Trains and Lovers: A Novel (14 page)

“THERE ARE VARIOUS WAYS IN WHICH YOU CAN
get off at the wrong station. You can …”

“… go to sleep,” said Kay. “That happened to me once. I went to sleep and when I awoke I was three stations down the line.”

YES, YOU CAN GO TO SLEEP, AND THEN WAKE UP
and think that the next station is yours when in fact you’ve just passed it. That’s easily done. Or you can misread the sign on the platform. You know how hard it is to make out letters when they’re flashing past—well, you might do that. Or you can get on the wrong train in the first place, and then get out at what you think is the right station only to find it’s the wrong line.

I was reading at the time. I was sitting there reading a book that was so gripping that I had no idea where we were. Then, as the train drew into a station, I looked out of the window and saw a building that I thought I recognised.
My destination was a town in the west of England—not an important place, but the company I worked for had clients there and I went there from time to time to deal with their issues, travelling all the way down from Edinburgh to London and then across England.

I closed my book, stood up and took my overnight case from the rack above my seat. Had I looked out of the window at that point I would have seen that I was at the wrong station, but I did not. Even so, I might have realised my mistake had I looked about me once I was on the platform, but again I did not. One of my shoelaces was undone, and I reached down to tie it. The lace broke, and so I had to re-thread it so that the remaining bit did the work. That took time, and I was conscious as I did so that the train was pulling out of the station. When I stood up I saw the name of the station staring me in the face.

I felt so foolish. It was not a disaster—my meeting with the clients was not until first thing the following morning, and I knew that I would be able to catch the next train down the line in good time to book into my hotel at my original destination. But it was such an avoidable mistake, and it would mean a wait for an hour or two on an uncomfortable bench.

There was a timetable on a board a few yards away
and I went to look at this. There were several later trains, I saw, but the next one would not stop for another couple of hours. I had alighted, it seemed, at a station that was not important enough for each and every train to call at: many went through without stopping.

I looked around for somewhere to sit. There was a bench near the steps that led to a footbridge across the line, but it looked rickety and unappealing. My gaze moved down the platform, and then I saw her. She was standing at the entrance to the platform, looking at her watch, glancing anxiously around. It was immediately obvious why she was there: she had come to meet somebody off the train from which I had alighted, only to discover that she was too late, or had got the wrong train.

There was something about her that drew me to her. She was a complete stranger, but I felt almost as if there was some sort of affinity between us. Without really thinking about it, I started to cross the platform towards her. At first she seemed not to notice me, but then our eyes met. I’ve often thought about that first exchange of looks. What did she think I was doing?

“You were expecting somebody?”

She hesitated as she weighed whether to rebuff me. Men did not approach women on railway stations; they
just did not. Yet normal human courtesy, which is quite capable of surviving social inhibitions, won through. “Yes. But obviously she’s not coming. That was the London train, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. There were some other people who got off, but I didn’t really see them. Perhaps your friend wasn’t on it.”

She sighed. “I don’t think she was. It’s infuriating. She’s done this before—changed her mind and forgotten to tell me about it. It’s really inconsiderate of her.”

I commiserated. “Yes, it must be.”

“And you?” she asked. “What about you? Going somewhere?”

I shook my head. “I feel a bit stupid. I got off at the wrong station. So now I have to wait here for almost two hours for the next train to where I want to go.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Bad luck.”

I looked at my watch and then spoke on impulse. “It’s almost seven,” I said. “And I’m hungry. How about dinner?”

She was momentarily taken aback. “Me?”

I gestured to the empty station. “Well, there’s nobody else here, as far as I can see. Yes, you. That’s a pub over there, isn’t it?” I pointed to a building on the other side of the road from the railway station. The Lamb and Flag.
There were numerous Lambs and Flags throughout England, and here was one conveniently to hand. “I imagine they do food. How about it?”

She hesitated, but only briefly. “I have to see somebody at nine,” she said.

I doubted the truth of this; she needed an excuse to get away if the evening became difficult. “I have to catch my train anyway,” I said. “It’s at nine-fifteen. We’ll have finished by then.”

She thought for a moment longer before she said, “Yes, why not?”

We left the station and crossed the road to The Lamb and Flag. “I’m Hugh,” I said. “And you’re …”

“Jenny.”

“I’m glad you said we could have dinner. It means I don’t have to sit on that platform counting the minutes.”

“And I don’t have to go back to my place and be cross with my friend.”

I remarked that sometimes being stood up could have unexpected benefits, and perhaps this might be such an occasion.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

THE PUB WAS NOT AT ALL BUSY—IT WAS THE EVENING
of an important football match, England against
France—and the pub had held out against television. We chose our meal, which was delivered quickly and was piping hot. The conversation was easy, and within a few minutes we found that we each knew rather a lot about one another. She was a teacher, she told me. She originally came from Durham, and had qualified there, but had moved to Gloucestershire a couple of years earlier. She had done so on a whim, and did not regret it. “I think that if you think too much about things, you can end up never doing anything new,” she said. “Don’t you agree?”

“Such as inviting somebody for dinner two minutes after you’ve met them?”

She laughed. “Yes, that sort of thing.”

She told me that she shared a house in a village with two other teachers, although they all worked at different schools. “We met at an induction weekend,” she said. “One of them had already spotted this house, you see, and wanted somebody to share. It’s at the end of a long lane. The lane is really rather narrow, and so you have to hope that you don’t meet another car when you’re driving along it.”

“You have to breathe in if you do?”

“More or less. But that hardly ever happens.” She paused, looking at me searchingly. “And you? Do you share or …”

I noticed her glancing at my hand. You can always tell when somebody is looking for a wedding ring; it’s usually obvious enough.

