Serial Monogamy (3 page)

“I'm sure he will be back soon, dear. He's probably helping other passengers.” Mrs. Ternan tried to sound comforting but stating their predicament only made Nelly feel worse. Her hand, which she had barely noticed in the first moments after the crash, was throbbing badly and an alarming amount of blood was still seeping through Charles's now sodden handkerchief. It had been a quarter-hour since he had left to get help; soon after he had disappeared from view, she had checked the little pocket watch he had given her the Christmas before last, and then checked it again, and again. They could hear all kinds of noise outside, shouts and moans, the sound of which convinced them they were much better off than some. They debated whether perhaps they should clamber up to the door in their turn; Mrs. Ternan pointed out that even if they could not climb down from the carriage in their skirts, at least they could call and get someone's attention.
But Nelly forestalled her; Charles would want us to wait, she said. Neither said out loud what they were both thinking: the novelist would mainly want them not to draw attention to themselves as his travelling companions.

Nelly shifted her weight a bit to lift her hand, causing the carriage to move slightly as she did so. She winced, and her mother now noticed how stained the handkerchief had become.

“Let me look at it, dear.”

“It's fine.”

“It's not fine. It's still bleeding.” Mrs. Ternan leant over to grasp her daughter's hand. Nelly tried to draw it away and this time, with her sudden movement, the carriage swayed perceptibly. They both gasped but Mrs. Ternan did not let go.

“Nelly. You need a better bandage. Maybe I could use my petticoat.”

“No, Mother. Don't. You'll spoil it.”

“It's a petticoat, dear. We can always get another. I don't suppose I am going to be able to reach my sewing scissors. Where's my dressing case?”

Mrs. Ternan looked about the jumble of bags in the carriage and spied her dressing case up on the luggage rack, wedged in between two other cases in one corner. Thankfully most of their belongings had been on the rack above her head in what was now the lower side of the compartment so the bags had been forced back on themselves rather than tumbling on top of them as they
landed on the floor. It was mainly their hat boxes that lay about them; Nelly would not trust her new bonnets to the luggage van where their trunks were stored, so the hat boxes had travelled with them.

“I'm just going to have to rip it. Let's see if there isn't a seam loose,” said Mrs. Ternan as she lifted her skirts and began to examine her petticoat. And it was at this awkward moment that they heard various sounds outside the window and saw a hand reaching up to rap on the glass.

“Ladies? Are you all right?” a male voice called through the door.

“Yes,” Mrs. Ternan called back, hurriedly rearranging her skirts, “but my daughter's hand is cut.”

“Right. We'll get you out of there. Are there two of you?”

“Yes.”

“I found 'em, Dan,” the voice now called back to someone else. “Ladies, if I may, I will need you to try to open the door for me. I can't quite reach the handle. Can you do that?”

“Yes. We'll try to open it.”

“I'll just stand back then.”

Mrs. Ternan now inched her way over to the door, reached up to the handle positioned well above her head and opened it up into the void as Charles had done before. There was a bit of puffing and panting and finally the man's head and torso appeared at the floor of the
doorway. “Ladies,” he said, “we heard you might be needing a hand down.”

He helped Mrs. Ternan down first but their progress was slow. Clambering up to the ledge in her crinoline and getting her legs over without exposing her underthings was a tricky business and made the carriage shift alarmingly “Gently does it, gently…” their rescuer kept saying. He was evidently a rail engineer or perhaps a platelayer, since his blue overalls were tolerably clean. Mrs. Ternan finally succeeded in getting herself modestly seated on what was the bottom of the doorway into their compartment. Steeply angled upwards by the position in which the carriage had settled and without a station platform beneath it, it was elevated well above the ground and the man could hardly be expected to lift her by her waist like a girl. As Mrs. Ternan sat there, waiting to negotiate her descent—Nelly could not see how far a jump she had to take and it was only when her turn came that she realized the engineer had reached them by standing on several wooden crates that had been dragged into place—she looked back over her shoulder and called out to her daughter.

“Nelly, my dressing case!”

Nelly looked at the precious dressing case, still sandwiched up on the luggage rack.

“I can't safely reach it, Mother. You'll have to wait.”

