He hadn’t quite thought this last bit through, and it came out halfway between a normal question and a rhetorical one. Peggy seemed like she might be about to answer but luckily someone at a neighboring table knocked an entire pot of tea onto the floor, whereupon five members of staff appeared from nowhere and cleared up the mess with the efficiency of Formula 1 mechanics in the pit lane, and the moment passed. Peggy seemed to use the distraction to do some weighing up of her own. “If you’re free then you should definitely come,” she said, once the pit lane crew had done their cleanup. Andrew recognized that tone. It was the way someone spoke when they were trying to convince themselves as much as the person they were talking to that what they were suggesting was a good idea.
They left the café and walked most of the way back to the office without speaking. Andrew glanced at Peggy, saw her furrowed brow and knew that like him she was replaying the conversation from the café over in her mind. They crossed at some lights and stepped around either side of a woman with a pram. When they came back together their arms bumped and they both apologized at the same time, then laughed at their politeness, the tension of the silence broken. Peggy raised an eyebrow at him. It seemed like such a daring gesture, to Andrew. As if she was on the verge of acknowledging what they were both thinking about the trip, that it was much more important to both of them than they were letting on. Furthermore, Andrew had the sudden realization that it was, in fact, one of the most spectacularly perfect eyebrows he’d ever seen, and that his heart was starting to beat uncomfortably fast.
“So what’s Barter Books like, then?” he said, trying to restore normality to the conversation.
“Oh, it’s amazing,” Peggy said. She was attempting to put her coat on but was having a hard time finding one of the armholes. “It’s a huge old place, rows and rows of books, comfy sofas dotted around.”
“Sounds lovely,” Andrew said. For some reason, putting one foot in front of the other had become an impossible task. Was this really how he walked? It seemed so unnatural.
“It really is,” Peggy said, finally getting her arm through the coat sleeve. “It used to be a station and they’ve kept the waiting room and turned it into a café. The best part is there’s a model train that runs all the way round the shop above the bookshelves.”
Andrew stopped dead in his tracks before hurrying to catch Peggy up.
“Say that again?”
— CHAPTER 16 —
To Andrew’s dismay, the trip was nearly scuppered before they’d even booked train tickets.
Cameron, for reasons that were unclear, had taken to getting people’s attention by whistling at them. At first it had been a sharp, enthusiastic toot. But recently, in parallel with his mood, the whistle had become a low, melancholy sound, like a farmer instructing his sheepdog on its last outing before it was to be put down.
It was by this method that Andrew was beckoned into Cameron’s office. There were folders and documents all over the place, and he had to gather a bunch of them up and move them off a chair so he had somewhere to sit. Distressingly, Andrew realized the office had started to resemble a room he might usually find himself searching through with surgical gloves and a litter picker.
“Rightio then, Drew,” Cameron said. “This holiday you’ve booked. In future please check with the others in the team about timings because Peggy’s away at the same time and that’s just not ideal. Please just be a bit more nimble about things, okay? It’s so easy to cascade this sort of thing.”
“Ah right, yes,” Andrew said. He and Peggy hadn’t deliberately concealed the fact they were going away together, but Andrew couldn’t help but enjoy how illicit that seemed to make it. He realized that Cameron was looking at him expectantly.
“I’ll check next time,” he said quickly.
“Good. Thanks,” Cameron said.
Andrew hoped that was going to be the end of it, but the next day he was at his desk when he heard raised voices coming from Cameron’s office. “It’s just absolutely outrageous,” Meredith was saying, with typical understatement. “I’m sorry, literally the last thing I like doing is complaining, but you can’t just turn around to me and say I can’t take holiday when I want to, that’s against my rights. I don’t see why Andrew and Peggy can just swan off at the same time and I can’t. It’s ludicrous. It’s completely unfair.”
Cameron followed her out, wringing his hands with an alarmingly tight-looking grip.
“As I have told you, Meredith,” he said, his voice ominously quiet, “you can take a holiday. I have just asked you not to go away the one week Peggy and Andrew are.”
