The Secret of the Night Train Read online

  To my grandparents:

  Peter and Dorothy Gerosa

  John and Barbara Bishop

  With all my love

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  1. The Beginning

  2. The Very Beginning

  3. Paris to Munich

  4. Munich to Budapest

  5. Breakfast in Budapest

  6. Marek, Marek and Ruszy

  7. The Széchenyi Baths

  8. Budapest to Bucharest

  9. Bucharest to Istanbul

  10. Istanbul at Dawn

  11. A Cupboard in Sirkeci Station

  12. Salem Sadik

  13. The Admirer, the Rival, the Menace and the Child

  14. Behind the Painting

  15. Istanbul (Properly)

  16. Home

  Acknowledgements

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  Max Morel had never left France in her life. Now, on the first day of the Christmas holidays, she was sitting on the 3.55 train from Paris to Munich, a city in Germany.

  It felt like a dream. An odd sort of dream. Max was sitting with her nose pressed to the window, wrapped in a warm navy coat and three scarves, accompanied by a nun who was humming to herself and fixing a shoe.

  Why three scarves? Because December was bitter that year, and Max’s mother had a great fear of the cold, and an even greater fear of far-away foreign cold.

  Why the humming nun? That is a difficult question. Sister Marguerite is not really the sort of person to whom “Why?” applies. You will just have to put up with her.

  And why was Max on the train at all? That is a much easier question. She was going to visit her great-aunt Elodie in Istanbul. Or at least – that was the plan. But perhaps to really explain things, we need to begin with the day that Great-Aunt Elodie called.

  All Max knew about her great-aunt Elodie was that she had moved to Turkey years and years ago, and that she was very rich, and lived all by herself in Istanbul. Every Christmas she sent the Morels some well-meaning but ugly knitwear, and every year they sent her a card with a family photo printed on the front. Apart from that, they never heard from her. She hadn’t been to visit since Max was a baby.

  Then one day, when December had arrived and iced Paris all over with a slippery frosting, Max skidded-slid-stumbled home from school to find her mother on the phone. She was saying “Mm-hmm, of course” with her voice, and YOU ARE AN UNBEARABLE STRAIN ON MY SAINTLY PATIENCE with her eyes. The voice tinkling on the other end was not familiar. Max made herself some hot chocolate on the stove as usual, but extra slowly and quietly, so that she could listen for clues about the mystery caller. She was curious – this was out of the ordinary, and things at her house were hardly ever out of the ordinary.

  After a very long time of “mm-hmm” and “of course”, her mother finally said au revoir, and hung up the phone. She tutted, sucked in her cheeks and rolled her eyes all at once, which made her look like an overexcited prune.

  Max tipped the steaming milk out into a bowl, and cupped the bowl tightly to get some warmth back into her fingers. “Who was that, Maman?”

  “Your great-aunt,” sighed her mother. “Is that chocolat, Maximilienne? Don’t ruin your appetite for dinner, now.” (She said this every day when Max made chocolat. Max’s house was like that: most things happened the same way every day, like gently whirring clockwork.)

  “Why was she calling?” Max asked.

  Max’s mother sighed a second time, even more gustily. “Your great-aunt,” she declared, “is a very difficult woman.”

  This wasn’t really an answer. Max was very curious to know what made her great-aunt so difficult, but Max’s mother started loudly tidying things that were already tidy, which was her way of letting Max know that she was asking too many questions. So Max took her hot chocolate, and some tartine to dip in it, and she went up through the house to the attic.

  Max’s house was full of thick curtains and dim lamps and soft carpets. It was a nice enough house, but a heavy sort of place. It was difficult to think anything new there, when everything was so sleepy and still and exactly-the-same-as-yesterday. Max had to find her own private places for thinking in. When she was small, she used to wriggle into a gap behind the sofa, but she couldn’t fit there these days; so she had moved up into the attic instead.

