by Alyson Rudd
‘Restructured?’ Sylvie said slowly.
‘Yes, sadly, restructuring. It happens.’
Indignation rumbled in Sylvie’s belly but did not erupt. She was mostly numb but knew that her pay-off was too good to ignore for the sake of fighting for a job that was not one she loved anyway, not since Gerry, her boss, had begun to sulk.
She read the document as slowly as she dared and then provided her signature.
‘Excellent,’ Jane Jessop said. ‘Jason will escort you from the premises. Don’t be alarmed. It’s standard procedure as I’m sure you know.’
Jason had appeared stealthily and handed Sylvie a box, which she peered in to as if it might contain a pair of kittens or a bowl of expensive fruit.
‘For you to clear your desk,’ Jane Jessop said, but she was already punching a speed-dial number and thinking of other employees. Sylvie was a small problem sorted.
Jason stood deferentially to one side as Sylvie cleared her desk of the cashmere scarf she kept for emergencies, her spare make-up bag and the plump echeveria cactus that had sat dutifully by her phone for the full two years. The box, she felt, was barely necessary. The thought of entering the lift holding it made her almost retch. She placed it slowly, as if it were a bomb, on her desk. She wrapped the scarf around her neck, placed the make-up into her handbag, lifted the cactus off the desk and spun around to give it to Cheryl who had been housed at the adjacent desk for under a month and who seemed pleasant enough.
‘A parting gift,’ Sylvie said and Cheryl blushed, not in delight but in embarrassment at being seen to be favoured by the sacked one. Jason frowned but said nothing. He wondered what the magic words might be to ensure that by the time he and Sylvie were on the street, they had arranged to meet for a coffee.
They took the lift in silence, Sylvie inwardly smarting at the injustice of how easy it had been for Jane Jessop and Gerry and the rest of them to erase her.
They reached the pavement.
‘Splendidly escorted,’ Sylvie said in soft sarcasm and walked towards the Tube station.
Jason, knowing no magic words, simply stared at her as she walked away.
She realized she was sat on a westbound Piccadilly train without having made a conscious decision to be there. The idea of engaging in her normal commute six hours earlier than usual filled her with dread. She would dawdle, maybe go to a gallery. She was not ready to walk in through her front door, place her keys on the table, fill the kettle and face life as someone unemployed. The train had other ideas. It was perky, this train, she noted. It was not rush hour so it could open its doors, collect its passengers, slam the doors shut quickly and then speed off as if late for a doctor’s appointment. She understood for the first time the attraction of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories. Trains could be humanized, have personalities, quirks of character.
They had already left Hyde Park Corner behind. She tried to concentrate. There was culture galore if she got off at South Kensington but she recalled big crowds and long queues and she was more in the mood for a gentler perusal of art or at least a calmer sort of dodging of reality. She was fairly sure the Tate was near Pimlico so she changed onto the Circle line at South Kensington and then changed again at Victoria but when she emerged at Pimlico there was a swirling wind whipping up the rain and she decided that to wander the marbled corridors of the Tate with dripping hair and wet feet was not quite the diversion she had envisaged.
Her mind empty of an alternative, Sylvie boarded a northbound train hoping for inspiration. She looked at the map. What she really wanted was to stroll across Regent’s Park but she was prepared to accept that was only the case because the weather made it impossible. The train whistled into Oxford Circus and still she had not formulated a plan – but there was no point staying on the Victoria line so she hopped off, stood on the platform helplessly and then hopped straight back on. Her rather dull proposal, formulated in desperation, was to go to King’s Cross St Pancras station. She had never seen that station, it was supposed to be architecturally impressive and she was hungry. She could eat lunch there without the need to brave the weather and then, once fed, she could assess if she felt ready to go home with her cashmere scarf and abundance of make-up.