“Well how was I supposed to know when they were away? I’m not Mystic Meg, am I?”
“You’re supposed to plan in advance and look at the log,” Cameron said.
“What?”
“THE LOG! THE FUCKING LOG!”
Cameron covered his mouth with his hands, seemingly more shocked than anyone about his outburst. It was at that point that Keith wandered into the office, humming something a semitone out of tune and brandishing a heart attack between two slices of bread. He looked at them in turn and took a massive bite, ketchup dripping onto his chin.
“What have I missed?” he said.
Andrew got to his feet. He had to act quickly so the trip wasn’t endangered. “Look, I think what Cameron was trying to say, Meredith, is that we just need to make sure this log . . . thing . . . is filled out from now on. It’s a bit of miscommunication, that’s all. I’m sure he didn’t mean to shout. Right, Cameron?”
Cameron looked at Andrew as if only just realizing he was there. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s right. Tough week. Clara and I . . . Not that I want to get into all that business but . . . I’m sorry.”
Andrew decided to ignore the Clara comment and quickly moved to settle things. “I’m happy to take on some of your workload this week to make up for it, Meredith.”
Peggy was looking at him slightly curiously, perhaps equally as surprised as he was at him taking charge like this. It felt sort of liberating—for a moment he had a taste of what it would be like to send cold food back in a restaurant, or ask people to move down on the tube.
“Well,” Meredith said. “It doesn’t make up for not being able to go away. I was planning on going on a yoga retreat, so that will need rescheduling. Not ideal, as you can imagine. But yes, I am hugely snowed under, as it happens. So thanks, I suppose.”
“Yoga, eh?” Peggy said, licking the lid of a yogurt she’d produced seemingly out of nowhere. “Downward dogs and all that bollocks?”
Andrew widened his eyes at her.
“I mean, good for the old joints and that, I’ll bet,” she said.
“And flexibility,” Meredith said, glancing at Keith, who smirked and took another huge bite of his sandwich.
“I know what,” Cameron said suddenly, with a startling return to his usual bright self. “How about I go out and buy us a cake?”
“A . . . cake?” Andrew said.
“Yes, Andrew. A cake. A big lovely cake. Right now. That’s what you hardworking lot need.” And before anyone could say anything else Cameron walked out, not even stopping to pick up his coat despite the torrential rain.
Keith sucked his fingers clean.
“Fifty quid says he’s in the papers tomorrow morning.”
Peggy rolled her eyes. “Don’t say things like that,” she said.
“I do beg your pardon,” Keith said, in his best attempt at a snooty voice. Meredith giggled. “Besides,” Keith went on, “if he’s out of the way maybe we keep our jobs.”
Nobody, it seemed, had a response to this. There was just the sound of Keith giving his fingers one final clean.
* * *
—
Come on, come on, come on.
Andrew was pacing back and forth—as much as you can pace back and forth in a tr
ain vestibule. The train was scheduled to leave King’s Cross at 9:04, and he and Peggy had arranged to meet on the concourse at 8:30. In retrospect, alarm bells should have rung when she’d said “eight thirty—or thereabouts.”
He’d messaged her three times so far that morning:
Just on the concourse. Let me know when you get here—sent at 8:20.
It’s platform 11. Meet you there?—sent at 8:50.
Are you near . . . ?—sent at 8:58.
He couldn’t write what he really wanted to, namely, WHERE IN GOD’S NAME ARE YOU??, but he hoped the ellipsis would get the general gist across.
