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For thirty seconds after the lorry had halted between the shack and the petrol pumps the summer night was absolutely silent. There was no wind; the leaves and the grass stalks were held in motionless suspense in the sultry air. And after the headlights had gone out the summer darkness was complete too. The pumps were dead white globes, like idols of porcelain; there was no light at all in the station. Then, as the driver and his mate alighted, slamming the cabin doors and grinding their feet on the gravel, the light in the station came suddenly on: a fierce electric flicker from the naked globe in the shack, the light golden in one wedge-shaped shaft across the gravel pull-in. And seeing it the men stopped. They stood for a moment with the identical suspense of the grass and the trees.

The driver spoke first. He was a big fellow, quite young, with breezy blue eyes and stiff untrained hair and a comic mouth. His lips were elastic: thin bands of pink india-rubber that were for ever twisting themselves into grimaces of irony and burlesque, his eyes having that expression of comic and pained astonishment seen on the painted faces of Aunt Sallies in shooting galleries.

His lips twisted to the shape of a buttonhole, so that he whispered out of the one corner. ‘See her? She heard us come. What’d I tell you?’

The mate nodded. He too was young, but beside the driver he was boyish, his cheeks smooth and shiny as white cherries, his hair yellow and light and constantly ruffled up like the fur of a fox-cub. And unlike the driver’s, his lips and eyes were quite still; so that he had a look of intense immobility.

He could see the woman in the shack. Short white casement curtains of transparent lace on brass rods cut across the window, but above and through them he could see the woman clearly. She was big-shouldered and dark, with short black hair, and her face was corn-coloured under the light. She seemed about thirty; and that surprised him.

‘I thought you said she was young,’ he said.

‘So she is.’ The driver’s eyes flashed white. ‘Wait’ll you git close. How old d’ye think she is?’

‘Thirty. More.’

‘Thirty? She’s been here four year. And was a kid when she was married, not nineteen. How’s that up you?’

‘She looks thirty.’

‘So would you if you’d kept this bloody shack open every night for four year. Come on, let’s git in.’

They began to walk across the gravel, but the driver stopped.

‘And don’t forgit what I said. She’s bin somebody. She’s had education. Mind your ups and downs.’

When they opened the door of the shack and shuffled in, the driver first, the mate closing the door carefully behind him, the woman stood behind the rough-carpentered counter with her arms folded softly across her chest, in an attitude of unsurprised expectancy. The counter was covered with blue-squared oilcloth, tacked down. By the blue alarum clock on the lowest of the shelves behind it, the time was four minutes past midnight. At the other end of the shelf a flat shallow kettle was boiling on an oil-stove. The room was like an oven. The woman’s eyes seemed curiously drowsy, as though clouded over with the steam and the warm oil-fumes. And for half a minute nothing happened. She did not move. The men stood awkward. Then the driver spoke. His india-rubber mouth puckered comically to one side, and his eye flicked in a wink that was merely friendly and habitual.

‘Well, here we are again.’

She nodded; the drowsiness of her eyes cleared a little. All the same there was something reserved about her, almost sulky.

‘What would you like?’ she said.

‘Give me two on a raft and coffee,’ the driver said.

‘Two on a raft and coffee,’ the woman said. She spoke beautifully, without effort, and rather softly. ‘What’s your friend going to have?’

The mate hesitated. His eyes were fixed on the woman, half-consciously, in admiration. And the driver had to nudge him, smiling his india-rubber smile of comic irony, before he became aware of all that was going on.

‘Peek up,’ the driver said.

‘That’ll do me,’ the mate said.

‘Two on a raft twice and coffee,’ the woman said. ‘Is that it?’

Though the mate did not know it for a moment, she was addressing him. He stood in slight bewilderment, as though he were listening to a language he did not understand. Then as he become aware of her looking at him and waiting for an answer the bewilderment became embarrassment and his fair cherry-smooth checks flushed very red, the skin under the short golden hairs and his neck flaming. He stood dumb. He did not know what to do with himself.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know your friend’s name or his tastes yet,’ the woman said. ‘Shall I make it two poached twice and coffee?’

‘Just like me. Forgot to introduce you,’ the driver said. His mouth was a wrinkle of india-rubber mocking. ‘Albie, this is Mrs Harvey. This is Albert Armstrong. Now mate on Number 4, otherwise Albie.’

The woman smiled and in complete subjection and fascination the boy smiled too.

