The Girl on the Train: A Novel

SUNDAY, AUGUST 18, 2013

MORNING

For some reason, the whole thing seems very funny all of a sudden. Poor fat Rachel standing in my garden, all red and sweaty, telling me we need to go. We need to go.

“Where are we going?” I ask her when I stop laughing, and she just looks at me, blank, lost for words. “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Evie squirms and complains and I put her back down. My skin still feels hot and tender from where I scrubbed myself in the shower this morning; the inside of my mouth, my cheeks, my tongue, they feel bitten.

“When will he be back?” she asks me.

“Not for a while yet, I shouldn’t think.”

I’ve no idea when he’ll be back, in fact. Sometimes he can spend whole days at the climbing wall. Or I thought he spent whole days at the climbing wall. Now I don’t know.

I do know that he’s taken the gym bag; it can’t be long before he discovers that the phone is gone.

I was thinking of taking Evie and going to my sister’s for a while, but the phone is troubling me. What if someone finds it? There are workers on this stretch of track all the time; one of them might find it and hand it in to the police. It has my fingerprints on it.

Then I was thinking that perhaps it wouldn’t be all that difficult to get it back, but I’d have to wait until nighttime so no one would see me.

I’m aware that Rachel is still talking, she’s asking me questions. I haven’t been listening to her. I feel so tired.

“Anna,” she says, coming closer to me, those intense dark eyes searching mine. “Have you ever met any of them?”

“Met who?”

“His friends from the army. Have you ever actually been introduced to any of them?” I shake my head. “Do you not think that’s odd?” It strikes me then that what’s really odd is her showing up in my garden first thing on a Sunday morning.

“Not really,” I say. “They’re part of another life. Another of his lives. Like you are. Like you were supposed to be, anyway, but we can’t seem to get rid of you.” She flinches, wounded. “What are you doing here, Rachel?”

“You know why I’m here,” she says. “You know that something . . . something has been going on.” She has this earnest look on her face, as though she’s concerned about me. Under different circumstances, it might be touching.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I say, and she nods.

I make the coffee and we sit side by side on the patio in silence that feels almost companionable. “What were you suggesting?” I ask her. “That Tom’s friends from the army don’t really exist? That he made them up? That he’s actually off with some other woman?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Rachel?” She looks at me then and I can see in her eyes that she’s afraid. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“Have you ever met Tom’s family?” she asks me. “His parents?”

“No. They’re not talking. They stopped talking to him when he ran off with me.”

She shakes her head. “That isn’t true,” she says. “I’ve never met them, either. They don’t even know me, so why would they care about his leaving me?”

There’s darkness in my head, right at the back of my skull. I’ve been trying to keep it at bay ever since I heard her voice on the phone, but now it starts to swell, it blooms.

“I don’t believe you,” I say. “Why would he lie about that?”

“Because he lies about everything.”

I get to my feet and walk away from her. I feel annoyed with her for telling me this. I feel annoyed with myself, because I think I do believe her. I think I’ve always known that Tom lies. It’s just that in the past, his lies tended to suit me.

“He is a good liar,” I say to her. “You were totally clueless for ages, weren’t you? All those months we were meeting up, fucking each other’s brains out in that house on Cranham Road, and you never suspected a thing.”

She swallows, bites her lip hard. “Megan,” she says. “What about Megan?”

“I know. They had an affair.” The words sound strange to me—this is the first time that I’ve said them out loud. He cheated on me. He cheated on me. “I’m sure that amuses you,” I say to her, “but she’s gone now, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Anna . . .”

The darkness gets bigger; it’s pushing at the edges of my skull, clouding my vision. I grab Evie by the hand and start to drag her inside. She protests vociferously.

“Anna . . .”

“They had an affair. That’s it. Nothing else. It doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“That he killed her?”

“Don’t say that!” I find myself yelling at her. “Don’t say that in front of my child.”

I give Evie her midmorning snack, which she eats without complaint for the first time in weeks. It’s almost as though she knows that I have other things to worry about, and I adore her for it. I feel immeasurably calmer when we go back outside, even if Rachel is still there, standing down at the bottom of the garden by the fence, watching one of the trains go past. After a while, when she realizes that I’m back outside, she walks towards me.

“You like them, don’t you?” I say. “The trains. I hate them. Absolutely bloody loathe them.”

She gives me a half smile. I notice that she has a deep dimple on the left side of her face. I’ve never seen that before. I suppose I haven’t seen her smile very often. Ever.

“Another thing he lied about,” she says. “He told me you loved this house, loved everything about it, even the trains. He told me that you wouldn’t dream of finding a new place, that you wanted to move in here with him, even if I had been here first.”

