She walks off, pressing her phone then lifting it to her ear. She is being a good wife.
Guy is gathering up the drinks, talking to someone else at the bar. Ellen reaches across and puts a hand on my cheek.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Lara. What’s going on?’
I flinch, then look at her and decide that if I could trust anyone, it would be Ellen.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, don’t do that. You’re not yourself. You’re incredibly on edge. Come on, sweetie. What?’
I bite my lip and look at the darkness outside the window. Paddington station is still out there. It is only quarter to eleven: the train won’t leave for another hour.
‘I’m going to leave Sam,’ I tell her, my heart thudding as I say the words. ‘I can’t do this any more. And Guy’s going to leave Diana. This weekend. Tomorrow.’
Her eyebrows shoot up.
‘Is he? Is he really?’ She pauses, weighing up her words. ‘Just don’t be surprised if he comes back and says he couldn’t do it. He’ll have an excuse. The moment wasn’t right. Et cetera. It’s a big thing to do, to pull a family apart.’
I am ashamed of myself. ‘I know. And of course he can take as long as he wants. I’m leaving Sam no matter what.’
‘Will you move back to London? Will we lose you from the train?’
‘I suppose.’
‘We’ll still see you in London. Well, Guy will, of course, but I hope that I will too.’
‘Of course, Ellen. Always. And Ellen?’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s something else …’
But I stop, because Guy is back, passing each of us a drink. Ellen has a little bottle of white wine, and Guy and I are both having gin and tonics. He puts Kerry’s miniature wine bottle down on the table. I signal to Ellen with my eyes that I cannot tell the story in front of Guy, not now, though I am desperate to offload it.
‘This is yours,’ he says, carefully giving me the plastic cup with the black stirring stick in it.
‘Why’s it mine? What’s different?’
‘Oh, I took the liberty of getting you a double. Bloke at the bar said you looked as if you needed it, and when I looked over, you did. You really did. Dutch courage for the weekend.’
His voice is so kind, his concern so genuine that even though I remind myself that he is married and a father and on his way back to his unsuspecting family, I am overwhelmed with love for him. I want him desperately. I long to be with him legitimately.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I told Ellen about our plans. Sorry. I couldn’t help it.’
‘Cheers,’ says Ellen, pouring her wine into her plastic glass.
We all raise our cups.
‘To you, Lara,’ Ellen says, just before I take a sip. ‘This is you doing the right thing. And to you, Guy – and good luck with working out what the right thing is.’
I hear Guy say: ‘Oh, tell me about it,’ as I take a gulp from my drink, and then another.
I feel the alcohol coursing through me, and numbing me. I take one more sip. The periphery of my vision starts to go black. I am more tired than I realised.
I will just lean back, rest my head for a moment. Without meaning to, I let my head slump sideways and feel myself slipping down so I am resting on Guy’s shoulder.
I vaguely hear their voices. ‘Lara!’ they both say. ‘Lara, are you OK?’ I hear the woman, Kerry, coming back, hear the concern in her tone without being able to make out the words.
‘Yeah, fine,’ I hear myself answering. I open my eyes a little. ‘Fine. Just tired.’
‘She’s very stressed,’ Ellen’s voice says, and then she is taking charge. ‘Come on. She knocked half that drink back very quickly. No wonder she’s keeled over. Let’s get her back to her compartment and tuck her in. You leave her alone tonight, matey. OK? Next week she’ll be all yours, by the sound of it.’
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Right. Yes. All right. She’ll be all right, won’t she? Hey, Wilberforce?’
It takes an enormous effort to force my legs to walk, but I do my best, and with one of them on either side of me and Kerry somewhere nearby, we make our way slowly to my compartment, which is in the carriage next to the lounge car.
They put me on my bed. I hear their voices, though now they are so muffled that I cannot even distinguish individual words. Someone takes the shoes off my feet. They pull the bedding over me, and switch the light out, and then they are gone.
I feel the blackness breaking over me like a wave, and as the train clanks along the tracks, I succumb.
