September in the Rain

by Peter Robinson

  Platform Three was to the right at the steps’ head, and it was deserted. There in the silence a white cloud floated above the empty railway lines. You let your sack fall to the dusty ground. Then, collapsing with relief at having reached this place of safety, you began to shake once more—but now with silent sobs as well. Standing beside you, with my shoulders pinned back by the narrow canvas straps, arms hanging uselessly, I could do no more than slightly raise my hands, palms inward. Only you were too overwhelmed by your own wretchedness to notice that gesture which might have been of care, intercession, exhaustion, or even something resembling remorse.

  Coaches that would make up the Paris train were being shunted towards the platform. Immediately they halted we climbed aboard and found an empty compartment. The first thing you did was step over to the window, lowering the blinds and then sitting down with your back to the

  engine. Then you turned and opened the flap of your rucksack, placed on the seats as a deterrent against other

  passengers who might think to come in. The buckles

  undone and strings untied, you fished among the carefully folded wad of your possessions. Searching around in there, you drew out a toiletries bag and change of clothes.

  ‘Watch our things,’ you said, ‘while I go and have a wash.’

  You slid the stiff compartment door open, stepped into the corridor, glanced around to find the nearest lavatory, and then set off to the right.

  I could imagine you sensing the faint draughts of cold air below, washing yourself all over in that confined space, rinsing the dried red mud from between your toes, and taking the morning’s pill from its silver card, baffled by the fact that the flying squad hadn’t felt they needed to examine you. While you may have been doing these things, I sat gazing absently from the express train window. Petals of marigolds in pots were fluttering by the ochre-washed wall of a station building. A railway employee went past spearing litter and placing it in a black plastic bag. Then the silences and quarrels of those two weeks in Italy began to tumble out once more.

  On our very first Sunday morning in the country, dropped off by the main road from Brunik heading south, we had all but given up thumbing and simply stood bickering beside the curb.

  ‘Just leave me alone!’ you had shouted. ‘God, I’m going home. The first town we get to I’m taking the train.’

  ‘But you can’t do that: the travellers’ cheques are all in your name.’

  ‘Well, that was your brilliant idea,’ you came straight back. ‘I’m going to cross this road and get a lift into town and change them all at the first bank I find. You can have yours and then, I mean it, I’ll get a train out of here.’

  ‘But do we really have to, now that we’ve come this far?’

  Which was when an open-topped saloon veered over and offered a ride. The Austrian couple in the back squashed up and all six of us made the last part of their drive from Stockholm along the swerving autostradas as far as Florence. They were from Carinzia and heading for Amalfi, where the Swedish currency earned in a Saab factory would keep them in comfortable hotels till the end of September.

  ‘So tell me, now, do you have any idea if this is the road to Rome?’

  That was as we climbed towards Fiesole two days later.

  ‘Well, for God’s sake, just ask someone, will you?’

  And Piazza Navona, the sun at its zenith, would forever be associated with a fight about whether we could afford one more ice cream. The very next day, somewhere down near the Tiber, tired and hungry, we were fussing about a suitable restaurant. I was feeling too timid to ask did they do a tourist menu. Had it started because we’d stopped talking to each other?

  ‘Oh please just do something,’ you complained. ‘Tell me why does it always have to be me?’

  Exasperated, I had walked on ahead, leaving you to catch up in the heat. It was only a few minutes later, not exactly sure where we were, wandering along a narrow street with high blank walls on either side, you walking on the outside, that the terrible sequence began. I should have been on the street side of you, I realized now. Why didn’t I guess why the Vespa with the two boys on it was revving up behind? We were terribly tired and hungry—too wrapped up in what was not going right between us. Being robbed like that was a daily occurrence. It could have happened to anyone. It happened to you.

  Now, in a green dress with tiny red flowers printed on it, like poppies in an early summer cornfield, you stepped back into the compartment. Your legs below the knee were both bruised. You held out towards me a bundle of clothes.

  ‘Do something with these for me, will you?’

  Outside the compartment, the door closed, wondering what to do with them, I was carrying your jeans with the frayed ends, stringy and damp; a small pair of pants; your pale blue blouse with a button hole badly ripped at the front; and a crumpled white bra.

  Stepping down from the carriage, I looked to the left and right. At the far end of the platform, knots of points and sidings snaked away beyond the station, its signal

  boxes and trackside huts. The trees’ scorched leaves hardly stirred in the glittering air. Then taking a few quick paces, I thrust the bundle deep into a half-full rubbish bin at the platform’s head.

  Back in the compartment, a nun was picking fluff from her habit, a spindly old man in a trilby had settled himself by the door, and an overweight matron with two noisy toddlers was unpacking some plastic bags of

  refreshments and finding a handful of comics to keep the blond, mop-headed infants entertained. These would be our nightlong companions. Undeterred by the blinds or the scattered baggage, they had asked if there were places free and taken up their positions.

  Put out that we wouldn’t be able to lie across the seats and get some rest alone, I lifted the rucksacks onto the racks provided, first taking out a book to read. The fat mother leaned across and raised one of the blinds. The narrow space with those people had made it impossible to speak.

