Under the Sign of the Moon

Photograph by Benoit Paillé

The train paused at a red light on its way into the station, waiting for a platform to clear. The passengers had put on their coats and put away their laptops and lifted their bags down from the luggage rack; some were already standing, queuing between the seats. Liverpool was the last station, the end of the two-and-a-half-hour journey from London; they were ready to move on but could not move anywhere yet. Quiet and stillness settled unexpectedly on the carriage. Because the forward motion of their lives was suspended while they waited, the passengers were suddenly more intimately present to one another—although no one spoke or made eye contact. Greta felt the change in atmosphere and looked up from her book and out the window, keeping her finger on her page. They were waiting in shadow, in a cutting between high walls of red sandstone.

In the rock, she could see, like art patterns following the natural lines of the strata, the chisel marks of the navvies who’d once cut and blasted down into it. The rock face was streaked with moss, and here and there buddleia and fern had rooted, scrawny because they lived out their lives in this subterranean railway kingdom; far above, ash saplings stood out against a pale sky. The strata in the rock were woven into sections of brick wall and the old bricks—small and vivid, rust-colored, crusted with salts—seemed to flow as if they, too, had been put down in sedimentary layers. Elegantly arched recesses were built into the base of the wall. The old engineering was as magnificent in its scale and ambition as a Roman ruin, Greta thought, its ancientness inscrutable and daunting and moving.

The man sitting across the table from her noticed that she was looking out. He told her that this was the oldest stretch of railway in the world, and that they used to have to haul the trains into Lime Street from here, because it was too steep for the early locomotives. “There are stables built into the rock for all the horses,” he said. “We’re inside a hill they call Mount Olive.”

Greta didn’t know whether she believed him: whether he was the sort of man who knew about things or the sort who made them up. She made an interested noise, then looked back down at her book without speaking. Since her illness began, at least in the intervals when she felt well enough to read, she had immersed herself in books almost fanatically, trying not to leave open any chink in her consciousness through which she could be waylaid by awareness of her body or by fear or disgust. She read only fiction, not history or politics, and nothing experimental or difficult that would require her to pause for reflection or argument. She had read a lot of novels recently that she would have disdained in the past.

As soon as she had settled into her seat at Euston, the man across the table had shown signs of wanting to talk. He had asked her how far she was going, and then whether she was travelling for business or on a holiday. Greta had answered, friendly enough, that she was going to see her daughter, Kate, who had moved to Liverpool recently. It hadn’t occurred to her at first that he might want their conversation to continue past these preliminaries. The gap between them had seemed too immense; she was almost sixty, and he was surely nearer to her daughter’s age. His rather distinctive hair was short and thick: dark blond, wavy, and wiry, with burnished gold threads in it. When he found out that Kate lived in Aigburth, he told her that he was born there, and seemed disproportionately astonished and delighted by the coincidence. Greta couldn’t hear any traces of a Liverpool accent, but he might have shed it or never had it.

There was something in his eagerness to please that warned her off. His good looks reminded her of those of certain damaged film stars and pop stars from her nineteen-fifties childhood: cheekbones and jaw chiselled too rigidly, mouth loose-lipped and needy, handsome head oversized in relation to the slack, slight body. He was neatly dressed: none of Kate’s male friends would ever have chosen to wear a belted short white mac, an open-necked yellow shirt, and a maroon V-necked jumper. If Greta hadn’t heard the man speak she might have thought he was a foreigner, a Central European, dressing according to a different code. He took the mac off at some point and folded it, laying it carefully on the seat beside him, on top of a leather box-briefcase with a combination lock. You didn’t see those briefcases so often now, she realized, because everybody carried a laptop. The briefcase was old-fashioned, like his clothes.

He kept telling her how much she was going to like Liverpool. It had a reputation, he said, but actually it had changed completely since the bad old days. Liverpudlians were the most warmhearted people you’d ever meet; they’d give you their last crust if you needed it. Greta thought she could hear the accent then, slipping into his speech—almost as if he were putting it on for her benefit. The only thing she didn’t like about Liverpool, she thought, was the way people who came from there harped on about how warmhearted they were. She didn’t bother to tell him that she had visited Kate once already, a year ago, just after her diagnosis. And she had lived in Liverpool for a while, too, in the seventies, with Kate’s father—who was not the man she was married to now. So she knew something about how much the city had changed.

Determinedly, she opened up her book.

“I can see you’re a great reader,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I wish I had more time for it. I used to love stories when I was a kid. Mum said the world could end while I was reading and I wouldn’t even notice.”

