The Window Seat

Some people have a therapist, a life coach or an app that reminds them to drink water. I have carriage 4 of the 7.42, the window seat, facing forwards. It's cheaper, and it doesn't ask questions.

I've been taking it for three years, ever since Éditions du Pélican hired me in Brussels and I refused, on principle and out of sheer laziness, to leave Namur. An hour on the train in the morning, an hour in the evening. People feel sorry for me. They're wrong. An hour is exactly what it takes to finish a chapter, botch three sketches and arrive in Brussels feeling as though you've already lived through something.

That Thursday, the 8th of October, I very nearly lived through nothing at all, because Pompon had decided to sleep on my keys.

Pompon is a six-kilo ginger cat with the morals of a pirate and the sense of humour of a bailiff. A neighbour left him with me four years ago, “for a fortnight”. The neighbour is still in Spain. Pompon, for his part, considers that the second-floor flat in Jambes, with its view of the Meuse and the Citadel, belongs to him, and that I am some sort of rather slow domestic staff.

“Pompon,” I said, “I need my keys so I can go and earn your biscuits.”

He opened one eye, closed it again, and stretched out to his full length across the keyring with the voluptuous slowness of a man who knows the law is on his side.

In the end I lifted him like a sack of flour. He protested in some ancient language. I grabbed my bag, my sketchbook and my battered paperback of The Life Before Us, which I was reading for the fourth time, and I hurtled down the stairs.

In the morning, Namur is a grey that belongs to nobody else. A pearl grey, with pink in it when the weather's fine and bottle green when it rains. To paint it, you'd need one drop of white in a wash of Payne's grey. That Thursday the Citadel was still wearing a woolly hat of mist, and I crossed the Enjambée footbridge on my bike, pedalling standing up like a teenager late for school, which is what I was, give or take fifteen years.

I locked my bike outside the station, between an abandoned scooter and the apple-green bicycle of a man I don't know but whose padlock I know well. Then I did what I do every morning: a café crème at the counter, standing up, in two minutes flat, served by Patrick, who stopped asking me what I wanted two years ago and who calls me “the young lady with the crème”, which is flattering at thirty-one.

“You've been running,” said Patrick.

“I was taken hostage by a cat.”

“They do that,” he said, with the gravity of a specialist.

I burnt my tongue on my crème and went up onto platform 2.

There was the usual seven-forty crowd: suits heading for the ministries, students heading for Louvain-la-Neuve, a tall man in black headphones reading as he leant against a pillar, whom the crowd flowed round the way a river flows round a stone. The train was already in, waiting with its doors open, with that look of a large patient animal that trains have at the platform. Carriage 4. My seat was free. It always is: regulars respect one another, like cows that each have their own stall in the byre.

I sat down by the window, facing forwards. I put my book on the little table. The train left on time, which, in Belgium, deserves to be written down in a notebook.

I need to explain something, because what follows won't make sense without it.

Eight months ago, in February, Thomas went off to live in Lyon “to find himself”. We'd been together for six years. We had a sofa in common, a plan for a house in Wépion and a list of names for children who didn't exist yet. One Sunday evening he put his mug down on the coffee table, said he was suffocating, that he needed to find himself, and I remember thinking, very calmly, that nobody finds themselves in Lyon, they get lost there if anything, because of all those secret passageways.

I didn't say it. I said, “All right.” It's the stupidest thing I've ever said in my life, and I've said a great many.

Since then I've made a decision, which I announced to my best friend Inès, to my sister Margot and to Pompon, in that order. I will not fall in love again before I'm forty. Nine years. That's reasonable. It's a savings plan for the heart. I spend nothing.

“Nine years,” said Inès. “You do realise that's exactly the kind of thing people say in the first chapter of a novel?”

“I'm not in a novel. I'm in carriage 4.”

“That's worse,” she said.

