Rupert Thomson - Divided Kingdom

I had been wondering whether we would get to this point and what I would say if we did. After all, I had no idea who she was, this girl with the unique face and the disarming manner. She could have been anyone. In the event, the long hesitation worked in my favour.

‘Listen, if it’s confidential,’ she said, ‘I completely understand. It’s just that you don’t often see people from the Red Quarter all the way out here.’

So she did remember me. Before I could say anything, though, she spoke again.

‘You seem very much at home, if you don’t mind me saying so. I mean, I would never have guessed, not if I hadn’t seen you at the conference.’

‘No, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s strange, but that’s exactly how I feel. Almost as if —’ I cut myself off, wary of giving too much away. ‘Of course there are things I could never get used to.’

She nodded vigorously. ‘Of course.’ She reached for her purse. ‘I’m just going to the buffet. Can I get you anything?’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

At the buffet I asked if I could buy her a drink. A brandy would be good, she said. Rather than returning to our seats, we took our brandies to a table in the dining-car. The girl’s name was Odell Burfoot, and she seemed eager to talk.

‘It must be extraordinary,’ she said, ‘crossing borders like you do.’

‘I haven’t really done very much of it …’

‘No, but still. How does it feel?’

‘It’s such a big thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s something you’re not even supposed to think about.’ I paused. ‘When it actually happens, it’s almost impossible to separate all the things you’ve been told you’re going to feel, or imagined you might feel, from the actual feeling itself. Does that make any sense?’

The look on her face, though neutral, appeared to intensify, as if her heart rate had accelerated or her temperature had just gone up. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think it does.’

‘In the end, you’re doing something you never thought you’d do. So there’s excitement, but there’s fear too. I don’t think that would ever go away.’

She smiled at me with her eyes, but said nothing.

We flashed through a country station and on into the dark. As I sipped my brandy, I thought back to the conference. I tried to place Odell at one of the events or functions, but her face refused to float up into my memory. Another face came floating up instead.

‘Do you remember somebody called Walter Ming?’ I said. ‘He was at the conference too. His hair looked like a wig, and he wore the most peculiar suits.’

She laughed. ‘Poor Walter.’

‘You met him? What did you make of him?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I’m not sure. I suppose I thought there was something suspicious about him.’

‘I think he was just lonely. He asked me out to dinner, but I said I was busy. He was rude to me after that.’

Lonely? It had never occurred to me that Ming might be lonely.

‘I saw the two of you together,’ Odell said. ‘You talked to him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. A couple of times.’

‘He seemed really taken with you. Maybe he’d never met anyone like you before.’

‘You think so?’ All I could remember was how offhand and aloof he had seemed, and how slippery. ‘How odd that you were there — that you saw it all …’

She finished her drink, then glanced out of the window.

‘Aquaville,’ she said.

I climbed down from the train. There, once again, was the station concourse, with its sluggish crowds and its posters advertising remedies for colds and flu. To think of how nervously I’d surveyed the scene when I arrived back in November! Imagine how I must have stood out! This time, though, I was dressed in phlegmatic clothes, phlegmatic shoes. This time, against all the odds, I looked the part. What had that girl said? You seem very much at home, if you don’t mind me saying so. I hadn’t minded at all. In fact, it had bolstered my confidence. And yet, as I hesitated on the platform, I half expected to feel a hand plucking at my sleeve, and when I swung round, there he would be, the man I’d seen before, with his slicked-back hair and his damp greenish complexion, something of the gambler or the ticket tout about him. He would be facing away from me, of course, pretending to consult the departures board, its litany of cancellations, and I would hear the words — something that might interest you — then he would slip a card into my pocket. Instead, it was the girl with the freckles who circled round in front of me. She had put on a black cloche hat and a long dark coat whose hem brushed the tops of her carefully polished brogues. She had the severe, otherworldly look of a lay preacher. For the first time I felt a flicker of recognition, as though, at some point in the past, I had smelled her perfume as she stood beside me in a lift, or caught a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror as she walked behind me, but the flicker stubbornly refused to resolve itself into anything more definite.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose this is goodbye.’

‘Yes.’ I shook hands with her.

‘Are you going to forget me again?’

‘Probably,’ I said.

We both laughed.

She thanked me for the drink, then turned away.

As soon as she had vanished into the crowd I felt desolate. Foolish too. Why had I let her go so easily? I should have arranged another meeting — a walk, maybe, or dinner. This was my new life, after all, and I had enjoyed her company. But then, almost immediately, I had the disturbing sensation that the encounter hadn’t taken place at all, that I had invented the whole thing, right down to her freckles and her bracken-coloured hair, right down to her name — Odell Burfoot — so awkward, like somebody talking with a mouthful of stones … Or, if it had happened, it was already fading. Even the one moment of physical contact — the handshake — was beginning to seem ephemeral, as if I had shaken hands with a figment of my own imagination.

A dense fog had descended on the city. The passers-by looked shadowy and incomplete, mere sketches. The weather couldn’t have been more appropriate. I would be able to make my way through the streets without the slightest fear of being recognised. I only wished I had something warmer to wear. Perhaps, in the morning, I would find a charity shop or a fleamarket and buy myself a second-hand coat. How easy to allow that thought to form, how natural it seemed, and yet, at some point between now and tomorrow, I would be turning the handle on that pale-gold door, and then — and then what? I didn’t know. I had hopes, of course, but that was all. I couldn’t possibly have predicted what I’d be feeling in twelve hours’ time.

Opposite the station were three high-class hotels — the Aral, the Tethys and the Varuna. I remembered their ornate, decaying façades from my previous visit, but with my limited finances and little or no idea of what the next few days might bring, I decided it might be prudent to economise. I turned right, then right again, away from the city centre, opting for the maze of obscure canals that lay to the west of the station. Within minutes, I found myself in a different world — rubbish bags dumped everywhere, the scuttle of rats, and a smell that was almost sweet, like rotting celery. Wooden boards had been nailed over the ground-floor windows of all the houses. Once, I was able to peer between two slats that had come loose. The dark glint of floodwater, a framed photo of three children floating on the surface … Further on, a crudely painted arrow pointed to a basement. A palm-reader known as Undine plied her trade down there. I pictured Undine as a fat woman in a rowing-boat, which she would steer from one room to another using a frying pan or a spatula or the lid from an old biscuit tin. I hurried on, passing beneath the tattered awning of a fish restaurant. Sooner or later I was bound to find a cheap hotel, the kind of place where they wouldn’t care about documents or think it untoward if someone had no luggage.