Platform Seven Read online

  Her husband Alex came up the path behind her, briskly, conforming to stereotype by checking his phone as he walked. I took against him straight away – a smug show-off in his well-fitting suit and polished shoes. At the reception, I noticed he couldn’t stop staring at the bridesmaids, beautiful fourteen-year-old twins with flowers in their hair. I wasn’t the only one who noticed – and Virginia herself seemed to become a little brittle as the reception progressed.

  At one point, I needed some air and went outside the Hall on Main Street – this was definitely not a City wedding – to join the smokers, and got chatting to another friend, called Charlene. ‘God, did you see how he just nearly fell down Orla’s cleavage?’ Charlene said. ‘Virginia is so gorgeous, what’s she doing stuck with him?’ We sniggered to each other but of course we knew, and there was envy and hypocrisy behind our sniggers. Charlene was in a suit, Next or Hennes I was guessing. I was wearing a purple dress from M & S that I was hoping didn’t look like a purple dress from M & S. We would both have loved a wardrobe that matched our youth, our looks, but neither of us could afford it – we would have put up with Alex, temporarily at least, in return for Virginia’s silk shift, those earrings that looked as though they were selected casually at the last minute from a wooden box. And yes, in public Alex came over as a bit of an arse but maybe behind closed doors he was perfectly charming. Who knew?

  It’s a deal we all make, I remember thinking. What kind of life will I live with this person? All relationships are a balancing act, after all, each individual perched on either end of a seesaw. Your husband snores. Your wife leaves wet towels on the floor. But he brings you tea in bed every morning. She’s a terrific cook. All unions, all associations, every partnership – they all have their benefits and their drawbacks, their subscription fees.

  *

  When I met Matty at the entrance to the Minor Injuries Unit of the City Care Centre, with its snarling security guard and cautionary cat, I was thirty-five and he was thirty-one. I was a teacher, he a doctor. It turned out we both liked going to the cinema and Italian food; neither of us had been to Venice and we really wanted to go. We both thought that people who talked about their dairy or wheat intolerances were boring. Neither of us was on Facebook – him to avoid his patients and me to avoid my students – and we swapped notes on how friends gave us a hard time about this and how they didn’t understand. I loved the strands of white hair at his left temple, a thin badger-streak against his dark hair; he said he couldn’t decide if my eyes were green or brown and he needed to look at them a lot more before he worked it out. Here is the paradox of sexual attraction: how universal are our thoughts, just at the point that we regard them as particular.

  On our first date, in what would become our favourite Italian restaurant, he fed me with his fork. While I was mid-sentence about something, he reached out a hand and rested it on my left upper arm and said, ‘I love your shoulders, they’re very elegant.’

  I said nothing. Like most women, I had not been trained in how to receive a compliment with anything other than self-deprecation.

  ‘You have one either side of your head, as well,’ he added, returning to his food, ‘which is very clever of you.’

  ‘I am nothing if not symmetrical,’ I replied, and he looked at me as if I was the wittiest person in the world.

  *

  He wanted to meet my friends straight away. He said he wanted to know what made me tick.

  People – by which I mean the women friends in my social circle – were very excited, and often told me so. As far as everyone else was concerned, it was only a matter of time.

  *

  Not long after Matty and I started dating, Rosaria and I had a conversation, on the phone. I was walking to school. I had set out early because it was a nice day and so I could afford to talk and walk, to dawdle. Rosaria was at a bus stop. She worked as the Catering Manager of a pharmaceuticals firm out at the Orton industrial estate.

  It was a Monday morning. She had rung me for an update. Isn’t this one of the best bits of a new flirtation or relationship, reporting back to your closest woman friend? Later comes the phase when your loyalties start to shift, when talking about him behind his back starts to feel a bit wrong, but for now, with Matty’s status in my life still so uncertain, I felt no compunction in giving her the full details.

  I had told her Matty and I had gone to the cinema, then back to my place and shared a bottle of red.

