As
if answering his whistle and the sweep of his green flag, the locomotive
shuddered back to life. With a blast of steam, its great wheels spun, slipped,
then bit the rails and began to pull away from the station. Roderick Halford
had done it a thousand times. Always the same sequence. Always exact. He
glanced at his pocket watch and allowed himself the smallest of smiles. 7:16
a.m.
But this morning was different.
Before leaving for work, he had
stood in the bedroom doorway, watching his wife sleep. She was gravely ill. He
had kissed her gently and lingered, troubled by a thought he could not shake. Will
this be the last time?
Now, standing on the platform in
his usual place, three carriages from the caboose, he tried to steady himself.
That was when he noticed her.
A young woman seated by the
window. Their eyes met only briefly, yet something in the glance held him. Not
a regular passenger. He would have remembered her. There was, too, a
disquieting flicker of recognition, though he could not say why. By the time he
raised his whistle again, the train had gathered speed and was gone.
A week later, she was there
again. Same train. Same seat. This time the glance lingered. Had she smiled?
The question unsettled him. For a
man of routine, anything unexpected disturbed him. He nodded almost despite
himself and studied her more closely: chestnut hair falling to her shoulders in
soft waves, a face not quite clear behind the glass and yet curiously familiar.
He could not properly see her eyes but knew, absurdly so, that they were amber.
She raised a white-gloved hand in
greeting.
He blew his whistle, waved his
green flag at the engineer, and when he looked back, she was gone.
***
“How
are you today, my love?” he asked that evening, leaning to kiss his wife’s
forehead. “You were sleeping soundly when I left.”
She smiled faintly. Beneath the
bandana, the chestnut hair he had once loved had thinned to a few frail grey
wisps. “I’ve had a so-so day. I’m exhausted. I can’t even watch television. But
I’m all right. How was your day?”
“The same as always,” he said.
“Nothing new. Let me get the tea.”
He moved through their familiar
ritual with the care of a surgeon. The kettle on. Tea leaves measured exactly.
Five minutes to steep. He helped her sit up and arranged the tray across her
lap: salmon sandwiches cut into neat triangles, warm scones, and the special
strawberry jam she liked. Then her treasured china cup, the tea carefully
poured, one cube of sugar, a measured spoonful of milk.
Everything for her.
They had met during the war. He, a
painfully shy young airman, uncertain of himself; she, a nurse at RAF Biggin
Hill, quick-minded and warm, with a confidence he found both dazzling and
alarming. Before her, his life had been almost entirely devoid of women. She
had been the first to look at him as though he were worth knowing. He had
proposed one evening in Leicester Square after they heard Vera Lynn sing at the
Jackpot Nightclub. Courage had come slowly, but at last it had come.
“Let me put the music on for you,”
he said now. “It always helps.”
In the sitting room he opened the
gramophone, chose the record with hands that still, after all these years,
treated it tenderly, and lowered the needle.
I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places…
She closed her eyes and listened.
Now she was fading.
Each morning, before leaving for
work, he paused in the bedroom doorway and watched the rise and fall of the
bedclothes, measuring with dread the frail persistence of her breathing. She
had become so light, so diminished, that at times he could scarcely reconcile
this ravaged figure with the woman who had once filled every room she entered.
Yet even now she would not let him stay home. She insisted on the old routine:
on the train, the platform, the watch in his pocket, the tea waiting to be made
at day’s end.
So, he went.
Once the 7:16 had pulled out and the
last carriage slipped from sight, the emptiness would come over him again. It
was then he found himself waiting for the glimpse of the girl by the window; the
chestnut hair, the gloved hand, the look that held him a heartbeat longer than
it should have. He did not ask himself why the sight of her should steady him.
He only knew that, for those few seconds before the train pulled away,
something in him eased. And when it was gone, he felt bereft all over again.
She had been a nurse at Dulwich
Infirmary after the war. He, because he could type and because she had urged
him to do something more with himself, had secured an office post with the
railway, and later trained for station work. There had been chances to go
farther, take a promotion elsewhere, but they had not wanted to leave London. So,
he remained a local assistant and remained content. Or as content as a man like
Roderick could ever be without her.
