Free Trains and Lovers: A Novel by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

out onto the yard, beyond Bruce’s shoulder. There were trees, framed by the casing of the window. The branches were moving slightly, and beyond them was cloud.

KAY WAS WONDERING WHETHER DAVID WAS GOING to say something. He was clearly thinking—the expression of a person deep in thought betrays the fact—but his thoughts, it seemed, were to be private because he had chosen to keep them so. Which is how it should be, she decided, if that was what he wanted; the disclosure of something as intimate as love should not be a matter about which one should feel obliged to speak simply because others were doing so. And yet she herself wished to speak, because what she had to say had a lot to do—everything, in fact—with the reason why she was on that particular train journey. Her father had been Scottish …  had been: his Scottishness had been replaced by another identity altogether. One could do that in Australia, just as one could do that in America or Canada—each of them a place that offered an identity that could be put on, like a new jacket. Her father had stopped referring to himself as a Scotsman and had begun to call himself Australian; such an importantstep, like putting aside a maiden name, or taking on, as one does in some religious conversion, a name given by the new faith, the name of some saint or prophet.
    “My father was Scottish,” she said.
    David looked at her. Whatever he had been thinking about had been interrupted. “Oh yes?”
    “He left Scotland in 1946. That sounds so long ago now, doesn’t it, and it was, I suppose. Imagine what the world was like then: a year after the end of the nightmare, after the dropping of those two atomic bombs and the liberation of the camps and, well, all that suffering. The world must have been like a hospital ward, with the wounded and the confused standing around and waiting to find out what was going to happen to them. But perhaps it was a good time to start a new life, particularly if you were nineteen, as he was, and impatient.”
    David said to her: “Yes, of course. At that time people could just decide where they wanted to go, couldn’t they? There was very little red tape. If you wanted to go and live somewhere, you just did. You didn’t have to worry about visas and permits and all the rest. You moved. If you had the right citizenship, that is.”
    She smiled at that. “There was more than red tape for some. There were fences and gates.”
    “Yes, I suppose there were. But not for your father, I imagine. Half the map was coloured red then. Or was it pink?”
    “Red. So he could have chosen. He could have gone to Malaya or Nyasaland or Hong Kong—there were lots of places that would have taken a nineteen-year-old Scotsman who was good with his hands and prepared to work. There were plenty of places where he would have been slotted in. But he went to Australia because of a book he had as a child. It was called The British Empire in Pictures , and it showed people doing all sorts of things in exotic settings. He said that there was a picture of an Australian stockman on a horse and this man had turned to the camera and was smiling. He said that there was something in the man’s expression that meant something to him, and when you turned the page you saw a picture of people running into the surf on a beach in New South Wales and that tipped the balance.
    Imagine being in Scotland, just after the War when there was still rationing and you were hungry and probably cold as well, and you saw these pictures of people riding horses and standing on beaches. Imagine.

MEN NEEDED FOR WESTERN AUSTRALIA. THAT was all it said. He saw it in the newspaper that his father brought back from work each day, and he might easily have missed it, had he not begun reading a report on page ten that was continued on page twenty-two, where the notice was tucked away alongside other advertisements for cheap suits, pills, sturdy bicycles. The wording might have been terse, but