The Passengers

“She always loved this stretch on the railroad. Helen, my wife, I mean. Going through this very spot was her favourite part about our weekly trips to London, a treat of sorts!” 

I spoke to no one in particular, but there was a man much the same age as me sat on my right, and a young woman opposite, both of whom became an audience to my early morning monologue. I glanced at the woman who offered me a warm smile, so I continued:

“You see, when you get to that hill over there - the one that’s quite far now but will be close soon enough - right before the train gets there it slows down a little so it can get around it comfortably, and as it does - and you know where to look, and you happen to be carrying a bit of luck with you on the day - you can see hares on the hillside!” 

Another warm smile, more pronounced than the last one. 

“I have never noticed!” said the man.

“Many people don’t, you must keep your eye out for them otherwise it’s "blink and you missed it!". They’re peculiar looking creatures. People always assume hares are much like rabbits but they’re really quite different. A hare is much larger than a rabbit and they have big bulging eyes, whereas a rabbit’s eyes are smaller and less expressive. Hares are also solitary in comparison to rabbits who tend to stick together in their colonies. I guess they’re less ‘cute’ in the traditional sense of the word, but they’re quite fun to observe. And they go wild in Spring - young males box each other like a pair of heavyweights in the ring in Vegas! That’s where the expression “Mad as a March hare” comes from!” 

I chuckled awkwardly at my own rather mediocre joke and received a quiet but pleasant laugh in return from the woman opposite.

We were making our way through the rolling hills of Somerset County on a crisp January morning. I had left the house in the pitch-black darkness an hour earlier but now the cool winter sun had emerged on the horizon, splashing shades of bright yellow across the pale blue canvas. Overnight the frost had left a layer of sugary ice over the fields and the air outside the carriage was visibly cold and wintry. It was my last commute into London before my retirement and almost two years to the day since Helen died. 

I have never been particularly fond of English winters - mostly they’re just soggy and grey, which hurts my joints and dampens my mood to match the weather outside. On rare crisp days like this however, especially when I pass this hillside, I am reminded why I have not yet left our wet little island for sunnier shores. 

Helen always insisted we’d move to Italy when we finally retired. She adored the baking heat of the sunshine, the wines, the food, the azure-blue waves of the Mediterranean and the carefree Italian lifestyle – la dolce vita! Her intense love for the country which she had felt long before she even met me, infected me too. Soon her dream became ours. 

“We moved down to Somerset ten years ago when working from home became the norm and we didn’t need to be near our offices. It was to be the final ten years before our eventual retirement abroad. We looked at the usual commuter villages just outside the city, but it never really felt like us – a sort of halfway house that is neither here nor there. You know what I mean? Then Helen had the idea – she was always so full of ideas! - that until we get to retirement age, we should swap our small, terraced house in the suburbs out for a proper country house and a small London pied-à-terre instead. Do they even say that anymore? No, I didn’t think so. It’s a lovely expression though. Everything in French sounds marvellous, don’t you think?” 

““Then we’d get the best of both worlds!”” she declared with her usual resoluteness. I thought she was mad at first but the more I dwelled on it the more it made sense, and before long, her brilliant idea became my very own obsession. A year later we owned a run-down old farmhouse in Somerset and a small flat – and I mean small! – in West London. It even turned out to be much cheaper that way!” 

“The country house was a true find. Some parts of it were built in the late 17th century and it’s in the middle of disused farm fields which we let grow wild again, and it’s so remote you need to drive down a dirt road for good ten minutes before you even get there. It’s gloriously secluded. Helen loved the solitude; she grew up in a farmhouse not unlike ours and she’d always joke that if you can see smoke coming from your neighbours’ chimney, they probably live too close!” 

I drifted for a moment and then yanked myself out of it, conscious of my audience. 

“We’d go to London for a few days every week, the rest of the time we were at the farm. The weekly commute was tiresome at first but each time we were in the city and started our journey back to Somerset, leaving behind the crowds and the madness, I felt tranquillity I never realised had been missing from my life.” 

“Helen died in that house too. Cancer, the ugly beast. She was sick for a while, then she got better but when it came back, it came back with a vengeance, and she was gone fast. I had little time to say goodbye, and after she passed, I sought solace from work, afraid to face the bleakness of my sparse life, and the painful thoughts of retirement plans – our Italian dream - that would now never materialise. It all felt so utterly pointless. They had to force me to retire in the end. So here I am, for the last time doing this weekly commute. What happens next, I have no idea. What is my journey now, where am I going?” 

The young woman in front of me adjusted herself, swapping out one crossed leg for the other. She was beautiful – auburn curls, freckles, a kind face. One of those people who doesn’t say much but always seems to know more than others, understand more, as if she held the key to some big mystery of life, the secret meaning that other simple souls like me were not privy to. She wore a green wool coat and had a mile long scarf wrapped around her neck; she sat calmly and not a word crossed her lips as I carried on talking – her deep brown eyes said everything she had to say. 

We looked at each other for a moment and as I turned my gaze back to the hillside I spotted a hare. I pointed it out to the man next to me who was visibly grateful for what he saw, even if it came at the expense of having to listen to the sad ramblings of a complete stranger.

The creature stood still as we passed by slowly and as the train stopped for a short second, it looked in through the window and right into my eyes. The train hurried past the animal only seconds later but out of everyone on the entire train the hare chose me to stare back at.

“What do you think I should do?” I said solemnly turning back to the young woman but she was gone. She had vanished quietly, just as she had appeared there moments before, in her youthful form wearing the green wool coat and mile long scarf she had on the day we first met, leaving me longing for answers to questions I never imagined myself asking.