Trains and Lovers: A Novel (4 page)

The painting that Hermione had to investigate had been consigned by a dealer who had a good idea of what it was, but confirmation was needed. The artist was known,
but the auction house did not have any of the literature. That was in the library of the Courtauld Institute, where there were some articles on his work in an obscure German art history review. Hermione read German, and was asked to go and look through these to see if there was anything that might help the senior members of the department to make a firm attribution. They wanted to promote the painting from “attributed to” status. This was where the auction house said that the painting was probably by the artist to whom they attributed it, but they were not saying that it definitely was. “Attributed to” was not a bad status to have, and was better than “Circle of” or “Follower of,” but it made a big difference to the price if they could commit firmly to a particular painter.

Hermione told me about her assignment. I felt envious. “Proper work,” I said.

She smiled at me. “You’ll get some too,” she said.

I shrugged. I had been given the task of proof-reading a catalogue, checking the spelling of artists’ names and their dates. She smiled again when I told her about it, and how boring it was, and then she said, “We could go for a drink after work, if you like. I’m going to meet some friends. You could come along too.”

I accepted, and for the next couple of hours I analysed
every word of her invitation.
If you like
 … Was that because she was worried that I might think that she was asking me out, and because she did not want me to form that impression? Was she inviting me along because she felt sorry for me; she was off to the Courtauld to do some real research and I was stuck checking the dates of Dutch Golden Age painters—going to the pub would at least give me something to look forward to. And as for the friends she mentioned, were they male or female, or both? And if they were male, or at least some of them, then might one of them be her boyfriend?

She came back from the Courtauld half an hour before we were due to stop work.

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

She showed me a sheaf of photocopied pages. “Screeds of stuff,” she said. “And it’s all good news.”

I felt envious. I had found one minor mistake in the catalogue: an artist who had been born in Haarlem was described as having been born in Delft. I had circled the error in red ink and then I had sat and gazed at it. The red circle, I realised, was the sum total of my achievement that day. Hermione, by contrast, had found information that might add thirty thousand pounds to the price of a painting.

“You still going for a drink?” I tried to sound casual, but I don’t think I succeeded.

She looked at her watch. “Is it that time already? Yes, sure. The others can’t make it. They texted me.” She hesitated. Or, at least, I thought she hesitated. “But we could go.”

I shrugged. “Why not?”

She picked up my insouciance. “Unless you’ve got something else to do.”

“No. Nothing,” I blurted out.

The pub was an underground journey away, and it was rush hour. We stood next to one another in the train, and at one point, when the driver applied the brakes at the platform, she had to hold on to me in order to regain her balance. I smiled at her, and I think she left her hand on my arm for slightly longer than was necessary. I looked away and saw a small poster poem displayed on the wall of the carriage.
Love requires an Object
, I read,
But this varies so much / Almost, I imagine / anything will do: / When I was a child I / Loved a pumping engine / Thought it every bit as / Beautiful as you
.

“Why are you smiling?”

I pointed to the poster and she peered over my shoulder to read it.

“W. H. Auden,” she said, reading the smaller print at the bottom. She looked at me quizzically. “Will anything do, do you think?”

I was not sure.

“You see,” she went on. “I don’t think I could love
anything
or
anybody
. Surely that cheapens love. The person you love has to be worthy of it, don’t you feel?”

“I suppose so.” And yet I was thinking of a girl I knew who had loved somebody who had been dishonest and even violent towards her. She had loved him to the point where she denied the lies and the violence.

“Love can blind you to a person’s faults,” I muttered.

We had reached our station and she bent down to pick up the bag that had been resting at her feet. I watched her, my gaze dwelling on the curves of her figure, on the line of her neck, her shoulders. And then, for a brief few moments, I closed my eyes as if to test the reality of what I felt. It seemed to me to be a miracle that there was somebody like this in this crowded, ordinary train. She did not belong here; she was altogether too exotic a creature to have to endure the indignities of the London Underground. But it seemed to me to be completely appropriate that we were talking about love, because I could think of nothing that I wanted to talk to her about more than love. As we left the carriage, I took her hand, just for a moment or two, and squeezed it. She was surprised, as I was, by my boldness, but I could tell that she did not mind. She returned the pressure, and then we disengaged and joined the throng of people jostling their way onto the escalator.

In the pub she said to me, “I have to tell you something.”

The words fell cold about me. She was going to tell me she had a boyfriend; I was sure of it.

“What’s his name?”

She frowned. “How did you know?”

My voice was flat. “People like you have boyfriends. They just do.”

“Had,” she said. “Had. I was going to tell you that we split up two weeks ago. Then I was going to tell you that I’m not sure that I’m ready …”

Now it was my turn to say “How did you know?”

“How did I know that you … that you …”

“Sorry,” I said. “Oh sorry.”

“What?”

“I can’t help it. I’ve fallen for you. I feel so stupid.”

We were sitting opposite one another at a table in the corner of the pub. She leaned forward to take my hand. “But I want you to. I want you to like me.”

I said nothing.

“I want you to because … well, I just do.”

“You’re out of my league.”

She burst out laughing. “Why?”

“You’re this … You’re Oxford and God knows what else and I’m just a nobody from nowhere in Scotland and …”

“I love the way you talk,” she said.

“What I say? Or how I say it?”

“The way you say it. That Scottish accent is just so sexy.”

“You’ve been watching too many films.”