My journey has a ritual. Between Namur and Gembloux, I read. Between Gembloux and Ottignies, I look out of the window, because there are enormous fields there, square stone farmhouses and rows of trees that make me itch for a pen and ink. Between Ottignies and Brussels, I draw people. Not the ones behind me: I never turn round on a train. You look ahead or out of the window; behind you is the past, and as far as the past goes, thank you, I've done my bit. I draw the ones I can see: the back of a man's neck, a hand on a newspaper, the profile of a woman who has been knitting an endless mustard-coloured scarf since September.

That Thursday I read as far as Gembloux, as planned. I'd got to the part where Momo talks about Madame Rosa, and on page 47 I'd underlined, in pencil, a sentence that had caught in my throat. I always underline in pencil. People who underline in pen are never in any doubt about anything, and I don't trust them.

Then came the ticket check. The train guard, the tall blond one who laughs loudly and smells of chocolate cereal bars, came down the aisle saying “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, tickets please”, with a smile that could have lit the Brussels tunnel all on its own. I rummaged in my bag for my season ticket. I found a strawberry-shaped rubber, two till receipts and a cat treat. He waited, very patiently, chewing.

“Take your time,” he said. “We're in no hurry. Well, the train is. But we're not.”

I laughed. He laughed louder.

I found the season ticket. He scanned it, wished me a lovely day and carried on down the aisle, broad-shouldered, his cap slightly askew. I watched him go for longer than was strictly necessary. It was professional observation: he had a very interesting walk to draw. I told myself so several times.

After that I drew all the way to Brussels. Brussels-Luxembourg, Schuman, Brussels-North. At Brussels-Central, as I do every morning, I leapt up in a panic, because I never get up in time: I stuffed my sketchbook into my bag, grabbed my jacket, apologised to a pillar and stepped out onto the platform into that warm draught that smells of metal and waffles.

It was only when I got to Éditions du Pélican, five minutes later, at the foot of the Mont des Arts, that I realised.

My book had been left on the seat.

I did what any responsible grown woman would do: I wailed.

“It's just a book,” said Inès, who was watching me wail from behind her layout screen, between two columns of text.

“It's my book. It's annotated. It's got four readings' worth of my underlining. There's a drawing of Pompon on page 112. There's a shopping list on the flyleaf from 2019.”

“So it's your diary,” she said. “Right. Your diary has gone off to Brussels-South, or further. It's going to have a far more exciting life than you.”

At Lost Property, a polite voice explained that a paperback with no name in it was “possible but not probable”. I spent the day drawing a hedgehog who was afraid of the dark for Mrs Wauters' picture book, and my hedgehog, I have to admit, looked profoundly bereaved.

That evening, Pompon ate the cat treat that had been left at the bottom of my bag. It was the only good news.

On Friday morning I had my crème at Patrick's, went up onto platform 2 and got into carriage 4.

And the book was there.

On my seat. By the window, facing forwards. Placed perfectly straight in the middle of the seat, the way you set a plate in front of someone you're expecting for dinner.

I stood frozen in the aisle, my bag clutched to my chest, while people squeezed past me, sighing. I looked around. In front of me, a man was reading L'Écho. Across the aisle, an elderly gentleman in a camel coat was turning the pages of a hardback. Nobody was looking at me, nobody looked like someone who had just returned a book to a stranger. I didn't turn round. I never turn round.

I sat down. I picked up the book. It had the same dog-eared cover, the same coffee stain along the edge, the same shopping list from 2019 (“cat litter, lemons, ring Mum”). Nobody had damaged it. If anything, it seemed to me, someone had straightened it a little, the way you put someone's collar right.

The train pulled out. Out of habit, I leafed through to page 47.

Next to my underlined sentence, in the margin, there were a few words in pencil. Slanting handwriting, fine and even, with letters that dropped a long way below the line, as if they wanted to go and see what was underneath.

“Page 47, you underlined the wrong sentence. The right one is three lines further down.”

And beneath it, by way of a signature, a little drawing: two parallel lines and a stem. A two-pronged fork. Or a catapult. Or a Y that had gone off the rails.

I looked up. Through the window, the rooftops of Namur were slipping away, grey and pink. I felt myself blush right to the tips of my ears, with anger, or with something else, I couldn't have said which.

Then, of course, I read three lines further down.