by Alyson Rudd
She guessed that Catherine would have had fun at the Lancaster Gate man’s expense. That she would have told him she would indeed like to go to a hotel with him, have followed him up the escalator, maybe even out into the street, maybe even into the hotel bar to order an expensive cocktail she could throw into his lap. Catherine might even have gone further but she hoped not. Catherine’s boss had been far less revolting than Dirt Lancaster and now she would have to find another station to settle down in before heading home. She plumped for Bethnal Green but for the whole ninety minutes that she stayed there she was agitated. Lancaster Gate nagged at her as unfinished business. Maybe she was not near the end at all. This could be, still, the beginning of a very long quest.
Isak’s life was a quest funded by Andrew. His money, or rather his allowance, came from the fact that his stepfather was big in the City. His mother had met Andrew when Isak was twelve and sufficiently difficult to mean it was hard for her to make friends and forge romantic relationships. So she did not mention her son until Andrew had flown her to London for dinner and a musical and their relationship appeared to be something real. She had braced herself for a tight smile and a cursory kiss goodnight but Andrew had toasted her son – her awkward, sometimes frightening, sometimes frightened son – and said he would like very much one day, if she deemed it appropriate, to meet him. It was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to her and now Isak was twenty and, thanks to Andrew, receiving the best care, which intermittently allowed him the freedom to roam the capital looking for clothes. Isak was a man-child with no future but Andrew never drew attention to the open-ended nature of his financial support. Isak was Isak. They never argued about him. Andrew viewed him as an extension of Ulla. It was, for him, as natural as buying her insurance for her car. If Isak was contained, coping, content, then Ulla would smile, run her hands through Andrew’s hair and he would be, at last, happy.
Chapter 13
The weekday mornings were different now. Ryan was not even sure if he wanted to travel in the first carriage any more. He could smile and say hi and she might look right through him, the odd man who knew the works of Mrs Henry Wood. She might smile back, though. He bit his lip. He had made one mistake, just one. Everything else about their modest lunch at Waterloo had been fine. Better than fine once the buzzing in his ears had ceased. Millie, now Sylvie, was real, for a start, and still as beautiful; she owed him a salad and over that salad she would him tell why she stayed underground for so long and it would be reasonable or maybe even wonderful. Maybe.
For the first three subsequent commutes he could not eat any breakfast. He was sick with nerves, but when a full week had passed with no sighting he calmed down and forced himself to feel fatalistic. After two weeks he was not so much worried as sad. After four he began to suspect she was avoiding the salad.
Paul arrived in London two weeks before Christmas to sort out his accommodation.
‘I am,’ he announced, ‘like the curry or funny tea women have when they want to give birth. Now I am here she will reappear.’
The two men did not have a set tradition but when feasible would visit each other’s family homes on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day to ease the burden. Grace became giddy then drunk then maudlin every time but would always rally when Paul arrived with a box of expensive chocolates for her, usually from an airport.
Grandpa rallied too, roused by the smell of mincemeat and pastry and stuffing, the random and frequent offers of a festive glass of wine or brandy or sherry. Ed had not asked Hana if she wanted to join some of their fellow ramblers for a festive walking break. Hana would have said she had to be with her mother because there was never any question of a breaking of tradition, but she had expected him to ask all the same.
‘Thank you for the lovely book, Grandpa,’ she said.
‘You’re welcome,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively.
On his lap he had a giant chocolate panettone which he had just unwrapped and was unwilling to share. They all knew he would have a slice as a sort of starter before he tucked into the Christmas cake in front of the Queen.
Hana stood and looked out of the window onto the street. She and Ed had made no arrangement to meet that day but she had a feeling he would pop by to surprise her, that he would not have gone hiking at Christmas without her.
‘It’s drizzling,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing remotely winter wonderland going on out there.’
A car pulled up but it belonged to a relative of the single mother who lived opposite, whose family multiplied with such alarming regularity that even the most ardent socialist could not but help calculate how much she accrued in benefits. Grace glanced over at her daughter and caught a glimpse of the sad version of her Hana, the one who had come home to her in tears, broken and hurt.
She beckoned Ryan into the kitchen.
‘Are your sister and Ed still OK? I’m wondering if they’re not and she doesn’t want to worry me.’
Ryan exhaled. He too had noticed the frown lines on Hana’s forehead, the slightly hunched back, the way she checked her phone when it had not made a sound.
‘She hasn’t said anything to me, Mam, but I’m sure it’s just normal stuff, the ebbs and flows of everyday romance.’
Grace planted a kiss on his cheek.
‘Get you, Mr Ryan Wordsworth,’ she said. ‘When will you be bringing a girl home for Christmas?’
Ryan shrugged in an exaggerated manner and patted his stomach.
‘I have that I’m-full-to-busting-but-need-a-mince-pie feeling,’ he said as the Queen and Grandpa began to speak, one mentioning the Commonwealth, the other demanding to know where his cake was.
