Platforms

Hannah Collett stood outside the entrance to King's Cross with a room in somebody else's house open on her phone. It was in Hitchin, twelve minutes' walk from home if the letting agent was being honest and twenty if he was not, with a narrow bed, a desk under the window and a chest of drawers the colour of weak tea. The advert called it a studio. Hannah could see a microwave on top of a mini-fridge and, in the corner of one photograph, what looked like the end of a shower curtain. She had looked at it four times since lunch. The first time had been practical. The second had been to check the price. The third had been after Simon sent her a message asking whether they were still going to talk tonight. This time she had no excuse. There was a note on her phone called THINGS, because giving it a more accurate title had felt theatrical. It contained eight lines: Short lets. Mortgage. Tell children together. Alternate school nights? Spare room if temporary. Grace exams. Jacob football Thursday. Money. The question mark after alternate school nights had been there for eleven days. Hannah had moved it twice and once changed it to three nights / four nights before putting it back. She had looked at a one-bedroom flat near the station and rejected it because there was nowhere for either child to sleep. Another place had two bedrooms but was far enough out that Jacob would need a lift to school, which meant Simon would end up doing the mornings anyway. The room on her screen was worse than both of them, except it was available immediately and came with a door she could close. Simon knew none of this. He knew they were unhappy in a way married people sometimes knew they were unhappy: thoroughly and mutually, without agreeing what the knowledge required them to do. He did not know she had worked out what half the mortgage was, or searched how long a separation had to last before it stopped being described as temporary. Hannah closed the note too. A man clipped her shoulder with a rucksack and said sorry without turning around. Hannah moved closer to the wall, out of the stream heading towards the concourse, and closed the advert before she could press the button marked REQUEST A VIEWING. Her phone immediately showed her the family group instead. GRACE: Can someone put money on my lunch thing JACOB: you spent it all at costa GRACE: That isn't relevant SIMON: Done GRACE: thank you favourite parent JACOB: corruption There was a photograph underneath, sent by Simon half an hour earlier. Jacob was standing in the kitchen with one foot on a chair while trying to reach the top cupboard, despite being tall enough to reach it perfectly well from the floor. Grace was behind him making a face at the camera. The cereal cupboard door was open. Somebody had left the milk out. Hannah enlarged the picture without meaning to. Simon had not appeared in it. He rarely did. For years they had accumulated family photographs in which one of them was missing because one of them had always been holding the phone: holidays in Norfolk, birthdays, Grace's first day at secondary school, Jacob with two front teeth absent and an expression of enormous satisfaction. Hannah had once meant to make proper albums. The pictures were still sitting in a cloud account in folders labelled by month. Another message arrived privately from Simon: Still on for later? No accusation, no heart, no attempt to make it sound lighter than it was. Hannah typed Yes and left it in the box, deleted it, typed Of course, deleted that too, and finally sent: Yes. On my way. The reply came while she was passing through the doors: OK x. That was Simon. He could still put a kiss at the end of a message about the possible end of their marriage because he had been putting kisses at the ends of messages to her since phones had numeric keypads. Removing it would have required a decision of its own. She put the phone in her coat pocket. King's Cross was in its evening mood: everybody moving with purpose even when they had no idea which side of the concourse their train would appear on. The big departure board drew faces upwards. People stood underneath it with bags between their feet, waiting for a platform number to become a fact. Others watched the smaller screens and began walking before the people beside them had noticed anything had changed. Hannah bought a bottle of water she did not need and a cheese-and-onion sandwich she probably would not eat. The woman at the till asked whether she wanted a receipt. Hannah said no, changed her mind as the woman was already dropping it into the bin, then told her not to worry. It was exactly the sort of interaction that made her think she should not be allowed to make major decisions on a Tuesday evening. Her train appeared on the board: CAMBRIDGE. The calling points ran beneath it in smaller lettering. Finsbury Park. Potters Bar. Hatfield. Welwyn Garden City. Then Hitchin, Letchworth, Royston and Cambridge. The platform number appeared and the movement across the concourse began almost at once. Hannah went with it. She had told Simon they needed to talk on Sunday afternoon. That had been the mistake, if she was going to nominate one. She had not said what about, only that they should probably sit down properly after the children were in bed. Simon had looked at her for long enough that pretending he did not understand would have been insulting. Then Jacob had come into the room looking for his PE kit, which was apparently an