LOVE'S GHOST (a romance) (3 page)

The train pulled into the station and it was the fast one from Southampton. This is the one I invariably board. There is one thing that annoys me about this particular train. It’s the only rush-hour train that has a first class carriage. And there is hardly ever anybody in it. So while I’m squashed against ten other bodies all standing in the vestibule between carriages, a few yards away some corporate banker has his feet stretched out beneath two empty plush seats. How annoying is that?

This morning turned out to be no different. I held back while the scrum ran its course, then leapt into the carriage. But I stumbled and had to use a particularly portly man in an ill-fitting suit as a buffer. It was like hitting a bouncy castle, and I bounced off him, nearly back onto the platform.

I apologised profusely, but he didn't need the apology. The smile on his face said he enjoyed it. In fact, his lips curled, giving him a lascivious look that said he thought I did it on purpose. I had to get away from him. But we were so tightly packed in that it was hard to move.

To the right was the standard class carriage. I craned my neck as much as I could to glimpse the situation. Not only were all the seats occupied, but the aisles were full of people, too.

I hadn’t had a panic attack for a few days, but I could feel one coming on now. My body temperature was increasing and my breath shortening.

To the left was the first class carriage. There were about seven people sitting down in the entire carriage. But I didn’t have a first class ticket, just my
standard class
season ticket.
 

Then I had a thought.
 

I rarely see a conductor during rush-hour. What would be the point? He wouldn’t be able to walk from one end of the train to the other checking tickets. There were too many people crowding the corridors. So why not take a chance?

Besides, if I didn’t move now I would soon slump to the floor, breathless, and have to close my eyes, trying to force my lungs up and down until we reached Waterloo.

“Excuse me,” I said. Not to anybody in particular, just to the mass of bodies clustered in front of me. There was a shuffling of feet, but the bodies hardly moved — there was nowhere to move. I lifted my bent arms and forged a pathway for myself. There were some awkward looks, a bit of mumbling, but I ignored them. My bouncy castle friend looked positively distraught at my leaving.

It was wonderful walking through the doors to first class. It’s not like first class on a plane. The chairs can’t be converted into beds. I think you receive a complimentary coffee and then there’s the extra leg room. Oh, and I think you get free Wi-Fi. But that’s about it. What you really pay for in first class is to be treated like a human being and not a sardine.

I didn’t want to be too close to the vestibule, in case a bunch of train vigilantes ratted on me. So I wandered down the aisle trying to look like I was born to travel first class. My clothes were appropriate. As a booker in a model agency, I have to look stylish. But not too stylish. I’d heard one model complain that her booker, accompanying her to a photo-shoot, was trying to upstage her.
 

I follow my mother’s advice. She tells me to have a French attitude to clothes rather than a British one. She says the French buy fewer clothes and make sure they’re of a high quality. The British, she says, tend to fill their basket with lots of clothes, sacrificing quality for quantity. My mother’s half English half French, so she doesn’t have any axe to grind.

My mother gives good advice when it comes to clothes, or make-up. She’s not so good with relationship advice.

I walked three-quarters of the way down the carriage before I sat down. I should have chosen a seat away from any of the other passengers, so as not to draw attention to myself. But the end of the carriage was getting closer, so I slumped into the nearest seat. Almost directly
 
opposite me, on the other side of the aisle, was a man. I tried not to look at him.
 

But curiosity got the better of me and I pretended to look out of the window on his side of the train.
Yes, it’s going to be another fine day today,
I thought. The blue skies would at least make the winter temperatures bearable. And… oh crap, how dare that man be so incredibly gorgeous.

He was sitting at a table, leaning back in the seat, his feet stretched out as if he was in his own lounge at home.
 

He had what can only be described as a serious face. It might have been the book he was reading. It was
Ways Of Seeing
by John Berger. I’d never heard of it, but this guy was reading it very intensely, as if it were the only object in the whole world.
 

