En Voiture

By PAT MILES

IMPROVIDENT travellers, we had a night journey before us and no seats booked and now at the beginning of the run, though the train was still half-empty, there was a buff 'loud' tab clipped to the rack above everyseat in every carriage.

Except one, where by some freak of omission it seemed, the two window corners were free. Relieved, we threw our bags on to the shiny green convex of the seats and took possession.

It was only after we'd settled down that we noticed the brass tablets and remembered about the Mutilds de Guerre, that phantom regiment that haunts all the public services. We had never seen any of them on the SNCF. But on a long journey the odds would be greater and to be awakened in the glimmer dark of a train night by two mutilated men would be no joke.

So we began to walk up and down again. One carriage, with eight tabs like the rest, had the corridor corners missing from th notice on the door saying when .passenger would join the train, and on the third tim of passing it we moved in.

The only other occupants so far were an elderly French couple by the window. The man was taking off a stiff hat and putting on a beret. He had a sandy, moulting appearance, with a big nose and amiable eyes.

Our doubtful claim brought an urge a propitiate and, addressing him in haltin French, we said we were taking the seat because there was nothing about them on th door.

'As you see, all are resairved,' said the man forcing us back into English.

'Yes, but not on the door.'

'It is the same, like the othaires, all ar• resairved.'

'Perhaps these two have been cancelled since on the door—'

'When a scat is resairved, one puts always as here,' he touched the buff tab above his head, and his wife, who had a closed, pro- testing sort of face, touched her tab at the same time.

Obstinately now : 'We understand. But the names should also be on the door.'

'Oh the door l' he shrugged. 'Maybe, I don't know.'

'At any rate we will remain at present.'

'Certainly, with pleasure.' He bowed as if we had just been introduced and his wife bowed also.

'You stay in France?—Yes?'

'No. We cross to England.'

le 'By Neuf'aven?—No?'

S. 'Yes. Tomorrow morning.'

p 'I visited to England in nineteen hundred forty-six. To London. I marched down 'Ouitall in the Ddfile de la Victoire.'

Helped by the black beret, the vaguely assembled features stood to attention for a moment. But the illusion didn't hold. Besides, a good deal of muddy political water had flowed under the bridge since 1946 and the anti-Nazi resistance hero of those days, chosen by his district to march in the Victory Parade, might well have changed into one of the Ultras of 1958.

Nice interrupted these conjectures and with some anxiety we began to watch the influx of new passengers looking for their seats.

However, when the train started we were undisturbed, though the carriage was now unpleasantly full with a woman and three children in the centre seats and a lot of luggage.

Two of the children were prim little girls who sat together on one side and began immediately to occupy themselves with a host of trivia extracted from plastic handbags slung round their shoulders.

The boy, sitting with his mother, was smaller and had a more earthy quality, if it was only that he was a flagrant nose-picker, almost turning his soft, pliant little snub inside out.

His mother couldn't leave him alone, nor he her, though this continuous physical intimacy seemed to vex them both. On the other hand, she took scant notice of the little girls, who were evidently used to the situation and whose self-containment, as the train rocked on its way, began presently to invest each of them with a wan but mildly engaging personality of her own.

After Toulon we felt safer, for at Marseilles it would be midnight, an unlikely hour for anyone to board a train. Some time ago, with a perfunctory 'Vous permettez?' the Frer,ch- man had clicked off the light and the little girls had quietly folded up together and gone to sleep.

But the boy and his mother were still restless. In the confined space of the middle seats, her body alternately grew and shrank like an ill-shaped concertina, so that when she was extended he sprawled on her chest in a toppled version of the Holy Family, and when she hunched up he lay womb-like but uneasy between her breast and thighs.

As the night advanced, however, a more profound torpor set in, bringing a certain measure of grotesque quietude. Heads lolled on broken necks, limbs attached themselves to other bodies and faces sagged into imbecility.

Time, too, became chaotic. From recording the minutes in weary isolation, it began to slide over them, marking the gaps only by a sudden jerk or a flick of blue, overheated vision before sliding on.

Except at stations, where sometimes for a moment the orderly passage of the outside night broke through. The scream of a standing engine, braked trucks butting in tired suc- cession, hollow feet on empty platforms. Then nothing again but the compelling, hypnotic rhythm of the train: Kalamazoo, kalamazoo kalama kalama kalamazoo.

Minutes or hours later, the carriage light was suddenly clicked on and we woke to find the two little girls sitting up clasping their handbags and stretching their eyes brightly over abandoned sleep.

The boy was still curled on the seat. But having fixed the girls, his mother turned on him, and when he didn't respond at once, began to slap his buttocks with cruel zest.

There was a physical understanding between them, however, that would have defied the tut-tuts of a brigade of child psychologists. Half-waking to the slaps, he butted her in the stomach with his head, beginning another bout of cosy violence only terminated by the necessity, since the train was coming to a stop, of persuading him into his cowboy hat and miniature businessman's coat.

At the station, either Valence or Dijon, there was a combined effort with the heavy cases. 'Merci Monsieur, ,nerci Madame, ne vous derangez pas, merci mille foil, au revoir messieu' dames, bon voyage,' and she had gone with her brood.

But hardly had we extended our cramped limbs, whe.) like a pistol shot the corridor door flew open again.

'Messier, 'dames, it y a des places id?'

Even in the dark it was clear that there were, but everyone feigned sleep and faced with lifeless bodies, he hesitated and finally with- drew, sending the door slap-sliding fiercely back in its runnels.

On the next awakening, shreds of the coining day hung like grey cobwebs in the corners of the carriage, and, through the window, vineyards and olive trees had vanished and the flat northern plain stretched under a low sky to a horizon streaked with ugly pastel shades of pink and green.

'What to do with a drunken sailor . . . So early in the morning?' Straddle over him and

then over his mate and then over the mark who had asked for a seat at Valence and was now reduced by our collective egotism to lying flat on his face in the corridor.

The 'occupe' sign was in the slot of the lavatory door and a queue of people with

yellow whites to their eyes were already waiting outside it. Through the door came a compound smell of spirit soap, stale urine and engine fumes. Every time the door was opened, the smell got stronger, but in between, it was diluted to a sickly faintness by the cold autumn air gusting through the corrugated coach junction.

During a shuffling approach, however, the impact lessened so that in the end the slopped floor was almost an anticlimax and the only concern to keep one's balance without clutching dubious surfaces with the train lurching over junction rails at a hundred miles an hour.

A bell sounded faintly in the distance, clanged violently, and died away. Its passing cleared the corridor prones so that in its wake they drooped over the rail, fogging the windows with their breath, or sat listlessly about on upturned bags.

On the way back from the restaurant half an hour later, most of them had disappeared and the carriage itself was unrecognisable at first, with two complete strangers sitting in the middle seats.

'When you arrive to London?' asked the Frenchman across the strangers.

'This evening.'

'I remember well London . . . In nineteen hundred forty-six . .

This was where we came in. But the events of the day before and the expectations of the coming day were already beginning to flow together to obscure the night between. And the Frenchman himself, still talking, began to lose substance as the train rocked past platforms crowded with early Parisian com- muters, so that by the time we arrived, he too had ceased to exist.