On the train.
It comes in on the wrong platform, which is the first problem.
The last time it chugged in on Platform 1 but this time I had to leg it across the bridge to Platform 2, therefore losing what few cool points I had remainding, considering I was laden with bags and wearing three different clashing patterns (I didn't think the wardrobe change through for today when I was packing), all of them in the rough range of pink and all of them unseasonable since it was raining. I also had mud covering my shoes from the supposedly romantic long country forced march through a field of head-high giant nettles past which, if you stood on your tiptoes (not that easy in mud) you could just about see the river Severn; though since it was the colour of Caramac but much less appetising, frankly, it was better just to sink into the puddled mire and keep on trudging. In single file. While dodging the stinging nettles. And the huge rabid dog belonging to local axe murderer. (Okay, spaniel. Miniature spaniel. But the man did have a sinister West Midlands accent which the fact that we were in the West Midlands did not render any less menacing.)Yep, very, very romantic.
But I digress. I am now on the train, bags stowed around my person, laptop out but ignored, dozing pleasantly through the Cotswolds when I feel one of the clashing patterns being rearranged (the one belonging to the coat) and a small man in an expensive chocolate brown suit snuggles next to me. I apologise for my expansionist tendencies. He pats my arm reassuringly, lingering a little longer than I might expect from a man who has just sat next to me in a train. Let's put it this way. I've had relationships with less affection.
I adjust all bags a little closer to my person and resume my gentle doze.
'Terrible day,' he says, turning to smile at me endearingly like Mr Tomliss, anxious to warm me up in front of a fire and ply me with tea.
'Yes, it was summer when I set off yesterday.' I reply, not failing to notice the Narian element in that statement.
'I like your coat,' he smiles, patting me again, his hands fanning out expressively and then covering his mouth self-consciously, as though he was afraid of what he might say next.
Gay, I thought. I checked out his fingers. Silver ring on the left hand. Definitely Gay, and partnered up.
I know, I know, excuse the stereotyping and just be glad I'm not a criminal profiler or all my half-Muslim (there's no such thing as half-Muslim, but let it slide for now) kids would be living in a detention centre in Brackley, which come to think of it....) So the warm and friendly type then, not a pervy touchy feely man who was going to look down the front of my dress.
(I got him next to me on the bus.)
I thanked him for the compliment and continued to look out the window at where I had been, overcast and covered in drizzle.
'Up to the smoke again - it's such an ordeal...' He said, giving me another view of his teeth that looked like a Dulux colour swatch of the beige and fawns.
'Actually, I live in London. I've just been down in the country for the night.'
'Oh that's nice. It's good to get out of the city, I expect. Where have you been. Somewhere pretty?'
I think of the puddled river bank, but only for a nanosecond, and I smile. 'Yes, Worcester.'
'Worcester?' He turns the word over in his mind a couple of times like it's a shiny box and he can't find a way to open it.
'So what's in Worcester?'
A man who asks a lot fewer questions than you do, I didn't say. Instead I dropped my voice to a murmur and stopped at Man.
'Oh lovely, that's lovely.' He seems absolutely delighted, which makes two of us, and nods at me confidingly with a camp little giggle and another blinding grin, before telling me how nice it must be for us to be able to spend time ('time' said with a little wriggle of the eyebrows) in the middle of the week together.
I agree. Very, very nice. Worcester man's favourite words of praise.
We swap job descriptions, and I throw in the novel as glitter.
He likes the glitter. He writes down the title which will put my sales up to 1 if he follows through.
'I've often wondered if I had a novel in me...' he begins.
I cut him off before we get into that conversation and ask him were he lives.
'Charlbury,' he says, which in turn invites my confidence that I once had a goldfish called Charlbury which I won at a village fete there when I was eight, and it died two days later.
I am trying not to hold him responsible.
He says he used to live in Tackley. I can talk Oxfordshire geography for hours since I lived there for almost a decade and spent many of my childhood holidays there with my sister, but just as I am about to launch into another memory of dead pets gone past, he shrugs ruefully and admits that it has been a very hard year for him, and that he has only recently moved from Tackley.
'Why?' I ask. (Look, sorry, but I can be as nosy as the next person, or indeed, a darn sight nosier.)
'I split up with my wife and left my children...'
'Oh dear,' Not so much dead pets as dead marriages. Is the whole world splitting up in middle age? I am surprised. He looks so happy. And so not the marrying kind. I remember the silver ring which is flashing every time he gestures. Maybe he's doing a David (who recently split with my friend Eva because they weren't getting on after 25 years, and PS he was gay, but it had absolutely nothing to do with him leaving...)
