Night Train to Lisbon (5 page)

Men,
her uncle had said back in London, on her first afternoon abroad, and Carson had been cau
tioned. But
men,
she realized now, with a shock, on this stark, cold night, wasn't the same as a single, individual
man
—one with a crooked smile, at that.

She blinked in the strange, dim light of this realization, and Alec took her face in his hand, turning it toward his. “Come here,” he said, his voice a whisper, and she obeyed, moving toward him, closing her eyes as his mouth found hers and the wind lifted her hair, and the train continued on along its tracks, unaware that on the platform at its very end, a young American girl—no, a young American woman—was falling in love.

D
isoriented from all that had happened to her aboard the night train, Carson disembarked at the Estação Santa Apolonia and stood on the crowded platform with her aunt and uncle, waiting as their luggage was unloaded by porters. The heat in Lisbon was oppressive even in the early morning, and the sunlight was far stronger than what she was used to. Though on the train there had been a stew of languages and accents, almost all the voices she heard now were speaking Portuguese, the words flying fast and becoming nearly impossible to follow. Carson hadn't slept at all last night. After Alec had kissed her, she'd been unable to calm down at all, and a little later, lying in the upper berth of her bed with her aunt below her, she'd lain wide awake, staring at
the low ceiling and feeling the thudding of her own heart.

Down the corridor, Alec was lying in his own berth. Was he wide awake, too? she wondered, or was kissing a stranger on a train the sort of thing he did every day? She really had no idea at all. After the kiss, they'd stood out in the wind and simply looked at each other. Carson had felt her hair whipping around her head like a corona; she resisted the impulse to smooth it down, to make herself appear perfect. Alec seemed to like looking at her out there with her hair so wild.

“What's going on here?” she'd asked him, as though she were a third party who'd just walked in on a kissing couple. But no, she was one half of that couple, as responsible for the kiss as he was. She'd wanted it without really knowing she'd wanted it, and it had happened. The night had been like some sort of strange fever dream, in which the dreamer finds herself walking through uncharted territory, coming upon sights she's never seen before, all of it swirling in some kind of unreal, endless, rolling mist.

But today was the day when the fever broke and the dreamer was thrust back to blinding, sun-bleached reality. Yes, she'd really kissed this man who was a total stranger. And yes, she'd really liked it. It had happened, all right. They had kissed; they had parted. Now what? Out on the platform at the station in Lisbon, Carson shielded her eyes and looked all around for him.

“What are you doing, Carson?” asked her aunt.

“It's very sunny out,” Carson replied now. “I'm just shielding my eyes.”

“I see.”

Carson looked at her aunt, and noticed a slightly sly expression beneath the impassivity of the gaze. It was as though Jane
knew.
And maybe she did. Maybe that glimpse that Carson's aunt and uncle had gotten of Carson and Alec from their compartment was all they needed to draw their own conclusions. But before Carson had a chance to ask herself whether it mattered what her aunt and uncle might suspect, Alec appeared.

He was approaching from across the platform, lugging one end of a trunk. Freddy was carrying the other end. The two men eased the trunk to the ground, and then Alec took a step toward Carson.

“Good morning,” Alec said quietly.

“Good morning.” Carson heard her own voice. It sounded unnaturally shy and tentative, a tone she'd never needed to adopt with any boy back in Marlowe.

“I realized,” said Alec, “that I forgot to ask where you were staying in Portugal. Will you be right in Lisbon?”

“No,” said Carson. “We'll be in Sintra. We've rented a house. I mean, my aunt and uncle have.”

She turned to indicate her aunt, and Carson saw that both Aunt Jane and Freddy had turned discreetly away. Did everyone know what had happened on the platform last night? Or, more likely, did they merely sense something…unmistakable?

“Excellent,” Alec said. “My friends and I are staying right here in Lisbon, at the Pensão Moderna. But Sintra, according to my map, isn't far away at all. Many people live there and commute to Lisbon every day. Perhaps we can see each other.”

