The Sleeper (7 page)

‘I know you do, darling.’

‘Evening, ladies.’

My heart leaps, and I pretend it hasn’t. Keeping my expression as neutral as possible, I shift up slightly as Guy sits next to me.

I passed Guy in the corridor on my first journey to London, the night before my first day back at work; I first spoke to him when Ellen introduced us in the waiting room at Paddington that Friday. He is handsome in an unmissable, Clooney-ish way: he is one of those men who settle beautifully into middle age. He is also excellent company.

‘You’re late, matey,’ Ellen remarks. ‘We thought you’d stood us up.’

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Had to go to a work thing. Have you ordered? Bet you didn’t get me one. It was a leaving do. Champagne and all that shit, in some stupid wine bar at London Bridge. I was glad of the excuse to get away.’ He smiles at Ellen, then at me. ‘I would have preferred water and packets of biscuits in the waiting room with you two to champagne in a wine bar with my colleagues. You know that.’

‘I should hope you would.’ Ellen gets up and goes to add a third drink to the order. While she is gone, Guy turns to me, and I try not to enjoy his attention. We are sitting so close together that our thighs are almost touching, and I am acutely aware of the small distance between us. His hair is thick and dark, flecked with grey, and his eyes crinkle at the corners.

‘How’s the week been?’ he asks. ‘Are you moving out of your sister’s yet?’

‘Thinking about it,’ I tell him. ‘Christ, that sounds pathetic, but it’s a step closer, and that’s as good as I can make it for today.’

It is the oddest thing, but I can be myself with Guy and Ellen, on the train, in a way I cannot with anyone else and in any other location. If I knew them in any other context my guard would be up. Here, on this train, it is down. I would, and do, tell them anything. I consider telling Guy about my weird shiver on the station, but decide better of it.

‘Well, then it’s progress,’ he nods. He wriggles out of his suit jacket, slings it on the empty seat next to Ellen’s and rolls his sleeves up.

‘Barack Obama does that.’ I nod at his forearms, which, I notice, are muscular and hairy in just the right amount. I look away quickly, smiling to myself. This is the most harmless type of crush possible, considering that we are both safely married.

‘Barack Obama does what?’ He sounds mystified, as well he might.

‘He takes his jacket off and rolls his shirt sleeves up. It’s a nice look, that’s all. I like it when men do that.’

‘Seriously?’ He nods at his arms, leaning on the edge of the table. ‘This works for the ladies?’

‘For me it does.’

‘Cheers, Lara. Good to know these things. Not that I’m in any position, or have any inclination, to act on it.’

Ellen comes back, followed by a lounge car attendant I recognise, who bears a tray carrying three gin and tonics.

‘Thanks, Sarah,’ says Guy, winking at her. ‘You’re a life saver.’

‘Welcome,’ says Sarah. ‘Plenty more where those came from.’

‘Good.’ I take one and stir it with its little plastic stick.

‘Cheers,’ says Ellen. We clunk plastic glasses, and I relax. The week is frantic. This weekend is, I hope, going to be less difficult than the last one was. The pressure, when Sam has been looking forward to my return relentlessly all week, can make us bicker without stopping, and last weekend we were both in tears by Sunday afternoon, the uncompromising separation looming, raising the stakes, making everything a million times worse.

Three drinks later, Guy is leaning back in his seat yawning. His knee rests casually against mine.

‘Do you find,’ he says, looking first at Ellen and then, for longer, at me, ‘do you find that the weekends are almost as much hard work as the week sometimes? I mean, I get back Saturday morning, bloody fucking knackered, and then it’s all “Dad, do this. Guy, do this. Be fun. Be nice. Fix this. Go and buy this. Help with homework. You have no idea what it’s like being the one stuck at home all week, you’ve been in London, you can put the washing on for once …”’

‘Nope,’ Ellen says at once. ‘Jeff’s a farmer. You know that. Our day jobs couldn’t be more different. The farm doesn’t wind up for the whole weekend, though he makes that happen as much as he can because of our time together. I love the weekends. But then again, it’s just the two of us, so I was never really going to have the pressure. If I was someone’s mum, well, that would be an entirely different matter. Neither of us cares who does the laundry. It gets done, one way or another.’

They both turn to me.

