They’re both family men. Guillaume spends every second evening with his Francoise and their little boy in their lodgings just off the tracks, a kilometre before Montparnasse Station in Paris, where the rooms shake every time a train goes by. And Victor lives with his Joséphine by Montparnasse Cemetery, ten minutes’ walk from Guillaume’s. The mates never see each other in the city, as their wives don’t get on, but they spend ten days out of every eleven elbow to elbow on the footplate of Engine 721 and every second night in the same boardinghouse in Granville. Even their work clothes have merged over the years; they grab smock shirts, soft jackets, denim trousers, and caps from the one parcel the laundrywoman sends back.
Guillaume wears boots, but Victor prefers clogs so he can stamp out a flaming cinder without setting his soles on fire. He cracks four eggs into a puddle of butter on his shovel to test the fire’s heat.
How they crackle! Guillaume’s stomach is empty, harsh with a morning shot of black coffee and red wine. He breaks a roll and leans over the glowing red metal.
“Wait!” Victor says.
Guillaume laughs under his breath.
“One more minute,” Victor insists, holding Guillaume’s sleeve.
“But you always overdo the eggs.”
“Half a minute, then.”
Guillaume bumps him aside, dips his bread. The two fight to mop up the slithering gold. Merde, that’s good. They burp and wipe their mouths. Victor scrubs at his moustache with a handkerchief that’s not yet grimy. Some of the men call him Walrus; only Guillaume knows that his stoker grew it from the age of twelve to hide the puckered scar from a cleft lip.
Nothing’s hurting Guillaume yet, and the day promises fair weather. “What kind of trip are we going to have, mate?” His customary question.
“Fast but smooth,” Victor assures him.
Guillaume cracks his tight knuckles one by one. “Smooth but fast.”
Blonska’s bones are sixty years old and feel more like a hundred. She stirs on the platform where to save a night’s lodging she curled up behind a pillar, which failed to keep the Granville wind at bay. The sea breeze, the locals call it, as if it’s some soft zephyr rather than a knife of air. Her eyes are cemented shut; she rubs the crumbs away. She tries to sit up. May have overdone it this time, kipping on flagstones . But what else was Blonska supposed to do when she found the platform had no benches? This morning she might not be able to get to her feet in time to board the Express before it blasts away. If she has to be carted off to hospital—if this seaside town even has one—it’ll mean further worry and expense for the Parisian ladies who sent her here for a fortnight to restore her health. (Blonska’s eyes have been red and blurred, her twisted spine more trouble than usual.)
This modern notion of needing to go away on holiday for one’s health is an invention of the railway companies, in her view, but it would have seemed churlish to refuse her patrons outright. Still, she didn’t feel obliged to spend all their money on her own trivial comfort, and a week seemed more than long enough for a rest. So last Tuesday she came down in Third Class instead of First, as it would have offended her intelligence to pay twenty-seven francs. She took one look at Granville’s H?tel des Bains—facing the shore, all froufrou gingerbread and ruched curtains—and turned away towards the steps clambering up the cliff. For the first six nights she found a much cheaper room in an alley where the wind whipped across the high town, rented out by the wife of a fisherman who was off in Newfoundland after cod for half the year. She also saved the money her patrons had given her for meals, instead munching on nuts and apples as she looked out at the island of Jersey and sucked in the free salt air.
Hard to catch her breath on this busy platform, though, after the cold night on the ground. Blonska’s dressed in her patrons’ gauzy hand-me-downs; she has no objection to fine wrappings if they’re free, even if they look queer on an old spinster bent over like a question mark. Back in Russia, before any journey, you sat down on your baggage for a quiet moment to gather your forces. But Blonska has brought only a satchel, to save the effort of toting a suitcase, and it’s time to stop stalling and get up. When she tips back her head, she realises that the iron-and-glass roof of the station needs to be this high to make room for the steam and smoke; a low ceiling would trap passengers and crew in a blinding fog.
