Olly and Tim had made the railway journey to Vienna together, and David followed by himself a few days later. He’d had to be at home for a sister’s wedding. The event had been vaguely upsetting – which was silly in the light of the fact that his new brother-in-law seemed a thoroughly nice man. But during the marriage service (in which certain tremendous things were said, so that he had felt the tears in his eyes) it had suddenly occurred to him that he might lie awake that night, imagining the very private consummation that must follow upon this very public solemnity. He would visualise the couple’s caresses, their kisses, the disposition of their limbs – the lot. And it seemed to David that this almost involuntary or compulsive voyeurism would mark him out as an extremely depraved and degenerate person. He had, of course, read the appropriate books, and knew that the most disgraceful phantasies generated themselves occasionally in other heads besides his own. But there was a kind of incestuous slant to this impending indulgence that would surely make it totally unforgivable.
Needless to say, when he got into bed the horror didn’t happen. He even saw that he wouldn’t be a monster if it did. And from this he went on (for there was a certain boldness in his nature) to try to make it happen. But this immediately seemed quite foolish, and he fell asleep. Next morning, his memory was very little perturbed by the whole thing. Yet a little uneasiness remained. Here he was, with his twenty-firster behind him. And he wasn’t being at all good at coping with the whole area of experience that ends up, presumably, with your getting married yourself.
At Calais he got into his second-class sleeper, which was the way one travelled in those days even when still living on one’s father. One side of the little compartment made up into two beds or bunks for the night. But it turned out that there wasn’t going to be another passenger. So he had it all to himself, including a privy and wash place through a sliding door. It was as good as travelling first – although it would be rather solitary in effect, except when he went along to dinner and breakfast in the Speisewagen.
The train was called the Orient Express, and if you moved up to the front you would be in carriages that went on to Constantinople, and that advertised the fact by saying so in Turkish characters on boards slung below the windows. David, although not so widely travelled as his own children in their nonage were to be, had been here and there about the continent – usually with his parents in Italy, but sometimes with friends, or even on his own, in other places. So he wasn’t particularly keyed up by his present situation. Still, it was something of a milestone, or at least it ought to be. He was off and into something in a way he’d never been before. It was a pity, the more sagacious side of his head opined, that it wasn’t something a bit more definite.
David settled down in his encapsulated and gently wobbling condition to read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This and The Orators and Words for Music Perhaps constituted the reading-matter with which he had provided himself for the journey. At the bookstall at Victoria his father had spent a well-meaning but futile seven-and-six on buying him an Agatha Christie detective-story. It had to be admitted that he and his father (although in general agreement about Giotto and Masaccio) weren’t all that close to one another. He hadn’t even owned to his father that he wanted to be a writer – an unnecessary reticence, since his father would have regarded it as a quite ordinary thing to want to be.
But Gertrude Stein – although described facetiously by Olly Russell as a writer’s writer’s writer – didn’t on this occasion hold David’s interest, any more than did the Belgian industrial landscape (which was like souped-up Wadsworth) deploying itself along the railway line. He put down the book and explored his little wash place and loo. It turned out to be shared with the neighbouring compartment, but when he locked the door on his side a door on the other side locked automatically too. He wondered whether his neighbour was also travelling alone, and might prove to be a beautiful and accessible (but not promiscuously accessible; accessible, really, only to a masterful David Read) girl. When he had peed and washed his hands and returned to his seat he remembered that he hadn’t entered the word ‘loo’ in the pocket notebook he kept for brand new words, and he made good this deficiency before withdrawing into an introspection controlled at the outset by his shamelessly sanguine and sadly unrealistic fancy. He had to admit – owning, as he did, considerable intellectual clarity – that if such a neighbouring girl there were, and if she now came to him all warm and breathing and so on, the result would simply be to scare the pants off him, although not in a literal and apposite way.
So far, he hadn’t been much good with girls. Once in a taxi coming away from a dance (he hated dances), he had put his hand on a girl’s leg just above the knee – prompted, possibly, by the memory of Leon’s successful performance with Emma Bovary in a cab. But he hadn’t himself been successful. The stocking had felt unexpectedly harsh and grainy, so that he had taken his hand away with a mumbled apology, pretending that the contact had been accidental. On another and similar occasion he had suddenly grabbed a girl and kissed her. She had been surprised and upset, and on the following day had told her best friend about it, so that in no time the story was all over the place. This could only mean that she had interpreted his action as merely oafish – unegrossiereté voulue would be the French for it – and in this she had no doubt been far from astray. He hadn’t really wanted to a bit! It was a humiliating recollection, and he still sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with it. In fact it was the climax of a recurrent wet dream. Which was very mysterious indeed.
He knew he wasn’t homosexual: hadn’t ever been so even in a schoolboy way. Olly, that extravagant liar, was fond of expatiating on the enormous secret lust that had possessed him whenever he had walloped a small boy for burning his toast or failing to get the mud off his rugger boots. This was incomprehensible to David, who was convinced that Olly had simply picked it up from a school story of the modern spuriously emancipated, now-it-can-all-be-told sort. David had worked it out that his own embarrassingly retarded condition had something to do with his mother. Again with the aid of the appropriate books, he had seen that, although not father-eclipsed, he did go in for mother-refuge in a big way. In fact he was rather like Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers – this much more than like Leon or Rodolphe in Madame Bovary. No Miriam would be any good to him until his mother was dead, probably after a long and agonising illness. What an appalling condition! David was still brooding over it when the Orient Express expressed itself into Germany, and horrible Polizei were clicking their heels at him and arrogantly demanding to see his passport. Soon, however, he began to look forward to his dinner. He would call for Lowenbräu in a knowledgeable way. And what had been going through his head he would put behind him. It was stuff he would never dream of confessing to Olly and Tim, now waiting for him in Vienna.
But before he got there a strange, and strangely upsetting, thing happened. It was in the middle of the night. He had wakened up, he supposed because the train seemed to have slowed down a little. Leaning out of his bunk, he pulled up a blind and looked out. He had no idea where they were, and now there wasn’t much to enlighten him. A crescent moon was in the sky; there were clouds over most of the stars; a vague impression of forest and mountain was something he was perhaps merely making up. Then the train’s speed dropped further, and there was a rattle and slight swerve as if it was passing over points. A few faint lights appeared, then a low building, and he saw that they were running through a station. On the platform he glimpsed a uniformed man standing stiffly at attention in the solitude of the night. They did things like that, he remembered, in Germany. The chap probably took pride in thus turning out and going on parade for the benefit of perhaps nobody at all. David himself couldn’t even wave to him.
They were through the station and in complete darkness again. But not quite. There was a house, close to the line, in which there was a single lighted window. In a moment David was abreast of this. And in the window, apparently looking out at the train, stood a young woman. She was quite naked.
The train hadn’t yet gathered speed; nevertheless, what David ought to have seen was no more than a blurred impression of something barely to be identified. But this hadn’t been the fact. The vision had been as clear, as detailed in every way, as if he had been standing before a frontally posed nude by Ingres. Only Ingres’ nudes aren’t real; aren’t meant to be. This had been real.
David dropped the blind and lay back in his bunk, trembling and with his heart thumping. He’d never before seen a naked girl. No, that wasn’t quite true. He remembered a girl cousin, straight from her bath and with her dressing-gown hanging open, smiling at him from the top of a staircase. But she’d been about three, and he hadn’t been much older. So here was yet another measure of inexperience. He was astounded by the instantaneity and pitch of his excitement. It was quite a long time before he went to sleep again.