Smiling noncommittally, she pretended to be wrapped up at once in her novel—though for a few moments the words she stared at swam in her mind, not conveying any meaning. She was too aware of her companion’s presence across the table, and of having so firmly cut off his desire to talk. He seemed at a loss as to what to do without her. He didn’t even have a newspaper with him. But Greta had to save herself, and didn’t care if he thought she was rude or cold.

He didn’t show any sign of being offended. He spoke to her again from time to time—usually when, having forgotten about him, she looked up inadvertently from her reading. “How’s it going?” he asked jocularly once, nodding at her book as if it were a marathon test she’d set herself. The train stopped at Stafford, and he seemed to know all about that, too—he told her about a castle, and a battle in the Civil War. Was she imagining things, or did she detect faint traces then of a Midlands accent? He might be one of those chameleons, changing his coloration to match wherever he was. When he went to get coffee from the buffet he offered to bring one for her, too; she longed for coffee but refused, because she knew she’d feel obliged to pay for it with conversation.

She would have been quite sure, once, that this man was trying to chat her up—there was a certain persistent, burrowing sweetness in his attentions. However, that was out of the question now. When Greta put on her reading glasses to look in the mirror these days, she saw that her skin was papery and sagged on her neck and under her jaw, her face was crisscrossed by tiny creases. This wasn’t all the effect of her illness; much of it was just ordinary aging. She had spent yesterday afternoon at the hairdresser’s, having her hair cut and highlighted so that she could present a cheerful, sanely coping front to Kate, but still her brown hair was full of gray. Also, Greta couldn’t help believing that her problems, which were gynecological, showed on the surface somehow, barring her definitively from the world of sexual attraction. That part of her life was over. She didn’t want to read online about women who’d had what she had and gone on to enjoy exciting sex lives for years afterward. She dreaded the smiling pretense even more than the bleak truth.

When Greta wheeled her suitcase off the platform and onto the main Liverpool concourse, she expected to catch sight of Kate at once. The rush of emotion in this expectation took her by surprise: most of her feelings, over these past months, had been muted, as if she were persisting through grim effort. She anticipated with her whole body the instant when she would see Kate and they would be enfolded together; looking keenly around, she seemed to see her daughter already stepping forward—handsome, tall, spirited—out of the crowd. They weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who were always cuddling and touching, but surely they would embrace now, after everything that had happened.

“Kennel changes a dog, Muffin.”

Then she heard her phone ping and had to rummage for it in her handbag and put her glasses on to read the text. Kate would be about twenty minutes late—no hint of regret or apology. And Greta knew Kate: twenty minutes meant half an hour, at least. Her disappointment as she read was infantile. What did it matter if Kate was a bit late? But the idea of her daughter’s waiting for her had seemed for a moment like a rich gift of the good luck she had got used to doing without. She had been trying so sedulously not to want anything too much. Quickly she wiped her eyes with a tissue from her sleeve. Nothing had gone wrong; everything was still on track. She could use the time to get herself the coffee she had wanted earlier. Wheeling her suitcase over to one of the café franchises in the station, she didn’t see until the last minute that her companion from the train was there ahead of her, sitting at a table out on the concourse, beside the dark little den where the coffee was made.

He hadn’t seen her, either: he was bending his head over his coffee, blowing on it to cool it. At least she couldn’t accuse him of stalking her; it looked now, if anything, as if she were in pursuit of him. Away from the train, with his mac on and a paisley silk scarf tied around his neck, he didn’t seem quite so unfortunate; there was even something touchingly contained and self-sufficient in the way he sat absorbed in the steam from his cup, not texting or talking on his phone, no phone in evidence at all. His skin was rough and pitted, but the slanting lines and planes of his cheekbones were striking in profile, beautiful like those of a peasant in an old Central European photograph, though Greta thought he didn’t know it. When he did notice her—a wheel on her suitcase got caught on the leg of one of the wrought-iron café chairs, scraping it along the floor—he put down his cup with what appeared to be genuine pleasure at seeing her again. Concerned, he asked if everything was all right. Probably her nose was flushed red—that was usually what happened when she cried. She explained brightly that her daughter had been delayed, and she’d decided to have a coffee while she waited.

On an impulse, she paused beside his table. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

He leaped to pull out a chair for her. “Be my guest.”

This time, Greta allowed him to buy her a coffee, a cappuccino; he went to queue for it at the counter inside. Actually, she was grateful; she needed to sit down. She wasn’t in pain, exactly: there was only the deep ache where her womb once was, and a familiar draining sensation as if her blood were waves, dragging at the gravel on a shore. There was no need to hold herself so carefully apart from this stranger, she thought, just because he was needy and lonely. She was needy, too. They might as well keep each other company.