  No one else ever went up there. There was a skylight, and under the skylight there was an old red velvet chair that was too shabby for the rest of the house, and under the armchair there was a box of Max’s notebooks. Today – like every day – she took out the latest notebook, rested the chocolat in the crook of her left arm, and began to write.

  Max had been keeping notes for four years now. They were notes about everything that happened each day – although with things being same-as-clockwork every day there wasn’t always much to report, especially during the school holidays. Max’s father said that she was doing Social History, and her notes could be very important in the Future. Max’s older brother Pierre said she was being weird. Max’s even older sister Claudette was much too old and important to have an opinion.

  That day she made her notes, then sat and thought for a while, and watched the clouds shift over her skylight. The slice of sky above always made her feel like she could go anywhere and do anything. She forgot all about Great-Aunt Elodie’s call until dinner.

  The three Morel children and their parents always had dinner together, round a long table in a dark green dining room, with candles and all the right cutlery. Tonight, Max was imagining that it was the galley of a pirate ship to liven things up. She was the ship’s captain, and they were going somewhere exciting, although she was a bit vague about where exactly. She gripped her sword (butter knife) fiercely, in case any of the other pirates were planning a mutiny.

  “Your aunt Elodie called today,” said Max’s mother to Max’s father. She made this sound as though it was his fault.

  Max’s father pulled a face. “What about?”

  “Well, it’s all very tiresome. Maximilienne, stop waving your butter knife around.” Max made her fierce-sword-gripping a bit subtler, and Max’s mother continued. “She’s rather ill, and she has to have an operation. Apparently the doctor said she ought to have someone else at home while she recovers. She was asking if one of us would like to visit.” She said “visit” as though visiting would involve wading through a large swamp, covering yourself in slime, and possibly wrestling with some ill-tempered crocodiles.

  As far as Max was aware, though, Great-Aunt Elodie did not live in a swamp. She lived in a big and beautiful city, far away from Paris. Max forgot all about being a pirate captain sailing to somewhere-or-other. This was better: this was real. This was the sort of thing Max always felt might happen when she looked up through the skylight, but it never had – until now.

  Her mother, however, was less excited. “I’m much too busy at work,” she said. “And besides –” she turned to Max’s father “– she’s your aunt.”

  But Max’s father had a very important meeting with very important people coming up, and couldn’t possibly go, even if it was his aunt. Max’s older brother Pierre had a national chess tournament that week, and Max’s older sister Claudette had an international showjumping championship.

  “Well, that’s that, then,” said Max’s mother. “I’ll just call her and tell her we can’t go.”

  “I could go,” said Max.

  “She can’t expect us to be at her beck and call,” agreed Max’s father. “We’re very busy.”

  “I’m not busy,” said Max.

  “I’ll just have to be firm,” said Max’s mother. “And we can all send her a get well soon ca
rd.”

  Sometimes, Max got the feeling that all the low ceilings and dim lamps and heavy curtains had cast a thick fog over her family, and they couldn’t actually hear her. She tapped her mother on the shoulder. “Maman,” she said, loudly, “it will be the Christmas holidays. I could go.”

  Max’s mother and Max’s father and Max’s brother Pierre and Max’s sister Claudette all turned to look at her, not sure what to do with this idea. Normal things for Max to do included going to school, disappearing into attics and being told off for daydreaming at the dinner table. Max going to Turkey to visit great-aunts was not on the list. Pierre snorted. Claudette examined her fingernails with magnificent disinterest.

  “Don’t be silly, Max,” said her father. “You’re only twelve.”

  Max was eleven, actually, but she decided not to point this out. “I’d be fine,” she said. “It’s not like I’d be staying by myself. I’d be with Great-Aunt Elodie.”

  “But it’s so far away,” said her mother. And she sighed despairingly at the thought of anyone being foolish enough to put a city so many miles from Paris. “It would be so tiring for you.”