“Don't worry, miss. We will come back for all the baggage,” the engineer reassured her, but later, when she saw what awaited them outside, she came to doubt anyone would care much about the fate of a dressing case or hat box. Still, her mother's concern brought her back to the practicalities of the moment, awakening her to something other than her throbbing hand and soaked bandage. She looked at her hat boxes lying on the floor and she looked up again at the rack where the dressing case was stuck. The bag on the outside of it was her own dressing case, smaller than her mother's, a dainty ostrich-skin cube that Charles had given her for her birthday the winter before last, at a moment in their relationship when, if she were honest with herself, he had bestowed on her so many gold trinkets that the idea of yet another held little appeal. But it was the bag on the other side that was important: the largest of the three, it was wedged in against the far wall of the compartment. It was Charles's battered old grip, a large rectangle of solid brown leather sitting upright on the luggage rack. And inside it, there was the manuscript, a good five dozen pages written in his flowing Italic hand that comprised the next two months' instalments of the latest serial, the first due at the printer's the following week. As her mother and the engineer began to discuss how it was the older woman would make her descent down to the ground, Nelly, carefully, gingerly, trying ever so hard not to move the carriage any farther, stood up and began to climb onto the seat that she and Charles had been sharing on the train.

She got onto it and managed to stand, but as she began to reach toward the luggage rack she realized she only had one hand at her disposal to pull down the heavy bag. She looked back; her mother was still in sight but absorbed by the task of descending into the arms of her rescuer, offering loud encouragement from below. Looking above her head, Nelly stretched up and grasped the handles, which were almost out of reach. She managed to grip them firmly enough to tip the bag onto its side, pushing the two dressing cases out of its way, but she certainly did not have the power in one hand to bear its weight as she swung it down off the rack. Standing back, she took a breath, tensed the muscles beneath her corset and tugged. The bag budged a little. She tugged again and again, and finally edged it to the lip of the rack. She tugged one last time, it teetered and, as she stepped aside, it fell with a thud that coincided with Mrs. Ternan's leap toward the embankment. Nelly clambered down and, with one hand, hauled the bag toward the door.

Soon enough a friendly face reappeared there.

“I can just lift you down, miss, if you'll permit the familiarity,” the engineer volunteered. “I warn you, the ground's soft underfoot. You'll get your shoes muddy, I'm afraid, but there's not much for it.”

“I don't care about the shoes, but I have a bag with me,” Nelly replied. “Can I perhaps just throw it down ahead of me?”

“Just pass it to me, miss, I'll take it,” he replied.

“Thank you. My mother and I are much obliged to you.”

“Not at all, miss. Least anyone can do for you after what has happened. I hope your mother is not too alarmed.”

“No. She is quite calm, thank you.”

It was after she had passed over the bag and began to settle herself on the ledge provided by the bottom of the compartment door that the engineer noticed her bloody bandage.

“Why, you are hurt, miss. I had not realized.”

“It's all right. I just cut myself on some glass. I only need a fresh bandage.”

“We will get you a doctor soon as we can, miss. There are poor souls who are in worse need, I'll tell you true enough, but we can't leave you to bleed.”

Nelly and her rescuer both braced themselves and he simply lifted her down to the crate he was standing on and from there to the ground. It was soft and muddy, as the engineer had warned; Nelly found herself standing in what seemed like a marsh area, a good ten feet below the track.

As soon as she was clear of the carriage she began to recognize just how lucky they had been. The front of the train stood on the rail ahead as though nothing had happened but the back carriages had failed to cross a low viaduct that covered the width of the wetland and lay in a shambles in the low ground in which Nelly now found herself standing. The carriage she had just climbed from was the last to have remained on the bridge but dangled
at a precipitous angle, which explained the discomfiting swaying they had felt.

“If you just move this way, miss. We are trying to lay some boards.” The engineer indicated a few planks that had been laid so they could reach the far side of low land, where the last cars of the train still stood on the rail.

“What happened?” Nelly asked, pausing to puzzle out the derailment as she stepped onto the planks ahead of him.

“We were working on the track, miss. Had a section right out midway through the viaduct there.”

“So the train didn't clear it? Why didn't someone warn the engineer?”

“Oh, we would have, miss, in the usual manner of things, we would have had the missing section all back in place and shipshape. But we didn't expect the Channel train until four o'clock.”