All of a sudden, a whistle makes her jump, and her back spasms—the moustachioed guard’s giving the first warning of departure. She scrapes herself off the flagstones and lurches to her knees, then to her numb feet. Only her orthopaedic corset holds her up. This was a surprisingly useful present, moulded to her exact misshape, so she hasn’t passed it on to someone needier.
Sometimes Blonska accepts lavish gifts to soothe the givers’ unease; it’s only in the privacy of her mind that she mutters, Go to hell with your bonbons and your fortifying wines . It’s a fact that society would be rather less terrible if the bonbons, wines, and francs were more evenly distributed, so Blonska plays her part by letting the guilty philanthropic ladies of Paris use her as a faceted lemon-squeezer on which to press their wealth.
Third Class is always placed at the front of the train so as to catch the brunt of the coal dust and of course so that in the event of a head-on collision, those in the cheap seats will do their duty by getting crushed before their betters. The middle of the three brown doors is hanging open just a few steps away. Blonska might move with the frail, bobbing glide of a seahorse, but she’s a tough old boot. She heaves her satchel upwards and pushes it onto the splintering floor of the carriage, then gets one worn sole on the metal step, claws at the handrail, and drags herself up and in.
She scans the pairs of long wooden benches facing each other. She inches through the narrow gap down the middle of the carriage. The air is thick with tobacco, garlic, whiskey, linseed oil, and wet straw. Ah, a gap; Blonska drops into it. She leans her shoulder blades against the narrow back bar. Catching her breath, she peers past somebody’s hat at the steamed-up window. She’ll have a view north this time, all the way home to Paris. She’ll enjoy the scenery, even if the lush green fields of lower Normandy aren’t a patch on the Great Steppes.
She takes her knitting out of her satchel because she can knit by feel. She’d love to read on the journey—she’s halfway through Chekhov’s latest stories—but she must keep resting her eyes or she’ll be no use to Monsieur Claretie this week. Blonska has a part-time job looking after his library at the Comédie-Francaise and takes pride in this slim connection to the oldest theatre company in existence. She’s put in order the books and papers of other men of letters as well (less for money than out of her itch for tidiness)—the tireless reformer Clemenceau, for instance, who calls her stubborn old Blonska . She was baptised Elise, but these fellows use only her surname, almost as if she’s one of them.
A fisherwoman opposite has a startlingly intricate strip of Bayeux lace over her muscular shoulders. She’s holding a great basket of oysters that pokes Blonska’s knees and is already causing complaints from a man in a bowler hat.
“Fresh out of the sea,” the oysterwoman tells him without turning her head, “and the sea’s all you can smell, so don’t dare say otherwise.”
“Well, I just hope they don’t start stinking by Paris.”
“Cold day in October? No fear of that.”
“Can one of you pull down the blind to keep the sun off them?” he grumbles.
“Oi!” Several voices are raised in protest at the idea. Blonska nods; she’s still chilled to the bone and would miss the bit of sunshine.
The bowler-hat man sucks on his pipe. “Well, can you move the basket so we’ve got some elbow room?”
“Move it where?” the fisherwoman wants to know.
“Put it on the floor.”
“Can’t have no dirt or ash getting on my oysters.”
“Such prices you lot charge,” the bowler hat says, “Granvillais can’t afford a taste of our own shellfish anymore.”
The oysterwoman pulls a faux-sympathetic face. “Have to sell high, don’t I, to cover the ticket to Paris and back?”
“Or you could save yourself the trouble of going—stay home and sell them cheaper. It’s not as if it takes long to pull a few oysters off the rocks.”
“Risking my life in those storms, and the highest tides in Europe? If you think it’s that easy, go pull your own!”
Blonska’s seen fistfights break out in Third before, but this argument has a lazy tone to it; the two locals are just passing time.
“Well.” The oysterwoman sighs. “Poor people’s bread always burns.”
Nobody’s inclined to disagree with that old saw.
The man with the bowler hat folds his coat into a lumpy cushion to sit on. Blonska would do the same with her shawl if she didn’t need it to keep the chill off her chest.