The station was enormous, like a mini-city from a sci-fi film. There were glossy shops with sparkling-clean glass doors and windows, and cafés and restaurants. The trains were hidden and she was intrigued enough to cease feeling the gnawing self-pity and decided to explore. Some trains were upstairs and some were behind barriers away from the eateries. She bought a feta cheese Greek salad and sat at the sort of scrubbed chunky wooden table usually found in a farmhouse kitchen. She took out her phone and laid it beside her carton of lunch. She was unemployed and had no idea what kind of emails and messages an unemployed woman might receive.
The answer, she discovered, as she crunched a piece of cucumber, was very few. She was off the mailing list. There was a message, though, from Catherine, a PA to a man very like Gerry, only chubbier.
You must be livid, sweetie. Fancy a drink one night next week to vent?
It was a curious sort of note, Sylvie thought, both thoughtful and brusque. Am I livid? she wondered. She decided she was not. She was hurt. As she took her last bite of the last olive, she winced. How had it taken her three hours to realize what had actually happened?
She jabbed the plastic fork into the back of her hand. A tiny drizzle of olive oil trickled towards her wrist. She licked it and noticed a man sat opposite, leering. She sneered at him by curling her lip and narrowing her eyes. He did not blush, he simply kept staring. She rose slowly. She was ready to go home now.
Sylvie did not rush, though. She wandered into a clothes store that was half full of cardigans for spring and half full of expensive new-range dresses for a summer that was still three months away. She fingered the knitwear. She was rich, or rather in a mirage of wealth. She could afford to be impulsive but nothing took her fancy. A young man in a faded frock coat was playing at a white piano as she walked towards the Underground. She paused, noting how he was too immersed to flirt, to notice how many women stopped to listen, and she shivered as she recalled Gerry’s dry, gingery breath on her neck as he leaned too closely.
Chapter 3
Over a tuna mayonnaise sandwich, four hours later, Ryan searched for East Lynne on the computer in his small office. The plot summary was impenetrable. He was not at all sure he could bluff that he had read it – so he ordered it instead and then asked his boss if he could come in a little later the next morning as there were no exams for him to oversee. Ryan smiled to himself. He was definitely being proactive, albeit subtly so; so subtly that nothing he was doing could really match the dictionary definition of the word but he felt relatively empowered rather than his usual floatingly useless self and that made a nice change.
It was a risk, using up a favour from his boss when he could not be sure Millie would even be on his train the next day. He arrived at North Ealing station five minutes earlier than his usual five minutes early and surveyed the first carriage of the first train to pull in. He drew back and looked at the departure strip. Three minutes until the next eastbound train to Cockfosters. He felt good about that train and he scanned the carriage with narrowed, focused eyes. She was there. If he was sprightly he could grab a seat on the opposite row and two places apart. He made it. She did not notice the fact. Her novel, with its image of a woman in white, slumped in despair at a small desk, was held in front of her face but not for long. She sighed as if she had reached the end of a dissatisfying chapter, closed the book and then closed her eyes.
Ryan frowned. Millie appeared for all the world like someone who was settled in for a long ride. He had imagined her destination to be, if not Knightsbridge, then Green Park or, at worst, Covent Garden. He fidgeted and looked at his watch. The doors opened at Green Park and then closed again and still Millie’s eyes were shut. They pulled into Piccadilly Circus. Nothing. No movement. The train trundled slowly towards Le
icester Square and her eyes flashed open. She put her book in her bag and stood.
Ryan held his breath. He had not thought beyond this moment. Was it even useful for him to know this was her stop? He sat, in paralysis, for a few seconds and then darted through the doors. ‘I appear to be following her,’ he said to himself, as if the narrator of his own story. He was half amused and half embarrassed. And then he became irritated. Millie was following the signs for the Northern line. Her journey was much longer than he had assumed. He had to abandon this lunacy. He would be pushing his luck back at work.
As he climbed back onto the Piccadilly line he wondered at his disappointment, at the lack of any logic to it. He thought they had the Piccadilly line in common but she had wandered off to the Northern and for all he knew she would change again, onto the Bakerloo or Jubilee. He gazed at the Tube map on the wall and imagined her at Waterloo station, maybe taking a mainline train to… He racked his brains for towns served by Waterloo. Bournemouth. She could be on her way to the coast by now.
