Evan had hoped for a relaxing three-hour train ride on the scenic route from Aberystwyth to Birmingham. He knew he could not expect the same on the connection to London due to crowds. He needed calm before his interview, but he grew frazzled soon after he began the trip.
He had booked a reservation in a quiet car, with a plan to catch up on his end-of-semester reading. But he moved to avoid a coughing woman with teary red eyes. Where was her mask? He cursed himself for forgetting his own. With approaching exams, he was chary of becoming ill. He then found an unreserved window seat, but soon a rabble of foreign holidaymakers boarded and plopped nearby. Locals were aghast at their unabashed, loud, and coarse language. His philosophy professor would hypothesise something about the entrenchment of self-absorption among these people, but Evan thought overindulgence in liquor was a more likely explanation. He took no pains to hide his annoyance as he moved on.
Finally, in a different car, he found an aisle seat. The place was not ideal, with passengers whisking by to use the loo and cart handlers selling overpriced flat whites and crumbly packaged Welsh cakes. At least, no one surrounding him was spewing germs, and the spot was quieter.
Facing Evan, on the opposite side of the train, sat a young woman. Unlike him, she had the pleasure of a perch by the window, facing forward. He was aware that she and others beside her glanced at him when he made a racket stowing his backpack overhead. He caught her cracking a faint smile in his direction, but he was not in the mood to reciprocate. He thought perhaps she saw through his grumpiness. He noticed her poise while she befriended adjacent passengers. He admired how she took care of herself as she laid out a homemade sandwich, a bunch of grapes, and a bottle of water on the table before her, whereas the other travellers bemoaned the limited choices of the passing food cart. After she had eaten, she excused herself politely from conversation to focus on her work as she shuffled loose sheets of paper. Evan returned to his reading, but his eyes kept straying off the pages in her direction.
*****
“A man with a book is worth a look,” Elin’s mother liked to say. The young man did carry a frayed library copy, but it was his dapper form that had first caught her eye. Elin thought he dressed well for the season with a grey woollen beret, a red scarf, and a black overcoat. She was intrigued by the discord between the timeworn book and his sleek tailoring. Did he have a fondness for vintage or did he value thrift? And what was he reading? His gait, as he changed seats on the train, was one of a self-driven man. He sounded genuinely polite when he apologised to nearby passengers for his trouble in arranging his belongings. She thought she could listen to his soothing voice for hours. She gathered that something must have bothered him as he settled in his seat, well into the journey. She imagined his chiselled face in a brighter mood and chanced a smile at him. But to Elin’s disappointment, the young man either missed her cue or ignored it — she could not tell. She thought she might try again later and peered out the window. As the train sped on, graffiti plastered on walls began to blur into streaks of roughly blended paints as on a giant palette.
*****
Evan woke with a start when the conductor asked to check his ticket. The first leg of the trip had reached its halfway point. He was thankful for the interruption because he needed to return to his reading assignment. As he came to, he saw the young woman smiling at him again, but in his grogginess, he wondered why she had found his kip so amusing. He hoped he had not snored or done worse. He lowered his eyes and bit his lip in embarrassment, although her glance still roused his interest. Thereafter, he noticed her frequent gazes out the window. Sun rays and the shadows of bare trees flickered across her face like the moving frames of an old film. The Welsh countryside must delight her, he surmised. He craned his neck to peek at the passing scene but saw only a skein of clouds and cows grazing on scattered hay. The flat landscape was thin of grass and dotted with puddles, one with a sulking grey heron. Old farmhouses stood far apart from one another. The loneliness of the view struck him.
Now he regretted not acknowledging the young woman’s gentle overture. He really did not mind if she laughed at him — he often laughed at himself! He could try to catch her eye should the opportunity arise a third time, as she was too far away to strike up a conversation. Other passengers cluttered the space between them, and she seemed too cosy in her nook to disturb. He was curious about what she scribbled — maybe notes for her diary, an essay, or a short story? Given her intense concentration, he bet that she was also doing schoolwork.
When he rose to fetch an apple from his backpack, she held the clipboard of papers to her chest and sighed as if stuck in midthought. He could not help eavesdropping on her sporadic conversations, but only learned that she was at university like himself. He did not get far with his reading, as the dense passages in his book made him drift off to daydreaming.
*****
The train arrived in Birmingham on time. All passengers gathered their belongings to alight. A few now stood between the two young people, still unmet. He wanted to compliment her on her smile and ask her about what she had found fascinating out the window, but he feared that she might feel uneasy about his observing her. As for her, she had had enough playing with the aloof stranger. She avoided looking at him, lest he spurn her once again. She knew her self-worth and was not the sort to pursue an improbability.
On the platform, the older, coughing woman stopped Evan to ask for directions. He helped her and hurried past the group of loud foreigners, who were fretting about some lost items by a rubbish bin.
“Hey buddy, did you drop these papers on the platform?” one of the foreigners asked him. “You were sitting near us at one point.”
“No, not mine,” said Evan.
“Wait, take a look! That’s you, isn’t it? Somebody has real talent.”
Evan was stunned to see drawings of his own face in mirror image. The first sketch was only of his eyes, looking askance, mid-scowl, and full of scorn. His downcast lashes, drawn longer than they were in real life, added vulnerability. The second sketch showed him taking his kip, with his mouth a tad ajar and his lips plumper than they would otherwise appear in a mirror. He looked untroubled, unaware of the trundle of the train. The last picture showed him biting an apple and looking straight into the distance as though yearning for something else beyond reach. His other hand pressed an open, old hardback edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost against his chest. The three sketches were untitled, undated, and unsigned.
Evan raised his head to search for the sketcher among the hurrying passengers, but she had already become one with the moving horde.
