Sample chapter of The Valentine’s Express. Meet Poppy and Scott.
Chapter 1
Poppy took off her cotton-print apron and grabbed a box of heart-themed decorations. Now that the breakfast rush was over, her next job was to decorate the station cafe for Valentine’s Day. She always liked doing that, not because she had anything exciting lined up for Valentine’s Day, but because it meant the heritage railway would run a full steam train service and there would be loads of customers in the cafe. At this time of year, when Christmas was a distant memory and spring still months away, you celebrated every little thing you could.
She stood on a chair and pulled the red-and-white fabric bunting out of the box. The cafe, like much of the heritage railway station, had a faint 1950s vibe to it. It wasn’t retro, it was just so old that it had come back into fashion again. Her boss, Nina, had just leaned into the style, so that the staff aprons were all cheerful floral-print affairs and the decorations were made of cotton and bias binding.
Poppy removed a bit of tinsel that was snagged on the hook on the wall and looped the bunting over it. The cafe phone ringing made her jump and wobble on the chair. Nina, who was putting up posters advertising the Valentine’s Express train, looked up in alarm.
“I’m fine,” Poppy said. She got back down off the chair and answered it.
“Hello love,” said a cheerful male voice. “It’s Andy from the engine shed. We’re taking one of the locomotives for a run to check her out. You couldn’t get us an order of seven toasted teacakes ready, could you? We’ll pick it up on the way through the station.”
Cheeky buggers. “Did breakfast not fill you up?” she said.
“That was a whole hour and half ago,” he said. “It’s hungry work sprucing up the engine.”
Poppy laughed. “Fine. I’ll have it ready for you. What time do you want them?”
“They should be there in about fifteen minutes.”
Poppy hung up, tied her apron back on and got the teacakes on the grill.
Nina laughed when she explained. “It’s a good job it’s quiet, eh?”
Poppy had toasted, buttered and packed the teacakes before the engine arrived. She might as well wait, so she walked along the deserted platform to the nearest bench. The end of the bench was in a pool of sunlight. Poppy sat down and settled the warm box on her lap, inhaling the warm buttery smell that rose up from it. It wasn’t often she got to sit down, so she let out a long breath and looked around.
The morning mist had burned off and the station gleamed wet in the winter sun. Everything had been closed since Christmas but there were already signs of it waking up. The welcome billboard had already been changed to the spring poster, where the words ‘The Brambleberry Railway’ in old British Rail lettering curved over a picture of Arthur the green engine steaming past a field of daffodils. The smaller posters were all in shades of red and white, advertising the Valentine’s Express dining experience.
In a few days, volunteers would be all over the platforms, polishing the brass and sprucing everything up. The hanging baskets would be full of primroses and the raised flower beds would have daffodils put in. Even the shops would have some bunting up and cheery window displays. Burton Cavanby Station, when it was in full livery, was beautiful.
Poppy sighed. It was like living in a postcard – pretty but not fully real. This was the sort of place you came from, or went on holiday to. Not the sort of place where you actually lived. Over the years the holiday cottages had overtaken the practical side of village life. They didn’t even have a post office anymore. It was fine if you were on holiday and wanted everything lovingly handmade. If you wanted a loaf of sliced bread or a frozen pizza, you had to go to the next village.
As a teenager, she’d vowed she’d get out of there as soon as she could. She had left to go to university. She’d even had a job lined up in the hotel industry at one point … yet here she was, twenty-seven years old and stuck back there, working at the station cafe, because she couldn’t leave Mum for long and there were precious few other jobs around here.
The rails started to click and a whistle sounded. Poppy stood up to watch the train come down the track. When you grew up near a heritage railway track, the sound of a steam whistle was part of your everyday soundtrack.
A couple of the guys from the engine shed jogged up the side of the platform. One of them was her friend Spider. He slowed down and grinned at Poppy. “Are those the teacakes?”
“Yes.” She held it out towards him.
“Could you give it to the driver? He’ll keep them warm. We can have them at tea break.” Spider wasn’t particularly tall, but somehow looked lanky. His real name was Arjuna, but as far as Poppy was aware, no one called him that. Except maybe his mum. He had acquired his nickname early on in secondary school and it had followed him around ever since.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Poppy tucked the box under her arm. “I thought it was just the engine coming through.”
