I'm on the train! (2 page)

He studied the sea of faces; mostly male and mostly set in grim, unsmiling masks. Apart from the tartan maverick, the standard dress was sombrely conventional. He was just one of a whole army of Identikit businessmen – all neat, all correct – so why should
he
be given the job, rather than that suave guy by the door, or the successful-looking fellow in the corner, with his handsome profile and sleek designer briefcase?

Reproaching himself for negativity, he dragged his attention back to the inquisition.

‘What would you consider, Mr Dickson, to be your particular strengths?'

Ah – that he'd rehearsed a good two dozen times: ‘I never tolerate a job half-done … I'm aware of team dynamics and aim to be
co-operative 
and flexible in all team situations … Should a customer have a grievance, I strive to remain cool and calm, whatever the—'

‘Fine. And what about your weaknesses?'

Trickier by far. He would have to tread extremely carefully, so as not to make any damaging admissions. His weaknesses of character were all too woefully apparent: passivity and over-caution; lack of audacity and forcefulness.

‘You haven't a clue, Pete, honestly! Christine doesn't give a shit about you or me or….'

Who
was
this idle Pete, who appeared to have all the time in the world to natter on till doomsday; who didn't have to leave for work, or cut the conversation short, in order to earn his living? Doubtless some scrounger on benefits, whom hard-working taxpayers were forced to subsidize. Not that
he
was a tax-payer, just at present, which made it all the more essential that he got the job and stopped relying on his wife. And, now he came to think of it, why should poor Yvonne have to slave away all hours, when this airhead of a woman could run up monstrous phone-bills and splurge obscene amounts of money in the shops?

‘Pete, you don't know what you're talking about! How can you possibly defend the bitch? It's obvious she's out to do us down and….'

Welcome aboard this Southeastern train service to London, Charing Cross. Our next station-stop will be Orpington.

Both voices were drowned as a train roared past in the opposite direction. He fought an urge to leap aboard and travel right to the end of the line. Then, instead of facing an interrogation, he could laze on the beach at Hastings, cool his sweaty feet in a frill and froth of waves, even recapture his childhood pleasure in building
sand-castles
….

‘Listen Pete, if you imagine you can trust her an inch, then you're utterly deluded! I know Christine of old, remember, and I can tell you straight she's a scheming little….'

He tried to focus on the brochure on his lap, although the very name – Alpha Insurance – only seeded further doubts. He had never been an alpha male – not at five-foot-eight, with no proficiency in any sport, no record as a Romeo and—

‘What d'you mean, “give it a rest”? … OK, keep your hair on! … Yes, I
will
ring off, but only if you promise we can discuss it later on. I'm not letting that cow win! I insist we thrash it out this evening, so I'll phone you from the station and tell you when I'm on my way, all right?'

He dared to hope. Any moment, the maddening yakkety-yak would cease and he could concentrate, at last.

‘What? But I thought you said … No, I
can't
make it ten – that's ridiculously late! … All right, let's compromise. How about
nine-fifteen
?'

‘Yes, fine,' he hissed, replying on Pete's behalf. But the guy had clearly had his bellyful and must be seeking some sort of let-out.

‘I'm sorry, Pete, but that just won't wash! How can you say you “won't be in”, when you told me, half an hour ago, that half-past eight was fine?'

He leapt to his feet and, having heaved the tartan bottom to one side, pushed and shoved the other stolid bodies out of his way, until he was standing directly over the prattling pig of a woman.

One blow sufficed. He brought his fist down with such force, she crumpled in an instant. He could hardly believe his own strength – yes, an alpha male, who could annihilate any tittle-tattling fool and escape the consequences. No one had protested; no one rushed to the woman's aid. Not that he was surprised. Commuters were famed for minding their own business and never drawing
unwelcome
attention to themselves.

He strutted back to his seat. Of
course
he could act impulsively, take a stand, put up a fight, refuse to be ground down. And, of
course
he would get the job. Hadn't he just demonstrated the very qualities that Alpha Insurance sought: determination, assertiveness, confident conviction? And why settle for being just their new Claims Manager, when, given time, he could be their CEO?

