by Alyson Rudd
Four hours later he sidled into her booth high above the platform at Waterloo.
‘Is it OK if we share?’ he said gently.
His ears buzzed with the nerves he felt. His peripheral vision was shot to pieces, the mezzanine-level shoppers and diners were two-dimensional, disfigured fuzzy-felt figures walking as marionettes might walk, bobbing exaggeratedly. He wondered if he should stand up again and wished he had not spoken in the first place.
‘Of course,’ she replied, and so he did not stand. He remained still, waiting for the buzzing to ebb away.
She had been asked this question many times before and only once had it led to an unpleasant lunch when a woman, in her sixties perhaps – or maybe younger because her features were bloated and mottled by years of too much booze and cigarettes – had sat down and taken her acquiescence to mean she wanted company. The woman had been angry with her day, angry with her life, and her bitterness had seeped into Millie’s pasta parcels. Even the waiter had noticed and gave Millie a sympathetic grimace as she pushed the half-eaten plate of food to one side.
Ryan studied the menu, occasionally darting a glance in her direction. She had taken off her coat and was wearing a subdued blue soft cotton long-sleeve T-shirt. The waiter was reasonably new and had not seen Millie before.
‘You two ready to order?’ he asked with the jolly twang of an Italian who had learned American English.
‘We are not together,’ Millie said neutrally. ‘Please, could I have the dolcelatte and walnut salad and a fresh orange juice?’
‘We’re not together but I’d like the same,’ Ryan said. ‘But with garlic bread.’
‘OK,’ said the waiter, ‘I wish all customers made my life so simple.’
‘Hey,’ Ryan said. ‘I’ve just worked it out. I saw you on the Piccadilly line this morning.’
She lifted her face and looked at him steadily as the buzzing in his ears returned to taunt his rehearsed line.
‘Well, that’s a coincidence, I suppose,’ she said.
There was a silence as Ryan rejected every possible next sentence. He could not ask her what train she was catching because he was fairly sure she was not catching one and that might make her uncomfortable. He could not say he recognized her because she was so pretty because that would make him sound corny or horny or like a pervert.
Her phone vibrated and she sat back and read a message and scrolled for a few seconds before putting it back in her bag.
Ryan slowly rolled back his shirtsleeves, wondering for the first time in his life if his forearms were too hairy or too slim. She smiled, he was sure of it.
‘It’s warmer now,’ he said.
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘That’s why I went for a salad.’
The waiter placed their juices in front of them. Ryan was certain he winked at him as he did so. He took a sip at the same time she did.
‘This is like the opposite of speed dating,’ he said, trying very hard to sound intelligent and relaxed.
‘Have you been speed dating?’
‘No. It sounds nasty.’
‘Me neither.’
She looked down at the concourse, at the uneven rows of people staring at the departure boards, waiting for their platform to be announced. A murmuring had begun and so she looked at the boards too and saw the words ‘delayed’ and ‘cancelled’ repeated across them.
‘What’s happening?’ Ryan said, hopeful that the station would be in lockdown, that they would be forced to sit together for longer.
‘They never say why, but there’s a problem on most lines, it looks like. Leaves made soggy by this odd rainforest weather in November perhaps.’
‘Humidity is definitely an issue. I’ve had to roll up my sleeves. You’ve taken off your coat.’
‘Will you miss a meeting or something?’ she asked him and he was startled into a gormless silence.
He had worried for so long about what to say to her that he had not considered what she might say to him.
‘No, I’ll be fine,’ he said lamely, hating himself.
‘OK,’ she said, biting into a walnut. ‘Me too.’
He could not prevent himself from frowning. She was so reasonable, witty, normal, beautiful – so why was she about to disappear back underground? As he chewed on his last bite of garlic bread he had a brainwave.
‘I’m going to the bookshop,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you are too? That would be another, very nice, coincidence.’
She smiled and delved into her bag, pushed a nearly red curl behind her left ear, and pulled out the novel he had seen her close with a sense of sad finality that morning.
‘I finished this on the train,’ she said. ‘I thought it would last longer. So, that’s not a bad idea at all.’
