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We saw it. We were there. We watched. Witnesses to an agonising slice of a slow death.

Not just bystanders, we were instrumental: with her trapped up against us he ground his heel into her soul. There is only so much grinding a soul can take.

But the story doesn’t start there, at the end. It starts at the beginning and with the last words that Melinda said to me.

“You are such a bastard.” 

That was it. There was no slamming of the door, no angry recrimination. Mel wasn’t going to waste her beautiful energy on me. Just that. Just those five words and then she was gone. Forever. 

It wasn’t what she said: I have been called far worse. It wasn’t even the way she said it: there had been many more endings with far more emotion. Nor the way she looked at me when she said it.

But, we both knew it was true: I was a bastard. And she wasn’t going to put up with it any more. It was over. 

Melinda. Mel. Melly. I think I might even have learned to love you. With time, perhaps, ours could have become a great affaire. If you had just given it another chance. 

Instead you left me, just when we were about to leave for the airport. We had a plane to catch and then we had a train to catch. I still had a train to catch, because I had to: it was my job and I couldn’t afford to lose that too. So because you left me I had to catch it alone. The slow train to Cape Town. 

You weren’t the first and you definitely won’t be the last to leave me. But if you had been there on the train with me, then you wouldn’t have kept quiet. You would have said something. You would have intervened.

I am not saying you could have saved her. I don’t know that any of us could actually have saved her. The time for saving her had perhaps come and gone a long time ago. But you would have tried, which is more than any of us did. We all shuffled and smiled and cleared our throats and looked away in that way that people do when they are pretending. Pretending that this sort of thing—this thing that happens every day before our eyes—isn’t happening at all. Or that it’s normal, that it’s a private matter, of no concern to us. And then we carried on.

Maybe we were each waiting for the other to say something first and so no one said anything at all. What cowards we all are.

But you, Mel, you were never a coward. You would have said something. You would have intervened. You would have called him out for being a bastard. I know you would have. 

So it was. 

Melinda left me and, instead of catching the plane and then the train together, I found myself sitting at the airport alone, and on the plane alone, in a taxi on my own, and then eventually at the station alone, waiting for that slow train to Cape Town.

You’ve Arrived!, the travel magazine that I write for, had commissioned a story: a train trip from South Africa’s capital Pretoria to its most beautiful city Cape Town. It was part of a piece they were doing on the revival of train travel in a more climate-conscious age.

The distance of nine hundred miles can be flown in under two hours on one of the regular, carbon-spewing commercial flights, leaving every half-hour. It can be driven comfortably in fifteen hours; less if you are willing to be cavalier with the speed limits. 

But this slow train is different. This is a journey of nearly three days. Three days of luxury in the style of the great train journeys of lifetimes past. 

Think Orient Express, the Ghan, the Golden Eagle, the Royal Scotsman, the Presidential Train: there are only a handful that remain and I had dangled in front of the lovely Melinda the prospect of an all expenses trip comprising a flight to South Africa and train trip to Cape Town: a five star dining carriage, wine pairings with every course, air-conditioned cabins, luxury private bathrooms. And if that wasn’t enough, there would be a few nights stay at a hotel and spa in the shadow of Table Mountain, and then home. 

I would have thought that no one could resist an offer like that, but I hadn't bargained on Mel. Once her mind was made up there was no going back. I asked if she wouldn’t perhaps overlook my indiscretions for just this one last amatory adventure. It didn’t even have to be all that amatory. She stopped at the door and, smiling sweetly, walked back to where I was standing and kissed me gently on the cheek. Then slapped the spot she had just kissed and left. I was surprisingly hurt.

On my way to the airport I tried calling two sort-of-exes, one occasional fuck-buddy, and my best mate Tim. I wasn’t that keen on Tim, but was even less keen on being that one loser on the train without a travelling companion. They all turned me down. Tim, it turned out, wasn’t as much of a loser as I had given him credit for or as much of a bastard as me: he had a new girlfriend and wasn’t going to risk it by disappearing with me for a week to sunny South Africa. 

