A Woman I met on the train

It was fairly inevitable I suppose.  The train was not that busy but not having perfected, or employed, a kind of menacing force-field around me, someone was bound to sit on the other side of the table.  It was a table after all, and as much as I insist on facing the rear (“you should always have your back to the engine” Audrey fforbes-Hamilton would say), there are just as many or more who prefer to face the front and thus this is a plumb seat.  And she got it. 

            She sat down, faffed as people do when they sit down in railway carriages, fiddled with the newspaper sections she had and the plastic bag they were in.  She set down a drink on the table.  No food though, so we were spared that.  She has unconvincingly-fake-tanned skin on her face, with a foundation that neither covered it, nor matched it, nor suited her.  Her face was adorned by synthetically coloured hair that was as obvious as the vertical wrinkles on her upper lip, spaced a couple of millimetres apart, that are only possessed of women who have smoked regularly in young adulthood but given up later on; we see her now less than a decade before the modern answer to middle age.  After reading the free London newspaper that is only ever read out of boredom or by fools who wish to look intellectual, she opened her plastic quarter-bottle of cheap new-world white wine, and proceeded to drink it out of a plastic water cup that looked as though it had been taken from a water cooler. 

But.

This was unselfconsciously done.  The poured cups were not filled to the brim, she was not drinking it this way simply to avoid drinking it out of the bottle, this is how she liked it.  By this time she had moved on to reading the travel section of a Sunday broadsheet, and cracked open the reading glasses.  The combination of this and the time since, had settled her.  This was not to last however, and the colour supplement was replaced by an A5 catalogue from a budget supermarket from which she proceeded to tear a selection of pages.  These were to keep rather than to throw away one imagined.  They were recipes the pictures of which seemed to consist predominantly of green salad vegetables, and sweet cakes.  Not cakes merely for tea, but those that could only involve children.  Young children?  How would that work for a woman in her mid-40s? 

Of course.  Her lack of bright pastel colours had failed to alert me sooner.  Her wedding band and engagement ring were a pleasant silver, with the latter containing a single stone.  Tasteful, both of them.  Clean, tidy hands, but not lazy ones.  The care and attention was undoubtedly the result of the new lease of life afforded by hormone replacement therapy that somehow unaccountably took years off her.  That is how a woman in her mid-40s happened to be baking cakes for her otherwise unborn grandchildren on a train to Lingfield in late spring.

We never spoke a word of course.  This is the south of England, a place where one of the last bastions of what was once a much more ‘correct’ social structure is still observed.  Of course it exists now for more and different reasons than once it did.  First, it is easier not to talk than to talk.  Second, third, fourth and fifth, we have smart-phones and laptops and books and newspapers to busy ourselves on railway journeys.  And so the silence has lived on; it is as silent as ever it was, but it survives because it has evolved.  Other privacy has vanished of course.  Health records, how much money one has and where one has been and what has been done are far more readily available and they ever were, I feel sure.  The idea of privacy has changed out of all recognition.  Many of the manifestations of it in days of olde have disappeared.  Of course servants ate in the Servants’ hall and this was tucked away at the bottom of the house or right at the top.  How else were the staff to be given any privacy?  Of course their lot was not palatial – but surely no one was expecting that.  Rather as now, the lot of a Polish immigrant who works on building sites on the minimum wage is not palatial.  And he does not, as they did not, scurry.  Servants do not scurry.  Good ones at least do not.  Why would they? 

Oddly though, this structure also provided for the privacy of the above-stairs protagonists.  They do not have to eat in front of the staff, any more than the other way around.  I wonder how many would dissent from that now.  Even on a railway carriage: no one wants to eat ad hoc on a train.  We do because we are hungry or bored or disorganised but a choice between that and even the buffet car—for the time they are left on the network—is not a hard one to make, even for the uninitiated. 

But neither of us ate so no indignity could befall us, nor could any snobbery.