‘You might be about to meet your husband,’ Christabel said, and she bent down to pull her left sock higher over her bony knee. Satisfied, though her socks were still uneven, she put her arm through mine. ‘Isn’t that exciting!’ As she said it my stomach twisted, but I let Christabel pull me onward towards the station.
I stood under the clock at 11.55 and watched Christabel, hidden behind the wall of the newsagent’s. I don’t know why she was hiding, because nobody was looking for her. She pulled up her right sock and stumbled into an old man with a spectacular hunch. He shook his cane at her and I laughed.
Over the next fifteen minutes, I watched Christabel’s freckled face transform from excitement to impatience to pity. Across the station, I could see that she was biting down on her bottom lip. There were two little trenches on the centre of her lip because she did this so often. By a quarter past twelve, I knew he wasn’t coming. My palms were hot and I felt that all the world was staring at me in my uncomfortable dress. I wanted to cry. I wanted to go home. But I found myself rooted to the spot, unable to move or to deviate from my instruction to stand under the clock and wait.
I looked for Christabel, but she was gone too. And then the tears came. I stood and watched the people hurrying about the train station with their coats and their cases. Some of them spotted the girl in the floral dress without a coat, crying under the clock, but most people scurried past oblivious.
Then I was aware of a hand on my shoulder and I jumped, momentarily expecting to see the face of a strange Christian boy. But it was Christabel. She stood beside me and looked out on the station.
‘Do you ever wonder,’ she said, as she kept her arm around my shoulder, ‘if the boy you were meant to marry got killed in the war?’
I asked her what she meant.
‘I mean, perhaps there was this boy who was perfect for you, and you were supposed to meet him in the future and fall in love. Only, he was a soldier and he died in the trenches in France, and now you’ll never get to meet.’
‘Do you think that about me?’ I asked. ‘That I’ll never find someone to love?’
‘Not you specifically,’ she said, ‘I think it about everyone. I think about all the people we’ll never meet.’
‘Well, I’m cheered up now,’ I said.
Christabel laughed and held out two tickets to Edinburgh. ‘Let’s go to the zoo,’ she said. ‘I want to see Wojtek the soldier bear.’
And she pulled me by the hand to the platform and onto the 12.36 to Edinburgh.
The carriage was busy so we sat in a booth opposite a young man in a suit. I estimated he was probably about twenty-five and he seemed not to notice us until Christabel’s pink dress, which had layers and resembled a soufflé, brushed against his legs. He looked up then, surprised.
Christabel tucked her dress under her knees and I thanked my stars that she didn’t go to pull at her socks.
‘That’s a pretty dress,’ he said, and Christabel shone red.
I said nothing, taking him in. He was very slim, and I had a feeling that when he stood up, he’d be tall. He was wearing a white shirt that looked as though it had been worn several times already that week, but his hair was neatly combed to one side and held in place with thick cream.
His eyes met mine.
‘We’re going to Edinburgh,’ Christabel said, buoyed by his compliment.
‘Me too,’ he said, and he held up his ticket like he’d won a line at the bingo.
‘I’m taking her to the zoo,’ Christabel said, ‘to cheer her up.’
‘And why would you need cheering up?’ he asked me, but Christabel answered, speaking quickly.
‘Margot had a date today, but he didn’t come.’
‘You’re Margot?’ he asked, a slight smile on his lips.
I nodded, my face burning.
‘You were just saying, actually, weren’t you, Margot? That you might never find someone to love?’
His eyes didn’t leave mine as he said quietly, ‘I could love you, if you want.’
He offered his love like a cough drop. As though it were nothing at all.
The nurse was standing beside Margot’s bed, squinting at us. He seemed like he might have been standing there for a while.
Margot lifted up her purple sleeve and held out her arm.
‘Just the anti-sickness,’ he said gently, as he snapped the protective top off the needle and placed it in her arm.
‘Ooh.’ She shut her eyes and breathed in through her teeth.
‘All done,’ he said. He stuck a dot of a plaster on her arm and helped her roll down her sleeve. ‘Visiting hours are nearly up, do you need someone to come and collect you?’ he asked me.
‘Oh, no, I’m fine,’ I smiled.
Once he’d gone, I turned to Margot.
‘What happened next?’ I asked.
‘I’ll have to tell you the rest later,’ she said, and she pointed behind me.
New Nurse was standing at the foot of Margot’s bed. ‘Found you!’ she said, with a look that was somewhere between amusement and annoyance.
As we made our way down the corridor and back towards the May Ward, I asked New Nurse, ‘What were you like when you were seventeen?’
She stopped still, thinking for a moment, then she smiled and said, ‘Drunk.’
That night, when I would usually take to the wild waters for rafting with the handsome instructor, who had recently purchased a pair of tropical shorts, I found myself pulled. Not by the water, but by Margot. I didn’t go to the grassy knoll by the water’s edge or lie in the raft with the sun warming my skin. Instead I took a little walk to a train station in Glasgow and I
