7:42

Photo by Oyut Jargalsaikhan on Unsplash

Susan Rowe took the 7:42 from Woking to Waterloo every weekday morning and had done so for eleven years.

She sat in the same seat, coach D, window, facing forward. She read her book. She did not speak to other passengers.

The man got on at Weybridge.

He sat opposite her, which she did not like—the table seats were supposed to be a kind of shared solitude, each person in their quadrant, eyes down—but the train was full and she had no grounds for complaint.

He was mid-fifties, grey at the temples, wearing a dark suit and a tie she recognised as Hermès because her ex-husband had owned the same one. He had a leather document folder on the table. He opened it and began to read.

Susan opened her book. She read a page. She looked up—an automatic movement, the social calibration of two strangers at a table—and she saw the page he was reading.

It was typed. Double-spaced. The font was Courier, which she associated with screenplays and manuscripts. She could not read the text from her angle—she was not trying to, she was glancing—but she saw her name.

Susan Rowe.

She looked down at her book. She read a sentence without absorbing it. She looked up again. He had turned the page. She could see, in the middle of a paragraph, the word “Woking.”

This was reasonable. There were other Susan Rowes. Woking was a town with eighty thousand people. The manuscript, whatever it was, could have been about anyone.

She read her book. She got through two pages. She looked up. He was making notes in the margin with a pencil. His handwriting was too small to read.

He turned another page and she saw, in the first line, the words “the 7:42.”

Susan closed her book. She kept it on the table, her finger holding the page, as though she might return to it. She looked out of the window. The Surrey countryside moved past—hedgerows, playing fields, the backs of houses. She looked at the man. He was absorbed. He had the concentration of someone reading for work, not pleasure—checking and assessing.

The train stopped at Surbiton. People got on. A woman stood in the aisle for a moment, looking for a seat, and the man lifted his folder slightly, a reflexive gesture, protecting the pages from a stranger’s eyes. In doing so, he angled the folder towards Susan.

She read the top of the page: Chapter 4. And below it, the opening line:

Susan closed her book. She kept it on the table, her finger holding the page, as though she might return to it.

She had done this. She had done this thirty seconds ago. The sentence described what she had done, in the order she had done it, with the detail correct—the finger in the book, the pretence of returning to it.

Her chest tightened. The feeling was less fear than the sensation of missing a step on a staircase: the lurch of a body expecting solid ground and finding air.

She looked at the man. He was still reading. His face was neutral—the focused blankness of a commuter engaged in work. He did not look at her. He did not seem aware that she was reading his pages, or that his pages were about her, or that the sentences he was reviewing were describing events as they occurred.

Susan picked up her book. She opened it. She did not read. She held the book in front of her face and thought about what she had seen, telling herself that she had misread it—that the name was not her name, that the train was not her train, that the sentence was not about her. She got it all wrong.

She lowered the book. The man had turned the page. She could not see the text.

“Excuse me,” she said.

He looked up. His eyes were grey. He had the face of a man who was used to being looked at—not handsome, but composed, the face of someone who had decided, long ago, what his face would show the world.

“Yes?”

“What are you reading?”

“A manuscript.”

“For work?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Can I ask what it’s about?”

He looked at her. His expression did not change. He did not smile, did not frown, did not show any awareness that the question was unusual.

“It’s about a woman on a train,” he said.

The train moved through Wimbledon. The automatic announcement said: “The next station is Waterloo.” Passengers stood, gathered bags, shuffled into the aisle. Susan did not move. The man did not move.

“What happens to her?” said Susan.

“I don’t know yet. I haven’t finished.”

“You said it’s a manuscript. Someone wrote it.”

“Someone is writing it.”

“Who?”

He closed the folder. He looked at her with the patient attention of someone who has been asked a question he expected and is deciding how much of the answer to provide.

“Does it matter?” he said.

“It has my name in it.”

“Susan Rowe is a common name.”

“It has my train. My seat. It described what I was doing while I was doing it.”

The man put his pencil in his pocket. He straightened the folder on the table. The train was slowing, the brakes engaging, that particular screech of metal that meant Waterloo.

“I’m an editor,” he said. “I receive manuscripts. This one arrived last week. I don’t know the author. The manuscript is about a woman called Susan Rowe who takes the 7:42 from Woking to Waterloo. I assumed it was fiction.”

“You assumed.”

“Until this morning, yes.”

“And now?”

He picked up the folder. He stood. He was tall, taller than she’d thought, and standing he blocked the light from the window so that his face was in shadow and she could not read it.

“Now I’m not sure,” he said. “Which makes it either a remarkable coincidence or a very good piece of writing. Either way, I intend to finish it.”

He joined the queue in the aisle. Susan watched him go. He moved with the crowd towards the doors, the folder under his arm, his head above the heads around him. He did not look back.

Susan sat in the empty carriage. The cleaners would come through in a few minutes. She should get up. She should go to work. The sensible thing to do would be to forget the man and the manuscript.

She stood up. On the table, there was a single page. He had left it—dropped it, or placed it. She picked it up.

It was the last page of the chapter. She read it standing in the empty carriage as the cleaners approached from the far end.

The final paragraph described Susan standing in an empty carriage, holding a page, reading.

The final sentence said:

‘She put the page in her bag and walked to work and did not tell anyone, because who would she tell, and what would she say, and who would believe that her life was being written as she lived it, and that she had met the editor, and that the editor did not know the author, and that the manuscript was not finished, and that nobody knew how it would end?’

Susan put the page in her bag. She walked to work. She did not tell anyone.

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