He was keen to talk about himself, when Greta encouraged him. He had come to Liverpool to visit relatives who lived in Blundell Sands, but they wouldn’t be home from work yet so he was in no hurry; he would have a little look around before he caught the bus. He had only a small suitcase with him, she saw, along with the briefcase. These relatives weren’t his own age; they were his mother’s cousins. Greta began to guess that he was one of those people who spent their youth involved with an older generation, until they themselves became elderly by association—and didn’t mind it in the least or try to escape. This would explain his clothes, and something quaint and dated in his manner. She could imagine him as the cherished boy in a strong extended family, which for no particular reason hadn’t produced many children. Such a good, obedient boy, and so nice-looking: they would be bemused by the fact that he didn’t have more friends his own age, or a girlfriend. Greta inquired about girlfriends and he reddened, said he was afraid not, not at present. He might be gay: she had already wondered about that.

He worked for his uncle, who managed a small wholesaler’s in Brentford, supplying foil containers and other utensils to the food trade. The Liverpool relatives had invited him to stay because he needed a change of scene: he was still getting over the shock of his mother’s death, six months ago. He and his mother had been very close, he said; he had lived at home to keep her company after his father died. It was easy to assume that families like this didn’t exist anymore: submissive, frugal, unpolitical, tribal. Greta knew for certain, as though she’d seen it, that last night he had laid out his clothes for the journey, along with his train ticket, just as his mother would have done for him when she was alive, and that he had checked several times to be sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. This was the world of Greta’s childhood, which she had rejected so absolutely. She knew that the tragic story of his mother’s visits to the G.P., her misdiagnosis, and her falling down unconscious in the street while she was shopping must have been recounted many times: it was as well-worn as the track of footsteps around an old carpet. You could feel the reality collapsing into the familiar safe phrases, becoming part of a routine, becoming myth: “The nurses in the hospital were very kind. They did everything they could. She looked very peaceful when they laid her out.”

Then Greta lifted her head and saw Kate in the distance.

“Ah, here’s my daughter!” she cried, triumphant, interrupting him, half standing up from the table to wave to Kate. She knew it was unseemly of her to abandon him like that mid-sentence: he was telling her something so intimate and so important to him, and she had encouraged him to tell her these things, had skillfully probed for them. Kate was wearing silky loose trousers, a cropped top tight across her breasts, showing her bare midriff, and some kind of military-style coat with yellow frogging, hanging open. She was the very opposite type to Greta’s new friend, not in the least meek or old-fashioned. The long rope of her hair, worn in a ponytail high on her head, was red by nature, dyed with streaks of a wilder red. Catching sight of Greta, she strode across the concourse toward her, impatient as if she weren’t the one who was late. “I don’t have the car,” she announced, only glancing disparagingly at her mother’s companion. “Boyd needed it today. We have to get a taxi.”

Kate always had an air of submitting to her mother’s kisses, rather than returning them: her quickly proffered cheek tasted of moisturizer, the skin so clear. There was hardly time for Greta to say goodbye to the young man, and they parted as if it were the merest accident that they’d been sitting at the same table. She hadn’t properly looked at him again, once she’d seen Kate. And yet, while she was smiling proudly, watching Kate make her way toward them, he had said something fairly astonishing—so quickly, and with such an air of its being an acceptable and reasonable suggestion, that Greta wasn’t sure at first that she’d heard correctly. Then she didn’t have time to respond before Kate was there, taking charge. He’d said that he would be at the Palm House, in Sefton Park, on Thursday afternoon, at two o’clock. If she wanted, she could meet him there.

When Greta lived in Liverpool, in the seventies, with her first husband, before Kate was born—in fact the very summer Kate was conceived—she wasn’t called Greta. Her name then was Margaret: Maggie. And Ian, Kate’s father, wasn’t strictly Greta’s husband, either, not by law. It was while they were staying with friends in that squat in Liverpool that they had devised their own marriage ceremony. Under the sign of the moon and the eye of the goddess, it began. With my body I thee worship. It was difficult to know, with Ian, just how much irony there was in this. He could be pretty mocking about phony mysticism. He knew about the real pagans, he said: he had read classics at York University, which was where he and Greta had met, though Ian had dropped out halfway through their second year. And he had a way of inciting other people to behave extravagantly, then looking on with gleeful amusement, as if he couldn’t believe how biddable they were.

Ian and Greta made little cuts on their thumbs in front of their friends in the squat, and mingled bloods, and ate their food from the same dish. He was smaller than she was, very skinny and lithe and excitable, always jumping about like a kid, with a silky beard and very pale skin and the same silky auburn hair as Kate’s. Sometimes he was exquisitely kind to Greta—especially in sex, but not only then. He loved it when she absorbed herself in his crazes, for planting things or baking bread or Hungarian folk music; they had talked seriously about moving to Wales together, to try subsistence farming. She had learned never to relax her guard, though. He could snatch his favor away from one moment to the next, retreating into a dark mood, leaving her bereft.

