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Chapter 5
There was a pod of wooden benches underneath the escalator up to the Eurostar terminal and lowering myself onto the last empty seat, I stuck my foot out and bent to examine it. I hoped it wasn’t going to swell, I’d never get my wedding shoes on, then.
I was busy prodding the flesh around my ankle bone when a huge black bag – the huge black bag – dropped out of nowhere, landing with a bang on the floor next to me.
I looked up in disbelief. ‘What are you doing here?’
He shrugged. ‘It is ok, your foot?’
‘Not sure why you’re pretending to care,’ I said, feeling petulant. For some bizarre reason I was suddenly acting like a sulky teenager.
He knelt down on the ground in front of me and gently slipped off my ballet pump.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, swiping my foot away, embarrassed.
‘I am checking over your ankle,’ he replied patiently, easing my foot back towards him and resting my heel on his thigh.
‘Now who’s feeling guilty?’ I said.
‘It has not become red, that is good,’ he said, peering down and ignoring my childish retort.
‘What, are you a doctor or something?’
‘No,’ he said, giving me a condescending look. ‘I am not a doctor. But I do know a broken ankle when I see it.’
‘Broken?’ I said, shocked.
Surely it wasn’t that. How was I supposed to get to work every day on crutches? I’d never get up and down the escalators on the Tube.
‘Does this hurt?’ he asked, twisting it to the left.
‘Yes,’ I winced.
‘And this?’ He turned it the other way, more gently than I’d expected.
I took a deep breath in and then out. ‘A bit.’
He smoothed his thumb across my instep, over the place where my toes ended and my foot began.
‘Yeah, you can stop now,’ I said, finally succeeding in moving my foot away, aware that the teenage girl sitting next to me, who had previously been scrolling through her phone, suddenly looked very interested in what was going on.
‘I think it is a sprain,’ he said confidently.
‘I’m pretty sure I could have worked that out for myself,’ I said. Trust him to make a big deal of stating the obvious.
I looked up at the nearest departures screen. 7.28. Our train had been erased from the schedule as though it had never existed. Now not only had I lost my phone, but it was touch and go as to whether I’d make it to the wedding at all. I imagined Catherine and her parents, waking up in their executive suites, cracking open the champagne. No expense had been spared on this wedding, that much I knew. When I’d first met Si’s family, I’d had to hide my surprise when Si pulled up outside a sprawling detached house that was at least five times the size of the one I’d grown up in. I’d looked up at it in all its double-fronted glory, trying not to gasp out loud at the perfection of its double bay windows, its grand, brass-laced door and its brickwork laced with ivy. Their sweeping driveway, flanked by expansive, manicured lawns, was large enough to house about six cars. For when they hosted their posh dinner parties, probably, and the whole village came.
‘Here we are,’ Si had said, chirpily. ‘Home sweet home.’
‘Well this is lovely,’ I’d said, smiling inanely at him, trying to hide how annoyed I was that he hadn’t warned me his family were loaded. I supposed this was so normal to him, this life, that it hadn’t even crossed his mind that I might like to know. That I might have wanted to prepare myself. I immediately felt underdressed, in high-street jeans and a bobbly black polo-neck jumper, which I’d been convinced had looked chic and French when I’d flattened myself against the wall of my tiny room in my shitty house share in Manor House to check myself out in the mirror. I’d been kidding myself, obviously: it was hardly sophisticated enough for this spectacle of a house.
The Gare du Nord was getting busier by the second, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I watched people rushing in from outside, their summer clothes wet with rain, flicking water off their umbrellas, leaving tiny, shiny puddles on the floor. I didn’t know how long I was going to be stuck in this station for, but I’d already had enough.
‘Am I missing something here, or are there no Amsterdam trains on the board?’ I said, pointing at the nearest screen.
French Guy stood up to see for himself, brushing dust off his knees.
‘I cannot see anything either,’ he said, looking at me over his shoulder and ruffling his hair with confusion.
