Trains and Lovers: A Novel

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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 …”

  DAVID HAD REACTED WHEN ANDREW HAD MADE his remark about thinking about somebody every day of his life. He had stiffened briefly and then had smiled. It was a private smile; not one intended to signal anything to the others.

  Oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can’t help it, because he’s always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you’re thinking about him, he’s not thinking about you. That’s the hardest thing about it. That’s what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness. It’s like a great white sea—one of those inland seas you see pictures of in the National Geographic; seas that are completely still, seas too salty to have waves or currents. Seas of tears.

  WE LEFT WORK TOGETHER THE NEXT DAY AS SHE had said that we would have to catch a train to her father’s place. It was forty minutes outside London, she said, in one of those places that is technically outside the city, but is not in the real countryside—a place of trees and lanes that negotiated their way past high hedges intended to shield the houses on the other side from view, but which afforded occasional glimpses of the luxury they almost concealed.

  Hermione’s mother lived in France, she said. She had gone off a few years earlier with another man—one of her father’s closest friends. “They don’t speak. They write to one another through their lawyers. Not that there’s much to say—it’s mostly threats, I think.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “She’s much happier, though. She told me their marriage was a nightmare.”

  I hesitated to say anything. The house was not far from the railway station, and we were walking. There was loose gravel on the pavement—small chips of it from some road repairs, and it made a pleasant, crunching sound. I had walked on gravel before, but never walked on gravel with her.

  At last I said, “It must be awful to be that unhappy in a marriage.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like being in prison,” she went on. “And then suddenly it’s over and you’re free.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “They’re both happier now,” she said. “Although I don’t think my father really cares one way or the other. I’m not sure that he was all that unhappy anyway; he didn’t really notice my mother. She was just there. He wasn’t nasty to her—or not as far as I could see. He just ignored her.”

  I said that I thought that some people would feel that ignoring somebody amounted to being nasty—certainly it could amount to unkindness, could it not?

  “Some people don’t know when they’re being unkind,” she said. “I think my father’s one of them. His mind is on other matters. Business mostly.”

  I had never asked her what he did. I was worried that she would think that I was interested in her for her money—if they had it, which I imagined they did. I had read somewhere about how wealthy people are very discreet and are always concerned that people are going to befriend them for their money rather than for themselves. But now that she had mentioned his business, I brought it up.

  “He owns a newspaper,” she said. “But that’s not the only thing. It’s for his ego. He’s the chairman of an investment firm. You see their ads all over the place. I think that’s the bit that really matters to him.”

  I nodded. Newspaper proprietorship was exactly right for a real alpha male—so much so that it almost amounted to a cliché.

  “I can see what you’re thinking,” she said.

  I blushed. “I wasn’t …”

  “No, you were. And I don’t mind. You were thinking that he owns a newspaper because that’s what somebody like him wants to do. People like that own newspapers or football teams. It’s about power, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. But, look, I can’t say very much about it. How can I? I haven’t even met your father.”

  “You soon will,” she said.

  We had reached a gate. There was a buzzer that she pressed to open the gate. A voice from a small speaker above the button said, “Hermione, darling.” It was a man’s voice.

  She leaned forward to the microphone. “Daddy.”

  The gate was unlocked from within the house. There was a quiet click. Well-oiled machinery, I thought.

  She turned to smile at me encouragingly. “Come on.”

  I SAW IMMEDIATELY THAT HE LOOKED A BIT LIKE her. That was disconcerting at first, because you love a face and then discover that the thing you love is in another face. I know I’m not putting that very well, but it’s a very odd feeling. You feel that you should love the other person too—if only a little, out of gratitude.

  He looked at me in the same way in which she sometimes did—that same intense stare. That was another thing she got from him.

  “So you’re Andrew. They call you Andy, no doubt.”

  “Sometimes. But I like my full name.”<
br />
  It sounded rude, which is exactly the opposite of the effect I had intended. I felt far from confident in the presence of Hermione’s father; I was out of my depth, and I knew it. I noticed him react. The intense stare faded and he glanced briefly at Hermione before his gaze turned back to me.

  “Of course,” he said evenly. “You should never fool around with somebody’s name. Names are very important.”

  “Daddy’s called Peter,” said Hermione. “I call him Hosh.”

  “A family nickname,” he said quickly. It was a clear invitation not to call him Hosh.

  We were standing in the drawing room, a large formal room that looked out onto an expanse of lawn. At the far end of the grass there was a summer-house, a small wooden structure with a shingled roof. I could see chairs inside and what looked, from where I was standing, as if it was a stuffed bear.

  I glanced around the room. It was as different from our living room at home as it could be. My eyes alighted on a picture above the fireplace, a large post-impressionist framed in one of those wide gilt frames that the works of the impressionists and their successors so often appear in. Hermione noticed my glance.

  “Bonnard,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Of course that’s what you do, isn’t it?” said Peter. He looked at the painting. “I’ve always liked Bonnard. I bought that in New York. Sotheby’s, not your bunch.”

  “It’s lovely,” I said.

  “A woman in a bath,” Peter said. “It must have been difficult being married to Bonnard. Always wanting to paint you in the bath. No privacy at all.”

  “She might have been flattered,” said Hermione.

  Peter shrugged. “Maybe.” He turned to me. “And what’s the art market doing right now? Jittery, like everybody else?”

  I tried to remember what somebody had said over coffee the previous day. “It’s all right,” I said. “Contemporary art is doing rather well. Chinese too.”

  He smiled, and I wondered whether he had guessed that this was just the recitation of something I had heard from somebody who really knew what he was talking about. But I was not the cause of his smile; it was the fortunes of contemporary art. “Interesting,” he said. “I read the other day—it was in the FT, I think—there was a report about how one of these chaps, a big name in art today, didn’t sell when they put a whole stash of his work up for auction. Nobody wanted it. Because it was rubbish.”