Mistletoe and Wine

“Christmas time, mistletoe and wine…” warbled the radio.  Lady Agnes allowed herself a small smile as she bustled about the kitchen.  No-one in their right mind would put the mistletoe and wine together, she thought.  Mistletoe’s berries were rather poisonous, and dipping them into wine, which would leach the poison out and into itself, would be murderous.  And she disliked people who accused her of being murderous.  She counted the coffee cups and found that she was still two short.  She sighed, and looked around, wondering which cupboard Hettie usually kept the crockery in.  It was a great shame that she’d had to rush off like that to tend to her sick Aunt in a small cottage in the middle of the countryside, but one had to let the help have the occasional day off or they’d leave and not come back.  She opened the nearest cupboard door and found a sack of flour inside.  That was nice, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure what it might be used for.  Perhaps Hettie used it instead of make-up.  Was that why the theatre folk she knew referred to it always as pancake?

Three more cupboards located a box of tinsel, what looked like a wartime stockpile of napkins, and finally the crockery.  There were two whole shelves of cups, many of them even matching.  Lady Agnes frowned at this, wondering where they’d all come from.  She had three cups of tea a day, and even allowing for Hettie only doing the washing up at the end of the week there were too many cups here.

As she added them to the tray and wondered which of the many white plugged-in boxes was the fridge, she had a sudden recollection of the tea-parties that her mother used to host.  There would be tiny sandwiches cut into finger widths and carefully spread with just enough paste to remind the tastebuds of what they were missing out on, petit fours that were really only petit threes, an acre of cucumber garnish and a blanket of parsley, and then all the cups.  They would be set out on trolleys next to the tea urns, in which a box of teabags would be stewing, and then people would be invited it to partake of the bounty.  Ah, so that was where the cups had come from.  Left over from entertaining the hoi polloi.

Finding the fridge took another three attempts, and then she wondered at the number of cartons of milk that she found there all with different colour tops.  Disregarding anything that had a picture on the outside that wasn’t a cow she went with green top and hoped that it was actually some form of milk and not egg-white or reconstituted anything.  Then she carried the tray to the sitting room.

“Please excuse the delay,” she said brightly, setting the tray down on an occasional table near the four chairs that clustered around a tiny coffee table set with an empty cake stand.  “Hettie’s relation is apparently very sick and she’d rushed off urgently to tend to her.”

“Oh, quite,” said the Vicar, sitting back down again.  He’d bounded to his feet when Lady Agnes came into the room, though his politeness hadn’t extended to taking the tray from her.  “What relation, pray?”

“Toboggan,” said Lady Agnes firmly.  She hadn’t listened to a word Hettie had said beyond hearing that she wanted a couple of days off.

“Ah, uh, really?” said the Vicar.  He went to the tray and lifted the teapot.  “Shall I be mother?”

“Yes,” said Lady Agnes economically.  The Vicar poured, not quite staunching his wince when he saw how orange the stream of tea was.  He poured a generous cup for Lady Agnes, and mixed his own with two-thirds of a cup of milk.  Even then, when he sipped it, he felt briefly as though he might be a builder or other manual labourer.  Then he felt bad for succumbing to stereotyping and promised himself that he’d say three Hail Mary’s when he returned home.

“Is she perhaps Scottish?” he asked.  “Only I was under the impression that a toboggan was actually an item of transport.  For use in the snow.”  His voice, gentle and refined, sounded a little like an educated horse might.

“She’s common,” said Lady Agnes.  “I didn’t get involved after that.  My mother always used to say that the help were the help, and if you needed to help them then they weren’t doing their job properly.”

“Ah yes,” said the Vicar.  He sat back in his chair, his china cup caught in the steeple of his fingers and seemed to be deep in thought.  “Your mother.  You know that that’s why I’m here, of course?”

“No,” said Lady Agnes.  “She is dead, Vicar.  You’re rather too late to have caught her at home.”

