The Forty-Year Passenger: read the first chapter

Part OneChapter One · The Tea Round

The last thing Cora Marsh ever said to Abel Quist was that she was sure it wasn't nothing, and she said it kindly, and she said it to a man she had never met.

He stood in the vestibule for some while after the door shut. That was not sentiment. The train did not go anywhere in particular when it left a station, and there was a period of a minute or two in which the windows showed a place that had recently existed, and Abel had learned over fifteen years that if you looked at that for too long it did something to you that took a week to walk off. So he stood with his back to the glass and counted, which was what he did instead of thinking, and when he got to four hundred he went and put the kettle on.

He had given them the map.

He had thought about that for eleven hours on the walk to the wall and he had known all the way that he was going to do it, and he had done it, and now the canvas bag on his shoulder held a pen, a tin mug, a spare cardigan and nothing else. Fifteen years of work. Three hundred and eighty-one red doors logged, four gardens, eleven washrooms, the corridor in the thirty-first that changed on Tuesdays. Every square foot of green he had ever walked. Gone down a platform at Ashwick Central in the hands of a young woman who could not have told you her own surname.

It had been the correct thing to do and he did not regret it and he was aware, standing in the buffet car waiting for the water, that he had also given away the only reason he had for getting up.

Because the map had not been a map. He understood that now, in the way you understand things about yourself roughly a decade after everybody else has. The map had been a way of behaving as though he were doing something. A man who is drawing a map is a man with a project, and a man with a project is not a coward, he is merely busy, and Abel Quist had been extremely busy for fifteen years in a carriage two doors down from his brother.

The kettle clicked off.

He made three cups, which was the number he had made every morning for eleven years and which was one more than he needed, and he stood looking at the third one for a while, and then he drank it himself, standing up, too hot, and burnt his mouth.

---

Carriage nineteen. Third bay on the left, facing forward, window seat.

"Here he is." Peter Quist lit up the way he always did, the whole face going, both hands coming off his knees. "Here's the fellow. Sit down, sit down, you'll not believe the morning I've had."

"Go on then."

"Nothing whatever has happened." Peter took the cup in both hands, the way he had taken cups since he was nine years old and had once dropped a mug of Bovril on a kitchen floor in front of their father and had never afterwards held anything in one hand again. "Not a thing. I've been sat here since I don't know when and the most interesting event of the day was a woman going past with a bucket."

"That'll be Ivy. She does the ninth."

"A bucket," Peter said again, with relish, "of nothing. It was empty. I watched it go by and I thought, now there's a woman with a system."

Abel sat down opposite him and drank his tea and let his brother talk, which was the job, and which took about forty minutes, and which he had done four hours a day for eleven years without once being able to explain to himself what he thought it was accomplishing.

There is a thing about a man who has lost everything of himself, and it is this: he is not diminished in the way people expect. Peter was not a shell. Peter was funny. Peter had opinions about the buffet car, and about a woman in the twenty-second who he maintained was pilfering sugar, and about the correct way to fold a newspaper, and he delivered all of it with the same broad enjoyment he had brought to a building site in 1978. What Peter did not have was yesterday. He could hold about a day and a half in his hands at a time, and then it went, and the next morning he was as pleased to see Abel as he had been the first morning, which was the part that took the skin off.

"Are you a relation?" Peter said, at about the thirty-minute mark. He always got there eventually.

"No."

"That's what I can't make out about you." Peter shook his head, delighted and baffled. "Every day, this one. Every single day, and he's no relation. What is it you're after?"

"Company."

"Well, you've chosen badly." Peter laughed at his own joke, hugely, the way he had always laughed at his own jokes, and Abel laughed too, and the laugh was real, and that was the thing nobody understood about it either.

At the door of the carriage, going out, Abel stopped and looked back at the third bay on the left. His brother had turned to the window and was watching a country with no name go past and appeared, from the back, to be a large contented man on a long journey.

Fifteen years, Abel thought. And what I have to show for it is that he has never once been frightened.

He decided that would have to do, the way he decided it most days, and went to make the second round.

---

Eilish Devane took her tea black with two sugars and had, over the course of about four months, developed the habit of asking him a question at the door, just as he was leaving, so that he had to come back.

"The two women," she said.

Abel came back. "They got off."

"Both of them?"

"Both."

"Well." Eilish considered the window. "That's very good. That's very good indeed." She said it the way a woman says a thing about somebody else's grandchildren. "And they'd not a scrap between them, I suppose."

"Not a scrap."

"No. That's how it goes." She turned her hands over in her lap. "There was a man got off some years back, they said the same about him. Danny somebody. Everyone was very pleased and I remember thinking at the time, well, but where's he gone to. That's the bit nobody asks."