He had the darkest hair I’ve ever seen, swept sidewards like a small wave on the ocean, frozen in time. His skin had a Mediterranean sheen, a glossy tan that seemed so natural it must have come from his skin pigment. And he was dressed entirely in black. Black trousers, black sweater. But they were no ordinary clothes. They hung on him as naturally as his skin. They were definitely made by somebody who knew how to cut cloth. I’d plump for Armani. They had his effortless style. The austerity of his outfit was relieved somewhat by the black espadrilles on his feet, which, thankfully, he wore without socks.

But it was his eyes that I couldn’t take my eyes off. Though they were partially hooded because he was reading the book, I caught enough of their pull. People talk about “intense eyes”. I couldn’t describe his eyes as intense. They were more relaxed than that, as if they knew that their glossy depth was enough to garner attention. They ran on half-power because anything more than that was pointless.

I expected him to look up at any moment. I knew I should look away but I didn’t want to.

Then I heard a voice behind me. “Tickets, please.”

Shit, it was the conductor. Didn’t he know that it was too crowded to check tickets during the rush-hour?

What should I do? I couldn’t get up and walk in the opposite direction. This was the last carriage on the train. And if I walked towards the conductor, he’d ask me to show him my ticket before he let me by. I had to brazen it out.

“Tickets, please.” He was standing next to me, looking down, under the peak of his cap. I showed him my ticket, keeping the thumb over the corner that indicated it was for standard class. But he wasn’t having any of it. He snatched the ticket from me.

“This is for standard class,” he said.

“Yes.” I didn’t add anything else. He waited for an explanation, but I didn’t provide him with one. Instead, I just smiled gently. But to no effect.

“Where did you get on?”

“Surbiton.”

He pulled a handheld console from his bag and started tapping in the details.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m issuing you with a first class ticket.”

“But I already have a ticket.”

He scowled at me. “For
standard
class.”

I didn’t mean to give him the puppy eyes, but I was distraught at the injustice of it all. “There’s no room in standard class. It’s like a cattle truck.”

He wasn’t listening to me. He just carried on tapping in the details “If you want to take it up with the train company, you’ll have to get in touch with them.”

“But it’s not fair. You need to put on more carriages. It’s outrageous really.”

Another voice joined the conversation. It was laid-back, yet authoritative. “I’ll buy the ticket.”

It was the man. He was looking straight at me. I think he was wearing a smile, but I’m not sure. If the corners of his mouth were higher than the rest it was by a minuscule amount.

I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t speak for a moment. Then I blurted out. “No, it’s fine. I’ll pay.”

“No,” he said firmly.

I think my jaw dropped, slammed open by the certainty in his voice.

“If you pay,” he said, “you’ll have given up on your principles. I don’t want that. I’ll pay.”

The conductor smirked and wandered over to the man, who handed him a twenty-pound note. The console whirred and a ticket was spat out of its mouth.
 
The conductor turned back to continue on his parade and handed me the ticket as he went by.

The stranger returned to his book. I watched his face for a while, waiting for a self-congratulatory smile, a self-satisfied grin, something. But there was nothing. His expression was the same vista of seriousness as it had been before. He didn’t look away from his book, even though I stared at him for ages.

I was going to take out my magazine, but decided against it. If I displayed the cover of my rag, it would look inferior next to his intellectual tome. Normally I wouldn’t care, but I didn’t want him to have the upper hand. So I sat there, a little bored and more than a little annoyed.

After about five minutes, he put the book down and pinched his eyes. Then he looked at me. Apparently, now was the time for him to engage with me.

“You’re annoyed,” he said.

I didn’t speak, just a couple of nods — quick nods, to emphasise my irritation.

“Do you want to know how to get your own back?” He delivered the line without any inflection in his voice that would indicate humour.

I wasn’t going to smile. No way was I going to smile. I didn’t say anything.

“The way to get back at me, the way to seriously annoy me, would be to have dinner with me. I’d hate that.”