“They make Third Class as uncomfortable as they possibly can, don’t they?” he throws her way.
She smiles. “On purpose, monsieur—you think?”
“The Company’s trying to force anyone with the cash to fork out for Second. See these tiny holes drilled in the floor to make draughts?”
Sceptical, Blonska bends over—but the man’s right, there are pinpricks at regular intervals.
On the whole, she’s relieved to have her holiday behind her and to be heading back with more than two hundred francs stuffed in her corset. (She can’t imagine any robber bold enough to riffle through her damp wrappings.) Blonska will have the satisfaction of handing over the cash to the next person she meets who needs it for rent, shoes, coal and candles, bread and milk. Having somehow made it to the advanced age of sixty despite all her ailments, she likes to see how long she can sit on a winter day without lighting a fire; scrimping gives her a little shiver of triumph. That’s conceited in its own way, Blonska knows; everyone has his or her vanity, and doing without happens to be hers.
Perhaps this will be her last long trip. Life’s too short to make a habit of travelling arduously to faraway places and doing nothing there in hopes of bolstering your powers so you can do useful things again for a little longer. Why not just keep trying to be useful until the whistle blows?
It’s best to be prepared. Long ago Blonska entrusted a hundred francs to her employer Monsieur Claretie to be used to bury her decently. Varvara Nikitine, whom Blonska lived with for two years, has left space for her friend in her own plot in Montparnasse Cemetery. (Varvara was touring Ireland to study poverty when she caught pleurisy and died of it.) You can’t cheat the hourglass; the sand will run out whether you’re watching it or not. Forward over the graves , as Goethe wrote after the death of his last child.
Senior guard Léon Mariette checks he has all his necessary kit: timetable, rule book, pencil, log (squared paper covered in black cloth and closed with an elastic band), medical kit, pocket torch, whistle, carriage keys, signal flags in red, green, and white. He relishes the weight of responsibility, unlike young Jean Le Goff, who gets by with a penknife, a flashy waistcoat and tie, and a ridiculous moustache.
Léon has followed the departure protocols; he’s walked the length of the platform with a station guard (a former stoker deafened by the work). They’ve scanned every coupling and sprung buffer to make sure they’re sound and oiled with a pair of side chains hooked on as a backup but loosely enough to give some play where the train will need to curve with her tracks. Sometimes those turnbuckle screws work loose, or the chains crack, or dishonest railwaymen nick bits and sell them for scrap. In Léon’s experience, the Company of the West is infested with thieves, shirkers, and time-wasters.
Crews can be just as stupid as civilians; they cut corners and rebel against the rules. Few seem to grasp that accidents don’t happen by accident. Léon thinks of the railways as a hard school in which making the least slip can kill an innocent person. A stage upon which character is revealed in a merciless light… but unlike at the theatre, on the railways justice is not done.
Now he’s making sure that every door is shut and every handle horizontal. He wishes he could grab the last few stragglers like stray chickens and toss them into their hutches. He’s already heard Le Goff’s first whistle—pert, almost cocky—so he hurries all the way to the train’s nose to check that the kerosene headlamp is burning well above the Company plaque that reads West . The smokebox is like a great clock with no hands, and the steel blade (for snow or other obstructions) is gleaming below.
Moving at a trot, Léon doubles back to Front Baggage, his base for the journey, and climbs in just in time to hear Le Goff’s final warning whistle. He mounts the short ladder to perch in the senior guard’s birdcage, a lantern-shaped lookout on the roof. He glances down at the platform and sees a young woman with a lidded tin lunch bucket dash out of nowhere and up the steps of Rear Third.
“Too late,” Léon roars at her. More than a few fools have brought death on themselves by leaping on or off at the last moment.
