For the first time on the train back to Cornwall Gabby felt a sense of dread. The sky was a cold, closed battleship-grey. A November sky. The train half-emptied at Reading and a sort of titanic hush descended on the remaining passengers in the carriage, all the way back to Penzance.
Gabby drank relentless cups of bitter coffee that made her feel squeamish, and the heavy emptiness in her stomach refused to budge. She would have two, maybe three months without Mark, who had flown home to see his family ahead of Christmas. His foster mother was still alive and being cared for by his half-sister. He had friends and colleagues he wanted to catch up with. He had a house that needed attention. He had a wife and five daughters.
There lay the rub. There lay the chill of the human spirit. Gabby, watching the bare wintry trees and small Lowry figures muffled up and bent into the wind on a sea wall landscaped by a vicious cold sea, hurt. Was stilled and dumb with misery. She sat huddled into her seat, bent towards the window, bent away from contact with other passengers.
She had travelled up and down on this train through a spring and a summer. Up and down, using the journey to settle back into the life waiting at the end of it. On that first trip to London the hawthorn blossom had been out, great mouthfuls of it flaming along the track. Gabby had watched people cycling along canal paths, running with dogs across fields, all getting in the mood for a summer that was hovering, just around the corner.
That first glimpse of London, breath held for she was meeting Mark again, was stamped indelibly on her memory. Magnolia buds like upheld mouths were beginning to open in small town gardens. Cherry trees were already out on the pavements. Delicatessens and coffee houses had wiped down chairs and tables placed outside in the spring sunshine. People had cautiously left their coats at home and sat at the tables pretending they were in Paris.
Great trays of plants and flowers had flowed across the pavements next to antique and newspaper shops, bicycle and betting shops. The sun, Gabby thought, changes everything. She longed to travel back in time, to have that spring and summer all over again.
She had trailed down the wide roads observing the routine and ordinary lives lived in a city, watching mothers wheeling children and walking dogs to the shops, and she had thought suddenly, as she gazed into the windows of houses where all these millions of lives were being lived out, Why, I could live here. I could melt into another person. I could metamorphose into someone who has a town life. As long as I could see from my window a green tree, have great pots of colour in a yard; as long as I could walk in a park. How is this? I never believed I could live anywhere but by the sea.
I could have been one of these women who wheeled her child along these pavements. I could have been a city girl who jumped off and on tubes without blinking an eye. I would have taken my child to galleries and museums. To the V&A. To the Tate and to the river to watch the boats.
As the train travelled along the coast a watery sun appeared, glazed behind hazy cloud. The moon was already out over the sea. The tide was high and Gabby felt she could almost stretch out to reach the water from her carriage. It was as if the train was travelling through it.
As evening came into the near-empty train, Vs of birds flew south. Seagulls followed a fishing boat like a swarm of butterflies.
At Teignmouth the sky above the sea wall as the sun set looked like some tinged and misty Jerusalem. Love for this familiar landscape welled up in Gabby like a small wave. I am schizophrenic, split into two, she thought, as puffs of smoke rose from houses and a moorhen scooted across the calm surface of the water. Gabby felt choked with the certainty of belonging, but to whom? To what?
It was as if the merging of day and night mirrored her confusion and identity. The silent transference from golden dusk to darkness, of lights snapping on in houses. Of the last rays of the sun staining the sky like a mirage then fading in the blink of an eye behind a fall of land, only to appear again ahead of the train. It was like following a flame into darkness.
Then the light was truly gone and the day had died. The train travelled over the Tamar in blackness with street-lights and the lights of ships below them. Over the bridge it slid into Cornwall. Home at the end of the world.
As the long-empty train pulled in to Bodmin, Gabby was in the end carriage beyond the platform and lights, beyond the opening and banging of train doors. She was in a little pool of darkness, in the middle of nowhere. This was just a long journey home and yet Gabby felt suspended. She had left herself behind somewhere and was travelling forward in limbo. Fear rose. If she had lost herself, who was she now? What might she become?
As the train got closer and closer to Penzance she felt as if all her nerve-endings were on the surface of her skin. Throughout the whole journey she had felt acutely aware of insignificant things. Small observations barely noteworthy were heightened and seemed important; like a dream sequence singled out to seem profound. Yet, as in a dream, there was this abiding sense of loss that made the familiar strange, a known landscape foreign. There had been a surreal quality to this train journey that deeply disturbed her with its uncertainty and sense of threat.
Gabby stared at the perfect half-moon as they drew into Penzance. Thought of the relentless tug of time and tide, of the ephemeral fleetingness of human lives. She thought of that same moon shining down on Mark’s house, a house which contained his wife and daughters. Loneliness, like a shocking icy wave, swamped her.
Nell was waiting on the platform. She had Shadow on a lead. The dog barked with joy as she spied Gabby and strained at the lead and Nell let her go. She raced towards Gabby with little yelps of pleasure.
Gabby dropped her bags and bent to her thick fur, buried her head into the dog’s neck, hugged her fiercely, fought the relentless urge to burst into tears and howl on the deserted windy platform.
By the time Nell reached her, she was able, just, to leap up, willing herself jolly.
‘Hi Nell!’ she said, hugging her.
‘Hello lovie …’
She held Gabby away and examined her face. ‘Gabby, how thin you are. It’s a damn good thing you have a long break for Christmas. You are getting to look like a pale city girl.’
As Gabby climbed into Nell’s truck she vowed to leave the city girl behind her, to practise happiness. Shadow, in the back, draped her long pointed nose and head over Gabby’s shoulder like a fox fur, breathing doggy breath down Gabby’s neck.
Gabby sighed, closed her eyes, leant back into the seat and caught the whiff of Nell’s familiar scent. She would think no further than this moment. This small intimate homecoming in the darkness with Nell and her dog.