I drank enough on the plane to assuage the crazy drummer in my head. And then that same amount again to help me forget my loneliness. And then I had thought I had better do it a third time, because . . . Well, I can’t really remember why I did it a third time, but that was why I arrived at the station in Pretoria hung-over and late. 

I missed the historic tour of the steam locomotives, the original station platform, and the first vintage carriages. I declined the concierge’s offer to join the tour late and instead sat in the colonial comforts lounge where I was served from a silver tray a glass of champagne and snacked on triangles of crustless sandwiches made with an assortment of cucumber, smoked salmon, cheese, and ham. 

I made use of the time, while I waited for my fellow travellers to return from the tour, to snap a few photographs of the gleaming steam engine puffing smoke in the painfully bright African sunlight and to read up some of the promotional brochures. And I sent spiteful messages to the beautiful Mel. Messages, I might add, that to date the persistent grey ticks show she has not bothered to read let alone answer. 

It was there, sitting in the lounge on a leather sofa, that I first saw them as they bustled in loudly from the station platform. 

In order there was Jeremy, then André, and behind him came Junelle carrying an oversized handbag over her shoulder, her husband André’s portmanteau and cardigan in one hand, and with her other hand she fanned ineffectually at the heat of the Highveld summer afternoon. Pinpricks of perspiration patterned the heavy layer of foundation she wore on her flustered face. 

Junelle and André were, so I learned later, South Africans celebrating their fifteenth wedding anniversary, their four children left in the care of her mother. She must have been in her early twenties, if that, when she married. He told us proudly that he was self-made and not yet forty. After me, they were the youngest people on the train. 

The bright sun behind them, the comparative dimness of the lounge, and my tired eyes meant it took a moment for me to adjust, to see each of them to understand what their noisy fuss was all about. I may have stared for a moment too long for Jeremy’s expression was at first quizzical—an arched eyebrow, something in his expression asking if we had met before—and then it became a look of appraisal, a lingering gaze that travelled from my eyes down to my waist and then back up again—was I up for it, was he up for me. 

Then came a fourth person, a woman, and behind her clumps of others who drifted in talking in that way that new strangers do. This single woman, Louise as I later learned, was walking far enough behind that it wasn’t clear to me if she was part of the first three, or of the group that followed. She glared at me. A look of outright hostility, I felt ashamed, like I had been caught out, but I wasn’t sure at what.

I panicked as my mind fought through layers of numb cotton-wool confusion: did I know her, had I slept with her somewhere in the past, had I tried to and failed? She was not unattractive, although perhaps a little older than my usual. I prepared myself to feign recognition or, more likely, to offer up a hurried apology for some past wrong now unremembered. 

But she didn’t approach me. She held my gaze for just a moment longer than she might have. Then her angry, questioning face changed and she smiled in a way that suggested only she was in on the joke. She looked away past me into the depths of the lounge in search of her husband, Jeremy. She held on tightly to the smile, at the corners of her pretty mouth, lest it escape. 

Louise was not lagging behind her husband, Jeremy: he was doing his best to outpace her.

I was there to write and, as best I could, I listened attentively to the introductory speech. When it got to the part forbidding the use of mobile phones I stopped typing out angry texts to Mel and discreetly slipped mine into my pocket. 

I listened on and dutifully noted down what was said in the recesses of my mind for the article that was to follow. In case you are interested it is available via subscription through You’ve Arrived!’swebsite; and if you are wondering, I took the photographs too. There is one with just a glimpse of Louise in it, as she turned away from the camera; Junelle and André are in the foreground: she is planting a big lipstick smooch on his plump cheek. 