“Heheh,” said the Vicar politely.  “No, Lady Agnes, I was referring to the fact that the police wish to exhume her body.  Again.”

“Let them,” said Lady Agnes, waving her hand.  The Vicar frowned, not sure if she’d flipped in the bird in that gesture.  “Mother was buried clean, and there’s been three diggings up so far.  If she’s really hiding anything down there the police don’t seem able to find it.”

“Well,” said the Vicar.  “I’d really rather not have the graveyard disturbed like this all the time.  Have you considered having your mother’s remains cremated?  These problems might go away then.”

“Looks suspicious,” said Lady Agnes.  “If it were up to me Vicar, I’d have her left in a body bag in their freezers so that they can violate her bones whenever they feel like it.”

“Have you suggested that to them?”

“Yes.  They looked outraged and started talking for a an hour.”

“What did they say?”

“I didn’t listen.”

The Vicar fell silent.  After a few minutes he looked at Lady Agnes.

“What did you mean, she was buried clean?” he asked.  Lady Agnes grinned.

“Don’t ask questions you wouldn’t like the answers to, Vicar,” she said.

After the Vicar had left, muttering imprecations under his breath, Lady Agnes took the cups down the kitchen and wondered if she had a dishwasher.  The radio was still playing, and the song she’d heard earlier came on again.

“…children sing in Christian rhyme…” it warbled.  Lady Agnes snorted.  Christian rhyme might well have its place, but when you needed things done cleanly you needed far older languages than that….

NaNoWriMo update

50,000 words was actually reached on Day 18, but so far just under 37,000 have been posted on here. I'm not sure if I'm going to post the rest, or go back to the schedule just yet... I think perhaps a month of Christmas(-y) stories every other day might be more interesting than continuing the NaNoWriMo novel for now.  Feel free to comment if you'd rather see more of Joshua and Marie :)

g

NaNoWriMo Day 30

“Hold up,” said Joshua as they reached the ground floor.  “There’s a faculty list round here somewhere,….”

“In your office, it’s called the phone directory,” said Mark.  He stopped, and then followed Joshua round a corner.  “Where are you going?”

“The phone list is the current faculty,” said Joshua, rounding another corner and then stopping in front of a large wooden board, nearly six feet square.  It was divided into eight rectangles, six of which were filled and the seventh was two-thirds full.  “This is a list of all faculty that have been at Sherwood University Mathematics Department.”

“This is weird,” said Mark.  “Why is this here?”

“I don’t know,” said Joshua.  “I found it when I first got here and was looking round the building.  Apparently you have to be promoted to full professor while you’re here to appear on the board now, but up until about 1900 it listed everywhere who ever taught here.  Ah, ok, here he is.”  Joshua pointed to a name that had the year 1872 next to it.  Markka Koivula.

“So what?”

“So at least I know he was a lecturer here,” said Joshua.  “So it was probably him annotating his manuscript.”

“And he crossed his own name off it?”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“Weird.”

Joshua did manage to only stay for one drink this time and went to bed at half-past ten when he was yawning too much to concentrate on the television.  As he got into bed he noticed that the room felt cold, so he got up again to close the window.  Finding it already closed he went back to bed thinking that it must just be unseasonably cold outside.  He dreamt.

He found himself standing half-way up the stairs of Robin Hood Tower.  He looked down at himself and realised that he was dressed except for shoes and socks; his feet were bare and he could feel the cold from the stone seeping into them.  He started climbing the stairs to warm himself up and find something to stand on that wasn’t stone.  As he reached the next floor there was a sea of dust covering it, and he had to practically wade through it to make progress.  He trudged to the next flight of stairs leaving a wake behind him in the dust, and carried on up.  The dust rose up around him and made him sneeze and his eyes water, so when he reached the next landing he stopped and rubbed his eyes and tried to get a breath that wasn’t full of dust.  As the dust settled around him again he realised that one of the doors on this floor was open and that light was coming from it.  He found himself drawn to the light, wondering who might be up here, and thinking that maybe Lieutenant Georges had come back and was systematically going through all the offices.  The dust thinned out until it was just a thin layer on the floor that was barely disturbed at all by his passage, but his feet were so cold now that his toes were numb.  He couldn’t feel his little toes at all, and his other toes hurt gently.

