Read 1915 for Free Online Page B

together,” he caught Frances’s view of Billy and tried to worsen it, “primary school. He left early.”
    But Frances talked on: “Something else happened.” Now she peered out the window herself, blowing an oval of mist, erasing it line by line with a gloved finger. The train slowed through a long curve before entering a tunnel. “He and Dad were friendly enough at dinner, but the next morning Dad was angry with him.” Her voice trailed. “Something horrible happened. I don’t know what.”
    With a gulp the compartment filled with noise and they were in the tunnel. Frances prepared to shout the beginnings of an explanation and then thought better of it. She unfolded her travelling rug and arranged it on her lap. The overhead lamps wasted away as blue licks of flame guttered in the mantles. She dropped her shoes to the floor and tucked her feet under the rug. Walter fetched his own rug from the luggage rack, in the process leaning over her. Sleepily she readjusted her position and bumped him on the knee. “Sorry,” she mouthed. Goose-bumps climbed the inside of his leg. Deep ahead the engine puffed breathlessly through constricted space. The wheels ground and squeaked, the air swirled and peppered them with soot. Frances huddled into herself, the blanket crept higher. Walter gazed at dark lashes on pale skin, at hands in an oddly formal clasp peering from a gap of blanket, at a hump formed by swaying knees.
    Abruptly they slid from stuffy darkness onto a frosted upland. The silence after the underground roar was almost complete: a faint click-click of wheels, amurmur of movement — that was all. The effect was of bodiless gliding across vast sheets of phosphorescent water. The women slept and Walter sat guarding them — he was happy. Whenever he opened his eyes — Frances. Billy receded to a tiny dot under a remote pool of light on Parkes station, which then sank below the horizon.
    At a late, indeterminate hour Walter woke again. He listened for a while to the knock of steel on steel. The figures of Frances and the old lady were like exhibits of exhausted life in a museum, making the same repeated movements — the tremble of a chin, the sway of a loose strand of hair — over and over as though controlled by a system of rods and wires.
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    When Walter woke at five in the morning clusters of houses, mysterious candleflame, dived at the train and drifted back into obscurity. Occasionally a light flashed in the distance keeping pace for a few minutes before looping behind. With a premonitory rattle of windows and then a loud bang a dark goods train rushed past. The cold of the outside world had now completely taken over from the airless cold of the compartment. Icy air slipped through hidden crevices in the floor. Walter stood and stamped his feet, rubbed his hands and hitched his blanket more securely around his shoulders. As he did so he noticed that Frances’s blanket had slipped, so he slowly drew it up again, daring her not to wake. He stayed looking at her face: and suddenly she woke. Her black shining eyes stared as though she had been awake all along behind carved lids.
    â€œThanks.”
    He was close enough to feel the puff of breath that formed the word, a sweet-smelling association of saliva and warmed air. “That was kind of you,” she said in the next breath, while his heart pounded.
    â€œOh, I’m stiff,” Mrs Stinson spoke from her corner, “and freezing cold.” She thumped herself into a new position. The tail-end of Frances’s gaze disappeared into a secret hiding place that closed over. “Nobody will sleep now that I’m awake,” commanded the old lady. She revealed a florid capability that had not been visible the night before, pointing to her hamper on the luggage rack and directing Walter to fetch it down. “Let’s have breakfast!” The giggle of her youth had aged to a hum of