In the article you can read all about how we were warned against being late for meals; meeting the maid who serviced my carriage: my double-bed turned down after dinner, made up again during breakfast, and tidied-up during lunch; deliciously white linen, cloudy soft towels, a piping hot shower in a private bathroom bigger than the one in my apartment; my bags were carried to my suite, one of three in the wood-panelled carriage; chilled champagne awaited me there and then there was champagne with breakfast, champagne with lunch, and champers before and after and during dinner if I wanted it too and sommeliers, barkeeps, and waiters to provide me with whatever else might take my fancy inbetween; meals were served in the dining carriage, wine-pairings with lunch, wine-pairings with dinner, four gourmet courses, more if you wanted it; high tea in the lounge; cocktails in the observation carriage; morning excursions; and the slow steady rhythm of the train’s wheels tick-tocking time away against the tracks. Formal dress at dinner, smart-casual at lunch, card-games in the afternoon, a nap before dinner, lots of hello’s and how are you’s and ever-so-do-be-well’s and a glimpse of life in a bygone era that only the very wealthy get to sample or on occasion the working classes like me and the maids and waiters and sommeliers. And all the while the extraordinary changing landscape of the city and the towns and the countryside going ever so slowly by.

I described it all. 

But what I am telling you here, you won’t find there. The story I am telling you here you won’t find written anywhere.

I stayed in my suite for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. 

I took a long hot shower to wash off the accumulated grime of airports and long-distance travel. Dressed in the cotton robe that was provided, I reclined on my bed and drank the champagne, rued again Mel’s absence, read up from the brochure on the history of the Rail company, and looked at some of the routes they travelled through Southern and into equatorial Africa. But mostly I just lay back and looked out of the picture window as first the station, then the city and its surrounding towns, and then the countryside slipped away. I may have napped, because, without me noticing, the sun slipped away too.

Startled by the sound of the dinner gong, I hurriedly rinsed my sleepy champagne mouth, drained the bottled water in my cabin, and dressed for dinner. 

A wonderful expression that, Dressed for Dinner, loaded as it was with all of the meaning and suggestion of an era far more civilised than this one. I checked my appearance in the floor-length mirror: black tie, sandy hair, and blue eyes, the tailored suit trim against my slim thirty-something body, a crisp white shirt. I hadn’t shaved in thirty-six hours and didn’t have the time to do so now. 

I was the last to enter the dining carriage and, as I made my way down the aisle to an empty table at the far end, one hand pretended to fiddle with the cufflink of the other. I nodded a greeting at the older men who watched me go and smiled hello at their wives.

A waiter unfolded the starched napkin onto my lap a moment after I sat, and ushered that evening’s menu du jourinto my hands. They already knew that I was travelling alone; there were no awkward questions about my dining companion; I had arrived a moment from being late and, as other waiters ferried bowls down the carriage, mine solicitously asked if I would be having the wine pairing or something else to drink with my meal. I demurred in favour of the easier option and was promptly poured a deliciously crisp glass of white.  My entrée and hot bread roll arrived almost at once and, realising at last how hungry I was after my largely liquid diet of the past twenty-four hours, I slathered creamy white butter over the broken bread while simultaneously tipping spoonful’s of rich salty gazpacho into my mouth. 

A waiter paused on his way past my table, to fill my water glass and ask if everything was to my satisfaction and it was only then that I emerged from my self-imposed solitary confinement to look more carefully at the diners seated alongside and opposite my own narrow, single table. The South African, who had apparently been watching me the whole time, spoke first: “You are travelling alone, I see?” and, after the briefest of pauses, “I am André; this is my wife Junelle.” (He pronounced the J softly in the French style, and then promptly suggested I should call her June, the consonant hard; she smiled in greeting.) “We are celebrating our wedding anniversary.” Junelle nodded and showed me her ring, as though it were still new. I introduced myself, muttered something about how, at the last minute, “my partner” had been delayed, but would be meeting me in Cape Town, and offered the celebrants my congratulations. 

The waiter took my empty bowl and cleared the breadcrumbs off the tablecloth. André continued: “Have you met Jeremy and Louise? They are also from abroad.” When he said Jeremy and abroad he emphasised the second syllable and rolled the “r” in what I came to learn was his Cape accent. 

