Again, as at Heathrow: he had the strange sensation that he was trying to be anxious about the situation, and that this was difficult because he was also on a rare adventure with his daughters. When had he last sat next to Helen on a train? No one had that kind of time anymore. And America was peculiar, more foreign than he had expected, it sharpened his senses. What a contradictory place: for every limitation, there was an expansion, for every frustration, an easement. The train was absurd, trundling along at barely sixty miles an hour. And Penn Station was a bloody embarrassment to a great capital city. To a great city, rather. But this journey was extraordinary … it had a pioneer feel—the enormous Hudson, with chunks of ice like broken pavement in the water; and the huge wealthy forests, the valley full of forts and power stations and opportunistic houses glooming on vast icy bluffs, the railway stations more like adventurers’ huts than anything in Europe—barely manned outposts without proper platforms, and with outlandish names … Poughkeepsie, Yonkers, Schenectady; the train high above the ground, the big wheels polishing the rails, and the driver blowing that childishly dissonant horn. Why did he blow it so often? Maybe because he enjoyed it so much? Perhaps that childish harmonica sound, the crushed klaxon peal, reminded him of being a boy again? Reminded him of Christmas Day, of blowing a spitty mouth organ fresh from the box. But then at other times it sounded less like a harmonica than an animal’s long cry from the prairie. And that sound, the big easy loiter of it, was America for him, though he couldn’t say what “America” was, except that sound. He would, at the very least, see the kind of life Vanessa lived in the States, her American life.
“Tell me what you know about Josh,” he asked. “I mean, in practical terms.”
“Vanessa’s kept quiet about him, hasn’t she? I don’t know if he teaches philosophy or works at a Starbucks. Or both. Actually, I do know. He writes about technology. For magazines and suchlike.”
“I knew that, too. It doesn’t seem enough of a job, to my mind. Josh is short for Joshua, I suppose?”
“Come on, Dad, what do you think? Of course it is. He is quite a bit younger than her.”
“Ah, how very scandalous…”
“Well, it could be a problem.”
“Said as if you want it to be a problem.”
“Not at all.”
To be fair, Helen did know about age differences. Before she married Tom, she had lived for three years with a man who seemed dangerously close to late middle age, though being in the music industry he didn’t act like it—went around in jeans and trainers, even turned up at a wedding dressed like this, and had a very juvenile haircut. He collected bass guitars and, according to Helen, took twenty-four pills a day, bullshit supplements of one kind or another. Alan had fiercely distrusted him. He still took not one single pill regularly.
“I fancy a wander to the buffet. You want anything?”
Helen made it clear enough she would never eat or drink anything, except perhaps bottled water, from the Amtrak café car.
“Mainly I just want to kick all those doors open,” he said, smiling.
* * *
Off he went, his black Oxfords ready for kicking. She saw again his slightly long sleeves, and how formally he was dressed. Good jacket, crisp dark trousers, white shirt. He was elegant, had the parched elegance of skinniness, like Charlie Watts—the same kind of narrow, compact miner’s body, all sinew and tendons. Pulleys and wires, somehow. Strength in that body, endurance above all. But also a harder body than his spirit, which was generous, expansive in some ways. At the end of the carriage, he stopped, a bit theatrically, looked back at her, and then kicked the hard black pad at the base of the metal door, quite sharply, as if it were a football. Nothing happened. He looked like an aging mime artist (but weren’t all the great mime artists aging?…). He’d missed. Another kick worked, and he disappeared into the next carriage.
She’d reached a point in her life when she wanted both her children and her father to stop aging. She needed him to stay in the same place, not fade away. She needed him to be ahead of her. Maybe this desire for stasis was the very definition of being middle-aged, though surely she wasn’t quite that yet? But why didn’t Tom fully feature in her picture, her frieze? It was always just her and the twins; even in her dismayingly frequent nightmares, when in her sleep she battled men with knives and jumped out of fiery hotel windows, Tom was curiously absent. Why? Because she’d spent her teenage years in a household with one parent, and felt that to be normal? It wasn’t normal. She could see herself in the backseat of the warm car, her dress sticking to the seat, and her parents in front of her, where they belonged: Mummy in the passenger seat, holding a map or reading aloud from the newspaper, and Daddy driving, his hand on the steering wheel, the calm sweat on the back of his neck, and that funny habit he had of slightly adjusting the knee of his trouser leg after each gear change.
There was a young family on the other side of their carriage, a girl and a boy, unremarkable but beautiful in their juvenility. Helen couldn’t keep her eyes off them. If she’d been entirely honest with her father, she would have said that her eagerness to leave Sony (apart from the important fact that the bastards at Sony didn’t seem to want her any longer, or want her enough) had a lot to do with the children. She couldn’t really bear the travel, the long hours talking crap with people who didn’t have kids, or didn’t care that she had. There were guys, always guys, who deliberately prolonged meetings, at exactly 6:30 p.m., so that they didn’t have to go home; whereas by that time of the day she had a need to be with her children that was drainingly physical. Sometimes she wished she could have two long lives, one straight after the other—a full life devoted only to work, followed by a second full life, devoted only to being a parent. The combination of the two was so difficult.
Winter sunlight threw a white trembling dagger of illumination across her left hand with its adult veins and adult wedding ring, across her father’s New York Times, then briefly bleached out the virtual solitaire she’d set up on her laptop. They were coming into Albany, slowing down, and outside there were the usual American urban scraps—a body shop; redbrick warehouses with smashed milky windows, their bricks daubed with the fat, dirty-white, risen-loaf lettering of graffiti artists; parking lots with new cars in orderly ranks; a flat-roofed mall; and a weirdly new high school. She wanted to go home. But the light, the light: she loved the clear, therapeutic blue of these American skies! When skies are blue, we all feel the benefit … one of the greatest, saddest songs ever written. Her father was returning, clumsily bearing a flimsy cardboard box. He seemed to have bought everything in the buffet: a bag of Doritos, a large coffee, a bottle of water, and some kind of soi-disant Danish. She could see it sugar-sweating inside its clear plastic wrap.
“You’ve gone native,” she said. “How were the carriage doors?”
“My aim got better and better.”
She closed the laptop, not eager for him to see how she was squandering her time.
“We’re coming into Albany, so we don’t have long now. Eat up! It looks revolting.”