The chime of an incoming email pierces the darkness, and I am wide awake, as if the noise had activated my ‘on’ switch. I reach for my phone in the dark, but because I did not put myself to bed, it is not in its place in the mesh net beside my head. Normally I turn its volume off at night but leave it on. The blue light is bathing everything in the room in a woozy half-glow, but I have no idea where the phone could be.
The train is moving. I have no idea how long I have been asleep.
I feel horribly sick, and then I realise I need to move quickly. I stand up and lurch to the basin, fumbling with the lid and clicking it up just in time.
As I hunch over it, waiting for the eruption I know is about to happen, I hear a second message arrive and register the fact that the phone is still in my bag, just as I am sick into the basin, hugely, urgently sick with a stream of acidic liquid. I hope the little sink is up to the job: the idea of its not draining is horrendous.
I wash it away, wipe my mouth on the First Great Western flannel, and shakily brush my teeth. Then I make my trembling legs take me back, to sit on the edge of the bed. I find the bag, locate the phone in its front inside pocket.
Then I laugh. I was woken by two junk emails, one from Pizza Express and the other from the dotcomgiftshop, from whom I bought a little light once and who now email me more regularly than any actual human being. There is, however, also a text from Guy, from what I realise was only an hour ago, when I was comatose. I have hardly been asleep for any time: it is only half past midnight.
Lovely Wilberforce
, he has written.
I’m going to be worrying about you all night, but I know Ellen’s right and I must leave you to sleep. If you wake and want to see me it’s F21. I love you. Truly. We will make this happen. xxx
I stand up, wobbly but surprisingly well recovered, and try to unlock my door, realising as I do so that it was not locked in the first place, because I had not been capable of doing it.
I stumble along happily, and his words run through my head again and again. He loves me. He has never said that before, and I have carefully not said it to him either. We will make it happen. He loves me. We will make it happen.
I walk down the narrow corridor, enclosed in my familiar world, with its institutional train smell, its reassuring constant movement. In the space between carriages, I pass a man in pyjama bottoms and flip-flops heading towards the loo. He gives me a ‘we’re in this together’ smile, and I return it. I knock on Guy’s door, and when he doesn’t reply, I try the handle and push it open.
The scream rises in my throat. I grab the door frame to keep myself upright while I stare at the scene in front of me, a scene that makes no sense at all.
The train grinds to a halt, and everything is still.
part two
Iris
chapter thirteen
It was one of the sobbing mornings. They were happening more and more frequently, and I hated them. I was furious with myself for behaving so illogically. This kind of thing was not meant to happen.
I woke, in absolute darkness, crying, hiccuping, and feeling hopeless. For a second I thought Laurie was not beside me, that he had slipped away in the night, but then I saw that he was there, sleeping peacefully on his side, his mouth slightly open. I had not even disturbed him.
The only thing I could do was to get out. I took my bike and rode away into the blackness.
It was better at once. There was something invigorating about being out on a dry winter morning with my bike lights on (I put two on the front and two on the back as a nod to safety), my long hair squashed on top by my helmet, my furry coat covered by a huge reflective jacket. As soon as my feet crunched across the frozen grass, something lightened inside me. I was just a tiny part of a huge universe, and nothing really mattered. Every single thing was temporary, and one day all of us would be gone without trace. It was an intensely soothing thought.
I retrieved my bike from the place I left it when I remembered, hidden in the hedge. I appreciated the fact that the little noises of cycling – the heaves and squeaks of a bike setting off, the crunch of a stony lane under tyres – were the loudest thing in this tiny corner of the cosmos.
I knew it was past six o’clock, but it felt more like two in the morning. There were owls screeching as I set off down the lane, and invisible night creatures fled into undergrowth at my approach. I could hear the occasional distant car, and I liked the feeling of solidarity, and particularly the certain knowledge that whoever was in that car would never think to wonder if there was a woman on a bicycle somewhere nearby, listening.
I knew, as I cycled towards the main road, that one day I was going to have to stop running away. Things were not right between me and Laurie and I knew that, if I were braver, I would have been addressing that fact. One day he would leave. He would have to. It would be better if I were to take control and make it happen, rather than continuing to limp on like this.