Sat at the table opposite, Jeremy had been surreptitiously watching. He smiled more warmly than I expected, “ You are American?” He was not fat, far from it, but there was something about him that suggested a soft roundedness. His smooth cheeks wore the subtlest of dimples and his thin fringe was swept forwards in a way that cleverly concealed his receding hairline. He had only a touch of grey at the temples. The frames of his glasses belonged on a much younger man; his bowtie was brightly spotted. He was Oxbridge; a barrister; Queen’s Counsel. 

Louise, his wife, looked younger, but she must have been close to his age. She never told me, but I worked out from things she said—the stages in their careers when they met, her recently ended professional life as a commercial partner in a law firm, the ages of her children, the fact that she married Jeremy late—that she must have been close to sixty. Even if you made allowance for her being well groomed and that she obviously looked after herself, you would never have guessed it to look at her. Slim and trim, silvery blonde hair brushed back from her face, just the hint of crow’s feet around her eyes—she was extraordinarily beautiful without being pretty. The only clues to her true age were the sunspots on her hands, the ironed-out creases above the bridge of her nose, the way the skin around her lips puckered when she sucked my cock. 

Jeremy asked if I had been to Cape Town before; he had grown up there. He asked if I liked to swim; he knew the best spots: secret coves; but the water was cold. You need to be careful where you end up, he said conspiratorially. And with whom. I could have sworn he winked at me. 

André, who had also grown up in the Cape, added his agreement and then prattled on about all the places I should visit while I was there: “You can write whole articles for every day.” And he was right.

Over the next two days I met them all, my fellow travellers: the American Professor and her husband, now feted at a foreign university, she longed for her nascent grandchildren; the Swedish couple, making the most of the little time remaining to them, had tried but failed to leave their sorrow at home in Stockholm; the four from England found that they not only had that in common, but also shared a common goal of trying to drink their money’s worth from the all-inclusive bar; the Australian mining engineer and his wife—she dressed in leathers, offset by the most exquisite diamonds; he farted and laughed loudly—brought with them a wonderful sense of uncouth reality to the rarefied atmosphere; they were, however, disdained by their fellow Australians—he a banker from Sydney; she not; the only travellers to bring their children along—who made it clear that they not only came from the other side of the continent, but also the other side of the tracks from their Antipodean neighbours. The Von Bavel’s from Germany, the Jones’s from Wales, Canadians, Norwegians and a mixture of people who came at once from somewhere and everywhere or perhaps nowhere in particular in the modern cosmopolitan way. The rest of the passengers were South Africans, among them a hyperactive investment consultant with the most beautiful eyes and whose husband’s place I would have usurped in a heartbeat.

But for the most part, I found myself spending my time with the original four—André and Junelle, Jeremy and Louise—and one of those cosmopolitan couples, Charles and Élodie, who were French speaking although I never quite managed to work out where they were from. 

Charles was a caricature of himself: immaculately turned out, charmingly gallant, sophisticated in aquiline nose and Galician palate, closer in years to me than he was to Jeremy, I found him to be ageless. He could have been my father; or, as easily, my brother. To my shame, I have very little recollection of Élodie at all: she was neither plain nor beautiful; I can’t remember us exchanging much more than Bonjour or Bonne nuit—it did not take much before I had exhausted the full extent of my polite French. 

Louise, I discovered, was fluent in the language. While Charles puffed and huffed in front of Jeremy and André, Élodie seemed only too glad to be able to sit and chatter away, in her quick quiet French, to Louise. 

Lying naked on the post-coital sheets of the bed in my hotel in Cape Town, on the last afternoon before I was due to fly back home, Louise relayed how Élodie had met Charles when—he in his final year at university, she just starting out—he was assigned to supervise her tutor group. She did not finish her studies; never took her degree; they were married before the end of the year. Louise told me that Élodie had replied, apropos of something or the other Louise had said, that at least Charles had been faithful to her over the years. If it was a remark that had stung Louise, she never said. I did wonder, though, why of all the things Élodie had said to her, Louise chose to tell me that story.

I don’t really know how Charles and Élodie came to attach themselves to our little group, but when I went to lunch on the second day, they were already a part of it. It didn’t bother me especially: I found that with both of them there the pressure lifted: I could sit back more, listen and observe from the safe distance of the opposite side of a narrow railway carriage. 

