Night Train North

The flat was going to be emptied at seven in the morning. Ines had been told this on Tuesday, in a phone call that lasted ninety seconds, and by Wednesday evening she was standing on a platform in the south with a small bag and a ticket for the sleeper.

She wanted one thing out of that flat: a cardboard box that her grandmother had kept under the bed for as long as anyone could remember. Nobody in the family knew what was in it. Her grandmother had always said, "When you're old enough to want it, you can have it."

The train left at 21:48. Her compartment had two bunks and a window with a curtain that didn't quite close. She put her luggage under the lower bunk, sat with her coat still on and watched the city break apart into car parks, then fields, then nothing but her own face in the glass.

At half past ten the attendant came round with tea. Her name badge said Fenna. She had worked the northern route for nine years, she said, and in that time the train had been late for every reason a train can be late for, including a horse.

Ines slept badly, the way people do on trains, in twenty-minute pieces. At some point she noticed that the noise had stopped. She lay in the dark and listened. There was no rhythm under her, no rocking, nothing. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders and looked out.

Outside there was a wood, and beyond the wood there was a hill with one light on it. The clock in the corridor said 02:14. She found Fenna standing at the end of the carriage with a torch. A tree had come down across the line eleven kilometres ahead.

"How long?" Ines asked. Fenna said the line would be cleared by five, perhaps six. Ines did the arithmetic out loud and heard how bad it sounded. If the train arrived at nine, the flat would already be empty. The box would be on a van, and the van would be anywhere.

She explained about her grandmother and the box. She had not meant to explain anything to a stranger at two in the morning, but the corridor was cold and empty, and it came out anyway. Fenna listened without interrupting, which is rarer than people think.

Then Fenna said something Ines hadn't expected. "We're standing three hundred metres from a level crossing. There's a road. If you can get a taxi to the town before the junction, there's a bus at half past five that goes the whole way round."

It took two phone calls and forty minutes. At 03:05 Ines climbed down onto wet stones with her bag, and the driver of a taxi flashed his lights at her from a farm track. She looked back once. The whole train lay in the field, lit up, quiet, like something dropped there by mistake.

The bus was almost empty. Dawn came slowly, first as a grey line and then as a hard orange one, and Ines watched the north arrive: low walls, wet roofs, a harbour, and then the long straight street where her grandmother had lived for fifty-one years.

She got there at 07:40. The van was still at the kerb, half loaded. Two men were carrying a wardrobe, and one of them told her that the small stuff was still upstairs. She went up with the key in her hand and found the box exactly where it had always been.

Inside there were letters, tied in four bundles with sewing thread, and a small brass thimble worn thin on one side. Ines sat on the bare floor of the empty bedroom and read the first letter twice. Then she wrote down Fenna's name, because she wanted to send her one of the photographs.