The door was only half-open, but it swung fully open as he approached, and he could see that someone was in there, sitting at the desk and leaning forward.  As he got closer he could see that they were writing something on paper on the desk.  The desk looked clean and tidy, and then Joshua realised that he could see a thin layer of dust on the desk, except in rectangles where something had been removed.

The person at the desk looked up and looked at him, and dark eyes met his.  The person, a man, laid down the pen he’d been using, and turned slightly so that his body was facing Joshua.  Joshua wanted to look at the man, but couldn’t free his gaze from the man’s eyes.

“I found those papers in my mother’s bureau,” said the man.  His voice was raspy as though he’d not spoken in a long time.  “They were mine, I found them.  I took them, and they were mine.”  He paused as though waiting for Joshua to say something, but Joshua found he couldn’t speak.  “Beauty is terrible when it’s pure.  It’s just a topological transform you know.  Look three pages from the end and you’ll see it.  It has to work, it just won’t work here.  The dimensions are wrong.”  He sounded as though he were running out of breath, and his voice became deeper and harsher.  “But that’s not always the case.  If you bridge the gap, then you can bring the dimensions with you.”

He stopped speaking, and his eyes flicked to something behind Joshua.  Suddenly freed, Joshua realised that he could look around the room again, and at the man in the chair.  He was skeletally thin, wearing an ivory ruffled-collar shirt and dark trousers beneath a brocaded gown that looked like something from centuries before.  His hair was grey and sparse and long; it looked at though it hadn’t been washed.  The rectangles on the desk suddenly jumped into relief, like an optical illusion suddenly becoming clear and Joshua knew that that was where they’d taken the papers from earlier.

Something behind him laid a hand on his shoulder and pressed down.  It had great strength, and though he tried to resist he could feel his legs buckling.  The man in the chair looked ecstatic, and stood up, the gown he was wearing reaching the ground and looking like some kind of priestly robe.  His hands lifted upwards as though in supplication and the sleeves fell back revealing arms so thin that the bones were visible and the muscles along them stood out like wormy ropes.

Joshua tried to turn, but another hand grabbed his head and forced him to look forwards, and the man at the desk suddenly ran to the packing crates.  Joshua didn’t remember seeing them there before, but they were there now, stencilled with numbers beginning with 301-.  Everytime he blinked the numbers seemed to change, and he couldn’t remember any of them for long enough to check.  The man scrabbled at a case, pulling the lid of it off with difficulty, and plunged his hand inside.  He searched around in there, and Joshua could hear things being knocked over and pushed around, and then the hand pulled out a rusty-looking knife.

“True beauty is truly terrible!” said the man, his grin nearly a rictus.  Joshua was absolutely certain that he was looking at the face of madness.

Something smashed outside the office and the hands gripping Joshua let go.  He staggered, not having realised how hard he’d been trying to get free, and the man with the knife looked past him again.  Then he looked down at Joshua.  “Beauty awaits you,” he said, his voice dryer than ever, and then he exploded in a cloud of dust.

Joshua turned around as the dust swirled about him, coughing and spluttering, trying to clear the dust from his watering eyes.  Out in the corridor was another figure, and for a moment he saw it clearly.  It was Venkat.

He rubbed his eyes and opened them, and felt a hand land on his shoulder.  He fell over, shocked.  On the ground he tried to work out where he was.  This wasn’t his bed, and he’d been sleeping.  This should be his bed.  It must be a dream.  Only dreams were usually so cold.  Or wet.  The soil was wet.

