Chapter 5
Gare Austerlitz railway station certainly looked practical, with arched windows and ranks of bicycles chained up in racks outside.
A gloomy staircase led up to platforms, where local turquoise and white trains sped off busily every few minutes, taking Parisians home or perhaps out for the evening to have some fun.
We found noticeboards where trains were leaving for exciting destinations and stared at them hungrily. Orléans, Briancon, Chateaudun and most excitingly Nice. We were booked to travel on the Intercités de Nuit – the sleeper train.
Eventually after a lot of false starts and bickering, we found the right platform, an empty bench and sat down. The train which we assumed was ours was there, but all the doors were locked. Never mind, it wouldn’t be long until we boarded and the next part of our adventure began.
Harriet pulled out her plastic wallet of notes and our tickets to recheck the details. We all had the necessary information on our phones but we had long ago decided that she was the most responsible of us, was used to herding groups of students about and should be our unofficial tour leader.
‘We are going first class, but don’t get too excited. It’s not the Orient Express with mahogany panelling and turn down service with a chocolate on your pillow,’ she said.
‘Nor will there be any murders, I hope. Or strange Belgian detectives,’ Anna added.
‘It’s a four-berth couchette, numbers 41, 42, 45 and 46, but I booked the whole compartment for us, otherwise we might have had a fourth person in with us.’
‘And it might have been a mysterious Russian princess with a penchant for Goethe and depressing poetry which she would sit up and read all night to us,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen that film far too many times.’
More people arrived on our platform, groups of students laughing and play-fighting, hardy-looking couples with walking poles and huge backpacks, a few family groups with small children with their own little zebra-striped suitcases.
Perhaps they were on their way to visit relations for a holiday by the sea, or maybe they were going home after spending a week with a terrifying grandmère in her child-unfriendly apartment in Saint Germain des Près.
I wondered if people looked at us in the same inquisitive way and wondered what three grey-haired women were doing on their own, what they would have thought of us, if indeed they saw us at all.
At last, a uniformed guard with a smart peaked cap with a red band around it came to unlock the doors and we all surged politely forward, all keen to get on and see what it was like.
The students went in a different direction, perhaps towards the reclining seats further down the train where they would have to sit up all night. But then they were young and more flexible than us.
We went to the first-class area where we found a serviceable, clean but rather dull compartment which looked absolutely nothing like the Orient Express.
It was decorated in red and grey, with three of the four bunks set up, plastic bags filled with sleeping stuff and some little free gift pochettes.
Even at my age this was very exciting indeed.
I’d always been a sucker for that sort of thing.
Harriet and I were first in and plonked our bags on the two lower berths.
‘Shotgun. You’re the smallest, Anna, you can climb up to the top bunk,’ Harriet said firmly. ‘And with my knee…’
Anna clambered up the metal ladder and sat with her feet dangling over the edge.
‘Oh, you and your flipping knee! It’s not that bad up here actually,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope these support straps don’t collapse during the night.’
There were our nice little amenity kits to investigate which came complete with a bottle of mineral water.
There were earplugs, an eye mask and even some rather shapeless, grey sleep socks.
There wasn’t really anything to do then except investigate the bedding, click the reading lights on and off and wait for the train to move.
After a while we went out into the corridor again to pull the window down and look out at the platform where people were still boarding the train.
After that I went to walk the length of a few carriages, catching glimpses of people trying to fit into the six-berth couchettes and arguing about their luggage, the lads sitting in the reclining seats with their filled baguettes and jumbo packs of crisps laid out across the tables.
They had a giant bottle of cola, some beer cans and a multipack of chocolate bars too.
I’d noticed that young men were always eating.
Any hour of the day or night, they were always hungry.
There were bicycles chained up on a bike rack too which they looked at protectively as I walked past.
And then I went back into our couchette where Harriet was adjusting the support bandage around her knee and Anna was sitting on my bed looking at a map.
Then, hoping for some entertainment, we read the instruction board on the back of our sliding door.
