Chapter Fourteen
Alex
That train journey to Godalming felt like both the shortest and the longest of Alex’s life.
Firstly, it is extremely frustrating that British trains do not know how to behave – to arrive when they say they’re going to, and, above all, not to be cancelled.
What is the point of meticulously planning your life if external circumstances will not cooperate?
Or perhaps that is the point: meticulously planning your life with an extra half an hour’s breathing space at every turn, just in case. It is all extremely tedious.
He had a plan. He was going to get to the station in plenty of time for a good seat with a table, get one of these romance novels out of his backpack, and give it a try with a pencil in hand and as much of an open mind as he could muster.
But, instead: no seat. No way to make notes.
And a very distracting blonde who probably didn’t need to be quite so close to him at all times, but whose closeness he could be forced to reluctantly admit that he did not, exactly, hate.
Reading together companionably is the best kind of friendship as far as Alex is concerned.
In an ideal world, would you also be standing in a train corridor alongside far too many University of Guildford students exchanging gossip, popping bubble gum, and occasionally breaking into song?
The answer to that should go without saying.
Still, he is glad that Jess did not insist on small talk all the way to Godalming – or even any of the way – and he enjoyed the faint smell of apple shampoo he caught from her hair when the train’s swaying delivered her closer to him.
It was uncanny, in fact, that the descriptions of the heroine in this book he was reading included the pleasant smell of her hair, so that Jess’s presence acted almost as a live olfactory illustration of what he was reading.
Had he known he would be travelling with Jess, he would have packed a different book – a Churchill biography, perhaps – so as not to invite ridicule.
He wanted to read romance in private, decide for himself what he thought of it before risking being interrogated as to his views.
But if she had noticed he was reading a romance novel, she didn’t say.
Jess seems grateful when Alex lugs her ridiculously heavy suitcase down the train steps for her.
She probably has eighteen pairs of shoes in there, even though she and he are only going to be holed up inside the house, arguing about the best way to rip apart his novel and start again.
He has stopped short of tracksuit bottoms and ratty T-shirts and made himself bring jeans and shirts in his backpack.
When he writes at home, it’s all about comfort, and also all about dressing in such a way that would make him too ashamed to go out, for fear of being recognised by a reader, as tends to happen around Hampstead.
He wouldn’t be surprised if there had been a Londonist article forewarning residents and potential visitors to be on the lookout for writers on the Heath, because that is where they go for inspiration.
Which is not untrue: he’s seen Alan Hollinghurst on one occasion, Nina Stibbe on another, nodding to each of them as he passed, in an indication that he both recognises and appreciate them but feels no need to interrupt their day.
It is not, however, impossible that on this trip Jess will drag him outside for a walk – not impossible that he will drag himself outside in an effort to gain some space away from her: breathing space, thinking space, space to express himself without being judged for his supposedly pretentious views.
‘Should we call an Uber?’ Jess asks, once they’re out of the station.
‘If I remember correctly, the house is quite close to here,’ he says.
When he says if I remember correctly, this is really just for propriety’s sake.
He definitely remembers correctly; he has planned every step of this journey meticulously.
He just doesn’t know what will happen once they actually arrive.
That is anybody’s guess. Inwardly, and not for the first time since meeting Jess, he curses Nathan and the freshers’ fair at Durham where they met and became friends.
He catches her slightly wincing. Maybe it’s her ankle.
‘It’s a twenty-minute walk, I think.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s quite far with a suitcase …
’ He’s not trying to be judgemental or difficult.
Just stating facts. A twenty-minute walk in the out-of-London fresh air honestly sounds delightful after that cramped train journey full of hazards, like trying not to get too close to Jess despite noticing how good she smells; trying not to overthink what it means that she allowed herself to be jostled into him; trying to concentrate on his book without being too obvious about the cover.
‘Oh, no,’ she says. ‘It’s not that. It’s just …’ She’s blushing now, and he’s wondering if, as is so often the case, he would have been better keeping his mouth shut. ‘I could really do with the loo. I had an ill-advised cup of tea just before leaving home.’
