Emily Barr - The Sleeper

The sea air was painfully fresh and filled me with ideas and possibilities. I lost myself in daydreams of travel, and was surprised to reach my destination so quickly. I walked across the beach to the place where the high tide met the stones and deposited its seaweed, and stared out at the solitary tanker close to the horizon, I decided to turn around and walk straight back, all the way to Pendennis point and around it to Lara’s house.

I knew I should go back to London, just for a visit. Laurie wouldn’t mind that. I walked back quickly, tentatively planning. From London you could be in Paris in a fraction of the time it took to get anywhere from Falmouth. From Paris you could catch a train to anywhere in Europe; or you could go to an airport and pick a destination. This money, my secret money, could literally take me anywhere in the world. I did not have a clue where to find the courage to start.

During my walk back I played fantasy destinations. I tried to picture myself looking out of a train window in India, or learning to tango in Argentina, or bungee jumping in New Zealand. Sometimes I got close to thinking I might actually be able to do it. Then I remembered that I was the least adventurous person in the world and that my grand plans had always stayed in my head, and that my passport had been firmly in the filing cabinet for the past five years. I could not leave Laurie behind; not without telling him. If I left, I had no idea what would become of him.

Lara’s house was an odd little modern one, bright white and unusual, somewhere between a Californian art deco place and a British seaside bungalow. There was a car in the drive, the same blue Renault she had driven when she came to visit me. Because the house was on a hill, the actual garden was at a lower level, and I leaned over a railing and found I was looking down on it from a storey up. It was a nice garden, grassy, with a clematis and a camellia briskly awaiting spring, and a brown-leaved palm tree towering high above everything.

I rang the doorbell, energised by the exercise and suddenly starving, because it occurred to me that I had forgotten the part of my plan that had involved breakfast. I would stop at the shops on the way home and fill my basket with food.

There were heavy footsteps inside and the door flew open.

Lara’s husband was broad and blondish, with bits of grey that were barely noticeable in his light hair. He was wearing jeans and a baggy jumper and old man’s slippers. I took all this in while noticing that the moment he saw me, his face dropped dramatically, from an already low starting point. It was verging on the crumpled.

‘Oh,’ he said. He was shorter than I remembered and his appearance was a million times more shambolic. He was even less welcoming than he had been last time. If he’d had an aura, it would have crackled and sparked with hostility. I tried to stop mine doing the same. Mentally, I smoothed myself down. I stood in the faint winter sunshine and forced a smile.

‘Hi.’ I tried to remember his name. ‘Hi, I’m Iris. We met before. I’m a friend of Lara’s …’

He interrupted. ‘Yes. Lara. Where is she?’

I stared. ‘Where is she?’

‘Is she with you? Have you got a message? What’s happened?’ His voice was rising. ‘Where is she? Tell me. Where is she? What has happened to my wife?’

chapter fourteen

‘You’re sure you haven’t seen her?’ he asked again. ‘Or heard from her? When did you last hear from her? Why isn’t she answering her phone? Why have you turned up if you didn’t know something was wrong?’

I sat on the edge of the sofa. The sitting room was bright, even in this pale morning light. Other people’s central heating always smelled odd, because our cottage was only heated by its wood burner. Radiators made houses feel nostalgically comforting.

‘She’s late getting home,’ I told him. ‘People often are.’ I wondered if I could ask for a coffee, since he clearly wasn’t going to be offering. Food was obviously not going to be an option.

Her train, according to her husband, had arrived at 7.38, right on time. But she wasn’t on it. ‘She’s always on the train,’ he told me. ‘Well, once she wasn’t because the sleeper was late, but she called me to say that and then she was on the next one. And now the next train’s already come and she wasn’t on that either.’

Sam. That was his name. I was almost sure of it.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure there’ll be a reason. Maybe she’s lost her phone. Perhaps the train’s late and she’s lost her phone or it’s broken. My phone goes wrong a lot. I bet they’ve broken down outside Liskeard or something, where there isn’t any reception.’

He was staring out of the window, at the Docks station behind the house. It was a good vantage point for examining people arriving: no one could get off the train here without Sam seeing them. I could feel him willing her to saunter off the next train with an excuse that, the moment she said it, would make perfect sense.

‘She works so hard. Spends half her life on the sleeper. All to pay off our debts. It’s taking longer than we planned: her life in London is expensive because her sister … Anyway, I need her. Where is she?’

He was on the verge of falling apart, and, much as I did not want to, I knew I had to take charge. I was afraid on Sam’s behalf: not that she was not safe, but that she wasn’t coming home to him. I kept staring at his phone, waiting, like him, for something to change.

‘Sam,’ I said, and when he did not react I knew I had his name right. ‘Sam. We need to call the train company. First Great Western.’

‘I looked on the website. It didn’t say anything. In the stuff they have about broken-down trains and all that. There’s some things but not that. Can you check it again?’

‘Of course. And can I make some coffee? You look like you could do with it.’

I was pleased with this. Making it for him, supportively, while getting my own much-needed caffeine fix: this was a plan with no down side.

‘In the machine. I always make it when she’s due back. Chuck it away. It’s been there too long.’

His face crumpled again, and I had to push him down into a chair, then go to sort out the coffee. I was desperate for it. There were four croissants on a plate, but I knew it would be too crass were I to eat one. I could not be the woman who came to this house and scoffed a missing woman’s croissant.

‘I’ll call the train people,’ I told him. ‘Websites don’t always get updated, do they? Particularly not early on weekend mornings. So if she normally gets off the train at half past seven, she’s not much more than an hour late yet. Honestly, Sam. She’ll be fine.’

Their coffee machine was a stove-top percolator. I tipped out the old, cold stuff and looked for a pan so I could warm some milk to go with it.

Other people’s kitchens were odd, I thought. There was a strange intimacy to finding your way around, to trying to imagine where they might keep the cups and whether the coffee would be in the fridge or somewhere else.

For a moment I pretended that I was Lara, and that this was a routine domestic chore. It hit me with a flash, and I jumped back, knowing at once that she was bored with Sam. He was boring. She was not. She had probably left him.

I loitered, spooning ground coffee into the right component of the machine. All I could hear was Sam’s laboured breathing, and I became more certain that she would be in touch only to say she was not coming home. She had been jumpy on Christmas Eve. There were things she was not telling me.

According to the website, the train had left London on time, and had reached Truro on time before arriving, on time, at its end destination in Penzance. However, Penzance station, I noticed, was now closed, ‘due to an incident’. That generally meant someone jumping under a train, I thought. It would be hard to jump under a train at Penzance, the terminus: trains would surely be going too slowly to make it worthwhile. Still, people were inventive.