Trains and Lovers: A Novel (19 page)

You might have imagined that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and unkempt; the streets seemed run-down and dirty, the people sour-faced. But that, I suspect, is how coming home is for everyone; Parisians probably felt the same when they returned from elsewhere.

I returned to Edinburgh, and Jenny caught a train back to the West Country. She saw me off at Kings Cross station before she went off to Paddington. We kissed at the ticket barrier, interrupting the flow of people onto the platform.

“Perform fond farewells elsewhere, if you don’t mind,” said the man at the barrier.

“That wouldn’t have happened in Paris,” muttered Jenny.

Back in Edinburgh, I telephoned her every evening, as we planned our next meeting. I was determined now to get to London, and to get her there, too, if I could manage it. In pursuit of this, I applied to the company for a temporary transfer that had been advertised internally. One of the company’s London employees was going to be away for a year doing an MBA, and the post needed to be filled. I think that I must have fitted the requirements exactly, as the personnel department telephoned me immediately and said that if I wanted the posting it was mine. I accepted.

“Now we can see one another every weekend,” I said to Jenny. “Maybe even more often.”

She said she was pleased. She had been thinking of applying for a job herself in London, but felt that we should wait and see how the new arrangement worked out. She enjoyed her job in Gloucestershire, and would
prefer it, she felt, to teaching in London, which was more stressful. I agreed.

So I left Edinburgh and moved to a flat in Notting Hill. It was a more expensive flat than I could ever have afforded myself, but it belonged to a friend who had taken a job in the City and had done well. He had a spare room that he was keen to let out, and we knew that we got on well enough to share. It was the perfect solution from my point of view as Colin, my friend, spent most weekends with his girlfriend in Canterbury, and that would mean that Jenny and I would have the flat to ourselves.

Our lives settled into a pattern. She arrived in London at five on Friday afternoons. That evening we would go out to dinner, and then on Saturday we would enjoy what London had to offer, going to exhibitions, to the cinema or theatre, browsing in Portobello Market, which was just a few blocks away from where I lived. We built up a new circle of friends, too, and would have these friends round to dinner on Saturday night, or go out with them to a gastro-pub or Indian restaurant. Life was very enjoyable, and I was already trying to work out a means of prolonging the year, even if it meant switching to a new company.

From time to time, rather than Jenny coming to London, I would go to stay with her. This was generally
more difficult, as the house she shared with the other two teachers was minuscule, and there was barely room for a fourth person. But it was a change from our London routine, and we both enjoyed it. Shopping and theatre were replaced by country walks and the occasional meal at The Lamb and Flag, where it all began.

It was on one of these weekends in Gloucestershire that I made my discovery. Jenny had gone out to buy something that she needed for the meal she was making and had left me in the house, reading the newspaper. I decided to tackle the crossword, which I occasionally do, although not very successfully. I needed a pencil to do this, and I thought I had seen one on the small writing desk that Jenny had in her room. I crossed the room to this desk.

The top drawer had been left open. This contained envelopes, a box of paper clips, and a bottle of correcting fluid of the sort that people used before the invention of printers. I picked up the bottle—it was an ancient relic, encrusted round the top with the white powder of its dried contents. I put it back. I found the pencil I was looking for, but then I noticed something that was half hidden by an envelope. It was a passport that had been cancelled and had the top right hand corner of its cover clipped off to signify the cancellation.

I picked it up and looked at it. The front pages bore a number of border stamps, and there was also an Indian visa. I turned to the back, where the personal details of the holder are set out. The passport belonged, it seemed, to one Mary Broughton. The photograph had been cut out of the page.

I was about to replace it, thinking that it must have belonged to some friend of Jenny’s, when I happened to turn to the page that gave the details of relatives who might be contacted in the event of accident. This part is filled in by the passport-holder and in this case it gave two names, with addresses and phone numbers. One of these was of somebody who lived in Leeds, another was … I stopped. Johnny Bates, with an address in London.

Then I noticed something else. These names were written in handwriting that clearly belonged to Jenny.

Fumbling from the shock, I picked up the pencil and wrote down Johnny Bates’ address and phone numbers on a piece of paper. Then I replaced the passport, slipped the piece of paper into my pocket, and closed the drawer. Returning to the crossword, I tried to apply my mind to it, but could not. What I had seen had shocked me so much that I could not concentrate. So I got up and returned to the desk to take another look at the passport.

“What are you doing?”

I spun round. Jenny had come back from the shops and was standing in the doorway of her room, carrying a large plastic bag. At moments of crisis, one notices odd little details, and I noticed that peeping out of the bulging shopping bag was a bulb of fennel.

“Fennel,” I said. “I love fennel.”

“But what are you doing?” repeated Jenny.

Fortunately I did not have the passport in my hands …

“A pencil,” I said. “I was looking for a pencil.” And then, in an innocent tone, “Are we having fennel tonight?”

She put the bag down, glancing at the desk as she did so. I moved away. “I’m not going to bother,” I said. “I was going to do the crossword, but now that you’re back I don’t think I will.”

“Suit yourself,” she said. “I’m going to take this stuff to the kitchen.”

I did not make the mistake of returning to the drawer once she had left the room, and just as well, for she came back a few seconds later. It struck me that she was testing me, that she had returned to see what I was doing, but I cannot be sure of that.

For the rest of that weekend I tried to put the incident out of my mind. When I did think of it, I said to myself that it was absurd to think that the passport told a sinister story. And yet there was the evidence of her handwriting,
as well as the name of Johnny Bates. That pointed, surely, to the fact that Johnny had been right—that Jenny was really Mary Broughton.