“So this is what you do when I pretend to leave, then come back unexpectedly in five minutes.”

Ian dropped acid for the first time on their wedding day, along with a gang of their friends. Greta was too afraid to try it, but said she would stay with the others to watch out for them. They went wandering around the streets at night, exclaiming over all the ordinary sights: telephone boxes and cars and garden shrubs. All natural things were beautiful; everything man-made seemed monstrous. Ian announced that he could see into the atomic structure of the paving stones under their feet, which was like a fluorescent grid of energy: he could have sunk through it if he’d wanted, but he consented to the laws of physics, allowing it to hold him up. They climbed over a fence into a park—it might have been Sefton Park—and headed for the open grassy slopes, where they lay on their backs looking up at the sky. Some of the boys built a fire out of fallen branches and stood talking to it. “Brother fire, we won’t hurt you,” they said. They found it funny and profound when someone asked whether the fire was heating them or they were heating the fire.

Then Ian wanted Greta to consummate the marriage with him there on the grass, in honor of the moon goddess: except that there wasn’t a moon, the night was cloudy, and the grass was wet. Obviously they had had sex many times before—but he insisted that this time was sacred. Greta said that she couldn’t, because of the others being there.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, coaxing her, lying half on top of her, rubbing her breast with his palm, covering her neck with little nibbling kisses. “Trust me: Margaret, Maggie, Marguerite. It will be different, because we’re man and wife. It will be amazing. Don’t be uptight, don’t be bourgeois.”

He often teased her for being bourgeois. His own family was far nastier than Greta’s—his father was a bully, who worked for the BBC, and his mother was an actress and an alcoholic. But perhaps it was worse to be safe and dull. Their lovemaking would be beautiful for everyone to see, he told her. “Knock knock, open up.”

“How come your title doesn’t change,” Greta said, “and mine does? You’re still man, but I’m wife? Why don’t you call yourself husband?”

Her feminism in those days consisted mostly of these niggling technicalities. Usually Ian tolerated them, as if they were of no importance. Now he stopped kissing her but stayed on top of her, his hand still on her breast; his breath on her cheek smelled sour. He was looking through the dark into her face—not at it but into it. Up to that point she had wondered whether the tab of acid was really having any effect on him, because he had sounded too much like himself, putting on what he imagined tripping ought to be like.

“I can see into your thoughts,” he said. “I can see them pulsing. I can see the little petty, sulky worms of your thoughts, eating you up because you’re dead. Poor little Maggie, everyone. So pretty, isn’t she? But I found out she’s dead.”

For a moment, Greta seemed to see what Ian saw, as if she were looking down at herself. The whole sum of her being had a kind of corpse-luminescence in the darkness: stiff and mechanical, inhibited. Because of her background, or perhaps just because of her intrinsic nature, there were certain levels of experience she would never be able to attain; she would never break out of the bounds of her reasonable self. Then she pushed him away and sat up and was upset and angry, and he ignored her, cutting her out of conversations as if she weren’t there.

The others all seemed by now to have passed into a world she couldn’t enter. Eventually she left them to it and made her way back to the squat; she spent her wedding night alone, sobbing and desolate, worrying that something terrible would happen because she’d abandoned them. Nothing terrible did happen—although the police turned up in the park, because of the fire, and chased them out. And she did find out, weeks later, that after she left Ian had made love on the grass anyway, with a girl called Carol, whom they hardly knew: a friend of a friend, passing through the squat. Greta had wondered why Carol left so precipitously the next day. When she confronted Ian, he asked if she thought she owned his body, just because she was married to him. “We’re not going to do any of that crap,” he said. “And, by the way, that trippy sex was amazing—like fucking the universe, for eternity. You should try it sometime. Honestly.”

Greta sometimes told stories about Ian to her second husband—the real one, Graham, who came later. Reliably, Graham would be outraged by Ian’s arrogance and swaggering selfishness. Whenever the two men crossed paths—Ian would take a fancy, every so often, to being involved in his daughter’s upbringing—Ian could be counted on to turn up hours late, to feed Kate the sweets that made her hyper, and to keep her up long past her bedtime, so that she had a sick headache the next day. He condescended with amusement to Greta and Graham’s domestic routines. Greta, by this time, was an English teacher at a comprehensive school, and Graham worked with disaffected teen-agers. Ian never settled down to anything so steady; for a while, he had a business buying old pine furniture and stripping it. It didn’t help that when Kate was little she adored her father, who forgot about her for months at a time: it was Graham who pushed her on the swings in the playground, packed her little bag for nursery school, got up with her at night when she had bad dreams.

