Already a subscriber? Log in
At Dover, we mount coaches that say VIP on the side in towering letters. I am not sure about luxury coaches; I feel a bit like I am certain the Queen did when she was photographed peering out of a luxury camper van recently, looking confused. That is to say, I am not sure coaches can be posh. We are given nuts because we haven’t eaten for at least six minutes, and the coach drives into a box on Eurostar, and we sit on the coach that sits on the train in the dark, awaiting the headliner: the Orient-Express. (This part of the journey feels intensely silly.)
She stands on a platform at Calais station, a dull, cloudy wasteland, over-looked by an ugly block of flats which may contain teachers. It is an odd station for this neat blue train with the lovely innards; her true station should surely be a fictional one under Claridge’s Hotel, with halls studded with diamonds, or Kate Cambridge’s pants. The stewards are lined outside in white, a small, food-waving army, in the manner of Jewish mothers.
A. is rather big, so the cabin, which is wood and silver and dinky lights and coat hooks, looks like a cabin owned by an absent munchkin. We play with it for a while (A. can’t lie down on the sofa, if they call it a sofa around here, because he is too long) and then to dinner, past a bar car designed for people to impersonate, well, it’s still Noël Coward unfortunately, and a shop that sells luxury copies of Murder on the Orient Express and themed ties.
Dinner is odd. It is obviously the restaurant du posh on wheels, a glorious mush of carvings and fabrics and camp servility, but the food is not as good as on land. Lobster ravioli is fine, but the main course, fillet of beef, is monstrously overcooked. The cheese course is far better and pudding, chocolate canolo with meringue, is so fine that we look on the Normandy boneyards with something like love, although slowing down for the stations, and again watching the commuters, who are now French, watch us, is still incredibly weird. Not that it matters. This train travels with its own internal fantasy and it is, in an incredibly bourgeois way, wild.
Cocktails: I know I should mock the honeymooners, who hold hands damply, or the anniversary couples, who have obviously saved up a lifetime of ‘Lady in Red’ looks for just one evening; of course they are the kind of people who go to the Phantom of the Opera as foreplay, and then go home to shag their ennui to death. Unfortunately, A. is behaving worse than any of them. He has squeezed himself into a tuxedo and is nose to nose with the barman, ordering the corniest drinks in all cocktailia, and ostentatiously tipping the pianist, who has the vaguely superior look of a man who has managed to smuggle a baby grand piano on to a train.
A. orders a champagne cocktail, a Brandy Alexander, and then, with a terrible inevitability that reminds me of the collapse of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a Vesper Martini, the drink James Bond invented in Casino Royale. Don’t let people know that you’re a spy, I tell him. He pouts, tosses his hair and asks the fashion model opposite, who is morose and lovely, if she has any vices. I apologise on his behalf, and yank him back to the cabin, where he spends ages playing with his formal-wear; to him, the Orient-Express is a giant toy called the idealised past, and it has broken him.
At 9 p.m. we slide into Paris. You don’t really disembark from the Orient-Express — how to disembark from a dream? It spits you out.
Also in Society
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in