I told myself that there must be an innocent explanation, even if I could not readily think of one. I reminded myself, too, that I had noticed Jenny’s own name, written in her handwriting, in some of the books she kept in her room. She
was
Jenny—she had to be. No school employed anybody without proper checks on their qualifications and identity—had she been hiding anything, then surely the school authorities would have discovered it. Unless … unless she had assumed the identity of somebody else altogether, had stolen it. Such things happened. We were always being warned about identity theft, and although those warnings were mostly about credit cards, there were surely other, more dramatic, instances in which one person claimed to be another.

I tried to act normally, but I found it hard, and I think she noticed that there was something wrong.

“Are you feeling all right?” she asked. “You seem to be distracted.”

I shrugged. “I’m feeling a bit out of sorts. I think that it might be some sort of mild bug I’ve picked up in London. Travelling in the Tube you get everything, I imagine.”

She offered me a couple of aspirin, which I took. She watched me as I swallowed the pills, and it crossed my mind that she was watching to make sure that I actually took them and that I had not been bluffing. And then, no sooner had I swallowed them, the thought occurred to me: What if they weren’t aspirin?

I went into the bathroom and locked the door behind me. Putting my finger down my throat, I tried to make myself sick. I retched—not too loudly I hoped—but the pills remained down. Then I saw on the basin a small bottle of pills. The label clearly said aspirin, and so I calmed down. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said to myself. “Don’t become like Johnny Bates—paranoid.”

I returned to London a little earlier than I had originally planned. I had a genuine excuse for this—I had some work to finish before my first meeting at work the next morning, and Jenny said that she understood. At the same time, when we said goodbye, I think she sensed that something was wrong.

“I think you’re feeling a bit down,” she said. “Maybe it’s a result of some virus you picked up. They can leave you feeling a bit weak, a bit depressed, I think.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s probably it.”

IN LONDON I TOOK OUT THE SLIP OF PAPER ON
which I had written Johnny Bates’ contact address and phone numbers. I dialled his mobile first, but it quickly switched to answering mode. I left a brief message, asking him to phone me, and then I tried the other number on the card, a land-line.

The phone rang at the other end but was soon answered. A man’s voice answered: a Liverpool accent. It was not Johnny. I assumed it was a flatmate, perhaps one of the other two men we had seen him with in Paris.

“I’d like to speak to Johnny,” I said. “Johnny Bates.”

“So would I,” said the voice.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’d like to speak to him too. Johnny’s gone off somewhere without telling us.”

For a few moments I said nothing.

The nasal voice sounded irritated. “Are you still there?”

“Sorry. Yes, I’m still here. Is Johnny all right?”

“How do we know?” said the voice, peevishly. “We’re on the point of reporting him missing. If he’s not back by tomorrow morning we’re going to do that.”

“What about home? Has he got family anywhere?”

“We’ve spoken to them. They’re in the dark too.”

I asked whether he had done this before. Perhaps it was his job. Perhaps he was working somewhere else for a few weeks.

A snort of derision came down the line. “Job? You obviously don’t know Johnny very well. Ever seen Johnny do any work? I haven’t.”

I concluded the call and sat back in my chair. What had Jenny said?
I should do something about him
. It was an appalling thought. No, it was impossible. And yet Johnny had said, very deliberately and as if he really meant it:
I think my life would be in danger
.

I closed my eyes. These things did not happen in real life—in fiction, yes, because you suspend disbelief in novels, but not in the everyday world about us. You simply don’t meet women on the run from the police at railway stations. And these women don’t then make muttered threats against men who have tumbled to their secret, and then carry these threats out. It doesn’t happen.

IT WAS JENNY’S TURN TO COME TO LONDON THE
following weekend. I toyed with the idea of calling the visit off, but when she telephoned me a day or two later everything sounded so normal and she seemed to be so looking forward to the trip that I said nothing.

“I can’t wait to come,” she said. “It’s turning into a dreadful week at school. The kids are all excited about their sports day and being hyper in the classroom. I’ve had three pant-wettings, two full-scale punch ups, and one case of aggravated hair-pulling—and that’s by Wednesday.”

I had to laugh. “Occupational hazards.”

“Yes. Remember those films where the children sat at desks all in a row, even the small kids. They sat at their desks and weren’t allowed to get up without permission. What happened?”

“The nineteen-sixties.”

“Yes?”

“That’s when it started.”

“But conditions were dreadful before that,” she said. “Somebody like Mary Lewis would have been slapped for her pains.”

“Mary Lewis?”

She explained that Mary Lewis was the girl who stood
accused of pulling another girl’s pigtails. “She comes from a badly behaved family,” she went on. “Her brother set fire to a farmer’s barn, and the father, I gather, is a well-known thief.”

I listened to this and then, without really thinking about it, I said, “Mary. It’s a name that I’ve always liked. Yet I think it’s not as popular as it used to be. Do you like it?”

The question hung in the air for a time before she answered. “It’s all right.”

Mary Broughton
, I thought.

Then I said, “Would you like to be called Mary?”

There was complete silence. My heart gave a leap. I had not intended to test her; it had simply slipped out.

At length she said, “Why do you ask?”

“Well, names are odd, aren’t they? Some people are dissatisfied with the names they have and like to think of themselves as being called something else. When I was about ten I wanted to be called Roger and started writing Roger on the title page of books I owned.
This book belongs to Roger
. That sort of thing.”