Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Barbara agreed. “Sometimes,” she said, “when I look up and see an aeroplane overhead I think of all the people in it. All those people being carried in the sitting position through the air. If you just took the outer skin of metal away, imagine what it would look like. Rows of people shooting through the air.”

Hugh smiled. “Yes, very odd. I think I probably prefer being carried sideways through the night to being carried through the air like that. One is less of a hostage to fortune when one is only a few feet off the ground, don’t you think, rather than, what is it, four miles above it?”

“Five, I think.”

“Give me a train any time.”

Trains were normally of little interest to Barbara, except as a means of getting from place to place, but this one was different. At first, it seemed to her that it had no windows, that it was that curious thing, a sealed train, of the sort in which Lenin travelled from Switzerland to Russia; then she saw that there were windows, but they were rendered opaque by drawn blinds.

“I can hardly remember when I last took a sleeper train,” she said. “As a teenager I did some travelling on the continent. We were in a wagon-lit, I think.” It was a hazy recollection: a vague memory of sounds, of being rocked through the night on the way down to Italy; the slightly acrid smell of sleeper carriages, a smell redolent of batteries and stuffiness, and slightly sour milk.

“I want to go on the Orient Express one day,” said Hugh as they neared their carriage. “To Istanbul. I’ve always wanted to. It’s such a romantic idea, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” said Barbara.

“Shall we do it?” asked Hugh. “Should I book?”

She laughed. “Perhaps.” He had started to say we now, quite frequently, and she was still getting used to it. It touched her. Oedipus Snark had never said we; her life with him had never been a shared one. With Oedipus, it was always I.

They boarded the train. A woman with a clipboard, a diminutive woman with a strong Glaswegian accent, showed them to their compartments, two single-bed cabins with a communicating door between. For a moment Barbara felt a twinge of disappointment, but then asked herself what she had expected. Sleepers did not have double bunks, of course, because that was not the point of a sleeper. You were meant to sleep when on a sleeper – as the name suggested.

The woman took their order for morning tea, which would be served, she said, just before they drew in to Glasgow. Then it would be on to Fort William, where they would arrive shortly after ten. Then, with a smile, she left them.

Barbara put her case on the rack, and then raised the window blind. As she did so, she caught sight of her blurred reflection in the blank glass of the window. I am on a train with my fiancé, she thought. I am going to Scotland. I am with the most beautiful man I have ever met – yes, he really is that – and it is I, Barbara Ragg, who has him. He is mine. Mine.

It was an unexpected thought, a form of stocktaking in which we all engage from time to time. We contemplate our situation and say to ourselves, Here am I, doing this; me, of all people, doing this – who would have thought? We ask ourselves how we got what we have got and why Nemesis does not yet appear to have noticed. It is not a matter of desert. It was not that now, at least in Barbara’s case; for her it was more of a feeling of wonder that it had happened at all. It had not been in her script. It was not meant to be like this.

She turned round. Hugh was standing behind her.

“My darling, beautiful, wonderful Barbie,” he whispered.

The first part of this was fine; the latter not quite. He had never called her Barbie before.

She made light of it. She smiled. “Barbie™?”

He put his arms around her. “Barbie. Well, its short for Barbara, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But … But do you know who Barbie™ is?”

Hugh looked puzzled. He planted a kiss on her brow. He was wearing some sort of cologne; there was the scent of sandalwood. “No.”

“She’s a doll.”

Hugh smiled. “I knew somebody who called his girlfriend ‘doll’. She seemed to like it. She was one of those blondes, you know, not a great intellectual. Doll seemed to suit her.”

The train gave a sudden shudder.

“We’re on our way,” said Hugh. Then he whispered, “To be in love and to be on the sleeper. Bliss.”

Barbara closed her eyes. “Oh, Hugh …” And then she thought: Barbie. Few mistakes were genuinely without meaning – Professor Freud had told us that, and the lesson still stood. So was Barbie Barbie or another Barbie? Or even her? Or was she Barbie? It was enough to confuse even a semiotician.

“I have a surprise for you,” said Hugh.

The surprise that Hugh had for Barbara was revealed shortly after the sleeper train slipped out of Euston, rocking through the somnolent suburbs of London, headed for Scotland and the Great Glen. The surprise was a demonstration – nothing more than that – of a special way of keeping the interconnecting door between their two compartments open during the journey. This was done by attaching one end of a leather belt to a coat hook in one compartment and the other end to a second coat hook in the other.

Barbara watched, and if her smile seemed rueful, it was. What had she expected? When a devastatingly handsome man, one whom one can – with complete pride – call one’s fiancé, says that he has a surprise in store, what is one entitled to expect? A present of some sort, perhaps? Something one would never buy oneself – an item of jewellery, a brooch, a set of earrings. Or, more imaginatively, and perhaps even more romantically, a concealed miniature picnic basket, produced and opened to reveal a tiny pack of delicate sandwiches – translucent cucumber slices on slivers of bread – a half-bottle of champagne, kept chilled in a tight-fitting ice-filled life-vest, and flecked quails’ eggs, as neat and beautiful as the tiny birds that had laid them. Such a picnic could be eaten in the half-light of the sleeper compartment, the two of them perched companionably on the one bunk, like two children enjoying a midnight feast in the far-fetched pages of some schooldays story. One would not expect merely this, a mundane way of keeping a door from opening and closing with the movement of the train.

“Now we’ll be able to talk,” said Hugh, pointing at his vaguely Heath Robinson arrangement.

She looked down, a look tinged with regret. “Of course.”

“Talking in the darkness is very special,” said Hugh. “You hear your words going out into the night, almost like a prayer – because you can’t see the person you’re addressing them to.”

He took off his jacket. She saw that a button was missing from his shirt; there was a glimpse of brown beneath. He was one of these people who did not need the sun to look tanned. He took off his shoes. There was a hole in one of his socks exposing the tip of a toe; it made her smile. He looked so vulnerable.

“What’s funny?”

She pointed to his holed sock. “Your poor toe.”

He wiggled the toe. “This little piggy,” he said, “went …”

“If you do that,” she said, “you’ll enlarge the hole.”

Hugh finished the line – the pig’s destination should not remain unclear – “Went to market. What do you think that means? All those nursery rhymes have a hidden meaning, you know. Often quite sinister.”

“They can be dreadful,” agreed Barbara. “They’re full of violence and cruelty.” She paused. “Why do you think we feel the need to scare our children?”

Hugh thought for a moment. He wiggled his exposed toe again. “Bettelheim?” he asked.