  Now with a jolt the train was in motion. Opposite me, your eyes were shut and your head had slid over to be cushioned by the compartment wall. Your dress lay crumpled from long folding against the skin of your body, shaken slightly as all were by the movement of the wheels. You opened your eyes, aware that we were moving. Far too late, I attempted to give you a warm and tender look. But you immediately curled back into the seat to rest once more.

  Asleep, all tension seemed to flow from your body, to be painted across the landscape which unfolded and rolled up beyond the carriage window—for the rest of that day through the St Gothard Pass. Tiny hamlets were

  constructed in patches of steep but cultivated land, the surrounding forest so thick no sunlight could penetrate it, great crags obtruding from the slopes. Narrow pathways twined around and up above. They would catch my eye a moment and be gone, replaced by columns of smoke rising from hidden chimneys or farmer’s fires.

  The train trundled on through precipitous pasture with rugged cows cropping where they could, inaudible tinkling bells on leather straps around their necks. There were herds of goats. A wiry deep-tanned farmer waved to the coaches from his byre. Moment by moment, your head would slip forward on the green-padded carriage wall. You would be woken by the jolting over points, or discomfort of your

  position, would look blankly at me reading, draw your head back to the upright of the seat, and shut your eyes to sleep.

  Your oval full face, its small mouth drawn tight and hair limp from the crown, rocked gently from side to side on the column of your neck as if it were saying ‘No’ over and over. I tried to sleep too, but, my eyes closed, the sounds and glimpses would come out of the dark—and with them the series of what ifs and if onlys, the should we haves, and might have beens that I couldn’t then begin to unravel. The only way to keep them at a distance was to stare and stare at the page below. When you awoke, you would have been able to make out, upside down, it was Florentine Painters of
the Renaissance that appeared so absorbing, my eyes enlarged behind the thick lenses, reading page after page, retaining nothing at all, yet seeming entirely lost to you in art.

  You had eased yourself backwards in the seat and stretched out your legs. It was night outside and somewhere in central France. The shadowy reflections of the compartment’s inhabitants, people attempting to get some sleep, were only just more visible than the phantom countryside beyond. From time to time a gathering of lights would promise the outskirts of Paris. Looking up from a discussion of tactile values, I would find the lamps dispersing in countryside and darkness yet once more.

  Framed in the panel above your head was a black and white photograph of a French chateau. It had thick, crenellated towers with pointed tiled roofs and dominated its valley from the summit of a small, steep hill. Around its walls were the roofs of a village grown up in the castle’s shadow. The foreground contained a lake, glistening, still and silent under glass. Looking into that picture, I could feel the tiredness and ache of more than thirty-six hours without sleep taking hold. Over and over on that journey through the night, you would seem to blink awake. As I looked across to try and offer a smile of sympathy, you would close your eyes and leave me to the blurred, swimming pages of my book.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Every now and then an opening or private view will bring me up to London. Whenever it happens, as like as not the mood will seize me to get off the Tube at Holborn and walk round by way of Boswell Street to take another look at those places once more. I can see myself emerging yet again into that leafy square, standing for a moment in front of the Italian Hospital, its ornate black cupola surmounted by a crucifix, Ospedale Italiano and Supported by Voluntary Contributions picked out in faded red lettering. The Italian has two flagpoles at splayed angles, and a shield above its entrance. Although its flaky pillar moldings have now been carefully restored, the sight of the place will still start a

  fugitive nostalgia for those months spent working as a porter at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases. Founded in 1859 as the Hospital for the Paralysed, it has again

  recently changed its name to something more patient friendly, a name that doesn’t mention nerves or diseases.

  Being a porter at the National was my first real job of any kind. No longer a teenager, hardly an adult, I would collect my pay packet in the hospital’s basement every Thursday from mid-March through to the end of August, then slip away down Powis Place and round the corner to deposit a portion in a savings account at the Lloyds Bank there. We were going to Italy in September.

  In the extra year of your social sciences degree, you found a training placement at the Hospital for Sick Children, just round the corner in Great Ormond Street, the place that still owns the copyright to Peter Pan. By now we had been together for the whole of university; and so, in a year off before taking my place at the Courtauld, I decided I would follow you down to London for my gap year, as it’s known now. And what a gap it would end up making, more like a great gulf fixed. The first few weeks were spent sleeping on the floor of a borrowed flat in White City, just beyond the BBC Television Centre and Westway flyover. While I was crashing on the floor there, a Manpower Agency offered me a bit of temporary work at a warehouse in nearby Park Royal. But then the students came back from vacation and wanted their living room all to themselves.

  An early edition of The Standard produced that first real job of mine at the National. The head-porter knew of some accommodation near the Arsenal football ground, which is how I came to be renting a tiny bed-sit in Alexandra Grove, off the Seven Sisters Road, opposite the grassy, tree-lined hillocks and paths of Finsbury Park.

  Back in the Seventies, remember, when you started at The Children’s Hospital, you were staying in a Christian hostel near the Earl’s Court Tube. Sharing the room was a vicar’s daughter training to be an occupational therapist. She was intent on living down her upbringing and would come back late in the evening, put her head round the door, and ask if she could possibly have the room to herself for an hour or so. Of course, of course: and so off you would go wandering along the rows of shop fronts in search of a coffee bar open that late.