Spider, who looked after the carriages and what he called ‘fiddly bits’ rather than the locomotives, shrugged. “It’s always nice to see the first run of the year.” He looked over his shoulder at the approaching engine and smiled. “I’ll just go help with the turntable. I’ll see you later, Poppy.” He ran off, following his colleague.
The steam engine, with no carriages attached to it, eased into the station. The railway had two old locomotives, affectionately nicknamed Arthur and Gwen. This one was Gwen. Dora could tell her what type of engine it was, but to Poppy, it was just the red one. It came to a stop with a hiss and a whiff of hot coal smoke.
Poppy walked up to the cab to find the driver. Her friend Dora jumped out onto the platform and gave Poppy a grin before kneeling at the platform edge to inspect something on the engine. Poppy handed the box of teacakes up to the driver, who said, “Thanks, love,” and put it carefully on the seat by the fire.
Poppy folded her arms and waited, listening to the whoosh clink of the fireman adding coal to the fire. She knew better than to interrupt Dora when she was working. Dora was now lying on her stomach on the platform edge, her dyed orange hair a beacon of colour, peering at something under the engine. Apparently satisfied, she stood up and dusted herself off. “Looks good to me,” she said to the driver. “Do you want to get her turned around?”
Poppy moved back from the platform edge without needing to be told. Dora came to stand next to her and watched the engine move off. Since she was at work, Dora was wearing shapeless blue coveralls, and she already had smudges of soot on her forehead. Even so, she still managed to look petite and elfin in a way that Poppy could never hope to be.
“Have you thought any more about tomorrow night?” Dora said.
Ever the optimist, Dora had found a speed dating event for Poppy to go to. Dora didn’t date, but she seemed to want to live vicariously through Poppy.
Poppy wasn’t sure how she felt about this. On the one hand, meeting someone would be nice. On the other hand … she wasn’t sure Dora was the best person to be helping her with it. She put her hands in her pockets. “I don’t know, Dor. It’s only two villages away so chances are, we’ve met all the men who are going to be there anyway.”
“Oh, come on,” said Dora. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Poppy gave her some serious side eye. “I admire your optimism.” She nodded at the two men working the turntable. “Are the lads going?” The ‘lads’ were Spider and Titch, Dora’s fellow engineers. Poppy’s social life, such as it was, tended to be evenings spent in the pub with the three of them.
“I haven’t told them,” said Dora. “They’ll show up and take the piss and then that’ll be your last chance with any guys gone.”
“I really don’t think there’s going to be much potential there, love,” said Poppy.
“I mean, what if there was someone nice and you got a date for Valentine’s Day?”
Poppy shook her head. “I’ll be working on Valentine’s Day. I’m helping Nina with the dining train, remember.” There was no way she was missing that. It paid well.
Dora clicked her tongue. “I suppose that’s better than staying home and watching Bridget Jones by yourself on Valentine’s Day again,” she said. She raised her hands theatrically. “There must be a nice man out there for you, surely.”
Poppy shook her head. Burton Cavanby was very pretty, but it was still a trap. “It’s pointless. There are no new men. Nothing ever bloody changes around here.”
***
Scott had been expecting it, but he still jumped when Adam banged on the door. His coffee slopped over the side of his mug. Luckily it missed him. He was dressed – properly dressed rather than putting a shirt over pyjama bottoms – for the first time in days. No one ever really saw him, so why bother with daytime clothes?
Another series of loud thumps.
“Coming. Bloody hell. Coming.” He put his coffee down and answered the door.
Adam looked him up and down. “You’re dressed.”
“I told you I would be.”
Adam’s face showed he really hadn’t expected him to be. “So,” he said. “Are you ready?”
He wasn’t. He really didn’t want to do this. But he needed to. Anyway, he’d asked Adam to nag him into getting back out into the real world and Adam, it turned out, was very good at nagging.
Scott glanced at the photo hung by the stairs. He raised his chin and grabbed his coat. “Let’s go.”
Adam looked him up and down. “You know this is a good thing, right? See how you get on being out near people. You don’t have to talk to anyone if you don’t want to. Just … try.”
The urge to curl up into himself and whimper was so strong that Scott shivered with it. But Adam was right. He had come here to recover. Part of that involved actually leaving the bloody house. He sighed. “Let’s go.”
He let himself be ushered out. As he locked up, he could feel his heart inflating and collapsing noisily in his chest. It felt ungainly and hollow. He paused, key still in the lock. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. He could do this.
Adam was waiting for him. Scott hauled himself into the passenger seat.
