Trains and Lovers: A Novel (15 page)

We did all the usual things that visitors to Paris do. I knew the city a bit better than she did, but neither of us was all that familiar with it. We went on the Seine, we spent hours in cafés and restaurants, we walked in gardens. I experienced what I suppose was sheer delight in being there with her. It was one of those times when one is conscious of the fact that there is nowhere else one would wish to be, and nobody else in the world with whom one would prefer to be. I was blissfully happy. Paris makes you feel different. The ordinary you, the you that has to go to work every morning, the you that has to run a household, pay bills, do all of those things—that you is somehow changed into an exciting, artistic,
fully alive
you. That’s what Paris does.

I found out all about her. It seemed to both of us to be entirely natural to be sitting in one of the pavement cafés revealing to one another our most intimate thoughts: how we felt about our parents, our brothers and sisters; the things that we liked doing; the books we liked reading; the films we liked. She told me about her life in that town in Gloucestershire and there, in Paris, it seemed somehow exotic, as did my life in Edinburgh.

We arrived late on a Thursday. On Friday we had dinner in a restaurant in the Latin Quarter, one that I had read up about in a guide to Paris that I had brought with me. On Saturday we found another restaurant—one not mentioned in my guide—that seemed even better. And then we returned to the hotel.

I knew immediately that something was wrong when we went into the lobby to get the key to our room. There was a group of people who had just arrived—three men and one woman—and they were in the process of checking in. They must have arrived on a late flight, as their suitcases, still with airline luggage-tags on them, were on the floor beside them.

Jenny had been saying something to me as we stepped through the front door. Then she stopped mid-sentence, staring at the group. I looked at her inquisitively. She had paled and was now half turned away. But she did not do so quickly enough; one of the men in the group had also turned round and seen her. He froze. Then he glanced briefly at me before he turned round again and muttered something to one of his companions.

“What’s wrong?”

She ignored my question. “You get the key,” she whispered, “I’ll see you upstairs.” And then she walked very
deliberately, with head bowed, through the lobby to the staircase on the other side. I looked back at the group of new arrivals. The man who had looked at us turned his head slightly; he was watching her.

As I waited to collect our key, they were completing their registration. I stole a few glances at the other man, and I think he did the same for me. He was about my age, I think—thirty-ish—and was of similar build. He had blond hair and one of those faces that one sees in northern European countries, including England—a rather ruddy, open, well-fed look. It’s not Viking—it’s more the sort of look that one finds, say, in the Netherlands. Remember pictures of Dutch boys on packs of butter? That look. I did not like him. I could not put my finger on it, of course, but I think I would have felt uncomfortable in his presence even if he had not caused that reaction in Jenny. They obviously knew one another, and it was equally obvious that there was something between them.

I collected our key and made my way up to the second floor, where Jenny was waiting in the corridor.

“What was all that about?” I asked as I approached her.

She gestured to the door. “Let’s talk inside.”

I fumbled with the key but eventually succeeded in
opening the door. Once inside, I turned to her expectantly. “Well? That guy?”

She took off her coat and threw it down on the bed. “He’s called Johnny Bates.”

“You know him? Well, obviously you do.” I did not intend it, but I think I sounded sarcastic.

She turned to me with a look of appeal. “Yes, I do.”

I softened, realising that I was not being sufficiently tactful. She had told me that she had broken up with somebody six months ago and it had not been amicable. It must have been with Johnny Bates.

I made my apology. “Look, Jenny, I’m sorry. It must be awkward for you. Johnny Bates was the person you were involved with. I should have put two and two together.”

“Yes, he was.”

I tried to make light of the situation. “And now he’s here. We go away for a romantic week-end in Paris, and we end up staying in the same hotel as Johnny Bates.”

She began to recover. She smiled. “We were here first. He ended up staying in the same hotel as us.”

“In that case,” I said, “let’s forget all about him. No more Johnny Bates.”

She put her arms about me. “Good idea,” she said.

WE WERE DELIBERATELY LATE GOING DOWN FOR
breakfast the following morning. Neither of us said anything about it, but I think we both wanted to make sure that we would not run into Johnny Bates and his party. We succeeded; we were the only people in the dining room and the staff began to clear the other tables while we were still there. Nothing was said about the previous evening’s awkward encounter, and I was optimistic that it could be completely forgotten. We were going to be out of the hotel for the rest of the day and we were having dinner in a restaurant. On the following morning—Monday morning—we were going to be leaving for the airport at five in the morning, which meant that we were fairly unlikely to run into Johnny Bates again.

But I was wrong. After we set out that morning, I discovered that I had left my guidebook in the room. We had not walked more than a couple of blocks from the hotel, but I suggested that I could go back and fetch it while
Jenny did some window-shopping. She agreed, and I walked briskly back to the hotel and made my way up the small, winding staircase at the back of the lobby. The hotel had a lift—an ancient, cage-like apparatus—but this was so slow, and so cramped, that it was far easier to use the stairs.

I bounded up and more or less collided with Johnny Bates, who was coming down. The stairs were narrow and we could not pass one another; we were face-to-face.

I muttered an apology and started to make my way down to the floor below.

“Listen,” he said. “Don’t rush off.”

I turned back to face him. “Yes?”

“I saw that you were with Jenny. Are you …”

I decided to make it easier for him. “Yes, we’re going out together.”

He seemed to chew on this information. “I see.”

I wanted to end the encounter. “I know you and she were … well, she told me that you used to be together. But that must all be over now. Let’s not …”

He frowned. “Oh, I have no intention of trying to rekindle anything—believe me. I just wondered if you knew.”