I shake my head. “Why on earth would he tell you that?” I ask her. “It’s utter bullshit. I’ve been trying to get him to sell this house for two years.”

She shrugs. “Because he lies, Anna. All the time.”

The darkness blossoms. I pull Evie onto my lap and she sits there quite contentedly, she’s getting sleepy in the sunshine. “So all those phone calls . . .” I say. It’s only really starting to make sense now. “They weren’t from you? I mean, I know some of them were, but some—”

“Were from Megan? Yes, I imagine so.”

It’s odd, because I know now that all this time I’ve been hating the wrong woman, and yet knowing this doesn’t make me dislike Rachel any less. If anything, seeing her like this, calm, concerned, sober, I’m starting to see what she once was and I resent her more, because I’m starting to see what he must have seen in her. What he must have loved.

I glance down at my watch. It’s after eleven. He left around eight, I think. It might even have been earlier. He must know about the phone by now. He must have known for quite some time. Perhaps he thinks it fell out of the bag. Perhaps he imagines it’s under the bed upstairs.

“How long have you known?” I ask her. “About the affair.”

“I didn’t,” she says. “Until today. I mean I don’t know what was going on. I just know . . .” Thankfully she falls silent, because I’m not sure I can stand hearing her talk about my husband’s infidelity. The thought that she and I—fat, sad Rachel and I—are now in the same boat is unbearable.

“Do you think it was his?” she asks me. “Do you think the baby was his?”

I’m looking at her, but I’m not really seeing her, not seeing anything but darkness, not hearing anything but a roaring in my ears, like the sea, or a plane right overhead.

“What did you say?”

“The . . . I’m sorry.” She’s red in the face, flustered. “I shouldn’t have . . . She was pregnant when she died. Megan was pregnant. I’m so sorry.”

But she’s not sorry at all, I’m sure of it, and I don’t want to go to pieces in front of her. But I look down then, I look down at Evie, and I feel a sadness unlike anything I’ve ever felt before crashing over me like a wave, crushing the breath right out of me. Evie’s brother, Evie’s sister. Gone. Rachel sits at my side and puts her arm around my shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, and I want to hit her. The feeling of her skin against mine makes my flesh crawl. I want to push her away, I want to scream at her, but I can’t. She lets me cry for a while and then she says in a clear, determined voice, “Anna, I think we should go. I think you should pack some things, for you and Evie, and then we should go. You can come to my place for now. Until . . . until we sort all this out.”

I dry my eyes and pull away from her. “I’m not leaving him, Rachel. He had an affair, he . . . It’s not the first time, is it?” I start to laugh, and Evie laughs, too.

Rachel sighs and gets to her feet. “You know this isn’t just about an affair, Anna. I know that you know.”

“We don’t know anything,” I say, and it comes out in a whisper.

“She got into the car with him. That night. I saw her. I didn’t remember it—I thought at first it was you,” she says. “But I remember. I remember now.”

“No.” Evie’s sticky little hand presses against my mouth.

“We have to speak to the police, Anna.” She takes a step towards me. “Please. You can’t stay here with him.”

Despite the sun, I’m shivering. I’m trying to think of the last time Megan came to the house, the look on his face when she said that she couldn’t work for us any longer. I’m trying to remember whether he looked pleased or disappointed. Unbidden, a different image comes into my head: one of the first times she came to look after Evie. I was supposed to be going out to meet the girls, but I was so tired, so I went upstairs to sleep. Tom must have come home while I was up there, because they were together when I came downstairs. She was leaning against the counter, and he was standing a bit too close to her. Evie was in the high chair, she was crying and neither of them were looking at her.

I feel very cold. Did I know then that he wanted her? Megan was blond and beautiful—she was like me. So yes, I probably knew that he wanted her, just like I know when I walk down the street that there are married men with their wives at their sides and their children in their arms who look at me and think about it. So perhaps I did know. He wanted her, he took her. But not this. He couldn’t do this.

Not Tom. A lover, husband twice over. A father. A good father, an uncomplaining provider.

“You loved him,” I remind her. “You still love him, don’t you?”

She shakes her head, but there’s no conviction there.

“You do. And you know . . . you know that this isn’t possible.”

I stand up, hauling Evie up with me, and move closer to her. “He couldn’t have, Rachel. You know he couldn’t have done this. You couldn’t love a man who would do that, could you?”

“But I did,” she says. “We both did.” There are tears on her cheeks. She wipes them away, and as she does so something in her expression changes and her face loses all colour. She’s not looking at me, but over my shoulder, and as I turn around to follow her gaze, I see him at the kitchen window, watching us.