Night Music (2 page)

It was at this point that he spotted a woman passing through the overgrown bushes a little farther down the line. He had noticed before a trail of sorts there, for the branches of shrubs had been broken in places, but it was a poor substitute for his own path, and he had no desire to damage his clothing or his skin on briars. The woman wore a dark dress, but what caught Berger's eye was the little red bag she carried on her arm. It seemed in such stark contrast to the rest of her attire. He tried to see her face, but the angle of her progress concealed it from him.

At that moment he heard a distant whistle, and the stile beneath him started to vibrate. The express, the last train of the evening, was approaching. He could see its lights through the trees as it came. He looked again to his right. The woman had stopped, for she, too, had heard the sound. Mr. Berger expected her to pause and wait for the train to pass, but she did not. Instead, she hastened her steps. Perhaps she wishes to be across the track before it comes, thought Mr. Berger, but that was a risky business. It was easy to misjudge distances under such circumstances, and he had heard tales of those who had caught a foot on a sleeper, or stumbled while rushing, and the train had been the end of them.

“Ho!” he called. “Wait!”

Instinctively, he stepped down from the stile and walked quickly toward her. The woman turned at the sound of his voice. Even from a distance, Mr. Berger could see that she was beautiful. Her face was pale, but she did not seem distressed. There was about her an eerie, unsettling calm.

“Don't try to cross!” he shouted. “Let the train pass.”

The woman emerged from the bushes. She hitched up her skirts, showing a pair of laced ankle boots, and proceeded to climb up the embankment. Now Mr. Berger was running, but he continued to call to her, even as the express grew louder before passing him in a flash of noise and light and diesel. He saw the woman cast aside her red bag, draw her head between her shoulders, and, with her arms outstretched, throw herself on her knees before the train.

Mr. Berger flinched. The angle of the line meant that he did not witness the moment of impact, and any sounds of distress were lost in the roar of the engine. When he opened his eyes, the figure was gone and the train was continuing on its way.

Mr. Berger ran to the spot at which he had last seen the woman. He steeled himself for the worst, expecting to find the track mired with gore and body parts, but there was nothing. He had no experience of such matters, though, and had no idea whether a train striking a person at such a speed would leave a great mess or none at all. It was possible that the force of it had sent fragments of the woman in all directions, or even that it had carried her broken frame farther down the track. After searching the bushes by the point of impact he followed the line for a time, but discovered no blood, and no sign of a body. He could not even find the woman's discarded red bag. Still, he had seen her, of that he had no doubt. He had not imagined it.

He was now closer to the town than he was to his home. There was no police station in Glossom, but there was one in Moreham, some five miles away. Mr. Berger walked quickly to the public telephone at the old station house, and from there he called the police and told them about what he had witnessed. Then, as instructed, he sat on the bench outside the station and waited for the patrol car to arrive.

The police did much the same as Mr. Berger had done, only with greater numbers and at greater expense in man-hours and overtime payments. They searched the bushes and the track, and inquiries were made in Glossom in case any female residents had gone missing. The driver of the train was contacted, and the train was kept on the platform at Plymouth for an hour while its engine and carriages were examined for any sign of human remains.

Finally, Mr. Berger, who had remained seated on a stile throughout the search, was interviewed for a second time by the inspector from Moreham. His name was Carswell, and his manner when he confronted Mr. Berger was colder than it had originally been. A light rain had begun to fall shortly after the search for a body had commenced, and Carswell and his men were now damp and weary. Mr. Berger was also wet, and found that he had developed a slight but constant shiver. He suspected that he might be in shock. He had never witnessed a person's death before. It had affected him deeply.

Now Inspector Carswell stood in the growing dark, his hat jammed on his head and his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his coat. His men were packing up, and a pair of dogs that had been brought in to help with the search was being led back to the van in which they had arrived. The townspeople who had gathered to watch were also drifting away, but not without a final curious glance at the figure of Mr. Berger.

“Let's go through it again, shall we?” said Carswell, and Mr. Berger told his story one last time. The details remained the same. He was certain of what he had witnessed.

“I have to tell you,” said Carswell, when Mr. Berger had finished speaking, “that the driver of the train saw nothing, and was unaware of any impact. As you can imagine, he was quite shocked to hear that a woman had been reported as throwing herself under his wheels. He aided in the examination of the train himself. It turns out that he has some unfortunate experience of such matters. Before he was promoted to driver, he was a fireman on an engine that struck a man near Coleford Junction. He told us that the driver saw the man on the rails but couldn't brake in time. The engine made a terrible mess of the poor fellow, he said. There was no mistaking what had happened. He seems to think that, if he had somehow hit a woman without knowing, we'd have no trouble finding her remains.”

Carswell lit a cigarette. He offered one to Mr. Berger, who declined. He preferred his pipe, even though it had long since gone out.

“Do you live alone, sir?” asked Carswell.

“Yes, I do.”

“From what I understand, you moved to Glossom fairly recently.”

“That's correct. My mother died, and she left me her cottage.”

“And you say that you're a writer?”

“Trying to be a writer. I've started to wonder if I'm really destined to be any good at it, to be honest.”

“Solitary business, writing, or so I would imagine.”

“It does tend to be, yes.”

“You're not married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No,” said Mr. Berger, then added, “not at the moment.”

He didn't want Inspector Carswell to think that there might be anything odd or unsavory about his bachelor existence.

“Ah.”