The arrival of Charles coincided with a change in Jeremy: his asides and entendres—now more general and not pointed in my direction alone—could be deliciously bated and barbed. Junelle, at first scandalised, progressed from clicking her tongue in mock disapproval and blushing coyly at Jeremy’s more coarse comments, to slapping him playfully and telling him in a shrill voice, “Jeremy! You are so naughty.” Even Louise at her most irritated with him, couldn’t keep from smiling. By the end of the second day she could imitate Junelle perfectly: rolling the R in Jeremy, and pronouncing the last word naughty not as one word, but as though it were two. 

Looking back, I think it was Jeremy’s wit that kept the five of us together beyond our initial first meeting. I am not sure why Charles stuck with us, especially because he was himself so often targeted by Jeremy. Élodie, it was clear, went wherever Charles was wont to go.

I am not suggesting Jeremy’s attention had been diverted from me to Charles; Jeremy had found another distraction. 

On the first morning after breakfast I had wandered down to the observation carriage at the rear of the train—notebook and pen in hand. The carriage was full and I had just made my mind up to sit instead in the lounge one car back when Louise beckoned me over from the opposite end. There she sat in the company of the German couple. 

When I approached them Herr Von Bavel did not interrupt his earnest explanation to her of how it was English hubris alone that had resulted in their collective act of Brexit stupidity. Louise had had enough and, at my arrival, seized her chance to make good an escape. Before I had even a chance to acknowledge Von Bavel’s nodded greeting, she interrupted him mid-sentence and said to me, “David, I brought that book you wanted” and, standing, thrust a slim novella into my surprised hands.

I looked in the direction of her companion, for whom this act of profound rudeness had just confirmed everything he ever thought of the British and, for that matter, the Americans. But Louise, who was not going to let any sense of genteel propriety stand in her way, continued with “Jeremy has a frightful headache and I promised him that as soon as I had delivered this book into your hands I would see if I could find him some tablets. Here, you can sit with Mr Von Bovril.” And smiling goodbye to her erstwhile interlocutor, she fled the carriage and I took her place. 

It was with a great sense of relief when, forty-five minutes later, my own lecture—on how my boorish president (no matter how many times I explained that I had not and would never vote for him, Von Bavel insisted he was “my president”) had fallen foolishly into the trap laid him by the former KGB operative now running Moscow, the new Stalin, as he described Putin—came finally to an end. In my haste to leave the carriage, however, I left behind the unfamiliar novella. It was only as I was nearing my compartment and passed Jeremy exiting a toilet cubicle at the end of my carriage, that I remembered. 

“How’s the head, Jeremy?” I asked as we passed one another; and, judging by his expression and the absence of a witty response, assumed he was still feeling worse for wear. I slid open the door of my compartment, tossed my notebook and pen around the corner onto the bed inside and, sliding the door closed again turned back in the direction of the observation carriage. And as I passed the toilet cubicle the door opened again and this time one of the young crew members emerged. He stood to the side, adjusting his uniformed waistcoat, said “Good morning, sir” and then, having waited for me to pass, went off down the passage.

I was at lunch before the other four arrived and, when they did, Charles and Élodie were tagging along; it was the start of their attachment to us. 

I thought I heard Charles mutter something vexed about Herr Von Bavel, but no doubt it was just because the morning’s incident still rankled with me. It had obviously stayed with Louise too, for she stopped alongside my table, rested her hand on my shoulder and said “I am so sorry to have done that to you, but I couldn’t carry on any longer. And telling him that I had voted ‘Remain’ seemed to only goad him on. Was it awful; did you end up stuck with him?”

I am not sure what she wanted me to say; perhaps I was expected to reassure her that it was fine; tell her how I was only too pleased to have been able to help; maybe I should have asked politely after Jeremy. But that was not how I felt: I was still angry that she had taken advantage of me, irritated by its repercussions, and not inclined to feign ignorance about her lie. So instead I said, less coldly than I would have liked, “I have your book. It is in my compartment. I will return it after lunch” and returned to studying my salad.