‘Let me,’ he said as the waiter brought two bills. ‘You’ve made what would have been a dull bite to eat a very pleasant lunch.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I could say the same so let’s pay for our own.’
But he was floating now, surprised and happy.
‘In that case, let’s do this again and then you can pay.’
She shrugged and pulled on her coat. As they stood she offered her him her hand and he froze, remembering Naomi’s abhorrence at Cappi’s big mistake.
‘I’m Sylvie,’ she said, amused.
‘I – sorry, I was thinking of, sorry, I’m Ryan.’
They approached the bookshop in companionable silence and split up once they walked through the door. Ryan mooched among the bestsellers, occasionally glancing around to see where she was, wondering if he needed to actually buy a book, wondering if he did whether she would think him lowbrow and dull. But he had said he needed to buy one so he had better buy one. He decided the safest bet was to buy Hana a novel, the sort that had an old watercolour on its cover and was labelled a classic. He chose an Edith Wharton simply because its illustration was so very corseted. He would give it to her at Christmas, pretend it was from Grandpa. To give her two novels she had not asked for in one year would be weird.
He timed his arrival at the cash desk to dovetail with Sylvie’s.
‘It’s for my sister,’ he said as she peered at the cover.
‘Oh, you must give her this too. I’ve no room at home for all the books I get through.’
She handed him The Shadow of Ashlydyat, the very heavy novel she had finished at Blackfriars. It was by Mrs Henry Wood. He remembered ordering East Lynne for Hana. That had been by the same author. This was the moment to shine.
‘Didn’t she write East Lynne?’ he said but, instead of seeming impressed, Sylvie looked at him guardedly.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘Anyway, maybe you can say hello next time we are on the same train and then we can arrange for another lunch.’
She sounded more brusque now, in a hurry to leave, but he was uncertain what it was that had caused the mood to alter.
‘Where are you off to?’ he said lightly, but she did not answer. She walked instead towards the escalators that led to an array of Tube lines as if she knew exactly where she was going, and maybe she did, he thought, but he doubted it.
He felt deflated and was unwilling to head back onto the Underground immediately. He returned to the bookshop where, towards the back of the room, was Ellen, her head bowed as she traced her fingers across a stack of paperbacks.
Ryan blinked. He knew it was not a co-incidence. An elderly man walked in front of him. Ryan tilted his head to look past him. Ellen’s jumper was being worn by a skinny teenage boy.
‘Oh my God, you never did,’ Naomi said
‘Oh but I did,’ he said. ‘But of course, as it went so well, it had to end badly.’
‘You kissed her bloody hand, didn’t you?’
He could not help but laugh, but when he explained the exchange in the bookshop, Naomi nodded seriously.
‘Ah, I see.’
‘Well, do please explain because I don’t.’
Naomi spread out her arms, rotated her wrists and wrinkled her
nose.
‘It’s like, well, it’s like, you knew too much. Like in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray has known Andie MacDowell for ten years and she has only known him for two days. He thinks he can impress her because he knows what ice creams she likes but she is spooked. Blokes like you don’t know Mrs Henry Whatserface. Think about it. Think about it and watch Groundhog Day.’
‘Seen it,’ he said, pouting.
‘See it again,’ she said.
Chapter 11
Sylvie had headed serenely towards the Bakerloo line after their lunch. Ryan had been familiar in a hard-to-pin-down-why sort of way. He had been by the far the most attractive and pleasant person to have ever struck up a conversation with her at a railway station but, also, he had seemed to be hiding something and she was perturbed. People were complicated; people were sometimes kind while being cruel. She was too busy, anyway, to be side-tracked by him and whether he was kind or cruel. She travelled to Oxford Circus. She could have sat down but she chose to stand, to sway with the bends that were peculiar to the Bakerloo, a noisy, squeaking line that she sometimes felt was used by people who failed to take their journeys seriously. She walked, slowly, to the Central line and travelled as far as Lancaster Gate. She sat on a bench and took out her new book, which was not by Mrs Henry Wood. It was A Passage to India, a novel she had been meaning to read for some time but was only now in the mood to begin.