"He wanted to see his mother," Abel said.

"Did he find her?"

Abel had been asked a great many questions in fifteen years and had made a point of answering all of them honestly, which had cost him a good deal, and he did not see any reason to stop.

"I've no idea," he said. "There's nobody comes back to tell us."

"No." Eilish nodded slowly. "That's the thing about a door, isn't it. It only goes the one way for the purposes of information." She smiled up at him, small and apologetic and entirely lucid, which she was perhaps one day in three. "You've gone thin about the face, Mr Quist. Are you eating?"

"I'm eating."

"You've nothing to do. That's what it is." She said it without any cruelty at all, which was the trouble with Eilish Devane; she had spent so long looking for a man she could not remember that she had developed a horrible clarity about everybody else. "You had those two to fuss over and now they're away and you're stood in a corridor with your hands empty. I've watched it happen to four people."

"And what happened to the four?"

"Two of them sat down," said Eilish. "One of them started drinking, which is more difficult than you'd think aboard. And one went off into the black and I never heard another word about him." She took a sip of her tea. "You'll want to find yourself something, is all I'm saying. It doesn't much matter what."

---

The map was gone, so there was nothing to write in, but Abel had been keeping records for fifteen years and the habit did not know that. He sat in the buffet car at the hour the lamps went amber with a pen in his hand and a paper napkin in front of him and found he had nothing to put on it.

C. Marsh — departed. J. Marsh — departed.

He wrote that. He looked at it. It was the last entry of the only useful thing he had ever done and it took up eleven words.

He sat there a while longer.

Then a question arrived, and it arrived in the particular way that useful questions do, which is sideways and dressed as something trivial: what happens to the name?

Because it was on the wall. Both of them were on the wall. He had stood in that room himself and watched June Marsh go over her mother's name with a pen and watched the plaster drink it black, and then the pair of them had walked down a platform at Ashwick Central and out of the world, and their names were presumably still up there, four feet apart, in a warm room in a train, with nobody to be attached to.

In fifteen years of counting he had never once asked what became of a departed name. Nobody had. There was no reason to; the wall was a thing you consulted about the living.

Abel Quist folded the napkin into his pocket and went to find out.

---

It took him nine hours through the green and he did not mind one minute of it, because for the first time since a door closed at Ashwick he was walking somewhere on purpose.

The Room of Forgotten Names was warm, the way it always was. He came in and stood a moment to let his eyes do what they had to do, and then he went along the left-hand wall with his hand up at shoulder height, the way you would go along a shelf of books.

He found June's without difficulty. It stood up out of the plaster where she had been inked in, black and slightly raised, like a scar that had healed proud.

He found Cora's four feet away, black as boot polish.

And then he stopped, because between them, where he was quite certain there had been a column of names — Ndiaye, Okonjo, three or four others he had read off slips in a crate in a room with a photograph of a house pinned above the bed — there was now a patch of clean plaster about the size of a dinner plate.

Not faded. Not thin.

Clean.

Abel put his hand on it. It was smooth and slightly cool, and there was no ghost in it, no pressure, no place where a letter had been. It was as though the wall had been made yesterday and no one had ever written on it at all.

He stood there for a long moment with his hand flat on the plaster and a very old feeling coming up through him, one he had not had since about his second year aboard, which was the feeling of a man who has been walking round a building for years and has just noticed a door.

Departed names came off. That was the answer. A person got off this train and the wall let them go, cleanly, no residue, which was in its way the kindest thing he had ever learned about the arrangement.

But there had been six or seven names in that column and he could account for two of them.

He got the torch out and went over the patch properly, low, at an angle, the way you look at a page that has had something rubbed off it.

And in the middle of the clean plaster, cut in very fine and very small, about an inch and a half across, was a mark.

It was not a name. It was not writing. It was three short strokes rising to a point above a horizontal bar, cut precisely, with the crispness of something done with a proper tool by somebody who had done it several thousand times before.

Abel Quist crouched in front of it with the torch shaking slightly in his hand.

He knew what it was. He had spent two years on a road gang in Lancashire before he ever went into joinery, and he had seen them cut into the corner-stones of churches and the parapets of bridges and the wall of a Post Office in Clitheroe, and he had had one explained to him by a man in a donkey jacket who had thought he was a fool for asking.

It was a benchmark. A surveyor's benchmark. The crow's foot the Ordnance Survey cut into a wall when they wanted a fixed point of known height, so that everything else could be measured from it.

Underneath it, so small he had to put the torch almost against the plaster, somebody had cut four figures.

1981

End of Chapter One · The Tea Round. The Forty-Year Passenger © Simran Mehta. Reproduced here by the author.