Page 16 of Love Walked In

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Leo

It had been a long time since I’d taken a train out of London, I thought as I looked for Mari in the herds of tourists milling around Paddington Station.

I’d gone on so many trips to Cambridge and Oxford with Alexander, slow, rattling trains out to Buckinghamshire to visit my mother’s mother at her so-called country pile.

I’d run off to Edinburgh with Vinay and our other friends for a long weekend during uni, and Becca and I had taken the Eurostar to Paris for our honeymoon.

My shoulders slumped a little when I remembered that trip, the feeling of my wife’s hand in mine as I’d dragged her through as many art museums as she could stand, hers tugging mine to look at every single posh restaurant menu and sparkling designer window.

I closed my eyes now as I remembered the absence of touch too, how far away she felt curled up in a ball on the other side of the mattress, my failure to please her in the cold, empty space.

But Becca was gone, and taking a train with Mari now would be a whole new experience.

I found her in the middle of the crowd, scanning the departures board with wide eyes.

She wore a soft-looking knit dress the color of pine forests, with bell-shaped sleeves, and a small green pendant on a long gold chain.

She had her hair a little higher too, chestnut wisps escaping down her neck.

I was so used to seeing her in jeans and baggy jumpers that I almost didn’t know who this Mari was.

If we were strangers, maybe this would have been the beginning of a different story.

Not two colleagues on a work trip, but a shy man who admired a clever, pretty woman, who’d gather all his courage, stammer out a compliment and a request to buy her a drink.

I shook my head hard to drive off the unwelcome thought. Too much of our story had already been written, and she was more suited to Graham, anyway. That moment with the custard tart in the bookshop had made that clear.

She turned and saw me, and I couldn’t help but smile at her huge wave of greeting.

“I’m so excited!” she said as I approached. “This is a real adventure already. I’m at Paddington and I’m about to go on my first-ever train ride. I should have brought marmalade sandwiches.”

“Surely you have trains in America,” I said incredulously.

“Of course we have trains, in New York and Boston. Rural Northern California, not so much.” She bounced on her toes. “Your place names are ridiculous, by the way. Pewsey? Weston-super-Mare? Not to mention Cockfosters. I keep seeing it on the Tube map, that’s a real double entendre.”

I flushed a little bit. I had no idea why the end of the Piccadilly line was called Cockfosters, and she’d probably just take the piss out of my answer, anyway. But some demon of perversion made me blurt, “Fingringhoe.”

Mari froze. “You did what?”

Mortification made me stutter. “It’s a village. In Essex. With a filthy name. Probably a single entendre, not double.”

For a moment she just stared, and I wished for the train station floor to open and swallow me. Then she cackled, raucous and joyful as a magpie. “Fingringhoe! I love it! Amazing. Also, you should say crude things more often. It works for you.”

Thoughts of the rude things I could say turned my bit of a flush into the full scarlet.

“Err, thanks,” I said brilliantly. “Tickets. We need tickets.” I walked her over to the machines and pressed buttons to pay for our journey.

“So you really haven’t taken a train before?

” I said, trying to keep myself present in the loud, overlit train station, not imagining darkness and warmth and closeness.

“Nope.”

“What is that even like ?”

“There’s this newfangled contraption called the auto-mo-bile.” She held her hands palm out and swept them away from each other. “It’s like a carriage, but powered by a combustion engine instead of pulled by horses.”

I snorted at the impeccable piss-take. “I deserved that.”

“ Yeah, you did.”

Once we’d gotten our tickets and settled on the largely empty train, I studied her face. Most of the color was back in her cheeks, though she still had shadows under her eyes. Uncertainty made me ask, “How are you feeling?”

She didn’t look away from where she was checking her ruby-red lipstick in a pocket mirror. “Fine.”

After hearing her say she was “fine” when she was prostrate on the bathroom floor, I knew that word was like a false wall, appearing solid to the naked eye but utterly hollow behind. I sat forward, hands folded in my lap, and waited until she’d stopped looking in the mirror.

When her eyes caught mine, her round cheeks flushed a little.

“How are you really feeling?” I asked.

She looked down, focused on closing her compact and putting it away. “I’m definitely not sick anymore,” she sighed. “Can’t deny I’m still pretty tired.”

“Close your eyes if you like. I can wake you up when we get to Frome.” I’d arranged for a minicab to pick us up at the other end and take us to Tommy Clifford’s cottage.

She opened her mouth with the spark in her eyes that I now knew meant she was about to argue with me, but a huge yawn came out instead. “Not a terrible idea,” she finally said.

“Sometimes I have good ideas,” I couldn’t help but snark.

“Idea, singular,” she said playfully. “Keep trying, maybe you can get a streak going.”

She leaned her temple against the window, tucked her legs under her, and closed her eyes, and I kept my own eyes down on a copy of Tommy’s first book, a coming-of-age novel he’d published under his own name.

Mari had speed-read the battered, yellowed paperback and passed it to me with a Mona Lisa smile, saying that I might find it enlightening.

But I’d kept getting distracted and had only made it two chapters in.