She had been sat down for twenty minutes and seen five eastbound trains come and go when a short, trim man with a neat beard, aged around fifty, sat down next to her and, in the lull between an emptying and filling-up platform, asked her if she wanted to go with him to a nearby hotel.
‘You look ready,’ he said and her heart froze.
‘Go away,’ she said in a low voice.
‘No,’ he said as, for reasons best known him, he felt empowered, fairly sure he would get what he wanted.
She stared at the open page of her book, which was about Dr Aziz and his poetry, but the letters were jumbled. She turned the page all the same while the man stroked his knee and she felt her stomach tighten. The next train approached and she did not lift her eyes from her book. The doors opened and still she did not move. The man shuffled slightly, smugly acknowledging that by staying put the girl was coming round to the idea of a liaison, but then she leaped from the seat, her book still open, and darted into the carriage just as the doors began to close. As she exhaled a tall man in a smart dark suit glanced at her quizzically and a taller, younger man with a shock of white hair buried his head in his hands, unable to accept that sudden movements were not connected to him. Someone was letting him know he had spent too much money today.
Sylvie felt exposed, that all eyes were upon her now, that she was a misfit. It maddened her that an older man had believed it acceptable to try to pick her up. What signals had she given him by being sat quietly reading a classic novel? Her brow wrinkled at the notion that there were no safe spaces any more. She had assumed that anyone sat, absorbed in a book, was as close to invisible as you could become without a magic cloak. And Ryan, come to think of it, had seen nothing to stop him from flirting with her even though she had not looked up at him until he spoke. She began to grind her teeth in annoyance. A woman alone could not be alone, it would appear. They all think they can own you, help you, pester you, intimidate you. Only when the trains were moving was she safely in a bubble of isolation, but she could not be in motion the whole day long. It was essential she stopped from time to time, maybe for an hour, maybe for three, to give a station her time, although if anyone asked why she would not be sure of the reasoning. Her routine had not been decided by her. It had been decided for her. Most of what she did was done on instinct, after all, and where that came from, she did not know either. Her life held so little logic these days that sometimes she wanted to peer into the Tube tunnels and shriek into the darkness.
Is this all becoming untenable, she thought. What is it I am waiting for?
Eight months earlier…
‘Don’t go straight home,’ he had said. ‘Wait. I’ll buy you a drink.’
He would probably be saying the same thing to her replacement in a few weeks’ time.
There was a map on the wall near the ticket machines at King’s Cross. The whole of London was there and accessible. She daydreamed a little, wondering if her next job would take her to an office in the City or the West End. She reached out and placed her forefinger upon Holborn station as if it were an eyesore. A job near the building she had been escorted from that morning was out of the question. She would need a fresh start and she scanned the Tube map. St James’s Park would be nice. Green Park would be nice. She frowned. Were they two stations serving the same stretch of park? She did not know. She smiled, aware that she was prevaricating; aware, also, that she had done too little exploring of London since moving here to work. She needed to go home, begin the search for a new employer and a job that was not so time-consuming so that she could enjoy the metropolis.
The map told her she could catch a train that took her directly to Eastcote station and home or she might need to change at Baker Street. The platform was what she would term mildly busy. She walked towards the rear end of it, where a young woman, a small, compact woman in a long, layered skirt, was there too, holding a package tightly.
The woman turned to look at her. There was a recognition in the woman’s face, she had turned as if she and Sylvie had an appointment and the strange thing was that Sylvie felt the same way. The young woman’s large brown eyes flickered to life and Sylvie had to bury an urge to say hello as the beginning of the underground breeze stirred a sweet wrapper and sent a charcoal-coloured mouse scurrying into a hole. The skirt began to billow, Sylvie’s hair was fluttering as their eyes met, and the young woman thought to herself that she had been found by an angel and that she could, just maybe, find some peace.
