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did not speak to her, nor she to them. She travelled once overnight from Milan, alone in a compartment with a girl who was reading the same book she herself was reading; a book both of them might have been proud to acknowledge and not a word did they exchange. Another time, in a crowded train from Edinburgh, she sat opposite a woman who started to weep as the train left the station; she wept silently and effortlessly for hours, great tears rolling down her white cheeks into the neck of her emerald-green sweater, and at York Helen offered her a cigarette, and she declined it, and ceased weeping. On another occasion a man kissed her in a corridor as they drew into Oxford; she liked him, he was a lovely man, but he was drunk and she turned away her face and turned up the collar of her coat.
    And yet despite these wasted opportunities she continued to expect. Truly, she thought to herself, as she got onto the London train at Reading Station late one cold night, truly, it is a proof of madness that the prospect of this journey should not appal. It is cold, the train is half an hour late, I am hungry; this is the kind of situation about which I hear my friends most tirelessly and tiresomely complain. And yet I am looking forward to it. I shall sit here in the dark and the cold, with nothing to watch but the reflection of my own face in the cold pane, and I shall not care. As soon as the train moves, I shallsit back, and feel it move with me, and feel that I am moving, although I know quite well that all I am doing is going back home again to an empty flat. There will be rain and steam on the glass of this window by my face, and I shall look at it, and that will be all. What a hardened case I am, that such dull mileage should recall those other landscapes, those snowy precipices, those sunny plains, those fields of corn, those gritty swaying breakfasts in the pale light of transient Switzerland or angel-watched Marseilles. I am a child, I like to rock and dream, I dream as if I were in a cradle.
    And she shut her eyes, waiting for the whistle and the metallic connections of machinery; so with her eyes shut she did not see the man come into the compartment, and could never know for certain whether he had seen her, whether he had joined her because he had wanted to join her. All she knew was that when she opened her eyes, aware of the intrusion, aware of the draught from the opened door, he was already there, putting his overcoat up on the rack, arranging his books and papers on the seat next to him, settling himself in the empty compartment as far away from her as he could, on the corridor side, diagonally opposite, where she could not fail to watch him. She turned her fur collar up defensively against her face, and arranged her legs more tidily together, and opened her book upon her knee, disclaiming all threat of human contact, coldly repelling any acknowledgement of her presence, and all the time she watched him discreetly through her half-shut eyes. Because the truth was that not since she was seventeen, more years ago than she cared to think, had she sat on a train so near to such a man. When she was seventeen she had sat in a compartment with an actor, on the late-night train to Brighton, and he had talked to her all the way, and amused her by imitating Laurence Olivier for her and other famous men whom she did not recognize,and when they had parted on the station he had kissed her soft and girlish and impressionable cheek, and murmured, ‘Bless you, bless you,’ as though he had a right to bless. She had subsequently followed his unremarkable career, catching sight of his name in the Radio Times , admiring him once on the television, glimpsing him as he passed on the cinema screen; she felt quietly possessive about him, quietly amused by her sense of intimacy with one who must so long ago have forgotten her, and who would hardly now recognize her from what she then had been. Sometimes she wondered idly whether her