There was something not quite honest, Greta knew, in the way she prodded Graham to say those dismissive and loathing things about Ian. Partly, it smoothed out certain tricky passages in their relationship, made Graham her defender. Otherwise, he might have wondered how much she still yearned, treacherously, for Ian—because there were aspects of the stories about Ian that she withheld. When he told her, for instance, about the “trippy sex,” Greta had actually laughed, because she knew that he had chosen the word “trippy” deliberately to flaunt at her, with its plastic, blaring garishness, calculated to make her curl up. Fucking the universe for eternity, really? He couldn’t mean it, not in those preposterous words. And when she’d laughed, Ian had laughed, too, and their quarrel had finished, as usual, in vengeful, untender lovemaking, the two of them gripping hard, staring shamelessly, right to the bitter end, or almost to the end. “Look at you,” Ian had said with amazement. “Just look at you.”

Ian died when Kate was nine, knocked off his bike by a lorry in London. And these days she didn’t want to hear anything about him; she called Graham “Dad,” which she had refused to do when she was a child. In the taxi from the station, she chattered insistently, and Greta knew that it was because she was afraid of hearing about her mother’s illness. Greta would find that they’d made a few changes in the flat, Kate said. They’d bought a new sofa, and because they couldn’t afford a new kitchen they’d painted the cupboard doors a different color. Greta guessed that Kate was vaguely aggrieved about the new kitchen—her sense of her entitlement to material things was somehow not greedy, just part of her natural force. She and Boyd were doing well at the university: the department had won an important research grant, which would fund their fellowships for at least three more years. Boyd and Kate both worked in Ocean Sciences, Boyd on the carbon cycle, Kate on fish stocks.

Greta sat forward to look out the taxi window, trying to spot landmarks from the seventies. “I remember once it was dusk,” she said, “and we were in a car. I don’t know whose car—Ian didn’t own one. And the road ran around in front of a great circle of Victorian buildings, so tall they blocked out the sky—so many windows. Huge hotels, perhaps, railway hotels. Then we realized these buildings were empty shells, half-ruined—you could see right through them in places. Like being in ancient Rome after the fall of the empire.”

The whole idea of her mother’s past made Kate uneasy. “Who was that creepy guy you were with at the station?” she asked suspiciously. “You were chatting merrily away together.”

Greta was practiced at presenting a face wiped clean of knowledge. “Just someone who was sitting there when I sat down,” she said. “There weren’t any empty tables.”

“Yes, there were.”

It wasn’t until Greta’s suitcase had been unloaded onto the pavement in front of Kate’s flat that Kate asked about her health, hastily, as if in passing. The flat was a recent conversion, in a detached house in a wide street planted with hornbeams, where a few houses were still crazily derelict.

“So what do the doctors say? Are they pleased with you?”

Greta was paying the driver. She didn’t mind that Kate always asked like this, appealing above her head to the doctors, as if her mother couldn’t be trusted to understand her own disease; it was only Kate’s way of channelling her emotions. Greta said she thought the doctors were pleased: they didn’t want to see her for three months. This was the truth, although she pronounced it with an air of blessed reprieve that wasn’t exactly what she felt. Her expectations lately were so muffled and diminished, and there was too much that could happen in three months.

Inside the flat, Kate solicitously made Greta comfortable on the new sofa, put the kettle on for tea; she had bought almond cakes from an organic place Boyd approved of. Kate could forgive her mother for being ill, now that she was allowed not to dread the worst—she could even forgive her for not wanting cake. “You have to eat, you know,” Kate said. “You’re horribly thin. It doesn’t suit you.”

“Aren’t they killing you?”

Greta closed her eyes, giving herself up to the kettle’s roaring undertow, the thud and rattle of the fridge door closing, the chiming of a spoon against china mugs, Kate’s low humming to herself, the central-heating radiators coming to life, clicking and easing. Greta’s awareness of her daughter’s coming and going was like a thick thread of feeling, connecting them materially. In these past months, her mind would quite often submerge like this in her surroundings. This is all there is, she’d think—being alive, just here, right now. It wasn’t a reductive or depressing insight; it was almost a form of happiness, the kind of apprehension religious people strove for.

Away from Boyd, Greta could find herself resenting him; you might have thought he was a tyrant, from Kate’s anxious attention to his opinions and judgments. He wouldn’t touch alcohol; he liked only European jazz; because of climate change, he refused to fly. But Greta and Graham had scrutinized him with deep suspicion and had to conclude that it was Kate who made the tyranny, for her own purposes—she who had never submitted to anyone before. And, if it was tyranny, then she was thriving on it, blooming and softened and eager in his presence.