Franklyn was home. He had settled in Florida, become a sports physio and had missed the last two Berkshire Christmases altogether but this time brought with him a tanned and leggy girlfriend with perfect teeth. Sylvie felt herself sat in permanent shadow while Brooke hogged all the sunshine and pronounced everything to be so quaint, so awesome, so English.
Her parents had thoughtfully bought Brooke gifts so she too could be handed things to open from under the tree. Never, thought Sylvie, has a notebook from Harrods been greeted with such gleeful enthusiasm. Indeed, the final gift of the unwrapping session was for Brooke. It was a small box containing an engagement ring.
Ah, thought Sylvie, if a girl gets so excited over a green jotting pad, what will she do when proposed to?
A hundred ‘oh my Gods’ later, Sylvie’s father had opened the special-occasion Champagne and her mother was on the phone to her best friend. Far from appearing to think their Christmas had been hijacked her parents were variously touched, honoured, moved or thrilled by the whole escapade. The pièce de résistance came when Brooke said she would like the ceremony to be in England. Sylvie smiled. She could tell her soon-to-be sister-in-law was dreaming about a horse-drawn carriage and Windsor Castle. She looked over at Franklyn and realized for the first time that his nearly red hair and English freckles would have gone down a storm with the girls in Tampa.
She wondered if it would alter the mood at all if she chose to finally tell her family she had lost her job back in March. Such was the intense hysteria that she doubted they would hear her if she did, but the fact she had even considered it was another sign that the time she spent underground was finite. It would end. Surely it would end. She popped on her new Jacksonville Jaguars earmuffs and Brooke squealed in delight.
That girl, Sylvie thought, is far too easily pleased.
The snow came mid-January. It was not all that pretty and Naomi declared it bargain-basement sleet. It did not stick for long, but it was pesky enough to mean that Ryan had to blink a lot as he shuffled to North Ealing Underground station. He had a meeting with the lab’s main chemicals supplier to look forward to and, although he knew the weather meant they would be late, he had to be on time.
She was reading Bleak House. It is not weird, he thought, for me to know of other books by Dickens, but he did not comment on it all the same.<
br />
‘Hi, Sylvie,’ he said, ‘how are you?’
She looked up, a half-smile on her lips. He had remembered her name, but she had also remembered his.
He had imagined the moment, feared it, been impatient for it, but now it was here he was strangely relaxed.
‘I haven’t eaten a salad for weeks,’ he said, ‘you know, in preparation for the next one.’
‘I am a woman who pays her debts,’ she said. ‘Can you be at the same place at 12.30 today?’
He wanted to say of course he could but he knew that would be cutting it fine, even if the Chemical Brothers turned up on time.
She smiled some more.
‘Or 1 p.m. if that’s easier?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would be much easier. Great.’
The carriage became clogged and he had to shift a little further from her, making conversation a horribly public affair. No one else was talking at all. She returned to Lady Dedlock, only looking up again when they pulled into South Kensington and he whispered he would see her later. She nodded and as he stepped off the train he realized he was humming an atonal piece of electronica.
The meeting was, as he knew it would be, delayed by snow that did not stick in London but had stuck at a crucial point on the M40. Then there was the small talk about the weather and pleasantries about getting back into the swing of things after Christmas. Ryan found himself tapping the table with the tip of his pen. There was some chat about unavoidable price hikes and a weak joke about having the solution to it. Ryan forced a hurried laugh. It was already noon. At 12.40 he was hurtling through the main doors just as Ed was entering. Hana’s Ed. Had he not been so preoccupied, Ryan would have been bemused by his presence but he did not have a spare second in which to become distracted.
‘Can’t stop, Ed, running late,’ he said and he really was. He reckoned he would reach her ten minutes past the hour but there were no delays. A Jubilee line train was waiting for him at Westminster and he spotted her candyfloss hair at 1.05.
She was not alone. The restaurant was busy but the woman sitting opposite Sylvie had asked for the bill and when Ryan sat down she flapped her arms and said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m practically on my train already.’
‘It’s not really salad weather, is it?’ Sylvie said as the waitress approached.
‘I’ll have the penne giardinera and an Earl Grey tea,’ she said.
‘I’ll have the same,’ Ryan said. ‘But with garlic bread.’
‘Did you have a nice Christmas? Were you in London?’ she asked him.
‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘It was, let’s say, traditional, dull and a little emotional and, oh Christ, what was Ed doing at the uni?’
Sylvie raised an eyebrow but she seemed interested.
Ryan fiddled with a spoon and without knowing where the story would end began to tell her about the lunch in August, how Naomi and Ed had almost towered over Hana, had looked like a couple and had lots in common and right now he was probably doing or saying something that would hurt his sister.
‘Hana had a really bad time with a shitty husband and Ed is the first bloke she has seen since then so—’
‘So,’ Sylvie said, ‘you need to find out what he was doing there before you tell your sister anything.’
