Serial Monogamy (2 page)

Nelly was looking down at her skirt when the accident happened.

She had been gazing out the window, the way one does on trains, watching the gentle Kentish countryside unfold.

And then she had looked back at Charles with a quick, small glance of intimacy that expressed both an enduring bond—for good or for ill, she would not have been there without him—and a fleeting anxiety over their impending separation. Another hour or so and they would reach Charing Cross and they would be off in their own directions. She would never have dared tell him that, in their early days together, if their bags were light, her mother would sometimes simply pocket the fare for the hackney that he gave them and add it to the housekeeping while they squeezed onto an omnibus. But now they travelled like grand ladies, with hat boxes and trunks, and would require one of the four-wheeled coaches that would be waiting
outside the station to transport them in style. Charles would tell an attendant on the platform that he believed the ladies in carriage five required the services of a porter before he slipped into the crowd, leaving them to find their own way to their lodgings. Once there, they would make do with an egg for supper and take to their beds early. They led a different life when they were not with him.

But for the moment they were with him. Nelly was wearing a day dress that had been bought on the Rue de la Paix and could not stop admiring the sheen of the fabric, a pale blue silk. It was an utterly inappropriate thing to be wearing on a railway journey, with all the soot and the grime in the carriages. Her mother had said as much when she appeared at breakfast that morning before they left for the station. But the dress was new and Worth was the latest thing, and Charles had said, “A beautiful dress for a beautiful girl” as he bought it. Nelly had felt thankful to still be a girl, and she wanted Charles, when he said goodbye that day, to remember her that way.

There had been a time when she would never have imagined owning a dress from Paris. Her sisters, perhaps. More talented than she; more forceful, certain to be leading ladies on the West End someday, with fame, fortune and Paris gowns to follow. She had dreamed of it for them, even if it had not come to pass, but she never imagined it for herself. In truth, after the events of the past year, she
did not know what to imagine for herself and preferred on the whole not to think of it. This day she simply concentrated on the joy of wearing a beautiful dress; it must mean a fresh start, and at that moment she was looking down at it with some kind of thankfulness. And so the crash, the horrible lurching, the ghastly backward tugging and all the hard metallic sounds around them and the cries of horror and despair became forever associated in Nelly's mind with the ripple of the folds in a piece of powder blue silk.

It began with a noise, a persistent whistle, raising the alarm. There was something panicky about the way it was repeated on a higher and higher note, but it was only in retrospect that they read it as a warning of what lay ahead. At the time it just sounded like the engineer's whistle calling to the brakeman and indeed the train began to brake, strongly at first and then violently, with the screeching of metal on metal and, as they looked up at one another in surprise, the train began to lurch from side to side.

Nelly screamed, and clung to Charles, sitting on the seat beside her. They had the carriage, all six seats, to themselves—Charles always arranged this privacy for them—and her mother, discreet as ever, had been sitting across from them and in the far corner, facing the engine. As the train started shifting, her expression of concern changed to horror and she now flung herself across the narrow space between the two rows of seats and into
Charles's arms. So, there the trio clustered, with the gentleman sandwiched between two hoop skirts, his linen suit pressing against blue silk on one side and a sensible purple muslin on the other, all three of them clinging to one another as the train seemed to settle briefly back into a regular forward motion before suddenly there was the most horrible grinding and screeching, like the braking but worse. They could hear cries from other passengers in the compartments on either side of them, but these were soon drowned out by a ferocious series of crashing sounds, one after another, as though some giant were striding through a warehouse full of wooden crates, knocking down towers of them as he went. But this awful noise was not the worst of it. It was the sensation that accompanied it, that the passengers were being pulled backwards, jerked back down the track. Later they would say to one another, when trying to remember the exact order of things, “It all happened so fast,” and yet that moment also unfolded appallingly slowly, the three passengers sitting there in horror, wondering how far the carriage would slip before it stopped.

Suddenly, they were falling, all three flung from their seats to the floor as the other side of the compartment collapsed down in front them. Nelly tried to stop her fall with her hand but could feel something sharp cutting into it while Charles's larger body fell heavily against hers. And then, with one final crash, it all stopped.

