The British Pullman on platform 1 at Victoria station looks mad, because it is 9 a.m. and ugly British commuters are running around, looking wracked and unhappy, like extras from Les Misérables, in slightly uglier clothes. Yet this train, which could have steamed out of Julian Fellowes’s head, sits in a grand puddle of cliché, like a duchess desperately trying not to look as if she is shopping at Lidl: graceful, romantic, a bygone age, the romance of steam, er, Foyle’s War. Its customers, a pile of mother/daughter forgiveness jaunts and happy — or unhappy — couples, are trying to look classy, which isn’t easy at Victoria station on a weekday. They are huddled in a makeshift VIP pen beyond Starbucks, which is made from a velvet rope, a red carpet and a coffee wagon. Chomping staff with happy smiles begin the standard international luxury experience of treating everyone they can grab like babies. It all feels terribly weird, like marrying Prince Harry in Little Chef.
The British Pullman, you see, is the feeder train for the Orient-Express, and the Orient-Express, although it seethes with the possibility of strange and mysterious climbs, a bit like Peter O’Toole’s face, is actually all about food, because food is the only reason you can charge this much for a one-day journey to Paris or a two-day journey to Venice, in a train that puts you up in bunk-beds. (Men love it, of course.) Also, there are no showers or baths on the Orient-Express. (This makes me wonder if Cassetti was whacked in Murder on the Orient Express because he was inordinately smelly?) So to distract you this, and from the fact that you are travelling at 15mph in a glossy cigar box from 1931, they throw piles of food at you. Last time I was on the Orient-Express my friend fell asleep at table, and woke up with a sweet by his head.
Once on, it is a Ferrero Rocher advert poised above south London, on tracks; it is that level of naff — ‘Ambassador!’ — and it is wonderful, if, like me, you want to go on a day trip impersonating an Edwardian aristocrat, or — if you are in the ‘Nazi’ carriage of the Orient-Express (‘leased to the German Army 1942-46’) — a Wehrmacht officer, in which case you can say ‘Ambassador’ in a slightly more chilling way. The most fascinating — and disturbing — thing about the British Pullman is its mobility; you are exposed in all your sobbing snobbery to dazed commuters staring from train platforms, with curiosity but no malice. The impression is less that you are travelling, but more that bits of suburbia are being hurled at your face while you eat smoked salmon and scrambled eggs.
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.
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