Victoria Line, Central Line by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online

Mother and Louise and Elsie knew the name of every under-manager and a great many of the customers in his bank.
    Heather had always seemed amused about his talesof home. But then, Adam wondered with mounting horror as the train was taking them ever nearer, had he told accurate tales? Had he let her know just how very formal Mother could be? Heather hadn’t thought of taking a gift for the weekend, so Adam had bought a potted plant.
    ‘You can give that to Mother,’ he had said.
    ‘Why? I don’t know her. She’d think it was silly,’ said Heather.
    ‘No, first time meeting her, she’d think it was nice,’ he insisted. ‘It’s what people do, honestly.’
    ‘You didn’t take a plant to my Mum,’ she said reasonably.
    Adam was furious. He hadn’t taken a plant to Heather’s mother because she lived forty minutes away on the tube, because they had gone there for tea one Saturday, because Heather had said that her mother hated airs and graces and he hadn’t wanted to be considered a young dandy. Now it was being used against him.
    He thought about the kind of weekend they could have had if they had stayed in London. The cinema tonight, perhaps, and a fish and chip supper. Saturday morning poking around antique shops and second-hand stalls. Drink a few pints with some of Heather’s friends at lunchtime . . . the afternoon would pass in a haze of doing up the room they lived in, sweeping the leaves away from the basement gutters; they might carry on with that pictureframing; they might go and drink a bottle of wine with other friends until they went to the disco; and instead he had this torture ahead.
    The train stopped and his heart lurched; they couldn’t be there yet. Surely there was another half-hour.
    ‘Are we there?’ Heather yawned and rooted for her shoes. She hadn’t a hint of nervousness or anxiety. She reached for his carefully chosen potted plant.
    ‘Don’t forget your geranium,’ she said.
    They hadn’t arrived, but they had reached a situation which called for their having to change trains. That was how the guard put it.
    ‘Has this one broken down?’ Heather asked him.
    ‘It is a situation where you have to change trains, Madam,’ he said again.
    ‘I’d love it if he was in charge of any crisis,’ grumbled Heather getting out on to the platform. Her eyes lit on the Ladies Room. ‘I’ll take advantage of the change of train situation to have a relief of bladder situation,’ she said happily and scampered off to the lavatory.
    Adam stood glumly wondering why he thought everything that Heather said was funny and endearing at home in London and he thought it was coarse and offensive when he was starting to get into Mother’s orbit. He leaned against a telephone box waiting for Heather to come back from the Ladies and for the next train to come and rescue them. Onthe opposite platform stood lucky people going to London. They would be there in time to go to a theatre perhaps, they might be salesmen coming home from some conference in Brighton. None of them had forty-eight hours of anxiety lying ahead of them as he did. None of them had to worry about Mother asking Heather, ‘And what school were you at my dear?’ and Louise asking Heather, ‘You mean you actually sell things to the public? Heavens!’, Elsie asking Heather, ‘Would you like Earl Grey or English breakfast in the morning?’ He winced and felt a real pain at the thought of it. And there was no way he could muzzle Heather and ask her to remain completely silent, so she was bound to talk about times when they had both been pissed and to let slip that they had smoked pot, and lived in the same room, and that her father had died in an alcoholics’ home and her stepfather was bankrupt . . .
    Adam heaved a very deep sigh.
    Love was turning out to be full of problems that the poets and the movie makers never spoke of.
    Suddenly he thought he couldn’t stand it. Not now, not yet. He wasn’t ready to take the weekend now.