Carswell drew deeply on his cigarette.

“Do you miss her?”

“Miss who?”

“Your mother.”

Mr. Berger considered it an odd question to ask, but answered nonetheless.

“Of course,” he said. “I would visit her when I could, and we spoke on the telephone once a week.”

Carswell nodded, as if this explained a lot.

“Must be strange, coming to a new town and living in the house in which your mother died. She passed away at home, didn't she?”

Mr. Berger thought that Inspector Carswell seemed to know a lot about his mother. Clearly, he had not just been asking about a missing woman during his time in Glossom.

“Yes, she did,” he replied. “Forgive me, Inspector, but what has this got to do with the incident on the line?”

Carswell took the cigarette from his mouth and examined the burning tip, as though some answer might be found in the ash.

“I'm beginning to wonder if you might not have been mistaken in what you saw,” he said.

“Mistaken? How can one be mistaken about a suicide?”

“There is no body, sir. There's no blood, no clothing, nothing. We haven't even been able to find the red bag that you mentioned. There's no sign that anything untoward happened on the track at all. So . . .”

Carswell took one last drag on his cigarette, then dropped it on the dirt and ground it out forcefully with the heel of his shoe.

“Let's just say that you were mistaken, and leave it at that, shall we? Perhaps you might like to find some other way to occupy your evenings, now that winter is setting in. Join the bridge club, or take up singing in the church choir. You might even find a young lady to walk out with. What I'm saying is, you've had a traumatic time of it, and it would be good for you not to spend so many hours alone. That way, you'll avoid making mistakes of this nature again. You do understand me, don't you, sir?”

The implication was clear. Being mistaken was not a crime, but wasting police time was. Mr. Berger climbed down from the stile.

“I know what I saw, Inspector,” he said, but it was all that he could do to keep the doubt from creeping into his voice, and his mind was troubled as he took the path back to his little cottage.

It should come as no surprise to learn that Mr. Berger slept little that night. Over and over he replayed the scene of the woman's demise, and although he had not witnessed the actual moment of impact, still he saw and heard it in the silence of the bedroom. To calm himself, he had taken a large glass of his late mother's brandy upon his arrival home, but he was not used to spirits and the alcohol sat ill with him. He grew delirious in his bed, and so often did the woman's death play out before him that he began to believe that this evening was not the first time he had been present at her passing. A peculiar sense of déjà vu overcame him, one that he was entirely unable to shrug off. Sometimes, when he was ill or feverish, a tune or song would lodge itself in his mind. So entrenched would its hooks become that it would keep him from sleep, and he would be unable to exorcise it until the sickness had passed. Now he was having the same experience with his vision of the woman's death, and its repetitive nature was leading him to believe that he had already been familiar with the scene before he was present at it.

At last, thankfully, weariness overcame him and he was able to rest, but when he woke the next morning that nagging feeling of familiarity remained. He put on his coat and returned to the scene of the previous evening's excitement. He walked the rough trail, hoping to find something that the police might have missed, a sign that he had not been the victim of an overactive imagination—a scrap of black cloth, the heel of a shoe, or the red bag—but there was nothing.

It was the red bag that bothered him most of all. The red bag was the thing. With his mind unfogged by alcohol—although, in truth, his head still swam slightly in the aftermath—he grew more and more certain that the suicide of the young woman reminded him of a scene in a book: no, not just
a
scene, but perhaps the most famous scene of locomotive-based self-immolation in literature. He gave up his physical search and decided to embark on a more literary one.

He had long ago unpacked his books, although he had not yet found shelves for them all, his mother's love of reading not matching his own, thus leading to her preference for large swathes of bare wall that she had seen fit to adorn only with cheap reproductions of sea views. There was still more room for his volumes than there had been in his own lodgings, due in no small part to the fact that the cottage had more floor space than his flat, and all a true bibliophile needs for his storage purposes is a horizontal plane. He found his copy of
Anna Karenina
sandwiched in a pile on the dining room floor between
War and Peace
and
Master and Man and Other Parables and Tales
, the latter in a nice Everyman's Library edition from 1946 about which he had forgotten, and which almost led him to set aside
Anna Karenina
in favor of an hour or so in its company. Good sense quickly prevailed, although not before he had put
Master and Man
on the dining table for further examination at a more convenient time. There it joined a dozen similarly blessed volumes, all of which had been waiting for days or weeks for their hour to come at last.

He sat in an armchair and opened
Anna Karenina
(Limited Editions Club, Cambridge, 1951, signed by Barnett Freedman, unearthed at a jumble sale in Gloucester and acquired for such a low price that Mr. Berger had later made a donation to charity in order to salve his conscience). He flipped through the pages until he found Chapter XXXI, which began with the words “A bell sounded . . .” From there he read on quickly but carefully, traveling with Anna past Piotr in his livery and top-boots, past the saucy conductor and the woman deformed, past the dirty hunchback
muzhik
until finally he came to this passage:

She was going to throw herself under the first car as its center came opposite where she stood. Her little red travelling-bag caused her to lose the moment; she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul a whole series of memories of her youth and childhood; and suddenly the darkness which hid everything from her was torn asunder. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her. But she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the center, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. For a second she was horror-struck at what she was doing.

“Where am I? What am I doing? Why?”

She tried to get up, to draw back; but something monstrous, inflexible, struck her head, and threw her on her back.

“Lord, forgive me all!” she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.

A little
muzhik
was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.

And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.