‘Mm.’ The gin, followed by wine, has relaxed me. ‘I find it hard,’ I admit, making an effort to direct my words towards Ellen, because Guy is disconcerting me. ‘It’s early days for us, you both know that. But if I’m not sparkly and adoring and adorable, if we don’t have a shiny precious weekend, then I feel hugely resented. Last weekend was hellish. You know that anyway because of how I was on the Sunday train. I can’t blame Sam for it: as far as he’s concerned, I’m in a high-pressure job, and negotiating my bloody sister the rest of the time, and then I’m on this train, and he has no idea how much fun this is, or that I sit up for most of the night drinking. So he thinks I’m toughing it out, which I am, and pining for our quiet life in Cornwall, which I’m afraid I’m generally not.’

‘He probably lives for the moment you get back, Lara,’ says Guy. ‘What’s his job like? Does he go to the pub and have a life? Or is he sitting there all week looking at his watch and sighing and counting down the hours on his fingers?’

‘Yes,’ Ellen agrees. ‘I’m intrigued by this Sam of yours. Will you get him to bring you to the station on Sunday so we can see him?’

This makes me laugh. ‘But you two will’ve been on the train since Penzance. If he was waiting on the platform you’d be lucky to catch a glimpse out of the window.’

‘No,’ says Guy. ‘We’d be at the door, waiting for Truro, and as soon as the train stopped we’d open it and jump down to help you with your bags. Both of us. A little chivalrous double act.’

‘You’d freak him right out.’

Ellen nods. ‘I thought so. Go on then. What’s he like? How did you meet him?’

‘He’s lovely.’ I say this in my firmest voice, as their amused curiosity about my husband makes me feel disloyal. I move my leg away from Guy’s, and he does not attempt to reinstate contact. ‘He really is. He’s the most lovely man in the world, and if anything I’ve said makes you think otherwise, then that’s my stupid fault. I met him when I was twenty-four. Twelve years ago. I’d been travelling in Asia for a bit. Things had …’ The last thing I want to do is talk about my time in Thailand, so I bite my lip and jump away from what I was about to say. ‘I got back and I’d got a load of stuff out of my system. I was ready to settle down, properly. In fact I was craving a stable, conventional life. I was qualified in property development. My godfather – my dad’s best friend, Leon – he helped me get a job. Encouraged me not to sit around at my parents’ house doing nothing. I started working, and I worked hard. I rented a little studio flat, then bought a house. And I met Sam.’

‘And you weren’t close to your sister back then either?’ Ellen interjects.

‘Never,’ I agree. ‘She was in the same flat she’s in now, even though she was in her first job, in PR. Olivia: the world’s least likely PR woman, I always thought. The person who will go out of her way to let you know she doesn’t like you. Turns out that’s only with me. She’s a brilliant schmoozing pro with everyone else. Anyway. Our dad encouraged me to buy a place as soon as I could, and I got a little terraced house in Battersea. Again, it seems impossible now, a decade later, but I did. I had the job, the mortgage, friends, and I just needed a boyfriend. I didn’t need one, of course, but I desperately wanted one.’

‘And you met him …?’

‘And I met him. In a café, in Soho. It was like one of those meetings in a film. It was pissing down with rain, and I was sheltering with a drink, a coffee I think, on a Saturday afternoon, wishing I hadn’t come into town, a few bags of shopping by my feet, considering going to watch whatever was on at the Curzon because it was at the end of the street and I wanted to sit somewhere warm and dry for a couple of hours without being bored. The café was packed, the windows all steamed up. I’m sitting by the window, and I’m so out of sorts that I’m drawing pictures in the condensation on the glass without even realising it.

‘When someone politely asks if he can join me, I’m properly annoyed. I want to say no, but I know I have to say yes. And then I look at him. It’s hard to explain, but probably not, for you guys, because you’ve both got long-term partners too. I just knew as soon as I saw him that he was the person I was looking for.’

‘Love at first sight?’ I glance at Guy, wondering if he is mocking me, but I do not think he is. His knee knocks against my leg, then retreats.

‘Not love. Safety. Certainty. Conviction that this was the man I would spend my life with, the missing piece of the jigsaw, at first sight. And he was. He was tall, broad, and I like both those things. Blondish, stubbly. Beautiful eyes. And an air of … well, of rightness. He sat with me, laughed at what I’d drawn on the window.’

‘Which was?’ Ellen asks.

‘Oh, a child’s picture. A house, with four windows and a door and a tree next to it, and I think there was an outsized person, too, out of all proportion to the house.’