He tries not to smile at the coyness of her blush.
But it also takes every bit of the self-control he has carefully cultivated over the years not to ask the kind of question he spent his teenage years asking his younger siblings: Why didn’t you go when you had the chance?
The train toilet had been literally footsteps from their standing space.
In fact, they’d occasionally caught less than delightful wafts of odour from it.
‘Ah,’ he says, handing over the key. ‘I see. Well, in that case, why don’t you call an Uber, and I’ll see you at the house? I’d quite like a walk.’
Jess looks relieved at his suggestion. He chooses to believe it is the imminence of the toilet, rather than the twenty minutes away from him, that has this effect.
‘It’s a plan, Stan,’ she says. He hasn’t heard that particular turn of phrase in a decade, and it makes him smile.
Alex has never been to Godalming before, but it feels oddly familiar – perhaps because it’s the platonic ideal of a small British town, the kind of place Postman Pat might have driven around in his red van, with, of course, his black and white cat.
Alex takes his time walking to the cottage: thirty-two minutes, to be exact.
The introvert in him is mildly terrified at the idea of spending an entire weekend in someone else’s company – someone talkative, someone with opinions, someone whom he very much suspects is the opposite of an introvert.
Writing, more than anything, is an activity he likes to undertake in complete silence and solitude.
He’s never understood people who take their laptops to cafés and expect inspiration to strike with all that background noise, all those interruptions.
He’s also never understood the idea of co-writing – another reason this entire project seems doomed.
Writing is one man – or one woman – and their notebook and favourite pen, in silence, utterly concentrated.
Alex loves the feeling of fountain pen on smooth paper, gliding along, carrying his thoughts from left to right along the page.
He loves the smell of ink. The sense that these rituals link him back through time to generations – centuries!
– of writers that came before him and on whose shoulders he stands.
(He’d like to think that it links him forwards to the generations to come, too, but he is not so naive.
They write two-thumbed on their phones; they tap away at their keyboards, easily and happily and regularly distracted by the supposed delights of the internet.
If looking down on such ways of working makes him a curmudgeon, then so be it.
He’ll gladly be called a Luddite in exchange for knowing the joys of a quality fountain pen.)
Cafés, however, have their uses: namely, the use they were created for – the provision of quality hot beverages.
Though he invested part of his advance for his last novel in his own machine, he is yet to master the art of the perfect flat white.
On the way to the cottage – and only partially to delay his inevitable arrival and the onslaught of Jess’s ideas and sunny enthusiasm – he stops at Gail’s to pick one up.
And while ordering it, he remembers that during that first work meeting – the one in the coffee shop, where she let down her hair – her order was a flat white, too.
With one sugar, if he remembers correctly (which he does, but only because he has a good memory for random facts).
So while he’s here, buying one, he might as well buy two.
If nothing else, to make up for the fact that he’s never acknowledged that he remembers her as the girl from the bookshop, remembers their brief flirtation.
He’d only flirted like that because he’d thought there was nothing at stake, since he’d never see her again.
Flexing his chat-up muscles so that they didn’t entirely atrophy.
He knows he’s in no fit state for a girlfriend at the moment.
The way he’s writing – or not writing – is not so much a signal to him that he’s not doing brilliantly, as much as a giant red flag flapping in the wind and declaring that he’s got some things to sort out in his mind, and probably his heart, and the few therapy appointments he’s had so far have confirmed as much.
He didn’t expect the interaction with the blonde to have such an impact on him; he didn’t expect to still be thinking about the girl from the bookshop when he arrived at Nathan’s office; he certainly didn’t expect her to turn up at the meeting.
And he wouldn’t have expected himself to behave so appallingly when she did – a spoiled brat, a child – but he was embarrassed, and confused, and flustered, and that combination has never worked well for him.
All in all, better late than never: Jess more than deserves an apologetic flat white. Rounding the final corner as he makes his way to Ethan’s cottage, Alex hopes against unlikely hope that it will buy enough of her approval to at least start the weekend together on something like the right foot.