time from the corner of her eye one pair of jean-clad ankles hurrying away beyond the pillar. She rose, as the carriage doors slid open, to face the puzzled regard of the boy.
`What you doing? What you think you doing?' Furious, confused, looking around in sudden panic. 'And where's… where's…?' The train tick-ticking, breathing impatience.
People appeared from nowhere, stepping aboard, others, fewer, alighting. `Where's…
Where's…?'
`She's gone, William. Get on the train, quickly. You're late.' Her voice emerged with brisk authority.
William's look of animal confusion vanished, replaced by a vacant gaze, the clearing features of a boy who has remembered well-rehearsed lines after a moment of panic. 'Who's gone?' he said loudly, jumping on to the train with unnecessary energy. 'Who do you mean?
Must be mad..
But as Helen followed, sat next to him, she watched him stretch and peer through the closing doors, scanning the platform as the train moved past, desperately seeking clues, a sight, a glimmer of the paste earrings or the plimsolled feet. Helen's limbs were trembling; so, she noticed, were his. They sat in silence, drowned by the noise of the train until it thundered through the tunnel into empty, floodlit Stratford. Outside Stratford, alongside the graveyard for cars, motion ceased entirely. The lights in the carriage flickered.
September summer: humid, storm-filled, feeling like winter darkness, an inky daylight black, scarcely relieved in the heavy-breathing train. Even less light in this last of all compartments and no people, either; William and Helen sitting as silent companions, frozen with unease.
He turned and looked at her with cunning curiosity. 'No one's gone,' he said with conviction. And then, 'I know you. You come in the bar. I know you. And you talk in court.
You're one of them.' He nodded vigorously; she nodded in turn. Sitting on a train, the two of them, lately prosecutor and defendant. Helen was glad that the resentment of the defendant was less often directed at the prosecutor than towards the policeman who felt the collar, and William was clearly feeling no resentment at all. Feeling nothing, apparently, apart from anxiousness to convince her in words of one syllable that he had been accompanied by no one. No one had gone: he had asked his questions of air.
`There are mice on the tracks, did you know?' he asked, beaming goodwill.
`Yes, there are,' said Helen. 'William, how long have you known Evelyn? I know her, too.'
Evelyn? Evie… Don't know Evelyn. What you mean? No one's gone.
Evie, Evelyn. Evelyn Blundell, the girl with the earrings. Your friend.'
`My friend… Yes, my friend. No, she isn't. Which Evie? Don't know her at all. Stop it, that's silly. Stop it.' He muttered in agitation, squirmed, and looked towards the door for escape. The train was obdurately still, locked in a semi-silent signal-failure zone between one civilization and the next, a kind of no-man's-land, while someone was probably calling someone else out of a pub. She patted William's arm to soothe the quivering; she was not a parent after all, not here to cross-examine.
To her surprise, he seized her hand, held it, examined it. 'Nice,' he said, 'very nice.'
She felt the first queasy tremor of fear as he parted her fingers and scrutinized them, then saw he confined his attention to a sapphire ring, Helen's only piece of sparkle, Bailey's only gesture of ownership. 'Nice,' said William, twisting to look at her with the familiar vacuous grin, still holding the hand, stroking it now, sighing slightly.
She smiled back; that action of face seemed prudent while she wished the train would move, which it did, slowly, clack, clack, a peaceful crawl, resigned to reluctant effort.
William swayed with the carriage, abandoning himself to movement, suddenly relaxed by the motion, reminded of the buses and the soothing sound of his mother's washing machine humming beneath his room. The train exhaled and stopped.
I like girls,' he said, apropos of nothing, and placed a hand on her thigh, hot through her skirt. Helen withdrew slightly, rummaged in her bag, discovered chocolate, and offered him some. 'Oh, goody,' he said. At least he was capable of distraction – not completely.
William was feeling affectionate, inquisitive with it. He pressed his shoulder against hers, warm through her blouse, hotter to touch than his somewhat grimy hands. He had removed himself from Evie and everything else, attached himself to present company. He liked her.
`
Do people… ' he asked, face contorted with the intellectual effort of formulating a question. `Do all people… people as old as you still do it?'
`Do what, William?' She was slightly fazed by the question, parrying for time without doubting the meaning of his enquiry.
`Do sex, I mean. I know some people older than you do it. I thought they got tired of it. They don't ever have pictures of them doing it. It must be horrible when you're so old.'
`Some people,' Helen replied drily, amused by the question despite herself and despite the hot hand on her thigh, which she gently removed, 'even older than me do it all the time.
But only if they want to. Which means it can't be horrible or they wouldn't do it, would they?'
The train, having started, slowed again. She felt an overpowering sense of the ridiculous.
Even when they're more than forty?'
Which is, after all, very old indeed, Helen reflected with even more amusement. I'll soon be over the hill if forty's the limit. And Bailey's already only a few years on the other side. Bailey would enjoy this conversation, seems to enjoy that which William is discussing, come to that. Hope he doesn't think it's horrible. Shows no sign of it, or waning powers either.
Must tell him this boy would imagine he is simply doing his duty.
Oh, yes, even when they're over forty. Or fifty or sixty.' Ugh,' said William.
`Why do you ask?' she enquired in calm conversational tones, offering more chocolate.
`To see if I'm right.'
About what?'
Oh, everything.' He waved a limp hand, fell into silence. Perhaps they could talk about something different, but William's mind, master of the non sequitur, remained on its own peculiar tangent.
`Mrs Blundell liked it,' he remarked, picking up Helen's even tone. 'She liked it a lot, but we thought she was silly.'
Helen's reactions were suddenly sharper, her body stiller, her voice on the same even keel.
'Oh, did she now? Well, I told you, a lot of people do like it. I suppose you saw Mrs Blundell in the woods?' A good enough guess, judging from the nodding.
William was forgetting his lines. 'Yes. Both of us saw her. With Evie's teacher, on a rug he brought. Very, very silly.' He giggled. `She looked horrible. All bare. Evie was very cross. I told her my mummy would never do that, never.' She was silent, waiting for him to continue.
I 'spect Evie was cross because they were our woods,' he added. `She said if her mummy and that teacher went to the woods, they might come up and find the summerhouse.
Sometimes they passed it. I watched them. They were all silly, like people get after drinking in our place. They came through our garden and out over the field. Evie was furious. 'What's she coming here for?' she said. 'If she finds us, she'll kill us. You first, me after. No, Dad'll kill me, slowly.' Never seen her as cross as that, but she does get very cross. Sometimes.
'She'll kill us,' she said…' There his voice faltered in a dim realization of too much spoken.
`Well,' said Helen, keeping her own voice as untroubled as her throat allowed, 'she didn't find you, so that's all right, isn't it?'
`Yes. I suppose so,' said William, slightly mollified, still driven to speak. 'But we found her, though.'
`You? When?' Too late to prevent the give-away sharpness of tone. 'When was that, William?'
But he was retreating fast, shrinking, remembering stricture and warnings, horrified by his forgetfulness of learned-by-heart promises.
On the ground. You know, dead. Evie fetched me. No, she didn't; I was there. I'm not supposed to say that. Oh, stop it, stop it, stop it.'
He was squirming in agony, his movements accelerating with the sudden speed of the train, possessed by a pain beyond enduring, electrocuted by the gravity of his own words.