“But I don't think our train was early. We left Folkestone about five minutes late…”

“I don't rightly know, miss.” His voice became strained now as he tried to justify the unthinkable. “We weren't expecting the train, that's all.” He stopped there and then said more firmly, “I'll carry this across for you, if you go ahead. Your mother is just on the other side.” He shepherded her over to a drier area that Mrs. Ternan had already reached on the far side of the viaduct. Nelly thanked him, and taking the precious leather bag, she stumbled up the embankment.

W
hen I first started chemo, Al or Becky came with me and sat and waited while the nurses dripped the magic poison into my veins. But with the girls to be picked up from school and housework and cooking to be done, it soon seemed stupid to have another adult taking several hours off work to be there. It was more useful to have Becky do our groceries than come to my medical appointments. By my third cycle, Al was dropping me off at the hospital's front door and I was taking a cab home. For my three-month checkup, I took the subway for the first time in almost a year. I was rather proud of that, another milestone, like Frank's party. There was a huge Christmas tree in the hospital's atrium, sparkling with oversized silver balls; the doctor said, “That all looks fine,” and I stopped on the way home to pick up a gift I wanted for the girls. It was a good day.

Al hurried into the front hall as soon as I came through the door.

“Where were you? I thought you'd be home by now.”

“I stopped to do some shopping.”

“So?”

“So far, so good.”

“All good?”

“Yup, all good. That's what she said.”

He folded me into his arms, hugging me tight, but after a moment I pulled back to look at his face. He was smiling. He looked relieved and happy. What else did I expect? It's not that I thought he wanted me dead or anything; on the contrary, he may have wanted me to get better really fast. Once or twice in the first months after he came home, the phone rang and someone hung up when I answered. Maybe it was just a wrong number. I mean, if she was calling, surely she'd just call his cell. But I got a horrible little reminder of what it felt like when he first told me of her existence, the twisting doubt at every turn, the gut-wrenching assumption about every unexplained gap in his schedule; the ugly temptation to pick his phone up off the kitchen counter and read an incoming text. We had agreed to set this stuff aside, concentrate on my getting better. Of course, I asked him about her. Once, he said, “She understands,” which wasn't very encouraging, and another time he said, “It doesn't matter. You don't need to worry about it,” which sounded better, but mainly I had been too sick and tired to pursue it any further. It's been a year since he came home, but I can't help wondering if she's still waiting for him. If I get better, will he leave?

“We should go out to celebrate tomorrow night, get a babysitter,” he said.

“We'll never get one at this time of year. And I'm busy tomorrow; remember, I asked Frank for a drink. I want to strategize about the serial.”

At that Al just raised an eyebrow.

“A good Christmas. That will be our celebration,” I promised.

Despite the approaching holidays, there was a whiff of fear in the newsroom when I dropped by to meet Frank the following day: it took me a second to recognize it, but it was a familiar odour. The chemo clinic smelled of it too. There, everybody was slow and shuffling, almost languid in their pace but terrified nonetheless.
The Telegram
, on the other hand, seemed to survive in an atmosphere of barely controlled panic; the place was full of scurrying bodies and bent heads, all the editors and reporters engaged in a desperate busyness that suggested they were bailing the
Titanic
rather than simply putting out tomorrow's paper. In the brew pub across the street, where Frank and some of his cohort often go for a beer, the gossips reported that subscriptions were in free fall; advertising was down and traffic to the website where readers scarf up the content for free was not beginning to make up the difference. Stanek, like some tyrant who can't believe that nature won't bend to his will and
so blames his underlings for famine and floods, had just fired a perfectly respectable editor and replaced him with some roving social media executive who promised to turn everything around. One of Frank's witty buddies said the guy was just working in newspapers the way hipsters affect porkpie hats. It's retro and fun and hey, the next big thing should be on its way soon.

They continued in this bitter vein for some time and it took me a while to get Frank on his own.

“You know about this Dickens serial idea?”

“Emm.”

“If the publisher is so keen on new media, why am I being commissioned to revive a nineteenth-century form? Nobody publishes fiction in newspapers any more. Do you think people will read it?”

“I'm not sure people read newspapers period, so why not give it a try?” he asked. “Stanek is an eccentric; marking the Dickens bicentenary is a pet project of his. And the serial is counter-intuitive; he likes that aspect. On the one hand, you've got one-hundred-and-forty-character blasts appearing on your phone every second; on the other, wait a week to run out to the good old newsstand and buy the next gripping two-thousand-word instalment.”

“I'm not sure it'll work,” I said.

