Trains and Lovers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  But I was wrong. After we set out that morning, I discovered that I had left my guidebook in the room. We had not walked more than a couple of blocks from the hotel, but I suggested that I could go back and fetch it while Jenny did some window-shopping. She agreed, and I walked briskly back to the hotel and made my way up the small, winding staircase at the back of the lobby. The hotel had a lift—an ancient, cage-like apparatus—but this was so slow, and so cramped, that it was far easier to use the stairs.

  I bounded up and more or less collided with Johnny Bates, who was coming down. The stairs were narrow and we could not pass one another; we were face-to-face.

  I muttered an apology and started to make my way down to the floor below.

  “Listen,” he said. “Don’t rush off.”

  I turned back to face him. “Yes?”

  “I saw that you were with Jenny. Are you …”

  I decided to make it easier for him. “Yes, we’re going out together.”

  He seemed to chew on this information. “I see.”

  I wanted to end the encounter. “I know you and she were … well, she told me that you used to be together. But that must all be over now. Let’s not …”

  He frowned. “Oh, I have no intention of trying to rekindle anything—believe me. I just wondered if you knew.”

  “About you? Yes, I’ve just told you.”

  “No, not about me. About her.”

  I did not know what to say.

  He lowered his voice. “You know that she’s not who she says she is?”

  “What?”

  “She’s not really called Jenny Parsons. And she’s not a qualified teacher. Her name is something quite different—I never found it out—and she’s … all right, I know you’re not going to believe this, but I think she’s wanted by the police.”

  I stared at him with utter incredulity. “The police? What are you talking about? Is this a joke?”

  He shook his head. “Why should it be a joke? I don’t know you, do I? I’m just warning you, pal. You’re with some sort of confidence trickster. Not only that, but I think that she’s …” He lowered his voice. “I think she’s dangerous.”

  I wanted to burst out laughing. This was ridiculous. Here we were in broad daylight in a Paris hotel and a complete stranger was telling me that my girlfriend was dangerous. “Oh, come on …”

  “No, you just listen to me. Jenny is not who she says she is.” He paused. “And here’s another thing. If you’re wondering why I’m keeping away from her, it’s because, well, if I didn’t I think my life would be in danger.”

  There was something about his manner now that worried me. Although I might have written him off a few moments earlier as either a practical joker or a mental health case, it now crossed my mind that he was entirely serious. “Look,” I said. “Tell me exactly why you think this. You can hardly expect …”

  He cut me short. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t say much more than that. Just think about what I’ve said, okay? Think about it.”

  His unsettling message delivered, with a final, worried glance he slipped past me and continued downstairs. I stood where I was, unsure what to do. It was a good few minutes before I reminded myself that I was meant to be fetching the guide to Paris and that Jenny would be outside in the street waiting for me. If she really was Jenny, of course … I put the doubt out of my mind. Things like that did not happen; they simply did not. And yet, what if he were telling the truth? How well did I know Jenny? I asked myself. It was all very well to pick up somebody at a railway station, but what would one know about her? Everything that you knew would be learned from her, and how could I trust her? What if her whole story were untrue from start to finish? I remembered a friend saying to me once, “I can always tell whether somebody’s lying to me. It’s easy; you just know it.” I had been doubtful. “I can’t,” I had said.

  SHE NOTICED IMMEDIATELY THAT SOMETHING WAS wrong. She was looking in the window of a patisserie when I caught up with her.

  “Mouth-watering,” she said. “Look at that cake over there …” She broke off. “Was everything all right at the hotel?”

  I avoided her gaze. “Yes. Fine.”

  I tried to keep my voice normal, but my distraction must have shown because she reached out and touched me on the forearm.

  “Are you sure? You look as if you’ve seen something …”

  “Something nasty in the woodshed,” I joked. “Remember Aunt Ada Doom in Cold Comfort Farm? She saw something nasty in the woodshed and it affected her for life. Nobody ever found out what it was.”

  “I haven’t read it. We had it at home, I seem to recall, but I haven’t read it.”

  I found myself thinking: What home? The home you told me about—the one in Durham—or is that entirely fictional?

  “It’s very funny,” I said, still trying to sound as normal as possible. But I was aware of the incongruity of the situation. We were looking in the window of a Parisian patisserie, admiring the cakes, and I was talking about English comic novels.

  “Where’s the guide?” she asked.

  I felt in my pocket. I thought that I had put it there, but it was empty. I put my hand to my forehead in a gesture of confessed stupidity. “I must have left it in the room,” I said.

  “But you went there to fetch it.”

  “Yes, I know I did. But I must have been thinking of something else. You know how you can go somewhere to do something and then completely forget that you were meant to do it. You must have done that yourself.”

  She shook her head. “Look, Hugh, something happened, didn’t it?” She had fixed me with an intense stare, and I felt extremely uncomfortable. I averted my eyes. “No, don’t look away. Don’t deny it. Something happened … You saw Johnny. That’s it. You saw him, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I met him on the stairs.”

  “And he said something? He did, didn’t he?”