Chapter 12
There had been peace, a stillness, when Franklyn left for university, Sylvie reflected as she settled in for a long haul on the Bakerloo line. Sylvie had held her breath, or so it seemed to her, all the way back from the airport. Her mother had cried snottily, trying to smile and say jolly things while her father fiddled with the radio – a crackling voice told them about a wicket taken at the Oval. Sylvie was numb. She had so looked forward to Frank leaving, to having the undivided attention of her parents, but it seemed they would spend all the hours she hoped were hers bemoaning his absence.
‘Oh, it feels so strange,’ her mother had said when they had been home for just ten minutes. Sylvie had to agree. Her brother had gone out a lot but there was a definite, tangible emptiness. A stillness. A stillness she knew, then, she would not be able to shatter. She went to her room and nestled into the pile of plump cushions on her bed with an Agatha Christie, her easy read in between tackling The Mill on the Floss. Outside, bees hummed in the August heat. Later, her mother would potter in the garden and her father would unfurl the crossword. Nothing would change except they would miss their darling Franklyn, and she pictured endless meals where the conversation would be all about how he was faring.
Sure enough, that evening, they sat at the kitchen table, speculating on the standards of his fellow scholarship undergraduates in Florida, how certain he had been about what he wanted, how he would enjoy every minute.
‘You’re very quiet, Sylvie,’ said her father, ‘missing your big brother already?’
She nodded without making eye contact, annoyed that her parents assumed she shared their emotions, miffed that they had not even considered how the absence of their son could mean a new, improved relationship with their daughter. Out of spite, more than interest, she cleared her throat.
‘I’d like to study in America too. What do you think?’ she said.
‘My, she is missing her brother, isn’t she?’ her mother replied, and Sylvie quietly growled as her parents moved on to discussing when they would fly out to visit their son.
‘Christmas is too soon, don’t you
think?’ her mother said in a tone which conveyed that Christmas was leaving it too long.
Sylvie rolled her eyes. She did not much like the heat and she certainly was not keen on substituting the frost of a Berkshire December for Santa in the sunshine. All the same, from the age of twelve she would spend three Christmases in a row in Tampa and hated them mostly because she became aware that she was just too young to be considered an asset, too young for her brother’s friends to flirt with her, too young to interestingly fill the void when Franklyn had to dash off, leaving his family to fend for themselves at the crab shack. Worst of all was that the family car, back in Berkshire, now sported a bumper sticker celebrating the sunshine state.
As far as Sylvie was concerned her parents might as well write on the boot of the car that their eldest child was a superstar soccer prodigy on a sports scholarship abroad and their pride in him was beyond measure. Convinced there was no point trying to compete, she let her studies slip and became an average student unlikely to win a scholarship anywhere. Her parents barely noticed.
She was, though, put in charge of the school musical – or at least of its admin and ticketing and props – which led to her head teacher suggesting she should take courses that could lead to her being an executive PA or office manager. Given this was the most interest in her life anyone had shown for a while, Sylvie responded with gusto and, by the age of twenty-one, was earning much more than any of her friends or peers. Even at twenty-three, when many of them had left university and found jobs, she still earned more. It turned out she was very good at organizing things. It turned out she rather liked the gratitude of her bosses, of being told an event or meeting would not have run so smoothly but for her talents. It turned out she was brighter than her parents knew and when she changed jobs she picked up the new rhythms of a new sector with ease. She was good at what she did – and now she had been sacked.
Perhaps it should not have shocked her so. Her boss had been volatile. Initially he had been distant and then grateful and then attentive. Had she really been dismissed because she had removed his hand from her thigh? He had taken it well at the time, she thought. She had even praised herself for how well she had navigated the whole male ego dilemma. She had not made a complaint about him. She had not stopped smiling when she said good morning to him. She had told Catherine about it but Catherine had slept with her boss and not suffered for then not sleeping with him. She wondered if other women her age confided such problems to their mothers rather than not so very close colleagues. It would have been nice to have a mother who was wise and worldly, but mostly it would have been nice to have a mother who was caring enough to be aghast at what had happened to her daughter, to be protective, possibly angry. Sylvie could have forgiven her mother all manner of poor advice had it been delivered out of love, but her mother’s contributions were uninspired out of a lack of interest.