‘Oh, yes, of course. But it’s a bit weird. Him being there today, don’t you think?’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘My brother brought a Tampa girl home and proposed to her in front of me and our parents on Christmas Day. That was weird.’
‘I have a hunch we are the only sane people in our families,’ Ryan said and then guiltily sipped his tea, remembering that for some time he had feared Millie, now Sylvie, and her journeys might turn out to be too weird. She might still be highly peculiar and so he could not yet bring himself to ask where she was going, where she had been that morning, where she would be tomorrow.
‘Are you a student?’ she asked him.
‘No, I run the chemistry labs. I was late meeting you because of a fascinating meeting about the price of nitric acid.’ He paused. ‘Are you a student?’
She laughed.
‘Long story,’ she said. ‘I’m job hunting right now.’
‘Do you need a job in a chemistry laboratory?’ he said, hoping to sound self-deprecating rather than patronizing.
‘If your lab needed organizing and hosted events and the nitric acid fell out with the, with the… helium, and needed a new cupboard every five minutes, then yes, I could work with you.’
‘Helium is expensive,’ he said, ‘due to inflation.’
She stared at him blankly then spluttered over her pasta.
‘My, that’s so bad it’s almost funny,’ she said. ‘Do you have a joke for every gas and acid and Bunsen burner?’
He nodded sagely.
‘What do you call a clown in jail?’
She pretended to think about it then shook her head.
‘A silicon,’ he said.
‘And all you’re drinking is Earl Grey,’ she said.
‘I have to get back to work,’ he said, ‘but I’d really like to take for you a drink one evening. Early evening perhaps. Friday. This Friday, if you could make that?’
She nodded.
‘Can I take your number to arrange it? We could meet in town or nearer your home?’
‘I’ll meet you there at six,’ she said, pointing to the champagne bar a bit further along from where they were sitting. It was a bar designed for people waiting for trains, for meeting friends off trains, for serving people that starter drink before a big night out or for a last drink before heading home after the theatre. It was not the sort of place he had in mind at all and a wave of claustrophobia briefly engulfed him.
‘We can start there, of course,’ he said, brightening. It was a start, after all. He looked at her hands. She had slim fingers and unpolished nails. A mischievous voice in his head – that sounded suspiciously like Naomi’s – told him to reach for her hand and kiss it but he resisted.
‘Shall we go halves?’ he said but she firmly declined and remained seated as he slid a five-pound note under the salt cellar for the tip.
‘See you over there then on Friday at six,’ he said.
‘Understood,’ she said, which seemed to him to be an odd thing to say but perhaps she was teasing him for being overly officious. He walked away towards the escalator trying to appear nonchalant – trying not to appear overjoyed that he could happily take a different Tube line and maybe, just maybe, not ever need to follow her again.
Naomi was in one of the meeting spaces designed for informal academic discussions. She was with a small group of biodiversity postgraduates who were plotting a field trip and she had the sense that someone was watching them. She looked around to spot Ed loitering, hands in his coat pockets. It was a long, heavy dark grey coat that only a tall man could wear well. She signalled to him then pointed at her chest to ask if he was there to see her.
He nodded, not sheepishly, but boldly, smilingly. She held up her hand to indicate ‘five minutes’ but the discussion broke up before then.
He kissed her cheek. She did not need to stoop; he did not need to stoop.
‘I was nearby and thought, well, I’ve never seen this place. Thought you could give me a tour and tell me more about your Masters.’
Naomi was struck by how relaxed he was, how natural it seemed to him to seek her out even though they both knew, didn’t they, that there had been an inappropriate frisson between them at Grace’s lunch.
‘First up, I have to tell you I was badly drunk when we met for that hot-day roast lunch and, um, sorry if I was an idiot.’
Ed was genuinely surprised.
‘No need for an apology,’ he said, ‘unless you were making up your life. You made perfect sense and it was refreshing to be able to talk about science and nature to someone who knows what it means and should mean.’
‘You’re not humouring me?’
‘I most certainly am not.’
/> She gave him the tour, they bumped into a few people she knew and she introduced Ed as ‘a friend of mine’ even though she did not know his last name. She liked showing off the building but mostly she liked the way they were streamlined, comfortable.
‘Oh, you make a divine couple,’ Daryl, a short, annoying blond Aussie said as they passed him in a corridor.
They both ignored him.
‘And where does Ryan work?’ Ed asked and she blushed.
‘This way,’ she said, trying to slow her breathing, practising in her head how to look innocent when Ryan saw them, but the labs were empty and locked.
‘Shame,’ Ed said ‘but, then again, chemicals are less fascinating to me.’
‘Of course,’ Naomi said and without thinking added, ‘You’ll have to give me a tour of your place.’
‘I think it would much more fun if we met for dinner,’ he said and he confidently took out his phone. ‘Give me your number,’ he said as if there was no subterfuge, no moral dilemma, no awkwardness, and so she did.
‘I’ve texted you, so you have mine too now,’ he said.