“About you? Yes, I’ve just told you.”

“No, not about me. About her.”

I did not know what to say.

He lowered his voice. “You know that she’s not who she says she is?”

“What?”

“She’s not really called Jenny Parsons. And she’s not a qualified teacher. Her name is something quite different—I never found it out—and she’s … all right, I know you’re not going to believe this, but I think she’s wanted by the police.”

I stared at him with utter incredulity. “The police? What are you talking about? Is this a joke?”

He shook his head. “Why should it be a joke? I don’t know you, do I? I’m just warning you, pal. You’re with some sort of confidence trickster. Not only that, but I think that she’s …” He lowered his voice. “I think she’s dangerous.”

I wanted to burst out laughing. This was ridiculous. Here we were in broad daylight in a Paris hotel and a complete stranger was telling me that my girlfriend was dangerous. “Oh, come on …”

“No, you just listen to me. Jenny is not who she says she is.” He paused. “And here’s another thing. If you’re wondering why I’m keeping away from her, it’s because, well, if I didn’t I think my life would be in danger.”

There was something about his manner now that worried me. Although I might have written him off a few moments earlier as either a practical joker or a mental health case, it now crossed my mind that he was entirely serious. “Look,” I said. “Tell me exactly why you think this. You can hardly expect …”

He cut me short. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t say much more than that. Just think about what I’ve said, okay? Think about it.”

His unsettling message delivered, with a final, worried glance he slipped past me and continued downstairs. I stood where I was, unsure what to do. It was a good few minutes before I reminded myself that I was meant to be fetching the guide to Paris and that Jenny would be outside in the street waiting for me. If she really was Jenny, of course … I put the doubt out of my mind. Things like that did not happen; they simply did not. And yet, what if he were telling the truth? How well did I know Jenny? I asked myself. It was all very well to pick up somebody at a railway station, but what would one know about her? Everything that you knew would be learned from her, and how could I trust her? What if her whole story were untrue from start to finish? I remembered a friend saying to me once, “I can always tell whether somebody’s lying
to me. It’s easy; you just
know
it.” I had been doubtful. “I can’t,” I had said.

SHE NOTICED IMMEDIATELY THAT SOMETHING WAS
wrong. She was looking in the window of a patisserie when I caught up with her.

“Mouth-watering,” she said. “Look at that cake over there …” She broke off. “Was everything all right at the hotel?”

I avoided her gaze. “Yes. Fine.”

I tried to keep my voice normal, but my distraction must have shown because she reached out and touched me on the forearm.

“Are you sure? You look as if you’ve seen something …”

“Something nasty in the woodshed,” I joked. “Remember Aunt Ada Doom in
Cold Comfort Farm
? She saw something nasty in the woodshed and it affected her for life. Nobody ever found out what it was.”

“I haven’t read it. We had it at home, I seem to recall, but I haven’t read it.”

I found myself thinking:
What home? The home you told me about—the one in Durham—or is that entirely fictional?

“It’s very funny,” I said, still trying to sound as normal
as possible. But I was aware of the incongruity of the situation. We were looking in the window of a Parisian patisserie, admiring the cakes, and I was talking about English comic novels.

“Where’s the guide?” she asked.

I felt in my pocket. I thought that I had put it there, but it was empty. I put my hand to my forehead in a gesture of confessed stupidity. “I must have left it in the room,” I said.

“But you went there to fetch it.”

“Yes, I know I did. But I must have been thinking of something else. You know how you can go somewhere to do something and then completely forget that you were meant to do it. You must have done that yourself.”

She shook her head. “Look, Hugh, something happened, didn’t it?” She had fixed me with an intense stare, and I felt extremely uncomfortable. I averted my eyes. “No, don’t look away. Don’t deny it. Something happened … You saw Johnny. That’s it. You saw him, didn’t you?”

I nodded. “Yes. I met him on the stairs.”

“And he said something? He did, didn’t he?”

I was silent, trying to decide what to do.

“He told you something about me, didn’t he? Go on: tell me. Tell me what he said.”

I found it impossible to resist this examination. “Yes. He said something or other.”

“Oh yes? What exactly?”

I almost told her, but then something stopped me; something made me afraid to do so. I looked away. “Nothing in particular.”

She gripped my arm more tightly. “Come on, Hugh, I wasn’t born yesterday. He said something. Of course you remember it. It’s what’s making you so peculiar right now. Tell me. You know it won’t be true—you know that, don’t you?”

“He said …”

She interrupted me to encourage me. “I can just imagine what he said. He said something about my not being a proper teacher? Is that what he said?”

I could see that she was angry—not with me, but with Johnny. “Something like that. It took me by surprise, and so I suppose I didn’t take everything in.”

She shook her head, as if to dispel her anger. “He’s completely lost the place, you know. He’s … deluded. It’s bizarre.”

Her denial, which gave every impression of sincerity, reassured me. “Yes, it was a bit like that.”

She explained that he had not wanted to end their
relationship and had tried everything to keep it going. “He was so possessive—ridiculously so. He wanted to know where I was all the time and whom I was seeing. He expected me to be at his beck and call, and if I was an hour or two late in returning his calls or text messages he’d become very suspicious. I couldn’t cope with this. Who could?”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “It must have been suffocating.”

“It was. And then when eventually I decided that I couldn’t take it any longer and told him that we needed to break it off, he went ballistic. I thought that I’d have to tell the police about it, but then, the moment I threatened to do that, he backed off. But I know that he said some ridiculous things to some of my friends.”