She has the cheek to ignore him, this peculiar person, upright as a toy soldier in a straight skirt, a collar and tie, brilliantined hair cut to just below the ears, a worn slouch hat. Paris fashion—Léon will never understand it. But she’s wrestled the carriage door open and leapt in, and here comes the dignified note of the steam whistle, Guillaume Pellerin formally asking permission for departure. Only once the Granville guard clangs his handbell does Léon lift his own whistle from his chest to give the sharp all-clear. Some gripe that you could shave a minute off the whole ritual by cutting out this exchange of sounds, but as Léon always says, Better prepare and prevent than repair and repent.
Sometimes ignorant civilians or even fellow railwaymen, who should know better, address Senior Guard Mariette as if he’s a mere baggageman, a creature of labels and ledgers, when the fact is, the lives of more than a hundred persons are in his experienced hands. Up in his birdcage, he has the most comprehensive view of train and track, and an alarm bell hangs to his right in the event of his spotting danger ahead or behind.
Also, he plays an unseen but not unimportant role in actually driving the train. Every time Pellerin moves the train out, Léon fingers the leather binding of his hand brake and leans a little on the crank, which turns a screw under the floor and presses the iron teeth softly against the wheels to smoothen the gathering movement. Without that, the links of the train can jerk, which Léon feels just like the ache in his hips at the end of each day. (He turned forty-two this year.) He wishes passengers would understand that rolling stock is called that because it rolls; it’s in the nature of its pieces to lag a little behind or leap ahead or nudge each other. Do these people expect to glide halfway across France in a day as smoothly as angels on a cloud? And it’s Senior Guard Mariette, the public face of the Company, who’s obliged to present himself on the platform at every station, patient and accountable. Those who complain of being yanked about , let them take it up with the Maker, who neglected to polish the earth like a billiard ball.
Léon skews around to check himself in the Front Baggage van’s small mirror. His muttonchop whiskers are sharply trimmed; his stiff, black, flat-topped kepi reminds him of the red one from his army days. (As it was peacetime, he was mostly assigned to protect railway lines in West Africa—keeping order as civilisation advanced across the continent one kilometre at a time.) His buttoned-on shirt collar is fresh this morning and his grey coat is fastened all the way down his thighs over its matching jacket. This makes it rather hard for Léon to bend at the waist, but what’s the point of having standards if they’re to be let slip?
The Paris Express is properly underway now, so he releases the hand brake and allows himself a moment’s ease, watching the last shuttered houses of Granville flick by.
Moving at last!
She is how the crew refer to the train, out of fondness but also to mark the distinction between her and them. Technically, she is Engine 721, a six-wheeled locomotive constructed for the Company of the West eighteen years ago. But in another sense, she is this whole train, since without the coal and water in the tender coupled on behind her, she couldn’t huff and puff and power her wheels, and without the long, thick chain of carriages assembled afresh every night, she’d have no reason to move.
From the tip of Normandy, she cuts due east, like a spoon taking the top off the lightly boiled egg of France. Every passenger, whether paying nine francs to squeeze into one of her Third-Class carriages, eighteen for Second, or twenty-seven for First, will be treated to the luxury of speed. Today’s trip of 326 kilometres should be interrupted by only four brief stops. Barring acts of God, caprices of Nature, mishaps, or human failings, she should pull into Paris-Montparnasse in seven hours and ten minutes, at 3:55 p.m.
Why should you take an interest in this particular railway journey? France has one of the densest meshes of tracks on earth. The iron vine writhes across the plains, bores through the mountains, leaps the rivers. Every hour of the day, trains shatter the quiet, char the air, and scare the wildlife. So why care about this one express from Granville on the morning of the twenty-second of October, 1895?
Not because she’s bound for Paris. Most trains go to or from that knot at the top of the net, the spider at the heart of the web. It’s prohibitively expensive to ship goods anywhere other than the capital, but that’s where the majority of customers live anyway. For half a century, the six companies have extended their routes like spokes radiating from the great hub of Paris.
No: What’s remarkable about this train is that she’s heading straight for disaster.
Every journey must come to an end, after all. As a Scottish saying has it: Hours are time’s arrows, and one of them is fletched with death.