  I was silent, trying to decide what to do.

  “He told you something about me, didn’t he? Go on: tell me. Tell me what he said.”

  I found it impossible to resist this examination. “Yes. He said something or other.”

  “Oh yes? What exactly?”

  I almost told her, but then something stopped me; something made me afraid to do so. I looked away. “Nothing in particular.”

  She gripped my arm more tightly. “Come on, Hugh, I wasn’t born yesterday. He said something. Of course you remember it. It’s what’s making you so peculiar right now. Tell me. You know it won’t be true—you know that, don’t you?”

  “He said …”

  She interrupted me to encourage me. “I can just imagine what he said. He said something about my not being a proper teacher? Is that what he said?”

  I could see that she was angry—not with me, but with Johnny. “Something like that. It took me by surprise, and so I suppose I didn’t take everything in.”

  She shook her head, as if to dispel her anger. “He’s completely lost the place, you know. He’s … deluded. It’s bizarre.”

  Her denial, which gave every impression of sincerity, reassured me. “Yes, it was a bit like that.”

  She explained that he had not wanted to end their relationship and had tried everything to keep it going. “He was so possessive—ridiculously so. He wanted to know where I was all the time and whom I was seeing. He expected me to be at his beck and call, and if I was an hour or two late in returning his calls or text messages he’d become very suspicious. I couldn’t cope with this. Who could?”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “It must have been suffocating.”

  “It was. And then when eventually I decided that I couldn’t take it any longer and told him that we needed to break it off, he went ballistic. I thought that I’d have to tell the police about it, but then, the moment I threatened to do that, he backed off. But I know that he said some ridiculous things to some of my friends.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yes. Weird.�
�� She drew in her breath, as if girding herself for action. “I should do something about him.”

  I leaned forward and gave her a kiss. “Listen, this is a romantic break in Paris. I’m not going to allow some jealous creep to ruin it, are you?”

  Her face broke into a smile. “No, I’m not.”

  “And we don’t really need the guidebook,” I said. “We can get by perfectly well without it.”

  “Of course we can. We can go where the spirit moves us.”

  We wandered off. We had lunch in a restaurant on the Île de la Cité and then walked along the banks of the river, looking at the stalls selling prints and books. Then we went to the Louvre, which she had never visited before. I showed her my favourite picture—Ghirlandaio’s picture of the old man with the bulbous nose returning his grandson’s look of wonderment. She liked the Vuillards best: “So comfortable,” she said. “People doing ordinary things—ironing, arranging flowers and so on. I love them.”

  The day went past very quickly. At six o’clock we returned to the hotel, had showers and changed. Then we went out for dinner again, and it was there that I told her that as far as I was concerned this was the most wonderful love affair I had ever had. She said that she felt the same.

  “I’m so lucky that I found you on that railway platform,” I said. “And you weren’t even in a handbag.”

  She looked puzzled. “Oscar Wilde,” I said. “The Importance of Being Earnest. One of the characters was found as a baby in a handbag on a railway station. So Lady Bracknell says, ‘A handbag?’ It’s one of the best-known lines in drama.”

  She laughed. “And would it have made any difference if I had been in a handbag?”

  “None at all,” I said.

  After that, we sat for a few moments in complete silence. She was looking at the menu, and I let my gaze wander to a neighbouring table. An imposing-looking woman was seated opposite a neat, rather fussy man, considerably smaller than she was. He was wearing a yellow waistcoat, his dash of colour, I thought—his statement. They were a very conventional couple, I decided; safe in every respect … Safe. I looked back at Jenny, and caught her eye. She smiled at me, but I noticed a slight hesitation before the smile, as if she was unsure what I was thinking and how she should react. It occurred to me that everything she had said about Johnny might be untrue, and that her hesitation sprang from her uncertainty as to whether she had been believed. She was judging me, perhaps, determining the degree of my gullibility. I looked away. No. No. I believed her; of course I believed her. How could you not believe somebody with whom you had travelled to Paris and with whom you were having dinner and telling just how much you liked her?

  NO, THOUGHT ANDREW. NO. YOU DIDN’T REALLY know her. It was just sex. Be honest. It was different with us—I would still want to be with Hermione even if sex had never been invented. Would I? Yes, I would. Definitely. But that was not what he was going to speak about. He was going to say something more about Hermione’s father.

  “HE CLAIMED TO BE FOND OF HER,” HE SAID. “But would any parent who loved his daughter—and I mean really loved his daughter—have done what he did? At the time, I didn’t think so. I thought in his case it was more a matter of ego. Hermione was one of his possessions, so to speak. He thought he owned her, in that same way that he owned his business. She was an adornment, and he wasn’t having just anybody taking her away from him. The person who did that had to match up to him as well as to Hermione.”

  Kay nodded. “Sounds familiar. Possessiveness. Ambition. There are plenty of people like that about. And it can be difficult, you know, for a parent to accept that a son or daughter is being taken away from them by somebody else. You have to see it from their point of view—particularly where it’s a case of father and daughter or mother and son.”

  “Are those worse?”

