The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman

after the soaking and strain of the day. She continued, however, to listen to Mimi and Roper chatting together in surprising sympathy; every now and then made an observation of her own; and, thinking things over, wondered that on the whole they had turned out so well. It was Margaret who poured out the coffee.
    What were Mimi and Roper talking about? He was asking her in great detail about their dull office routine; she was enquiring with improbable enthusiasm into early railway history . Neither could have had much genuine interest in either subject. It was all very unreal, but comfortable and pleasing. Roper, many aspects of whose position seemed to Margaret to invite curiosity, said nothing of himself. Every now and then a train passed.
    ‘A pension at sixty doesn’t make up for being a number all your life. A cipher. You want to get off the rails every now and then.’
    ‘You only get on to a branch line, a dead end,’ said Roper with what seemed real despondency. ‘It’s difficult to leave the rails altogether and still keep going at all.’
    ‘Have you ever tried? What do you do?’ It was seldom so long before Mimi asked that. She despised inaction in men.
    ‘I used to work in the railway company’s office. All the Ropers were in the railway business, as you will have gathered . I was the only one to get out of it in time.’
    ‘In time for what?’
    ‘In time for anything. My father was the company’s Chief Commercial Manager. Trying to meet the slump killed him. Things aren’t what they used to be with railways, you know. My grandfather was run over just outside that window.’ He pointed across the dusty desk at the end of the room.
    ‘What a perfectly appalling thing!’ said Margaret. ‘How did it happen?’
    ‘He never had any luck after he took on this job. You know how two perfectly harmless substances when blended can make something deadly? Building the railway through this valley was just like that for my grandfather. A lot of things happened…. One thing the valley goes in for is sudden storms. On a certain night when one of these storms got up, my grandfather thought he heard a tree fall. You noticed the trees round the house? The original idea was that they’d provide shelter. My grandfather thought this tree might have fallen across the line. He was so concerned that he forgot the time-table, though normally he carried every train movement in his head. You can guess what happened. The noise of the approaching train was drowned by the wind. Or so they decided at the inquest.’
    When a comparative stranger tells such a story, it is always difficult to know what to say, and there is a tendency to fill the gap with some unimportant question. ‘And was the tree across the line?’ asked Margaret.
    ‘Not it. No tree had fallen. The old man had got it wrong.’
    ‘Then surely they were rather lax at the inquest?’
    ‘Wide Joe had always been expected to meet a bad end, and the jury were all local men. He was pretty generally disliked. He made his daughter break off her engagement with a railwayman at Pudsley depot. Marrying into the lower deck, and all that. But it turned out he was a bit wrong. The man got into Parliament and ended by doing rather better for himself than my grandfather had done by sticking to the railway. By then, of course, it was too late. And my grandfather was dead in any case.’
    ‘That was your aunt?’ inquired Mimi.
    ‘Being my father’s sister, yes,’ said Roper. ‘Now let us change the subject. Tell me about the gay world of London.’
    ‘We never come across it,’ said Mimi. It’s just one damn thing after another for us girls.’
    The moment seemed opportune for Margaret to get her pullover, as she still felt cold. She departed upstairs. In some ways she would have been glad to go to bed, after the exhausting day; but she felt also an unexplained reluctance, less than half-conscious, to leave Mimi and Roper chatting so intimately alone together. Then,