The train pulls in. Unlike the other passengers, I don’t need to wait for the doors to open. There’s no reason why I couldn’t go and sit in First Class but old habits die hard. I choose a half-empty carriage near the back and, glory! I get a table all to myself and I sit down on the window seat, facing front.
The train doors slam. The whistle blows. What beautiful, beautiful sounds. And then, how pleasing and how slow at first, the train begins to pull out of the station, the promise of what is to come building and building in the shuddering beneath us.
As we pass the end of the platform, I look to my left and clearly visible above the British Transport Police building is the multistorey car park. The grey shape is there and I know what it is. It is Matthew, in his hooded parka – or rather, it is his future. I see that future, clear as day, as the train picks up speed. I see that one Saturday morning a year or so from now, he will be returning to his car, which he has parked on Level Six, looking out towards the station. His baby son Jason is in a pushchair and his wife Shelley is holding his stepdaughter Estella’s hand. Estella is nearly five now and has started school. They have just come back from a tiring trudge round Queensgate and she is whining. Baby Jason is curled up on his side and making a kind of low grizzling noise, the one that infants do when nothing is really wrong but they want everyone to know that whatever it is, frankly, they’ve had enough of it.
Outside the multi-storey car park, a grey drizzle falls. Matty and Shelley are arguing and as they reach the car, he grabs her by the lapels of her jacket and shoves her back against the yellow railings, hard against them, bending her back and shouting in her face. Estella, standing next to them, begins to scream.
A man and a woman are passing at that moment. The man is small, Asian, shabbily dressed and quite elderly – and yet he marches up to Matthew and stands next to him and sticks his finger in his face. Matthew lets Shelley go and she looks around for Estella, who is crying while the woman tries to comfort her, and for Jason, who is sitting in his pushchair by the side of the car and has begun to wail.
Matty has both hands raised, placating the man, and eventually the couple leave, looking from Matty to Shelley, to each of the kids and back again. Everything calms down. Shelley unclips Jason from the pushchair and Matty folds it and puts it in the boot. As they get into the car, though, something in Shelley is giving way. There have been plenty of scenes like that at home but this is the first time he has done it in public and there is something about the humiliation of it. Even though she doesn’t know it yet, that is the point she starts making her plans.
The elderly couple have walked away but they are not prepared to let it rest. While the husband was remonstrating with Matty, the wife was quietly using her phone to take a picture of the number plate of his car.
They go to Thorpe Road Police Station two days later. The young PC who speaks to them takes notes a little wearily – it sounds a very minor incident to him. When the couple have gone, he goes back to his desk and looks up the car registration and sees that on the Police National Computer there are two reports about Dr Matthew Goodison: the callout to Helen Lovegrove, the no-crime domestic, and the witness statement from a Mrs Leyla Abaza following the death of Lisa Evans. The young PC has a word with his sergeant and she arranges for a couple of officers to visit Matthew Goodison’s home while he will be out, to have a word with his wife.
The visit from the police is what gives Shelley the courage to believe her own feelings, the ones she has always had. It takes a while but within a year, she asks Matty to leave. He keeps coming round, of course, banging on the door, and has to be arrested twice before he stops. Eventually, the restraining order does the trick but Shelley doesn’t really feel safe again until she gets a job in Norwich and moves there with the kids. They settle there, the three of them, and it’s hard, but she got out while they were still young, at least.
Matthew Goodison will never go to prison. There are other girlfriends, after Shelley – and to each he tells the same story, of how jealous and unreasonable his wife turned out to be, how she took his children away from him and he will never recover.
One day, at the age of fifty-two, he will be found drunk on the top floor of the multi-storey car park, with one leg over the yellow rail, in the middle of the afternoon. Sadly, a member of the public will spot him in time and call the police and a negotiator will talk him down. After that, he’s just a blur, a grey blur.
*
The train has picked up speed and we are through the outskirts of Peterborough and out into the open countryside. In her small flat in Welwyn Garden City, my mum will be preparing for bed, brushing her teeth slowly and carefully as she does each night, combing back her hair. I always thought there was something so sweet about that – my mother combed her short curls each night before she got into bed, as well as in the morning. She wanted to be neat in her sleep. Just before she turns her light out, she will look at the framed photograph again.
Outside the windows of the train, it is pitch black now: night, in all its blankness. I have no reflection, of course, so all I see is black. Diagonally opposite me there is a young man of around nineteen or twenty, watching something on his phone with headphones in his ears, his mouth open as he rocks in his seat with silent laughter. In the seat behind him, a man in a business suit sips a ready-mixed gin and tonic straight from the can, staring straight ahead, his gaze vacant. Behind him is a woman who is talking to the person sitting next to her, who I can’t see. I watch all these people, and I know what I always knew, a knowledge that is a kind of bedrock beneath all the other layers of knowledge that I have. Love takes so many forms.