  ‘So, go on …’

  ‘Rosie!’

  ‘No, go on!’ Her voice was shrieky with glee and I imagined the other people at the bus stop, looking at her. There was no filter with Rosaria – how she was in private over a glass of wine was exactly how she was while waiting in a queue for the number 20 to Orton Southgate. ‘Tell me, tell me now!’

  ‘Well, seeing as you ask, yes …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What do you mean, and?’

  ‘And how was it?’

  I allowed a dramatic pause. I had turned off Thorpe Road. There was birdsong. ‘Fantastic …’

  A shriek from her. I was bragging, and loving bragging, and she was loving me loving it.

  ‘Yeah, well, you know, he’s a doctor. Let’s just say he knows his way around …’ This was not an exaggeration.

  There was a bit of sniggering and snorting between us then, schoolgirl stuff, not quite laughter, the sort of childish noise you only make with a trusted friend. I pictured her bending double while she perched on one of those narrow metal bench seats, the cold slippy things they have at the bus station that are designed to deter homeless people from trying to get anything approaching a good night’s kip.

  ‘Please, please tell me he wore a stethoscope …’

  ‘No … but …’

  ‘What, what?’

  ‘I’m not telling you!’

  At one stage, Matty had been lying on his back on my bed and I had been straddling him and, as I rocked slowly on top of him, to and fro, with him inside me, he had reached up with one hand and placed it gently on my throat, then looked into my eyes. Our gazes locked. I wasn’t sure what he was about to do but it’s fair to say that he had my undivided attention. With his other hand, he took hold of my wrist, placed his fingertips in a row on the front of it and his thumb on the back. He increased the pressure of the hand on my throat. I smiled at him, still moving back and forth. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  He smiled back, his eyes never leaving mine, and said softly, ‘Taking your pulse.’

  This was a moment of such complexity that I could not explain it to my friend, for the individual elements of it sounded either mundane or weird. I straddled him: yes, so what? He took my pulse: bit cheesy, for a doctor. He had his hand on my throat: hmm, that sounds a bit worrying. But it was not any of the individual actions, of course, it was the combination, and the slowness and precision of his movements, the intensity of his concentration upon me. None of this was explicable in a gossipy telephone conversation. I wasn’t sure if it was explicable at all – it was a bit like repeating a joke you’d heard at a comedy gig: you had to be there.

  Rosaria was astute enough to draw her own conclusions. ‘What you’re saying, girl, or rather not saying, is that the sex was dirty.’

  ‘Rosie, just how many people are you standing next to?’

  ‘No, it’s fine, I’m on the bus now. Top deck.’ Her voice was still very loud. Oh well, I thought, at least she’ll be keeping the other passengers entertained on their Monday morning commute. ‘You know what they say, don’t you, doll? If the sex is dirty, then the rows are too.’

  ‘Ha, well, we’re a long way from our first row, at least I hope we are!’

  ‘Don’t you remember Mart?’ Martin was an ex-squaddie Rosaria had dated for a while the previous year. They had met on Tinder and had amazing sex, she reported – something about damaging a kitchen counter top – but also ended up throwing crockery at each other’s heads. When they split up, she wept catastrophically for one who
le evening round at my place and was over it the next day. That was Rosie.

  ‘You told me he was great and you didn’t regret a minute.’

  ‘Well yeah, I know, seriously, I mean, you can have vanilla or not vanilla. I’d always go not vanilla myself, until you want something serious of course, then it’s definitely best to settle for vanilla. Have babies with vanilla. You’ve been moaning about being single ever since you split with Ian. Aren’t you my vanilla-babies friend?’

  Our conversations often went this way – her wildness as opposed to my relative conservatism – but like most friends, we stereotyped each other, in a comfortable and friendly kind of way. I was sure Rosie would settle for a conventional marriage some day, and for all my occasional bouts of loneliness I was equally sure that it was a lot less likely where I was concerned.