He leaned back in his seat with a smile of anticipation, as he began working out the details of his enviable new lifestyle. A
house-move
, naturally. No alpha male would deign to live in the cramped and shabby bungalow he had called home up till now. He would need a large, impressive house, with extensive gardens, front and
back, a conservatory, a three-car garage…. Once Toby had passed his driving-test, he would buy the lad a sports car, and Yvonne could have a BMW, a Jaguar, a Porsche – anything she liked, in fact, including a life of leisure. And he mustn't forget his daughter. He would gladly pay her fees at whatever swanky ballet-school she fancied and, as for ballet-shoes and tutus, she could stockpile them in shedloads and he wouldn't turn a hair.

He returned the jotter to his briefcase, along with the Alpha brochure; closed his eyes and let himself relax. There was no more need to prepare. Words would spring to his lips spontaneously – every answer spot-on. They'd immediately cancel all the other poor sods' interviews and he'd be swept into the chairman's office to celebrate with champagne; maybe even—

‘Pete, I've told you ten times already, if you take that line with Christine, she'll simply walk all over us! Yes, I know I said I'd leave it, but no way will I ring off till you begin to see some sense.'

Startled, he looked up. The woman was unscathed; her whiney voice as shrill and intrusive as ever; no trace of blood or bruising on her face; no damage to her vocal cords. He glanced around the carriage. Nothing had changed at all. Those busy on their BlackBerries and laptops were still assiduously at work; the guy with the iPod still drumming his fingers in time to the vacuous music; the girl on his right now abandoning her newspaper to bite into a Mars bar, scattering chocolate crumbs dangerously close to his lap.

He froze. He was so cowed, so shocked, even his breathing seemed to have stopped, and he didn't dare to raise his eyes from the dirty blue of the floor until the train pulled in at Orpington. And there – abjectly, politely – with apologies to left and right, he squeezed his way through the crush of bodies and alighted on the platform. He stood a moment, motionless, feeling strangely chilled in the oppressive morning heat. Then, with a sigh of resignation, he crossed the footbridge to the other side and checked the times of the down-trains. According to the departure-board, there was over half an hour to wait for one that stopped at Wadhurst, which meant he wouldn't be home till mid-morning. Still, with the kids at school
and Yvonne at work, at least he'd be alone in the house – the
bungalow
, he corrected himself; knowing how perilous it was to harbour ideas above one's station. So, once he had washed and changed, he would have plenty of time to work out what to tell them and just where to put the emphasis.

Pacing up and down the platform, he began rehearsing his lines right away; seeing in his mind the circle of expectant faces: his wife's, his son's, his daughter's; their hopes and dreams all resting on his heavy-burdened shoulders. It was essential that he retained their respect and didn't come across as a loser, so he must stress how well the interview had gone; how he'd actually been congratulated on a highly creditable performance, and hadn't, once, been lost for words, or failed to supply incisive answers. Nor had he forgotten the importance of judicious eye-contact and assertive body-posture. In short, he had done his absolute best.

But then had come the shocking revelation: he had discovered, later on, from another unsuccessful candidate, that the whole thing had been a stitch-up: they'd already decided to give the job to one of their own executives, and thus the interviews were just a sham; laid on simply for the sake of keeping up appearances by following empty protocol.

Yes, of course, he was completely gutted and, of course, it was unfair – downright scandalous, in fact. But, now that he'd had more time to reflect, he had come to see it was self-defeating to allow himself to get worked up, or lose time and sleep on pointless
recriminations
. One just had to take the view that some companies were venal, some CEOs corrupt; put the matter down to experience and try again, elsewhere. His family would be proud of his maturity, his resilience and calm acceptance in the face of rank duplicity.

Wouldn't they?

‘S
o tell me about yourself, Jo.’

She stared down at a breadcrumb on the tablecloth, unsure what to say. She was like that crumb – just an unimportant speck – so there was nothing much to tell. Anyway, she wasn’t good at words and her voice might come out rude and loud, just because of nerves. The people at the nearby tables were speaking very softly, like you were meant to do in church. And they were all scary-grand and talked posh, so they might think she was common.