Sometimes I came close to losing my poise completely. I could feel myself edging closer to yelling at him, swearing, demanding that he get out of my bed and my head. When he went away just before Christmas, relief had ambushed me. I had functioned fine. I even had a friend over to the house, like a normal person, and even though I had panicked when she insisted on coming to my house rather than meeting in town or at the beach, it had ended up being the most satisfying interaction with someone from the real world that I’d had for years.
That was what I would do, I decided as the light from the street lamps on the main road started to illuminate my surroundings. There was the church, the trees, the houses set back from the road. I would go and call in on her. That would calm me down. It would give me enough of a blast of reality to keep me functioning for a while.
I had spent the previous evening sitting by the wood burner, painting my toenails carefully lilac, and trying to pluck up the courage to ask him to go away again, to travel, to do something without me. I was his whole world, and he was mine, and that, I was finally suspecting, was not healthy. Other people did not live like this. We kept people away by being rude to them. It was not the way I was brought up, but it was quite enjoyable.
‘I’m not going to leave you,’ he kept protesting. ‘Not ever again,’ and I was so infuriated, and so annoyed with myself for being a tiny bit grateful for his insistence, that I’d burst into tears and stormed off to bed.
We lived on the outskirts of a village which itself was on the outskirts of Falmouth, which was, I suppose, a town on the outskirts of Great Britain. The two of us had hidden here for years, shutting out everyone, and it had suited us both, for a while. We lived with the cats, Ophelia and Desdemona, and I worked at home, proofreading impenetrable legal books that arrived by special delivery every few weeks. Our life was small, but then one week I bought a lottery ticket with the Saturday paper on a whim, and now everything was surreally different.
I had not told Laurie that I had won the lottery. My plans were not going to include him.
I pulled on to the main road, which was pleasingly empty of cars. I would, I thought, go into Falmouth and wander around for a while, have breakfast in a café now that I could do such a thing without counting the pennies, and then I would go to visit Lara. I liked the idea of our setting up a little routine of going to one another’s houses, with neither Laurie nor her grumpy husband involved.
I did not know Lara well, at all. She lived in London for most of the week, making lovely old buildings into horrible identikit ‘luxury apartments’, and her husband, on the two occasions I had met him, had made no secret of the fact that he wished I had not been there. I had done my best to radiate his hostility right back at him. Nonetheless, getting to know Lara felt like a first tentative step back into the world. She was, unwittingly, my test friend. I made an effort, with her, not to shut her out, not to be brusque or sharp. It was hard at first, but I liked it after a while.
She had spoken enthusiastically about her commute on the night train, when I saw her on Christmas Eve. She loved that train. She would be getting off it that morning, transferring in the grey half-light to the Falmouth service. I would show up and see what happened. If they told me to go away, I would. If she was busy, I would cycle home. It was just an idea.
I chained my bike to a traffic sign outside Trago’s as it started to get light. The street lights were still on as the sky turned pink, and I was warm on the inside from my bike ride, and cold on my cheeks. It would be a while until I was able to get breakfast, I thought, so I would find the coast path and stroll for a bit instead.
I walked for an hour along the clifftops, until the path descended to the beach at Maenporth. That stretch of coast path was crunchy, with glassed-over puddles and solid peaks and troughs of frozen mud. The sea was as perfectly still as a pond, and the bare branches of the trees around me did not move at all. I passed one runner, a skinny man with the muscular leanness and hollow cheeks of one who exercises too much, and one dog walker, a woman in her forties with wild insomniac eyes.
The sea air was painfully fresh and filled me with ideas and possibilities. I lost myself in daydreams of travel, and was surprised to reach my destination so quickly. I walked across the beach to the place where the high tide met the stones and deposited its seaweed, and stared out at the solitary tanker close to the horizon, I decided to turn around and walk straight back, all the way to Pendennis point and around it to Lara’s house.
I knew I should go back to London, just for a visit. Laurie wouldn’t mind that. I walked back quickly, tentatively planning. From London you could be in Paris in a fraction of the time it took to get anywhere from Falmouth. From Paris you could catch a train to anywhere in Europe; or you could go to an airport and pick a destination. This money, my secret money, could literally take me anywhere in the world. I did not have a clue where to find the courage to start.