emergency requiring both parents, and Sunday became Monday. On Monday Grace had a migraine and went to bed at seven, and Simon said they could leave it another night if Hannah wanted. Hannah had wanted. That morning, standing with him in the kitchen before either child came down, she had said, "Tonight. I mean it." Simon had been making toast. He turned the dial down because it always burned on four. "All right," he said. That had been it. There had been no demand for reassurance and no sudden attempt to fix a marriage neither of them had yet formally admitted needed fixing. Simon kissed her cheek on his way out of the kitchen and asked whether she needed him to move his car so she could get hers out at the weekend. Hannah had spent the walk to the station thinking that if he had been a worse man, this would be easier. There had been no single conversation in which their marriage changed shape. Six months earlier Hannah had asked him, in bed, whether they were all right. Simon had been reading an article about replacing the shed roof and had put his phone down immediately. He took her seriously. That was one of the problems too. "I think we're knackered," he had said. She had laughed because it was true. Grace was revising, Jacob seemed to need driving somewhere every second evening, Simon's mother had been recovering from a hip replacement and Hannah's team at work had been running one person short since February. They had talked for forty minutes and agreed to go away for a weekend. They never booked it. Nothing dramatic happened after that. Simon still brought her tea when he made his. Hannah still picked up the coffee he liked when she passed the shop near work. They watched television on the same sofa and sometimes laughed hard enough at something stupid that Hannah wondered what exactly she thought was missing. Then a Saturday would arrive with no children's plans and no obligations, and she would find herself inventing errands because being alone with her husband for an entire afternoon felt like a test she had not revised for. She had stopped trying to decide whether that was sufficient grounds for leaving. It was simply where she had got to. At the platform the train stood with its doors open, clean enough to suggest it had started the day somewhere less crowded. Four carriages, blue and white, the destination glowing above the cab. CAMBRIDGE. People were already taking possession of pairs of seats by placing coats or bags beside them and looking faintly surprised whenever anybody asked to sit down. Hannah walked past the first carriage, which had too many schoolchildren, and through the second, where single seats were scattered between occupied pairs. In the third she found a window seat at a table, facing forward, and put her bag on the floor rather than the seat opposite. That small virtue earned her a man with a large black tool bag, who arrived thirty seconds later and said, "Mind?" "Course not." He slid into the seat opposite, manoeuvring the bag between his boots. Mid-forties, perhaps, work trousers with pale dust at the knees, navy fleece under a heavier coat. He had the tired, scrubbed look of someone who had washed his hands at the end of a job but not managed to remove the day from the rest of himself. "Cheers," he said, and began trying to untangle a charging cable. Hannah took out her own phone. The room advert was still open in the browser history; she closed the tab. A woman around Hannah's age sat diagonally across the aisle with a canvas shopping bag wedged between her feet. She had grey threaded through dark hair and kept checking the carriage doors as if someone else might still be joining her. Farther down, a younger man in a green overshirt was arguing quietly with a power socket. An older man had opened a paperback before he was fully settled. Across the aisle, a woman in a camel coat had placed a slim laptop on the table but was staring out through the window instead of opening it. Ordinary people, the kind Hannah saw three or four evenings a week and could recognise without ever knowing their names. Her phone buzzed. For one second she thought Simon might be calling, and felt the unreasonable spike of relief that came with being given a chance to postpone something for a reason she had not manufactured herself. It was only a message: Need anything from shop before I come home? She looked at it longer than it deserved. Milk, she typed, then remembered the carton sitting out in the photograph and deleted it. Nothing thanks x. She sent the kiss because not sending it would also have been a decision. The man opposite finally defeated his cable and plugged his phone into the socket under the table. "There we go," he said, mostly to himself. The train doors gave their warning tone. Hannah looked through the glass towards the platform. People were still hurrying towards them, one man breaking into a run although another set of doors stood open six metres behind him. A woman dragged a small pink suitcase into the next carriage just before the doors shut, and then the train moved. Hannah had the familiar, unreasonable thought that leaving the station had settled something. It always felt that way. Once the train was moving, work was behind her and home was ahead; the distance between them became someone else's problem. Tonight the problem was still waiting at the other end. She put her phone face down on the table, opened the sandwich she had not wanted, and took a bite anyway.