Skinner retires to the room that was once his parents’, switches on a small plastic wireless beside the bed and hears soft music, the sort of music that people listened to before the war when they were all younger and stronger, with the productive years still in front of them. But this is now yesterday’s music, just as the walls around him contain yesterday’s portraits and faces. And with yesterday’s music playing in his ears, he sits on the edge of the bed and contemplates the light in Miss Carroll’s tent. If he goes too close to that light, will it lose its glow? This is Skinner’s dilemma, and this is the dilemma that he takes to bed with him as Katherine lies back in her fold-out cot and goes over, once again, the sequence of the day’s events. There was a sound, somebody called out.
Rita, her feet hitting the hallway floor like the webbed feet of a mother duck, approaches her bed and a night of broken sleep, for the moment lifted by the thought that the roundness of her body might just bring more of the laughter that is both loud and big that she heard tonight and that the future she and Vic are about to enter will be the clean start they’re looking for. And Vic, in the kitchen, raises a pot and pours tea in the same casual manner that the absent father he has never met may very well be doing at this moment, indifferent to the fact of Vic’s being in the world. The sound of Rita’s feet fade in the hallway, taking the weight and roundness of the future with her, while Vic lingers on the image of stick-figure soldiers, the past that might have been his and the future that Rita carries with her that might never have happened.
In the café with the odd Russian name, the journalist and the painter sit, the newspaper with Katherine’s photograph and the article the journalist wrote today open on the table. The two have been talking for some time, the conversation beginning with Miss Carroll, straying from her to talk of foreign places and that elsewhere that they all long for, then returning, again and again, to the strangely haunting image of the old woman and her tent. Before they step into whatever it is that awaits them in that elsewhere they long for, this painter has resolved that he will catch, on canvas or board or whatever comes to hand, with or without the subject’s consent, an image of the world that they are so intent upon leaving. A lasting image that will be there in years to come when the old lady and her tent have long since given way to houses and streets and factories and shops. Just one image upon which they can all look back and say, ‘That is what we were.’
And all the time, while the journalist and the painter talk long into the night, and while Webster contemplates a map of the place that will contain his world, the blue streamlined engine, with the bold yellow stripe down the side and the yellow crest at the front like a bird about to take flight, travels through the night in air-conditioned ease. For the Spirit of Progress does not stop for sleep, nor is the Spirit of Progress ever tired. It is out there, it is always out there, speeding through the night where nobody sees it, from sunset to sunrise, covering the distance between here and elsewhere on shiny rails that converge but never meet and never end.