To the Ends of the Earth

I REMEMBER MISTER DUFFILL BECAUSE HIS NAME LATER BECAME a verb—Molesworth’s, then mine. He was just ahead of me in the line at Platform 7 at Victoria, “Continental Departures.” He was old and his clothes were far too big for him, so he might have left in a hurry and grabbed the wrong clothes, or perhaps he’d just come out of the hospital. He walked treading his trouser cuffs to rags and carried many oddly shaped parcels wrapped in string and brown paper—more the luggage of an incautiously busy bomber than of an intrepid traveler. The tags were fluttering in the draft from the track, and each gave his name as R. Duffill and his address as Splendid Palas Hotel, Istanbul. We would be traveling together. A satirical widow in a severe veil might have been more welcome, and if her satchel was full of gin and an inheritance, so much the better. But there was no widow; there were hikers, returning Continentals with Harrods shopping bags, salesmen, French girls with sour friends, and gray-haired English couples who appeared to be embarking, with armloads of novels, on expensive literary adulteries. None would get farther than Ljubljana. Duffill was for Istanbul—I wondered what his excuse was. I was doing a bunk, myself. I hadn’t nailed my colors to the mast; I had no job—no one would notice me falling silent, kissing my wife, and boarding the 15:30 alone.

The train was rumbling through Clapham. I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts, but by the time we had left the brick terraces and coal yards and the narrow back gardens of the South London suburbs and were passing Dulwich College’s playing fields—children lazily exercising in neckties—I was tuned to the motion of the train and had forgotten the newspaper billboards I had been reading all morning: BABY KRISTEN: WOMAN TO BE CHARGED and PLAN TO FREE STAB GIRL AGED NINE—none lettered NOVELIST VANISHES, and just as well. Then, past a row of semidetached houses, we entered a tunnel, and after traveling a minute in complete darkness we were shot wonderfully into a new setting, open meadows, cows cropping grass, farmers haying in blue jackets. We had surfaced from London, a gray sodden city that lay underground. At Sevenoaks there was another tunnel, another glimpse of the pastoral, fields of pawing horses, some kneeling sheep, crows on an oasthouse, and a swift sight of a settlement of prefab houses out one window. Out the other window, a Jacobean farmhouse and more cows. That is England: The suburbs overlap the farms. At several level crossings the country lanes were choked with cars, backed up for a hundred yards. The train passengers were gloating vindictively at the traffic and seemed to be murmuring, “Stop, you bitches!”

The sky was old. Schoolboys in dark blue blazers, carrying cricket bats and schoolbags, their socks falling down, were smirking on the platform at Tonbridge. We raced by them, taking their smirks away. We didn’t stop, not even at the larger stations. These I contemplated from the dining car over a sloshing carton of tea, while Mr. Duffill, similarly hunched, kept an eye on his parcels and stirred his tea with a doctor’s tongue depressor. He had that uneasy look of a man who has left his parcels elsewhere, which is also the look of a man who thinks he’s being followed. His oversized clothes made him seem frail. A mouse-gray gabardine coat slumped in folds from his shoulders, the cuffs so long they reached to his fingertips and answered the length of his trampled trousers. He smelled of bread crusts. He still wore his tweed cap, and like me was fighting a cold. His shoes were interesting, the all-purpose brogans country people wear. Although I could not place his accent—he was asking the barman for cider—there was something else of the provinces about him, a stubborn frugality in his serviceable clothes, which is shabbiness in a Londoner’s. He could tell you where he bought that cap and coat, and for how much, and how long those shoes had lasted. A few minutes later I passed by him in a corner of the lounge and saw that he had opened one of his parcels. A knife, a length of French bread, a tube of mustard, and disks of bright red salami were spread before him. Lost in thought, he slowly chewed his sandwich.