He planted his foot so that it was halfway out of the train door, ready to defy every fiber of his being and jam it open. He could just get off, of course, although they had bought specific tickets for this time that were nonrefundable—not that he cared about that sort of thing, obviously. He swore under his breath and dashed over to the luggage racks to retrieve his bag. Ideally he would have been traveling with an elegant little suitcase, the sort of thing you saw BBC4 travel documentary makers in white linen suits wheeling through Florence. But what he actually had was a great, cumbersome, bright purple backpack that at one time in his life he’d used to carry every single possession he had to his name. While he hadn’t upgraded his bag (or bought a linen suit for that matter), he had spent far too much money on an extensive clothes overhaul: four new pairs of trousers, six new shirts, some leather brogues and, most daringly, a charcoal-gray blazer. On top of this he’d also had his quarterly haircut, choosing a more upmarket place than usual, and bought a bottle of the stinging lemon aftershave the barber had splashed unbidden on his cheeks, which made him smell like a sophisticated dessert. At the time, looking at himself in the barber’s mirror, in his new garb and new haircut, he was pleasantly surprised at his reflection. Would it be too much of a stretch to think he looked handsome? Perhaps even—dare he say it—Sean Bean–esque? He had been secretly quite excited to see what Peggy might make of his new look, but by the time he got to the station the unfamiliarity of it all was actually making him feel even more self-conscious than usual. It was as if everyone in the station were judging him. Well well well, the man in Upper Crust seemed to be thinking, eyeing his jacket scornfully. A bold fashion choice for a middle-aged man who still clearly uses a combined shower gel and shampoo.
Andrew felt something itching at his hip, and realized to his embarrassment that he’d left a label on his shirt. He twisted the material around and began pulling and yanking at the label, until eventually it snapped off. He shoved it into his pocket and looked at his watch.
Come on, come on, come on.
There were two minutes before the train was scheduled to depart. Resignedly, he swung his rucksack onto his back, nearly falling over in the process. He took one final look down the platform. And there, miraculously, flanked by her two girls, waving tickets at the guard and hurrying through the barriers, was Peggy. The three of them were laughing, urging each other on. Peggy too wore a ludicrously bulky rucksack, loosely secured, which was wobbling violently from side to side as she ran. Her eyes scanned down the carriages until she saw him. “There’s Andrew,” he heard her say. “Come on, you two slowcoaches—run to Andrew!”
They were only feet away from Andrew now, and suddenly he was overcome with a desperate desire to stop and bottle the moment. To see Peggy rushing toward him like that, for him to be needed, to be an active participant in someone else’s life, to think that maybe he was more than just a lump of carbon being slowly ushered toward an unvarnished coffin; the feeling was one of pure, almost painful happiness, like a desperate embrace squeezing air from his lungs, and it was then that the realization hit him: he might not know what the future held—pain and loneliness and fear might still yet grind him into dust—but simply feeling the possibility that things could change for him was a start, like feeling the first hint of warmth from kindling rubbed together, the first wisp of smoke.
— CHAPTER 17 —
Andrew jammed the doors open, incurring both the anger of the guard on the platform and the unbridled tutting of passengers in the vestibule. Peggy frantically ushered the kids onto the train before jumping on herself, and Andrew released the doors.
“Well that’s probably the most rebellious thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “I imagine this is the same feeling you get after a skydive.”
“What a hell-raiser you are,” Peggy said, struggling to catch her breath. When she looked at him she seemed to do a double take. “Wow, you look . . .”
“What?” Andrew said, running a hand through his hair self-consciously.
“Nothing, just . . .” Peggy picked a stray bit of cotton from his blazer. “Different, that’s all.”
They held eye contact for a moment. Then the train began to pull away.
“We should find our seats,” Peggy said.
“Yep. Good plan,” Andrew said, and then, suddenly feeling rather devil-may-care: “Lead on Mac . . . lovely . . . duff.”
To Andrew’s great relief, Peggy had turned to her daughters, who were waiting patiently behind her, and didn’t seem to have heard this. He decided to leave devil-may-careness for another day. Perhaps when he was dead.
“Kids, say hello to Andrew,” Peggy said.
Andrew had been worried about meeting Peggy’s girls, and had turned to the subforum for advice, waiting for a spirited but good-natured debate about the best way to replace valve gear pins from driving wheels to finish before bringing the conversation around to his nerves at meeting Peggy’s children.
