Trains and Lovers: A Novel by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

bathing pool had been fashioned out of railway sleepers. The water, he had been told, was ancient water—it had fallen tens of thousands of years ago in the wet north of Australia and had percolated down over time into the vast reservoir that lay beneath the central Australian depression. It would never dry up; it would always force its way to just below the surface, and once pumped up it would quickly evaporate inthe glare of the sun. But not before some of it had been piped to the station-master’s house and to the high tank from which the dangling canvas elephant’s trunk filled the engines.
    The previous station-master was retiring. He and his wife had been there for eighteen years and were going back to the small town on the coast from which they had come. Their time in the Outback was written on their faces—in the lines, the texture of the skin, in the weathered look that came from all that time in an atmosphere of dryness and baking heat.
    They were hospitable in the week they spent together on the hand-over. The down train would take their effects away just as the up train had brought his. He helped them pack it into the wagons—the standing lamps, the Morris chairs, the photographs in their frames, wrapped in several thicknesses of brown paper, the bed-linen tied in bundles. His baggage was simpler: several suitcases of clothing, some kitchen items, his small collection of books. “A bachelor’s possessions,” the station-master’s wife said, smiling.
    They left, and he was in control of the siding. It would be two days before the next train came, and so he busied himself with such paperwork as the job entailed.He waited for somebody to come along the track and call in for water, but on that first day there was nobody. He retired that night and looked out of the window of the bedroom from his bed, up at a sky that was almost white with stars. He got up and went onto the veranda, where it was cooler. Looking south, he saw the Southern Cross, suspended in the velvet sky. It gave him comfort, located him in this vast emptiness. At least there would be other human eyes that were looking up at that at that precise moment.
    He thought: I shall not be able to bear this loneliness. I should have stayed in Adelaide; I should not have come out here. I should not have done this.

A YEAR AFTER HIS APPOINTMENT AS STATIONMASTER at Hope Springs, he took his first annual leave of three weeks and travelled to Sydney. The rail journey there was not a quick one, and precious days of holiday were spent on it, but he had never seen Sydney and was keen to do so. There was another reason, too, why he wanted to go there: his pen-friend lived in the city and after six months of correspondence he had suggested they meet.
    He had started writing to her on a whim. One of the passengers on the up train to Alice Springs had come into his office during a stop and asked to send a telegram. This was something he could do, sending the message down the wire that followed the line back to Adelaide. He enjoyed sending telegrams, in fact, as it provided some variety in his work and the messages often amused him. HAVE CHANGED MY MIND was a message that he had been asked to send on more than one occasion; a long train journey is a time for reflection, perhaps, and the mind might easilychange in such circumstances. Another simply read, FORGIVEN STOP COMPLETELY STOP, while, in contrast, yet another had said THIS IS WAR. He had the power to decline messages of a hostile or improper nature and had hesitated on this wording; forgiveness was one thing, war another, but he eventually let it through. WILL YOU MARRY ME? had at least the attraction of simplicity and unambiguity, and he hoped that the answer might be yes. On rare occasions, he received telegrams to await passengers passing through in either direction and had once received a telegram that read YES STOP. He had delivered that without any indication of having read the message—the rules stated