On the Edge [= Dead Gorgeous]

7

On Wednesday afternoons the Imperial College timetable was marked ‘Sport’. Some of the staff unselfishly turned out to referee football matches or cycle along the towpath shouting through megaphones. Vic went to bed with Antonia.

If it counted as sport it was of championship quality, brilliantly performed. He managed to be tender and passionate just as desired, alert to every signal she gave. She cried out repeatedly and gritted her teeth and promised herself she would never be parted from him. It was impossible to imagine it with anyone else.

The climax left every sport for dead. It should have been set to music and played at the last night of the Proms. Then they lay still.

Presently he pressed his hands into the pillow and eased himself upwards to get a better sight of her. ‘These are pretty terrific, too.’

‘I’ll settle for pretty.’

‘Just pretty, then.’ He continued to look.

‘Cover me up for the love of Mike. There’s a wicked draught coming in.’

He removed his weight and Antonia gripped the bedclothes and pulled them up to her neck. Vic found enough space to lie on his side, resting his hand on the flat of her stomach. She let it remain there.

‘I didn’t know you were cold.’

‘I was coming out in goosepimples.’

‘Is that what they were?’

‘Ha bloody ha.’

‘Want a fag?’

‘All right.’

They lit up. She waited a while before asking what she was dying to know.

‘Have you heard any more from America?’

‘No.’

‘Is it still on?’

‘I’m afraid so. Can’t we talk about something else?’

‘If you wish. What would you say to getting married next spring?’

He twisted around to face her and almost fell out of bed in the process. He grabbed her arm. ‘What?’

‘You heard, lover.’

‘You’re not free to marry anyone.’

‘I might be if I get a good offer.’

‘How come? What about Hector? I thought divorce was out of the question.’

‘Vic, just answer my question, will you? Would you marry me if I was free?’

‘Christ, I never thought of it as a possibility.’

‘We love each other, don’t we?’

‘Well, yes. But I don’t see how—’

She put a finger against his lips. ‘Yes, or no?’

The puzzled look remained.

‘Vic, I want an answer.’

‘Yes, then.’

‘Good. I don’t consider this a proposal, by the way. You can save that up for the appropriate time.’

‘When’s that likely to be?’

‘Not long.’

By Thursday Antonia had twice travelled the tube with Barry. She had waited for the evening exodus of bowler-hatted civil servants from the Stationery Office depot at 5.30. She’d taken the precaution of concealing her hair in a headscarf knotted at the front, factory-girl style, and she wasn’t wearing lipstick. She had kept her distance when Barry crossed Sloane Street and made a beeline for the tube station, but she needn’t actually have bothered because he hadn’t been looking about him. He’d had that faraway expression that you see on the face of regular travellers. Anyway, it was six years or more since she’d been to bed with him.

Those six years had taken their toll of Barry. The laughlines were deep creases now and his neck had thickened and was chafed by a collar that he’d obviously outgrown. He’d kept the handlebar moustache and, if anything, it was bushier than before, only it simply didn’t go with the bowler hat; he should have shaved it off on the day he was demobbed. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to draw conclusions from someone’s appearance after a day at the office, yet it seemed to Antonia that Barry had looked more jaded than he had in the old days after many nights of flying. She had no difficulty picturing him among the middle-aged men in hotel bars on Friday evenings who leered optimistically at anything in skirts.

Still, an ex-pilot’s reactions ought to be sharper than the average man’s. Better not underestimate him.

She had watched him buy his evening paper from the man at the underground entrance. He’d studied the front page all the way down the escalator, so she had been able to get really close to him. It was worth the risk because she could easily have lost him in the rush for the platform when the rumble of a train was heard.

Barry had evidently worked out the most convenient point at which to board the train. It suited him best to be at the rear, which meant walking the length of the platform to the Brompton Road end, behind the people waiting three and four deep. Each of the two evenings she had observed him he had allowed one train to draw in and leave, making no attempt to get on board. This way he guaranteed himself a front position at the edge of the platform. And a seat on the next train.

The position he took up was some twenty yards from the tunnel. The trains came in so fast that they couldn’t possibly halt until they were more than halfway along the platform.

It wouldn’t be a lingering death.

And now it was Friday and she was already on the platform, standing by a chocolate machine. She’d decided there was no need to follow him all the way down the escalator. She could wait here in confidence that he’d shortly be along. This time she had put on a plain blue and white headscarf knotted under the neck like most of the shopgirls and typists standing around her. She had a light brown coat with a belt and she was wearing gloves and flat shoes. She had an empty handbag looped over her arm.

