Chapter 3

A Little Train

I'm an illustrator. When I don't know what to say, I draw. It's a manufacturing fault I've had since nursery school, where, according to my mother, I answered the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with a drawing of a giraffe in a wedding dress. Nobody ever worked out what it meant. Neither did I.

So that Tuesday, between Gembloux and Ottignies, I held my pencil over page 47 for a good ten minutes, hunting for a witty reply to “Neither”, and came up with nothing. Everything I wrote in my head sounded like a corporate Christmas card. So, beneath his sentence, I drew.

A little train. Three carriages, a round engine with a funnel of the kind no train has had for fifty years, wheels like buttons. And at the window of the last carriage, instead of a face, a question mark. A big, plump one, with a little dot underneath that looked as if it were holding a suitcase.

I looked at it. It was sweet. It was even, dare I say it, rather good. It asked the question I didn't dare write: who are you? But it asked it the way you ask a child playing hide-and-seek: without insisting that he come out.

At Brussels-Central I stood up in time, put the book in the middle of the seat and got off without turning round. I was getting the hang of it.

On Wednesday there were two books on my seat.

Mine, first of all: The Life Before Us, with its coffee stain and its shopping list from 2019. I opened it at page 47. My little train was there. Under my little train, nothing. Not a word. The disappointment was so violent it made me ashamed of myself, until I noticed the other book.

It was lying on top of mine, slightly askew. Another paperback, but from another era, with the kind of eighties cover you find at the second-hand booksellers on rue de la Croix in Namur for two euros and a bit of dust: Froth on the Daydream, by Boris Vian. It had been read, a great deal, but with care. The spine was supple, not broken. It smelt of old paper and, underneath that, of something else, something woody and warm, like the inside of a violin shop.

I opened the cover. On the flyleaf, in pencil, in the slanting hand:

“I liked your train. It was a carriage short. Here it is.”

And his signature underneath. I was starting to find this catapult rather charming.

I hugged the book to me like a schoolgirl, which is ridiculous at thirty-one on a train full of European civil servants. Then I sat down, with great dignity, and read the first few pages before the train had even moved.

I knew Froth on the Daydream, of course. Everyone knows it, or thinks they do: you read it at sixteen and you remember a water lily, a mouse and an ending that makes you cry. I'd read it at sixteen, I'd kept the water lily, the mouse and the ending, and nothing else. I didn't remember it being so funny. I didn't remember it being so tender.

And above all, I didn't remember the pianocktail.

The pianocktail is the piano Colin has invented, where every note corresponds to a spirit, so that when you play a tune you get a cocktail. I burst out laughing between Ottignies and Brussels-Luxembourg, when Colin explains his contraption. And in the margin, right next to it, there was a note in pencil. Not a correction, this time. A confession.

“The only piano in the world I would refuse to tune.”

I thought it was funny. I thought: he has a sense of humour, he loves music, he knows enough about pianos to know they need tuning. I thought it was a bookish sort of joke. I thought nothing else. I still wonder, even now, how you can hold the truth in your hands for so long without seeing it.

I read on. There were other notes, not many, spaced out, like white pebbles in a wood. A light line beneath a sentence about snow. A tiny exclamation mark beside a passage about the mouse. And, a few pages further on, these words, very small: “Here, read on three lines further down.” I did. Obviously.

The rules of the game set themselves, the way they do in a sandpit between two children who don't speak the same language. Nobody said them out loud. Everybody kept to them.

One book at a time. Pencil, never pen. I left it on the seat at Brussels-Central when I got off; it came back to my seat one or two mornings later, when I stepped into carriage 4. I didn't know how. I didn't want to know. I never once tried to stay behind and watch, or lie in wait, or miss my stop on purpose. There are some magic tricks you don't want to know the secret of.

No first name. No phone number. No direct question about who he was: my little question mark at the train window had been the only one, and he hadn't answered it, which was an answer.

He wrote. I drew. Or rather, I wrote a little and drew a lot. A mouse next to the mouse. A water lily in the margin, with a little arrow: “not that one, that one's nasty”. And at the bottom of every reply, by way of a signature, my little train. Three carriages, a round engine. He had his fork, I had my train. We were quits.

“You've got a pen pal,” said Patrick on the Friday, handing me my crème.

I nearly dropped the cup.

“How do you know that?”

“I don't know anything,” he said. “But you're smiling at your bag.”

“You fancy him,” said Inès.

“Who?”

“Don't you 'who' me. The Reader.”

She was the one who first called him that. The Reader, with a capital letter you could hear when she said it. The name stuck.

“I can't fancy him. I don't know what he looks like.”

“So? You spent six years knowing exactly what Thomas looked like, first thing in the morning included, and look where that got you.”

“Lyon,” I said. “Well, him.”

“Exactly.” She bit into an apple. “The Reader, at least, reads. Thomas read the labels on craft beer.”

I didn't answer, because she was right, and I hate it when Inès is right before midday.

“And do you remember your promise? Nine years?”

“This isn't about love. It's about literature.”

“Of course,” said Inès. “That's how all the great literary love stories begin.”

And then there was the train guard.

I'd found out his first name on the Monday, by accident. The train had stopped at Ottignies, and a colleague in uniform on the platform had shouted through the open door, “Maxime! Your bar!” as he threw him a cereal bar, which Maxime had caught one-handed without even looking, with the ease of a rugby player. The whole of carriage 4 had applauded. He'd taken a bow, cap over his heart.

Maxime. It suited him. A name that laughs loudly.

Since the Monday, I'd been drawing him. Not from the front: I wouldn't have dared. From behind, in the aisle, his shoulders filling his navy-blue jacket. His profile bent over a passenger looking for a ticket. His hand holding the little ticket machine. I'd filled four pages. I hid them under a hedgehog.

And here is what I did that Wednesday, with Froth on the Daydream on my lap, while Maxime made his way up the aisle saying “Morning, morning” in his warm voice: I decided it was him.

Not for long. A second, perhaps. But I thought it, and it was a delicious second. After all, he came through carriage 4 every morning. He'd been there the day I left the book behind. He saw everything, he went everywhere, he had access to every seat at every stop. He was, objectively speaking, the ideal suspect. And he had big hands, and I'd thought since the very first day that they were hands that could have held a pencil delicately, cereal bar notwithstanding.

He drew level with me. I held out my season ticket. He scanned it. And instead of moving on, as usual, he glanced down at the book I was holding.

“Oh,” he said. “You've changed books.”

My mouth fell open. The train took a bend. Somewhere behind me, very far away, I thought I heard a clear note, just one, like a teaspoon against a glass, and then nothing.

“You noticed?” I managed to say.

Maxime smiled, the smile that lit up tunnels.

“I notice everything,” he said. “It's the job.”

And he winked at me.