Boyd arrived home, the first evening of Greta’s stay, laden with bags full of meat and vegetables from the farmers’ market he’d visited in the morning; he cooked a stir-fry, which was just the thing to appeal to Greta’s appetite. And, as soon as he was actually present, Greta remembered how much she liked him: fair and trim and rosy, light on his feet, with a neat round head and a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure. His fleecy clothes in primary colors were no doubt scientifically designed to keep him warm, or cool, or whatever it was he wanted. He was much better than Kate at asking sensibly how Greta was, and then not making a big deal of it but drawing her into more general conversation, doing her the courtesy of presuming that she was still interested in things. Boyd was definitely the kind of man who knew things. He had strong opinions, but they were always worth listening to. When Kate held forth about the degradation of the oceans she was indignant, as if it were everyone’s fault but hers; Boyd was more measured and realistic. Sometimes Greta even thought he colluded with her in amusement—which Kate didn’t notice—at Kate’s passionate partisanship. And no doubt his responses to Greta, when she didn’t know things or muddled her ideas, were tinged with the same, not ungenerous humor.

The life Kate and Boyd led wasn’t anything like Greta’s life had been, when she was in her thirties. For instance, Greta and Graham would have chosen to live on this street precisely because of its mixture of renovated houses with derelict ones. They’d liked to feel that they were living on the edge of something “real,” not retreating too far inside the safety of privilege; whereas, Boyd explained to Greta, unapologetically, that he and Kate saw this flat as a transitional step on their way to buying a house in a nicer area. And yet this younger couple were more likely to effect radical change in the world, for the good, through their work, than she and Graham ever had been. Their certainty and their energy warmed her—even if she couldn’t quite suppress her habit of critical observation. Boyd was comical, sorting the recycling with such earnest pedantry. And Greta enjoyed noticing that he had a weakness for sweet things—after he’d eaten his own almond cake, he finished the one that she had hardly touched.

She asked him about the cutting where her train had waited outside the station. Was it true that it was the oldest railway in the world? Someone had told her it was. Boyd thought it might be—the oldest passenger railway, at least. And, yes, they really had once hauled the trains up the last steep stretch into Lime Street station, because the old locomotives weren’t strong enough. But Boyd was skeptical when she mentioned stables. Horses would never have been strong enough to pull an entire train uphill. No, he thought that there had been some kind of pulley system—wagons laden with ballast going down, pulling up the coaches full of people. The evening began to be filled with their interest. Boyd looked things up on the Internet and read them out to Greta, about the building of the railways and the hard lives of the navvies. He was more or less right, it turned out, about the pulley system; Greta wondered whether she’d misunderstood the man on the train, who had mentioned horses, or whether he’d made a mistake. Kate didn’t care about the railways, but she was happy because Boyd wasn’t bored; he was enjoying himself.

That night Greta dreamed that she was at the Palm House in Sefton Park—although this wasn’t a place she remembered ever having visited in her real life. Her idea of it had obviously got mixed up with the memory of those Victorian hotels in their ruined grandeur; the high walls of the Palm House were precarious and toppling, and inside it was wildly overgrown with the exotic plants that must once have been cultivated there. In her dream, she was pushing through thick foliage—brittle, dusty leaves and clinging creepers and intricately fleshy blooms. And she was aware of someone else moving around nearby, rattling the spiky, dark-green leaves, grunting with puzzled and exasperated effort: at any moment they might come face to face. Then she must have wandered out somehow without meaning to. From outside, the Palm House looked more like a glasshouse, crazily dilapidated, its iron frame rusty and festooned with some kind of municipal tape, perhaps meant as a safety warning. A solid mass of plant growth pressed against the steamed-up glass inside and pushed out through broken panes. Dark figures seemed to be standing around the perimeter of the building at intervals, facing outward as if they were on guard. Greta woke up then, and opened her eyes in the pitch dark. She was on the sofa bed in Kate and Boyd’s spare room, which was also their study: lying on her back, which always made her snore. Probably that accounted for the grunting and the exasperated efforts.

Kate had managed to free up some time to spend with her mother, but on the Thursday, as it happened, she needed to go in to work. Greta reassured her that she would be happy spending the day by herself. She would go out for coffee to that friendly place nearby where Kate had taken her. And if the weather was fine she might manage a stroll in the park afterward.

