Romantic Short Story: Tickets Please

A ROMANTIC SHORT STORY BY ALISON CARTER

Romantic short story, Set in the 1970s, There were many reasons Elaine liked the number 14 bus, and the handsome conductor was top of the list…

The bus slowed, and Elaine could see from her usual seat at the front that the traffic ahead was heavy.

She didn’t mind: a pause on Putney Bridge was a perfectly nice pause.

She could look out of the window to her right, towards Fulham Bridge and glimpses of the silvery steel curves of Wandsworth Bridge beyond.

She could look to her left, along the stretch of river to Fulham and Hammersmith, both excellent London boroughs but not as nice as Putney.

Just the name had a delightful sound to it – a soft expulsion of air on the P.

Her mother had mentioned this to Elaine and it had stuck.

Mother had often reminded her that they were lucky to live there, in a refined area near St Mary’s Church, and within sight of the river.

The weather was fine, so it was a good day for a trip to Fortnum and Mason, but then every day was a good day for taking the number 14 bus – the best bus in all London.

The tide was high, too, so any muddy edges of riverbanks were hidden from view.

“Tickets, please.”

The conductor held on to a leather ceiling loop with his right hand as he moved along the aisle, looking down intently to reset his ticket machine.

The bus was stationary, so he had no need to hold on, but Elaine supposed it was habit with bus staff.

This man had been working on the number 14 for . . .

Well, Elaine struggled to recall a time when he hadn’t.

He was a tall, big-shouldered black man with a neatly fitting uniform.

He might be 10 years older than her or 10 years younger, she could not be sure.

Elaine had no trouble with what they now called race relations.

She was a Londoner, a metropolitan person, a woman of the world.

No, she was accustomed to people of all colours.

This conductor was a familiar figure.

Elaine took the bus at least three times a week, and they’d chatted in that brief way one does on a bus, perhaps late in the evening after a concert at the Wigmore Hall or a Pinter play with friends.

“Just as far as the V and A today,” she said with a polite smile. “The evening preview of an exhibition of domestic packaging, would you believe?”

She blushed faintly as he produced her ticket.

The man would have no interest whatever in temporary exhibitions at the museum.

Bus conductors had their own community: busy canteens at the depots, social gatherings with other transport people.

It was well known that one of the best London cricket teams was made up of men who had emigrated for bus and Tube employment.

She’d heard the team talked about when a group of inspectors had got on one day at Russell Square, all of them West Indians.

She could not remember the name of the cricket team, and it began to annoy her. It was an institution.

“The Central Street cricket . . . um . . .” She murmured it, trying to recall, and the conductor turned round.

“The Central Road?” he asked, surprised. “You know the team?”

“Goodness, no,” Elaine replied, blushing again. “I just forgot a name.”

He stepped further along the aisle, legs long, hips pivoting a little with each step to avoid making contact with protruding bags and umbrellas.

His machine whirred and ticked, and out came another buff-coloured ticket.

Elaine liked the sound. To her it signified a trip and the prospect of pleasure.

The conductor smiled as he handed over the ticket to a girl.

Suddenly Elaine wondered if everything on the number 14 – not just the bus, but the people, the diesel smell and the feel under her shoes of the bus platform’s wooden ridges – fed her joy at going into the city.

Elaine was a person of culture.

Not everyone in Putney understood their good fortune in having access to a bus that took them to the great museums of South Kensington, then sailed on to Fortnum’s, the sweep of Piccadilly, the theatres of Shaftesbury Avenue and the British Museum.

Her mother and father had guided Elaine in her search for art and knowledge, and she was grateful.

They had left her the house, of course; an elegant Edwardian on three floors.

She loved the house and she had a marvellous life, really.

If romantic love was the only thing that had passed her by, then she was a lucky woman.

Mother had always said that marriage was an ideal state, and that a woman should seek it out.

Elaine had followed her mother’s suggestions and improved herself, playing both the harp and the flute, and she had read widely.

Her clothes were good; she had no idea how to wear the cheesecloth that was so fashionable now, and could never contemplate flares, but stuck to twin sets and low heels.

Her father had always said she looked lovely, and so had a dozen men with whom she had attended events, or with whom she had enjoyed little dinners.

Elaine had a host of friends and acquaintances, but no man who was special, and that puzzled her sometimes.

The conductor came back past her and down on to the ridged platform, leaning against the stairs to the upper deck, in the spot that conductors always inhabited.

