Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

Duffill had put on a pair of glasses, wire-framed and with enough Scotch tape on the lenses to prevent his seeing the Blue Mosque. He assembled his parcels and, grunting, produced a suitcase, bound with a selection of leather and canvas belts as an added guarantee against it bursting open. A few cars down we met again to read the sign on the side of the wagon-lit: direct-orient and its itinerary, PARIS – LAUSANNE – MILANO – TRIESTE – ZAGREB – BEOGRAD – SOFIYA – ISTANBUL. We stood there, staring at this sign; Duffill worked his glasses like binoculars. Finally he said, 'I took this train in nineteen twenty-nine.'

It seemed to call for a reply, but by the time a reply occurred to me ('Judging from its condition, it was probably this very train!) Duffill had gathered up his parcels and his strapped suitcase and moved down the platform. It was a great train in 1929, and it goes without saying that the Orient Express is the most famous train in the world. Like the Trans-Siberian, it links Europe with Asia, which accounts for some of its romance. But it has also been hallowed by fiction: restless Lady Chatterley took it; so did Hercule Poirot and James Bond; Graham Greene sent some of his prowling unbelievers on it, even before he took it himself ('As I couldn't take a train to Istanbul the best I could do was buy a record of Honegger's Pacific 231,' Greene writes in the Introduction to Stamboul Train). The fictional source of the romance is La Madone des Sleepings (1925) by Maurice Dekobra. Dekobra's heroine, Lady Diana ('the type of woman who would have brought tears to the eyes of John Ruskin'), is completely sold on the Orient Express: 'I have a ticket for Constantinople. But I may step off at Vienna or Budapest. That depends absolutely on chance or on the colour of the eyes of my neighbour in the compartment.' In the end I stopped wondering why so many writers had used this train as a setting for criminal intrigues, since in most respects the Orient Express really is murder.

My compartment was a cramped two-berth closet with an intruding ladder. I swung my suitcase in and, when I had done this, there was no room for me. The conductor showed me how to kick my suitcase under the lower berth. He hesitated, hoping to be tipped.

'Anybody else in here?' It had not occurred to me that I would have company; the conceit of the long-distance traveller is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone – inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

The conductor shrugged, perhaps yes, perhaps no. His vagueness made me withhold my tip. I took a stroll down the car: a Japanese couple in a double couchette -and it was the first and last time I saw them; an elderly American couple next to them; a fat French mother breathing suspicion onher lovely daughter; a Belgian girl of extraordinary size – well over six feet tall, wearing enormous shoes – travelling with a chic French woman; and (the door was shutting) either a nun or a plump diabolist. At the far end of the car a man wearing a turtleneck, a seaman's cap, and a monocle was setting up bottles on the windowsill: three wine bottles, Perrier water, a broad-shouldered bottle of gin – he was obviously going some distance.

Duffill was standing outside my compartment. He was out of breath; he had had trouble finding the right car, he said, because his French was rusty. He took a deep breath and slid off his gaberdine coat and hung that and his cap on the hook next to mine.

'I'm up here,' he said, patting the upper berth. He was a small man, but I noticed that as soon as he stepped into the compartment he filled it.

'How far are you going?' I asked gamely, and even though I knew his reply, when I heard it I cringed. I had planned on studying him from a little distance; I was counting on having the compartment to myself. This was unwelcome news. He saw I was taking it badly.

He said, 'I won't get in your way.' His parcels were on the floor. 'I just have to find a home for these.'

Til leave you to it,' I said. The others were in the corridor waiting for the train to start. The Americans rubbed the window until they realized the dirt was on the outside; the man with the monocle peered and drank; the French woman was saying ' – Switzerland.'

'Istanbul,' said the Belgian girl. She had a broad face, which a large pair of glasses only complicated, and she was a head taller than I. 'My first time.'

'I am in Istanbul two years before,' said the French woman, wincing the way the French do before lapsing into their own language.

'What is it like?' asked the Belgian girl. She waited. I waited. She helped the woman. 'Very nice?'

The French woman smiled at each of us. She shook her head, and said, ' Tres sale. '

'But pretty? Old? Churches?' The Belgian girl was trying hard.

'Sale. 1 Why was she smiling?

i am going to Izmir, Cappadocia, and – '

The French woman clucked and said, 'Sale, sale, sale.' She went into her compartment. The Belgian girl made a face and winked at me.

The train had started to move, and at the end of the car the man in the seaman's cap was braced at his door, drinking and watching our progress. After several minutes the rest of the passengers went into their compartments – from my own I heard the smashing of paper parcels being stuffed into corners. This left the drinker, whom I had started to think of as the Captain, and me alone in the passage. He looked my way and said, 'Istanbul?'

'Yes.'

'Have a drink.'

'I've been drinking all day,' I said. 'Do you have any mineral water?'

'I do,' he said. 'But I keep it for my teeth. I never touch water on trains. Have a real drink. Go on. What will it be?'

'A beer would be nice.'

'I never drink beer,' he said. 'Have some of this.' He showed me his glass and then went to his shelf and poured me some, saying, 'It's a very drinkable Chablis, not at all chalky – the ones they export often are, you know.'

We clinked glasses. The train was now moving fast.

'Istanbul.'

'Istanbul! Right you are.'

His name was Molesworth, but he said it so distinctly that the first time I heard it I thought it was a double-barrelled name. There was something military in his posture and the promptness of his speech, and at the same time this flair could have been an actor's. He was in his indignant late fifties, and I could see him cutting a junior officer at the club – either at Aldershot or in the third act of a Rattigan play. The small glass disc he wore around his neck on a chain was not, I saw, a monocle, but rather a magnifying glass. He had used it to find the bottle of Chablis.

'I'm an actors' agent,' he said. 'I've got my own firm in London. It's a smallish firm, but we do all right. We always have more than we can handle.'

'Any actors I might know?'

He named several famous actors.

I said, 'I thought you might be army.'

'Did you?' He said that he had been in the Indian army – Poona, Simla, Madras – and his duties there were of a theatrical nature, organizing shows for the troops. He had arranged Noel Coward's tour of India in 1946. He had loved the army and he said that there were many Indians who were so well bred you could treat them as absolute equals – indeed, talking to them you would hardly know you were talking to Indians.

'I knew a British officer who was in Simla in the forties,' I said. 'I met him in Kenya. His nickname was "Bunny".'

Molesworth thought a moment, then said, 'Well, I knew several Bunnys.'

We talked about Indian trains. Molesworth said they were magnificent. 'They have showers, and there's always a little man who brings you what you need. At mealtime they telegraph ahead to the next station for hampers. Oh, you'll like it.'