“Sir?”  A voice above him spoke.  “Sir, can you hear me now?”

“Y… Yes,” said Joshua, starting to shiver.  “Where the hell am I?”

“Sherwood University campus,” said the voice.  “Are you aware that you’re naked, Sir?”

NaNoWriMo Day 29

It took another hour to sit down with Security – Lieutenant Georges recruited two other colleagues to speed the process up – and have each piece of paper and its relative order in the piles documented.  Only when they were sure that they had a clear record of exactly what Joshua had taken from the Tower was he allowed to leave.  They had, however, found a couple of folders to put the papers in so that they were less likely to be pulled out of his hands by the rising wind should he go outside.

“We’d be rather disappointed if you took them away from this building now, though,” said Lieutenant Georges as he was standing to leave.  “We understand that you might need to show them to a colleague, or you might want to take them home to study, but we’d like you to consider taking a scan or a photocopy instead.  If you have a smartphone you’ll find that it’s very easy to photograph the pages in question and then mail them to yourself or a Dropbox account.”

Joshua nodded, understanding the intentionally vague threat, and walked upstairs wondering yet again how on earth he’d managed to spend most of the day retrieving ancient papers from an old faculty member’s office, and why the whole thing seemed so strange.  He key-carded his office door open, and paused in the doorway.  He looked around, carefully checking for strangers, of the unnaturally tall and thin persuasion, and confirmed that the office was empty.  He hated himself for doing this, but he couldn’t help it.  He knew that he wouldn’t be able to sit down unless he was sure.

When the door closed behind him he opened all of the cupboards again to check that they had no-one hiding in them either.  He couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried, but he recognised what he was doing and managed to laugh at himself while still doing it.  Finally he looked underneath his desk, and only then did he sit down.  He looked at the folders, looked at the Macbook, and opened up the latter to check his email.

Half an hour later he looked at the folder again, and went to get a cup of coffee from the coffee lounge.  The corridors were quiet as he went there, but when he opened the door he saw several groups of students in there.  Not recognising any of them he quickly acquired a cup of coffee, then a Mars bar as an after-thought, and disappeared back to his office without being stopped and asked for help with homework problems.  Sitting back down at his desk again he closed the Macbook’s lid and opened the first folder.

The first couple of pages were rough working of some kind, and although he looked over it it wasn’t clear what problem it came from, and there was little text there either.  He surmised that when this guy’s office had been packed up, everything that was on the desk had been collected together in no particular order and just dumped in a box for transport.  He turned the pages over, until he found something with more writing on.

He was halfway down the pile when he came across a set of typewritten pages with handwriting annotating and correcting them.  The handwriting was in blue ink and was rounded and slightly childlike.  The first page looked familiar, but the second page proved to be the actual first page of the manuscript: A curious Bernoulli recurrence, by Markka Koivula.  The name had been struck through.

Joshua looked at it for several moments, and then placed the papers carefully on his desk and retrieved the journal from the bookshelf.  Turning to the bookmarked page, and noticing that the journal now showed a tendency to fall open to that page, he checked.  The author information was missing from the journal version.  He turned back to the Contents page, and discovered for the second time that the Contents listing ended at page 31 for some reason.  He turned to the end of the article, in case it was there in the small print; some modern journals provided small biographical information about authors there, but the last page of the article ended with a formula and nothing more.  He set the journal down, and looked back at the draft manuscript.  That an author would want to hide his name was a little curious, but especially so for a mathematical paper where precedence for new results was everything.  And these results were so new as to be at least a hundred years ahead of their time.  Why cross your name out?

He puzzled over it as he looked through the manuscript, noting that the corrections in handwriting were mostly changing the spelling of words; in some cases the misspelling was now the modern spelling.  Then he suddenly realised that he didn’t know who had made the annotations.  Was it possible that the annotator was someone other than Markka Koivula?  It wasn’t an English sounding name after all, and both the manuscript and the handwriting were in good English.  It was just a little bit old-fashioned to Joshua’s mind.