There were things about evacuation plans in case of emergencies, not smoking, locks and details of the air-conditioning, so we fiddled with all those switches again until one of the surrounds fell off and we wedged it back on again with some tissue paper.
At the end of the corridor was a loo and washroom, which we also investigated.
‘There’s no dining car?’ Anna said.
‘No, I did tell you. But I do have this,’ Harriet said, pulling out a plastic bottle of red wine from her backpack.
‘And I have these,’ I said, displaying a tube of Pringles.
‘And we have these,’ Anna said, and she pulled out a bag of Smarties and a pack of playing cards with pictures of dogs on the back, ‘so we are set for a jolly evening. We can play poker!’
‘I haven’t played that for years,’ I said.
‘Even better.’ Harriet smiled.
* * *
Exactly on time, the train started to silently glide out of the station. It was dark by then, and we were treated to the sight of the backs of Parisien houses and apartment blocks with their lights glowing.
People would be eating in there, watching the news perhaps.
Maybe they would be bickering in French about whose turn it was to put the bins out, or where the television remote was.
That was what had happened in my life for years.
Never having a simple chat or a laugh about things, Fred never agreeing to do anything he didn’t want to without a lot of sighing and grumbling.
But then it was probably the same in every country.
Then we passed through tunnels and dark cuttings and at last we were out beyond the suburbs, the petrol stations and the supermarkets and outside the land was dark, with just the occasional light from cars or a distant village.
We drank the wine out of disposable plastic mugs and played poker while Harriet kept up the score in her new notebook. At nearly eleven o’clock we agreed it was time to go for a last visit to the washroom at the end of the corridor before we went to bed and get what sleep we could.
‘Well, that was fun,’ Harriet said, looking at the final scores. ‘We must do that again. I won. Anna, you owe me nine thousand pounds and your car. Lizzie, you owe me twenty-three thousand pounds, a cruise to the Canaries and your house.’
‘Will you take a cheque?’ I asked.
Harriet smiled kindly. ‘Of course. But you really should stop saying double or quits. It’s done you no favours.’
‘Who knew you were such a card shark, and you look like such a sweet old lady sometimes,’ Anna sighed.
‘That was your first mistake,’ Harriet said waspishly. ‘I’m seldom sweet and by the way, I’m younger than you by six months. But getting older has its advantages. No one takes me seriously any more, you included. Right, stay here, you two, I’m off to clean the chocolate out of my teeth.’
‘We’re hardly going to go anywhere else,’ I shouted at her as she left.
I found my little toiletry bag ready for when it was my turn, and my nightie which was, I had discovered, the least bulky form of nightwear I could pack. Anna went off when Harriet came back, saying it wasn’t too bad, quite nice really, and then it was my turn.
The corridor to the washroom was empty and the door to the washroom ajar, so I stepped out quite confidently.
Outside, the dark countryside was slipping past with just the lights from our train showing how fast we were travelling.
All this was so far outside my everyday experience to be very exciting indeed.
As I passed the last compartment, the door slid open and the train gave a mighty rock to one side, as though it had crossed some points or something, and I lost my balance.
Those two things together meant that I stumbled into the open doorway of the couchette with a very unladylike oath and fell on the floor.
‘I say, watch out, are you okay?’ said a male voice, and I felt someone grab my arm as my nose scraped along the carpet.
All sorts of scenarios flashed through my slightly tipsy brain at that moment.
The first thing was that I actually had fallen over for the first time in years. Which at my age was no joke.
I’d always thought one of the ways to find out if you are old is to fall over; if people laugh, you are still young, but if people rush to help you, you’re definitely old.
Then there was the possibility that I was being abducted, although why anyone would want to abduct a sixty-four-year-old woman in John Lewis jeans and a Joules T-shirt with a red wine stain down the front, on a moving train, was anyone’s guess.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ he repeated, sounding very concerned and not at all like a determined kidnapper.
I gathered my wits, which were only very slightly foggy from the red wine, and sat up.
In front of me were a pair of legs in some trendy multi-pocketed fabric trousers and beneath them some Mickey Mouse socks. I looked up.
‘Hello again,’ he said.