‘That would have been the perspective,’ Guy reassures me. ‘The person must have been closer to the viewer.’

‘Exactly. Thank you. So we looked at that, and I drank my espresso, and he spooned the froth off his cappuccino, and we went to the Curzon together and watched a gorgeous Almodovar film. Then we went for dinner. We were together. That was it.’

‘Was he twenty-four too?’

‘Twenty-eight. He’d had a girlfriend, obviously, and they’d split up about six months earlier. We were both in the right place. We got married a couple of years later.’

‘Oh,’ says Ellen. ‘I’m too cynical for weddings, I really am. They get my hackles up like nothing else. All that horrific misogyny under the surface, the handing-over of the woman from one man to another. However, I have to break with my own tradition, Lara, and say that I bet you were the most stunning bride. Don’t you think, Guy?’

Guy looks oddly awkward. ‘Well,’ he says, fiddling with his plastic cup. ‘Given that Lara is one of those women who would look beautiful if she were wearing a bin bag, then yes, I’m sure she was indeed a glorious bride.’

I move on quickly. ‘It sounds like a happy-ever-after, but of course it wasn’t. The baby never arrived. We moved to Cornwall, and now I’m doing this, and he’s sitting at home waiting. He wants to adopt a child, and I don’t. To answer your question of ages ago, no, he doesn’t really go to the pub. He has friends at work, but not great friends. It’s me he wants.’

‘And no one else?’ asks Ellen.

‘Only one other person, or two or three, but they, it turned out, were never going to be born. He lives for the weekends. At least, I’m pretty sure he does. He could be cavorting around town with a different woman every night of the week, or going to lap-dancing clubs, or who knows what. But I really, seriously doubt it.’

‘Yeah,’ says Guy. ‘I doubt it too. Well, I hope you have a good weekend, Lara. I hope it’s not too pressured.’

‘Hey, Mr Thomas,’ Ellen says, turning to Guy. ‘How’s your job hunt going? Aren’t you meant to be looking for something closer to home?’

He laughs. ‘Yeah. Meant to be. On that note, I’m going to get another round in. Same again, ladies?’

‘Why not?’ I want to sit up all night, drinking with my new friends. I should be sleeping to make sure I am bright and energetic for Saturday. One more drink, however, will not hurt, and then I will have to buy another because it will be my round. After that, however, I will definitely sleep.

Before I stumble off to bed, at two in the morning, I kiss Ellen and Guy good night. Ellen hugs me tight and rubs my back and kisses my cheek. Guy brushes his lips quickly across mine, then holds me by the shoulders and looks into my eyes. I realise that my hands are on his waist, and I leave them there, liking the feel of him too much.

I look into his brown eyes. He looks back. Neither of us says anything. We could kiss properly at this point, but just as I think it might be about to happen, I pull away.

‘Good night,’ I say quickly.

He laughs quietly and steps back. ‘Night, Lara. Sleep tight.’

It’s chemicals, I tell myself as I lie on my back and feel the train bumping me westwards. It’s pheromones and things like that. It’s nothing else. I am married and so is he, and these things will happen from time to time. You just have to be aware of it and make sure everything is under control.

By the time I drift off to sleep, it’s nearly time to wake up again and pretend that it never happened.

chapter six

It is one of those clear Cornish mornings, and as I step off the train on to the platform, a breeze stings my face and lifts up every strand of my hair. I had no energy to do anything but run my fingers through it this morning.

I look around, half expecting Sam to be here, even though I told him to stay at home and put the coffee on. My head is swimming with stale alcohol, and my morning world is disconcertingly blurry around the edges. I know I look terrible, with lank hair and no make-up, and yesterday’s work clothes on because they were the nearest.

I nearly kissed Guy last night. I look back at the stationary train, wanting to see his face at a window, but there is no one. Other people are getting off here, most of them with work-style bags, a few with holiday suitcases. I want to ask every single one of them about their lives, to see who else is messing things up quite as badly as this.

The grey-black stone of the buildings at Truro station is lit up by the autumn sunlight, so much so that even they are verging on the dazzling. I smile at the tiny station, liking the fact that it is Cornwall’s major transport hub at the same time as being a fraction the size of Paddington or any other London station. It is barely as big as a Tube station: it consists of two and a half platforms, two bridges, a small ticket hall, an inept barrier system and the inevitable branch of the Pumpkin café.