All Souls Read Free Page A

Fridays or Saturdays on my return from the capital where I had nowhere to sleep unless I stayed in a hotel, a luxury I could only permit myself from time to time. Usually I chose to return home and, if necessary, to travel down again the following morning if something or someone required my presence there – Londonis less than an hour away on the fast train. The midnight train from London to Oxford, however, was not fast, but any inconvenience this caused me was compensated for by the pleasure of spending another hour in the company of my friends Guillermo and Miriam, a married couple who lived in South Kensington and whose conversation and hospitality formed the final stage of those days spent wandering the streets of London. Catching that last train involved changing at Didcot, a town of which I have never seen more than its gloomy station, and that only after dusk. The second train, which was to transport us with incomprehensible slowness from there to Oxford, would not always be standing ready at its platform for the arrival of the six or seven passengers from London making the connection (British Rail obviously believed any travellers on that train to be inveterate nightbirds who would not in the least mind getting to their beds a little later still) and then I would be forced to wait at the silent, empty station, which, so far as one could make out in the darkness, appeared to be entirely cut off from the town it served and to be surrounded on all sides by countryside, as if it were some rural halt.
    In England strangers rarely talk to each other, not even on trains or during long waits, and the night silence of Didcot station is one of the deepest I've ever known. The silence seems even deeper when broken by voices or by isolated, intermittent noises, the screech of a wagon, for example, that suddenly and enigmatically moves a few yards then stops, or the unintelligible cry of a porter whom the cold wakes from a short nap (rescuing him from a bad dream), or the abrupt, distant thud of crates that invisible hands quite gratuitously decide to shift despite the complete absence of any urgency, at a time when everything seems infinitely postponable, or the metallic crunch of a beer can being crushed up then thrown into a litter bin, or the modest flight of a single errant page from a newspaper, or my own footsteps vainly pacing to the edge of the platform and backjust to pass the time. A few lamps, placed some yards apart (so as not to squander electricity) timidly light those as yet unswept platforms that resemble the aftermath of some rather pathetic street party. (The women who will sweep them in the morning lie dreaming now in darkest Didcot.) In the hesitant light of each lamp, you can just make out brief stretches of platform and railway lines, just as one lamp lights both my own face framed by the turned-up collar of my navy blue coat and a woman's shoes and ankles whose owner remains engulfed in shadow. All I can see is the shape of a seated figure in a raincoat and the glow of the cigarettes that she, like me, smokes during the wait, even longer than usual that night. The shoes were lightly tapping out a rhythm on the platform, as if the person wearing them could still hear in her head the music she'd perhaps spent the whole evening dancing to; they were the shoes of an adolescent or an ingenue dancer, low-heeled with a buckle and rounded toes. They were very English shoes and kept my eyes swivelled in their direction, making the interminable hour spent in Didcot station more bearable. The butts of our respective cigarettes consorted on the ground. Whilst I flicked mine - using a genuine papirotazo — towards the edge of the platform over which they occasionally failed to fall, she tossed hers in the same direction with an arm movement reminiscent of someone rather feebly throwing a ball. And when she made that movement, her hand entered the beam of light allowing, for a fraction of a second, just the glimpse of