Jess knows it’s churlish to have planned to catch a train later than Alex’s. There’s no reason she needs to, and it would be easier to arrive together, jump in a cab together, dig around together for Nathan’s spare key. It’s just that it feels important to take control of this –the one thing that’s in her power – and to grab a tiny amount of space and time to herself before she is forced to share a house with her inconveniently attractive nemesis for an entire weekend. There’ll be nowhere to get away from him, not without good reason. She feels claustrophobic just thinking about it.
But she’s always loved taking the train, watching the bustle of London recede and give way to sparser houses and then farmland, rivers, and expanses of sky. She puts on a swelling classical music playlist or the soundtrack from the 2005Pride and Prejudicefilm and lets herself feel the weight and excitement of starring in her own film. It’s all very Main Character Energy.
Somehow, she imagines Alex wouldn’t let her do any of this, any more than he’d let her get lost in the pages of her book or concentrate on flicking through the magazine she always carefully chooses before a journey. (Godalming might only be half an hour away, but it’s still a journey, damn it, and she’s still going to enjoy it.) Even if he didn’tactuallysay anything, even if he, too, dug a book out of his bag – a thick biography of a worthy white man of Britain past, perhaps, like a Cadbury or a Colman – his, well, justbeingthere would unnerve her. She’d imagine him silently judging her as she sat, quietly daydreaming or paging through the advance copy of the latest book by one of her favourite authors that had flopped onto her doormat just that morning, with most fortuitous timing.
All of this plan, though, does not account for the current state of British railways. She always, somehow,forgets the essential detail that trains get delayed and trains get cancelled, and there’s rarely a seat anymore, let alone a window seat from which she can daydream and wave at the occasional sheep.
She should not have been surprised to see Alex waiting for her by the ticket gate, looking forlorn. But she always forgets this part, the part where you can’t rely on anything going according to plan. Her stomach, confused, drops, and then leaps.
‘My train has been cancelled,’ he announces, though she’s figured it out all by herself. Alex wouldn’tmissa train. He’d be half an hour early to allow for any small mishaps, and probably because he is always hoping that, this time, the platform announcement will come a decent amount of time in advance. Then, with the smug leisureliness of the unnecessarily organised, he’d be able to stroll to the platform and onto one of the many still-available seats.
He sounds irritated, and Jess can’t blame him. But whileherirritation stems more from her vague anger at the Conservative governments of the Eighties for championing privatisation and therefore being responsible for this mess, his, she suspects, is more from the world refusing to run according to his meticulously planned schedule.
‘I guess we’ll just have to travel together,’ she says, trying for playful, trying for awe-all-know-that’s-no-hardship-look-at-us-getting-on-so-wellvibe, and failing. Instead, she, too, sounds irritated.
By the time they board the train, Jess’s irritation has turned to plain annoyance. There was a last-minute platform change, because of course there was, and now they are scrambling on behind a crowd of similarly frustrated travellers; hopes of a Main Character Energy window seat – or any type of seat, for that matter – have faded into oblivion.
‘Come on,’ Alex says, his long legs carrying him faster than Jess can keep up with, with her still-not-totally-okay ankle and her heavier-than-it-should-be-for-one-weekend wheelie suitcase. ‘There might be more space up front.’
But there isn’t.
At the front, just behind first class – the aisles are already full of people standing, having, presumably, all had the same idea. The train is about to leave, so there’s no time to backtrack – the only thing for it is to stand in the delightful section right by the door and close to the toilet. The cup of tea Jess had with her grandparents before getting on the Tube to Waterloo is starting to feel like it might have been a mistake, so maybe this prime location will come in handy. It is, however, very much not in keeping with Main Character Energy. It has, instead, the energy of the background actor whose trailer is a fifteen-minute walk from the stage. Or maybe not even that. Maybe they just have a fold-up chair in the rained-upon carpark.
‘Mind if I move this?’ Alex asks her, motioning towards her wheelie case. She isn’t sure where he can move it to, but he somehow finds a gap on the side and wedges it there. It’s a Jenga move that makesmore space for everyone; it’s good thinking. She’s momentarily impressed with his practical side – not a string she would have assumed most writers like him had to their bow. Like liquid, the crowd flows around the new arrangement, finds new spaces.
‘What’s in that thing, anyway?’ he asks her. ‘Rocks?’
After being impressed with his Jenga skills, she is now disappointed in his lack of creativity.
‘Books,’ she says. ‘I figured, you know … New surroundings. A chance for a different background for some Instagram pictures.’ That, and her favourite sunflower jumper knitted for her by her grandmother years ago and perfect for the unseasonably cold weather that’s forecast for the weekend. It’s bulky rather than heavy, so Jess brought a bigger suitcase than she might have needed to, and from there it was only a small step to filling some of the spare space with life’s other essentials: a few changes of glasses (aubergine purple, jade green, yellow with black dots) and more novels than could ever be necessary for a work trip of just a couple of days.
