What she told a stranger on the train

The train stopped outside Peterborough and the guard said signal failure, then said nothing else for forty minutes.

Yvonne had the window seat. The woman beside her was well past seventy, with a tartan shopping trolley against her knees and a paper bag of mint imperials. Somewhere in the second hour, after the heating gave up, Yvonne started talking. Perhaps because the woman was getting off at York, and Yvonne would never see her again.

Can I tell you something stupid?

The woman unwrapped a mint. Go on.

"I've been married twenty-two years. Trevor's a good man. I want to say that first, because everything after it is going to sound like he isn't.

"I'm the one who remembers. Birthdays, his mum's tablets, the boiler service. When his dad was dying I did the nights so he could sleep. When the money went wrong I took extra shifts and never said a word. I'm the one who says, honestly, it's no bother.

"And it isn't. Or it wasn't.

"Last year I joined a choir. Church hall, eighty of us, tea in paper cups. Trevor said good for you and went back to the telly. That was fine. It was mine.

"There's a man in the tenors. He's got a cardigan with a button missing. But in the second term he started saving me a biscuit. A custard cream on a napkin, on my chair. Then I was off with a cold for a week, and when I came back he said, The altos were lost without you."

The woman stopped chewing.

"Nobody has said they missed me in years. Not the actual me. Not the jobs I do."

"Now we walk to the bus stop together after. That's all. Twenty minutes. He asks me what I wanted to be at nineteen, and then he waits for the answer. Nothing has happened. I want you to know that.

"But this is the stupid bit. I've started thinking I've earned it. Like I've been paying in for twenty years and nobody ever let me take anything out. And he's the taking out. And it's hardly anything. It's a walk to a bus stop."

The woman looked at her for a long moment. And what would you call it, if Trevor were doing the walking?

Yvonne turned to the black window and her own face in it.

"Something else," she said. "I'd call it something else."

In 2010 Anna Merritt, Daniel Effron and Benoît Monin reviewed the research on what they called moral self-licensing. Once people have built up a sense of themselves as good and decent, they can feel freer to do something they would otherwise judge as wrong. The good record quietly pays for the act. Years of virtue become a credit balance, and you hardly notice when you start spending.

The record is real. Yvonne really did do the nights. That is why the story works on her.

The train jolted and began to crawl.

I'll tell you what I think, the woman said, which isn't worth much. It isn't the biscuit. It's being missed.

"So what do I do with that?"

Have you told Trevor you want to be missed?

"How do you even say that, after twenty-two years?"

Badly, I expect. The first time.

Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson write about how decent people talk themselves, one small justified step at a time, to places they would never have chosen. Nobody decides to betray anyone.

At York the woman stood and pressed the last mint into Yvonne's palm. Good luck, love. Then she was gone.

Yvonne's phone lit up. Trevor. Saw the delays. Want me to come and get you from the station?

She typed yes please. Then I need to talk to you about something, and deleted it, and typed it again.

Choir is on Thursday. She does not know yet whether she will walk to the bus stop.

What you have earned is the right to ask for it out loud, at home.