Edward Cayley,’ he wrote in the steamed-up train window. ‘Edward Laurence Cayley.’ Then rubbed it out with his sleeve.
He had been driven from the house by his half-brother’s business chauffeur and hurried across the concourse of Liverpool Street as if he must be bundled out of sight as quickly as possible. The driver carried his case; he carried a small hold-all. The station smelled of smoke, which tasted on his tongue and caught the back of his throat. His hold-all and suitcase had labels tied on with his name and the station to which he was travelling. He was put in charge of the guard, inspected, turned round, and then put into the van.
‘Two hours.’ The guard had several missing teeth and the rest were brown.
After that, there was nothing. No one looked at or spoke to him, he had nothing to eat or drink. The train steamed on. He saw cows and churches, fields and houses, dykes and people on bicycles. He did not think and he did not feel, he simply accepted, having learned that accepting was the best and safest way.
He was neither happy nor unhappy: he was a frozen child, as he had been since he had arrived at the house of a half-brother who neither loved nor wanted him but who, with his wife, had looked after him dutifully, without fault or favour.
He was a pale, fair, thin boy, small for his age but fit and wiry now and with a sensitive and intelligent face. He was liked. It was taken for granted that he would find his way easily in life, that excuses would never need to be made for him.
But, looking out at the cows and sheep and churches and dykes and people on bicycles, he was unaware of any of this. He wrapped himself in a bubble of unknowing.
Leonora van Vorst travelled alone from Geneva the same day, with her name on a badge pinned to her coat and a brown suitcase covered in shipping line labels, thrown from porter to porter and, finally, to the driver of a hire car which was to take her from Dover to Iyot Lock. To anyone watching her follow the last porter with her case on his shoulder and her round overnight bag in his left hand, across the dock from the boat, she looked small, solemn and lost, but within herself, she was tall, confident and superior. She had money inside her glove for the last tip. The driver loaded her cases and pinched her cheek, feeling sorry for what he thought of as ‘the little mite’. Leonora frowned and climbed into the back of the car without speaking. She was self-possessed, calm, haughty, and without any sense that there was such a thing as love, or vulnerability.
The car sped east and after only a few miles she began to feel sick, but fearing to mention it, and seem weak, she closed her eyes and imagined a sheet of smooth black paper, as her mother had once taught her, and eventually the nausea faded and she slept. Through the rear mirror the driver saw a white-faced child with a halo of red hair spread behind her on the back of the seat, lips pinched together and an expression he could not exactly make out, partly of detachment, partly of something like defiance.