She wondered if there was an alternative road that avoided the train crossing. There had to be. She would always take it from now on, just in case. Then she told herself no: she couldn’t. She would have to face it and deal with it, and that was an end to it.
The gates hadn’t gone up. She glanced up the line cautiously. Sure enough, dramatically slower than the passenger train—thank goodness, thank goodness—a large freight train was coming down the line. She wondered if it was slowing because of what had happened before.
Suddenly, on impulse, she moved closer to the barrier. She hadn’t e-mailed Marek—she couldn’t decipher the strange hieroglyphs in the address—although she had thought about him. He had been kind to her when by rights he should have been extremely cross, and had given her a lift, but he was obviously just being nice. He was quite a lot older than she was and doubtless had a wife and family, either here or in Latvia. But even so, as Nina had been reading a novel with a dark-eyed romantic hero, she had allowed her thoughts to stray—briefly, very briefly—to his dark, kind, saggy eyes.
She leaned on the top of the gate so she could see up into the cab. It was true, the train was slowing right down. They must have been given new instructions. Craning her neck, she made out a bald head and a sturdy figure in a pale blue coverall. To her surprise, she saw it was Jim; he must be on day shift. Raising her hand, she waved and waved.
The train slowed down even further and Jim leaned his head out of the window, smiling, Nina was very relieved to note. She could barely make out what he was shouting over the noise of the engine, but it sounded something like: “We have to slow down because of the likes of you!” Nonetheless, he was still smiling as he shouted, and as the many loading decks of the train began to make their rattling way past her, he blew the whistle three sharp times.
Nina waited for the entire train to pass—fifty-five cars, she counted—but there was no sign of Marek. He’d said there weren’t always two members of the crew; it just depended on what they carried. Still, she realized, she’d had a thought that he might be on the back, waving just a little. The final car had a ledge on the outside like a balcony. You could have stood there if you wanted to watch the world go by. But he wasn’t.
Nina opened up the van. She had found an old cardboard real estate agent’s sign, complete with nail still in it, in a ditch and decided to keep it. On impulse, she felt in her bag for a pen—she always had a pen; she bought stationery the way other women bought lipsticks—and wrote on the sign, in thick black letters, HELLO, JIM AND MAREK! THANK YOU ALWAYS. Nina xxxx
She knew the color would run the second it started to rain again—probably in the next five minutes. But she drove the nail into the tree nevertheless. Then, delving into her bag once more, she found the book she’d set aside—an enthralling out-of-print history of the Baltic states written by an English gentleman adventurer—wrapped it in a plastic bag and hung that from the nail, too. Finally, she tapped the van sharply on the side, said a small but fervent prayer, and took out her keys.
Chapter Eleven
As luck would have it—and Nina was definitely, she felt, way beyond the point where she was due some luck—the person who bought the Mini Metro, after she’d removed all the boxes from it and put them in the van (where they instantly disappeared and looked tiny; she’d need a lot more stock), was a very smartly dressed farmer’s wife in need of a second car, who also recommended that Nina go and look at a place to rent that apparently wouldn’t mind a monstrous van parked outside.
Nina was undeniably worried. The amount she could pay in rent was negligible; even Surinder had been charging below market prices because they’d become such good friends (when Nina wasn’t knocking down her house). She had a bit from the car, and the very last dregs of her severance, and she’d tried to be careful with her salary, which usually lasted as long as her next foray past a bookshop, but she’d still have to manage month to month based on what she could sell.
She’d phoned the local government, who’d sounded absolutely relaxed about her parking one morning a week here and there, and, even better, had promised to e-mail her a list of farmers’ markets and car-trunk sales where she could rent a spot. That seemed like a pretty good idea. But first she needed to get everything ready, and to do that, she needed a place to stay.
Lennox Farm was just outside the village, set back a little from the road; a gorgeous farmhouse, painted a deep orange, which should have stood out but in fact was enhanced by the country hills around it, even in spring; Nina expected it must be absolutely glorious in the autumn.
According to the woman who’d bought the Mini Metro, the farmer’s wife had planned to turn a cottage near the farmhouse into a vacation rental, but apparently she wasn’t around anymore—quite the scandal, the woman had said, without elaborating—so it was up for rent longer term instead. “Standing derelict, more likely,” she added. Something had obviously gone very wrong somewhere, Nina figured, and hoped the place wasn’t in too decrepit a state. But what choice did she have?
No one was around as she drove up, following quite tenuous directions. She’d thought people would be all too ready to notice the van, as a) it tended to cast a shadow over everything it passed, and b) she had taken to driving at twenty miles an hour, just in case. But as she pulled in to the courtyard of the farm, all she could see was a lone chicken pecking its way cheerfully across the forecourt, eyeing her beadily as she parked and stepped down.
“Hello?” she shouted, feeling suddenly terribly self-conscious. She’d tried to Google the place, but had found only a faded-looking Web site, where the photos had come down and most of the links weren’t working. A dead Web site was a sad thing, she thought. Full of hope when it had been set up, and now floating away down the Google drain, gently decaying. Like the cottage itself, she thought glumly. An idea half executed then left to rot. On the other hand, she couldn’t sleep in the van.
“Hello?” she called again, then went and knocked on the door. There was absolutely nobody there, she could tell right away. She sighed and peered through the kitchen window. It was neat and tidy and very, very bare. There were no pictures on the walls or piles of mail or dirty cups. It had looked like this was the vacation cottage, but it was clearly the farmhouse. Across the cobbles and past the hen was a garage. She couldn’t see anything that resembled a cottage. She sighed and checked the address. This was it all right.