The doors closed automatically, beeping like a demented microwave, and the train sped off towards London. It was at Leighton Buzzard that she got on. Teri—her husband’s lover—swung onto the train jauntily, despite the fact that it was still only just after six-thirty in the morning. She looked as if she should be in a Tampax advert, with the strains of ‘It’s My Life’ following her and the confidence to wear white on days she really shouldn’t. Her style was casual rather than expensive, and Pamela was surprised at the absence of the power suit she had imagined. She looked small, vulnerable and nice.
Her body was angled towards them as she moved between the seats and the train jerked out of the station. She shook the rain from her hair, flicking her eyes over the occupants of the car. When they rested on Jamie, who was looking suitably ashen-faced behind his paper, she smiled—but the smile froze on her face as she spotted Pamela.
Recognition was instant. Clever as well as beautiful. But it didn’t give Pamela the pang of malice or jealousy she had expected. There was just a deep and abiding sadness to know that this woman, this girl, had been intimate with her husband. Intimate with his body and intimate with his thoughts. She would know the birthmark on his shoulder that looked like a map of Japan. Had Teri run her fingertips over its smooth, ragged outline and then lovingly nipped it as Pamela once used to do?
Pamela tore her eyes away from the other woman and fixed them instead on the stylised mural at the end of the car, which seemed to depict the Swiss Alps and stippled clouds floating above what appeared to be two nuclear bunkers surrounded by navy-blue grass.
When she could bear it no longer, she glanced at Jamie and saw that he was mortified. It had been wrong of her to come. She shouldn’t have done this to him. Throughout her childhood, Pamela’s mother had insisted on accompanying her into the classroom and helping her to hang up her coat while all the other children had struggled valiantly with theirs alone. The final ignominy had been a warm, wet kiss on her cheek as her mother disappeared with a flourish of skirts. It had branded her a wimp in front of the class, and she had longed for her maturity into junior school and out of such excruciating oppression. She could feel the same emotion emanating from Jamie and throbbing through her veins. It had been wrong.
At Euston the train stopped abruptly, and the impatient commuters spilled out onto the platform. Teri left the train without looking at them. They followed at a polite distance, Jamie fussing with his newspaper to give her a head-start. Pamela watched Teri’s hair bobbing in front of them, passing the hanging baskets over-flowing with garish red and yellow plastic geraniums, following the crowd of commuters through the ticket barriers like sheep being herded into a pen.
When she broke away from the mass of people and jogged up the slope into the main concourse, Pamela turned to Jamie, who was pretending not to watch her. ‘You can go after her if you want to. I don’t mind.’
‘No,’ Jamie said lifelessly. His face was a blank screen from which all trace of emotion had been erased. ‘I’ll stay with you.’
He tried phoning Teri all morning, but all he got was her jolly answerphone message, which said: ‘Teri Carter isn’t at her desk right now,’ but infuriatingly offered no further enlightenment.
The office was very quiet without Charlie, and Jamie listened to his secretary’s dissection of Animal Hospital with even less fervour than usual. It was nearly midday when Joyless Lovejoy came out of his office and announced that he wanted to see Jamie in private straight away. He was staring out of his office window at the pigeons on the roof opposite when Jamie followed him in and closed the door.
‘What do you know about Charlie?’ he said, without turning round.
Jamie sat down. ‘He’s getting better. He should be out of hospital in a day or two. They’ve been keeping him in for observation.’
Joyless turned round and perched on the windowsill. He looked remarkably like one of the pigeons outside. Pointy-nosed, beady-eyed and grey—overwhelmingly grey. ‘Is he mentally stable?’
‘He’s as stable as you or me,’ Jamie answered laconically.
Joyless’s head snapped up, and he scrutinised Jamie’s face for any sign of sarcasm. ‘This is very inconvenient of him,’ he said.
Jamie bristled. ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’
‘Is he fit to do your job?’
‘My job?’
