Emily Barr - The Sleeper

‘Seriously?’ He nods at his arms, leaning on the edge of the table. ‘This works for the ladies?’

‘For me it does.’

‘Cheers, Lara. Good to know these things. Not that I’m in any position, or have any inclination, to act on it.’

Ellen comes back, followed by a lounge car attendant I recognise, who bears a tray carrying three gin and tonics.

‘Thanks, Sarah,’ says Guy, winking at her. ‘You’re a life saver.’

‘Welcome,’ says Sarah. ‘Plenty more where those came from.’

‘Good.’ I take one and stir it with its little plastic stick.

‘Cheers,’ says Ellen. We clunk plastic glasses, and I relax. The week is frantic. This weekend is, I hope, going to be less difficult than the last one was. The pressure, when Sam has been looking forward to my return relentlessly all week, can make us bicker without stopping, and last weekend we were both in tears by Sunday afternoon, the uncompromising separation looming, raising the stakes, making everything a million times worse.

Three drinks later, Guy is leaning back in his seat yawning. His knee rests casually against mine.

‘Do you find,’ he says, looking first at Ellen and then, for longer, at me, ‘do you find that the weekends are almost as much hard work as the week sometimes? I mean, I get back Saturday morning, bloody fucking knackered, and then it’s all “Dad, do this. Guy, do this. Be fun. Be nice. Fix this. Go and buy this. Help with homework. You have no idea what it’s like being the one stuck at home all week, you’ve been in London, you can put the washing on for once …”’

‘Nope,’ Ellen says at once. ‘Jeff’s a farmer. You know that. Our day jobs couldn’t be more different. The farm doesn’t wind up for the whole weekend, though he makes that happen as much as he can because of our time together. I love the weekends. But then again, it’s just the two of us, so I was never really going to have the pressure. If I was someone’s mum, well, that would be an entirely different matter. Neither of us cares who does the laundry. It gets done, one way or another.’

They both turn to me.

‘Mm.’ The gin, followed by wine, has relaxed me. ‘I find it hard,’ I admit, making an effort to direct my words towards Ellen, because Guy is disconcerting me. ‘It’s early days for us, you both know that. But if I’m not sparkly and adoring and adorable, if we don’t have a shiny precious weekend, then I feel hugely resented. Last weekend was hellish. You know that anyway because of how I was on the Sunday train. I can’t blame Sam for it: as far as he’s concerned, I’m in a high-pressure job, and negotiating my bloody sister the rest of the time, and then I’m on this train, and he has no idea how much fun this is, or that I sit up for most of the night drinking. So he thinks I’m toughing it out, which I am, and pining for our quiet life in Cornwall, which I’m afraid I’m generally not.’

‘He probably lives for the moment you get back, Lara,’ says Guy. ‘What’s his job like? Does he go to the pub and have a life? Or is he sitting there all week looking at his watch and sighing and counting down the hours on his fingers?’

‘Yes,’ Ellen agrees. ‘I’m intrigued by this Sam of yours. Will you get him to bring you to the station on Sunday so we can see him?’

This makes me laugh. ‘But you two will’ve been on the train since Penzance. If he was waiting on the platform you’d be lucky to catch a glimpse out of the window.’

‘No,’ says Guy. ‘We’d be at the door, waiting for Truro, and as soon as the train stopped we’d open it and jump down to help you with your bags. Both of us. A little chivalrous double act.’

‘You’d freak him right out.’

Ellen nods. ‘I thought so. Go on then. What’s he like? How did you meet him?’

‘He’s lovely.’ I say this in my firmest voice, as their amused curiosity about my husband makes me feel disloyal. I move my leg away from Guy’s, and he does not attempt to reinstate contact. ‘He really is. He’s the most lovely man in the world, and if anything I’ve said makes you think otherwise, then that’s my stupid fault. I met him when I was twenty-four. Twelve years ago. I’d been travelling in Asia for a bit. Things had …’ The last thing I want to do is talk about my time in Thailand, so I bite my lip and jump away from what I was about to say. ‘I got back and I’d got a load of stuff out of my system. I was ready to settle down, properly. In fact I was craving a stable, conventional life. I was qualified in property development. My godfather – my dad’s best friend, Leon – he helped me get a job. Encouraged me not to sit around at my parents’ house doing nothing. I started working, and I worked hard. I rented a little studio flat, then bought a house. And I met Sam.’

‘And you weren’t close to your sister back then either?’ Ellen interjects.

‘Never,’ I agree. ‘She was in the same flat she’s in now, even though she was in her first job, in PR. Olivia: the world’s least likely PR woman, I always thought. The person who will go out of her way to let you know she doesn’t like you. Turns out that’s only with me. She’s a brilliant schmoozing pro with everyone else. Anyway. Our dad encouraged me to buy a place as soon as I could, and I got a little terraced house in Battersea. Again, it seems impossible now, a decade later, but I did. I had the job, the mortgage, friends, and I just needed a boyfriend. I didn’t need one, of course, but I desperately wanted one.’

‘And you met him …?’

‘And I met him. In a café, in Soho. It was like one of those meetings in a film. It was pissing down with rain, and I was sheltering with a drink, a coffee I think, on a Saturday afternoon, wishing I hadn’t come into town, a few bags of shopping by my feet, considering going to watch whatever was on at the Curzon because it was at the end of the street and I wanted to sit somewhere warm and dry for a couple of hours without being bored. The café was packed, the windows all steamed up. I’m sitting by the window, and I’m so out of sorts that I’m drawing pictures in the condensation on the glass without even realising it.

‘When someone politely asks if he can join me, I’m properly annoyed. I want to say no, but I know I have to say yes. And then I look at him. It’s hard to explain, but probably not, for you guys, because you’ve both got long-term partners too. I just knew as soon as I saw him that he was the person I was looking for.’

‘Love at first sight?’ I glance at Guy, wondering if he is mocking me, but I do not think he is. His knee knocks against my leg, then retreats.

‘Not love. Safety. Certainty. Conviction that this was the man I would spend my life with, the missing piece of the jigsaw, at first sight. And he was. He was tall, broad, and I like both those things. Blondish, stubbly. Beautiful eyes. And an air of … well, of rightness. He sat with me, laughed at what I’d drawn on the window.’

‘Which was?’ Ellen asks.

‘Oh, a child’s picture. A house, with four windows and a door and a tree next to it, and I think there was an outsized person, too, out of all proportion to the house.’

‘That would have been the perspective,’ Guy reassures me. ‘The person must have been closer to the viewer.’

‘Exactly. Thank you. So we looked at that, and I drank my espresso, and he spooned the froth off his cappuccino, and we went to the Curzon together and watched a gorgeous Almodovar film. Then we went for dinner. We were together. That was it.’

‘Was he twenty-four too?’

‘Twenty-eight. He’d had a girlfriend, obviously, and they’d split up about six months earlier. We were both in the right place. We got married a couple of years later.’