Let's Meet on Platform 8

by Carole Matthews

  Jamie must surely have been well on his way to Teri’s place by the time the train crashed. You’re hardly likely to hang around at the office if there’s a passionate night of sex on the cards, are you? To Pamela it seemed a cruel and ironic twist to be praying fervently that her husband was safely tucked up in bed with his lover. Somehow, she thought hysterically, it wouldn’t be what a relationship counsellor would advise.

  For the last time she tried to get through to the emergency number, but it was still frustratingly unavailable. There was only one other option. She stared at the phone, wrestling with her indecision. Perhaps he would come home soon? Safe and well and hopefully sexually unencumbered, too.

  The minutes squeezed by on the hall clock in exquisite slowness until another twenty had passed into the vacuum of oblivion, and there was still no sign of Jamie. She had lasted out this long, sweating and trembling beside the phone like a heroin addict who tries to prolong her fix as much as possible—but knowing full well that she will eventually succumb. Her hands trembled as she dialled Teri’s number for the second time that week.

  ‘Hi.’ A quiet, subdued voice answered the phone.

  Pamela swallowed. ‘Is that Teri?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was instantly cautious.

  It was horrifying how nice she sounded. Pamela wanted to hate her and be set against her but she couldn’t find it in her heart. ‘I promise I won’t make a habit of this,’ she said politely. ‘Is Jamie there?’

  ‘No.’

  Oh, my God. Pamela tried to breathe deeply. She closed her eyes to keep the blackness at bay. ‘There’s been a train crash, at Watford Junction. I just need to know that he’s safe.’ She steadied her voice again. ‘Has he been with you?’

  There was a moment’s hesitation before Teri answered. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s safe. He’s already left.’ She paused and Pamela heard her clear her throat. ‘He’s on his way home to you.’

  Pamela stood against the wall, her emotions scattered like a tub of candy, hundreds and thousands sprinkled on a kitchen floor. Relief flooded through her, making her giddy with happiness. ‘Thank you,’ was all she managed to say. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You love him very much, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Pamela said. She was crying and smiling at the same time. Tears of joy, of relief, of sadness and regret.

  ‘I do too,’ Teri said sadly. ‘I’m sorry about all this. We never meant it to happen.’

  ‘These things can take us all by surprise sometimes,’ Pamela said. She thought of Tom and Shirley, of Jamie and herself, and her heart went out to the sad and lonely young woman at the other end of the phone.

  ‘You’re a very lucky woman, Mrs Duncan.’ It sounded as though she was crying.

  ‘I know,’ Pamela said softly, and put down the phone.

  Chapter 30

  Jamie drove home along the main roads. His mind was too full of images of Teri to risk the twists and turns of the village roads in the darkness. The yellow-orange glow of the street-lamps soothed him, and the concentration of his driving helped to stop him thinking too much.

  He wondered how they would settle down in Manchester. It would be good for them to make a fresh start. He would make it up to Pamela—and the children. The thought of how close he had come to blighting their lives made him shudder. He had never wanted them to become just another blip on the broken-home statistics. How could he have coped with seeing Teri on the train and not holding her and smelling the fresh, clean scent of her hair—pretending that they were just friends and that they had never really been lovers? Would there come a time when he would be able to remember something she had said, but not be able to hear her voice, its tinkling intonation and the effervescence of her laugh? Would he remember the colour of her eyes, but not be able to picture her as sharply as he could now? Would he ever feel the softness of silk against his skin and not think of her? Would there be a time when he would look back and know that what he had just done was the right thing? Or would she remain gouged in his heart forever like the initials carved on a tree by a young and hopeful courting couple? Although he was married to someone else, the scar would remain with him always—lessening, fading with age, but never entirely disappearing.

  As he turned into the drive and pulled up at the garage doors, the security light flashed on, flooding the sweep of gravel with a harsh glare, picking out the colours of individual pebbles. It had been fitted for them by Secure Home Limited. There had been precious few perks in Pamela’s job, except for this state-of-the-art burglar alarm and a house that had more security lights than a NATO base. It was funny how they had taken so much trouble to defend their house, yet had left themselves so open and vulnerable to attack. He hoped Pamela would be able to forget Tom. She hadn’t been into work since the curry-flinging episode, and there hadn’t been any ‘hang-up’ phone calls, so he was quietly optimistic.

  He parked the car and set the alarm, closing the garage door behind him. This was one thing he wouldn’t miss about Milton Keynes—the car crime was rife here. Although he doubted that Manchester was very much better. You probably would have to move to Mars these days if you didn’t want your car to be nicked. If the truth was known, they probably already had little green joyriders there.

  Jamie pondered briefly how many vehicularly challenged juvenile delinquents would want to half-inch a Volvo with infantile vomit all over the upholstery and a baby seat in the back. No street cred or what. Still, there was something intrinsically embarrassing about having to make a claim of your own when you worked in insurance. It was better to be safe than sorry. And he had always been a cautious man.

  Pamela was waiting in the kitchen. She heard the car and the crunch of his feet walking heavily across the gravel. Her face was freshly washed and her make-up reapplied. There was an envelope in front of her and she fingered it tentatively, brushing unseen specks of dust from its surface with shaking hands.

