Between Gembloux and Ottignies

It took me five days to read Froth on the Daydream, which is a long time for such a short book. But I wasn't reading it the way you read a book. I was reading it the way you read letters from someone you're fond of: slowly, looking for the traces of the hand that held it before you.

They were everywhere, those traces, once you knew how to look. The corner of a page folded down, then carefully unfolded. A pencil line so faint you'd have thought he'd hesitated before making it. And his words in the margin, few and far between, always in the right place, like someone putting a hand on your shoulder at the exact moment you were about to trip.

As for me, I'd filled the margins with drawings. The mouse, mostly. I'd drawn Colin's mouse in every position imaginable: the mouse washing its whiskers, the mouse watching the rain, the mouse reading Froth on the Daydream in glasses far too big for it. I'd signed every page with a little train. On Monday the 19th of October, at Brussels-Central, I'd left the finished book on the seat, with one last mouse on the flyleaf, a mouse waving goodbye with its paw.

On Tuesday I had nothing to read. Perhaps that's why I opened my phone.

I never look at social media in the morning. It's a rule, like the window seat and pencil rather than pen. In the morning the world is still clean; I don't want anyone tramping through it in dirty shoes.

But that Tuesday, at the station, while I was waiting for Patrick to finish frothing my milk, I'd had a message from Margot. Just one word: “Sorry.” With a broken heart.

I didn't understand. I got on the train, sat down in my seat, opened the app, and I understood.

Thomas had posted a photo. Thomas, who never posted anything, apart from a photo of craft beer once a year with a comment about hops. Thomas, who used to say social media was “a shop window for people with nothing in stock”. He'd posted a photo of himself on the banks of the Saône at sunset, with a dark-haired young woman who was laughing, her head thrown back against his shoulder. Underneath, he'd written: “Found.”

Found.

He'd gone off to find himself, and he'd found himself. He'd found a brunette who laughed with her head thrown back. In eight months. I'd spent six years by his side without finding him, and it had taken him eight months to find himself, and someone else into the bargain.

I switched off the phone. I pushed it right down to the bottom of my bag, under the sketchbook, under the strawberry-shaped rubber, the way you bury something. The train set off. Namur slid away behind the glass, the rooftops, the Citadel in its mist, then the first fields. I held on until Gembloux.

At Gembloux the doors opened, people got on with their scarves and their umbrellas, and the woman with the mustard knitting sat down across the aisle and said “Good morning” to me in such a kind voice that something broke.

I don't cry prettily. I mention this so that nobody pictures a film heroine with a single perfect tear rolling down a porcelain cheek. When I cry, my nose runs, my mouth wobbles and I get a sort of silent hiccup that shakes my shoulders like an old engine. It isn't photogenic. It's actually quite close to what Pompon does when he's trying to bring up a hairball.

So I did what I always do in those situations: I turned my head towards the window, with all my might, as though the fields of Gembloux were the most wonderful sight in the world.

And in a way they were. That morning there was an October light, low and golden, stretching the shadows of the trees across the ploughed earth. The big square farmhouses looked like stranded ships. A flock of crows rose from a field, opened out like a black fan and folded up again further off. I thought, through my tears, that you'd need diluted Indian ink for the crows and a touch of raw sienna for the furrows. You can't change who you are. Even crying, I saw in colour.

I cried the whole way between Gembloux and Ottignies. Twelve minutes, roughly. Twelve minutes is a very long time when you're crying silently on a train, facing a window, hoping nobody notices anything.

Nobody noticed anything. Or so I thought.

Maxime came through twice. The first time for tickets: I held out my season ticket without turning my head, and he said “Thanks, have a lovely day!” in his warm voice, with his big smile, to my left ear. The second time he was coming back up the aisle the other way, chewing, and threw out a general “All good?” to the whole carriage. The carriage replied with a murmur. I nodded at the window.

The woman with the knitting handed me a paper tissue, without a word, just as the train was slowing for Ottignies. I took it. She went back to her knitting. I will never know her name, and I owe her my eternal gratitude.

After Ottignies, it eased off. I blew my nose. I got out my sketchbook. I drew a crow, then a second one, then a brunette laughing with her head thrown back, to whom I added a moustache, and I felt a tiny bit better.

“I'm going to send him a parcel,” said Inès. “An anonymous parcel. With a herring in it. A herring that's spent a week on my radiator.”

“Don't do that.”

“I've got a cousin in Lyon. She's very sturdy. She does roller derby.”

“Inès.”

“Fine.” She put her red glasses down on the desk. “Then we'll do something more grown-up. We'll go and have a chocolate waffle at lunchtime, and we'll slag him off for the entire waffle.”

We did. It was a very good waffle. Inès found fourteen things wrong with Thomas, three of which I didn't know about, and one of which, his habit of saying “soixante-dix” for seventy like a Frenchman instead of a good Belgian “septante”, long before Lyon, made me laugh until my stomach hurt. She has always known that heartache is better treated with icing sugar than with advice.

“And the Reader?” she asked, licking her fingers. “Did he write to you today?”

“He's got my book. I left it yesterday.”

“Just as well. That way he didn't see you with your Tuesday face on.”

I laughed. I thought it was funny. It was funny, at the time.

That evening Pompon lay down on me with his full weight, which, with him, is the equivalent of either a declaration of love or an attempted smothering, one is never quite sure which. I slept like a log.

On Wednesday the 21st of October, Froth on the Daydream was on my seat.

I smiled when I saw it. I was glad to have it back, like a friend after a bad day: it doesn't know anything, it doesn't ask anything, it's restful. I sat down. I opened it at the flyleaf, where I'd drawn my mouse waving goodbye.

Beneath the mouse were a few lines in pencil. The handwriting was the same, slanting, fine, with its letters that dropped a long way down. But it shook a little this time, as though the hand had hesitated, or as though the train had taken a bend at the wrong moment.

“On Tuesday, you cried between Gembloux and Ottignies. I didn't say anything. I didn't know how.”

And the little catapult underneath. Smaller than usual.

I read the sentence once. Then a second time. Then I closed the book, very gently, the way you close a door on someone who's asleep.

The train had just pulled out. Namur was slipping away. And I was understanding, with the slowness of a raindrop running down a window, what I had never wanted to understand.

He wasn't a ghost. He wasn't some man who happened to find books somewhere along the line and gave them back to me by some sleight of hand. He was here. On the train. On Tuesday, between Gembloux and Ottignies, for twelve minutes, he had been sitting somewhere in carriage 4, and he had watched me cry against the window. He had seen my nose, my shoulders, my old engine. He had seen everything I'd tried to hide from the crows.

And he hadn't said anything. He hadn't known how.

I felt my cheeks burn. With shame, at first. Then with something else, which wasn't shame at all, and which made me lay my hand flat on the cover, the way you lay it on someone's chest to feel whether their heart is beating.

He might be here right now. Three metres away. Two rows back. He might be watching me read his sentence.

The train picked up speed. So did my heart. And for the first time in three years, in carriage 4 of the 7.42, I felt a wild urge, an almost painful urge, to turn round.