Trains and Lovers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

different. A doctor. Who couldn’t like a Scottish doctor?”
    I saw him before me, getting into his car, driving away. His death was a matter of tangled metal and pain. It must have been like that, although they had told me—to spare my feelings—that he had died instantly.
    “You must miss him,” she said. And then, immediately apologising, “Sorry, that’s such a trite thing to say. Of course you miss him.”
    “Every day,” I said. “I think of him every day. At least once. Not that I say to myself—time to think about my father. It’s not like that. He just comes to mind. Somebody says something. Or I hear something to remind me ofhim. There’s a pipe tune, for instance, ‘Mist-Covered Mountains.’ I don’t think you’ll know it, but it’s very beautiful. Haunting, really. He loved it. And I hear it sometimes—a few bars of it in my mind, as if somebody were playing it somewhere, and I think of my father.”
    She reached out to touch me. “Do you think it’ll be like that forever? For the rest of your life?”
    “I suppose it happens. People can think of somebody every day of their lives. Lots do, I suspect.”
    She moved closer to me. She had an odd way of looking at me, intensely, as if to place me under particular scrutiny, searching for visual clues as to what was going on in my mind.
    “You might not like my father. He’s the sort who rubs some people up the wrong way. He’s an alpha male. There was even a newspaper article about him once that called him that. Mr. Alpha, it said.”
    I laughed. “I’ve met lots of alpha males.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yes. Bullies and so on …” I stopped myself. “Not that your father’s a bully. I’m not saying that.”
    She had not taken offence. “What you said about thinking about somebody every day of your life. I think that’s rather sweet …”

DAVID HAD REACTED WHEN ANDREW HAD MADE his remark about thinking about somebody every day of his life. He had stiffened briefly and then had smiled. It was a private smile; not one intended to signal anything to the others.
    Oh yes, he said to himself. Oh yes, you do. You do. You think about somebody. He fills your world. He is all about you, a presence, and you think about him; you can’t help it, because he’s always there, in your thoughts. But you know, of course, that all the while you’re thinking about him, he’s not thinking about you. That’s the hardest thing about it. That’s what makes it so very, very hard to bear. So hard that sometimes you just sit there and let the misery wash over you; the misery, the emptiness. It’s like a great white sea—one of those inland seas you see pictures of in the National Geographic; seas that are completely still, seas too salty to have waves or currents. Seas of tears.

WE LEFT WORK TOGETHER THE NEXT DAY AS SHE had said that we would have to catch a train to her father’s place. It was forty minutes outside London, she said, in one of those places that is technically outside the city, but is not in the real countryside—a place of trees and lanes that negotiated their way past high hedges intended to shield the houses on the other side from view, but which afforded occasional glimpses of the luxury they almost concealed.
    Hermione’s mother lived in France, she said. She had gone off a few years earlier with another man—one of her father’s closest friends. “They don’t speak. They write to one another through their lawyers. Not that there’s much to say—it’s mostly threats, I think.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “She’s much happier, though. She told me their marriage was a nightmare.”
    I hesitated to say anything. The house was not farfrom the railway station, and we were walking. There was loose gravel on the pavement—small chips of it from some road repairs, and it made a pleasant, crunching sound. I had walked on gravel before, but never walked on gravel with her .
    At last I said, “It must be awful to be that unhappy in a