‘Are you sure that’s all right?’ she said. ‘Poached and coffee? It sounds hot to me.’

‘Does me all right,’ the driver said.

‘I could make you a fresh salad,’ she said. And again she was speaking to the mate, with a kind of soft and indirect invitation. ‘There would be eggs in that!’

‘I’ll have that,’ the mate said.

‘What?’ the driver said. His eyes were wide open, his mouth wide also in half-serious disgust, as though the mate had committed a sort of sacrilege. ‘You don’ know what’s good.’

‘So you’ll have the salad.’ the woman said.

‘Yes, please.’

‘I can give you the proper oil on it, and vinegar. You can have fruit afterwards if you’d like it.’

‘Fruit?’ the driver said. ‘What fruit?’

She took the kettle from the oil-stove and poured a little hot water into the coffee-pot and then a little into each of the egg-poachers. ‘Plums,’ she said.

‘Now you’re talking,’ the driver said. ‘Plums. Some sense. Now you are talking.’

‘Go and get yourself a few if you like them so much.’

‘Show me. Show me a plum tree within half a mile and I’m off.’

‘Go straight down the garden and it’s the tree on the left. Pick as many as you like.’

The driver opened the door, grinning. ‘Coming, Albie?’

‘You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?’ the woman said.

This time she was speaking to the driver. And suddenly as he stood there at the door, grimacing with comic irony at her, his whole head and face and neck and shoulders became bathed in crimson light, as though he had become the victim of a colossal blush. Startled, he lifted up his face and looked up at the shack from the outside. The bright electric sign with the naked letters saying simply The Station was like a fire of scarlet and white. At intervals it winked and darkened, on and out, scarlet to darkness, The Station to nothing. The driver stood with uplifted face, all scarlet, in surprised admiration.

‘Blimey, that’s a winner. When’d you get that?’

‘It’s new this week.’

‘It’s a treat. It makes no end of a difference. How’s it you didn’t have it on when we came in?’

‘I keep forgetting it. I’m so used to sitting here in the dark I can’t get used to it. It’s a bit uncanny.’

The driver went down the shack steps, into the night. The woman, busy with the eggs, and the boy, leaning against the counter, could see him standing back, still faintly crimson, in admiration of the eternal winking light. And for a minute, as he stood there, the station was completely silent, the August darkness like velvet, the sultry night air oppressing all sound except the soft melancholy murmur of the simmering kettle. Then the woman called:

‘You’d better get your plums. The eggs won’t be two minutes.’

The driver answered something, only barely audible, and after the sound of his feet crunching the gravel the silence closed in again.

It was like a stoke-room in the shack. The smells of coffee and eggs and oil were fused into a single breath of sickening heat. Like the driver, the boy stood in his shirt-sleeves. He stood still, very self-conscious, watching the woman breaking the eggs and stirring the coffee and finally mixing in a glass bowl the salad for himself. He did not know what to do or say. Her thin white dress was like the silky husk of a seed-pod, just bursting open. Her ripe breasts swelled under it like two sun-swollen seeds. And he could not take his eyes away from them. He was electrified. His blood quivered with the current of excitement. And all the time, even though she was busy with the eggs on the stove, and the mixing of the salad, very often not looking at him, she was aware of it. Looking up sometimes from the stove or the salad she would look past him, with an air of arrested dreaminess, her dark eyes lovely and sulky. The deliberation of it maddened him. He remembered things the driver had said as they came along the road. The words flashed in his mind as though lit up by the electricity of his veins. ‘She’s a peach, Albie. But I’ll tell you what. One bloody wink out o’ place and you’re skedaddled. She won’t have it. She’s nice to the chaps because it’s business, that’s all. See what I mean, Albie? She’ll look at you fit to melt your bleedin’ heart out, but it don’t mean damn all. She wants to make that station a success, that’s all. That’s why she runs the night shack. Her husband runs the day show and she’s second house, kind of. It’s her own idea. See?’

And suddenly his thoughts broke off. The lights in his brain, as it were, went out. His mind was blank. She was looking at him. He stood transfixed, his veins no longer electric but relapsed, his blood weak.

‘Like it on the lorry?’ she said.

‘Yes.’ He hardly spoke.

She had finished making the salad and she pushed the bowl across the counter towards him before speaking again.

‘You’re not very old for the job, are you?’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘Get on with old Spike?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t it lonely at first? They all say it’s lonely when they first begin.’

‘I don’t mind it.’