  “They tend to be. Mothers can be more possessive of sons than they are of daughters, and the same with fathers and daughters—at least in my experience. But did he ruin it for you?”

  “He tried to.”

  “How?”

  I DON’T THINK HE SAID ANYTHING TO HER, OR AT least he didn’t say anything specific. That would have been a bit too heavy-handed: You’re not to see that young man any more! Nobody in his right mind says anything that direct any more, I would have thought. That would be an invitation for anybody to tell the parent to get lost. Obviously.

  No, he was more subtle than that, I think. She talked to me about it and told me how he did it. He invited her to various things, but just her, and never me. She went out of loyalty, and then discovered that there were all sorts of young men invited as well—by her father. Surprise, surprise! And these young men, it turned out, were all very attentive to her, having been encouraged by her father. I said that was subtle, and it doesn’t sound much like it—but it was difficult for her to prove anything. It was just a clear indication that he was keen for her to find an alternative to me. Of course, he might not have achieved what he wanted. If she had fallen for any of these rivals, then he might have had to do something about that as well.

  He tried to fill her time so as to squeeze me out. He suggested that she should accompany him to Paris, to St. Petersburg, to all sorts of places. Of course she was meant to be working in the auction house while all this was going on, and so she had an excuse not to go. But do you know what he did? He went and spoke to his friend, the chairman, and fixed it that she could take time off. She was furious, but somehow she found it impossible to stand up to him. I suppose he was just too strong a personality, and when you have a father like that, there’s not much you can do, other than walk away.

  I said to her once, “Hermione, sooner or later you’re going to have to choose. Do you let your father run your life, or do you make your own decisions? It’s that simple.”

  The question upset her. She said that she loved him for all his faults. “And what’s wrong with loving your father?” she asked.

  “Nothing. But you can’t let him dictate your life for you. You have to have … your own emotional space.”

  “Emotional space! You’re sounding like …”

  “A problem page. Okay, I admit it. But it’s true, isn’t it? And the idea of emotional space sums it up, if you ask me.”

  “Well, I need emotional space to think about this. So please don’t pressurise me.”

  “Pressurise you? Now you’re sounding like … like the instruction manual for an inflatable mattress.”

  “So that’s what I am to you? An inflatable mattress?”

  “I never said that. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  You can see that it did not exactly help our relationship.

  THEN HE HAD THE MOST SPECTACULAR FALL. IT happens, you know: one moment somebody is at the top of his game. Everything is going his way. He has power, influence, the admiration of the public. And then he does something that brings the whole edifice down about his ears.

  There are plenty of examples, and we all know about them: politicians who are discovered to have been fiddling their expenses; government ministers who have been getting too cosy with crooked businessmen; judges with gambling debts or secret mistresses. There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you’ve carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that—slippery at the edges.

  THE FIRST THING I KNEW OF IT WAS FROM THE newspapers. It was on page one. Hermione’s father had been accused of insider trading. I’ve never understood exactly what’s involved in that, but apparently this was a bad case of it and the papers said that the City of London was shocked. I gather it’s a tight community and if you tread on toes they certainly let you know all about it. But in his case there was more to it than that. The investigations into the insider trading had also revealed that he had abused his position as trustee for a very large and very popular charity. According to the reports I read, he had enriched himself at the expense of the charity. It was complicated, but it seems that the charity needed a certain consultation job done. Hermione
’s father had fixed things so that this contract was given to a company that he himself controlled. The company was not the lowest bidder for the work; in fact, it was the highest.

  Now this charity was concerned with the welfare of the children of servicemen who had been killed or wounded in action. It’s difficult to imagine a more sensitive cause, and the idea of defrauding something like that was about as distasteful as one can imagine. People were outraged, and had there been a mob, it would have strung him up on a lamppost.

  So from being an eminently respectable and highly influential citizen, Hermione’s father had suddenly become a pariah.

  “DROPPED BY HIS FRIENDS, I SUPPOSE,” SAID KAY.

  Andrew nodded. “Yes. Hermione told me later that he saw people cross the street if they saw him coming. To the other side, of course.”

  “Then they weren’t friends,” said Hugh.

  David agreed with this. “Can’t have been. Real friends stick with you.”

  “Even if you do something really shocking? I mean, really shocking?” Kay asked.

  David thought for a moment. “I think so. People convicted of serial killing get visitors in prison, don’t they?”

  “From people as depraved as they are,” suggested Andrew.

  David was not sure. They might be, he said. Or they might just be people who recognised that there was still a person there who was worthy of their friendship. And people forgave people, he said. They did. They forgave.

  Kay smiled. “Just as well, because …”

  They looked at her, waiting. “Because what?” asked Hugh.

  “Ever been forgiven?” she said.

  FORGIVENESS, THOUGHT ANDREW, AND THEN CONTINUED: Hermione stayed away from work on the day that the news broke. I telephoned her at her flat and on her mobile, but she did not answer. I left a message, asking her to call me back. She did that eventually, just before ten that evening. I told her that I could understand why she would not want to speak to anybody, but I thought it would help if we could meet.