The Night Train to Nowhere in Particular

The night train left from the far end of the station, past the buffet with its chairs turned up on the tables and the flower stall with its shutters down, at a quarter past nine exactly, because it always did.

Ruth had a berth in the third carriage. It was a small room with a narrow bed made up tight and a window with a blind, and at the foot of the bed a blanket had been folded into a square. The blanket was grey wool with one red stripe, and it was heavier than it looked. She sat on the edge of the bed with her coat still on and watched the platform slide away, and then the lamps of the goods yard, and then the backs of houses with their kitchen windows lit.

The guard came along the corridor about ten minutes out. She was a broad woman with a torch on her belt that she never seemed to need, and she put her head round the door and said, “Tea, milk, no sugar,” not as a question.

“Yes,” said Ruth. “How did you…”

“You’ve the look of it,” said the guard, whose name, it turned out, was Maureen. “Back in a bit.”

Ruth listened to her go down the corridor. Two doors along: “Black, two sugars, and a biscuit you’ll say you didn’t want.” A man’s voice, mildly offended, saying he never touched biscuits. Further along: “Strong, splash of milk, in the big cup, I know.” And then a laugh, and the sound of the trolley.

The train picked up its pace out beyond the last of the streetlights. The rails had a rhythm to them, two beats and a pause, two beats and a pause, and Ruth found that she was breathing along with it without having decided to. Somewhere under the floor a wheel had a slightly different note from the others, a little higher, like one bell in a peal that had been cast on a different day.

Maureen came back with the tea. It was in a proper cup, thick white china, with a saucer, and she set it on the fold-down shelf under the window as if it had been done a thousand times, which it had.

“Where does it get to?” Ruth asked. “The train. I bought the ticket, but the man at the window only said it was the night one.”

Maureen looked at her with something that was not quite a smile.

“Nowhere in particular,” she said. “It’s on the timetable. Has been for years.”

“That’s a place?”

“It’s a stop,” said Maureen. “You’ll know it when we get there. Drink your tea.”

Ruth drank her tea. Out of the window the country was very dark, the kind of dark that has hills in it, and every so often a town went by as a cluster of lamps on the far side of a field, orange and small, like something spilt. Then it would be gone and the dark would close up behind it. Once there was a level crossing, with its barriers down and one car waiting behind them, and she saw the driver’s face for a moment, patient, lit from below by the dashboard, and then he was behind them too.

Nobody on the train was in a hurry. That was the first thing she noticed and the thing she kept noticing. In the corridor the man with the biscuits was standing at a window with his hands behind his back, watching nothing go past, and he nodded to her when she went by to find the loo, and she nodded back, and neither of them felt the need to say anything. The woman with the big cup was knitting in her open doorway with her feet up on the opposite bunk, and the knitting was long and blue and had no obvious end. The ticking of her needles kept fairly good time with the rails.

“Sock,” the woman said, without looking up. “For a giant. Don’t ask.”

Ruth did not ask.

Around eleven the train slowed, and slowed, and stopped, at a station that was only a platform and a lamp and a man in a cap. Nobody got on. Nobody got off. Maureen leaned out of the door at the end of the carriage and the man in the cap raised one hand, and Maureen raised one hand, and that was apparently all that was required. Ruth could hear an owl somewhere, and the tick of the engine cooling, and then the long low breath of the brakes letting go. The platform slid backwards. The lamp went by. The man in the cap was already walking towards a small lit building with a kettle in it, she felt sure.

Back in her berth she took off her coat at last, and her shoes, and unfolded the blanket, and got under it. It settled on her the way a blanket ought to, heavily and all at once. The pillow smelt faintly of laundry and of coal, which was odd, because the train was not a steam train, and she decided not to think about it.

The rails went on. Two beats and a pause. Two beats and a pause.

She thought about the ticket in her coat pocket, and about the man at the window, who had said the night one and pushed it across as if there were no other. She had not been going anywhere, particularly. She had wanted, she supposed, to be moving and not to have to steer. And here she was, and the train was steering, and the country was going by in the dark with its lamps in little handfuls, and none of it needed anything from her at all.

Maureen came by once more, near midnight, and took the empty cup without a word and pulled the door to, not all the way, just enough.

“Nowhere in particular,” Ruth said, mostly to herself. “How will I know?”

“You’ll be asleep,” said Maureen from the corridor. “That’s how.”

Now the towns came less often. A farm with one light on in the yard. A road with no cars on it, running alongside for a while and then giving up and turning off. A river, black and quick under a stone bridge, there and gone. The blind tapped softly against the window frame in time with nothing.

Ruth lay on her side, and the train leaned into a long slow curve, and she leaned with it.

The wheel with the different note sang its one small line, and the other wheels went on underneath.

Somewhere ahead, the man in the cap had made his tea. Somewhere behind, the giant’s sock had gained another inch. The man with the biscuits had eaten his biscuit and would deny it in the morning.

Two beats, and a pause.

Two beats, and a pause.

The last lamps thinned to two, and one, and none.

And some time in the smallest hours the train slowed, and slowed, and came to a stop, and stayed there, with everybody on it asleep under their blankets and the cups washed and stacked in the little kitchen, and that was nowhere in particular, and that was the point.

Ruth did not hear it arrive. She was asleep, which is how you know.

Outside the window there was nothing but dark and a little mist, and the train sat in it, warm, and ticking quietly, and going nowhere at all.