Jeremy, seeing her in conversation with me and not thinking anything amiss, sat down at the four-seater table across the carriage from my smaller table; André sat opposite him, carrying on uninterrupted with his conversation; Junelle joined them; and Louise found herself having to take up the seat closest to me. My unchivalrous response had made her feel awkward, but with the other three engaged she kept up a polite conversation with me: thanking me for keeping the book, which led to a discussion about first that book, then others, and soon any pretence was forgotten as we worked our way through favourite authors, favourite books, movies about books, then movies. We had just started up on actors and actresses, when the others pushed their chairs out and Jeremy announced that they were all heading down to the lounge at the end of the train. Would I be joining them? Louise stood with them and then, noticing my cheese and coffee still untouched, said to them that she would wait with me while I finished my lunch.

She sat down in the chair opposite me and, when a waiter walked past, called for another glass of rosé. She smiled with her eyes, her cheeks flushed with the pink of her wine. 

When the waiter stopped by “our” table again I asked for another coffee, she wanted another wine, we were the only ones left in the dining carriage. The waiter suggested we head instead for the bar in the observation carriage at the end of the train. 

Louise walked ahead of me, effortlessly keeping her poise in the swaying carriage, I stumbled every now again as I tried to keep up. We passed my compartment on the way and I called out to her, “I am just going to grab your book.” I slid open my compartment door and, before I could retrieve the book and make my exit, she walked in and sat down on the edge of my bed, tucking her foot up beneath her. She unclipped the watch she wore on her wrist—a Patek Phillipe, I had noticed it before—and placed it on the table next to the bed. I slid the door closed and latched it.

Dinner on the last night was an even more impressive affair than it had been before: the waiting staff, dressed in tuxedos, handed out flutes of champagne and pinned corsages to the guests’ lapels; the dining carriage was decorated with candles and fresh-cut flowers; the chef prepared an especially exotic meal; the warm night air drifted in through the few open windows. 

With the exception of the Jones’s, everyone had dressed for the occasion. Even the Australian mining engineer had made an effort and joked about how his wedding suit no longer fitted him so he would have to keep this one for his funeral. His wife wore a long black leather coat with her black leather pants, and a black leather tie with what I now realised was her trademark bejazzled white blouse, her brightly whitenedd hair done up in a big black bow of lace. 

The seven of us—Jeremy and Louise, Junelle and André, Charles and Élodie, and me—took over two neighbouring four-seater tables and chattered away between ourselves, growing louder and more boisterous as the evening wore on and the champagne flowed. Junelle insisted that we swop places between courses and I played along: André, his accent thickened by beer, explained that the fresh-cut proteas in the vases were the national flower; I watched Charles make a show of tasting the guinea fowl, before proclaiming it to his satisfaction; I was sitting alongside Jeremy when Louise, from the other table, caught him staring at the young man from the toilet cubicle, who smiled shyly back; Louise stuck her tongue out at me, when she realised that I had seen too. 

For the last course, I found myself seated next to the increasingly playful Louise, with Junelle and Élodie opposite. The evening had been sublime. The mood amongst us was magical. Junelle teased me about being so handsome and still single. With just the tip of her pinkie finger, Louise discreetly stroked my wrist beneath the table. The maître d’, offering our table one last round of drinks, invited us all to join together in the observation car at the end of the train for cocktails and bridge and to enjoy the view of the stars in the clear Karoo night.

A smiling Élodie pushed her glass forward and, with pinched thumb and forefinger, indicated she would like just a little more champagne. “You have had enough, no?” Charles said, in English, from somewhere over my shoulder. Élodie stopped. Her shame spread across her cheeks. 

“Oh Charles,” Louise said in her poshest British accent, “do piss off and leave us girls alone” and indicated to the hovering maître d’ to top up Élodie’s glass. When we stood up to leave for the observation car, though, I noticed that the champagne had not been touched.

