Читать книгу Death and the Butterfly - Colin Hester - Страница 17

Afterward

They let her take Phillip’s final letter with her, and alone in the swaying compartment by the window she read it on the train. Eventually to Godmanchester. An evacuee. At Letchworth as the train chuffed in and idled in the station, a young man perhaps about Phillip’s age strolled past on the platform, glanced in through the window, froze in mid-step, and opened the compartment door. She didn’t look up. Just concentrated on the letter, conjuring forth her brother from within:

I’ll be sending home soon another package of laun dry, Mum.

“Excuse me,” the man said.

She looked up from the letter. His face was tanned, almost dark, like a character in the Bible, and he was finely dressed in a brown tailored suit. He carried a small suitcase and he wore a pair of white gloves and held a cane.

“D’you mind?” he enquired. An American accent. Like at the pictures.

“No,” she said, “not at all.”

“Good,” he said, and he stepped in, and with that solid metal-and-leather thoonk of a train door he closed it behind him. With one hand he stowed his suitcase on the luggage rack above—opposite her—and he sat next to the window on the seat beneath, sat so gracefully that the movement might have been choreographed for him. He sleeked a cigarette case from his suit jacket’s inside pocket and thumbing it open he offered her one.

“No, thanks,” she said.

“Camels,” he told her.

“Please, no.”

She looked down at Phillip’s letter. How—how could such an instrument still be? Still exist? Haunted and haunting calligraphy, each word utterly alive and inked in blue fountain pen on a tissue-thin aerogram. Shouldn’t it have rightfully perished with him? Reside with him?

“It’s okay, then?” the man asked.

She looked up.

“That I smoke?” he said.

“Yes, do.”

Came a vague platform announcement about Peterborough.

“This is my only suit,” he said.

“Oh.” She didn’t look up.

“Actually,” he continued, “these are all the clothes I have in the world.”

She didn’t respond.

“My uncle gave it to me,” he said. “The suit. As a favor to his brother. He’s a tailor.”

She thought for a second then looked up and nodded. “Yes,” she said. She glanced up at his suitcase on the luggage rack above.

“Empty,” he explained.

She blinked at him and returned her attention to the letter:

You’ll be shocked to know, Mum, I’ve met a girl, Joyce, through Captain Grey of all people. You’ll like her, Dad, quite good-looking, though Roger said not as pretty as our . . .

Her eyes skipped down a line or two until they touched on what she sought.

And Dad, please reconsider sending Susan up to Uncle Cec’s brother-in-law. Ben, isn’t it? The blacksmith? Look at it this way, Dad, not only will she be safe, but she might even learn a trade, ha, ha. (I know you’re reading this, Susan, I do.)

She folded the letter over on itself, unable to continue. The conductor’s whistle blew and the train lurched slightly and like all trains for an infinitesimal moment the linked carriages not only paused but almost reared back. Through the window, she could see the station building: dun-bricked, the mortar pock-holed from neglect, the pock-holes square, like a nag’s missing teeth; the station’s windows steamed and piped in peeling red. Slowly she shook her head.

“Everything going to be okay?” the well-dressed man asked.

“Who—who can say?” she answered.

Only now did the train couple forward, eventually clattering northward on its way.