The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [19]
“Hell of a way to spend a weekend in London,” he said as he held her arm and they walked toward her train.
Looking at him, she smiled. “In sickness and in health.”
Later, she wondered why she’d said it, because she knew she’d put meaning into the words. It was an inflection in her voice that just came out. She had been trying to make it light and funny but she knew it hadn’t sounded like that. Whether she meant it or not she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to think about it. All she remembered afterward was Paul taking her into his arms and kissing her. It was a kiss she would remember all her life, rich and exciting, yet at the same time filled with a strength and self-confidence she’d never before experienced with any man.
She remembered watching him from her compartment window as her train pulled out. Standing there in the massive station, surrounded by trains and tracks and people. “ Arms folded over his chest, staring after her with a sad, bewildered smile, and with every click of the wheels, growing smaller and smaller, until, at last, she was out of the station and could see him no more.
Paul Osborn had left her at 7:30 Monday morning, October 3. Two and a half hours later he was in the duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport, killing time before boarding his twelve-hour flight back to Los Angeles.
He was looking at T-shirts and coffee mugs and little towels with the London subway system printed on them when he realized he was thinking of Vera. Then his flight was announced and he waded through a sea of milling passengers to the boarding area. Through the window he could see his British Airways 747 being fueled and loaded with baggage.
Turning away from the plane, he looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven and Vera would be on board the Hover-speed, crossing the English Channel to Calais. By the time she reached her grandmother’s, the two would have little more than ninety minutes before she rushed off to catch the two o’clock train to Paris.
He smiled at the thought of her helping the eighty-one-year-old lady open birthday presents and then joke and laugh with her over cake and coffee and wondered if by chance she would mention him. And if she did, how the old woman would respond. And then, in his mind, he saw the succession of goodbye hugs and farewells and chastisements for so short a visit as Vera waited for her taxi that would take her to the railroad station. Osborn had no idea where Vera’s grandmother lived in Calais, or even her last name for that matter. Was it her maternal or paternal grandmother?
It was then he realized it didn’t make any difference. What he was really thinking about was that Vera would be on the two o’clock Calais-to-Paris train.
In less than forty minutes his bags were pulled from the 747 and he was in” the check-in line for the British Airways shuttle to Paris.
11
* * *
VERA WATCHED from the window of her first-class compartment as the train slowed and came into the station. She’d tried to relax and read for the few short hours she’d been on the train. But her mind had been elsewhere and she’d had to put her reading material aside. What impulse had caused her to introduce herself to Paul Osborn in Geneva in the first place? And why had she slept with him in Geneva and then gone with him to London? Was it simply that she had been restless and had acted on a whim at the attraction of a handsome man, or had she immediately sensed in him something else, a rare and kindred spirit who shared on many levels an understanding of what life really was and what it could be and where it might lead if they were together?
Suddenly she was aware the train had stopped. People were getting up, taking their luggage from the overhead racks and leaving the train. She was in Paris. Tomorrow she would go back to work, and London and Geneva and Paul Osborn would be a memory.
Suitcase in hand, she stepped from the train and moved along the platform in a crowd.