On Thursday morning, when Boyd and Kate had gone and she was alone in the flat, Greta took a long time getting ready. She knew she had to pace herself, for these efforts; when she took a bath, she was careful not to wet her hair, which still looked all right from the hairdresser’s, because washing and drying it would use up too much of her strength. Then she put on the nicest outfit she had brought with her: a dark-navy cord skirt and red wool shirt and navy cashmere jumper. She even got out Kate’s ironing board and pressed the skirt, which was creased from her suitcase. Sitting at the mirror in Kate’s bedroom, she made up her face, beginning with moisturizer, then putting on a very light foundation—which she never used to wear but thought she needed now, to make herself presentable. It seemed significant, but not unbearable, to be confronting her own worn-out face with such purposeful attention—pulling it into the old grimaces, creaming and painting and smudging with her fingertip—in the mirror that usually reflected Kate. In Greta’s imagination Kate’s youthful looks were somehow balanced against hers, redeeming them. Not that Kate wasted much time staring at her reflection. Her beautifying was still lordly and dismissive: fastening the long tail of her hair in a few quick movements, tugging earrings hastily into her piercings, stooping to the mirror to draw thickly with black eyeliner along her lids, finishing with that bold upward stroke. Kate could have gone naked into the street and been lovely.

The place Greta went for coffee was around the corner from the flat, in a row of independent restaurants and small shops selling home-baked bread and local pottery. A converted chapel offered Pilates and art classes, and Sefton Park was beyond that, at the end of the road. Greta bought a copy of The Guardian and found herself a corner by a warm radiator in the shabby red-and-yellow-painted café-bar. “It’s a hippie place, Mum,” Kate had said. “Just your kind of thing.”

Students were working on laptops; a couple of men probably Greta’s age, with flaring drinkers’ faces, were on to pints already, at the bar. Young mothers had escaped from home to gossip with their friends, steering their bulky pushchairs in beside the tables. There was plenty of room—no one would mind if Greta took her time over her coffee. It was a relief to be away from Graham for a while, she thought, though the thought wasn’t drastic or hostile: she never wavered, these days, in her appreciation of his kindness. When she looked at her watch at quarter to two, she decided to buy herself a second cup of coffee; then, on impulse, at the bar she asked for a glass of Pinot Grigio instead, though that was risky in the middle of the day. She was wary of alcohol, in her weakened state.

“What if we’re just a ship in somebody’s bottle? Yar, here comes me existential crisis.”

Although it was very ordinary wine—Graham would have refused to drink it—the cold green taste of each mouthful was heady and transforming, worth whatever it would cost her afterward. She began to feel liberated and exhilarated, just as she might have felt when she was twenty. It occurred to her—but very calmly, the way you might describe a limb getting over an attack of pins and needles—that she was coming back to life. And yet all her attention was focussed on what was in the newspaper, not on herself. She understood that her own experience was a tiny atom beside the cold, hard masses of history and politics, full of cruel truths. Boyd had read to her, the other night, about the men who had died cutting or tunnelling through the rock to build those early railways: killed in explosions or by runaway wagons, or crushed by falling stones, or by the buckets that carried the stone—and the men—up and down in the shafts. Twenty-six were killed, to make one tunnel.

She didn’t look at her watch again until two-twenty: it was surely too late now, for any meeting in the Palm House. Then, glancing out the café window, she actually saw the young man from the train walking purposefully along the street, away from the park. So he had turned up; Greta had begun not to believe in the meeting, thinking she must have misheard him. This proof of his independent, real existence was dismaying, because he’d come to seem a figment of her fantasy: in her memory, she had smoothed him out, forgetting that in his looks there was something unsettling and blatant—the thick lashes and coarse skin and big, sensuous mouth were in excess of any personality he’d shown her. His expression was intent and preoccupied; he wore his white mac and was still carrying his briefcase, and she was jolted by a pang of guilt for his loneliness. As he passed close by the café window, she tapped on the glass to attract his attention. Looking around, he was startled and forlorn. She had caught him out in his desolation: they were strangers to each other; he might even be angry with her because she’d let him down.

Smiling, placatory, Greta beckoned him inside. As soon as he recognized her, she saw him smother the raw truth she’d glimpsed, preparing his bright face for her approval like a good boy. While he made his way toward her—rattling at the wrong door first, which didn’t open—she was already regretting the loss of her solitude. He looked out of place in the hippie bar: he had even put on a tie under the maroon jumper, perhaps in her honor. She wanted to buy him a drink in return for the coffee at the station, but he insisted that he’d never let a lady pay for anything, and it wasn’t worth arguing with him. He bought himself a Coke, and got her another glass of wine, though she’d said she didn’t want one, and really didn’t. Still, once the wine was in front of her she couldn’t help taking swallows of it, just to ease the awkwardness of the situation. He didn’t mention that she hadn’t turned up to meet him. In fact, he said he was so glad she’d come, as if the bar had been their plan all along; counting his change carefully, he put it away in a little purse in the pocket of his mac.