‘What’s your girl say to it?’

It was as though the electric sign had been suddenly turned on him as it had been turned on the driver. He stood helpless, his face scarlet.

‘I ain’t got a girl.’

‘What? Not a nice boy like you?’ She was smiling, half in mockery. ‘I know you must have.’

‘No.’

‘Does she love you much?’ She looked at him in mock seriousness, her eyes lowered.

‘I ain’t got one.’

‘Honest?’ She pushed the bottles of oil and vinegar across the counter towards him. ‘I’ll ask Spike when he comes in.’

‘No, don’t say anything to Spike,’ he begged. ‘Don’t say nothing. He’s always kidding me about her, anyway.’

‘You said you hadn’t got a girl.’

‘Well — ’

She took two plates from the rack behind the counter and then knives and forks from the drawer under the counter and then laid them out.

‘Does she hate it when you’re on nights?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s she like – dark or fair?’

‘Dark.’

‘Like me?’

He could not answer. He only gazed straight at her in mute embarrassment and nodded. Every word she uttered fired him with passionate unrest. The current in his blood was renewed again. He felt himself tightened up. And she could see it all.

‘You’d better call Spike,’ she said. ‘The eggs are ready.’

He moved towards the door. Then he turned and stopped. ‘Don’t say nothing,’ he said.

‘All right.’

He stood at the door, his face scarlet under the winking sign, and called out for Spike, singing the word, ‘Spi-ike!’ And he could hear the sound echoing over the empty land in the darkness. There was a smell of corn in the air, stronger and sweeter even than the smell of the heat and cooking in the shack. It came in sweet waves from across the invisible fields in the warm night air.

‘I know how you feel,’ she said.

He turned sharply. ‘How?’

‘Come and eat this salad and cool down a bit.’

He came from the door to the counter in obedience, pulling out a stool and sitting on it.

‘Oil and vinegar?’ she said. ‘The coffee will be ready by the time Spike comes.’

‘How do I feel? What do you mean?’

‘You know.’

‘Yes, but how do you know?’

‘I’ve felt like it myself.’

She stood with her arms folded and resting on the counter edge, and learning slightly forward, so that he could see her breasts beneath the open dress. She looked at him with a kind of pity, with tenderness, but half-amused. He saw the breasts rise and fall with the same slow and almost sulky passion as she looked at him. He stared from her breasts to her face, and she stared back, her eyes never moving. And they stood like that, not moving or speaking, but only as it were burning each other up, until suddenly Spike came in.

The woman stood up at once. Spike’s cupped hands were full of plums.

‘They’re green,’ the woman said.

‘By God, if I didn’t think they was tart.’

‘Didn’t you find the right tree? On the left?’

‘I couldn’t see a blamed thing.’

‘Eat your eggs. I’ll get a torch and we’ll go down and get some ripe ones before you go.’

‘Eggs look good an’ all.’ Spike said.

The men ate in silence, the woman busy with bread and coffee. The boy put vinegar on his salad, but not oil, and once, noticing it, she unstoppered the oil bottle and pushed it across to him. It was her only sign towards him. The old manner of pity and intimacy had vanished. She was the proprietress; they were the drivers come in to eat. She stood almost aloof, busy with odd things at the far end of the counter. And the boy sat in fresh bewilderment, at a loss, and in wonder about her.

They each drank two cups of coffee and when the cups were finally empty she said:

‘If you’re ready we can go down and get the plums. But I don’t want to hurry you.’

‘I’m fit.’ Spike said. ‘And my God the eggs were a treat. You missed a treat Albie, not having eggs.’

‘The salad was all right.’

‘I’ll get the torch,’ the woman said. ‘You go out that door and I’ll meet you round the back.’

She went out of the shack by a door behind the counter, and the boy followed Spike through the front door, under the electric sign. Outside, behind the shack, the sweet smell of ripened corn and night air seemed stronger than ever. At the side of the shack and a little behind it, the bungalow stood out darker than the darkness. And after a minute the torch appeared from the bungalow and began to travel towards the men. The boy could see it shining white along the cinder path and on the woman’s feet as she came along.

‘You walk down the path,’ she said. ‘I’ll show the light.’

Spike began to walk down the path, the boy following him, and then the woman. The shadows strode like giants over the garden and were lost beyond the yellow snake fence in the dark land. The garden was short, and in a moment they all three stood under the plum tree, the woman shining the torch up into the branches, the tree turned to an immense net of green and silver.