  “I’d like to go,” said Max. “Really.” She tried to look sensible-and-reliable, while a great un-sensible balloon of excitement was being blown up inside her chest. To go all the way to Istanbul would be a hundred times more interesting than days and days of sitting in her attic and watching the sky and coming up with new things to pretend about the dining room. Maybe she would go on an aeroplane.

  Pierre rolled his eyes. “You wouldn’t like it. It won’t be like one of your stupid games. You’d get homesick in three minutes.”

  “I wouldn’t get homesick. I promise,” said Max. “Please can I go?” And very subtly, just an inch, she turned her butter-knife sword on scurvy landlubber Pierre, who had already lost interest and was making a face at Claudette about something. Claudette, of course, was much too old and important to notice.

  “We’ll think about it,” said her mother. And she started tidying the already-tidy salt and pepper shakers, so Max knew that she couldn’t ask again. For the rest of dinner they talked about chess and showjumping and the neighbours, as usual; then they all had coffee and watched the evening news, as usual.

  The headline was a new world record for the fastest solo hot-air balloon flight around the world. Max went to sleep that night imagining that she was flying a hot air balloon of her own, all the way to Istanbul, and her duvet was a nest of blankets in the bottom of the basket, and the on-off blink of the faulty street lamp outside was a star that she could navigate by.

  “We’ll think about it” was not normally a good sign. Max, however, was an optimist. She crossed her fingers all the way to school the next day; she had to uncross them to write, but she carried on pleading with the universe in her head, and doodled maps in maths and snaked tiny footprints all over her history book. At the end of the day she slid-skidded-stumbled home through the icy streets at top speed and went to her armchair to read about Turkey, and tug hopefully at her two long plaits, and look through the skylight, and generally wait for her parents to make up their minds.

  “Please let them say yes,” she begged the little slice of sky above her.

  The little slice of sky wasn’t bothered. A bird wheeled overhead, then went off somewhere else without her.

  As things turned out, the universe did intervene on her behalf – or Sister Marguerite did, which felt like the same thing. Sister Marguerite played at Pierre’s chess club. She was the only person who could beat him, which annoyed him a lot, but you aren’t supposed to be annoyed with nuns so he had to be nice about it. When she heard the story, she offered to take Max herself.

  “It’s a stroke of luck,” said Max’s mother at dinner that night. “She spent some time in Istanbul when she was young, and she’s keen to see it again. And she’s a nun, so obviously she goes in for the whole charity thing.”

  “Isn’t she a bit…” Max’s father rubbed his beard, as if the right word might fall out of it – “odd?”

  Max’s mother pursed her lips, in a way that suggested that odd charitable chess-playing nuns were one of the trials of life, and she would rather not talk about it. “A little. But she’s a nun. I’m sure she’ll take good care of Maximilienne.”

  So, just like that, it was settled.

  While Max fizzed with excitement, and had to be told not to wriggle, the others talked about chess and showjumping and the neighbours, and made coffee, and watched the evening news. Max found it difficult to concentrate. The headline was a break-in at a fancy vault in Paris, where lots of people locked away their diamonds and gold and so on. The police had turned up before anything could be stolen, which everyone on television seemed very relieved about, but Max couldn’t get very excited about diamonds that were so valuable you had to lock them away and not look at them. It would have been more exciting if they had been stolen. So she stopped listening, and thought about Istanbul instead.

  What would it be like? And what would Great-Aunt Elodie be like?

  She decided that she was probably going to like her great-aunt when a brown paper parcel arrived from her, sent by express delivery. It came on Saturday during breakfast. There was a letter on stiff headed paper saying how pleased Great-Aunt Elodie was, a picture postcard of Istanbul, a very ugly hand-knitted bobble hat (“For your travels across an Eastern European winter!”) and two envelopes with tickets in. Max thought it was a friendly sort of parcel to send, even if the hat was a bit monstrous.