‘We need to be sure of a replacement before we can promote you.’
‘Promote me?’ He was aware that he was beginning to sound like Little Sir Echo.
Joyless glared at him. ‘We’re merging with another insurance group. All hush, hush. It’ll mean reassessment, restructuring, reintegration, reorganisation and recentralisation. We want you to head up the IT department.’
Jamie swivelled in his chair. ‘I’m flattered.’
‘We want you in Manchester next Monday.’
‘Manchester!’
‘Didn’t I mention relocation?’
‘No,’ Jamie said. ‘You mustn’t have re-membered.’
‘So you’ll go?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Yes.’ Joyless nodded joylessly. ‘Redundancy.’
‘Manchester?’ Pamela’s voice rose in disbelief. They were on the train on their way home. Jamie was feeling tired and emotional, and the last thing he wanted was a scene. His wife was nursing an ominously large Harrods carrier bag, which he was trying very hard to ignore.
Pamela’s expression was pained. ‘Manchester doesn’t sound terribly salubrious.’
‘We live in Milton Keynes, for goodness’ sake. How much worse can Manchester be?’ He was trying to keep his voice down. ‘I think it would be a good move for us.’
‘But the children will grow up speaking with Northern accents.’ He wished Pamela would try to keep hers down too.
‘I have a Northern accent.’
‘Yes, but far enough north to have a certain rustic charm.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Jamie said tersely.
‘It was intended to be.’
‘Having a regional accent is hardly life’s biggest handicap, Pamela. Even the BBC allow their presenters to veer from Queen’s English these days.’ Jamie gesticulated expansively. ‘Most of these so-called “youff” programmes have presenters that are complete gibbering morons—they’re totally unintelligible. If we keep letting the kids watch these, they’ll grow up being unable to string two sentences together—despite your best attempts with the Alphabites.’
‘You’ve made your point,’ Pamela said.
Jamie stared silently out of the window as they rushed through Watford Junction. It was a rare thing—rushing through Watford Junction. ‘I could stop commuting and live nearer to the office.’
‘Is that some sort of veiled promise?’
‘Yes, it is.’ Jamie lowered his voice further. ‘I would have thought with our current domestic predicament that you would relish the chance of moving away. Unless, of course, there’s something—or someone—that would keep you here.’
Pamela ignored the barbed reference to Tom. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to move. I was just expressing distaste at Manchester.’
‘What does it matter whether it’s Mars or Manchester? This gives us a chance to make a fresh start.’
‘Does that mean you’re going to end it?’
Jamie looked around. The sea of raised newspapers and best-selling paperbacks jogged along with the steady motion. There was a pale-skinned pre-Raphaelite redhead farther down the car, with one button too many of her blouse undone. She had her face turned to the fluorescent tubes, rosebud mouth parted expectantly, eyes dreamily closed, and picked her fingers constantly until they were red raw at the quick. Or what about the man diagonally across, who since Harrow and Wealdstone had chain-eaten painkillers washed down with Diet Coke. Were they struggling to hold their lives and their sanity together? He looked at the blank, expressionless faces and wondered how many of them were disguising difficult domestic
situations that were straight out of soap operas. Probably all of them.
‘We shouldn’t be having this conversation on the train,’ he said.
‘Does it?’
‘Yes.’
Pamela’s eyes brimmed with tears and she started to cry. Slow, silent tears poured out of her eyes, rolling languorously down her cheeks and splashing onto her skirt.
‘Oh, grief,’ Jamie muttered. ‘Don’t cry.’
‘You shouldn’t tell someone not to cry,’ Pamela sobbed. ‘It negates their emotions.’
‘You’ve been reading Cosmo again, haven’t you?’ He searched frantically in his suit for a handkerchief and finally pulled one out of his top pocket. The shock of recognition showed on his face. It was the hanky panky.
He hesitated in handing it over. What had once been white and pristine was a terrible mess now, anyway—stained and spoilt. Ruined. It was unlikely that Pamela would want to have it anywhere near her.
