Chapter 7
The Northbound Train
The eleven-fifteen to Carrow left Halvern Central eight minutes late. The guard announced it in the tone of a man apologizing for a death in the family. Callum took the window seat of a half-empty carriage and set his bag on his knees like a passenger on a lifeboat.
The rain had thinned overnight to something that was less weather than mood. It hung over the town in a gray lace and came down in odd little handfuls. As the train drew out through the cutting past the gasworks and the allotments, he watched it break on the glass in beads and run sideways in the wind of the carriage. Behind the beads the town went by. Back gardens with trampolines. A wall of graffiti: a face, sprayed in white, with one enormous eye. A cemetery on a slope, orderly as a filing cabinet. He found he was holding his breath as they crossed the river on the old iron viaduct. The Dunmere, gray and wide and high below the bridge, was going the other way, toward the sea.
He hadn't slept much. He hadn't expected to. He had lain awake in the early hours with the telephone on the pillow beside him and the question going up and coming back. At five he got up and showered and shaved, standing at the basin in the cold white bathroom with his own face in front of him. He looked at it for some time. It was a long, plain, tired face, with a nose broken once at school and gray coming into the stubble at the jaw. He knew it the way you know a house you've lived in too long to see. A man who looks like he's been interrupted, Isabel had said. And he thought, drying his hands: I look like a man about to apologize.
The speech lay in the folder on the seat beside him. He didn't take it out.
"Are you sad?"
He turned his head from the window.
Across the aisle, in a seat facing the wrong way, sat a child of about five with her knees drawn up on the seat and a stuffed rabbit clamped under one arm. She had a round, serious face under a cap of dark hair cut straight across the forehead. She was studying him with the plain stare of a small person who has decided to adopt him for the length of the journey.
"Dulcie," said her mother from the next seat, without looking up from her phone. "Don't bother the man."
"I'm not bothering. I'm asking."
"It's quite all right," said Callum.
"You look like you're listening to something," the child said. "But there's nothing on."
"Do I?"
"Your face goes like this." She frowned, tilted her head, and pursed her mouth into a small expression of enormous, patient grief, so exactly like his own that he let out a short, surprised laugh. "My granddad does it. He's got a hearing aid."
"I have one ear that doesn't work."
"Which?"
"This one." He touched his left.
"Then you should sit on that side." She gave this advice with total authority. "So people come to the good one."
"That's very sensible."
"I know." She looked at him a moment longer. Then, solemnly, she held out the rabbit. "You can hold Mr. Biscuit. If you want. He's good at it."
He took the rabbit. It was threadbare and warm from her arm, and it smelled of biscuits and rain. He held it on his knee for the next twenty minutes while the child told him all about a dog called Pickles. Her mother looked up at last with a sorry smile, and he said it was a pleasure, which, to his surprise, was true.
When he gave Mr. Biscuit back at Knowle Junction, the child took him with a proud nod, like a customs officer. Then she said, in the careful voice she kept for important information: "It's all right if you're sad. My mum is, too, sometimes, but she does it in the bathroom."
"Dulcie!"
"What? I'm helping."
He didn't look at the mother. He turned his face to the window and watched the platform slide away, a bench, a bin, a poster for a pantomime, and pressed his thumb hard against the corner of his eye.
By one the rain had stopped and the land had changed.
At Halvern it had been hills, rolling and wet and green, hedged in the old way. Now the train ran out onto a broad flat country of ploughed fields under an enormous low sky. The earth was the color of strong tea. The horizon was so far off and so level that the telegraph poles shrank to a line of pencil strokes, one after another, toward a point. There were pylons. There were long shining drains. A heron stood at the edge of one as if an artist had put it there. He had always disliked the north. It seemed to him a landscape left unfinished, in its first state, before anyone had put anything in it. He turned to the window now with the interest of a man looking at the underpainting of a place.
He thought about Carrow.
He knew nothing about it. That was the odd part. In eight years of marriage, in eight years in the flat, Isabel had never once mentioned the city, and neither had he. He found now, by an effort like feeling in a drawer for a coin, that they had never talked about it at all. She had said once that the north was always raining and full of men with theories. She said it at a dinner, as a joke, and went on to a story about a tram. That was all.
