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part.
'You're mad,' the waiter shouted at Carruthers, his face red and
sweating in his anger. 'That child's a raving lunatic,' he shouted as
noisily at Miss Fanshawe.
Carruthers was humming a hymm. 'Lord, dismiss us', he softly
sang, 'with Thy blessing.'
'Put any expenses on my bill,' whispered Miss Fanshawe. 'I'm
very sorry.'
'Ashleigh Court'll pay,' Carruthers said, not smiling now, his
face all of a sudden as sombre as the faces of the other two.
530.
William Trevor
No one spoke again in the dining-car. The waiter brought coffee,
and later presented a bill.
The train stopped at a small station. Three people got out as
Miss Fanshawe and Carruthers moved down the corridor to their
compartment. They walked in silence, Miss Fanshawe in front of
Carruthers, he drawing his right hand along the glass of the win-
dows. There'd been an elderly man in their compartment when
they'd left it: to Miss Fanshawe's relief he was no longer there.
Carruthers slid the door across. She found her book and opened it
at once.
'I'm sorry,' he said when she'd read a page.
She turned the page, not looking up, not speaking.
'I'm sorry I tormented you,' he said after another pause.
She still did not look up, but spoke while moving her eyes along
a line of print. 'You're always sorry,' she said.
Her face and neck were still hot. Her fingers tightly held the
paperbacked volume. She felt taut and rigid, as though the unpleas-
antness in the dining-car had coiled some part of her up. On other
journeys she'd experienced a similar feeling, though never as un-
nervingly as she experienced it now. He had never before torn a
waiter's clothing.
'Miss Fanshawe?'
'I want to read.'
'I'm not going back to Ashleigh Court.'
She went on reading and then, when he'd repeated the statement,
she slowly raised her head. She looked at him and thought, as she
always did when she looked at him, that he was in need of care.
There was a barrenness in his sharp face; his eyes reflected the tang
of a bitter truth.
'I took the Reverend Edwards' cigarette-lighter. He's told me he
won't have me back.'
'That isn't true, Carruthers —'
'At half-past eleven yesterday morning I walked into the Rever-
end's study and lifted it from his desk. Unfortunately he met me on
the way out. Ashleigh Court, he said, was no place for a thief.'
'But why? Why did you do such a silly thing?'
'I don't know. I don't know why I do a lot of things. I don't
know why I pretend you were in love with a waiter. This is the last
horrid journey for you, Miss Fanshawe.'
Going Home
531
'So you won't be coming back —'
'The first time I met you I was crying in a dormitory. D'you re-
member that? Do you, Miss Fanshawe?'
'Yes, I remember.'
'"Are you missing your mummy?" you asked me, and I said no.
I was crying because I'd thought I'd like Ashleigh Court. I'd
thought it would be heaven, a place without Mrs Carruthers. I
didn't say that; not then.'
'No.'
'You brought me to your room and gave me liquorice allsorts.
You made me blow my nose. You told me not to cry because the
other boys would laugh at me. And yet I went on crying.'
In the fields men were making hay. Children in one field waved
at the passing train. The last horrid journey, she thought; she would
never see the sharp face again, nor the bitterness reflected in the
eyes. He'd wept, as others occasionally had to; she'd been, for a
moment, a mother to him. His own mother didn't like him, he'd
later said - on a journey - because his features reminded her of his
father's features.
'I don't know why I'm so unpleasant, Miss Fanshawe. The Rev-
erend stared at me last night and said he had a feeling in his bones
that I'd end up badly. He said I was a useless sort of person, a boy
he couldn't ever rely on. I'd let him down, he said, thieving and
lying like a common criminal. "I'm chalking you up as a failure for
Ashleigh," he said. "I never had much faith in you, Carruthers.'"
'He's a most revolting man.' She said it without meaning to, and
yet the words came easily from her. She said it because it didn't
matter any more, because he wasn't going to return to Ashleigh
Court to repeat her words.
'You were kind to me that first day,' Carruthers said. 'I liked that
holy picture in your room. You told me to look" at it, I remember.
Your white overall made a noise when you walked.'
She wanted to say that once she had told lies too, that at St Mon-
ica's School for Girls she'd said the King, the late George VI, had
spoken to her when she stood in the crowd. She wanted to say that
she'd stolen two rubbers from Elsie Grantham and poured ink all
over the face of a clock, and had never been found out.
She closed her eyes, longing to speak, longing above all things in
the world to fill the compartment with the words that had begun,
since he'd told her, to pound in her brain. All he'd ever done on the
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