“I share.”

She nodded.

“With another chap.”

It seemed to me that this was the answer she wanted; or it was the answer she wanted—subject to a qualification.

“The flat’s got two bedrooms,” I added. “So I decided to share it. It helps with the rent.”

She nodded again, and the conversation moved on. She asked me what I was doing on the train, and I explained about my visit to the clients. “They need to have their hands held,” I said. “We sell them software, and it’s easy enough to use it. They could fix all their problems themselves, but they don’t bother. They have to get us to show them how to do it.”

“There are children exactly like that,” she said. “They need you to show them everything. And then there are ones who don’t.”

I asked her about the friend she had been expecting. “She’s a sort of cousin,” she said. “She’s a physiotherapist, but she’s really scatty. It’s always the same. When some guy asks her out, she forgets about everything else.
You’d think that she could simply call me on her mobile and tell me. You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

I asked her how we got on before mobile phones were invented. What did people do?

“They wrote letters. They found phone booths.”

“It seems so long ago. It seems so impossible.”

I looked at my watch. “I mustn’t miss the next train.”

I was not prepared for what she said next. “You could always come to our place and stay there.”

I looked down at the beer I had ordered, unsure as to how to take her remark. Was this that kind of invitation? And if it was, how should I react? She had only known me for a few minutes and she was asking me to stay with her. What sort of person would invite a complete stranger to come home with her? I thought perhaps I had led too sheltered a life.

My surprise had an effect. “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she blustered. “I wasn’t propositioning you.”

This relieved the tension. “I didn’t think you were.” This, of course, was not strictly true, but I had to say it to spare her feelings.

“We’ve got a couch,” she went on. “It’s for visitors.”

I took a sip of beer. I did not want to say goodbye to her just yet. “I could stay on the couch,” I said. “It would
be better than the hotel I’m booked into. I don’t like hotels anyway.”

“And I could drive you there tomorrow,” she offered. “It’s the school holidays and I wasn’t planning to do anything much.”

We were sitting quite close to the bar, and I noticed that the landlord, who had been polishing glasses, had been listening to our conversation. He was smiling, as if to himself, and I knew that he had heard. As I looked in his direction, he gave me a wink. It was a conspiratorial sign, of the sort that one male may exchange with another when one of them has succeeded in the pursuit. I resented this; I wanted to point out to him that the situation was not as he imagined it—I had not been pursuing Jenny. This was simply a friendship. But then I realised that perhaps the wink was capable of another interpretation. Perhaps it was intended to say
I’ve seen this before
. Perhaps he wanted to say
This is how she operates
.

I looked at her. It was unlikely. It was highly unlikely.

“You don’t have to,” she said suddenly. “It was just that I didn’t want you to feel that you had to catch a train again when you’ve just got off one.”

I smiled at her. “I accept. Thanks very much.”

THE NEXT MORNING I TELEPHONED THE CLIENTS
and asked them whether it made much difference to them whether I arrived that or the following day. They replied that it was moderately more convenient to them for it to be the following day, and that settled it. I suggested to Jenny that we go off somewhere and have lunch, and she agreed that this would be a good idea. “And dinner too,” I said.

“No, I’ll cook for you,” she said. “I’ll do …” She trailed off. “I don’t really know what you like. But whatever it is, I’ll cook it for you.”

“Salmon steaks, salad and new potatoes.”

“Exactly what I had in mind,” she said.

We had our lunch, and our dinner, and when she ran me to the station the next morning we had already planned for her to come up to Edinburgh, where I lived. It was a long journey, and I wondered about the viability of a long-distance relationship, but we could talk to one another on our computers and in her job she had long holidays. But there was no question in my mind. I had found the right person. This was the woman for me. I was one hundred per cent sure. She was the one.

EDINBURGH WAS THE REAL BEGINNING, I SUPPOSE
. Then there was London, where we went a couple of months ago. And after that there was Paris. By that stage we had decided that I would move to London if I managed to find a suitable job. She could stay where she was, but it would be far easier to see one another when we were separated by a train journey of two hours rather than one of four. Everything was going well—we were completely compatible, as far as I could make out—and we felt quite comfortable in one another’s company. The only thing that worried me was what happened in Paris. That was a difficult moment in our relationship. Why? It was all about trust.

Kay sighed. “There was somebody else?”

“There
had been
somebody else …”

She sighed again. “Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? People don’t make a clean break. They let things fade away and then, when they take up with somebody else,
their ex is still hanging about somewhere, hopeful, perhaps, that things will start again. It gets messy.”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

She looked surprised. “So what was it like?”

WE STAYED IN A SMALL HOTEL NEAR THE ÉCOLE
Militaire. It was not the most obvious part of Paris to stay in for a romantic break like that—it was in a quiet street fairly close to the UNESCO headquarters. Most of the other guests, I think, were there for a UNESCO meeting—something to do with the protection of endangered languages. Some of them seemed to be speaking just such languages, I decided, as I found it difficult even to guess what they were. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how when you stay in a hotel almost anywhere all you hear are the major languages—Spanish, German, Russian and so on; you very rarely hear anything that sounds utterly foreign. But they were speaking some of those languages in the hotel that weekend—wonderful, exotic languages, including one that had clicks and whistles in it. As it happened, I knew what that was, as I had read about it. It’s called !Kung. And it has an exclamation mark in front of it. Imagine talking !English or !French with an exclamation mark. It was lovely to listen to—rather like the sound of
the wind in the reeds, or a pair of exotic birds talking to one another on the branch of a tree.