On the way to the observation carriage, André managed to lose his jacket and bow tie and Jeremy managed to lose his way. He found us eventually, but Élodie did not come at all. In answer to Junelle’s question, Charles said that she had a headache and had gone to bed. 

It was the second lie involving a headache that I had heard that day and, of a sudden, I had had enough and needed to be somewhere else. But when I bade the group goodnight they insisted I stay for just one more drink. “Don’t be a party poo-per,” Junelle said, rolling out the last syllable. Louise said, “you can’t leave now,” and tugged at my bowtie, which promptly came undone. She pulled it from my neck and pushed it down the front of her dress and said that I either had to fish it out myself or stay until she gave it back. It was then that I realised, with some relief, that Jeremy had been delayed. 

I nursed a rum punch and listened to them for a while longer. Then, when I finally could take it no more, said goodnight and left. Without my tie. 

The next morning at breakfast, when I saw the aftereffects of the evening in the faces of the few guests who straggled in, I was glad for my relatively early departure. 

Whether it was because she felt differently about my early departure or if it was just because she was feeling hung-over, Louise was taciturn and out of sorts. She ate little and spoke less. Jeremy hid behind dark prescription lenses: oversized, they made him look older, closer to the age I imagined him to be; his lips were thin and his usual jocularity pinched. A mood hung over our section of the dining carriage and I ate quickly and headed back to my compartment to type up some notes.

On the way back from breakfast Louise stopped in at my compartment to return my tie. She closed the door and when she leaned in to kiss me I could taste on her breath the sourness of stale alcohol and coffee. It was an angry kiss, devoid of any passion, and at the same time she reached down and grabbed my balls. I winced. 

As she left my compartment she turned and looked back at me. “I wonder sometimes: are all men bastards.”

Later that afternoon—after the off-train excursion, mid-morning tea, and another exquisite lunch, when she was back in my compartment—her mood had improved. 

It was then that we talked. I only remember bits and pieces. She told me of her career; something of what she had done and achieved before and after meeting Jeremy; of their marriage and children—one at university, the other on a gap-year doing charity work in the informal settlements in Cape Town (she and Jeremy had booked this trip to coincide with her visit)—and of her retirement from the firm at which she had become a partner. She had just grown tired of it all, she said, of all the dicks on tables, the machismo, the bravado of a big law firm, about who had written the most fees, pulled the most hours, hooked the biggest fish, fucked the richest client. She had grown tired of playing the game. Now she dabbled a bit here and there, volunteered for a community service, sat as a magistrate, enjoyed her money, enjoyed more not selling time for a living. 

This trip was, in part, a retirement holiday. Jeremy had suggested it: he had always wanted to bring her to Cape Town to see where he had spent his childhood years. 

“Now here I am,” she said, “with you.” Then she rolled over and, after taking me in her mouth to get me hard again, sat up on top of me, moving with the rhythm of the train, with the blinds up and the added excitement of being seen by people watching as the train went by. 

When she was finished and dressing she said that they would be in Cape Town for ten days. We arranged to meet. I knew better than to ask Louise whether Jeremy might not notice her absence, or wonder where she was. And it was not like there was anyone else waiting for me there (I had called a woman I knew—we met when I was on assignment in Europe, she on holiday—but she rather icily said that she was busy). It was Louise or I would have to try my luck. I opted for Louise.

She kissed me one last time where I lay naked on the bed, tugged gently on my tired penis, and said she was off to pack. I got up to shower one last time in that bathroom the size of the kitchen in my apartment back home. 

As I washed her off of me I thought of how it wasn’t just that seeing her again in Cape Town would be convenient: there was something about her, something I found alluring and compelling. I liked her. 

In the time that we were together—on the train and off—I never got the sense that she felt hard done by—by life or her marriage. I never felt sorry for her: she didn’t give that sense. And despite everything she had said about the law firm where she worked, I knew why she had survived and thrived; it was the same reason she had stuck it out with Jeremy. 

There was, at times, a certain wistfulness about her, a distance, but what its cause was she never said and I would not presume to guess. After all, I hardly knew her. 

She reminded me of Mel. The beautiful Melinda.

