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something about the practices of carnal love which she had not met before. This crossing of the borders. She was nonplussed. That was the trouble with the Way of All Doors — it sometimes plopped you down in the thistles. This was not an idea she had confronted before, that men might love both men and women. She felt she should leave it for now. Quickly. But she could not move the conversation fast enough and Ambrose went on. ‘And there are those who live damned near the border but just to one side of it. There is another devilish zone there.’ He said this with force, with the full effort of honesty, implying that it was not a serene place to dwell. ‘The free city of Danzig,’ he laughed, making a semi-private joke. She took his reference, a city belonging to no country, and maybe also the privatemeaning he was giving it. And, now, now, he was talking of himself.
    Edith took fright and the Way of Cowardly Flight.
    They were, thankfully, confronted by the fruit plate and she found herself again with something to say.
    He had fallen into a careworn silence and she felt that it was her fault. That she had better carry things for a while. ‘Orange, apple, and banana,’ she said brightly, examining the fruit plate with more attention than it deserved. ‘The three musketeers of the English winter.’ She smiled at him, relieving him of the investigation not only because of her perturbation but also from tenderness. ‘I count that as my anecdote on the matter of fruit.’
    Edith was still in silent disarray from her efforts to use conversation detectively. Maybe she’d been successful by her code, had dared to go to a new place in ideas. She’d been fearfully close to a blunder, and a blunder could not be claimed as a manoeuvre. But a conversation couldn’t be fully managed all the way. Not on trains. Part of the confusion was that it had begun as a conversation with a stranger on a train and had changed to a conversation with a colleague. It had at some point changed again to being flirtation, although she felt she wasn’t always good at knowing flirtation from friendliness. She even suspected the flirtation had been moving towards seduction.
    The meal was over. Ambrose told her not to pay the bill unless it was written out in her presence and never to make payment on a French train without a bill. ‘Just good practice,’ he told her. ‘Keep the bill for the dreadful people in Finance.’
    They returned to her compartment, which she had to herself, and he sat beside her and they sipped Singleton’s, which Ambrose described as a single malt Scotch whisky, from Ambrose’s well-worn and dented hip flask, in the small silver cups which went with the hip flask, embossed with Ambrose’scorps insignia, and they talked of their childhoods and other things through the few remaining hours of the darkening winter’s afternoon.
    She’d drunk Scotch with her father back in Australia and it reminded her of those conversations where the presence of the Scotch decanter had marked his recognition of her maturity. She relaxed into the motion of the train with its sensation of velocity, the play of the light and dusk at the window, enjoying the landscape blurred by speed, winter snow, the feeling of rushing through time, the alcohol and its rug of carefree warmth, the steam-heating of the train, and the faint smell of burning coal from the engine. If she let her eyes become lazy, the window view became an abstraction of light and shapes. It was a winter dark when the train stopped at Bellegarde. Ambrose told her it was the border. They’d already showed their League lettre de mission and other papers to the customs officers who’d moved through the train earlier.
    Standing together in the dim corridor after the train moved out on its last few miles to Geneva, looking out of the window, she admitted to him that she was rather elated at the idea of