Who's who aboard: the characters of The Train Between Worlds

The Memory Fare

Cora Marsh

Forty-seven, from Ashwick, eleven years in hospital records. Widowed in 2016. For six years she has signed the visitor book at Ashwick Central's lost property office every morning and searched the shelves for her daughter's handwriting, because looking for the daughter herself would, she knows, kill her. She boards the 11:47 on purpose, which nobody has done before, and she does it after doing six years of arithmetic on the cost of having been right in an argument about a phone bill. Sings two bars of something when she is frightened; does not know she does it.

June Marsh

Seventeen when she left the house on Bellweather Road with a grey bag on her shoulder; twenty-three now. Writes her lower-case g with a straight tail and has since she was eleven. Left hair ties on every tap in the house because “that's where I can find it.” Aboard six years, she has written Mum, go home on eleven doors, and she has been spending, four thousand times over, on something her mother has to walk a long way to understand.

The conductor

Tall, in a dark green uniform that was very good once, with a face that has been about sixty for a great deal longer than that. He has never lied to anyone and he cannot volunteer anything; he answers what he is asked. Tells every new passenger that the open door behind them is the better offer, and nobody has ever taken it.

Abel Quist

Fifty-eight, a joiner from Ackworth in the West Riding, with two years on a road gang in Lancashire before that. Aboard since 2011. In fifteen years he has opened eleven doors and drawn four maps, and he brings tea every morning at twenty past ten to a brother who does not know they are related. Counts things instead of thinking. Says “Right” instead of losing his temper. The one man aboard whose name has never gone thin, for a reason he spends most of Book Three finding out.

Eilish Devane

The old woman by the window in carriage nine, hands in her lap, coat buttoned to the throat. She boarded for a man and can no longer say his name, his face, or one thing about him, and she will not get off, because looking for him is the last of him there is. Lucid perhaps one day in three, and on those days she has a horrible clarity about everybody else.

Lumi

Small, dark, in a coat that was expensive forty years ago, with a young face and old eyes. The one character in all three books. She got on at nineteen and got off with a man called Elio: the girl who got off, the one who got off with the man from the fog, the one story passengers tell each other when they cannot sleep. Thirty-one years outside in a house with a bad boiler; then Elio died in March, and she came back.

Desmond

Runs the lost property office at Ashwick Central. Nine years in the building. Raised two daughters and buried a wife and has never once asked Cora a question. Keeps June's photograph pinned inside his stockroom door.

The Forty-Year Passenger

Peter Quist

Abel's brother. A big man gone soft, a joiner since 1978, in the third bay on the left of the nineteenth carriage, facing forward, window seat. Holds every cup in both hands and does not know why. Can hold about a day and a half at a time. Funny, opinionated, delighted every morning to see a man he does not recognise, and the author of eleven theories about a woman who walks past his window with an empty bucket.

Ivy

Does the round. Twice a day, the length of the train and back, stopping at every bay to look at the floor, carrying a galvanised bucket that has always been empty. Nobody knows where the name came from. “It's the only thing I brought with me.”

Verity Eleanor Sloane

Aboard since 4 August 1981. Fourteen years on the Ordnance Survey at Southampton before that. She found a benchmark on a retaining wall in Shropshire that was not in the register, spent four months on it, went back with a theodolite one night, and found a train standing in the cutting. She got on because it was not in the timetable and she wanted to know what it was. She had no one in the world she would go back for, and so could not pay a single fare; what she did about that is recorded in forty-three cloth-bound observation books in a small upright hand that never once sloped in forty-five years. Keeps her pens in order of nib width. I regret the necessity.

Marta Vey

Forties, cropped hair, sleeves pushed up, a pencil behind each ear. Nine years aboard. Ran the north-wall lists under June and runs the writing carriage after her, on the principle that people are what they do and every hour not spent getting somebody off is wasted. Has never once been wrong about the arithmetic, and has a sister in carriage twenty-four she has sat with four times.

Hollis

Very old, three cardigans, cuts slips with a blunt knife at the same rate whatever is happening. Has put in for pens. Nobody in six years has asked him how he is, and he says so out loud exactly once.

Danny Brack

Carriage twenty-two, nine years aboard, as far gone as anyone. One morning he stood up, said he wanted to see his mother, walked to a door, and the door opened. Abel watched it from the far end of the carriage and could not work out what he had done differently. The answer is in Book Two.

Fergus Nolan

Aboard since 1994, in the thirty-first carriage, with a jacket mended at the elbow with the wrong thread. Gave his answer without hesitation when asked what he was looking for, and repeated it a great deal. (Book Three; who he is looking for is the book's quietest reveal.)

Names in the record

Names on the wall, on slips in a crate, or in Sloane's red-brown annotations, who never appear in person but whose fates are part of the record: H. Ferriday (forty, April 1983, the first), Margaret Okonjo (three attempts, took on the third), Arthur Ndiaye, Pieter van Hout, Sunil Ramsaran, T. Abergavenny (resisted at sixty, persuaded), Robert Marsh (surveyor, died 2016, made his wife laugh so hard she couldn't drive), and Elio, who described a village, a green door and his mother's face to a stranger in 1988 and never afterwards had them.