But when I look back on that trip on the Rovos Rail to Cape Town, it is not Louise or Melinda that I think of most often, but Élodie. 

When I woke that last morning it was to the memory of Élodie’s public humiliation at the hands of her husband. Had I imagined it or had it really happened; perhaps I hadn't heard correctly: I had, after all, drunk a lot of wine myself; maybe it had all been a misunderstanding, something lost in translation; but why had he spoken in English at all, when she communicated only in French?

The memory had stayed with me. I had wanted to mention it to Louise, but then we had become distracted.  

They were all there at breakfast and then again at lunch and no one behaved any differently towards him. Or towards her. Life continued, as before; they continued, as before; I continued, as before. There was the morning’s off-train excursion and they mostly stuck together, walked together, talked together as a group. Jeremy marched on ahead. I hung behind, caught up in a conversation with the Americans. 

I spent my time after lunch with Louise. I showered. I packed. I met the on-board manager for a guided walk up the length of the train, past the galley, to the staff quarters behind the engine. I interviewed one of the engine-drivers; I spoke with the maître d’—she had worked with them for twenty-five years, beginning as a laundry maid—and then talked to some of the other staff. (Jeremy’s friend avoided me; I wondered if they had made plans to meet up in Cape Town or if Jeremy had other arrangements in place.) I took one or three last photographs. 

I went back to my cabin, where I wrote up some notes. In my absence my maid had stripped the bed and removed my bags, so I packed my notes and camera into my satchel, together with the promotional brochures, checked the safe one last time, and wandered down to the observation carriage at the end of the train.

André was there, necking his customary beer bottle, doing his best not to rise to the bait of Herr Von Bavel’s explanation of the many ways in which Africa had benefitted from European colonialism. He disentangled himself on my arrival—confirming, no doubt, the German’s opinion that it was us Americans who were solely responsible for the collapse of good manners—and we chatted amiably, made false promises about seeing one another one day in the US, even going so far as to exchange email addresses. Junelle joined us, off handing to André his portmanteau and cardigan as she took her Cosmopolitan from the waiter’s tray. After her came Jeremy, having regained his smile and sardonic wit.

The observation carriage was soon full and our little group moved instead into the lounge, where we sat on the sofas, and I ate more of the same slim sandwiches I had eaten when I first arrived at the station in Pretoria so many days ago. I also nibbled, at André’s insistence, on the beef jerky that the South Africans call “biltong”, although this was so much nicer than any beef jerky I had tried before. 

It was there, sitting on opposing sofas, that Élodie found us. Without Louise to chatter away to in French, she squeezed in alongside Junelle and struck up a hopeful conversation with us in hesitating English. It wasn’t much of a conversation: lots of repeated phrases, a sip of Junelle’s Cosmo, a giggle at something I said, the naming of places in South Africa where they had either just been or were about to go next, I wasn’t sure. Then she paused for a moment and looked up, before concentrating again on Junelle’s explanation of the Huguenot origins of Franschhoek near Cape Town. 

I followed her eyes to the end of the carriage where her Napoleonic Charles interrupted his march towards us to kiss the hand of Frau Von Bavel in a gallant gesture that, in anyone else, would have seemed horribly out of place. He dispensed charming smiles to other passengers and, when he reached us, greeted us all warmly, “Bonjour mes amis!” He looked around towards me and, as though noticing her for the first time seated between Junelle and me, said to his wife “Et tu?” She quailed, but held her ground.

My failed high school French got me past her initial response of “Charles, I have . . .” before he cut her off. 

His actual words, spoken fast and quick, were beyond my comprehension but the import of his tone—brutal and contemptuous—we all understood. There was a momentary hush and then she stood and, looking at me, said “Excuse me, David, please. For there are . . . I have misforgotten.” And shaking off Junelle’s hand, she hurried away. 

Charles sat down next to me, on the seat of the sofa still warm from his wife’s presence, signalled to the hovering steward for a drink and, as he did so, turned to me and said, “So, David, you are a writer, no?”

And I thought to myself, You are such a bastard.