“Yes, perhaps,” said Carson lightly, reverting to her old Marlowe ways, acting as though such a visit might amuse when in fact it was what she wished more than anything she could recall. Unlike Harris Black or any of the boys back home, however, Alec didn't respond to her cool distance by pressing harder. Instead he responded in kind. They traded telephone numbers, and then Alec waved good-bye and headed off into the Estação Santa Apolonia with his friends, leaving Carson to watch him lug his end of the steamer trunk and to wonder whether last night's encounter had meant anything to him at all—and whether she really ever would see him again.

 

The roads in Portugal were both primitive and curvy as the long sedan Uncle Lawrence had rented traveled first westward, then north, to the town of Sintra. The Atlantic, along the Costa da Prata, shone blue and gold in the distance. Occasional castles appeared as if out of nowhere, the architecture old and stately. The three of them had breezed right out of Lisbon, and Carson had barely had a chance to see the city. But the coastal region was entirely different from the chic splendors of either Paris or London. Those cities were
indisputably cosmopolitan, filled with shops and restaurants with gleaming silver, but this landscape was something else altogether. It wasn't about the present; it was about the past. Carson leaned back against the cracked brown leather seat and looked out through the window, silent and awed.

“You know,” said Lawrence as he drove, “Lord Byron once called this town ‘glorious Eden.' And in the nineteenth century it was an absolutely essential stopping place for aristocrats making the grand tour. Not unlike yourself, Carson,” he added.

“Oh, stop,” Jane said. “Don't tease her, Lawrie.”

“I'm not teasing her.”

“That's all right, Lawrence,” Carson said from the backseat. Last night, after Carson had returned from her rendezvous with Alec on the train platform, her aunt had inquired before bed whether Carson could find it in herself to drop the “aunt” and “uncle” when saying their names. Now Carson sat in the rear seat of the sedan and regarded the two of them, this middle-aged couple with reservoirs of worldly experience, and wondered what form a friendship with them could possibly take. Calling either of them by their first names seemed forced. She found it difficult to imagine either of them as ever being more than chaperones—kindly and funny, but chaperones nonetheless. Even now her uncle had slipped into the role of tour guide. He had been to the region before, and as the car bumped into the
village of Sintra, he pointed out the Palacio da Pena.

Carson tried to pay attention. The palacio was a Bavarian castle, her uncle was saying, and then he was saying something about Gothic turrets, and then he was saying something else about a Renaissance dome, but all the while all Carson could think about was Alec. What was he doing now? Was he settling into his hotel room in Lisbon? Was he sitting down on the bed, yawning, closing his eyes?

Was he thinking of her?

Would he ever think about her again?

She would have to put him out of her mind, she decided as the car drove ahead and her uncle continued his travelogue. Maybe the incident on the train would just become one of those memories people had, the kind they remember vaguely and fondly for many years after the fact.
The first kiss, aboard a speeding train in the continent of Europe, when I was but a girl.
Involuntarily, Carson sighed deeply, as though already being forced to turn the thought from action to memory.

From the front seat, Jane craned her head around to get a look at Carson. “Is Lawrence boring you to death?” she asked. “If he is, don't hesitate to say so. I'll make him stop.”

“Nonsense,” said Lawrence. “No one has ever been bored by my travel narration.”

“No one has ever admitted it, you mean,” said his wife.

Carson listened to their playful marital sparring. They were a good couple, she understood, in a way that her own parents were not. Though Lawrence could be severe and distant, there was often real communication between them; it flowed like a current. And there was a parallel sexual current there, too. Though it was none of her business, she could imagine her aunt and uncle caressing each other in bed at night, whereas her own parents seemed so formal and distant. She wondered if her mother and father actually loved each other. In all her life, it had never occurred to her to wonder about this. But now it was as though her brief moment on that train had awakened her to the possibilities of a couple, to what actually being part of a couple might be like. Thinking about all of this, Carson leaned her heavy head against the glass window. There was so much to see out there, she knew, so much unfamiliar landscape and so many curious architectural details and alluring beaches and kettles of Portuguese
linguica
cooking. She was overwhelmed, and despite herself, her eyes dropped shut, and she slept.

“I think this is it,” Jane was saying a little while later, and Carson awoke with a start. The car had stopped in front of a very large villa, its rough walls painted white and its roof composed of red tiles. There were flowers everywhere surrounding the house, and in the distance, the water shone.