“I knew you were an easy person to get on with,” he said. “As soon as I saw you.”

“I’m not really very easy. You don’t know me at all.”

He insisted that he was a good judge of people, he could always tell. Then they exchanged names: he was Mitchell, and she explained that she was Greta, short for Margaret. Astonished and delighted, he said that Margaret was his mother’s name. “You see, it’s funny because I had this feeling, before you even told me. I just knew what you were going to say.” Greta wasn’t sure that she believed in this coincidence, although it would be a strange thing for him to lie about. She remembered the impression she’d had on the train, that he was a chameleon making himself up to fit into any circumstances—to please her, or so that he could appear competent and connected. The wine was making her dizzy. “Kate’s father persuaded me to change my name to Greta,” she said. “Even before Mrs. Thatcher, he hated Margaret.”

“Are you divorced?”

She explained that Ian had died in an accident, long ago. “Though we weren’t together by then, anyway. And I’ve been married for years to someone else.”

“But I suppose Kate’s father was the love of your life.”

Greta was aware of laughing too loudly, and thought people were looking at them. They might imagine that Mitchell was her son or her nephew. Or they might detect something fervid and artificial in her reactions to him, and wonder whether he was a con man tricking her out of her money, or a gigolo she was paying for. She said she didn’t believe in that kind of love. It turned out that Mitchell believed not only in true love but also in destiny. Certain individuals were fated to be together. Everything that happened had its purpose, he said, even if we couldn’t see it. Yet, all the time he was setting out these platitudes with such solemnity, Greta felt sure that they weren’t the real content of his thoughts, just as her own skeptical, condescending cleverness, when she argued with him, wasn’t the real content of her thoughts, either. This conversation took place on the surface, while their real lives were hidden underground beneath it, crouching, listening out, mutely attentive. Mitchell’s physical reality was like a third presence at the table: his bitten skin and slanted, suffering cheekbones.

“I brought something for you,” he said. “It’s a present.”

Greta protested anxiously that she didn’t want any present, but he ignored her and twiddled with the combination lock on his briefcase, then lifted the lid importantly and took out a thick paperback book, well-read, its pages furry with use. Judging by the cover illustration and the title in embossed gold letters, it was the kind of historical novel Greta wouldn’t dream of reading: a gritty, working-class romance, all arrogant mill owners and salt-of-the-earth girls in shawls and clogs.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I hardly know you.”

“Please. I want you to have it. I know you’ll enjoy it.”

Thrusting the book at her, he managed somehow to knock over his drink; sticky Coke ran down the edge of the table and onto her skirt, though she shoved herself smartly backward in her chair. She had thought he was just drinking Coke, but she could smell now that there was alcohol in it, too, something sweet and strong—rum, perhaps.

“Oh, Jesus!” Mitchell said. “Jesus, I’m so sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t make a fuss.”

While Greta rummaged for a packet of tissues in her handbag, Mitchell ran to the bar for paper napkins. When he came back he knelt on the floor in front of her, dabbing at the wet patch on her skirt. “Will the stain come out?” he said.

“Don’t fuss. It’s nothing, honestly. It won’t stain.”

Their table was in a little nook beside the window, so that he wasn’t easily visible to the other customers. Suddenly he dropped his head into her lap, face down between her thighs. It was so unexpected, and his head weighed so heavily, that at first Greta thought he must have passed out. She could feel the heat of his breath through the wet cloth. She pushed at his head, not liking the feel of the coarse wire of his hair in her hands.

“Get off me,” she said urgently and quietly, not wanting to draw anyone’s attention. “Get up right now.”

He lifted his head and looked at her blearily, as if he hardly saw her, as if she’d roused him out of sleep.

“Leave me alone,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“You’d better go. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

Obediently, he got to his feet then, and he grabbed at his mac and briefcase and headed to the wrong door again, tugging desperately at the handle. Greta wouldn’t look up to see him go; she was burning with humiliation, exposed to all the customers in the café. He had left his book on the table and she opened it, just so that she didn’t have to see whether anyone was watching. A business card was tucked inside the front cover, with Mitchell’s name printed on it, and the name of the company he worked for. His phone number was circled in Biro. And there, written on the flyleaf of the book, was her name. “To Margaret,” it said. “With love.” Greta was confused, and for one long moment she really believed that it was fated, that this stranger had known her before he ever met her, and that he had written her name inside his book before she even told him what it was. ♦