It took all my powers of concentration to stop me from smiling at his joke. My lips trembled, but I made myself think sad thoughts and they stopped. I don’t think he noticed any movement.

I made him wait a while, then slammed him down onto the canvas. “I’m not single.”

He scowled. But it only made him more attractive. If a top designer could design a scowl, this would be it.

“That’s strange,” he said.

“Why is it strange?”

“It’s one thing I’m very good at — judging whether people are single.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I picked up my bag and took out my fashion magazine.

ULTERIOR MODELS IS a model agency that was set up by former magazine editor Polly Warner. The story goes that one day the publisher criticised her choice of models for a fashion spread, so she took all the layouts that were spread out across her desk and set fire to them with a match. She walked out and started the agency the next day.

Outbursts like this were commonplace for Polly. Nobody could get inside her head to find out why she did this. Nobody wanted to take that risk. But the fashion industry loved her.
 

She was invited to parties because the hosts hoped she would trash the place. And that by trashing the place, they themselves would get some media coverage. They just had to hope that the extent of the media coverage would outweigh their repair costs. Build an ice sculpture and Polly would melt it. Book the hottest band of the moment, and Polly would smash their guitars before they got a chance to perform.

Polly didn’t like the fashion industry. So she sought revenge on it by supplying them with an endless stream of ugly models. However, Polly’s idea of ugly was other people’s idea of quirky, individual, unique.
 

Polly Warner wasn’t stupid, she’d known this all along. But it didn’t stop her hating the fashion industry, hating all the models on her books, hating everybody who worked for her.

But for some reason she didn’t hate me. She didn’t love me, either. Polly thought me a curious specimen. I wasn’t pushy enough to be a model booker, she used to tell me.
Growl
, she would urge me.
Bare your teeth
, she would beg.

The only reason I hung on to my job, I think, was that I had “discovered” a model. That model, Sienna, went on to become the agency’s biggest earner, by a long way.
 

It gave me a couple of years of grace. But three months, disaster struck the agency. Sienna decided to give up modelling. She said she’d grown out of it. That wasn’t quite the truth. She was about to marry a Russian billionaire who had very traditional views on how a wife should behave.

The agency threw a leaving party for Sienna, which she attended for half an hour before being whisked away to a restaurant hired for the evening by her husband-to-be. We weren’t invited. She didn’t even say goodbye to me. I was hurt by that. I knew she wouldn’t ring up late to apologise. With her new social status, Sienna never had to say sorry to anybody ever again.

Soon after Sienna’s departure, Polly started treating me differently. She began to turn the screw.

"Anna has to go," she said as she strode past my desk.

I went to say something, but she'd already gone by before I could think of what I wanted to say.
 

Anna was a model I’d spotted while out shopping about a year before. I thought she had just the look that we specialised in — attractive but quirky, beautiful but not perfect. The most surprising thing of all was that she was a nice person, too. I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, but the models I get to work with tend to be a little… how should I put this?…
Difficult
.

But Anna was nice. She was normal. She had no inflated view of her own self-importance. I could talk to her about things other than her portfolio. She even sent me a card on my birthday.

And yet there was a problem with Anna. She hadn’t captured the imagination of the magazine editors. And advertising agencies didn’t want to know. They didn’t want her face to endorse any of their products. I couldn’t convince them, no matter how hard I tried.

When I showed them her portfolio of photographs, they would look at me as if I’d lost my marbles. Then they would recover their composure and agree with me that she was unique, quite stunning in her own way. But that was just to cover their backs. No creative director likes to criticise a girl, in case somebody else hires her and she turns out to be a roaring success. But nevertheless, they hated her.

This morning, Polly had left the door to her office open. I knew it was a sign for me to follow her in. But I was hesitant. This was a conversation I didn’t want, not now. A scrunched up ball of paper, a missile, bounced on my desk before continuing its journey. It was meant to hit me.