“Welcome to the Villa do Giraldo,” said
Lawrence. “We hope you'll be happy here this summer, Carson.”

“Oh, it's beautiful,” she said, her eyes focusing, taking in the grand dimensions of the house. This was a palace of sorts, Carson thought to herself. The water was so inviting in the distance, and the house itself seemed both foreign and comfortable.

Once inside, they all toured the rooms, walking across the ubiquitous cool red stone tile. Carson's bedroom seemed like something not only from another country, but from another century. In the middle of the room was a simple white bed surrounded by a gauze netting that gave it a magical quality. On the wall above the bed hung a cross, and the walls themselves were rough and painted a simple white. Simplicity: that was the dominant sensibility at work here.

“I love it,” said Carson, and as the days passed she did love it there in the Villa do Giraldo. She and Jane and Lawrence went exploring the region, stopping to make the trek up to the Palacio da Pena, and the ruins of a Moorish castle known as the Castelo dos Mouros, which loomed with seeming precariousness from the boulders high above the town proper. As Carson stood so high above the town, she looked down on all of it, and then turned so she was facing southward, toward Lisbon. Somewhere in that teeming city, Alec Breve was sitting, or walking, or eating lunch, or thinking about Carson, or not thinking about her at all.

Three days had passed since the train trip, and
there had not been a word from him. Carson had been determined not to let this trouble her too much, but thoughts about him persisted, especially at night, keeping her awake as she lay beneath the veil that was draped around her bed to keep out industrious mosquitoes.

She was always traveling on that train now. The sights of Sintra, the sinful midnight suppers of crustaceans and drawn butter, her uncle's wry and vivid descriptions of the local history and architecture, the distant lapping of the waves as she lay in bed at night, the intoxicatingly salty air that greeted her with the first morning light—none of these fully distracted Carson. She might be lifting the hem of her skirt and stepping delicately across the very stones, as her uncle assured her, where navigators once stood as they stared across the Atlantic and wondered what lay on the other side, and Carson would find herself thinking instead about that night on the train. When it happened, as it happened, she had wanted it not to end, had wished she could find a way to make it last and last. And in a way, she had. That night hadn't come to an end after all. Carson was trying her best to push all thoughts of Alec from her mind, yet again and again she found herself returning to him, and flushing with the warmth of those memories, and wondering,
What if?

What if she had allowed herself to linger longer? What if she had defied the reasonable expectation of her aunt and uncle, waiting awake back in their sleeping compartments, that their
niece would return to them at a decent hour? What if she'd told Alec in that one windswept moment on the rear platform of the train how she really felt about him? What if he'd told her that he felt the same way about her?

What if she hadn't acted in such a cavalier manner toward him in the train station in Lisbon?

Stop,
she told herself.
Just stop.
Those first days in Sintra she told herself this—tried to tell herself this—again and again, until she had scolded herself raw. She knew she was torturing herself, recalling over and over again that brief period on the train, the wind in her hair, the weight of Alec's jacket on her shoulders, his askew smile hovering above her, drawing nearer, until his lips parted, and then she always told herself:
Stop. Don't think about it.

Until the night she asked herself:
Why not?

 

As she lay awake within the womb of her mosquito netting, the question suddenly appeared to her. Why stop? What was the harm in thinking about the night she'd spent on the train to Lisbon? For one brief, thrilling moment, anything had seemed possible; everything had seemed perfect. The scene was like one of those fairy tales her mother had fed her before bedtime, though she didn't think her parents would exactly agree with her assessment of Alec as a prince. Still, what was the harm in reliving that moment? Why not linger on that platform in her memory in a way she hadn't allowed herself in real life? What
if that kiss had in fact meant to Alec what it meant to her, and they had confessed that truth to each other, and the two of them had stepped off the train in Lisbon together, as a couple? What if Alec were beside her now, if not in this bed in her aunt and uncle's villa, then in another bed, perhaps at his
pensão
? What if the feelings, the sensations she'd experienced on the rear platform of the night train to Lisbon, could somehow last forever?

And with this happily-ever-after fairy-tale premise playing itself out in her head, Carson fell asleep.