They sat up and found themselves clutching one another on the floor of the carriage, tumbled together
in one corner like gumdrops at the bottom of a paper bag. The seats they had occupied were now several feet higher than the ones across from them: the crash had left the compartment at a forty-five-degree angle, and as the immediate shock passed, Nelly became aware not only that her hand was bleeding profusely but also that their carriage kept shifting slightly, as though trying to settle into its improbable new position.

Outside, there were voices, some yelling instructions and demands, others simply calling for help, but in the compartment it was oddly silent as the three passengers waited for the movement to stop. Charles seemed to realize their predicament first. He turned to his older companion. “Are you hurt, Mrs. Ternan?”

“No,” she replied. “I think I am fine. I'll just see if I can stand…”

“I wouldn't do that. Stay down and try to move as little as possible. We don't want the carriage to fall any farther.”

“Nelly's bleeding,” she said, noticing her daughter's hand for the first time.

“It's all right. I've just cut myself. There's broken glass.” Charles pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wrapped it around her hand and then, very gingerly, sat up high enough to raise his head above the window. He looked about in both directions.

“I think I can climb down here,” he said. “The embankment looks to be within reach. I'll see if I can jump down and get help.”

He turned the handle of the compartment door, pushing it outwards and up into the air, and then carefully crawled into the opening and peered down.

“Should be able to manage it,” he said as he began to swing his legs into position and attempt to shimmy himself up and out the opening without making any sudden movements. He was in his fifties now—only a few years ago Nelly could not have imagined such an age as anything but decrepitude, but today she recognized it as the prime of mature life—and he was still athletic, sprightly when he needed to be. He seemed to have found firm footing beneath him for he slipped himself down from his perch and, as his head disappeared from view, they could hear the thud of his feet landing on the ground.

“Are you all right, sir?” Amid all the other noise, the voice that greeted him sounded close at hand. “Why, I know you…”

“Do you now?” Charles's response was almost jaunty.

Inside the carriage, Nelly froze.

“Sure I do. It's Mr. Dickens.”

And it was then that Nelly knew they were sunk.

D
ickens wasn't really my thing. That was Al's subject area. He was the big man in comp lit, the expert on Dickens' reading of
The Thousand and One Nights
, the prof whose devastating combination of an olive complexion, a Persian surname and a slight English accent—picked up when he changed planes at Heathrow en route from Tehran to Montreal aged thirteen, I guess—attracted a bevy of admiring undergraduates, girls with long tresses who had thought they might like to do a master's thesis on Jane Austen until they met him. But people often assume you share your spouse's interests.

The Dickens serial was first proposed to me at a Christmas party. In retrospect, I wondered if the whole thing had been a set-up, the party organized so the publisher could suggest his project in circumstances where it would be difficult for me to refuse. At the time, however, I just thought Frank Randle was trying to be kind.
He is the book editor at
The Telegram
, and I write reviews for him from time to time.

I gave up academia and all pretense of a serious interest in Dickens a decade ago; I wrote my first novel, a silly little thing about a girl obsessed with Jane Austen, and when a publisher took it on, I quickly abandoned scholarship. Without anything else to do and a promising advance, I managed to produce a second one in two years. It was published straight to the international best-seller lists a few months before the twins were born. Public taste is always something of a mystery to me—perhaps readers liked the happy ending and the fact I kept it short—but the sight of me on the daytime talk shows, eight months pregnant and promoting yet another hit, certainly contributed to the notion women can have it all. I was able to hire a nanny and returned to writing before the girls were three months old. I was soon making more money than a comp lit prof, much to Al's annoyance, I suspect, although he always said he was proud of me. His colleagues at the university, on the other hand, found it difficult to hide their contempt. My books aren't romances per se; they don't even necessarily feature happy endings any more, they just conclude with hopeful moments that allow the reader to decide whether widows have the strength to go on or divorced dads find love for a second time.

Frank, meanwhile, assigns me impenetrable literary experiments about which I dutifully rave or sexually
explicit novels penned by writers covered in tattoos that I defend against anticipated slights. I get to prove my intellectual credentials and he gets to parade my name through his pages. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.

