Wychcombe

The water tower appears at the wrong window.

For an instant it rises above a line of poplars, where the ground drops away and shows the grey tank beyond the treetops; the train has already hidden it again behind the embankments by the time Andrew starts working out which side of the carriage he sat on the summer before. His mother always asked at the ticket office for seats facing the engine, that much she did, but nobody ever asked for a side, and now that he wants it back he finds only the window as it was then, with the tower in it and no carriage around it. He rests his forehead on the glass, which holds the heat of the afternoon. Mown meadows with the bales still scattered, hawthorn, a yard with two sheets on the line, a road that comes alongside the railway and leaves it at once. The tower appears again further on, this time where he expected it.

At Reading, on the platform, his mother gave him the ticket, two sandwiches in greaseproof paper and a sentence: tell Aunt Ida I’ll write. His father wasn’t there. His father, at breakfast, had told him to tell his mother that his father needed the car on Saturday, and his mother, washing the cup, had told him to tell his father that she was the one who needed the car on Saturday. Since January that is how they have talked at home. Andrew carries the sentences from one room to the next, carries them even when they are in the same room, and he has learnt to do it well: he knows where to take a word out so that it lands less hard, he knows the voice must be kept level, he knows to wait until the other one has put down their fork. Nobody at school knows. On the train, for the first time in months, he has nothing to carry to anyone, except that one sentence for Aunt Ida, which is light and can be handed over straight away, and then it is done.

The suitcase under the seat won’t come out. He manages to drag it half out; a corner knocks the shoes of the man opposite, who draws his feet back, and at the second attempt the suitcase jams. The man offers a hand. Andrew shakes his head and pulls; the man waits a little longer, and in the end he is the one who tilts it, just slightly: the suitcase comes out with a jerk.

On the platform the air has been standing still for hours and smells of hot iron. Along the line the grass is the colour of a crust of bread, and where the ballast ends someone has burnt the scrub: a straight black strip runs beside the railway as far as the bend, with a thread of smoke that does not rise. Under the canopy there is a woman with a handbag held in front of her in both hands, at waist height, like a tray. She does not move until he has dragged the suitcase into her shadow.

‘It’s me,’ she says.

Andrew had known from the handbag. Aunt Ida is his mother’s aunt, and since he was seven she has been his too. He gives her the kiss on the cheek that she offers by tilting her head, and he smells the wax she puts on the furniture on Fridays. Aunt Ida looks at his neck for the jumper he isn’t wearing, then lifts the suitcase a hand’s breadth, changes hands and guesses the books. Andrew hands her his mother’s sentence. She says, Good, and asks nothing more.