The quiet of the train was fascinating. A quiet tamped down by all the snow, which we could see but, since we were kept in this Regency-stripe-flocked shuttle, not even imagine tasting or touching. The climate’s unaffected quiet infected everyone, I thought.
I had developed my sea legs, train legs, and I was buffeted all the way to the dining car, which was only two up from the last, the luggage car. I was very familiar with this last, since with each hardback book completed, I had to make another trip to replace it from my case. It was awkward, but I didn’t like to carry piles of books around with me the whole journey, drawing attention to myself.
In the luggage car, also, in that workmanlike place full of yellow dust and shunting boxes and cases and crates, were the magician’s stage props. I’d known we had a magician on board; I’d seen him clearing tablecloths for applause at dinnertime.
He was the shape of a purple pear and fit to burst through his immaculate evening dress, which he wore all day with a ludicrous top hat. He had a malevolent waxed moustache; as if he should stop the train and tie us all to the rails. He impressed everyone and we clapped at his antics with the crockery. After three days it palled and now he was quiet and not as showy. It doesn’t do to become too well known on a long trip, to be a prominent personality. We know that from disaster movies, don’t we? The mouthy characters (played by someone famous, known for doing quirky types) are the ones who’ll be killed, heroically perhaps, but pathetically and quite definitely. Think of Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.
So our magician kept his trap shut and soon we’d almost forgotten about him and his tricks. As the days in the interminable mountains slid by, he became dowdier and dowdier. There he was, this evening, sucking soup from a dull gold spoon in a shady corner of the dining car. His glasses were opaque and his shoulders hunched. I worried for him, even, that he mightn’t pluck up his charisma before arriving in Germany, where he was to start performing again. His assistant, Deborah, had shed her sequins and feathers and, sitting opposite him with a meagre salad, looked like an old man’s secretary.
When I went to swap my book I would spend a surreptitious hour among the luggage and stage props of the magician and his assistant. God forbid that anyone should have found me in those joyful hours. In her spangly outfits with a feather boa slung I’d be lying inside her glittering coffin and waiting to be sawed into two or three with his doves and rabbits and what have you nibbling and scampering and shedding bits of themselves all around me. I’ve always fancied myself as someone’s assistant. Preferably in show business.
But this far into the trip I’d grown cocky, I’m afraid. I look back upon my nonchalance—delaying lunch, breezing through the dining room with the feigned intention of changing my book first—with a judder of self-loathing. But there I go, blithely telling Andre the waiter to wait half an hour before bringing my starter and sashaying past the magician’s table where his cutlery is attached to the table by slender golden chains, though it needn’t be, with him being magical and all.
I flung open his cabinet and breathed short ecstatic breaths on its lacquered surfaces. I felt right into the corners of his mysterious carpetbags with a trembling hand: what new stuff could I find? The doves cooed and nudged each other, watching me stripping quickly and donning her shimmering stage underwear. An alpine-pure bunny scampered to the top of a pile of boxes to quiz my urgent erection as I lay down with a sigh in the sawing cabinet. To the rabbit it was a newcomer which might upstage him in the act. I concentrated on the exhibition I made for myself and only me. In this last carriage of the train we rocked and creaked with the awesome menace of the deep winter woods. Time slipped away from me, as it always does when I’m messing about.
And then—oh, God—like a terrible moment in an old, old melodrama, there’s the magician’s waxed moustache Pitching in furious indignation above me. His eyes bulge and I expect a card, stencilled in white letters, to appear between us: You cheeky bastard! What the fuck are you up to?
But it doesn’t come. The magician, it turns out, really is Italian, knows no English and, anyway, finds my hideously exposed recumbence and masturbatory fantasy life uproariously funny. Entirely at his mercy I submit to his terrifying giggles and then, wiping tears and turning to go with a stream of what for all I know could be evil oaths and threats, he bends and kisses me hard, thrusting a massive palpitating tongue into my mouth. Then he’s gone.
I die of embarrassment.
The very worst thing about resuming my place in the restaurant car and trying to eat lunch with a measure of equanimity was knowing that the magician would be sitting at his table, only yards away, telling Deborah all about me, his mouth still wet with that stolen kiss.
I had much rather eat my lunch in however intolerable a situation than fling myself off the train, so I swallowed my pride and went back to my place, determined to ignore them.
Two things had changed and they saved my face.
Deborah had gone from their table. The magician ignored me as I went by with my book and he’d gone back to being nondescript. The second change didn’t hit me until after Andre had brought