'My partner and I fell hopelessly and totally in love and I just had to take the step to leave. It's very hard without the children.' He looks despondent and tells me their ages - all in their very early teens. 'And it's been very difficult. My partner has also left a young family, so it's not been easy for either of us.'
I am reeling at the idea of his partner being a) a woman and b) leaving her two kids. I'm trying not to be horrified but my judgometer is working about as well as my fashion sense.
'Tell me about it. I'm in a similar situation myself, but I was the one left with the kids - all grown up though - and my husband was the leavee with the new girlfriend.'
He nods sympathetically and shakes his head in despair, but then again, he smiles with rueful delight. I can't imagine the enormity of walking away from two families, even though I've lived it myself. He flaps his hands like a magician's assistant but nothing comes out of his sleeve. Then he squeezes my arm again, confidingly.
'Yes, my wife says she has lost her best friend. She hates me now.'
'I felt the same way. All of it. Best friend lost. Hating.'
'How does Worcester man get on with your children?'
'He hasn't met them.'
'And what about him. Does he have kids?'
'Boys, grown up boys.'
'And do they like you?'
'I haven't met them either. His wife left him and so he isn't living with his children, and I wouldn't want to intrude on the time he spends with them. We're not that kind of couple.' We're not any kind of couple, actually, but I don't think he or indeed the rest of the passengers in our carriage need to know that.
He asks me how we met. I tell him through work, but I'm definitely not going to announce that back story to the carriage.
'Mmm. We're going to have my children to stay this weekend, but they don't want my partner to be there. They say they just want me all to themselves.'
'So where is she going to go?'
'Back to her old house.' He grimaces. I'm surprised her husband will let her in. What a tortured story - the things we do for love.
'But you're happy. It was worth it?'
A smile of unremitting bliss floats over his face and his teeth shine like Victorian paintwork.'Oh yes, yes.' He tells me that it's harder for his partner but as was the bread-winner and she was never at home anyway (presumably because she was schtupping him) it wasn't as bad as it could be, as though this means that the kids won't miss her. I want to get her husband's telephone number and call him up and weep down the phone with him and tell him she's not bloody worth it. I'm wondering how much he would pay me to push Mr Tomliss here off the train. He seems like a nice, inoffensive man, but I just can't stay objective.
He goes on to say that he's off to meet a friend who is 'in the same position as us' and had recently split up with his wife, and remarried.
'Not like 'us', like 'you',' I say. 'I haven't remarried the person of my dreams. (Or indeed met him) You left. I didn't leave. I was the left behind with the house and the kids and the peeling paint and the hole in the ceiling and the lack of privacy, and the piecemeal love-life picked out of the ashes of someone else's broken marriage and fitted around their custody arrangements, matey. Well I actually, I just stopped (with difficulty) at 'leave' and thought the rest in capital letters.
As I said. Failure of objectivity.
'I don't mean there's a moral difference, just that you made the decision so that you could be happy. I was the fall-out of someone else's happiness.'
He said he didn't mean to draw parallels, and gave me another smile, this one a little apologetic.
'Well I hope my wife will eventually think that I'm a nice man, because I am. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I didn't plan it. She's a wonderful mum, a wonderful woman. She didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't anything to do with her.'
'I think that's the problem. You would prefer it to be something to do with you, rather than that you're insignificant and the other person is so much more compelling.'
I've heard all this before, all about my own wonderful mum-ness and wonderful woman-ness. Next time a man leaves me it's going to be because I've remortgaged the house and spent the money on Ghanian toy boys and have run an escort service from the back room and slept with every one of his friends. It's definitely ruddy well going to be 'about me'.
I tell him I'm now very friendly with my husband, but as the words leave my mouth I'm wondering why? Why are there are not wax effigies of him scattered around the house with nails through his heart.
I left Worcester feeling joyful and happy and smiley and hopeful - and now I'm now pulling out of Reading feeling like the hole after you've sucked all the flavour out of a Polomint. From coital bliss to crap in ten stations. And, I mean, Reading, it's bad, but it's not that bad.
Just then, his phone rings and he fishes into his dilapitated briefcase and whips it out. HIs voice drops about ten decibels.
'Yes, loooooooovely, soooo looking forward to it. Did you have a nice run? Mmmmm.... I'll call you when I get to Pad? Me too...' He whispers, and then tucks it neatly away again.
'I don't like talking on the train.' He says, normally, and smiles again.
The man in the seat in front turns round and looks at us. I raise my eyebrows. He raises his back.