  I hated the idea of settling. I was thirty-five years old. If settling was what I was after, I’d have done it long ago. And this whole nice boy/bad boy thing – you wanted a nice boy to introduce to your parents but the bad boys were sexy. I didn’t buy it. Matty had impeccable manners – he actually pulled my chair out for me in the restaurant on our first date. I was sure I would have no problem introducing him to my parents when the time came. But the sex was, yes, well, no other word for it: a bit dirty. Both of these things pleased me immensely: I had every intention of having it both ways.

  I smirked to myself as I walked along the empty street with the phone to my ear, thinking of Rosaria on the top deck of the bus, the other passengers staring straight ahead and listening to her expound on the relative virtues of vanilla sex as opposed to dirty sex. I pictured who those other passengers might be: a respectable middle-aged woman in glasses, her mouth a cat’s-bum moue of disapproval; an elderly man, aghast; two schoolboys all agog, perhaps – and maybe a very old woman at the back remembering her youth and giving a sideways, secretive smile.

  *

  He liked to talk after sex, in the early days. One conversation in particular I remember. We were lying together, still hot and clammy – we had yet to pull the duvet back up over us. We were lying in the traditional position, the one I like best, him on his back, me with my head on his shoulder and one arm across his chest. Sometimes – more often than not, in fact – men fall asleep at this point, which always makes me feel a little deserted. Matty stayed awake, on that occasion anyway, stroking my hair absently with one hand, lifting a handful of it every now and then and letting it fall.

  Further on in our relationship, he was to say to me, people always tell the truth just after sex, you know, that’s when their guard is down. But for now, he just said, thoughtfully, ‘Tell me two things. Tell me the thing you are proudest of, and the thing you’re most ashamed of, that you’ve ever done, I mean.’

  No man had ever asked me such a question. Correction: no other man had ever asked me such a question after sex, rather than before. It made the other men I had dated seem small and self-absorbed. I felt no shudder of premonition – I loved the fact that he wanted to know the inside of me. He had just been inside me, and yet he still wanted to be there, to find out the inner things, to burrow.

  I thought for a bit. I wanted to give a frank answer, not a glib one. ‘Proudest of … I suppose my relationship with my pupils, the fact that every now and then I know I’m doing a good job. You just get a glimpse of it, now and then, with someone who is difficult or having trouble at home, sometimes you’re able to help, teach them well, and, I know it’s not saving lives like you do but sometimes it feels like it, if you know you’ve helped someone get on the right track, just a bit.’

  He was quiet after this, as if he was absorbing it, thinking about his own work maybe. I felt a twinge of anxiety that comparing our jobs was a bit presumptuous – after all, he did save lives.

  ‘And the other thing …’ he said after a while, his voice low.

  Again, I took the question seriously. I was determined to be honest with him. I was falling in love.

  ‘I was walking along a street one day …’ I hesitated.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. The room seemed very quiet. It was a Sunday afternoon and mild outside, with a light breeze, so I had left the small window open and the curtain curved against it, exhaled. Soon, we would get cold and pull the duvet back up.

  ‘I was walking along a street one day, it was summer, not this summer, last year I mean. It was summer but the street was empty. I was on my way to the Showcase and I’d taken that short cut from town behind the cathedral and I was walking quite quickly because I was late to meet a friend.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘No, just a friend, so I was hurrying because we had tickets to that thriller, the big one, about the, I can’t remember. Anyway, we were going to have a drink first …’ My memory for that sort of thing has always been quite poor – the names of things; films, books, television programmes – people too. I’ve never known whether it’s related to my condition or just one of those things. In my professional life, I’ve compensated by always keeping careful note of everything – in my personal life, I’ve got used to just being a bit rubbish.

