November 2022

The University of Glasgow had expected no more than twenty students to sign up for the course on Distance and Imagination but when the class first met, on an afternoon in late September, an afternoon of falling leaves and a clear, chilly sky, there were over sixty of them packed into the lecture room. It was an optional course – one of those courses that defy precise classification: it could have been psychology, or literary theory, or even geography – it had elements of all of these, and of other disciplines too. What made it so popular was the reputation of the lecturer, who had written a book entitled Saying Goodbye to Where You Once Were. Rather unexpectedly, this had become extremely popular, even to the extent that people who had not read it claimed that they had: the ultimate accolade for a book and an author.

Now he stood before them – before this collection of young people from all the airts – and said: “Distance has a certain dignity to it. It imposes upon an object or a person a status that is somehow special. This is not because the distant person or object has any inherent quality that sets him, or her, or it, apart from us – in any moral or aesthetic sense – but because he, or she, or it, is simply not there beside us. The separateness of the other is what intrigues us: this person becomes intriguing or attractive because of the distance that lies between us. And that, I feel, is because most of us actually want to be somewhere else. Auden expressed this insight when he talked about a child who is scolded in France wishing to be on the other side of the Alps. That is understandable, of course, and occurs in our everyday experience when we say that we wished – after committing some social solecism – that the earth could have opened up beneath us. But there is also the yearning for travel; the yearning to make a journey; to get on a train, perhaps, and go where the train goes, off into a yonder that is, in our minds at least, always blue …”

In the third row of seats, a young man turned to the young woman beside him, and whispered: “Have you ever been on a steam train? I mean, a real steam train …”

“That makes steam? As in those pictures in the books?”

He nodded, and she shook her head.

“I want to go,” he said, his voice still at a whisper. “Last summer I went with my parents to Arisaig. Do you know it?”

“No, I don’t. I live in Kelso, you see, and we hardly ever went north. We went to the Lake District. My parents liked that part of the world.”

“You’d love Arisaig. We took a little boat from the pier there – it’s called the Shearwater and it’s painted blue. You want to lick it. I know it sounds odd, but I want to lick things that are painted that shade of blue – I always have.”

She giggled. “You can’t lick boats. They taste of …”

“Salt,” he said.

“Exactly.”

He glanced at the lecturer; he did not want him to see them talking, but he seemed unaware of his audience and was staring up at the ceiling as he spoke. “The Shearwater goes out to Eigg and Rhum,” the young man continued. “It also goes to Muck, which is much smaller. I love that name. Muck. Imagine living on Muck. Your address would be just your name – there are so few people that this would be enough – and then Muck, Scotland. Imagine that.”

She looked at him. They had met one another before, in another course, but they had never done more than exchange a few words. She looked at his eyes, which were an unusual, grey colour. She liked them.

“When we came back on this boat,” he said, “we hung about the pier for a while. There was a man fishing for mackerel and he seemed to be catching them. He pulled up his line and there were three or four fish dangling from it. They were silver and had these stripes …”

“I know what mackerel look like.”

“Yes, of course. And anyway we were standing there – my folks and my younger brother – and then suddenly we saw a cloud of white steam above some trees behind the village and this cloud grew and began to grow like some of those clouds you see in the sky when it’s changing and they seem to bubble up and expand, to boil almost and …”

“Yes?”

“And I realised that this was a train and that it was moving off through the trees. With the hill behind it, the white was so clear against the green, and then it just faded away, like your breath does when you breathe out on a cold morning – you know the way that looks?”

“Yes, of course. Sometimes in my flat you see that in the morning when you wake up. We can’t afford to run the central heating – which doesn’t work very well, anyway, and it can get really cold.”

He smiled. “Your breath, in clouds, just like a steam train.”

She traced something on the open notepad before her. A cloud, he thought.

She suddenly asked: “Isn’t that the train that goes over that famous aqueduct? The one with all those arches?’

“I think it is,” he said. “I think it goes from Fort William to Mallaig. It goes along Loch Morar, I think. We went there as well – years ago. I went kayaking, and I fell in. It was freezing.”

She raised a finger to her lips. ‘We’d better start listening.”

He said yes, they should, but he still wanted to talk to her. There was so many things about her that appealed to him. He liked her hair, he thought, and he liked the way she talked. He also liked her wrists, which were delicate, and browned by the sun from somewhere else, not from Glasgow.

He listened to what the lecturer was saying. He was talking about memory now, and of how distance and memory are somehow intertwined. He was not sure that he was following him, but it did not matter too much. He liked the sound of this man’s voice and the occasional wry remark he threw into his lecture. There were appreciative laughs; Distance and Imagination was going down well.

At the end of the lecture, in the hubbub of voices that erupts when people who have been largely silent are allowed to talk, he turned to her again and said, “We could go, you know.”

She frowned. “Go where? For coffee?”

“Sure, we could do that right now. But what I meant was that we could go on that train. We could go to Fort William – it’s only three hours by bus, I think, and then we could get on that train to Mallaig. It comes back the same day.”

She was silent at first, and he wondered whether he had overstepped the mark. She’s got a boyfriend, he thought. Stupid me. A boyfriend.

But she did not say no; she asked: “When? This weekend? Next summer? When?”

It took him a moment to reply. “This weekend,” he said. Then he added: “I think you have to book, but I can phone up. It would be …”

“It would be terrific.”

“I think so. It stops at Arisaig and I could show you the pier where the man caught all those mackerel.”

She rose to her feet, slipping her notebook into a bag at her side. “I like the idea, but I’m not sure. Maybe …”

He pleaded with her. “You have to. You just have to. I’ll die if you don’t. I will. True.”

She laughed. “All right.”

They made the trip that weekend, just as he had suggested. In Arisaig they did not walk down to the pier but saw the island of Eigg across the sound. There was a strip of cloud, a line of attenuated white, half way up the high side of the island, which was like a veil, clothing of the land. He said: “Next time – when we do this again – we’ll go in the Shearwater. We’ll go over to the islands.”

She looked at him. The steam train was starting to move; there was steam against the window, drifting back from the engine; it was one with the cloud on the island, the strip of white.

He wanted to say to her: “Listen, I haven’t said this to anybody else before – but I want to say it to you. I feel …”

She looked at him expectantly, but he could not finish what he wanted to say. So she took his hand, and pressed it gently, and he left it where it was, in her hand, where he wanted it to be, and he looked again out of the window and thought, inconsequentially – but perhaps understandably – I love this country so much it hurts. It hurts.

This story, ‘Distance and Imagination’ was first published in an East Coast Rail collection.