Before the sun comes up, when the train is a steel tube of white light in the darkness, I take my seat at the start of another week. It is raining; there is a storm coming. Fortune serves me a room with a view. Behind me there is a young couple and in front a solitary man. I am grateful for my room with a view: although it is a little too deep into the storm for a sunrise, I can at least look out and behold the wet fields, ragged hedgerows, the naked trees.

The brightness of the carriage is what makes the dim scenery so appealing, but it is exactly that dimness which returns so much of the bright carriage! And if I groaned, it is because the dimness was so gentle; the dimness coddled and cradled me, whereas the brightness was brittle and explicit.

To make matters worse, the solitary man pulled a tablet from his bag, typed the six-digit code in and began to scroll through his photographs! There were hundreds of miniature thumbnails and he had the whole journey to scroll through all of them from right to left. So scroll from right to left he did! One miniature thumbnail after another, each enlarging so that it filled the screen. He regarded it a moment, and then scrolled. Some he stared at for a few moments, others he paid no mind at all. I tried to look out of the window, but the reflection of his photographs came back at me, demanding my attention. The dim fields were beyond, the tablet’s photographic reflections were the foreground. As much as I tried to ignore the scrolling, it seized my attention. What a snoop I was. Succumb to your voyeurism, I thought. It is no use trying to stare at the wet fields, ragged hedgerows and the naked trees. See, even the cows have been herded into the barns. No, invite yourself along to this solitary man’s exhibition.

Many of the photographs were from holidays, that unmistakable glisten of foreign shores. There were English beaches in there, but they were lost in the sea of Spanish ports and Italian hillsides. He was very proud of his wife; there were many photographs of her — always smiling, covered in sun — and there were many photographs of them together, side-by-side, done up for dinner or in front of a city’s monument. There were photographs of them on the plane with their friends, photographs of the clouds, a wing and jet engine, photographs of their children and grandchildren. All of the photographs — every single one — was taken in the sunshine, as if the camera would not work in any other condition.

I lived this solitary man’s life with him, uninvited but subtle. Reflected off the window, I saw what he had seen, stood beside his wife, took in the landmarks of European cities, traipsed those rocky trails, I remarked on the similarities of my grandchildren and smiled at my happy daughter with her husband. The bright train moved through the dark storm towards London.