  The envelope contained tickets for the Monaco Grand Prix. In Monte Carlo. A million miles from Milton Keynes or Manchester. She had stretched her flexible friend to the limits of its pliability and had booked a five-star hotel too. It would be her last wanton extravagance, and it would be worth it. The room had a Jacuzzi—perhaps they would make love in it.

  There were only two tickets, and they would abandon the children to the tender mercies of her mother and go alone. Husband and wife. Man and woman. The tickets had been difficult to get hold of and extortionately priced, and she would probably hate it—the noise, the crowds, the cloying smell of oil, the environmental pollution, the French. But she would go for Jamie’s sake, and she would make sure that she enjoyed it and that he enjoyed it too.

  Pamela realised it was a small and hideously inadequate gesture, but it was an attempt to compensate for the things Jamie had sacrificed for them. The things that his heart most desired. The things that he had confided to Teri and hadn’t been able to tell her. It was an attempt to say that she would try to make more time for him, to understand him and to show that she really did love him.

  They would have a smaller, cheaper house in Manchester, she decided—one without an Alien mortgage. One that didn’t strangle the life out of their relationship and make a prisoner of their dreams.

  She heard his key in the lock, and as she turned to greet him, her eyes glanced along the work surface. The stained and ruined handkerchief was lying on top of the pile of bills that waited patiently for someone to pay them.

  ‘Hi, I’m home,’ he shouted breezily. She heard the catch in his voice and the way it didn’t quite match the heartiness of his words.

  Pamela picked up the hanky and, clutching it tightly in her hand, she walked to the garbage. Pushing the lid deftly to one side, she dropped the hanky inside.

  Chapter 31

  Teri went back upstairs to the bathroom. There was a wet towel on the floor—it was clear no man was perfect—and a sprinkling of Johnson’s baby powder on the carpet that looked like a case of seriously bad da
ndruff. How could he think of using baby powder at the moment their relationship was turning to dust? There was a damp footprint in it—a Jamie-sized one—and she put her own foot down inside it and a flurry of soft white talc clung desperately to it.

  She had bought them both new toothbrushes. A pink toothbrush and a blue toothbrush. She picked Jamie’s blue toothbrush up and threw it in the bin. Her own looked so forlorn now. There was nothing in this world sadder than a toothbrush holder with only one toothbrush in it. It summed up the essence of loneliness.

  Teri ran her hands over the flatness of her stomach. Was she the only person in the world who was becoming fraught about a continued lack of cellulite and stretch-marks? She sighed and opened the bathroom cabinet. The box she had bought a few days ago sat staring at her insolently from the shelf. There were only so many early-morning vomiting sessions that could be blamed on an excess of champagne and smoked salmon and tiger prawns and cream-filled meringues.

  Teri lifted the pregnancy test out of the cupboard. It was quite predictably called Predictor, and she thought it sounded like the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger film. Perhaps the baby would burst forth from the birth canal brandishing an Uzi eight millimetre and blast the obstetrician into oblivion. Perhaps not. She placed it on top of the toilet. Perhaps she would use it tomorrow. Then again, perhaps not.

  Teri felt no guilt or shame or regret. Which for a convent-educated girl was quite a departure from how she had conducted most of her life. The Catholic ethos seemed to her to be one wrought in guilt and shame. It had been enforced wholeheartedly by a mother who had in a former life been a Spanish inquisitor, and a best friend who prided herself on being an incarnation of Sister Mary Bernadette—commandant of The Sacred Heart of Jesus Primary School. If there was a child, it would be born with pride and joy.

  She would call Clare and grovel and ask her to come back. Stoically, she would listen to all that crap about bindweed in the garden of romance again, and she would agree that Clare had been right all along, and that she could have avoided all this pain and suffering if she had only listened to her in the first place. And, for once, she would probably be right.

  If the pregnancy test was positive, she would tell Clare first, knowing that her friend would scold her and bully her and support her. And Clare would be there for her as she always was. Clare would get drunk and Teri would sip a glass of orange juice so as not to inflict any damage on the brain cells of the tiny tadpole inside her that would miraculously turn itself into a child.

  They would work their way steadily through a box of man-sized Kleenex and pontificate about what heartless bastards men really were. But she would say quietly to herself so that Clare couldn’t hear—not Jamie. If Jamie had been heartless, he would be here right now and not with his wife and children where he belonged.

  It was a good job that she had signed her contract for Out and About as soon as she had received it. What would her new producer think of a children’s television presenter who was not only unmarried but pregnant, too?

  She should do the test now. The most important pee of her life. So that there would be no doubt. And she would know for certain—one way or the other. The Predictor—it could tell her the future. Not such a silly name after all. She picked it up and took a deep breath. Teri was surprised to find that her hand was sure and steady. With unfaltering fingers, she peeled back the cellophane….

  LET’S MEET ON PLATFORM 8

  A Red Dress Ink novel

  ISBN: 978-1-4603-1175-2

  © 1997 by Carole Matthews.

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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

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