“Maybe.”

We stayed in the pub for an hour. Then she said that she would cook me a meal at her flat if I wanted that. Of course I did. And I stayed there that night. I know you shouldn’t talk about your love life because, well, these things are private and it makes her look cheap, which she was not. I’m sorry, too, if I embarrass you, but I seem to be telling you everything and I can’t begin to tell you how I felt that night. I shall never forget it. Not one moment of it.

She did not close the curtains—her flat was on the top floor and was not overlooked, except by the sky. I lay there with her—it was a warm night—and because it was summer the night was quite light. I saw a plane crossing the sky, and it seemed to me that I loved that plane, and that sky, and her flat—everything. Love had transformed the world for me. Transformed it.

IT WAS MY FIRST EXPERIENCE OF BEING HEAD
over heels in love; my only experience, in fact. I had been infatuated with a girl at university, but that had barely lasted three months and the relationship had not progressed very much. She toyed with me; it flattered her, I think, to have somebody who felt that way about her, but she had no intention of getting involved. “What’s the point?” she asked on our final date. “This isn’t going anywhere.”

“Because you don’t want it to,” I protested. I thought that if only she would give rein to her feelings then it would be different.

“No, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t.”

That was no obstacle, in my view. “You could make an effort. You could try.”

She smiled patiently. “You don’t try with these things. It’s either there or it isn’t.”

“So it isn’t there?”

“No. It isn’t.”

That rejection had the virtue of clarity, and I retired to lick my wounds. A few days later I saw her with someone else. She did not notice me, but I saw her flirting with him and knew that if it hadn’t been there with me, then it was definitely there with him. I thought of going up to her and saying, “Don’t try too hard,” but fortunately lacked the courage. It would have been petty, and she was right, after all; either it was there or it was not.

But this was so different: Hermione seemed to reciprocate my affection. And that was an extraordinary discovery for me, leading to a state of mind that at the time I had difficulty in describing, although I thought about it a lot. I felt around for the word to describe my feelings, and found a whole dictionary of terms to describe such things. Entrancement; rapture; bliss; there were others—all of them somewhat breathless and none of them capturing what was happening to me. Does everybody feel that he is the only one ever to have felt this way?

The world was suddenly immensely valuable. Everything seemed to have more significance; every moment seemed to have a hinterland of possibility: we might go for dinner somewhere; we might just talk; we might lie in one another’s arms in her room in that flat; might watch the clouds again through the skylight. Even London itself—that
great, straggling city with its washed-out, secondhand air, was somehow rendered brilliant and exciting. That’s the curious thing about love, isn’t it? It makes very ordinary things seem special. It makes them seem so much more valuable than they really are.

The auction house was the epicentre of this. I could barely wait to go to work each morning. Although we spent our evenings together, I always went back to the flat I was staying in, even if it was late at night. I sensed that she did not want me to stay, and I did not press her to allow it. She would look at her watch and sigh. “I have to get up early tomorrow.”

“Of course. Me too. That’s the worst thing about working in London. You have to spend so much time travelling. In Edinburgh you can walk to work from where you stay.”

“This isn’t Edinburgh.”

“No.”

She looked at her watch again.

“Tomorrow?” I asked. “What shall we do tomorrow? Not that we have to plan anything. We could just let the day happen …” The summer seemed endless. It was only June and we would be together in London until September.

“I don’t mind. Anything.”

“Go somewhere.”

She hesitated before answering. “Would you like to meet my father? I have to see him tomorrow evening. You could come, if you like.”

I did not particularly want to meet him, but could hardly refuse. “Of course.”

She asked me if I was sure, and I replied that I was. “Why shouldn’t I want to meet him? He can’t bite my head off, can he?”

She smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

“I’m sure he’s very nice.”

She thought for a moment. “I think he is. But then he’s Daddy.” She paused. “From what you’ve told me, your father was very different. A doctor. Who couldn’t like a Scottish doctor?”

I saw him before me, getting into his car, driving away. His death was a matter of tangled metal and pain. It must have been like that, although they had told me—to spare my feelings—that he had died instantly.

“You must miss him,” she said. And then, immediately apologising, “Sorry, that’s such a trite thing to say. Of course you miss him.”

“Every day,” I said. “I think of him every day. At least once. Not that I say to myself—time to think about my father. It’s not like that. He just comes to mind. Somebody says something. Or I hear something to remind me of
him. There’s a pipe tune, for instance, ‘Mist-Covered Mountains.’ I don’t think you’ll know it, but it’s very beautiful. Haunting, really. He loved it. And I hear it sometimes—a few bars of it in my mind, as if somebody were playing it somewhere, and I think of my father.”

She reached out to touch me. “Do you think it’ll be like that forever? For the rest of your life?”

“I suppose it happens. People can think of somebody every day of their lives. Lots do, I suspect.”

She moved closer to me. She had an odd way of looking at me, intensely, as if to place me under particular scrutiny, searching for visual clues as to what was going on in my mind.

“You might not like my father. He’s the sort who rubs some people up the wrong way. He’s an alpha male. There was even a newspaper article about him once that called him that. Mr. Alpha, it said.”

I laughed. “I’ve met lots of alpha males.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Bullies and so on …” I stopped myself. “Not that your father’s a bully. I’m not saying that.”

She had not taken offence. “What you said about thinking about somebody every day of your life. I think that’s rather sweet …”