Estelle wasn’t even considering him as a serious threat, although he was so objectionable to her. But he continued to stare and to watch. The train started to move in the opposite direction she had expected it to go; but it soon corrected this error of direction, and pulled out of the station, with the noise and the clanking and the turning which only the lowest-paying passengers knew about. The moment they were in motion, the man’s attitude changed. Motion had apparently given him more courage, more daring, more liberality. He placed her suitcase on the overhead rack, smiled, and sat beside her.
“Do you mind?” he said.
Inwardly, she flinched; she thought she knew exactly the kind of conversation he would begin.
“Do you mind?” This time, he took out a package of cigarettes. He lit a cigarette. He took two deep puffs on it, and the smoke erupted and seemed to hide his boorishness from her for a second. When it cleared, he was saying, “Very good book.” He had seen the title, and now he was giving her his comments. “Steinbeck is a great writer. Always thought he deserved the Nobel Prize.”
Estelle didn’t know what he was talking about. She had to glimpse at the title of the book to see if it was really written by the man named Steinbeck. And it was. This thing about a Nobel Prize: the book didn’t tell her anything about that. She was beginning to feel inferior with this strange unwelcomed man, who knew so many things about a book she held in her hands, and which she had read from cover to cover, and of which she apparently remembered nothing.
“Where’re you from? The States? Where’re you heading?” he asked, without giving her the chance to answer the first question. But then again, she didn’t think she had to answer him. She felt it was too personal a question for a stranger to ask: but she answered him nevertheless.
“Timmins.”
“You’re really going north!”
She did not answer him this time.
“Went there once myself. Great little mining community, and the local people’re real friendly. Small town, you know.” He puffed on his cigarette. “Say, would you like a drink in the club car?” She did not want to answer this question at all, but he was leaning over, commanding her to say something, so she felt she had to answer; it became one of those situations in which a lie would relieve the tension.
“Sorry. I don’t drink.” And she swallowed hard; for the greatest wish she had for that moment was for a drink.
“C’mon! A little drop never killed anybody! C’mon. We can have a drink, quietly, in the club car.” She was saved from answering by the arrival of the conductor who was taking up the tickets. Estelle found his work interesting: he would look at the tickets, seeming to know all the various kinds and prices and colours in the brainbox of his head by heart; and then he would punch a hole in them, destroying them, no doubt; and then he would stick the punched-up ticket in a little crease above the passenger’s head, on the side of the coach.
The man was going to Orillia. Estelle remembered this as being one of the early stops. She would be rid of him soon enough. Perhaps the drink, a free drink, wouldn’t be a bad idea, after all, she thought. The tall conductor looked at her. Fleetingly she went back in time and attitude to the night of her cold arrival at Malton International Airport, when the immigration officer gave her such a hard, unnecessarily cross-examining look. But this man was friendly.
“You are travelling in the wrong class, lady.” Estelle laughed to herself. Of course she was travelling in the wrong class! And in the wrong company! “You should be in a roomette. I’ll come later, and arrange for your roomette.”
“Lord, you saved me!” Estelle said in her heart. And to the man, who was waiting all this time for her answer, she said, “Well, one drink never killed nobody, eh?”
He almost fell over in a bundle of extreme pleasure. He got up swiftly (in case she changed her mind), and led her through the coaches, saying as they went along, “Let me! Allow me! Let me! Allow me! Permit me! Let me! Allow me! Let me!” The man had opened eight doors for her. And then they went round a corner, their bodies touching the panel, their hands brushing against the smooth, balancing wood, and into the club car, where Estelle blinked her eyes twice, because there were two black men serving drinks.
She was self-conscious again.
“What would you like to drink, dear?” he asked her. It took her some time to decide: he suggested a dry martini as a good summer drink, “although summer’s gone now! but the spirit’s still here!”; or a gin and tom collins or tonic water. And she took that. “Beer for me, tonic and gin for the lady,” he said.
The waiter smiled. (“Ain’t got much bread, eh baby?” he said to himself.) The waiter was accustomed to this. (“Can’t make no fucking tips this way, baby. Betcha this white bastard only got a five-dollar bill in his lousy wallet!”) When the drinks came, the man took out a thick wad of money, and