She managed the practical world: the
finances, the small domestic crises before they grew into large ones. He
accepted her bossiness as one accepts the weather, sometimes with a sigh, often
with gratitude. He never forgot a birthday or an anniversary. At Christmas, he
spoiled her. Even now he still left love notes beneath her pillow and tucked
into the refrigerator door.
The chemotherapy had done little
except punish a body already exhausted by illness. She had refused hospital
care. She wanted to die at home, in their own bed, with his hand in hers at the
end.
“We’ve said our goodbyes,” she had
told him. “I don’t want you sitting here all day, watching me disappear. Go to
work. Keep to your routine. Just be here at the end and hold my hand.”
And now, as she lay dying, his mind
was doing strange things.
It was giving her back to him.
Not as she was, but as she had been.
As she might have been. As he wished she could still be.
The girl on the train began to
change.
Some mornings she seemed younger,
almost girlish, smiling at him with bright, conspiratorial confidence. One day,
as the train slowed to a halt, he saw she was wearing a red coat. His favorite color
on her. Later, sitting alone in the lunchroom with a cup of tea gone cold, he
took out his wallet and stared at the photograph he kept there. She was wearing
red in that picture too, her hair lifted a little by the wind, her smile alive
with some private joke he had long ago forgotten.
What if they had met when he was
sixteen instead of twenty?
The years loosened.
At once she was there: not the frail
woman in the bed at home, nor even the composed young nurse he had married, but
a schoolgirl with the same chestnut hair, the same quick, amused smile, the
same unsettling way of making him feel both exposed and safe.
He was in the library, where he
often hid from the playground and from the boys who called him The Brick
because of his red hair and thick spectacles. He had been pretending to read,
though in truth he was writing in the back of an exercise book.
“You’re always scribbling,” she
said, sliding into the chair opposite him. “Read some to me.”
He stared at her. She was the sort
of girl boys turned to watch in corridors: lively, self-possessed, impossible
not to notice. Yet it was he she had chosen; he she smiled at as though there was
no one else in the room. Before he knew what was happening, she had taken the
exercise book from his hand and was reading, her lips moving over his words.
Then she looked up.
“You write beautifully.”
No one had ever said such a thing to
him before.
The memory or whatever strange
province of the mind this was, shifted again. A day of salt-wind and sunlight.
Brighton, perhaps, or somewhere very like it. She wore the red coat and drove
too fast, laughing when he clutched the door as they rounded a corner. There
were gulls overhead, the clang of arcade machines, the taste of melting ice
cream, her hand tucked through his arm as though she had every right to be
there. All day he moved in a daze of astonishment. That she should choose him.
That she should want to be seen with him. That when she smiled at him the whole
world seemed to brighten and tilt.
By evening they were alone in a
bedroom he did not know and yet somehow knew. She stood close enough for him to
smell her perfume. She loosened her scarf, then her dress, and smiled at the
panic rising in him.
“Roddy,” she whispered, using the
name no one else ever used, “what is it you’re afraid of?”
Everything, he might have said. Her
boldness. His own body. The terrible, thrilling fact of being wanted.
When she touched him, he flinched as
though burned. The room seemed to contract around him. His glasses fogged. His
hands would not obey him. With a cry of shame, he snatched his blazer and fled,
hearing her call after him as he stumbled into the dark.
Even in imagination, it seemed, she
had always been the brave one, and he the one who ran.
I’ll be seeing you
On every lovely summer’s day…
***
Rain
came down in torrents the morning the 7:16 arrived swathed in steam and wet
light. He sheltered beneath the platform canopy until the train stopped, then
went to his place and waited for the last of the passengers to board.
Condensation clouded the windows on the inside; rain streaked them on the
outside. She wiped the glass with a tissue. He could barely make out her face.
Had she cut her hair? What color was her coat today? Red, he hoped. Did she
wave? Was there any movement at all, or was he merely daydreaming again?
It rained all day.
That evening, timing it as he always
did, he climbed to the upper deck of the Number Forty-Seven bus and took his favorite
seat at the back. The windows were shut against the weather, filmed with
condensation. Damp coats steamed. Cigarette smoke hung in the air like blue
gauze. He closed his eyes, intending only a brief doze.
And then, without warning, the word
came to him.
Sister.
