Nicola Rayner - The Girl Before You

Edinburgh had made her nostalgic. She and George had visited the city for a couple of days early in their courtship. There had been something special about that weekend: away from the influence of his friends, George was tender and attentive – plus, of course, Edinburgh on the run-up to Christmas was magical.

They’d ice-skated hand-in-hand in the shadow of the castle, warmed up with hot chocolate and even taken a trip on the big wheel. As it was caught at the top of its cycle, hovering between travelling up and coming down, George had looked at her for a long time as if he were going to say something, but didn’t.

Later, in the Vietnamese restaurant where they’d had supper, he listened to Alice’s career plans with particular attentiveness – though family law was hardly the most romantic of subjects – and surprised her by chatting to the waiter in Vietnamese. She’d looked at him so proudly then, with an ache that had long since faded.

Coming out of the restaurant, walking downhill to their B & B, George stopped Alice mid-path with a kiss. The wind was wild that night and, as he stood in front of her, his red scarf flapped in front of his face and her hair blew into her mouth. He almost had to shout it when he said: ‘I love you, Alice Reynolds.’ It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her.

‘I meant what I said,’ he told her that night at the B & B between squeaks of the bed. ‘You have saved me.’ She didn’t ask: from what?

Alice exhales. Her breath mists up the window and she wipes her hand across the cold glass. Taking the newspaper from her bag, she settles in for the journey home. Behind her she hears the refreshments trolley rattling its way through the carriage and decides to have a gin and tonic. There’s no lemon, of course; the surly girl serving looks at her as if she’s mad when she asks, but there’s ice, at least.

As the sting of alcohol hits the back of her throat, she sighs. It has been a good day, work-wise; the conference went well. But she can’t shake the fluttering sense of disquiet, of something coming back for her. She has started waking in the middle of the night, frightened for some reason, unable to remember why. Her doctor has prescribed sleeping tablets. Opening her handbag, Alice touches the small packet with a fingertip. She thinks, for just a second, of having one, so she can sleep all the way back to London, and then pushes the thought away, taking another slug of gin. That will do. She doesn’t need them often.

The train judders to a halt at Durham and as the doors hiss open they let in an icy gust of January air. A large, suited man, carrying a briefcase, folds himself into the seat opposite Alice. She crosses her legs, irritated, tidies the miniature bottle of gin into the brown paper bag the girl had provided and unfolds her paper.

She glances for a moment at a photo of George in the television pages. His first show is airing tonight. She still can’t get her head around George’s new career – he had been in politics as long as she’d known him, president of St Anthony’s student union the year they met. She hadn’t been sure how he would fare as a presenter, but in the previews she had seen he’d done well. His sense of humour came across. The show, the first in a series exploring the lives of famous British politicians, allowed him to make a few self-deprecating jokes and a few at the expense of other people, too. George would just say what he thought and in television today that seemed to be a key requirement. Alice has always envied him that quality. He’s looking jowly, though, she notices – something she never sees when he’s right in front of her.

She skims through the piece but finds she wants a break from work – hers and George’s – and instead gets out a pen to do the crossword. Even then it isn’t long before the letters begin to swim before her eyes. Scrunching up her scarf, she tucks it under her head, insulating herself from the freezing glass of the window. She feels her shoulders unclench and closes her eyes.

As she drifts in and out of sleep, Alice feels as though she is being watched. She opens her eyes once or twice, glances at the man opposite her, but he is hiding behind his paper – reading the story about George. It makes her feel peculiar. A part of her is taken over by a childlike desire to say, ‘That’s my husband – you’re reading about my husband.’ She swallows hard and closes her eyes again. There is a faint smell of something tropical in the air. It’s an unlikely scent at this time of year but pleasant, like sun cream or rum.

The carriage fills up as she dozes. She hears a group of boys get on at York. They sit in a huddle not far behind her, and the hiss and click of their cans of lager permeate her sleep. At one stage, one of them comes over and tries to talk to someone across the aisle from her. ‘All right, darling. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ Alice strains to catch the reply and, though the girl speaks too softly for Alice to hear her words, their meaning is clear in the young man’s hasty retreat.

Nosiness gets the better of Alice and she takes a quick look at where she imagines the girl is sitting, but she can’t see much – just a pair of slim legs crossed towards her. She closes her eyes again and drifts off.

When, at last, she wakes up properly, Alice feels sticky and hot. The sun has gone down and the lights on the train have been switched on. She squints out of the window into the darkness, trying to work out how far they’ve got, but there’s now too little light for her to tell – just dark, indecipherable shapes whistling by. She looks for a second at her own face – pale, almost haggard in the dark glass. It’s not a flattering light; she runs a tired hand through her hair.

She scans other faces in the reflection. The man opposite her is looking at photographs on his smartphone, running his fingers over the screen. Alice thinks she spies the flesh tones of naked skin and holds her gaze a little too long, trying to make out what the shapes are – porn? Glancing up, the man catches her looking at him in the window. The faintest of smiles flickers on his lips, but Alice frowns and looks away.

On the other side of the aisle, a mother and her small daughter reading together cause her a twinge of pain. She still has them: phantom visceral experiences. Nothing dramatic like giving birth or breast-feeding – maybe because she doesn’t know what they would feel like – but other sensations. She’d bought a friend’s child a cardigan recently, a dear hand-knitted thing, and she’d had the sense, as she held it, of dressing an infant: pushing its arms into the sleeves, the wriggly feeling of resistance in the child’s limbs; it had been so strong, so clear, that she felt the weight of the baby in her arms for a moment.

Alice’s gaze falls upon the girl who’d been chatted up, two seats behind the mother and child; she is sitting by the window, facing Alice. Her face is obscured by a curtain of hair and the angle at which she’s sitting. Her hair is an almost shockingly bright red and the sight of it – the feeling of envy Alice experiences as she looks at it – stirs a sense of déjà vu. Alice shivers, pulls her scarf tighter around her shoulders. She feels spooked. Just for a second she has pictured the girl’s hair under water – spread out like seaweed. Why would she think of that?

The cadence of the train changes as they enter a tunnel. The world outside – smudged grey before – becomes reflective black. Alice glances at herself again. Her reflection now is sharper, harder-edged. She can see more detail on her face. She runs a finger along the rings beneath her eyes and thinks about an old university friend she’d bumped into at the family law conference. He had aged well. He was so thin at college but he’d grown into his face now; he still carried himself in the same way, though: calmly, lightly, as if he knew his place in the world.