The drive from Scott’s house fed straight onto the main road. Although, calling it a main road was probably a crime against B-roads. Scott stared at the trees on the roadside, at the mist that drifted on the side that held a steep drop down to a stream, the glimpses of sunlight … anything, really, rather than focus on the fact that they were on the road. Driving. His grip on the seat belt across his torso tightened.
“All right?” Adam said.
Scott looked at his friend. Who was driving. Scott was not driving. It would be okay. “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “So … where are we going?”
“I have to deliver some eggs and butter to the station cafe today. I thought you might like to see it. The station, I mean. They’re getting ready to reopen for the February run, so there’s a chance they’ll have a train in steam in the engine shed. It might be fun.”
Scott nodded and turned to look at the damp verge out of his window. Burton Cavanby was pretty. That was one of the reasons he’d come here. That and the fact that it was so far away from London that he wouldn’t bump into anyone he knew. Apart from Adam, of course. Adam had been one of his best friends at university.
Adam had left London nearly two years ago and now helped run his dad’s farm. With Scott still working in the city, they’d slowly drifted out of each other’s orbit. When … it … happened, Adam had reappeared in Scott’s life, and been the only one who didn’t think he was mad to want to run away.
Which was how Scott had ended up here, in a rented house in Yorkshire, working from home and trying to forget that London ever existed. He had been here about a month now and had managed not to leave the house. Yesterday, he’d decided he needed to pull himself together. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. He shook his head.
“You don’t have to talk to anyone,” Adam said, quietly.
“I talk to people.” He still had clients he spoke to on Zoom. They were the main reason he put a shirt on most days.
“Face to face?” said Adam.
“Zoom is face to face. They can see my face.”
“Hmm.”
They both knew that ‘remote working’ and ‘actively avoiding meeting people in real life’ were two different things. When the silence threatened to get uncomfortable, Scott said, “Anyway, who’s there?”
“At the cafe? There’s Nina, who runs the place, and a couple of assistants. Poppy is the regular waitress. Nice girl. We were at school together.”
“Wasn’t everyone?”
“Fair point,” Adam conceded. “It’s a small village.”
“At least she’s not one of your many ex-girlfriends.” Scott managed a smile.
“Um …”
This snapped him out of himself enough to laugh. “Seriously? Have you dated every woman under forty in this place?”
“No,” said Adam. “Only the ones I was at school with.”
Scott eyed his friend, all wide shoulders and muscle and rugged good looks. All the time he spent outside meant that he was tanned too. None of his other friends looked like that. Business consultants tended towards either gym fiends or gone to seed, with very little in between. The male ones, that was. The women rarely went to seed. He frowned. There weren’t that many women older than forty in his firm, to be fair. The company usually lost them to more family-friendly firms after a while. He frowned. Would Carrie have given up if they’d started a family?
The thought of Carrie hit him like a full body blow. So much so that he gasped. His throat constricted. He pressed a hand to his heart.
“Scott?”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “How can it still hurt so much?”
They pulled into the village and Adam parked up at the far end of the car park by the station. He gently put a hand on Scott’s shoulder.
“It’s been a year,” Scott said, his eyes still shut. “Why does it still … hurt?”
The hand on his shoulder squeezed gently. “I think that’s just how it is, mate? You don’t stop hurting. You learn to carry it with you.”
His stupid heart was flapping about in his chest now. Picking up pace. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. He focused on Adam’s grip, firm on his good shoulder. Deep breaths. His heart rate slowed a little. He opened his eyes, concentrating on the here and now. In a parked truck. With Adam. Who was helping him because he’d asked for help.
They sat in silence for a minute or two, before Scott looked at Adam and nodded. “I’m okay.”
The grip on his shoulder released. “Sure?” Adam patted the shoulder one last time.
“Yeah. Let’s go meet people. I need to be able to talk to real people again, right? I have to start somewhere, so why not here. Yes. Right.”
“ O … kay. Let’s grab a box each and go in then?”
There was nothing else to do but grab a box and follow Adam into the station. They passed a shuttered ticket booth and came onto the platform. Two guys in blue overalls sauntered past. They both greeted Adam. He really did know everyone. Scott looked at the track and the long, silent railway platform. His grandfather had been into steam trains. He had forgotten all about that. Grandad used to take Scott and his sister to see the stream trains down in Devon.
He followed Adam in a daze. How had he forgotten about the summers at his grandparents’ house? He used to live for those.