He took the half-sheet of paper out of his wallet and unfolded it on the folder. 07700 900316. The code said Carrow. It said a mobile, a prepaid phone bought in a shop for cash and put into a pocket and carried through one of the streets he was about to see.
You'll sit across the room from some perfectly innocent waitress, Dev had said, and think, that's her.
He folded the paper and put it back.
He didn't yet know it was the last time he would take it out as something he was unsure about.
Carrow Central was a Victorian cathedral to the god of steam, a high iron-and-glass barn under a roof of dirty panes. The light came down in long smoky columns, and pigeons paced the girders like clergy. He stepped out of the carriage into a roar of announcements and a smell of coal dust and fried onions. He stood on the platform with his bag at his feet, getting used to the size of the place.
It was a big station. It was a hall of mirrors. That was the first thing that struck him as he walked down the platform toward the barrier, with the crowd parting and closing around him: the amount of glass. Every pillar had a brass kick-plate polished bright. Every shop-front was glazed. The long wall of the concourse, from end to end, was lined with advertising panels behind perspex, and as he walked he saw himself in all of them, a tall, gray, stooped man in a dark coat, repeated twenty times, forty, going away in a long line like men on a bridge.
He kept his eyes down. It was a habit he had picked up from her.
She had been afraid of mirrors in lifts. It was a small, odd, very particular fear, one of the few he ever knew her to have, and she was embarrassed by it. It's the two of them, she told him in a hotel in Lisbon, standing in the corner of a lift with her face to the wall and her hand over her eyes. Facing each other. There's another one behind the first and another behind that, all the way down, and they all do it a second later. As if it's passing something along. She laughed, shakily, tap tap tap. I know. Ridiculous. I was an actress. I should be better at being looked at.
He passed under a clock. He passed a flower stall, a man selling umbrellas, a girl with a violin case. At the barrier he showed his ticket to a guard with a mournful face and went out through the glass doors into the rain.
The Ardent Hotel stood on a corner of Marlborough Square, six stories of cream stucco and wrought-iron balconies, the kind of place where the doorman wears gloves and the carpets are thick enough to drown in. He had been told it was where the Society held its dinners. In the wet gray light it looked like a wedding cake left out in the weather.
They gave him a room on the fourth floor, 412, at the back, with a view across an air shaft of other people's windows. A tall bed. A desk with a blotter. A chair covered in stiff yellow fabric. He hung the dark suit in the wardrobe and laid the speech on the desk, then sat on the bed with his hands between his knees and listened to the building.
There was a lot to hear, even for a man with one ear. The distant thump of a lift. A tap running behind a wall. Laughter, far off, in a corridor. Someone in a room below him was practicing scales on a trumpet, breaking off, and beginning again.
At five he walked out into the town.
He made himself do it. It was a decision, not an impulse, something he had promised himself on the train: he would see the place in daylight, as a stranger, and be done with it. He walked down Marlborough Square past the bank and the church, across a tramline, through a covered arcade of shops selling hats and umbrellas and fountain pens. He came out into a wide street of stone fronts called Tallow Lane. He passed a closed bookshop with a faded green awning. A florist. A café with chairs stacked on the tables. At the end of the lane stood a building with a pillared portico and a row of lit glass cases. He went toward it with the idle curiosity of a visitor, and stopped.
CARROW PLAYHOUSE, said a gilt sign. Below it, behind glass, were posters. A revival of something with a ship in it. A children's pantomime. A farce called Lord Have Mercy, in red. And at the far end, small and plain in a black frame, a bill for a play he didn't know: THE TWO VIOLAS. A line of names across the bottom in modest type. A date. The words Tickets from the Box Office. No photographs.
He read it down to the end, as he read everything. He didn't know why. There was nothing in it. Names. A phone number. Box-office hours.
He looked at it for perhaps a minute, in the rain, with strangers' umbrellas going past behind him. Then, with a small shrug aimed at no one, he turned up his collar and went back the way he had come, toward the hotel and the dinner and the ten minutes on the sky.
In the glass of the case behind him, as he went, the poster stayed where it was, lit and still, with its list of names in the gray afternoon. Among them, third from the bottom, in the same plain type as the rest, was one he had no reason to read twice.
Nora Albright.