Chapter 17: The Other Trains

The office had a window, and for the first three days Vashti did not know what to do with it.

It was a real window, plate glass, the kind that cost a fortune and announced one. She had spent eleven years walking twenty-nine carriages to borrow a view like it from a public bench, and now she had one of her own, in the wall of a small clean room in the front-middle with a door that latched and a key in her pocket. She found she could not work facing it. The country went by outside, the actual country she had given her life to watching, and having it always there, free and unearned, made it harder to see rather than easier. So she turned the desk to face the wall instead, the long blank wall she had been told she could pin whatever she liked to, and pinned her maps to it in order, and the composite beside them, and worked with the window at her back. That, it turned out, was how she could think.

Casper came most days. He had a reason to now, a formal one, and it still visibly unnerved him: he was allowed to read the records, all of them, the cabinet with the screw opened into his keeping by an Office that preferred him inside the tent. The permission sat on him stranger than the prohibition ever had. A man can build a whole self around not being allowed to do a thing. Take the prohibition away and he has to find out who he is with the door open, and Casper was finding out slowly, in Vashti’s new office, with forty years of omissions spread legally in front of him for the first time in his life, squaring the edges of each sheet before he read it.

Elliot had told them both, the evening after, what had been said behind the dark door — in order, without decoration, the word attended and the stop before the name and the chain of telling three chairs deep. He had told it once and not gone back over it. Since then he dropped in, which was the casual verb for a thing that was not casual. On the eighth day he came in with the restless look she had learned meant he had been thinking, and leaned on the wall by the window with the country going by behind his shoulder, and said the thing they had all been walking round for a week.

“It’s not just us,” he said.

Casper did not look up. “It is, though.”

Elliot waited.

“I notice —” Casper stopped, and put the sheet down, and made himself finish. “I’d be failing in my duty if I didn’t say it. What we’ve got is one train’s Office. One cabinet. One screw. Three hands, all ours.” He squared the sheet against the others. “That’s a local secret. I can’t call a local secret everywhere because it would be tidier. If I’d done that with the victualling ledgers I’d have proved the stores department was hiding the moon.”

“The track isn’t local,” said Vashti.

They both looked at her.

She got up and went to the composite and put her finger on the thickest of the clusters, where the marks lay closest together on the whole sheet. “That’s the crossing with the Calloway. That track isn’t ours. It’s shared with whatever comes alongside.” She moved the finger to the next. “So’s that. The marks are thickest where we touch other trains.”

“So the track grows on their stretches too,” said Casper. “Granted. I’ll — granted. That’s the ground. That’s not their offices knowing about it.”

“No,” said Elliot. “That’s what I’ve got.”

He came off the wall.

“I’ve stood in that court,” he said. “Sable’s. The Calloway’s Conductor, at the head of her own table, in front of her own people. She told them she’d been twenty years in the chair, and that the whole time there’d been a room in her office she’d never once visited. Papers went through it that never came to her. She’d allowed it, because when she took the chair the people who’d kept it before her told her some things in an office are older than the person sitting in it.” He was quiet for a moment. “She knew there was a room. She’d never been in it. Twenty years.”

Casper had stopped squaring the sheets.

“And she said one other thing, about her and ours,” said Elliot. “That they’d spent a long while saying very little to each other, very politely, every seven years.” He turned the small brass token over in his fingers, an old habit, and Vashti had seen it once before, in 74, and knew now what it meant: that he was deciding how much to give. “I thought that was manners. I think now very little was all either of them was allowed.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“That’s two offices,” said Casper at last. He said it carefully, a man taking a measurement he did not like. “Two isn’t every.”

“No,” said Elliot. “But I used to work for a firm with branch offices, before. If one branch made a mistake, it was a mistake. If two branches made the same mistake, in the same font, on the same day, it wasn’t a mistake. It was a memo.” He put the token away. “Somebody sent the memo.”

“Somebody,” said Casper, very quietly, “or something.”

“I don’t know. Neither does ours. That’s the bit I’d put money on.”

Casper looked down at the sheets in front of him: the square hand and the sloped hand and the recent one, keeping, for forty years, something they had never been told the meaning of. He was a long time looking.

“If it’s two —” he said. “I’m not saying it’s two. But if it’s two, then on every train there’d be someone like the square hand. Keeping the proof, not told what it’s for. And a Conductor above them who’s told and not shown.” He stopped.

“Two lonely people,” said Elliot. “At the top of two trains. Each holding a corner of something, and allowed to meet once in seven years to hold the corners up side by side and see if they match.” He looked out of the window, at the country. “They’re not running it. I want to get that right. Whatever it is, they’re not running it.”

“And there are more than two trains,” said Vashti.

“There are a lot more than two trains.”

She let it land. She stood in front of the wall and let it land properly, as she had let the stone land, and the size of it was this: the curve she had caught easing at Grenholm with a piece of string was one stretch of one loop of one train. The marks on her composite ran out to the crossings and stopped at the edge of her sheet, and past the edge of her sheet there was track she would never ride, under trains she would never see, kept by offices that did not know each other’s names. The track grew. The forgetting was done. The Conductor of this train had reached for the same word for both of them as a woman who had never been further than her wood. She did not know that it was all one thing. She knew that it was all attended the same way, and on a map, when two roads are kept the same way by people who have never met, that is how you begin to wonder whether they were laid by the same hand.

She was not going to say so. It was not a measurement.

“We’ve got one piece,” she said. “The best anyone’s had. And it’s still one piece.”

“I was hoping you’d talk me out of it,” said Elliot.

“I don’t talk people out of true things.”

“No,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”

Casper laughed, once, a short surprised sound, and then looked as though he wished he hadn’t, and then didn’t seem to mind.

Vashti turned back to the composite: eleven years of maps and forty years of cabinets, the most complete corner anyone had made of a thing with no edges she could find. In the top corner of the sheet, in the clean margin where the next loop’s measurements would go when the western approaches came round again — the better part of a year off yet — she took up her pencil and made a single small mark.

She drew it carefully, because she drew everything carefully. A question mark. It was the first thing in eleven years of maps she had set down that was not a measurement, drawn neat and small and exact in the corner of everything she was sure of.

Then she put the pencil down beside it, and nobody said anything about it. After a while Casper drew the next sheet towards him and squared it. Elliot stayed where he was, against the wall. And behind the three of them, through the plate glass, the country went on going by, unwatched for once by anybody in the room.