This man – the one she saw most often on the number 14 – reminded her a little of some rustic watercolours she’d seen at an Islington gallery: muscular, handsome young men leaning against farm gates and contemplating the landscape.

A number of people got off the bus at the Brompton Cemetery.

The cemetery was becoming something of a tourist destination.

Not that Elaine objected to tourists; she wanted nothing more than for the world to love London.

The bus became oddly quiet for seven in the evening, and Elaine experienced that nagging anxiety about silences.

The anxiety seized her at parties, or in interval bars at the theatre, when the group she was with would run out of conversation and a gap would open up that made her feel agitated.

To feel that, when it was just oneself and a bus conductor, was ridiculous, but it seemed – if that were possible – that the tall conductor might be suffering from the same affliction.

He coughed.

“There will be a longer stop at Hyde Park corner, when I will be swapping with a colleague,” he told her.

Elaine looked round at the rest of the bus, but he wasn’t speaking to anybody else.

“I’m only going as far as the V and A,” she reminded him. “This evening.”

“Oh, yes,” he returned. “I forgot.”

I don’t suppose you can memorise everyone’s journey.

Their chat had gone too far already. It was simply not done to bother London Transport staff.

He said nothing for a moment, and then smiled.

“They let me off early for a dance.”

“That’s nice.”

“A blues dance.”

He gazed out along the road in the direction they were going, looking for passengers.

“Old-fashioned,” he added.

“I wouldn’t know.”

Of course she wouldn’t know. She had barely heard blues music; her usual preference was for Mahler or Brahms.

She looked at the man and imagined him in some darkened basement with a record player, and people dancing.

Elaine had no idea how one danced to the blues.

He looked to be a little rough around the edges.

Immigrants had been through hard times and he was from a different world.

He was not looking at her any longer; he had detached himself.

Cold seeped in through the crank-handled window above Elaine’s head and she reached up to shut it.

Elaine continued to take the number 14.

She attended a wedding in Hampstead Heath, changing buses at Russell Square for the number 168.

Her friend Valerie was getting married, and Elaine had not even known she had a chap.

It was a well-organised wedding, but throughout it Elaine felt irritable.

In September, she arranged to go to a late afternoon novel-reading event with her friend Ian.

It was a new book by an American who was making waves.

She was late leaving home – a man had arrived to mend yet another leak – and she got the bus after the one she intended.

There had been no time to eat lunch and her stomach rumbled as she climbed aboard, noting that the handsome Caribbean conductor was not on duty.

The reading had been cancelled – a fact Elaine and Ian only found out when they found a notice pinned to the door.

“What a waste of our time,” Ian complained.

He tended to be a fusspot.

For a short while in 1969 Elaine had wondered what it would be like to marry Ian. Now she felt a sense of relief that she hadn’t.

She was suffering from a feeling of low spirits.

“We’ll get your favourite bus, Lainy, shall we?” Ian suggested. “I can hop off at Knightsbridge and get a Tube home from there.”

Elaine really didn’t want to do anything.

The weather was muggy and the conductor on the number 4 would still be the snappy Welsh lady who had given her a ticket 20 minutes ago.

“I’m going to walk for a bit,” she replied. “Why don’t you get the Tube from here?”

Ian departed in a huff, and Elaine tried to buck up.

It was the hunger, she reminded herself.

She hadn’t eaten since having a sandwich at home hours ago as she stared at the back door.

It was hanging off its hinges – woodworm, possibly.

She and her mother and father had all adored the Putney house, and these days it was worth a bob or two, but when she contemplated another long winter it seemed less wonderful.

“Talking of rain,” she muttered as a large drop landed on the brow of her nose, deciding she’d have to get the number 14 home after all.

It was not the Welsh lady conductor that she saw as she climbed aboard.

It was the tall black man who was slinking along the aisle, chatting to twins whose blond heads were just visible over the seat back, and their mother.

Elaine hovered behind the conductor, waiting to pass and reach her usual seat.

When he turned, he gave her a bright smile that was a real surprise, and then he recollected himself.

“The front seat’s free,” he told her.

Elaine made herself very thin to squeeze past him.

She grabbed a leather loop as she was about to sit, lurching to one side.

“Are you well, madam?” a low, lilting voice said from behind her.

It was the conductor.

“Just hungry, I think,” she explained. “Fine.”

The bus slowed at a traffic light.

She felt his presence behind her, then he slid his body into the gap in front of an empty seat across the aisle.

“I know a place that’s open this early,” he said.