His wife had stopped in mid-sob and was staring at him. Reluctantly, he shook it out. A tiny, folded piece of paper dropped out of it and fluttered delicately to the grubby floor of the car. They both watched it, mesmerised by its meandering descent. He passed her the hanky, unable to take his eyes off the note on the floor. She took it but didn’t use it, crushing it into a ball and twisting it between her fingers.
All the way to Milton Keynes the note lay on the floor between them, like a lone scrap of confetti, forgotten after the wedding had long since ended. Jamie listened to the wind-rush buffeting against the train, braced himself against the vicious jolt of a passing express and tried not to think of Teri.
The train slowed for Milton Keynes Central Station. Commuters gathered their belongings—newspapers, briefcases, coats from the overhead racks—and crushed towards the doors for their final burst to freedom. Jamie put his arm round Pamela to steady her as the train stopped. ‘I need one last night,’ he said. ‘Just one night and then that’s it. No more working late.’
Pamela chewed determinedly at her lip and nodded. A barely perceptible movement of the head, but a nod nevertheless. She was still wringing the hanky between her hands, and there were dark smears of mascara under her lower lashes. The harsh fluorescent lights that flattered no one picked out the fine lines on Pamela’s face. Jamie’s heart twisted into a tight line like a wrung-out J Cloth. He swallowed the lump that threatened to fill his throat and helped her—and the still-unmentioned Harrods bag—off the train.
The tiny note went unheeded, blackened and crushed beneath the weight of alighting feet. As the automatic doors closed, an eddy of wind caught it, whipping it and blowing it out of the train after Jamie and Pamela. It circled in the air, wheeling and soaring briefly before it plummeted to the platform. The train moved off and the wind blew along the dusty, grimy concrete, making the note skip animatedly. For a moment it teetered on the brink of the platform beyond the safety of the yellow line, before a final gentle gust tipped it over the edge.
The train was disappearing from view—whisking its passengers off towards the more exotic destinations of Crewe, Runcorn and ultimately Liverpool Lime Street. The scrap of paper lay on the track, forgotten, invisible, unnoticed by the people who pushed down the stairs onto the platform, cursed their bad timing and waited impatiently for the next train to come along.
Chapter 26
‘Jamie!’ It was the tenth time he had called, but the first time he hadn’t been answered by a recorded message. ‘I didn’t expect you to call.’
His heart still went into somersault mode at the sound of her voice, and it did a triple backflip now so that he wasn’t disappointed. ‘I need to see you.’
‘I wasn’t sure what to think after yesterday.’
He cut across her, impatient to get this over with. ‘Can we meet tonight?’
‘Of course we can.’ She lowered her voice, so there must be people around her in the office. ‘I’m sorry about what happened at the weekend.’
So much had happened he wasn’t sure exactly what she was referring to, until he realised that Teri was still in the dark as far as most things were concerned. She still didn’t know where he had gone when he left, or why Pamela had needed to contact him so urgently. He wasn’t keen to shed any further light either.
‘Is everything okay?’ she asked, when he didn’t answer straight away.
‘Not really.’ He sounded miserable.
‘Do you want to tell me now?’
‘Not really.’
‘Shall I get some food for tonight?’
‘No.’ How was he ever going to break this to her gently? ‘I thought we’d go to Steamers for a drink.’
‘Neutral territory?’ She wasn’t just beautiful, she was razor-sharp.
‘Something like that.’ The silence hung heavy between them. ‘I’ll meet you outside the office.’
Teri’s voice was quiet, and he could tell it had nothing to do with the hindrance of eavesdroppers. ‘I’ll see you later then.’
He hung up and twirled round in his chair, propping his feet up on the desk. Why the hell wasn’t Charlie here when he needed him? He would know what to do, what to say. Jamie was aware that he was sounding like Joyless Lovejoy. Charlie was doing all right. The bandages had come off, revealing dark, crusted slashes that would ultimately heal to nothing more than faint white reminders of a love gone tragically wrong.