Someone knocked on his door, and he called out “Come in,” while he put the papers back in their folder.  The knock came again, and he remembered that he had to open the door to admit visitors.  A nuisance now, but quite a benefit when you didn’t want to be disturbed.  He got up and opened the door, and there was Mark.

“Very funny,” he said.  “Come in, indeed.  Next thing I know you’ll be accusing me of breaking into your office when you’re not here and leaving journals on your desk.”

“Wanker,” said Joshua.  “Are you coming in or not then?”

“I was hoping to get you to come out,” said Mark.  “The pubs have opened.”

“They opened at 11,” said Joshua.

“And you were nowhere to be found at 11.  I came by and you were missing.  You were still missing after lunch as well.  I was starting to think you were hiding from the mysterious journal-gifted.”

Joshua half-smiled, and explained about his trip to Robin Hood Tower and what he’d found there.  He gestured casually to the folders, and then to the journal as he described the oddity of the crossed-out name on the draught-manuscript.

“Wow, spooky,” said Mark.  “Footprints that only go in, your very own stalker, and now a journal author who doesn’t want the world to know who he is when he’s got the biggest mathematical breakthrough in a hundred years.  All that’s missing are some meddling kids and Scooby-Doo!”

“It kind of feels like it, doesn’t it?” said Joshua.  “Hey, you know what, the pub sounds like a good idea.  But just the one, I’m not staying till closing again.”

Mark laughed and punched him lightly on the shoulder.  “It’s not me saying ‘one for the road’ every half-hour,” he said.

NaNoWriMo Day 28

Venkat was waiting for Joshua outside the Mathematics building.  Lieutenant Georges saw him first, and her eyes narrowed.  Joshua, who was walking along-side her and carrying the papers that had been so much trouble to obtain, had turned his head to speak to her and saw her reaction.  He looked back ahead of them, and saw a figure by the Mathematics building.

“Your little friend,” said Lieutenant Georges.  Her tone left no doubt that she was annoyed.

“Who?” asked Joshua, squinting to try and make the person out.  A few steps later and he recognised Venkat as well.  “Oh hell,” he said.  “He’s not my friend, I don’t know what he’s doing here.  I didn’t arrange to meet him.  Maybe he’s pestering someone else now.”

“Why would he be doing that?” Lieutenant Georges had quickened her pace, but she glanced at Joshua with curiosity.

“He’s a crank,” said Joshua.  Seeing that he needed to explain more than that, he continued, “He’s got some ideas in his head, kind of mathematical, that he thinks are more important than they really are.  He’s trying to find some real mathematician to pay attention to them and validate them, but they’re rubbish really.  He doesn’t want to be a mathematician as such, he just wants attention, and people telling him how clever he is.  If you ask him he’s probably got a bunch of stories of how clever he was a child, and how he did advanced courses or went to a special school.  You can find them everywhere on the internet, and they’ve pretty much always got some idea so badly wrong that you could spend months trying to untangle it for them, only to have them accuse you of making them look bad, or hiding the good work and keeping it for yourself.  The best thing to do is stay away from them.”

Lieutenant Georges sniffed.  “Sounds like a stalker, then,” she said.  “If you’re willing to say that, then I can keep him off our campus.”

Joshua hesitated.

“Oh good grief,” said Lieutenant Georges.  “It’s always the same isn’t it?  I offer you a definite way out of the problem, and you start worrying that you’re not being fair to him.  He’s a pest, he’s a stalker, and he’s going to use up your time for no benefit.  You just told me all that.  Why is it so hard to tell me that you want him excluded from the campus for your own safety?”

Joshua swallowed.  Everything she said was logical and correct, but it still seemed slightly wrong to just kick the guy off campus when he hadn’t actually done anything except hide a journal in his office and then try and talk about it.  Then he remembered the strange, shadowy shape in his office, and how many times he’d had to search the room before he felt comfortable again.

