Evening
There’s been a problem on the line. The 17.56 fast train to Stoke has been cancelled, so its passengers have invaded my train and it’s standing room only in the carriage. I, fortunately, have a seat, but by the aisle, not next to the window, and there are bodies pressed against my shoulder, my knee, invading my space. I have an urge to push back, to get up and shove. The heat has been building all day, closing in on me, I feel as though I’m breathing through a mask. Every single window has been opened and yet, even while we’re moving, the carriage feels airless, a locked metal box. I cannot get enough oxygen into my lungs. I feel sick. I can’t stop replaying the scene in the coffee shop this morning, I can’t stop feeling as though I’m still there, I can’t stop seeing the looks on their faces.
I blame Jess. I was obsessing this morning about Jess and Jason, about what she’d done and how he would feel, about the confrontation they would have when he found out and when his world, like mine, was ripped apart. I was walking around in a daze, not concentrating on where I was going. Without thinking, I went into the coffee shop that everyone from Huntingdon Whiteley uses. I was through the door before I saw them, and by the time I did it was too late to turn back; they were looking at me, eyes widening for a fraction of a second before they remembered to fix smiles on their faces. Martin Miles with Sasha and Harriet, a triumvirate of awkwardness, beckoning, waving me over.
‘Rachel!’ Martin said, arms outstretched, pulling me into a hug. I wasn’t expecting it, my hands were caught between us, fumbling against his body. Sasha and Harriet smiled, they gave me tentative air kisses, trying not to get too close. ‘What are you doing here?’
For a long, long moment, I went blank. I looked at the floor, I could feel myself colouring and, realizing it was making it worse, I gave a false laugh and said, ‘Interview. Interview.’
‘Oh.’ Martin failed to hide his surprise, while Sasha and Harriet nodded and smiled. ‘Who’s that with?’
I couldn’t remember the name of a single public relations firm. Not one. I couldn’t think of a property company either, let alone one which might realistically be hiring. I just stood there, rubbing my lower lip with my forefinger, shaking my head, and eventually Martin said, ‘Top secret, is it? Some firms are weird like that, aren’t they? Don’t want you saying anything until the contracts are signed and it’s all official.’ It was bullshit and he knew it, he did it to save me and nobody bought it, but everyone pretended they did and nodded along. Harriet and Sasha were looking over my shoulder at the door, they were embarrassed for me, they wanted a way out.
‘I’d better go and order my coffee,’ I said. ‘Don’t want to be late.’
Martin put his hand on my forearm and said, ‘It’s great to see you, Rachel.’ His pity was almost palpable. I’d never realized, not until the last year or two of my life, how shaming it is to be pitied.
The plan had been to go to Holborn Library on Theobalds Road, but I couldn’t face it, so I went to Regent’s Park instead. I walked to the very far end, next to the zoo. I sat down in the shade beneath a sycamore tree, thinking of the unfilled hours ahead, replaying the conversation in the coffee shop, remembering the look on Martin’s face when he said goodbye to me.
I must have been there for less than half an hour when my mobile rang. It was Tom again, calling from the home phone. I tried to picture him, working at his laptop in our sunny kitchen, but the image was spoilt by encroachments from his new life. She would be there somewhere, in the background, making tea or feeding the little girl, her shadow falling over him. I let the call go to voicemail. I put the phone back into my bag and tried to ignore it. I didn’t want to hear any more, not today; today was already awful enough and it was not yet ten thirty in the morning. I held out for about three minutes before I retrieved the phone and dialled into voicemail. I braced myself for the agony of hearing his voice – that voice which used to speak to me with laughter and light and now is used only to admonish or console or pity – but it wasn’t him.
‘Rachel, it’s Anna.’ I hung up.
I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t stop my brain from racing or my skin from itching, so I got to my feet and walked to the corner shop on Titchfield Street and bought four gin and tonics in cans, then went back to my spot in the park. I opened the first one and drank it as fast as I could, and then opened the second. I turned my back to the path so that I couldn’t see the runners and the mothers with buggies and the tourists, and if I couldn’t see them, I could pretend like a child that they couldn’t see me. I called my voicemail again.
‘Rachel, it’s Anna.’ Long pause. ‘I need to talk to you about the phone calls.’ Another long pause – she’s talking to me and doing something else, multi-tasking, the way busy wives and mothers do, tidying up, loading the washing machine. ‘Look, I know you’re having a tough time,’ she says, as though she has nothing to do with my pain, ‘but you can’t call us at night all the time.’ Her tone is clipped, irritable. ‘It’s bad enough that you wake us when you call, but you wake Evie, too, and that’s just not acceptable. We’re struggling to get her to sleep through at the moment.’ We’re struggling to get her to sleep through. We. Us. Our little family. With our problems and our routines. Fucking bitch. She’s a cuckoo, laying her egg in my nest. She has taken everything from me. She has taken everything and now she calls me to tell me that my distress is inconvenient for her?
I finish the second can and make a start on the third. The blissful rush of alcohol hitting my bloodstream lasts only a few minutes and then I feel sick. I’m going too fast, even for me, I need to slow down; if I don’t slow down something bad is going to happen. I’m going to do something I will regret. I’m going to call her back, I’m going to tell her I don’t care about her and I don’t care about her family and I don’t care if her child never gets a good night’s sleep for the rest of its life. I’m going to tell her that the line he used with her – don’t expect me to be sane – he used it with me, too, when we were first together; he wrote it in a letter to me, declaring his undying passion. It’s not even his line: he stole it from Henry Miller. Everything she has is secondhand. I want to know how that makes her feel. I want to call her back and ask her, what does it feel like, Anna, to live in my house, surrounded by the furniture I bought, to sleep in the bed that I shared with him for years, to feed your child at the kitchen table he fucked me on?
I still find it extraordinary that they chose to stay there, in that house, in my house. I couldn’t believe it when he told me. I loved that house. I was the one who insisted we buy it, despite its location. I liked being down there on the tracks, I liked watching the trains go by, I enjoyed the sound of them, not the scream of an inter-city express but the old-fashioned trundling of ancient rolling stock. Tom told me, it won’t always be like this, they’ll eventually upgrade the line and then it will be fast trains screaming past, but I couldn’t believe it would ever actually happen. I would have stayed there, I would have bought him out if I’d had the money. I didn’t, though, and we couldn’t find a buyer at a decent price when we divorced, so instead he said he’d buy me out and stay on until he got the right price for it. But he never found the right buyer, instead he moved her in, and she loved the house like I did, and they decided to stay. She must be very secure in herself, I suppose, in them, for it not to bother her, to walk where another woman has walked before. She obviously doesn’t think of me as a threat. I think about Ted Hughes, moving Assia Wevill into the home he’d shared with Plath, of her wearing Sylvia’s clothes, brushing her hair with the same brush. I want to ring Anna up and remind her that Assia ended up with her head in the oven, just like Sylvia did.
I must have fallen asleep, the gin and the hot sun lulling me. I woke with a start, scrabbling around desperately for my handbag. It was still there. My skin was prickling, I was alive with ants, they were in my hair and on my neck and chest and I leaped to my feet, clawing them away. Two teenage boys, kicking a football back and forth twenty yards away, stopped to watch, bent double with laughter.
The train stops. We are almost opposite Jess and Jason’s house, but I can’t see across the carriage and the tracks, there are too many people in the way. I wonder whether they are there, whether he knows, whether he’s left, or whether he’s still living a life he’s yet to discover is a lie.