Mandy looks at me accusingly now, as though I’m personally responsible for her children being taken into care. For the next fifty minutes we discuss her history and I listen to her excuses. We agree to meet next week and I write up my notes.
It’s just after three. Charlie’s train arrives in half an hour and I’m going to meet her at the station. I don’t know what we’ll do in Oxford on the weekend. I’m due to talk at a mental health symposium, although I can’t imagine anyone showing up, given the weather, but the tickets have been sent (first class) and they’ve booked me into a nice hotel.
Packing my briefcase, I take my overnight bag from the cupboard and lock up the office. Bronwyn has already gone, leaving a hint of her perfume and a lump of chewing gum stuck to her mug.
At Paddington Station I look for Charlie among crowds of passengers spilling from the carriages of the First Great Western service. She’s among the last off the train. She’s talking to a boy who is pushing a mountain bike with all the nonchalance of a Ferrari driver. He’s wearing a duffel coat and is cultivating sideburns.
The boy rides away. Charlie restores a set of white earbuds to her ears. She’s wearing jeans, a baggy sweater and an overcoat left over from the German Luftwaffe.
She offers me each cheek to kiss and then leans into a hug.
“Who was that?”
“Just a guy.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“On the train.”
“What was his name?”
She stops me. “Is this going to be twenty questions, Dad, because I didn’t take notes. Was I supposed to take notes? You should have warned me. I could have written you a full report.”
The sarcasm she inherited from her mother, or maybe they teach it at that private school that costs me so much money.
“I was just making conversation.”
Charlie shrugs. “His name is Christian, he’s eighteen, he comes from Bristol and he’s going to be a doctor—a pediatrician to be exact—and he thinks he might work in the Third World for a while, but he’s not my type.”
“You have a type?”
“Yep.”
“May I ask what your type is?”
She sighs, weary of explaining things. “No girl my age should ever date a boy her parents would approve of.”
“Is that a rule?”
“Yep.”
I take her bag and check the departures board. Our train to Oxford leaves in forty minutes.
“So is there any news I should know about? Any latest developments?”
“Nope.”
“How’s school?”
“Good.”
“Emma?”
“She’s fine.”
I’m interrogating her again. Charlie isn’t a talker. Her baseline demeanor is too-cool-to-care.
We buy sandwiches in plastic triangles and soft drinks in plastic bottles. Charlie puts her headphones back in her ears so I can hear the fuzzy thunga-thunga-twang as we board the train and sit opposite each other.
She has dyed her hair since I saw her last and has an annoying fringe that falls over her eyes. I worry about her. She frowns too often. For some reason she seems compelled to figure out life too early, long before she has the equipment.
The train leaves on time and we pass out of London, the wheels playing a jazz percussion beneath my feet. Houses give way to fields—a landscape frozen into still life, where the only signs of life are smudges of smoke rising from chimneys or the headlights of cars waiting at crossings.
A couple are kissing in the seats across the aisle, locked together. Her leg is pressed between his thighs.
“That’s disgusting,” says Charlie.
“They’re just kissing.”
“I can hear suction.”
“It’s a public place.”
“They should get a room.”
I glance at the couple again and feel a Pavlovian twinge of arousal or nostalgia. The girl is young and pretty. She reminds me of Julianne at the same age. Being in love. Belonging to someone.
Just outside of Oxford, the train slows and stops. The wheels creak forward periodically and then shudder to a standstill. Charlie presses her hand against the carriage window and watches a long line of men move across a snowy field, bent at the waist, as though pulling invisible plows.
“Have they lost something?”
“I don’t know.”
The train nudges forward again. Through the sleet-streaked window I see a police car bogged axle deep in snow on a farm track. A muddy Land Rover is parked on the nearby embankment. A circle of men, figures in white, are erecting a canvas tent at the edge of a lake. Spreading a domed arch over the spars, they fight against the wind, which makes the canvas flap and snap until pegs are driven into the frozen earth and ropes are pulled tight.