He opened his eyes at once,
frowning, as though someone had spoken it aloud. Sister. Why that word? He
turned the word over uneasily, resisting it at first, then sensing beneath its
strangeness some deeper truth his mind had reached before he did.
Not an actual memory. He knew that.
Not in an ordinary sense. He had no sisters. He had grown up alone in a narrow,
unhappy house with its silences, its sudden storms, its constant sense of
having done something wrong. And yet now, in the shifting half-light of grief
and exhaustion, his mind gave her to him in that form too: older than he was,
already grown, already kind, the one who came between him and the worst of
home.
He was small again, standing in the
kitchen with the broken teapot at his feet, hearing his mother’s voice rise
sharp as a blade.
“You clumsy oaf. What will you break
next? You’re worthless. Wait until your father gets home.”
And then she was there beside him, not
his wife exactly, not some invented stranger either, but a version of her his
longing had fashioned out of need and memory. Chestnut hair falling to her
shoulders. The red coat. The calm hand on his sleeve.
“It’s all right, Roddy,” she
whispered. “I’ll explain things to Mum.”
There had never been such a sister,
and yet there she was, as vivid as any memory he possessed: nine years older
perhaps, a nurse in a crisp uniform, moving through the house with the same
capable assurance his wife had once brought to every room. She was the one who
would have heard him crying and come to sit on the edge of his bed. The one who
would have stroked his hair, told him not to mind their mother, assuring him he
was not foolish or weak or worthless. The one who would have stood between him
and the world until he was old enough to bear it.
On the bus, with rain rattling the
windows, he understood at last what his mind was trying to do. It was not
merely remembering her as a young woman. It was finding every empty place in
his life and putting her there.
These were not memories.
Slowly, quietly, he was beginning to
understand.
His mind was reshaping his wife, stretching
her across his lifetime.
***
The
nurse was waiting for him when he arrived home. She should not have been there
at that hour. He knew before she spoke that the news would not be good.
“She may not last the night.”
He stood for a moment in the
hallway, wet coat in his hands, and felt the old house tilt around him. Then he
went upstairs.
She looked so small in the bed.
Thinner now, yes, but still unmistakably herself. He kissed her forehead and
then her lips, as gently as if she might break. Afterwards, because routine
still held him and because he did not yet know how to do otherwise, he went
downstairs, put the kettle on, hung up his uniform, and prepared the tray.
When he brought it up, she smiled
weakly but did not want the tea or the scone.
“I love you,” she whispered, and
squeezed his fingers with what little strength she had left.
He sat beside her and took her hand
in both of his.
As he looked at her face, memories opened
like a vast sunlit landscape. He remembered how she used to walk slightly ahead
of him in crowded streets—not out of impatience, but as though she were
clearing the path, making sure it was safe. He had followed her into marriage,
into laughter, into the small, ordinary rituals of a shared life. She had
always been the courageous one, the one who knew what to do next, the one who
took his diffidence and awkwardness and made a life around them rather than in
spite of them. She was the first person who had accepted him for who he was.
“You have been my life,” he
whispered. “My whole life. Before you, I didn’t know how to be with anyone. I
didn’t know how to love. You found me before I had the least notion of what to
do with myself, and you never once made me feel foolish for it. You took care
of everything. I’ve no idea how to be on my own.”
Her eyes opened a little, as if she
had heard every word. Her lips moved.
“I love you, darling,” she murmured.
“You’ll manage.”
Then her eyes closed again.
Throughout the night he sat beside
her, holding her hand, listening to the slow, uneven rhythm of her breathing.
At some point, without drama and almost without sound, the breath left her
body.
He did not at first believe it.
He sat on, waiting for the next one,
and then the next. When none came, he bent over her hand and wept into the
bedclothes until there were no tears left, only a hollow, aching stillness.
Some hours later his body, faithful
to habit, told him it was time for work. Instinctively, he reached for his
pocket watch.
“I’m not leaving you,” he whispered.
“I know you won’t be on the train. I’m going to play our song, and I’ll turn it
up so you can hear it better.”
I’ll find you in the
morning sun
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
But I’ll be seeing you
Today
Roddy would break his routine.
About the author
Michael Barrington, has published 13 books, and more than 60 short stories in the USA, UK and Europe. A former editor at The Brussels Review, he blogs on his website, www.mbwriter.net.
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