“He’s a stalker,” he said.  “I’d like you to exclude him from campus, please.”

“Was that so hard?” asked Lieutenant Georges.  She quickened her pace again, and Joshua let her get ahead, knowing that he’d end up out of breath if he tried keeping up.  He slowed as she reached Venkat, and then stopped, hanging back out of earshot.  He saw Venkat point at him once, but Lieutenant Georges slapped his arm down, and then got up close to him, stepping inside his personal space.  Joshua was slightly impressed that Venkat didn’t move and didn’t back off, but it seemed to do him no good anyway; something happened so fast that Joshua couldn’t follow it, and then Venkat was lying on the ground with Lieutenant Georges stood over him, holding his arm out straight and behind his back, and then two more Security staff were coming out of the mathematics building.

Five minutes later Venkat was being escorted away and Lieutenant Georges returned to where Joshua was standing.  “Come on,” she said.  “Let’s get inside and get those papers catalogued so that you can take them away with you.”

“What did he want?” asked Joshua.

“Does it matter?”

He had to admit to himself that it didn’t.

NaNoWriMo Day 27

Marie didn’t wake Jimmy until they were coming into Kings Cross because she wasn’t paying attention and the train didn’t actually stop at Milton Keynes.  She leaned over the table and shook his shoulder gently, unable to reach far enough to do any better.  Jimmy’s eyes flicked open like a striking snake, and his hand knocked hers away from his shoulder.  He sat bolt upright, his gaze fixed on her and his eyes feeling like they were burning straight through her.  Then he relaxed, and sank back.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said.  “We’re on the train, right?”

Marie nodded, too startled still to speak.

“Ok cool, whereabouts are we?”  He looked out of the window just as the train went into a dark tunnel.  He waited, but the tunnel seemed to go on forever.

“Kings Cross,” he said.  “I meant to ask you to wake me earlier.  Never mind.  You got all your stuff?”

Marie had put her puzzle book, the first puzzle still not completely solved, back in her handbag before waking Jimmy up, and she nodded again, and then lifted her handbag onto the table to show him.  He half-smiled.  “Right, good,” he said.  “When we get off we’ve got to go through the barriers, so get your ticket ready, but hang on to it.  It’s good for the underground as well, as we’re going on the Northern Line.  We’ve got four stops, then we’re off at Kentish Town.  Keep up with me, there’s a good girl; there’s going to be a lot of people going for our tube and I’d rather get there before them all.”

“Right,” said Marie, pleased to have found her voice again.  “Follow you and be quick.”

Jimmy smiled.  “Let’s get up,” he said.  “We’ve been sat down for hours, standing will get the blood circulating again.”

They waited in the lobby of the carriage until it pulled into the station, and then Jimmy leaned on the Door Open button as though it made a difference until the door opened.  He darted off the train as fast as a salmon leaping upstream, and Marie hesitated, startled before following him.  She had to run straight away to catch up with him, only managing to do so because the barriers slowed him down.  Then he led the way across a concourse and down a flight of stairs into a large tunnel, and then unerringly led her this way and that through the maze of corridors filled with people all staring ahead of themselves and hurrying just as fast.  When they emerged onto the north-bound Northern line platform she was gasping for breath, and the number of people already on the platform startled her.  She was sure that there were more people along this narrow platform than had got on her train down from Leeds, and they all looked impatient, and sometimes angry.  Jimmy walked down the platform, dodging in and out of people, forcing her to follow or get lost.  She found her eyes tearing up, but then he stopped and seemed to edge out a little space around him.  She hurried up to him, and he ignored her.