She glanced at the clock overhead. Time enough. He should appear in two or three minutes. Two Uxbridge-bound trains had already come in, filled and gone. The platform didn’t empty between trains, so she wasn’t conspicuous among the numbers still waiting. Some people stood back anyway, wanting Hounslow trains.

Presently came the drone of another, building steadily in volume. The power of the tube thrilled Antonia when she had first experienced it at four years old. She’d found it vastly more exciting than the West End pantomime she was being taken to see. Even as an adult she preferred it to the buses.

Sparks lit the interior of the tunnel. She mentally rehearsed while the front of the train filled the void and thundered towards her. She saw the driver, picked out by the station lights, pale, staring ahead, his hands on the controls. The push would have to be perfectly timed and forceful.

One good shove.

A mass of red crossed her vision. The train came to a screeching stop and the doors opened. Suppose, after all, he sees a space and gets on at the other end, she thought, then told herself it wasn’t possible. Barry had his routine. She just had to keep her nerve.

The sliding doors stuttered and closed and that train moved out.

The forward move to claim front positions along the platform edge had begun again. Barry still hadn’t arrived. Antonia looked up at the clock and stared towards the far end.

She watched the train depart until the last spark in the tunnel, then shifted her gaze to the oncoming passengers, mentally sorting bowler hats from trilbies and checking for large moustaches.

She spotted him.

He was walking towards her in his black raincoat and carrying his scuffed leather briefcase in one hand and his newspaper in the other, with the umbrella hanging over his arm. He stared blankly ahead.

Antonia put her hand to her face as if to yawn and turned towards the map of the underground behind her. She could still watch Barry’s approach. He stopped barely five yards from her.

The faint hum of the next train increased in resonance to a braying note. People stood four or five deep the length of the platform. Barry turned his paper over to look at the sport. He would let this one go.

In it rushed. The ranks broke and converged on the doors. An announcer appealed to people to stand back and let the passengers off first. Barry folded his paper and tucked it away in his briefcase.

The doors parted, people stepped out and others surged forward to take their places. The voice on the loudspeaker system sounded shocked at the mayhem.

‘There’ll be another one along in a minute.’

Barry was becoming restless, looking about him to see who else was in contention for a seat on the next train. Antonia put her hand to her face again.

‘Stand back, please.’

The doors closed. Barry and scores of others stepped forward and formed the front rank before the train moved off. Antonia coolly advanced a couple of steps. She didn’t join the line yet. She would go closer when the moment was right.

Her concentration was total. The ability to blot out what she called distractions had always been one of her strengths. During the Battle of Britain air raids she had surprised everyone who took her to be skittish and unstable by her utter reliability plotting the movement of aircraft. At this minute Barry was as impersonal to her as the metal arrows she had prodded across the map.

More passengers kept streaming in from both ends of the platform. The next train was signalled. She heard it faintly. The congestion at the platform edge increased. She moved decisively and stood behind Barry, so close that she couldn’t any longer see the advertisements on the opposite wall. She had a view instead of a small section of the track, glimpsed between Barry’s leg and the next man’s. She could see the four rails Hector had painstakingly described for her. And the pit below the rails.

She was conscious of people closing up behind her, someone tall. She didn’t turn round to look. She had a middle-aged woman on her right and a soldier on her left.

This would all be in the timing. She listened acutely to the drone coming from the tunnel, heard the swishing sound made by the sparks. She had to judge everything on the sound.

Any second.

Barry’s back was beautifully straight, his legs very slightly apart.

Her eardrums throbbed to the train’s roar.

Now.

She took a half step backwards and leaned into the man behind her. The moment she felt her back in contact with him she turned her head and said loudly, ‘Stop pushing, will you?’

At the same time she thrust both hands hard into the small of Barry’s back.

He tipped over the edge like a skittle just as the train rushed from the tunnel.

Antonia’s scream merged with the screech of the brakes. Just as she’d estimated, the train travelled most of the way along the platform before it stopped. This time the doors didn’t open. Other women were screaming now.

She said, ‘Oh, God, we’ve got to get help!’ and pushed her way past the woman beside her, through the crowd and out of the exit tunnel.

In a moment she glanced behind. Nobody had followed her. She took off her headscarf and walked to the escalator.