‘I’ll shine, Spike,’ she said. ‘You pick them. If they’re soft and they lift off they’re ripe.’

‘This is better,’ Spike said. His mouth was already full of plums. ‘I struck one match to every blamed plum when I came down.’

The woman stood a little away from the tree, shining the torch steadily, making a great ring of white light across which little moths began to flutter like casual leaves. The boy stood still, not attempting to move, as though he were uninvited.

‘What about you?’ she said.

And again he could feel the old softness of sympathy and pity and insinuation in her voice, and again his blood leapt up.

‘I’m about full up,’ he said.

‘Take some for the journey.’

He stood still, electrified.

‘Take some to eat on the way. Look here, come round the other side. They’re riper.’

She moved round the tree, shining the torch always away from her. He followed her in silence, and then in silence they stood against the plum branches, in the darkness behind the light. He saw her stretch up her arm into the silver leaves, and then lower it again.

‘Where’s your hand?’ she was whispering. ‘Here. It’s a beauty.’ The soft ripe plum was between their hands. Suddenly she pressed it hard against his hands, and the ripe skin broke and the juice trickled over his fingers. ‘Eat it, put it in your mouth,’ she said. He put the plum into his mouth obediently, and the sweet juice trickled down over his lips and chin as it had already trickled over his hands.

‘Was that nice?’ she said softly.

‘Lovely.’

‘Sweet as your girl?’

It seemed suddenly as if his blood turned to water. She was touching him. She took his hand and laid it softly against her hip. It was firm and strong and soft. It had about it a kind of comforting maturity. He could feel all the sulky strength and passion of her whole body in it. Then all at once she covered his hand with her own, stroking it up and down with her fingers, until he stood helpless, intoxicated by the smell of corn and plums and the night warmth and her very light, constant stroking of his hand.

‘Shine the light,’ Spike called. ‘I can’t see for looking.’

‘I’m shining,’ she said. ‘Albie wants to see too.’

‘Getting many, Albie?’

‘He’s filling his pockets.’

She began to gather plums off the tree with her free hand as she spoke, keeping her other hand still on his, pressing it against her by an almost mechanical process of caressing. He reached up and tore off the plums too, not troubling if they were ripe, filling one pocket while she filled the other, the secrecy and passion of her movements half demoralizing him, and going on without interruption until Spike called:

‘Albie! Plums or no plums, we shall have to get on th’ old bus again.’

‘All right.’

The boy could hardly speak. And suddenly as the woman took her hand away at last he felt as if the life in him had been cut off, the tension withdrawn, leaving his veins like dead wires.

He stumbled up the path behind Spike and the woman and the light. Spike was gabbling:

‘Sweetest plums I ever tasted. When we come back I’ll take a couple of pounds and the missus’ll pie ’em.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘The night after to-morrow.’

‘There’ll be plenty,’ she said.

She said nothing to the boy, and he said nothing either.

‘Let’s pay you,’ Spike said.

‘A shilling for you, and ninepence for the salad,’ she said.

‘Salad’s cheaper,’ Spike said. ‘I’ll remember that. What about the plums?’

‘The plums are thrown in.’

They paid her. Then she stood on the shack steps while they crunched across the pull-in and climbed up into the cab, the bright red sign flashing above her.

‘That sign’s a treat,’ Spike called. ‘You could see it miles off.’

‘I’m glad you like it,’ she called. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night!’

Spike started up, and almost before the boy could realise it the lorry was swinging out into the road, and the station was beginning to recede. He sat for some moments without moving. Then the lorry began to make speed and the smell of corn and plums and the summer land began to be driven out by the smells of the cab, the petrol and oil and the heat of the engine running. But suddenly he turned and looked back.

‘The light’s out,’ he said.

Spike put his head out of the cab and glanced back. The sign was still flashing but the shack itself was in darkness.

‘She’s sitting in the dark,’ he said. ‘She always does. She says it saves her eyes and the light and she likes it better.’

‘Why?’

‘Better ask her.’ Spike put a plum in his mouth. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s her husband doing, letting her run the place at night, and sit there in the dark?’

‘It’s her own idea. It’s a paying game an’ all, you bet your life it is.’

The boy took a plum from his pocket and bit it slowly, licking the sweet juice from his lips as it ran down. He was still trembling.

And glancing back again he could see nothing of the station but the red sign flashing everlastingly out and on, scarlet to darkness, The Station to nothing at all.