An announcement came over the PA system, loud and slightly distorted, so unexpected that she couldn’t understand a word of it, as though they were speaking in a foreign language.  Then a wind appeared from nowhere, and she looked around in a panic.  No-one seemed to notice it, and if anything they seemed to huddle closer to the platform edge.  There was a yellow line painted there, and they all seemed intent on being right up to it, but almost no-one stood across it.  There was barely ten centimetres of room after it before the platform ended and the train track started, so she didn’t blame them for not wanting to go past it.  Then the train arrived, sleek carriages drawing up lethally close to the platforms edge, and she squeaked now, astonished by the noise, the speed, and the proximity of it.  No-one even looked at her.  The doors opened with a clatter, and people poured off the train, not quite pushing aside the people on the platform, who moved reluctantly, unwilling to give up their positions relative to the doors.  For a moment there was stillness as the last person leaving came from the carriage, and then the flow reversed and she found herself sucked on to the tube with the rest of the crowd.  Jimmy was ahead of her somewhere, but it was only when the doors closed and she was left standing in the middle of the carriage that she saw that he’d sat down.  All of the seats were taken, and the train started with a jerk that pulled her feet from under her and knocked her to the ground.

Someone tutted.

She had to get up, slowly and carefully, using the glass panels at the end of the row of seats, that separated those standing from those seated, and then she realised that there were bars above her head for her to hold on to while the train moved.  Red-faced with shame and pain she clung to them, and when Jimmy stood up and got off without looking at her four stops later she followed him in silence.

“What did you think of the tube then?” asked Jimmy outside the station.  A row of terraced houses stretched away across the road in both directions.  “It’s an amazing piece of engineering.  And there’s some things down in those tunnels that they don’t tell people about.  I’ve always thought that Mr. High and Mighty knows something about what’s down there, but he’s not telling.  Not me, anyway.”

“It’s a bit scary,” said Marie.  She wished Jimmy would ask he she was alright, acknowledge that she’d fallen over, but she knew him too well to think that he actually would.

“You get used to it,” said Jimmy.  “Right, we have a museum to visit!”

NaNoWriMo Day 26

All the trains through Oakfell station were slow, stopping trains on what would once have been called a branch line.  There were three stops through to Leeds though, and from there the trains went just about everywhere around the country.  Jimmy had told her that he’d meet her at the station as he intended to get to Leeds the night before and visit some friends of his.  Marie didn’t know a lot about them except that they were in the gambling business and sometimes gave Jimmy advice on what to back.  He seemed to lose almost as much as he won, but he never doubted them.  Her train came in, pulling up at the platform with agonising slowness; the doors seemed to open equally slowly despite the man at the front of the queue to get off pressing the door open button repeatedly and insistently as soon as the train stopped moving.

The main concourse was crowded with people, all looking at the huge boards that showed which platforms the departing trains were leaving from and what their destinations were.  She looked at the boards as well, wondering if Jimmy would meet her in here or on the platform, and frowned.  Nowhere on the board could she see London mentioned, all the destinations seemed to be for other places like Kings Cross and Edinburgh.  A little confused now, she turned around, looking at the collection of small shops that lined the edges of the hall; mostly sandwich shops and coffee bars, the kinds of things that travellers wanted.  There was a newsagents that looked stuffed with magazines; a single wall housed books that had numbers by them, indicating that they were best sellers in various categories.  Opposite the shops was the ticket hall, dominated by the sleek, curving lines of the self-service machines; in the modern age the humans who could help you work out where you going and how to get there were pushed to one side and virtually hidden.  She turned around, and then turned around again, wondering how anyone found anything in here.

“There you are,” said a familiar voice behind her, and she jumped.  “On time and everything!”

“Jimmy,” she said, forcing a smile to her face.  She did feel rather relieved that he’d found her though.

“I have the tickets here,” he said, waving a couple of slips of orange and cream card.  And by the looks of things our train’s going to be on time, and should be being called in about a minute.  Only I know that it’s going to be platform 1, so let’s stroll over there now.

He grabbed her hand as she started moving, and pulled back slightly.  “Not too fast, we don’t want to let anyone know that we know.”

