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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 train 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 overhauclass="underline" 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.