  She opened up her packet of tickets, and was surprised to find four. She placed them in a line along the kitchen table. They were train tickets: from Paris to Munich, from Munich to Budapest, from Budapest to Bucharest, and from Bucharest to Istanbul.

  “Are we going by train, then?” she asked.

  Her mother sighed. “Your great-aunt doesn’t trust aeroplanes, apparently.”

  Max couldn’t help feeling that this was a bit beside the point, as her great-aunt was very much staying where she was. But she didn’t protest. The trains sounded fun – two of them were overnight trains, and her mother explained that she would have a bunk to sleep in on board. And although she wouldn’t have any time to explore Munich and Bucharest, she would have a whole day in Budapest. She looked up the cities in her atlas. Munich was in Germany. Budapest was in Hungary. Bucharest was in Romania. Max had heard of those places in geography, but she had no idea what they would look like. She whispered the names to herself.

  Pierre was working on chess moves on the other side of the table, and he started glaring at her, so she scooped up her tickets and went to the attic to do her whispering there. As she left, Pierre was muttering that she was way too young and would definitely get homesick, but Max had learned that she could save a lot of time by not listening to Pierre. Munich. Budapest. Bucharest. Istanbul.

  The next day she went to the library, and borrowed every book about Munich-Budapest-Bucharest-Istanbul that she could find. The early darkness of winter evenings meant she did most of her reading by the light of a slightly broken lamp, as the attic didn’t have an overhead light. She read about palaces and mosques and rivers and churches and lost kings and queens and battles. She read about the places in between, too, the places that the trains would pass through. She gave up making notes about her life in Paris, and made notes about the journey instead. This is the map she drew:

  Even more than the places, she wanted to know about the trains, but they weren’t in books. The train from Paris to Munich was in the newspapers, because it was new: a brand-new double-decker train, called the TGV Duplex. Max cut out the articles about it and stuck them next to her map. But for the other trains, she couldn’t find out anything. She had hundreds of unanswered questions.

  Her mother didn’t know the answer to any of them, and her father wasn’t much more useful, although he did try. “I learned something that might interest you, Maxie,” he declared one evening. It was four sleeps before she was going to leave,
and only her father was still listening to all her questions. “I was talking about your trip to a chap at work who likes trains, and he told me that the names of the trains all have meanings. I’ve written them all down.” He pulled a note out of his pocket, with great satisfaction, and cleared his throat. “The Kálmán Imre – Munich to Budapest – was named after a Hungarian composer. The Budapest to Bucharest train, that’s called the Ister; now that’s the Latin name for the Danube River, which you’ll cross. And –” he beamed “– the Bosfor train from Bucharest to Istanbul – now this is interesting – Bosfor is the Romanian word for the Bosphorus Strait, Istanbul’s waterway.” And he rubbed his beard in a pleased sort of way, like a Father Christmas who specializes in bringing useless facts to children.

  “Oh,” said Max, in her best interested voice. “Thanks, Papa. Did you ask him anything about what our carriages will be like? Or what we might see on the way?”

  He had not asked this. He leaned back in his armchair with his eyes shut, well pleased with his contribution.

  The days at school passed unbearably slowly. At last, there was only one more day of lessons, and then one sleep, and then it would be time to go. Max’s mother gave her some money before she went to school that day, and told her to buy a case for her things on the way home.

  This proved tricky. Max trailed around every bag shop she could find. There were huge suitcases and handbags and hiking rucksacks, but nothing quite right: they all seemed to belong to a different kind of person going on a different kind of journey. In the end she found exactly what she wanted by accident, in the window of a second-hand shop. It was an old-fashioned travelling case, small and brown, with metal clasps that pinged and a silky cream lining with a row of little pockets in the sides. It was a bit small, but Max was sure she could cram everything in.

  She had some of her own money in her pocket for a new notebook, too. This was easier. She chose a pale blue one, and it was half price, so she also got herself a pen with smooth indigo ink.