order.'
'What are you talking about?'
'I don't know. But there was something weird about him and then you came in and he went back to being how he always is. Or at least I think he did, but I was in the back room for most of the time, of course.'
'Yes you were, and he certainly seemed just like he always is to me, sadly. I always thought he might change, you know, open up to me. I tried so hard to get inside Jeff, but he never let me in. After twelve years together it still feels like I've been with a stranger. And now this whole break-up has happened and still he just stands there and grins like it's all kind of a joke and as if it all just meant nothing. Maybe it did just all mean nothing, Harvey, maybe it was all just a waste . . .' She buried her head in her hands and wept.
Harvey had to admit that the fellow travellers who had chosen the 2.27from Paddington this afternoon were getting their money's worth. From sexual jealousy to murder to marital breakdown. They could have stayed at home watching daytime TV and got no more. He reached across the table and awkwardly rubbed her arm, which was the only bit he could really reach. He considered getting up and going round but that would have meant a struggle past his duffel bag, which was on the seat next to him, and it would have meant sitting down with his back to the engine, which always made him feel sick. So he rubbed her arm and used his free hand to pick up his can and pour some of the Watneys into his mouth and some down his jumper.
When he had cleaned up a bit she had stopped crying and was looking better.
'I'm wondering about his maths teacher,' Harvey said brightly when he was sure she was ready.
'Pardon?'
'Bleeder Odd's maths teacher. He met him at the reunion, I saw them together and I was wondering what they talked about.'
'Mmm. OK, so it wasn't Jeff it was the maths teacher?'
'No, I'm not saying that.' Harvey wiped his mouth delicately with his sleeve. 'I just wonder what they talked about. I bet Jarvin doesn't know about him and I think we should interview him. What if Bleeder told him something important?'
'Like what?'
'I don't know.'
'But I thought we were going down to see Blee . . . I'm not calling him that . . . to see Charles. We can ask him directly, can't we?'
'Well, yes we can.' To Harvey this seemed somehow rather too easy, like watching Star Wars the week after it opened rather than queuing overnight. Surely they should creep up on Bleeder, surprise him with his maths teacher's new evidence, shock him into a full confession . . . that it was Jeff. He said something along these lines to Maisie and she laughed at him and then she got up and came round to remove his duffel bag and settle down cosily in the seat beside him and slid her hand up his leg. Harvey rather lost interest in the countryside for a while and his only thought was that their fellow passengers were perhaps going to get a finale that even daytime TV rarely delivered.
Chapter Twenty-nine
A town can look very different when you are not staying with your parents in it. It can look even more different, and indeed better, when you are sitting in front of a full English breakfast. Even when you are preparing to meet someone you don't know who may well be going to cause you a certain amount of unhappiness or confusion, it can still look pretty good. Harvey gazed out across the wisps of mist that lay beneath them towards the wild white horses of the sea beyond. They were sitting in the conservatory-style restaurant of the hotel to which they had awarded their business the night before. Harvey had decided that a B. & B. just wasn't what a youngish couple in something very close to love really needed and anyway he had long wanted to visit this hotel again. The Atlantic Rollers was set, in an act of glorious Edwardian vandalism, actually on St Ives's principal outreach from the shoreline: Porthminster Point itself, as if all the people who travelled so far to look at this chunk of wild nature would be delighted to find that their hotel was its principal feature. And indeed