  ‘… and I was just, you know, well, I was nearly there and I was going down Star Road, not really thinking about anything, and just at that moment I looked up at one of the houses. It was a terraced house, you know those little two-up two-downs, looked a bit run-down from the outside, paint peeling and the front garden was a mess but you know, they are.’ As I am talking, I remember that I was on Star Road because I had taken a detour. I was on my way to the cinema and had been doing some errands in town first. It was a lovely sunny day and I was mildly annoyed I had arranged to see an early show with my friend Katie when days such as this were so rare that summer. If we’d got tickets for the later show, we could have had a drink in the sun somewhere. So I thought that instead of going down Bishop’s Road I would take the pedestrian and cycle path that ran alongside Boongate. It was well away from the road, although you could still hear the roar of traffic. There was greenery on the other side for a lot of it – not enough greenery for the illusion of a country walk but it was quieter and pleasanter than going along the main road. I had just crossed Star Road and ahead of me the pedestrian path curved to the right and out of sight. I knew the roundabout was not far beyond that curve but also knew that for a short while, you are out of sight of both the houses and the road – and just at that moment, I saw a man ahead, on the path, facing me but stopped still, staring at me with an unmistakable look of appraisal. He was barefoot – his feet were filthy. He had a can of something in his hand but the hand swung loose at his side and I guessed the can was empty. His hair was brown and spiky – he looked wizened but I couldn’t tell what age he was. He stared at me, mouth slack and wet-lipped, and immediately I did what any woman in my position would have done – I turned right and strode confidently down the road, away from him. Damn, I thought, I’ll be late now.

  I did not mention this bit to Matty in the way women often don’t tell these small anecdotes to men – because men often want you to explain the problem. Why were you scared if it was broad daylight? Why didn’t you just walk right past him? Why were you even on that path in the first place, if you knew it was secluded? So to Matty, all I said was, I was in a hurry.

  ‘As I passed one of the houses, on my left, it had those cheap sash windows, and normally I wouldn’t look up and I don’t know why I did at that point, but something caught my eye, I don’t know, I saw, just for a second, a woman’s face at one of the first-floor windows.’ I paused again, interrogating my own memory. The picture was clear in my head. I wished it wasn’t. ‘It was too far away to tell what age she was but a grown woman, not a child or anything, but I could see, I think I could see, her expression was really frightened, her eyes were starting from her face and her mouth was open. Our eyes met.’

  There was a silence while he waited for me to continue. The hand playing with my hair had become still.

  ‘I only saw her for a moment, a second
really, but what made it strange was her face was at the bottom of the window, just above the bottom of the sash, not halfway up. I saw her for a second, and then a hand appeared above her and pulled the curtain across and she was gone.’

  Another silence.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘that’s all, nothing else happened.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Matty asked, after a while.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I carried on walking. I was late to meet my friend.’ As I said this, I felt a little nauseous, mostly with shame, but also because I was wondering if he would think less of me now, because I was absolutely certain that in that situation, Matty would not have kept walking. Most people would, but Matty wouldn’t.

  ‘When I got to the Showcase I said to my friend, Katie, I said, well, I told her about it, but by then I wasn’t even sure what it was I had seen and I told her and said should I have done something about it and she said it was probably nothing and then she said, anyway, best not to get involved.’

  The silence that followed was long. I wondered if he had fallen asleep.

  Eventually I said, ‘What about you, what are you most proud of and most ashamed of?’ He responded immediately, launching into his story with a small, self-deprecating snort, and any hint of unease I might have felt vanished. ‘When I was eight,’ he said, and his hand began to pick up my hair again, let it fall between his fingers, ‘we had to do a project at school, a really long one, British birds I think it was, we were supposed to work on it every week, you know, a bird per week or something, and on the last week before half term, we all had to put them on the teacher’s desk as we left the classroom. Well, I hadn’t done mine, of course, I was a lazy little bugger, so I sneaked out of the classroom without leaving anything on the teacher’s desk, and the whole of half term I worried about the first day back and what she would say to me, and it was only as I was going into the class that first day back that I hit on the solution.’ He had a coughing fit that jolted me from his shoulder and I sat up to let him raise himself a bit.