She was so surprised that she said nothing.

He went on.

“I recommend it often.”

He said it as though defending himself, as though assuring her that she was not being somehow targeted.

“Everyone needs to try Barbadian food once.” He seemed to grow less awkward and gave a soft chuckle.

“And once is the right word, because there is only one Barbadian restaurant in London.

“Plus it’s hardly a restaurant. I mention it because it’s just down there.”

He pointed to a narrow side street just coming into view.

“It’s a wonderful place,” he continued. “Great music, and a Bajan pepperpot stew that will warm the cockles of –”

“I’m fine,” Elaine interrupted.

Was he flirting with her?

She thought suddenly of her mother, who would tug her away from encounters that were not considered safe or decorous.

He nodded, slipped out of the space and moved quickly to the back of the bus.

Elaine heaved a sigh of relief, waited until he was upstairs, then jumped off the bus while it was still slowing into a stop on the Fulham Road.

She disapproved of this dangerous behaviour; she had often watched this very conductor asking passengers not to do it.

He was gentle with them, but they understood that he was serious.

Elaine marvelled at the sheer amount of time she had spent observing a bus conductor at work!

She avoided the number 14 after that, well into November.

There were plenty of events she could attend that were not on that route. Kew Gardens offered a range of activities in the colder months.

Other buses resembled the number 14 in almost all respects, of course, and Elaine felt foolish at liking one route so much.

But she was miserable.

Her dry rot spread, and one night some thugs broke a window in her sitting-room.

She watched a television series about some London police detectives, and they said “Putney” so often in a mocking tone that she had to stop watching.

She could not keep away from the number 14 for ever. It was ridiculous.

She waited at the St Mary’s stop one icy morning.

As the bus came to a stop she saw that there he was, the conductor, standing on the platform.

Her stomach began to churn.

She tried not to look at him, but he filled her field of vision in a way that she knew defied the laws of physics.

Two people got off, and two people standing behind Elaine tutted, weaved past her, and got on.

Elaine could not move, and the number 14 shuddered and lifted, moved and picked up speed.

It rumbled off on to the bridge, leaving Elaine where she was.

Her legs pinged into life like hat pins loosened, and she began to run, trying to remember where the next stop was – just on the other side of the river?

It slowed down.

It was held up just there – people in cars looking at the river and taking their foot off the pedal.

She grabbed the pole and swung her body on board, slamming against the arch.

She waited for the conductor to tick her off, but he was just looking steadily at her, wide-eyed.

He had eyes, Elaine thought, like two giant black marbles, so dark that a person could be frightened of them, if she let herself.

She held his gaze for a second then scurried to a seat, feeling sick and strange and . . .

She tried to work out what the other feeling was, and decided by the Hurlingham turn that it was elation.

She counted off the stops on the Fulham Road.

As they passed the narrow alley with the restaurant on it, she sensed him behind her.

His ticket machine was silent.

“Was it here?” she asked.

“Yes, just here.”

Elaine took as much oxygen into her lungs as she could.

“I’d like to try,” she said. “I’m really only familiar with French cooking, and the occasional curry.”

She could hear the gasp of her mother and the astonishment her father.

They ate in certain places, and later in life stuck to Fortnum’s restaurant.

She felt the breath of a dozen friends and relations on her neck, the askance look of fellow playgoers and recital buddies.

The smile of the bus conductor as he swung round to face her sucked them all away.

The charming conductor’s name was Harrison and he was forty-eight, just a few weeks older than Elaine. He had arrived in England in 1958.

“I trained in teaching,” he told her, “but times were hard and they cut jobs, so I came here.

“Great Britain was sold to me as the motherland.”

“And was it?”

Elaine felt alive, her body tingling as she sat at a laminated table in a dark, narrow restaurant with a naked bulb overhead and the buzz of talk all around.

He thought for a moment.

When he was in civvies, he looked like a professor. He’d have made such a teacher.

“It’s cold,” he said, “and most of us came with qualifications that we never used.

“But you make your own good time.”

“I’m not sure I ever have,” she said, “not fully.”

“Ah, the band’s here,” Harrison commented.

It seemed too tiny a place for music, but Elaine didn’t complain.

“I did mean to go home,” he admitted, “when I’d got enough money together.”

“What’s enough?”

He laughed, and she had a strong suspicion that she was in love.

“There’s the question,” he replied. “What’s enough? Whatever it is, I never felt I had it.

“Anyway, I love London.”