This might sound rather odd, BamBam wrote, but the best advice I can give is NOT to talk to them like they’re children. None of that patronizing, slow-talking nonsense. They’ll spot such bullsh*t a mile off. Just ask lots of questions and essentially treat them like you would an adult.
So with a general air of suspicion and mistrust, Andrew thought. Though he replied: Thanks, mate! and worried for two hours about the implications of his now being the sort of person who used the word “mate.”
As it turned out, Peggy’s eldest, Maisie, happily ignored them all for the duration of the journey—only lifting her head away from the book she was reading to ask where they were, or what a particular word meant. Her younger sister, Suze, on the other hand, conversed entirely through the medium of “would you rather” scenarios, which made things infinitely easier than Andrew was expecting. She had a twinkle in her eye that made it seem like she was constantly on the cusp of laughing, so Andrew was finding it hard to treat the questions with the gravitas they clearly warranted.
“Would you rather be a horse that can time-travel or a talking turd?” was the latest conundrum.
“Would it be okay for me to ask follow-up questions?” Andrew said. “That’s what Peggy—your mum, I mean—and I normally do.”
Suze yawned as she deliberated. “Yeahhh, okay,” she said, apparently satisfied that this was aboveboard.
“Okay,” Andrew said, suddenly aware that both Peggy and Suze were looking at him intently, and trying not to feel embarrassed. “Can the horse speak?”
“No,” Suze said, “it’s a horse.”
“That is true,” Andrew conceded. “But the turd can talk, though.”
“So?”
Andrew didn’t really have a response to that.
“The problem you’ve got here,” Peggy said, “is that you’re trying to apply logic to the question. Logic is not your friend here.”
Suze nodded sagely. Next to her, Maisie closed her eyes and took a deep breath, frustrated at the constant distractions. Andrew made sure to lower his voice.
“Okay, I’m going to go with the horse.”
“Obviously,” Suze said, apparently baffled as to why it had taken Andrew so long to get there. She tore open a bag of lemon sherbets and, after briefly contemplating, offered the bag to Andrew.
As th
e train snaked into Newcastle, the Tyne Bridge sparkling in the sun, Peggy took out the photograph of Alan and “B.”
“What do you reckon, kiddos. Think we’re gonna find this lass?”
Maisie and Suze shrugged in unison.
“That seems about right,” Andrew said.
“Oi,” Peggy said, kicking him gently in the shin, “whose side are you on?”
* * *
—
Peggy’s sister, Imogen, was, by her own admission, “a cuddler,” and Andrew had no option but to submit to her bosomy bear hug. She drove them to her house in a car with an alarming amount of gaffer tape holding it together, with Andrew sitting in the back next to the girls feeling a bit like an awkward older brother.
Imogen had obviously been busy that morning as the kitchen was teeming with cakes, biscuits and puddings, many of which Andrew lacked the critical vocabulary to describe.
“I see you’re catering for village fetes now,” Peggy said.
“Oh give over, you all need fattening up,” Imogen said. Andrew was glad that while cuddles were compulsory, pokes to the belly were apparently restricted to family.
Later that evening, with the kids in bed, Imogen, Peggy and Andrew settled down in the living room and half-watched a romcom, Imogen thankfully interrupting a dire scene involving bodily fluids to ask about Alan and the ducks.
“You’ve never seen anything like it, honest to god,” Peggy said.
“Well, it’s very sweet what you’re doing,” Imogen said, stifling a yawn. “I mean, you’re both mental, obviously . . .”
Peggy started to make their case again. She was sitting with her legs tucked back to one side, her sweater slipped off her shoulder. Andrew felt an ache somewhere in the region of his stomach. It was then he glanced over and saw that Imogen was watching him. More specifically, she was watching him watching Peggy. He looked away and focused on the TV, glad the room was dim enough to hide his reddening cheeks. He got the impression that Imogen wasn’t someone easily fooled, and just as he’d had that thought she cut across Peggy’s questioning of the protagonist’s Irish accent.
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