By the time he reached the university he believed he knew less than he knew before and he had much preferred his assumption that she worked only a few stops away from him. Now he realized she could be anywhere in London or anywhere outside of London. On the days he did not see her she could be in Poole or Southampton with her boyfriend or lover. He deliberately stubbed his toe against the wall and whispered that he was an idiot, not because he did not know her route or her real name but because he was jealous of whoever was waiting for her by the sea and he briefly forgot about the inventory he was supposed to be compiling and daydreamed, involuntarily, of her stood in front of a huge rock in Australia, a distant ocean breeze taking hold of her long white dress as pan pipes played from above.
He felt a bit grubby for a few hours and then, just a smidgen, triumphant. He had trailed a stranger and that was highly peculiar but it was not just because of her pretty, candyfloss hair. If he had been asked to find the words to describe why he was drawn to her he would have been nervous of trying but he believed there had been something that connected them the day she had helped the helpless student. There had been a familiarity, a thread of something almost comforting, a premonition of knowing her, a need to know more about her when he had assumed he would never be intrigued by a woman ever again.
He shook his head, exasperated by his inability to pin down his feelings, as he wandered aimlessly down the aisle of his nearest supermarket. Ellen had hated food shopping and had flitted at speed, collecting the bare essentials and appearing at the till while he was still comparing the prices of packs of mince. She would sit cross-legged, sucking dramatically at the strings of spaghetti he had cooked for them, she would make fun of him in a way that lifted his spirits and expanded his ego. That was quite a skill, he realized now for the first time. She had not cared he was not Tom. She had not considered that life is fragile, that to take off her jumper in her mother’s too-stuffy car could have consequences, that it could be devastating.
Chapter 4
‘You’re in a bad mood,’ Naomi said. ‘Everything OK?’
She was making pasta for them both and usually, if she did that, Ryan would perch on a kitchen bar stool and chat. Instead he sat on the sofa staring blankly at the screen of his laptop.
He made a strange tutting sound so she carried on chopping mushrooms in silence and soon took him a plate piled high with penne tossed in her creamy mushroom sauce. She brought her own plate to the sofa and curled into the corner to make sure there was as much distance between them as possible.
‘Maybe I can help,’ she said in a voice that she hoped sounded sisterly and not the least nosy. She had grown much fonder of Ryan than she assumed most lodgers to be of their landlords.
He swallowed a forkful of pasta, a tiny splash of cream landing, as usual, on his chin, then tapped his plate.
‘Good as always,’ he said and they sat without speaking for a few minutes.
‘Shall I distract you with Tamsin’s latest drama?’
‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Actually, why I don’t distract you with how pathetic I was today.’
She smiled. ‘I bet it’s not as pathetic as you think.’
He took a breath. This was almost interesting. He had no real idea how odd his behaviour had been. He was usually so predictable, he knew that, but maybe his small adventure was part of an average day for most other men his age. He wondered how to precis who Millie was and how she had become an obsession. He wondered whether if he formulated the words for it all, the spell would be broken: Naomi would giggle, he would guffaw, and by the weekend he would have forgotten all about her and be found clubbing with Beth, Tamsin, Naomi, Stu and Florence Nightingale.
‘There’s a girl on the Tube,’ he said as if relating the plot of a box set. ‘I see her most days, not every day, and she’s, well, she has got to me. I’ve no idea why. We’ve never spoken. Never smiled at each other even. I asked if I could go in late today so I could find out where she gets off. And she gets off at Leicester Square so I do too and then she goes to the Northern line and so—’
Here Ryan raised his hands. ‘And so I turn around and get back on the train so I won’t be too late and she seems more of a stranger than she did the day before. As I promised; pathetic.’
‘Well, not really,’ Naomi said.
‘Oh, I forgot to mention I spent the whole day obsessing about her visiting her boyfriend who probably lives in a big villa overlooking the sea.’