‘I see.’ He nods gravely, as if attempting to project that he is taking her seriously, but she is not fooled. What Jess doesn’t tell Alex is that the wheelie case also contains more changes of outfit than she could possibly need for a weekend, even if she were to change three times a day. She doesn’t know what she’ll feel like wearing at any given moment. And she wants, of course, to look her best – not for any particular reason, just because she feels good when she looks good, and when she feels good, she is more likely to do good work.
Jess looks around her, trying to assess how uncomfortable this train journey is likely to be. And just as she’s thinking,Okay, this is fine, it’s going to be fine, we don’t have to stand too close to each other; there might even be space to sit on the floor, a seemingly endless group of what she guesses are university students piles on, right before the whistle and the closing of the doors, chatting and singing and carrying eminently spillable coffee cups. And suddenly – whoa! – there she is, pushed a lot closer to Alex than she had ever intended to be.
‘Hi,’ he says, amused, with something almost soft in his voice.
‘Hello,’ she says, in a tone that she hopes communicates,I acknowledge the awkwardness of this situation and am deeply mortified. I assume you are too and I’m sorry about that, although not sorry in the sense that it’s my fault, just in the sense that I would very much like this situation not to be happening. A tone she hopes doesn’t quite communicate what she is actually thinking, which is,I want to die.
Jess closes her eyes and inhales deeply, ready to let out a long breath as slowly as possible, as she learned to do in 2020 when even escaping into romance novels wasn’t quite calming down her heartbeat sufficiently to fall asleep at night. But in 2020, when she did that, there was never the smell of clean laundry and cedar and fresh coffee mingling together in quite the way that Alex’s scent is right now. She keeps her inward breath going as long as she can, inhaling that scent, filling her lungs with it. It’s pleasant, that’s all. It’s calming. Maybeit’s not even him she’s smelling? She can’t imagine ever being calm around him.
Jess exhales slowly, opens her eyes. Takes a quick look around her, matching scents with their likely sources. No, it’s definitely Alex who smells so good. Why does he have to smell so good? This is unhelpful. It makes her want to rest her head against his chest, breathe him in. His red flannel shirt looks soft, too. It seems like maybe resting her head there could be quite comfortable, too. In the absence of a window seat, that’s all. Main Character Energy in a different way.
Now what, though? Do they make conversation all the way to Godalming, or do they ignore how close together they are? She has, after all, stood much closer than this to many strangers at rush hour on the Tube. She’s stood with her head under people’s armpits and her bottom in people’s faces, the breath of strangers landing in her eyes and, on occasion, in her mouth. And in those situations, she has, wherever possible, fished out her phone and pressed play on a podcast, or dug out her book and escaped into its pages, the awkwardness and unpleasantness and unwelcome intimacy of the cramped conditions fading into the background as she’s focussed on something else. So it seems that maybe this is what she should do now. Except he isn’t a stranger, and maybe it’s rude to screen off the reality of his too-close company?
Why does nobody prepare you for these minefields? This kind of thing is what they should teach at school, with extra PSHE classes instead of trigonometry,which she has not once used since handing in her GCSE Maths paper.
Thankfully, it is Alex of all people who rescues her from this dilemma. He reaches into the backpack at his feet and pulls out a book, in a way that seems almost designed to give Jess permission to do the same. From the tote bag on her shoulder, she retrieves a proof of the newest Katherine Center novel. Bliss. Some authors never let Jess down, and Katherine Center is one of them. She knows from reading the first paragraph that this book will be no exception. Some people reach for the same TV shows over and over for comfort, the characters like old familiar friends. For Jess, it’s the same authors she reaches for – their voices like a familiar soft blanket on a chilly afternoon. As she sinks into it, she’s absorbed by the story, the dialogue, the characters, and the will-they-won’t-they – although, quite clearly, in the time-honoured tradition of romance novels, they will.
She is fourteen pages in when groans around her alert her to the fact that the train has slowed and then come to a stop, and not in the usual here-we-are-at-the-next-station kind of way – more of an equally familiar here-we-are-stopped-for-no-obvious-reason way. She waits to catch Alex’s eye and sigh in unison with him. As she’s also experienced multiple times on the Tube, nothing bonds strangers like shared travelling trials. She’s exchanged many a raised eyebrow with fellow commuters in her twenty-eight years on this planet. But Alex’s brow is furrowed in a different way. He’s concentrating on his book, trying no doubt to graspthe nuances of a speech by Winston Churchill or what the election of Barack Obama has to say about twenty-first-century America and what came next.
Except.
Those books don’t usually have bright pink covers with cartoon characters.
What is he reading?
Could it be that Alex Maxwell is reading a romance novel?
