‘He smelt of fried eggs, a smell that still comes back to her at night.’
‘You’re damaging my jacket. I must ask you to release me at once.’
‘Are you married, Mr Atkins?’
‘Carruthers!’ Her face was crimson and her neck blotched with a flushing that Carruthers had seen before. ‘Carruthers, for heaven’s sake behave yourself!’
‘The Reverend Edwards isn’t married, as you might guess, Mr Atkins.’
The waiter tried to pull his sleeve out of Carruthers’ grasp, panting a little from embarrassment and from the effort. ‘Let go my jacket!’ he shouted. ‘Will you let me go!’
Carruthers laughed, but did not release his grasp. There was a sound of ripping as the jacket tore.
‘Miss Fanshawe’ll stitch it for you,’ Carruthers said at once, and added more sharply when the waiter raised a hand to strike him: ‘Don’t do that, please. Don’t threaten a passenger, Mr Atkins.’
‘You’ve ruined this jacket. You bloody little –’
‘Don’t use language in front of the lady.’ He spoke quietly, and to a stranger entering the dining-car at that moment it might have seemed that the waiter was in the wrong, that the torn sleeve of his jacket was the just result of some attempted insolence on his part.
‘You’re mad,’ the waiter shouted at Carruthers, his face red and sweating in his anger. ‘That child’s a raving lunatic,’ he shouted as noisily at Miss Fanshawe.
Carruthers was humming a hymn. ‘Lord, dismiss us,’ he softly sang, ‘with Thy blessing.’
‘Put any expenses on my bill,’ whispered Miss Fanshawe. ‘I’m very sorry.’
‘Ashleigh Court’ll pay,’ Carruthers said, not smiling now, his face all of a sudden as sombre as the faces of the other two.
No one spoke again in the dining-car. The waiter brought coffee, and later presented a bill.
The train stopped at a small station. Three people got out as Miss Fanshawe and Carruthers moved down the corridor to their compartment. They walked in silence, Miss Fanshawe in front of Carruthers, he drawing his right hand along the glass of the windows. There’d been an elderly man in their compartment when they’d left it: to Miss Fanshawe’s relief he was no longer there. Carruthers slid the door across. She found her book and opened it at once.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said when she’d read a page.
She turned the page, not looking up, not speaking.
‘I’m sorry I tormented you,’ he said after another pause.
She still did not look up, but spoke while moving her eyes along a line of print. ‘You’re always sorry,’ she said.
Her face and neck were still hot. Her fingers tightly held the paperbacked volume. She felt taut and rigid, as though the unpleasantness in the dining-car had coiled some part of her up. On other journeys she’d experienced a similar feeling, though never as unnervingly as she experienced it now. He had never before torn a waiter’s clothing.
‘Miss Fanshawe?’
‘I want to read.’
‘I’m not going back to Ashleigh Court.’
She went on reading and then, when he’d repeated the statement, she slowly raised her head. She looked at him and thought, as she always did when she looked at him, that he was in need of care. There was a barrenness in his sharp face; his eyes reflected the tang of a bitter truth.
‘I took the Reverend Edwards’ cigarette-lighter. He’s told me he won’t have me back.’
‘That isn’t true, Carruthers –’
‘At half past eleven yesterday morning I walked into the Reverend’s study and lifted it from his desk. Unfortunately he met me on the way out. Ashleigh Court, he said, was no place for a thief.’
‘But why? Why did you do such a silly thing?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I do a lot of things. I don’t know why I pretend you were in love with a waiter. This is the last horrid journey for you, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘So you won’t be coming back –’
‘The first time I met you I was crying in a dormitory. D’you remember that? Do you, Miss Fanshawe?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘ “Are you missing your mummy?” you asked me, and I said no. I was crying because I’d thought I’d like Ashleigh Court. I’d thought it would be heaven, a place without Mrs Carruthers. I didn’t say that; not then.’
‘No.’
‘You brought me to your room and gave me liquorice allsorts. You made me blow my nose. You told me not to cry because the other boys would laugh at me. And yet I went on crying.’
In the fields men were making hay. Children in one field waved at the passing train. The last horrid journey, she thought; she would never see the sharp face again, nor the bitterness reflected in the eyes. He’d wept, as others occasionally had to; she’d been, for a moment, a mother to him. His own mother didn’t like him, he’d later said – on a journey – because his features reminded her of his father’s features.
‘I don’t know why I’m so unpleasant, Miss Fanshawe. The Reverend stared at me last night and said he had a feeling in his bones that I’d end up badly. He said I was a useless sort of person, a boy he couldn’t ever rely on. I’d