‘He probably doesn’t,’ Naomi said and Ryan smiled.
‘Yeah, I just needed to get that off my chest. Now I know how ridiculous it sounds, I’ll stop stalking her.’
‘Hmm,’ Naomi said.
Hana had booked a walking holiday in Devon. It was customary for Ryan to stay at his mother’s when Hana was away. It was tough for Grace if left on her own day and night with Grandpa. Not one of them had ever suggested he should go into care. There was nothing wrong with him. He was, simply, sad, sometimes grumpy, and lost in a world of clockwork tears and cake.
Ryan arrived on the Saturday morning as Hana was holding Grandpa’s hand and saying she would be back in a week’s time.
‘I bought you this for the journey,’ Ryan said as he handed her the novel he had ordered online.
‘Thank you,’ Hana said, puzzled as she looked at the slouched woman on its cover.
‘Is it a Mills and Boom thingy?’ Grandpa said, somewhat sharply.
‘Boon,’ Hana said with a half-smile. ‘Boon. And I do hope not.’
‘A colleague recommended it,’ Ryan explained. ‘And as you watched that Dickens thing, I thought—’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Thanks. The bedding’s all changed for you and there’s loads of space in the wardrobe.’
‘I’ve cooked a chicken for us,’ Grace said, trying not to appear too excited to have Ryan back home, all to herself. ‘We’ll have it cold with salad, shall we?’
It was, Ryan knew, good for him to spend the occasional week at home. It underlined just how saintly his sister was for living with Grace and Grandpa when she ought to be more selfish, more married or more of a mother. She had been married, once, to a man who had been devoted in a saccharine manner while they were engaged and a mean-spirited sloth once hitched. He had dragged Hana’s self-esteem into the dirt and stamped on it as if extinguishing a lit cigarette; they never had any children, which was obviously a blessing, as his mother would say, and yet Hana had nothing now to compensate for the nasty years, the wasted years.
Grace, beaming at the prospect of the week ahead, had bought in copious amounts of bacon, sausages and eggs for the Sunday fry-up and the bacon sandwiches she would make for Ryan before he headed off to work.
‘Now then, I haven’t bought in the food for Monday’s supper so you’ll have to let me know what you fancy,’ she said. ‘You know what I’m good at anyway.’
Grandpa stirred at seven o’clock and fumbled for his handkerchief to wipe at his rheumy eyes. Grace went u
pstairs, returned with a warm face cloth, and proceeded to pad away at his tear-stained cheeks.
‘Ryan’s home,’ she said and he looked over at his grandson with such wistfulness that Ryan was almost moved to tears himself.
‘It’s not Tom, is it?’ Grandpa said.
‘No, it’s not Tom,’ Grace said in a voice that told of a barrier erected many years ago in order to cope with Grandpa’s questions.
‘Where’s my scarf?’ he said. This was the cue for them to walk him slowly to the local pub, one that would be quiet even on a Saturday evening. It showed no football nor served food but it was clean and the staff always made a fuss of Grandpa, found a cushion for his chair and brought him his whisky without being asked.
Once settled, Grandpa smiled and told them the history of the pub, something he did quite a lot, but neither Ryan nor Grace minded because it was gratifying to see him animated and content.
‘Now then, marriage,’ Grandpa said.
Ryan and his mother exchanged a surprised glance. This was a fresh departure.
‘What about marriage, Grandpa?’ Ryan said.
‘Didn’t suit your sister one little bit,’ he said.
‘No,’ Ryan said and he suppressed a twitch of guilt that he had never helped Hana out, never talked to her properly about her life, that he had been happy to let her shelter him from the worst of it. There were only six years between them but Hana treated it like a gulf, like she was another mother to him. As the dust peculiar to pubs danced its way towards the polished tables, Ryan, not for the first time, inwardly scolded his lack of maturity as he sat alongside this pair of older, seen-it-all, seen-too-much relatives who had in their different ways shielded him from dramas about which he only knew an outline.