But her silence didn’t seem to matter, because, after just a short while, the man went on talking himself. He seemed to like to talk; had been talking ever since they met.

‘Remember I told you I was in Nigeria, working as a DO? Well, in 1955, I was transferred to Kenya and promoted to DC, which was how I came to….’

It was hard to understand him. What was a DO, or a DC?

‘I was barely twenty-eight at the time, and although you may not realize, Jo, it’s pretty rare for a chap to be DC before he’s thirty, at the earliest. But then I’ve always been a high-flier. Even as a little lad, I wanted to be Prime Minister!’

He gave a big gaping laugh, which showed his three gold teeth. He must be very important, wanting to be Prime Minister and having real gold teeth.

‘Of course, I was doing a damned good job as DO, so, when they needed someone tough to take charge of a large area in the very heart of the Mau Mau uprising, I was their obvious choice. They stationed me up-country in the White Highlands – a town called
Nyeri, which has grown much bigger recently. In those days, it was….’

He’d been all over the world; places that made her mind ache. Her own world was very small. There was Lockerley, where she lived, and Bournemouth, where they went by coach in summer, and now London, the big, frightening place, where she’d arrived very late last night. When he’d stopped her in the street, this morning, and asked what she was doing trailing round, with no proper coat, in the middle of November, she’d said nothing for a while. If she admitted that she’d run away from Sunnyhill, she knew he’d send her back, so, in the end, she’d told him the truth: that she was looking for her mother. She hadn’t known how hard it would be to find just one special person, when there were such crowds of people everywhere; strangers bumping into you and not saying they were sorry.
He
was a stranger, too, although he’d been very kind and bought her tea – proper tea in a teapot, with a silver jug, for the milk, and something called a tea-strainer. And, afterwards, they’d come here to have dinner – except she mustn’t call it dinner. He’d told her, twice, it was ‘luncheon’.

‘I took up my post in the very thick of the violence, and, of course, the White Highlands were the spark that set off all the trouble in the first place.’

She didn’t know what trouble he was talking about, or where the White Highlands were. There were Highlands in Scotland, but they were grey, not white. Anyway, it wasn’t easy to listen, because words always went too fast for her and left her miles behind. And she was distracted by the room: the biggest dining-room she had ever seen – even in a film – with huge windows and a painted ceiling and waiters wearing evening dress. The place was called a club –
his
club, he’d said, which meant he must be terribly rich, because it was enormous, like a palace, with loads of rooms, and several different staircases, and pictures in gold frames – even mirrors in gold frames; mirrors big enough for giants. When she’d first seen the great tall building, with two stone lions outside and a huge wooden door, like a church, she was sure they’d send her packing from such a fancy place. But he took her arm and led her up the steps and a
man in a black uniform hurried forward to greet them and called them ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ and even gave her a little bow, like she was the Queen.

‘I have to say it was a really hairy time, but, of course, there was bound to be conflict, sooner or later, since the Kikuyu were
determined
to grab the white settlers’ farms – and to use any means to do so, however barbarous.’

He was eating while he spoke and sometimes little shreds of food sprayed onto the tablecloth, glistening with his spit. She didn’t like the food here and most of it she’d never even heard of. The waiter had brought them both a menu – a big one, with stiff covers, like a Bible – but the words inside were weird: things like bisque and grouse and whitebait and ceviche. And, in any case, she was used to big black letters, not squiggly writing with lots of loops and curls. So she’d pretended to be thinking and just sat quietly for a while. He had chosen the whitebait, which were tiny dead brown fish, with their heads and tails still on, and coated in greasy crumby stuff, a bit like Kentucky Fried, but with a nasty fishy smell. After what seemed ages, she’d seen a word she
did
know – soup – so she’d said she’d have the soup, please. But it wasn’t like the soup they had at Sunnyhill. They’d put a lot of cream on top, which turned it a funny colour, and also little bits of bread-stuff, hard, like leftover toast.