I tried to read instead of doing what I really wanted, which was to take out my sketchbook and draw Mari’s face gone soft with sleep, the delicate strands of hair that had escaped her bun, her deep-red lips parted ever so slightly.

But it was wrong to draw her when I couldn’t ask permission. It was wrong to even look at her as anything besides a colleague.

We were somewhere between Reading and Hungerford when she opened her eyes again and instantly sat up. I closed the book to ask how she was when she exclaimed, “Look! Everything is so green!” She pressed her nose to the window. “And look at the sheep! Baa.”

“You don’t have sheep in America, either?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Of course we have sheep. But people who don’t baa when they see a sheep or moo when they see a cow fundamentally hate joy.”

I chuckled at how matter-of-fact she was. “What else gives you joy, then?”

Her facial expression made me think of a doe hearing a twig snap nearby. “That’s a big question.”

I tried to keep my voice relaxed. “We’ve got over an hour until Frome, plenty of time for a big answer.” All at once, I wanted a big answer. I wanted the unabridged guide to whatever Mari Cole liked.

She rested her chin on her fist and watched the countryside go by.

“Hot coffee on a cold day, or iced tea on a hot one. Driving to the beach and inhaling the salt, listening to the waves. Running through the vineyards on a sunny morning. Putting a book in the hands of a customer and knowing they’ll have their own little world to escape into, hopefully one that will stick with them when times are tough.

” She smiled at me. “And reading, of course. I wouldn’t be here without it. ”

I smiled back, but I couldn’t help but notice that everything she was describing was solitary.

Of course we didn’t know each other well enough for her to talk about past or present lovers, but someone as charming and pretty as her surely must have had loads of people who’d happily go running with her.

Who’d love to bring her coffee and sit by her side on the beach and talk endlessly about books.

For a flickering moment, I thought about doing those things with her, though the only time I ran was to catch a bus, and I associated the beach with piercing cold and sandy picnics.

Oh, fuck . Did this mean I fancied her now? What a fundamentally silly thing to do.

“What about you?” she interrupted.

Now I had to pretend I hadn’t had an embarrassing revelation.

“My sisters. Listening to Gabs play her cello and kicking the football around with Soph. Supporting Arsenal, especially when they win. Wednesday nights with Judith—we used to have this ritual on nights Alexander played poker, where we’d take turns picking a record and sit around listening, and she’d knit or crochet while I read or drew. ”

Guilt rolled in my stomach as I remembered that we hadn’t had a Wednesday night in months. Judith had invited me a few times after Alexander died, but I’d begged off so often with tiredness that she’d stopped.

“Drawing gives you joy in general?” Mari asked. “I saw your sketchbook the first day.”

I blushed a little at the memory of being caught doodling instead of working. “Yes, always. Since I was little. Did your mum read to you?”

Mari blinked.

The words came out of me in a pained rush. “I’m sorry, I saw she wrote in your copy of Paddington and I was curious. Tell me to fuck off if you want.”

“I think we’ve done enough of that to each other already,” she said with a weak smile. “And yeah, every night before bed. She wanted me to love books as much as she did. Picture books and poetry when I was little, then Greek and Norse myths when I was older. But she passed away when I was ten.”

The book… it must have been her mum’s last gift. No wonder she’d carried it six thousand miles, kept it by her bed. “Fuck, Mari, I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said, the words bland.

I found myself pressing forward, looking for more. “Do you miss her?” Because I missed Alexander like someone had cut off my right arm.

Her lips folded in for a moment, like the words had tried to come out and she’d shoved them back. “It was a long time ago. I’m OK now.”

Which wasn’t quite an answer, but I could hear the finality in her tone, sense her about to slip behind another door and lock it, so I put my own feelings aside with an internal sigh. “Have you been out exploring London yet?” I asked instead.

She blinked at the change of subject. “I haven’t been anywhere except to buy groceries. Been kind of busy, you know, trying not to cough my lungs up. Small stuff like that.”

“Of course you’ve been.” I exhaled. “Maybe I could show you around town a bit, when we both have time off. Is there anything in particular you’d like to see?”

Now her eyebrows went up, not that I could blame her for her skepticism. “I never thought you were the tour guide type.”

“I’ve been a rubbish host.” I put my hand up to stop her objection. “And I know you’re here to work, but this is your first time in London, isn’t it?”

She looked at her lap. “First time leaving California at all.”

I paused. I knew Americans weren’t great travelers, but that seemed unusual to me. “You’ve never left your state?”

“I love where I’m from. Sonoma County is the most beautiful place on earth. The mountains, the vineyards, the beaches and the forests. I love working at Orchard House too, and I never wanted to be anywhere else.”

There was something a little tremulous in her words. This place wasn’t just her home, it was her safety, too. “Well, I can’t give you most of those things,” I said, smiling to take the sting out of the negative. “But are you up for seeing something different? Maybe going to look at some art?”

“Sure,” she said. “Since you’re the artist, why don’t you take me to your favorite place?”

Must not smile like a loon, must not smile like a loon. But she was happy again, her eyes bright, and I couldn’t help it.

I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to help a lot of things, when it came to her.