Inside the cafe, Adam said, “Scott.” He pulled himself back into the present and stepped inside. Adam said something he didn’t catch and gestured towards two women. One of them, a tidy middle-aged lady, who he assumed was Nina, led the way into a room at the back. The other, younger, one was curvy and tall with dark brown curls held back with a red headscarf. Why was she staring at him in that expectant way? Oh, right. He said, “Hello.”
Her face relaxed into a smile. “Hi.”
He placed the boxes where he was told and then went out to get the rest. “Adam,” he whispered. “I didn’t get their names. I was … miles away.”
“The older one is Nina, she runs the cafe.” Adam handed him a box. “The brunette is Poppy.”
“Your ex?”
Adam rolled his eyes. “She’s a friend.”
When they got back in, Poppy said, “Do you lads want a cuppa and a bun, before you head off?”
Oh god. Scott prayed that Adam wouldn’t force him to stay and talk.
Thankfully, Adam said, “Tempting, Pops, but we’ve got stuff to do. Maybe some other time.”
Scott drew a deep breath and said, “It was nice to meet you.” He made eye contact with her for the first time and smiled. She smiled back. It was a nice smile. A smile that gave you hope that today would be a better day than yesterday.
See. He could still do this social interaction thing. He hadn’t lost it entirely. Still smiling, Scott followed his friend out onto the platform.
“Walk with me,” said Adam.
“I thought you were busy?”
“I am. I’m busy walking with you. Come on.”
Scott followed. The station looked forlorn without people in it. It was built for bustle and movement. Empty, it looked like it was frozen in time.
As though he’d read his thoughts, Adam said, “It’s much nicer when the trains are in. Nina said they were testing out one of the engines. I thought we’d go have a look.” They reached the end of the platform, where a gate took them to a concrete path that ran alongside the track. The path was a little below the tracks and Scott could clearly see the rails through the wooden fence.
“They rely on volunteers a lot here,” said Adam, too casually.
Scott felt the tension in his solar plexus. There was a reason Adam was taking him along this path. He wasn’t sure he liked it. But Adam was his friend. He took a deep breath. He had to trust someone at some point. “Yes?”
“Yes. Like the guards and the ticket inspectors on the trains, you know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was thinking,” said Adam. “If you felt like it, you could volunteer to be a ticket inspector on one of the quieter trains. Like a Wednesday morning one or something. It would only be a short season this time of year – like, three weeks.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’d give you a chance to be around people, without having to form any meaningful attachments.”
Scott said nothing. The phrase ‘meaningful attachments’ brought with it another wave of pain. What could be more meaningful than being married to someone? She wasn’t here. It was his fault. There was a reason he didn’t want to talk to people. He opened his mouth to say no, but he remembered that there was a time to move on. He had told Adam he was ready to get his life back on track. So perhaps he should think about it a bit. And then say no.
A few minutes’ walk took them towards some large buildings. Engine shed. The words popped into Scott’s mind.
This was where they kept the locomotives that were due to go out. He had been to ones much like it in Devon with his grandfather.
Now he could hear voices and the hiss of a steam train at rest. Adam waved an arm over his head. The guy in the engine cab waved back and blew a short blast of the whistle.
Suddenly Scott was bombarded with sensory information. The smell of coal, steam and hot oil. The hiss, the whistle. For one second, he was transported completely to a childhood holiday in Devon, where he was standing next to Grandad watching a steam train being coupled up to its coaches. For that one second, he remembered what it was like to be completely, all-consumingly, happy. The air cleared and, as quickly as it arrived, the feeling disappeared. But he had glimpsed what it could be like. That feeling. It was a beacon in the fog. He had to keep pushing towards it.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“Volunteering. On the trains. I’ll do it. If they’ll have me.”
Adam was staring at him. Scott felt the world suddenly refocus. Shit. He’d agreed to Adam ’s mad ‘volunteer on a train’ idea, hadn’t he?
Adam folded his arms. “Seriously?”
The expression of extreme scepticism needled at him. “There’s no need to be like that,” Scott snapped. “I said I’d try to get myself out of this funk and I will. If I have to ride on a steam train now and again, I’ll do it.” The train wheeshed out steam again and he felt the corner of his mouth tug up. He’d loved steam trains when he was a boy. Why not now?
Adam nodded, smiling. “Okay. I’ll take you to see the volunteer coordinator. Now, do you want to see this locomotive?”
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