That was not, however, why he had invited me to a drinks party in the cramped Victorian he shares with two cats and thousands of books. It was a rare bit of entertaining on his part and I assumed I was there because he felt sorry for me. That had made me all the more determined to go, determined that I was going to feel well enough on the night, that I could do something perfectly normal, maybe even enjoy myself. Al was convinced that it would only be unnecessarily exhausting, but when he failed to dissuade me, he decided he had better come along too, chauffeur me there and lend support. That was fine; I'd put a brave face on the whole situation, show everybody I didn't need their pity on any score. My hair was just growing back; I had a little buzz cut that Al said looked sexy, which was just him trying to be nice. Every woman in the room knew I was too old for anything so radical and guessed the reason behind it if she did not already know the gossip. I was the woman whose husband came home only because she had breast cancer.

So there I was, parked in the living room with some other authors whom I didn't recognize, trying to remember to nurse the soda water I had been reduced to, only so that
I didn't need to run off to the bathroom, and pretending I had read some article in
The New Yorker
although Al had let our subscription lapse after he moved out and we had never got around to renewing it. We were debating whether Alice Munro might be overrated. It was the literary crowd behaving as though it was still the 1990s, as though nobody had invented the Kindle, as though nobody need remember the name of that woman who self-published a book about vampires and got it on
The New York Times
best-seller list, as though every citizen in the land still had half a pound of newsprint landing on the doorstep with a satisfying thud every morning. I was trying to think of something knowing to say when a big, square man with a flattened face that made him look a bit like a bull terrier approached the group.

“Sharon…Great to see you.”

I hadn't a clue who he was, but Frank now appeared helpfully at my elbow.

“Sharon, you remember Bob Stanek, our publisher.”

“And a huge admirer of your work…”

I couldn't imagine
The Telegram
's publisher ever reading my work; usually men like him are more honest and tell me their wives are fans.

But he persisted and was surprisingly convincing. We had a discussion of the plot of my last book—he seemed to remember it a lot more clearly than I did—before he eventually came around to the subject of Dickens. Turned out he was an aficionado. He had read every one of the
novels. Even the ones nobody reads, like
Barnaby Rudge
and
Our Mutual Friend
. He was one of those hard-nosed businessmen intent on proving to you they have a literary side or artistic sensibilities. The type who are Sunday painters and wish to discuss Tolstoy. I kept trying to shake him off, saying, “You must talk to my husband; I think he's in the kitchen,” and looking about for Al, who had not reappeared since he'd gone off to refill his wineglass. Frankly, I hear quite enough about Dickens at home, but Stanek wasn't taking the hint and burbled away until he came up with a brain wave—or made his pitch, depending on how suspicious I want to be. The next year would be 2012. The bicentenary of the novelist's birth. Dickens wrote serials. All of the novels originally appeared as serials. His genius was in somehow maintaining narrative integrity in something written in instalments. Newspapers need new ideas. So, a popular novelist, the Dickens of her day—I tried hard to compose my face into the correct expression of outraged modesty at this bit of sycophancy—writes a serial for the newspaper. A few thousand words a week, say twenty or thirty weeks' worth of instalments. Am I up to the challenge?

“Um, I'll think about it,” I mumbled, intrigued but not sure what to make of the proposal. And just then Al came into sight, raising a “Do you want to go home now?” eyebrow at me from across the room, and we left soon after.

We didn't talk much in the car. I told Al I had met
The Telegram
's publisher, and he repeated the kitchen's
assessment of the newspaper's chances of surviving beyond 2020. He was right: standing was tiring; talking was tiring. We hadn't stayed much more than an hour and I was exhausted. But it was a good tired; I was pleased with myself and just a little bit excited. I had gone to a party, and someone wanted me to write something.

When we got home, the girls were still up, an hour past their bedtime, but I sympathized with the babysitter, a teenager from across the street. Their young memories of our six-month separation might be fading, but their father had been back in the house less than a year and I had been sick through most of that. We tried hard, shelving our differences to get our fragile family through the days, but there must have been an undercurrent of instability all the time; they weren't going to nod off to sleep unless both parents were safely accounted for.

I kissed them and Al sat with them while I got ready for bed but I found I was now too stimulated to sleep. It was work I knew I could do. Immediate. Contained. When Al came to bed, I told him about Stanek's suggestion.

“You aren't thinking of accepting? It's way too soon.”

“Lots of people go back to work as soon as they're clear of chemo.”

“You have to be careful. You don't want to wear yourself out.”

“I'm tired of being sick. I want to do something.”

The serial sounded a whole lot better than vomiting up breakfast two days out of seven, so I agreed.