again, as with the woman on the check-in desk, John attempted the impossible. His doubts had dissolved. He wanted to go to Paris and he had to take this train.
‘Add another carriage!’
The man in front of him, a wizened old Indian fellow whose retirement was surely long overdue, would not be moved. John had to face facts. He would not be getting on this train. Paris now seemed to him like the most marvellous city in the world. Mohamed would be there waiting for him. An unforgettable night lay in store. Soon John would be stroking his date’s hand, subtly, so no one else would see. Mustapha would shoot him a glance that sent thrills down his spine. They would walk the streets of Paris before diving into some hidden doorway for a kiss.
‘Have you made up your mind, sir?’
‘I’ll take a seat on the last train.’
The last train left at 20.04. John quickly worked out he had ninety minutes before he needed to be back at the gate. It was too much time to sit around doing nothing, but not enough to attempt to do anything. There was no way he could contemplate leaving the area. By the time he got down to Soho to see if anyone was around, the train would have left without him. On the other hand, spending in excess of an hour traipsing around the station was a dismal prospect. ‘I’d look like I was trying to pick someone up,’ he thought wearily.
Out of habit, he glanced at his phone. He had no messages, obviously. His friends thought he had already left the country. He felt a twinge of sadness. How many friends could he really count on, when all was said and done? Six or seven, at most. Feeling increasingly sorry for himself, he realised it was more like five. Included in this revised total was the famous Ali of London, but John couldn’t exactly claim Ali as a friend. Could he even refer to him as an acquaintance? So the number was four, in fact. Kate, David, Philip and Enrico, an Italian John had met some ten years earlier. They had carried on seeing one another fairly regularly, two or three times a year. Did that make him a friend? John held the phone up to his face again as though expecting it to perform a miracle. There was nothing lighting up the screen of the exorbitantly priced device. Three friends then, at the final count.
He had to snap out of this mood. John slid the phone inside one of the external pockets of his travel bag to try to put it out of his mind. Every cloud had a silver lining, however small that cloud had been to begin with. John’s loneliness made him appreciate his freedom. He had taken the decision to get away for the weekend. He wanted to travel. Travel meant adventure, even if all he was embarking on was an apparently straightforward return trip to Paris. He had had to overcome one obstacle after another since leaving the office, after all. He pictured those climbers making their way up Everest, battling the cold, snow and avalanches. In his own small way, John told himself he had just faced a kind of avalanche. He had got out alive and that was the most important thing. All these thoughts of peaks and summits gave John the sudden urge to take the escalator to the upper level, from where you could watch the trains coming in and out. He was beginning to feel himself again. The great glass roof of St Pancras dazzled him, like the sun going down behind the slopes of Mont Blanc. The sky-blue canopy gave off a sense of majestic vastness. The enormous arch stood as a symbol of the power of the Empire.
‘Fuck!’ John said to himself. ‘That’s really something!’
It was the first time he had ever stopped to take a proper look at the station. He had passed through it so many times, but in his rush to catch a train or get home he had never even lifted his head to see where he was. Up ahead, the Brussels train was moving off. Once more seized with anxiety, John wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off going to Belgium. He could be halfway there by now, comfortably ensconced in his first class single seat. But what would he have done with himself in Brussels? There was no one waiting for him there. Dark thoughts circled in his mind. He stared up at the roof. It was glorious, obviously. But now what? He hurried back down the escalator to the main concourse where he joined the ranks of commuters window-shopping at the smart boutiques while they waited for their trains. John’s instincts told him to get out of the station. He needed air.
The rain was still falling and the wind had brought a chill to the air. Autumn had come early. A car raced by, ploughing through the wide puddle of oily water which had formed along the gutter and which John, standing on the edge of the pavement lost in thought, had failed to notice. He was soaked.
‘Shit!’ he shouted, turning back and heading inside the station. His mood having dipped once again, he told himself the old building must be worth investigating in greater depth. Bricks and mortar were his trade, after all. The lack of interest he had hitherto shown in the place put him to shame. But where should he start? He already knew the main concourse and the upper level. He decided to concentrate on the passages running off to the sides. John had years of experience showing buyers around lavish apartments, employing every sales trick in the book, effortlessly extolling the panoramic views, the dream living space worthy of the wealthiest clients, the rococo bedrooms, the cavernous entrance halls and all the unnecessary add-ons of a luxury abode. He loved describing places, using grandiose words to exalt what he always referred to as ‘high-end specifications’; but now, before this display of neo-Gothic architecture, supposedly the very definition of wow-factor, he found himself at a loss. He wandered in and out of the various passageways, but nothing captured his attention and he kept a hurried pace. He found it all tiring to look at. He came back out onto the street five minutes later, overwhelmed. There was nothing to see in there. If tasked with selling St Pancras to a Punjabi nabob, on the other hand, John would no doubt have found the words to sing its praises. A stunning, must-see gem, perhaps.
Come to think of it, John never really looked at the apartments he showed people round. A true salesman, he made do with a quick scan around the rooms to get a feel for space, proportions, views. He would note down two or three key points about the style of the property – Victorian, Georgian or whatever – and that was it. This thought reminded him of something else. John had failed to secure an important sale the previous week. The potential buyer, a businessman from Muscat, had judged the price too high. The flat, a nicely presented two-bed, was on the market for two million pounds, and its owner, Mrs Dodd, would not listen to John’s arguments. The market was heading downwards; there was even talk of a crash. Experts were predicting that prices might plummet thirty per cent in a matter of weeks, and the flat had already been on the market for four months. Mrs Dodd was an old rich widow who had inherited the property from her late husband, George Dodd, a distant descendant of a family of plantation owners in the West Indies.
‘If I reduce the price,’ she told John, ‘I’ll feel I’m being disloyal to George.’ Besides, these oil barons from the Gulf were extremely rich. If they wanted to come over here and buy a home in London, they could jolly well pay for it, she added, sounding a note of peculiarly British pride. John watched his commission go up in smoke.
John’s rumbling stomach called time on his ruminations. Hunger gave him the excuse he had been waiting for to leave St Pancras again. Outside, there was no improvement in the weather. It was now chucking it down. On the other side of the road, two fast food outlets stood side by side, both offering cheap burgers and fried chicken. The smell of stale fat reached him fifty yards away. As he got closer, the stench made him gag. Looking through the windows, he saw scruffy diners at Formica tables, the strip lighting casting an unhealthy pallor over their faces. John hurried past, back to the Black Swan.
18.40. Peak time at the bar. Drinkers were spilling out onto the pavement. Huddling under their umbrellas, they leaned against the wall, gulping down their pints. After a brief moment of doubt, John sharpened his elbows and worked a path to the door. That’s when the real problems started. A group of merry youths were leaving the pub, pushing John back out onto the cobbled street as they did so. There was nothing he could do: there were six or seven of them and only one of him. But before he had time to get worked up about it, he found himself being swept back the other way by
