Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(2)
The Line itself did not pass anywhere near Paris; the amount of demolition needed to accommodate it would have been ruinous. Its track gauge was unlike any other in Europe, to prevent other rail companies using it, but this also meant that everywhere the Line wanted to go, dedicated track had to be laid; it could not share the rail infrastructure of the nations and polities and duchies and sanjaks and earldoms and principalities and communes it passed through. In the case of Paris, a long consultation period had accompanied the negotiations for a Line Embassy. There had been protests and riots and sit-ins wherever the government proposed granting a site, and in the end Savigny-sur-Orge had been chosen simply because the level of civil unrest had been slightly lower there than elsewhere. There was a general feeling in France that Savigny had wound up with the country’s Line Embassy because the Saviniens had just not tried quite hard enough.
France was an unusual proposition for the Line. Everywhere else it passed, cities and polities clamoured for branch lines and Consulates and Embassies; there was a certain – unfounded – cachet in having a connection with the Line. But in France there was, on the whole, very little welcome, and the Line Company had found itself having to deal with militant architects, conservationists, eco-terrorists, political terrorists of many stripes, politicians, heavily-armed farmers, the French Army and Air Force, and hundreds of thousands of annoyed property owners. The Line solved the problem the way it solved all the problems it encountered during its decades-long plod across the Continent. It just kept going and eventually the opposition gave up. The Line stitched its way from one side of France to the other, and in time a branch curled away towards what, in a gesture of capitulation, the French began to call Paris-Savigny.
The Line recommended that all passengers arrive at least two hours before departure, to allow time for security and document checks. In practice, this always resulted in a last-minute rush before the boarding gates were opened, and by the time Kenneth, Amanda and William arrived at the Embassy compound there was a long line of people waiting to pass through.
They had to park outside the compound – the Line allowed no foreign vehicles onto its territory – and find a concierge who could come up with a motorised wheelchair for Amanda, but after that everything went to plan.
William had no visa, so they had to part at the gate to the compound, and all of a sudden the events of the morning seemed to melt away and they stood there awkwardly, unable to think of anything to say to each other. They settled for hugs, and then William turned away and headed towards the car park without looking back.
Kenneth looked at his wife. She was sitting uncomfortably in the wheelchair, cradling the bulge of her pregnancy, her face pale. “We’ll soon be on board,” he told her.
“It takes ten minutes to process each passenger,” she said with a weak smile. “Baggage check-in, security, documents, more security. They can process a hundred passengers at a time. Each train has a maximum capacity of fifteen hundred passengers.”
He reached down and squeezed her shoulder affectionately. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
“Two and a half hours to completely board each train,” she went on calmly. “And that’s if everything goes smoothly, which it never does because passengers forget their documents or their phones set off the security scanners or their perfume sets off the explosive sniffers or they just decide to argue with the officials about any damn little thing that occurs to them.”
“We’re in a priority queue,” he reminded her.
“More expense,” she said. “This is costing a fortune.”
“Just a few more minutes,” he said.
She reached up and took his hand. “I love you,” she said.
He squeezed her hand and looked around at the lines of people waiting to pass through the boarding checks. These were not, it occurred to him, people who were normally used to queuing for anything. Very few of them – none at all, in fact, he decided as he scanned the crowds – presented as working class, or even upper middle class. There were furs and Louis Vuitton carry-ons and cashmere overcoats draped capelike over shoulders, and children with sunglasses worth more than your average Renault factory worker’s annual salary. One small group – beefy shaven-headed father with expensive wrist jewellery, slim mother with a pushchair designed by the same people who designed Formula One racing cars, and three large neckless men who were almost certainly bodyguards – he tagged as mafiye. He thought he caught a glimpse, at the core of another knot of passengers, of a German actress of a certain notoriety. The Line was not so much a mode of transport, more a lifestyle choice. He and Amanda looked the part, but their clothes were all cheap copies, their luggage bootlegs of Swaine Adeney Brigg classics.
The Line did not care what its passengers were wearing. Its French Embassy was a forbidding four-storey grey cube at the heart of the compound, its upper three floors lined with tall slit windows and its flat roof festooned with dishes and antennas. To one side stood a building which looked like a small out-of-town motel, and it was through this, shepherded by liveried and armed Line security personnel, that the queues of passengers were disappearing.
Amanda was speaking on her phone. “Yes,” she was saying. “We’re just waiting to get on board now. Very, yes. Some time the day after tomorrow. In the evening, I think.”
They had been living in Paris for five years now. Amanda had her own design business, producing limited-edition silk-screen T-shirts for film and theatre premieres. They had been here long enough, Kenneth thought, to get a sense of the city’s moods and rhythms. He had thought that apart from the obvious signifiers of architecture and weather and language, all European cities were much the same, but Paris had proved him wrong. It was quite unlike anywhere else he had ever lived.