‘But, d’you know, despite the dangers, I never received so much as a scratch. I reckon I live a charmed life, Jo – always have,
probably
always will. I remember, once, when we were driving over the Aberdares, on our way to Naivasha….’

She wished he’d go more slowly. A minute ago, he was in the Highlands; now he was somewhere else.

‘This is quite a tale, Jo! You’ll never believe what happened. And every detail’s crystal-clear, even after all these years. We were rattling along this dirt-road and a bloody great ant-bear comes lurching towards us and charges straight into the Land-rover.’

You weren’t meant to say words like ‘bloody’, but important people always broke the rules. She wondered what an ant-bear was. There were ants in the Sunnyhill kitchen and she’d seen a bear, once, in the zoo, but ants were black and tiny and scurried everywhere,
while bears were big and brown and sat around doing nothing in particular, so how could the two be both at once?

‘The driver was killed outright, poor devil, and Giles was badly bruised, but
I
escaped scot-free.’

His deep, booming laugh surprised her. If the driver was dead and Giles was badly bruised, shouldn’t he be crying?

‘Whenever there was danger, Jo, I was the one who was spared – illness as well as accidents. For instance, everyone I knew in Kenya went down with malaria, at one time or another, but I managed to avoid it the whole time I was there. The other poor chaps were falling like flies, but I stayed as fit as a fiddle. I must have brilliant blood, I reckon!’

‘Your wine, sir.’

One of the waiters had come up – a tall, scary person, all in black, who looked even more important than the man, and spoke in the same posh voice. He was carrying a bottle, wrapped in a white bandage, and the bottle had a picture on it, of a building like a castle. But the waiter was very mean with the wine and poured just a tiny drop into the man’s big glass. And the man took a sip and held it in his mouth and frowned and made a face. She was
frightened
he might spit it out but, all at once, he swallowed it and said, ‘Yes, first-rate, Piers.’

Then the waiter poured some into her glass – a lot this time, not a tiny drop. She wasn’t allowed to drink, on account of all the pills. And when she took a gulp, it tasted sour and horrid, so she was glad it was forbidden.

‘Another time, when I was in the bush, I was bitten by a
puff-adder
. My boy kept me walking up and down all night, to stop the venom taking hold. I did feel a bit off-colour, but only for a matter of days. The following week, I was right as rain. I even played squash that weekend and beat my opponent hands-down. It was partly thanks to my boy’s good sense, but even so….’

She wondered how old his boy was. Quite old, most like, if he was allowed to stay up all night. It was rude to ask people’s ages, so she asked, instead, if he had a lot of children.

‘Lord, no! None whatever. Sadly, my wife had problems in that
department. We did employ a lot of staff, though, all waiting on us hand and foot. I never had to lift a finger until I came back here. Of course, I was up to my eyes with my own work – dispensing justice and all that sort of thing. I used to hold a daily court in Nyeri, to make sure the locals were kept in line. The
watu
were very fond of stealing each other’s cattle, which often led to fights, so I’d have to put my foot down and order the culprits to be caned.’

At Sunnyhill, the staff weren’t allowed to cane you, however naughty you were. In the old days, though, children were beaten black and blue, so Miss Batsby said.

‘I was also personally responsible for the hospitals, the prisons, the state of the roads, and general law and order. Sometimes, I’d be called out in the dead of night, to deal with an emergency or….’

He was still eating the dead fish – even the heads and tails, which meant he was eating their eyes and teeth. Once, in Bournemouth, she had seen a fish’s teeth, but that fish was dead, as well. She had never seen a live fish.

‘I remember, during Mau Mau, there was a really nasty incident. An entire white family were hacked to death, in the early hours of the morning. I was fast asleep, of course, but the minute I was summoned, I leapt out of bed and we drove full-pelt to the house. We arrived too late, though – found the place full of mangled bodies. Even their new-born baby had been slaughtered,
and
the poor damned dog.’

He’d seen lots of people die – first, the man killed by the ant-bear, and now a whole family and a baby and a dog. Yet he didn’t seem the slightest bit upset.

‘The Kenyan house-staff managed to escape. They were warned in advance, you see, and got out before the butchery. And the
perpetrators
were never caught. They just disappeared back into the forest and….’