One of the young nurses had been fussing around Charlie, surreptitiously administering lavender oil to his wounds. They would heal quicker that way, she had told them earnestly. It was something she had learned on the part-time aromatherapy course she had done so that she could supplement her meagre National Health Service pay. Jamie wondered if lavender oil could help the mental scars too.
He sat alone in the corner of the Clog and Calculator at lunchtime, not noticing the tasteless pint of bitter that sat in front of him and avoiding Gordy and three more of his cronies from the office. They were talking loudly and laddishly about the barmaid’s breasts, while she leaned lazily on the pumps, absently picking peanuts from the dish on the bar and popping them into the red gash of her mouth. Jamie had taken a detour on his way back to the office and had stopped at the flower shop— Blooming Marvellous—which announced Say It With Flowers! in the window. Which flowers were suitable for saying his particular it, was anybody’s guess.
He chose roses, the blooms of lovers. How romantic. They were deep dark red, the colour of let blood. The colour of hearts torn and mangled. The colour of the congealing wounds on Charlie’s wrists. The soft, velvet plush petals deceived the unwary and made them prey to the spiking thorns on the stems.
The florist offered to trim the thorns, but Jamie refused. They summed up perfectly the way he was feeling, particularly when she cheerfully pointed out that there were always more thorns on roses than there were petals. It was a thought that sent him further into his depression.
The florist wrapped the roses in copious layers of paper tissue and bound them tightly with a scarlet bow. He paid and clutched the bouquet to his chest. As he stepped onto the street, a thorn pushed through the protective layers and drew blood from the finger on which he used to wear his wedding ring. Blooming marvellous.
The roses spent the afternoon unfurling on the office floor, while Jamie went over in his head the best way to tell Teri that it had to end. By the time he left, they had gone from tight-curled buds to full-blown but tired-looking blooms. He knew how they felt. The heating in the office was rather like that on the trains. It made sure they froze to death all winter, and with the onset of the balmy days of spring it miraculously burst into life and fried them all through the summer. Armpits sweated, shirt collars chafed and shoes squelched. It was a blessed relief to be standing in the fume-choked, car-filled excesses of Euston Road waiting for Teri.
She burst out of the revolving doors chatting animatedly to a colleague and, despite the fact that he had made up his mind to do it, he wondered how he was going to manage without her. He kissed her chee
k and gave her what was left of the dying roses. They walked up Euston Road arm in arm, making no attempt at conversation.
At the station the concourse was, as usual, thronged with people. They made their way across towards Steamers. Jamie opened the door, and a wall of sound met them—the high-pitched hubbub and hearty laughter of aimless conversation.
‘Not in here.’ Teri pulled his arm. ‘If you’re going to end it, the least you can do is afford me some dignity.’
Jamie’s face crumpled. ‘How did you know I was going to end it?’
‘I may be green, Jamie, but I’m not entirely cabbage-coloured.’ She smiled at him wryly. ‘Come on, I’ve a bottle of fizz in the fridge at home, and I have got something to celebrate too.’
Jamie hesitated. ‘I promised Pamela.’
She looked straight at him. ‘It’s far too late to start worrying about telling lies now, Jamie. One more isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference. We’ll both be prodding the coals in hell as it is, and you’ll be lined up by that tiny little guillotine. Come on, or we’ll miss the train.’
Chapter 27
There was a policeman on the screen wearing a fluorescent-yellow vest which said POLICE INCIDENT OFFICER in bold capital letters.
Pamela looked up from her sewing. It was nine o’clock and the first time she had sat down that night. Jack and Francesca had squabbled incessantly since teatime and had forced her brow to crease into a permanent furrow and subsequent headache. Now she was stitching name tags into Francesca’s school sweatshirts in the vain hope that she might at the end of term have the same ones she started with.
Let's Meet on Platform 8 Page 22