Twenty-Three
‘Sanford Angelorum all change,’ said the station-master. ‘Sanford Angelorum, all change.’
After a moment’s thought: ‘Terminus,’ he added, and retired from the scene through a door marked PRIVATE.
Gervase Fen, dozing alone in a narrow, stuffy compartment whose cushions, when stirred, emitted a haze of black dust, woke and roused himself.
He peered out of the window into the summer twilight. A stunted, uneven platform offered itself to his inspection, its further margins cluttered with weed-like growths which a charitable man might have interpreted as attempts at horticulture. An empty chocolate-machine lay rusting and overturned, like a casualty in some robot war. Near it was a packing-case from which the head of a small chicken protruded, uttering low, indignant squawks. But there was no trace of human kind, and beyond the station lay nothing more companionable than an apparently limitless expanse of fields and woods, bluish in the gathering dusk.
This panorama displeased Fen; he thought it blank and unenlivening. There was, however, nothing to be done about it except repine. He repined briefly and then extracted himself and his luggage from the compartment. It seemed at first that he was the only passenger to alight here, but a moment later he found that this was not so, for a fair-haired, neatly-dressed girl of about twenty emerged from another compartment, glanced uncertainly about her, and then made for the exit, where she dropped a square of green pasteboard into a tin labelled TICKETS and disappeared. Leaving his luggage where it lay on the platform, Fen followed.
But the station-yard – an ill-defined patch of gravel – was empty of conveyances; and except for the retreating footsteps of the girl, who had vanished from sight round a bend in the station approach, a disheartening quietude prevailed. Fen went back to the platform and sought out the station-master’s room, where he found the station-master sitting at a table and sombrely contemplating a small, unopened bottle of beer. He looked up resignedly at the interruption.
‘Is there any chance of my getting a taxi?’ Fen asked.
‘Where are you for, sir?’
‘Sanford Angelorum village. The Fish Inn.’
‘Well, you might be lucky,’ the station-master admitted. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He went to a telephone and discoursed into it. Fen watched from the doorway. Behind him, the train on which he had arrived gave a weak, asthmatic whistle, and began to back away. Presently it had disappeared, empty, in the direction whence it came.
The station-master finished his conversation and lumbered back to his chair.
‘That’ll be all right, sir,’ he said; and his tone was slightly complacent, as of a midwife relating the successful issue of a troublesome confinement. ‘Car’ll be here in ten minutes.’
Fen thanked him, gave him a shilling, and left him still staring at the beer. It occurred to Fen that perhaps he had taken the pledge and was brooding nostalgically over forbidden delights.
The chicken had got its head out of a particularly narrow aperture of the packing-case and was unable to get it in again; it was bewilderingly eyeing a newish election poster, with an unprepossessing photograph, which said: ‘A Vote for Strode is a Vote for Prosperity.’ The train had passed beyond earshot; a colony of rooks was flying home for the night, dark blurs against a grey sky; flickering indistinctly, a bat pursued its evening meal up and down the line. Fen sat down on a suitcase and waited. He had finished one cigarette, and was on the point of lighting another, when the sound of a car-engine stirred him into activity. He returned, burdened with cases, to the station-yard.
Against all probability, the taxi was new and comfortable; and its driver, too, was unexpectedly attractive – a slim, comely, black-haired young woman wearing blue slacks and a blue sweater.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I occasionally meet this train on the off-chance that someone will want a car, but there are evenings when no one’s on it at all, so it’s scarcely worth while … Here, let me give you a hand with your bags.’
The luggage was stowed away. Fen asked and obtained permission to sit in front. They set off. In the deepening darkness there was little outside the car to repay attention, and Fen looked instead at his companion, admiring what the dashboard light showed of her large green eyes, her full mouth, her fine and lustrous hair.
‘Girls who drive taxis,’ he ventured, ‘are surely uncommon?’
She took her eyes momentarily from the road to glance at him; saw a tall, lean man with a ruddy, cheerful, clean-shaven face and brown hair which stood up mutinously in spikes at the crown of his head. In particular, she liked his eyes; they showed charity and understanding as well as a taste for mischief.
‘Yes, I suppose they are,’ she agreed. ‘But it isn’t at all a bad life if you actually own your car, as I do. It’s been a good investment.’
‘You’ve always done this, then?’
‘No. For a time I worked in Boots – the book department. But it didn’t suit me, for some reason. I used to get dizzy spells.’
‘Inevitable, I should think, if you work in a circulating library.’
A fallen tree appeared out of the gloom ahead of them: it lay half across the lane. The girl swore mildly, braked, and circumnavigated it with care.
‘I always forget that damned thing’s there,’ she said. ‘It was blown down in a gale, and Shooter ought to have taken it away days ago. It’s his tree, so it’s his responsibility. But he’s really intolerably lax.’ She accelerated again, asking: ‘Have you been in this part of the world before?’
‘Never,’ said Fen. ‘It seems very out-of-the-way,’ he added reprovingly. His preferences were not bucolic.
‘You’re staying at the Fish Inn?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I ought perhaps to warn you—’ The girl checked herself. ‘No, never mind.’
‘What’s all this?’ Fen demanded uneasily. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘It was nothing … How long are you here for?’
‘It can’t have been nothing.’
‘Well, anyway, there’s nowhere else for you to stay, even if you wanted to.’
‘But