At last, he finished eating and wiped his mouth on something called a napkin, which was like a small piece of the tablecloth, very white and stiff. It left a lot of greasy marks, but no one told him off. Then, he leaned forward and inspected her, close-up. He
probably
thought her clothes weren’t right for such a fancy club, or that
she shouldn’t have her hair loose. Edna said it was unhygienic to have it hanging round your shoulders and dangling onto your plate. But, all at once, he smiled – a big, wide smile that showed his three gold teeth.

‘You’re damned pretty, Jo, d’you know that? In fact, I’d go as far as to call you a real stunner. Which is why you need to be more careful, for God’s sake, or someone will take advantage. I mean, a girl your age ought to be safe at home, not wandering the streets on your own.’

She should have added on two years and told him she was eighteen, instead of sixteen-and-a-half. But it was wicked to tell lies and, anyway, she wasn’t even sixteen – or only on the outside. ‘Sixteen in body,’ Miss Batsby had told her, on her birthday, ‘but a child of ten in mind’. She
wasn’t
a child. She knew a lot of things that even grown-ups didn’t know and, anyway, they called her ‘madam’ here and you wouldn’t say that to a child. The man was eighty-four – he’d told her that as soon as they met, like he was proud of being old – but said he had the constitution of someone half his age. She didn’t know what a constitution was, but probably something expensive, like the wine.

‘And, if you don’t mind me saying so, you have a quite
sensational
figure. I like women who are women and have a bit of flesh on them. Most girls these days are just skin and bone – and starving themselves half the time, to try to look like fashion-models. I hope
you’re
not on a diet? You haven’t touched your soup, I see, but perhaps it’s not to your taste. We can change it for something else, you know – the game terrine, maybe?’

She’d never heard of game terrine and, in any case, she didn’t want to eat. Her last meal had been dry Weetabix, yesterday, at Sunnyhill (Dave had nicked all the milk), but running away made you scared, not hungry. She ate a piece of roll, though, to stop the man being cross. The bread was sort of greyish-brown, with little seeds on top and, when she bit into the roll, the seeds fell off onto her plate and a few fiddly ones got stuck between her teeth.

‘Well, if you don’t want your soup, Jo, shall we move on to our main course, or would you prefer a little pause?’

She wasn’t used to so many questions. At Sunnyhill, you were told, not asked. But he must have thought her rude, because, when she didn’t answer, he pushed his big, red, flabby face almost into hers and peered at her again – even closer, this time.

‘Are you
OK
, my dear? Not upset or worried or—?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said. Safer to pretend, or he might phone Sunnyhill and make them fetch her back.

‘If there’s anything I can do, Jo, you only have to ask. I have time on my hands at present and would be only too glad to help. To tell the truth, retirement doesn’t suit me. I was extremely lucky in that I stayed on after Independence for almost thirty years. Of course, it wasn’t only luck. I’d bloody well won my spurs by then! In fact, the president himself sent word that he wanted to appoint me a
magistrate
– a huge relief, I can tell you. You see, I assumed I’d have to leave the country, which would have really been a blow.’

He took another gulp of wine, then let out a great sigh. ‘But it couldn’t last for ever, alas. There comes a time when you’re
considered
just too ancient and no one wants you around. Although it’s damned difficult to take a back seat, when you’re used to being kingpin.’

She knew all the kings and queens of England, because they were on the wall at school. There wasn’t a King Pin.

‘Still, old age comes to all of us, so we just have to accept it. But, listen, Jo, let’s focus on you, for a change. I must admit I am a little concerned as to why you’re alone in London. Please don’t think I’m prying, dear, but perhaps you could enlighten me as to why you’re looking for your mother. What exactly happened to her?’

She picked up a seed and swallowed it, wondering what to say. Miss Batsby had explained that some mothers couldn’t cope if their babies were born with problems. It didn’t mean Mother didn’t love you; it just meant you were looked after in a home. She wasn’t sure what kind of problems she had, but Dave had called her a halfwit, so maybe it was that.