Very slowly I closed my book.
I looked out of the window. The forest had a majesty and horrible glamour you quite missed while hurtling through it on a train. It looked very much like some queer gigantic beast’s larder. These weren’t trees and clearings designed for the aesthetic sense and sensibilities of Western human beings. Everything we relish is deciduous. Nothing, I was sure, grew naturally, fruitily and juicily in this place. The woods were an aggregate of slate and ice and their vegetation was undoubtedly nine tenths poison. Some of my fellow travellers had started to talk, in whispers. They still sounded aggrieved and safe. I was already discomforted by the magician’s kiss: I knew we were up to our necks in it.
Into our poised silence came Deborah, with that breezy glamour of her own. She went straight to the magician. ‘Miss Farquar has vanished,’ she hissed. Heads turned.
‘Who?’ he asked, as if looking past her at somebody else.
‘Miss Farquar! The elderly lady we met at dinner a couple of nights ago. An eccentric old lady in a leopard-skin pillbox hat you said had the look of a smuggler about her.’
‘Did I?’ the magician purred and I realised they were talking English.
‘She’s just gone! Flown the coop! How can she just vanish off a moving train?’
‘We’ve stopped now, my dear.’ An indolence in his voice; he indulges her and likes to draw attention to himself. Which he is doing, as cutlery is put down with little clinks and rattles of golden chains.
‘She had vanished well before we stopped! I was looking for her when we did. Anyway…’ Deborah glances about with a frown. She hates the inefficient. ‘Why have we stopped?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know!’ shouts a gruff extra in a brown pinstriped suit.
‘Yes!’ adds another, an auntyish type, rather haplessly. ‘We all have appointments to keep. Why hasn’t the captain informed us?’
The magician laughs shortly. ‘Trains, as far as I know, do not have captains.’
‘They have something!’ the aunty replies curtly. She’s carrying some kind of cat. ‘And why can’t you spirit us back on the right tracks if you’re such a wizard at magic?’ He goes on laughing as if he hadn’t a care in the world. ‘Did anybody else see what happened to Miss Farquar?’ Deborah asks, with just a steely hint of desperation in her voice now, which is unusual for someone routinely stabbed and sawn up on stage. ‘I’m rather worried about her now; You see, she was elderly and diabetic, she said…’
The frowsty aunty said, ‘I’m sure I don’t know who you mean,’ before turning back to her lunch.
‘You must have noticed her. She always had a leopard-skin pillbox hat with her. She carried it obsessively as you do your cat, or that man does a recent book. As if she had something precious and rare sewn into its lining.’
The man in the brown suit shrugged and he too returned to his meal, as did the others, all refusing to remember Miss Farquar.
‘But you must recall her! She was such a personality!’ And Deborah’s eyes hit on me then. I squirmed under that momentary glance. I felt she must see through my waistcoat, see her fake jewel-encrusted basque—which I hadn’t had time to remove—beneath.
‘You! The journalist—you were in her compartment, weren’t you?’
With the faint sound of the cock crowing accusations of betrayal in my popping ears, I shook my head and returned to my book and my soup.
Deborah gave a faintly hysterical grunt of frustration. She called out, ‘I’m going to investigate this! It’s not me going mad! You’re not getting me to think that!’
She stalked off towards the front end of the train, going for official assistance.
The magician called after her, ‘While you’re about it, my dear, you might as well ask why we’ve stopped. This is, actually, ridiculous.’
She had left a couple of pink feathers behind her on the dining-car floor. Andre trod them into the pile when he cleared my table. They must have dropped out from under her travelling clothes when she was stamping her heel in indignation. Did she, too, wear stage clothes underneath her demure outer layers?
Back in my compartment I sat alone, stomach grumbling a habitual dream of indigestion brought on, no doubt, by my reviewee’s prose. I started to skim-read, which I only do in the greatest of emergencies. My compartment was otherwise empty; the two nuns and the schoolgirl weren’t back yet from wherever they went. They were quite as vanished as the elderly Miss Farquar in her leopard-skin hat.
I might have told Deborah: yes, of course Miss Farquar was and is real. I have spent much of this endless journey avoiding that roving, weeping eye of hers. But why should I do Deborah any favours? Fuck her! She’s got exactly the job and the lifestyle I should kill for. Well, not quite. My palate and vocabulary had picked up a faintly gothic air from my recent reading.
And at this point through my carriage window I saw two lions fucking in the undergrowth. Quite extraordinary and unabashed they were at it. Their shaggy, remorseless, leonine copulation. Vivid and auburn against the icing-sugar snow, they tumbled each other and ploughed up little showers of brilliance. Their lolling tongues were a decided hot pink in that frigid clearing.
I watched with a fascination excused only by the uniqueness of this privileged, TV-documentary proximity. They were magnificent and, when I think back, I wonder if I have since invented some of the tender and complicit caresses this king and queen of the forest exchanged. There was a sureness and equality about their performance… Did I really see her snag his golden, furry prick and balls and roll them