“Then why did you agree?”

“I don't have anything else on the go, and I like the idea of something so contained and written to such a tight deadline. I can be pretty sure I'll live to see it through.”

Frank swallowed and said nothing. People don't want to hear that you might not get better; they tell you there are all sorts of fabulous treatments these days, as though maybe you didn't know that already. I have an aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, triple-negative because it lacks all three of the common receptors they target with those nifty new drug treatments. The doctors never say much about the prognosis and on that night I was just trying to hold on to the previous day's optimism. I quickly filled the awkward pause.

“You guys are offering me pretty good money. And it's a flat fee. You pay me whether the readers buy it or not.”

“Yes. But you'll care how it does…”

“That's true. I was really hoping you would edit it, but some assistant called me and set up a meeting with the weekend editor. We are supposed to have lunch after the holidays. What's he like?”

“Jonathan Torres? Decent-enough guy once you get to know him. You'll figure him out. You're going to love the challenge. Publishing fiction weekly, just like Dickens used to. I bet you've already got something mapped out.”

I just smiled; it had been only two weeks since Frank's party but by this point I was already deep into research on the Staplehurst railway crash. “I should get home to the girls. Guess you'll see me in print.”

In my book, “decent-enough guy once you get to know him” is code for unprepossessing and not too bright but harmless. On meeting Jonathan Torres two days into the new year, I was not at all sure, however, that the man was harmless. He is tall and fit looking with curly black hair and would be good looking were it not for rather thick glasses that seem to displace his gaze by a few inches so that it is almost impossible to make natural eye contact with him. From the start he took a hearty tone with me that was audibly false. He came across as simultaneously awkward and smarmy. How appropriate, I thought, he's a Uriah Heep. You could almost imagine him rubbing his hands together.

Once we had shrugged off our heavy winter coats and settled ourselves in the cheerful French restaurant that offers about the best food you can get within walking distance of
The Telegram
, he read the menu quickly, picked out a steak, let me order a salad, and made a sound in his throat to indicate business will now begin.

“Fabulous project the publisher's got you working on,” he said. “Great idea. Love it. Do you know what you are going to write? I mean, I know you know what you are going to write. You're a novelist, an awesome writer. Love your stuff. I haven't read that much but what I have…I mean, the publisher loves your stuff and you've done this before obviously. Not quite in this form but I am sure you have ideas; I just mean…Well, do you have the plot worked out? We don't want you to get going and then
not know…Well, I guess novelists always know what their ending is…”

I listened as he tied himself in knots. He seemed to feel I was important enough that I had to be flattered but probably not good enough to actually do the job. I wondered if his world was full of people who were more powerful than talented. Or perhaps power was the only coin he recognized.

“Yes. I have an idea, and a plot.”

“Great.” He sounded very relieved. “Can I ask what it is?”

“I thought since we are reviving a nineteenth-century form that I would set the story in the nineteenth century.”

“Love it. A Victorian story. Sounds good.”

The food arrived and we ate for a bit before he seemed to realize he had not got what he wanted.

“So, you say a Victorian story.”

“No, you said that actually.”

“But you did say that it would be set in the nineteenth century? You just said that.”

“Yes. Nineteenth-century England, so that's Victorian. And France too. There will be a few scenes in France.”

“Great. So, France and England in the nineteenth century. So, um, what's going to happen?”

I took pity on him finally.

“Well, it's the Dickens bicentenary; the story will be one from Dickens' own life.”

“From his life?”

“Yes.”

“You mean the story of his life, an autobiography.”

“No, not really a biography,” I said, trying to hide any note of condescension as I corrected him. “Just an episode from his life. An episode in which he played a role, but he's not the protagonist.”

“So Dickens appears as a character, but he is not the main character?”

“That's right. It will be about people around him.”

“Good. Sounds great. Love it. Can you tell me a bit more?”

“Why don't you wait until you read it.”

“Emmm…Okay. I know Bob settled the fee with your agent. He told me you'd agreed to a minimum of fifteen instalments.”

“Yes, at least. I think it may take me more like twenty. I tend to underestimate how long anything is going to be, but once we get started, I can give you a final count.”

“You'll need to start soon, won't you?” He sounded alarmed. “We were hoping to begin publishing before the end of the month. I mean, it's 2012 now.”

“Don't worry. We'll be fine. I've already written two instalments. I am just beginning a third.”