A week later she announced that she had arranged a date for me with a nice boy from church. I wouldn’t know him, of course, given that my mother and I ‘never visited the house of the Lord’。 I was to meet him under the big clock at Glasgow Central Station at exactly twelve noon.
I recounted this interaction to my best （and only） friend Christabel as we hurried along my street towards the train station.
She scrunched up her face and her freckles moved, forming new constellations. ‘But we never talk to boys,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘So, what are you going to say to him?’
This thought hadn’t occurred to me and I stopped. Christabel stopped too, her pink skirt swishing. I don’t know why she was dressed up too, when it was me who had the date. My grandmother had put me in a starchy floral dress and pointed black shoes that were pinching my toes. I felt like I was a child playing at dressing like an adult. She’d put a gold cross around my neck and told me to ‘at least seem Christian’。 I had no idea what that meant.
‘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.