19
‘Take the train,’ the dying old man had said. Those words had shaken loose a memory for me. It was a vague recollection of a drinking session with Bob. We’d both had more Double Black than was good for us, on the rickety Queen Anne chairs around a table in Bob’s upstairs library, looking out on the drowned courtyard of Blenheim Palace. Bob had glancingly referred to a ‘commuter train’, one of the craziest rumours to come out of Dracopolis. I’d drunk so much that night I couldn’t remember the story in detail. Something about an idyllic country station with a white picket fence. Something, too, about bunting, coffee, and a workforce of suited clerks. The conversation had left me with a haunting impression of life in middle England in the 1950s.
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ I said
