The Train From Rhodesia

The wife of the couple on the train is the one character to whose thoughts we have access. Compared to her husband, she seems thoughtful and sensitive. She is more affected than her husband by the landscape around them, a landscape that causes her to question her own choices. Looking around her cabin at the souvenirs that they have gathered on their travels, she wonders how they will look in their home. She then has a brief, strange sense of her new husband as one of these souvenirs: “But he is not part of the unreality: he is for good now. Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places” (45).

While we do not know the story of the couple’s courtship, their marriage seems impulsive. The husband and wife appear opposite in temperament in a way that perhaps seemed exciting at first but will eventually create conflict. The dispute over the carved lion is an early sign of this conflict. We also know that the woman has spent some time alone before her marriage, suggesting that she married in part to fend off loneliness. Yet by the end of the story, she is lonelier than ever, afflicted by a sense of hollowness and pointlessness: “A weariness, a tastelessness, the discovery of a void made her hands slacken their grip, atrophy emptily, as if the hour was not worth their grasp” (47).