I smiled my thanks, ‘no.’
‘No, please: listen away. Do.’
‘No, really.’ My solitude, indolence and music in front of him? I would have taken more kindly to a proposal that he watch me have a bath.
‘I’d hate to think that I could come between you and …’ He looked away, to the window, before asking, ‘something poppy?’
Momentary confusion, for me, so I explained, ‘That’s my nickname.’
An eyebrow kinked, questioning.
‘Poppy.’
‘Oh, I am sorry.’
Was this sympathy? and how dare he? or an apology? and if so, for what? for the inadvertent familiarity?
He continued, ‘How nice. Because of your hair?’
I inclined my head, to give him what was intended as a long look: Stupid question. For a second, I pondered the symbolism of poppies: late-blooming? death-defying? full of opium?
‘Who uses this nickname of yours?’ But suddenly he backtracked, ‘I suppose that’s rather a personal question.’
‘Not at all.’
How quaint: a personal question.
I replied, ‘Almost everyone.’ This was the best that I could do; a more adequate account would have required my life story, friend by friend. I said, ‘Friends, family.’
Old friends, I had been about to say, before realising that I had no other kind: new friend being, for me, I realised, a contradiction in terms. With the exception of George; if I could count George.
‘So, the hair colour’s natural?’
‘You think anyone would try to sell this?’
He smiled. And this time, I saw how: a narrowing of the eyes; a tightening in one corner of the mouth. ‘Perhaps they should.’
Then he nodded towards my CD player. ‘So, something poppy? Something I’m too old to know?’
I was amused: ‘How old do you think I am.’ A rhetorical question.
But he replied. ‘Mid-twenties.’
I shook my head, owned up, ‘I’m the wrong side of thirty.’
‘Mid-twenties is the wrong side of thirty.’
I wanted to say, For a man, perhaps. Instead, I told him what he wanted to know: ‘I was listening to something called “NYC’s no lark”.’
‘Well, however old you are,’ he said to the window, to the swill of suburbs, ‘I’m sure that you’re not old enough to have come across that the first time around.’
So, either he knew his Bill Evans, or he had glanced over and read the CD case. Suddenly I saw how he was different from Sunday: no glasses; on Sunday he had been wearing glasses. Did he wear glasses for work? Even if that work consisted only of listening? He had shadows of tiredness, a purple petal dropped beneath each eye.
He said, ‘Not the happiest of tracks.’
‘Schubert said there’s no happy music. Obviously, he hadn’t heard Jelly Roll Morton.’ Then I asked, ‘Did George tell you, this morning, about his mother?’
‘I’m a historian, not a psychoanalyst.’
‘She used to cook for the prisoners in the cell in the station; even though she loathed cooking, and couldn’t cook, she had to provide those meals because she was the policeman’s wife.’
He was paying attention, now.
‘She’d been a flapper, George says; lots of tennis and parties. Then she married his father, late; in the days when late-twenties was late. Never took to small-town life, though.’
A wince of a smile, again: an unspoken, Who does?
I asked him, ‘Do you have a nickname?’
‘No.’
‘Not one that you know, anyway.’
And he laughed, but barely: an admission, his head bowed.
The reserved seats remained unoccupied throughout the journey: a mass missing of a train. Our unmaterialised travelling companions had a lucky escape. The train had been in a station for a few minutes when a disembodied, distorted voice informed us that we were experiencing a delay due to an electrical fault which has caused a failure of the doors.
Edwin worried, ‘How do doors fail? How do doors fail?’
‘They fail to open.’
‘Are you saying that we’re stuck?’ He stared at me, in disbelief. His irises were a visceral blue.
‘Well, that’s what he’s saying.’
‘Do you think that he’s having us on?’
Inside my head was the refrain, Jeepers, creepers, where d’you get those peepers?
He slid a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘Necessary,’ he remarked, apologetically, indicating it, ‘because I’m mobile, much of the time. Or, rather, because I’m not.’ He pushed a single button, told someone, ‘I’m stuck on a train, and I do mean stuck.’ He would ring again, he said, when he reached London.
‘Work?’ I sympathised, when he had finished.
‘Wife. Late lunch.’
It hardly needed saying, but I said it anyway: ‘Even later, now.’
‘Looks as if she’ll be lucky to see me for breakfast tomorrow.’ Then he asked me where I was going, and what I would be doing.
I said that I was on my way into London to meet up with my friend Fern.
‘Fern? Fern and Poppy? What is this? The flower fairies?’
‘Fern’s her real name,’ I qualified, rather pointlessly.
She is nothing like a fern; she is silvery, and brisk.
I was going to see Fern because, last week, Philip had said, ‘Why don’t you take the day off, on Friday?’
All that I could say was, ‘Off from what?’
Sagely, he had replied, ‘From your routine.’
He would be covering a sleep-in for one of his staff, so would have a day in lieu at home with Hal.
‘Hal and I’ll be boys together,’ he enthused. ‘We’ll kick a football around the park and then go to the pub.’ London was his suggestion for me: he knows how I like to spend my time; he seems to know better than I do, nowadays.
Edwin offered me his phone: ‘Can you reach her, to warn her that you’ll be late?’
I did not tell him that I had my own phone, and merely declined his offer. I had time in hand: Fern was doing something else over lunchtime. She is always doing something. Free time, of which she has so little, seems to hold a terror for her: time, for her, is to be used. Having fitted me into her schedule with a coffee or two, she would then travel across town to the offices of a Sunday newspaper. She works two evenings each week as a subeditor. The job helps to fund her expensive training.
‘Fern’s training as an analyst,’ I told Edwin, and clarified, ‘psycho.’
‘Freudian Fern.’
‘Lacanian,’ I admitted, ‘sounds like a baby milk formula, to me.’
‘Appropriately, somehow.’
Why had I thought of Fern when planning my day in London? Probably because I knew that she, the busiest of my friends, would make time to see