I loved my parents; I loved my friends. I loved my students, I really did – even the ones I didn’t like all that much. None of this precluded romantic love, of course – if I had had it, it could have led to children and a whole new world of love. I’m not dismissing that, any of it. I just wish that I had kept more sense of proportion.
And now I’m on a train. I’m going to Hertfordshire, to Welwyn Garden City. I’m going to find my mother. I have no poltergeist skills, nor will I ever, but somehow I will convince her – all the love she poured into me for all those years, all the times she loaded the washing machine and cut the crusts off sandwiches – none of it was wasted. I was not unhappy. I knew myself to be loved, and I loved. My life was short but it was a good life and I’m glad I lived it.
Given time, maybe I will be able to make her think of the good things, like the holiday when we all stood in a field with the wind in our hair and I reached out a puffy little hand to touch her face. She will remember we were happy and she will know that although I do not have a body any more, I am inside her; I live on in her heart. She is not alone. She was never alone.
It’s dark outside, but a beautiful dark, a dark full of blankness and possibility, and the train thunders on, relentless go the wheels, relentless now, for this is the glory of it, it goes on and on. A ticket inspector bounces from side to side as he makes his way down the carriage, saying in a sing-song voice, ‘All tickets and railcards, please!’ He bumps against the edge of the empty seat next to me but doesn’t pause because he can’t see me. I am neither here nor mirrored in the train window. I have no presence or reflection but to the people who cared for me, I exist, living on in their hearts. I am not alone. I never was.
Acknowledgements
In writing this, my ninth novel, I was – as ever – incredibly grateful to all the people with proper jobs willing to humour a writer’s desire to poke around in their lives. Thanks to: Inspector Andrew Pickles of the British Transport Police, who facilitated the bulk of my research; Chief Superintendents Jeff Boothe and Allan Gregory; Gemma Harris; Roopa Farooki; Sean Enright; Jodie Slater, Mark Johnson and many other staff working for what was then Virgin Trains East Coast, who let me hang around with them day and night, despite their understandable bafflement that anyone should want to write a novel set on Peterborough Railway Station.
I would
also like to thank the staff of the Great Northern Hotel who, by the second of my many stays, were already welcoming me like an old friend. For any other writer thinking of setting a book on Peterborough Station, I can recommend Room 132, from which you can see the train platforms, the BTP building and the multi-storey car park: if you open the window, you can listen to the announcements too. It’s not every novel where you can do your primary research while eating an excellent cooked breakfast in bed.
Thanks as well to Mandy Chasney and everyone in the Palmy Ukelele Band for letting me attend rehearsal and sing along. Really, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the inhabitants of Peterborough and I’d like to apologise for the wisecrack about dual carriageways.
Once again, eagle-eyed friends gave me invaluable help at the manuscript stage: Raj Kohli, Jacqui Lofthouse, Brigid Sheppard, Bob Gilbert, Jane Hodges, Nathalie Weatherald. Jill Dawson provided caffeine, cocktails and essential moral support.
My agent Antony Harwood and editor Louisa Joyner were exceptionally supportive of this book from start to finish, even when I explained it to them and it sounded really weird. Many thanks to them, to my copy-editor Eleanor Rees, to Anne Owen, Sophie Portas and to everyone at Faber & Faber for their continuing indulgence.
Most of all, I would like to thank all of my Peterborough relatives, in particular my cousin Maria Blyzinski, our Ria, who put me right on a host of small details. Now my parents are dead and my children grown, I value extended family more than ever. They, and the groups of people mentioned above, have shown me much generosity and kindness – arguably the purest form of love.
About the Author
Louise Doughty is the author of eight novels, most recently Black Water, which was published in 2016 to critical acclaim in the UK and the US, where it was nominated as a New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her previous book was the Top Ten bestseller Apple Tree Yard, adapted for BBC One as a four-part series starring Emily Watson. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers and broadcasts regularly for the BBC. She lives in London.
By the Same Author
fiction
CRAZY PAVING
DANCE WITH ME
HONEYDEW
FIRES IN THE DARK
STONE CRADLE
WHATEVER YOU LOVE
APPLE TREE YARD
BLACK WATER
non-fiction
A NOVEL IN A YEAR
Copyright
First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019
All rights reserved
© Louise Doughty, 2019
Cover design by Faber
Cover image © Plainpicture/David Carreno Hansen
The right of Louise Doughty to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32197–1
Platform Seven Page 37