  ‘It’s so completely shameless,’ you said with an apologetic smile. ‘I could never do a thing like that to anyone.’

  Which meant that on the two or three times we met, down in the place’s communal lounge, I would have to keep my emotions parked.

  ‘So how is it going on the Barrie Wing?’ I asked.

  ‘Alright: it’s dispiriting, though, you know, the way you go into this, yes, vocation, because you want to do some good, make a tiny difference, repair a bit of damage … but then you see the birth defect cases they have up there on the wards. It’s heartbreaking. They should be giving out medals to the nurses. And the tragedies you have to listen to each and every day.’

  I could only try and sympathize.

  ‘Still, it’s better than those social work placements up North,’ you add, shaken by the depths of despair involved in getting through the practical part of your degree.

  ‘I don’t know,’ you were saying, ‘maybe there’s something more for me in hospitals.’

  ‘Maybe there is—and, anyway, a change is as good as a rest,’ I tried.

  ‘And everyone always blames the social worker. If you intervene you’re meddling bureaucracy, if you don’t you’re culpably neglectful. Not that I wasn’t warned. When I first went up for my interview, Jean Minton finished off by taking me over to the window, pointing down at the rows of slate roofs and saying: “All this can be yours …” I should have known she was quoting the Bible.’

  Leaving the North had meant we were no longer living together. Reluctantly, I agreed it would be a waste of my year off to hang around the town where we’d graduated, and you were never entirely at ease in those northern tearooms we used to frequent. After two years of being together in the place you had decorated and furnished with the choice items from junk shops and house clearance sales, we left behind our tiny flat across the footbridge over the railway lines; you complained as much as everyone else about the grit and smut blown about by the wind. Most of the textbooks, papers and things were heaved up into my mothers’ attic till there was somewhere more permanent to send them. Only now we were working in London I couldn’t stop myself wondering why you didn’t seem to regret the fact we were no longer living together.

  No one could accuse us of not trying; but the places were always too expensive or too far from Queen Square. In the end, we answered a few ads for flat shares in the personal columns of Time Out. One evening, the door to the flat in question was opened by a swinging-London-survivor who promptly offered glasses of wine and ushered us into a

  party of strangers who’d all answered the advert, or else had jointly composed it. Their spare room would be allotted to the lucky partygoer on the basis of superior charm and sociability. Definitely not our bag: we gulped down the wine and made our apologies.

  Nor did my bed-sit off the Seven Sisters Road offer much of an alternative.

  ‘So why don’t you come over to Alexandra Grove?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh I couldn’t, I couldn’t,’ you whispered. ‘It’s just so cramped and sordid.’

  No, there wasn’t much space in that single bed of mine, nor around it; the thing took up more than a third of the entire place, not that you ever agreed to try it, and anyway even the thought was against Mr. Power’s pinned-up regulations. The rent was £5 per week for an oblong six foot wide. It was reduced in size, though, by the rudiments of furniture packed into it: a rickety bedside table, a utility chest of drawers, a metal-topped table with a gas ring, and a wardrobe with an inventory of fixtures pinned to the back of its door. Above the gas ring were sun-bleached duck egg curtains, behind them a window that showed a brown brick wall cut into with a mirror-like aperture. The tenant from the window opposite had to be a man, judging from the
off-white nylon shirts hung drying in the breeze, and from the thirst for beer evidenced by the row of empty cans that formed a bright stockade along its sill. After dodging the furniture, with less than a hop, skip and jump, you’d be perched on the top landing of a precipitous flight of stairs, to the left, the sink with its white tubular heater, to the right a locked door. One day after work, happening to glance that way, I discovered the landlord, Mr. Power himself, rummaging among the dead wine bottles and faded heaps of pornographic magazines he kept hoarded there.

  Nor when you found something more suited to easing my frustration did it actually amount to an improvement. Now you had an attic bedroom rent-free in exchange for being on duty most evenings with a group of reforming drug addicts at a halfway house in Stanhope Square. The lads who spent their time playing snooker in the basement were usually very jumpy. One or two had quickly taken a fancy to you, managing with their over-intimate

  approaches to start some piercing pangs of an unsuspected jealousy in me.

  After clocking off and hanging about for a few hours in Earl’s Court, I would take the Tube back to Finsbury Park, moodily remembering our student life in St Luke’s Square. Light from a street lamp through the flat’s white curtains faded before reaching the table, leaving the rumpled bed in shadow. You would be there with just a white sheet pulled up to keep off the chill, gazing absently at the room’s cracked grate while I got up to make some tea. One time, back turned, as I wiped my face with a towel, you were suddenly stage-whispering some tender words of love. Throwing back the sheet as I turned around, you kicked one small foot over the side of the bed and affected a

  mildly erotic smile. Only there was a red flush at your neck, and goose pimples along your forearms, like emblems of a precarious innocence, or of my inexperience, hardly disguised by that momentary mock-brazen look.