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

that you were not to pay attention to or use what was said in any telegram—but he had tried to work out, from the reaction of the recipient, what the question had been. He had been a man in his mid-forties somewhere and he had opened the envelope and read the telegram without giving anything away—at least at first. Then he had stared glumly out of the window and Alec had understood that yes could be bad news as easily as it could be good.
    The passenger who asked to send a telegram that day was a mining engineer. He had something technical to say in his message—something to do with ore samples—but he had stayed for a chat and had left behind a week-oldcopy of the Sydney Morning Herald . “Stale news, I’m afraid, but there’s a bit in there about the cricket that you may like to read.”
    He had thanked him and set the paper to the side. That evening he had read it from cover to cover, including the advertisements. One had been for an agency that provided pen-friends; for a small fee one would be given the names of up to three people who were keen to exchange letters with you—every one of them screened for suitability, the advertisers claimed. On impulse he had written a request for a woman correspondent between twenty and twenty-five, living anywhere in Australia. He almost did not post the letter, but remembered just in time to give it to the driver of the next train down to Adelaide.
    He was sent the name of a young woman called Alison Morsby, who lived just outside Sydney. She was interested in the cinema, dancing and flowers. She also read the novels of Nevil Shute, her profile revealed, and Charles Dickens. She was not very good at tennis, but she liked swimming.
    He thought about this. There was no cinema there, of course, and no dancing, except for the annual ball held at another siding sixty miles away. That attracted every bachelor and spinster within a radius of several hundredmiles, but was more about drinking, he had heard, than dancing. There were flowers, of course, but only for a brief spell in the year, and they had to be resistant to the harsh climate of the Outback. There was no tennis, and the only swimming was in the water hole at the spring, where there was room for one or two strokes in the tank made of old railway sleepers. He had heard about Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice —everybody had, as it had just been published and was much discussed in the papers; he could talk about that, he supposed, even if he had not yet read it. But Charles Dickens was another matter.
    He wrote a brief and rather formal letter, introducing himself. He wondered whether he should send a picture, but decided against it. He was not sure about the etiquette of that, and felt that it would be better to wait. If a correspondence developed, then pictures could be exchanged.
    Her reply came rather more quickly than he had expected. She had been very pleased to get his letter, she wrote. She enjoyed getting letters and had been writing for two years to a pen-friend in England, a young woman of her own age, whose dream it was to come to Australia one day. This young woman worked in a shop in Bournemouth, but was planning to move to London when she had saved up enough to do so. “I really like getting herletters and hearing about her life, which is very different from the life I lead in Paramatta. I have never worked in a shop, but I have a job as a secretary in a municipal office. I type the reports that building inspectors make when they go to inspect new houses. They look at the foundations etc. and have to check that everything meets the right standards. You’d be surprised, you really would, by some of the things that builders try to get away with. Sometimes I can hardly believe what the inspectors say about builders’ tricks.”
    He wrote back the day he received her letter. He told her about his job and about his time in Fremantle. He said that he was thinking of getting a ham radio operator’s licence, as