“How do we know?” asked Marie.  She looked again at the boards, which were easily twenty feet high and covered with detail about the intermediate stops that the trains made and when they’d arrive there.  “I couldn’t even find London on the board.”

Jimmy looked at her, his eyes raking over her face to see if she was joking.  Then he laughed, leading her off to the right as he did so.  “Kings Cross,” he said.  “The London stations all have names, and you just need to know which one you’re going into.”

“Oh,” she said, feeling herself flush red.  “Oh, I didn’t realise.”

“That’s ok,” said Jimmy.  They walked through a busy, broad archway, and the platform barriers were just ahead of them.  There were people near the barriers, but no-one seemed to be moving through them at that moment.  Four platforms were visible from where she was, and they all had a train sat at them, waiting to move off.  “You’ve not been down to London before then?”

She shook her head, and took the ticket that Jimmy offered her.  The barriers accepted them, spat them back out, and swung back their little doors of plastic-coated steel.

“We’re going into Kings Cross,” he said.  “It’s pretty central, but we’ll be taking the tube out north again straight away.  It’s a bit annoying, because we kind of have to go back on ourselves, but it’s the way the train network works, and we definitely don’t want to get off early and then get a stopping train down.  That would take all day!”  As they walked onto platform 1 a television screen suspended from a pole changed its screen to announce that the train was going to Kings Cross and stopping at five other stations en route.  Almost immediately the noise in the station increased as over a hundred people saw the announcement and started hurrying towards the barriers.

“We’ve got reserved seats, actually,” said Jimmy, walking briskly alongside the train.  Marie had to keep running every now and then to keep up with him.  “But it’s better to be on first, before anyone can take the luggage rack or be a nuisance.”

“A nuisance?”

“Yeah,” said Jimmy.

They were, unsurprisingly, the first ones into their carriage, and Marie was startled to find that they were sitting in the First Class carriage.  Jimmy walked quickly along the carriage, checking the little digital seat indicators until he came to a table, and then he sat down and shuffled over to the window seat.  Marie stopped, not knowing which seat she should take.

“It’s on your ticket,” said Jimmy.  “But it’s the window opposite me.  I hate sitting on the aisle and having to get up for people getting on and off, and then having people push past you with too many bags.  Let some other sucker sit there and suffer.”

“Right,” said Marie, not sure what to make of the hostility in his voice.  Jimmy sounded like he hated train travel.

“It’s not expensive,” he said, as he sat down and then edged her way across into her seat.  “If you book in advance you can get some pretty good deals.  And we get food, though it’s probably just a sandwich and some coffee.  I remember when you’d get a proper meal if you were travelling in first class; back then of course you had to know someone if you wanted a cheap ticket.  But back then you didn’t have all the plebs going by train either, so I guess it cuts both ways.”

“Right, said Marie, wishing that she could think of something else to say.  She wasn’t very sure that she wasn’t a pleb too, by the way Jimmy was talking, and she didn’t want to draw attention to that fact.

The train filled rapidly as though the entire station had been waiting for it, but their carriage filled more slowly, and Marie noted that the other people in the carriage were either elderly, with suitcases, or dressed in business suits and had laptops that they immediately set down and opened up.  She wondered at the number of people who appeared to be doing business while on the train and started to think that she should have tried to bring something with her to do as well.  She had a crossword puzzle book in her handbag, but she didn’t want to get that out in front of Jimmy.

After a couple of announcements about people getting off the train unless they were planning on travelling the doors hissed closed, hydraulics closing the heavy, solid portals with a definite thunk.

“Right,” said Jimmy slouching down in his chair and closing his eyes.  “Wake me when we pass Milton Keynes.  I was up late last night.”  By the time the train had reached its first stop he was snoring, and Marie had got her puzzle book out and was chewing the end of her pencil while she tried to solve the first puzzle.