Away-Day
W ith difficulty, Miss Feltham alighted from the train, negotiating the wide black void between the step and the platform. In her day, the step had been lower, just as the trains had been cleaner and quieter. She had spent most of the journey listening to one-sided conversations. The man opposite had made seven phone-calls between Charing Cross and Ashford. By now, she felt she knew him: his sinus trouble, his mother in Crouch End, his planned trip to Marbella, his dislike of nylon shirts. She smiled as he hurried past her on the platform, but he didn’t seem to see her. He was on the phone again.
Emerging from the station, she walked down towards the sea. She couldn’t smell it yet, only the reek of frying onions. Perhaps it was foolish to have come on a bank holiday. With her slow, unsteady progress she was a hindrance to other people - young couples walking entwined, practically devouring each other in public; families with push-chairs or toddlers darting all over the place.
“Hello,” she imagined saying. “Yes, reasonably well, thank you. Lovely weather, isn’t it?”
A little too hot, in truth. The sun smirked at her lisle stockings and chunky cardigan. Still, best to be prepared.
Suddenly she stopped. She could see it now - valiant blue and vast, stretching away, away, to France. (They should never have built the Tunnel. England was an island and she for one was proud of the fact.)
How busy and eager the waves were, pounding in, swishing back, up and back, up and back, all day, all night, all day. No empty hours, no silence.
The promenade was lined with stalls selling ice-cream and souvenirs. One was just a makeshift booth, manned by a tiny, gnarled old fellow dressed in a shiny blazer and a lopsided red bow-tie. Beside him was a hand-crayoned sign: “I’ll guess your age. Price 50p. If I’m wrong, even by a year, you win a prize.” She hesitated. 50p would buy a cup of tea, or pay for the hire of a deck-chair. But people were always saying she looked much younger than her years. It would be nice to win a prize …
She joined the queue. There were two young girls - teenagers most probably, although it was so hard to tell these days. They wore skimpy tops that showed their stomachs, and peculiar clumpy shoes. Behind them stood a middle-aged couple in matching baseball caps.
“Yes, dead right!” she heard the girls exclaim. “However did you know?”
“Practice,” smiled the little man. He was no spring chicken. Not as old as her, of course - no one was as old as her - but wrinkled like a walnut shell, with bowed shoulders and thinning grey hair.
The middle-aged couple turned away, sour-faced. “You said I don’t look forty-eight, Clive” the woman snapped.
“How was I to know?” her husband muttered. “Flaming waste of money, if you ask me.”
Her turn now. She handed over the coins and the wizened little man fixed her with an unwavering stare, as if his eyes could penetrate her skull, her very soul. No man had ever gazed at her like that before, and as time passed - whole minutes, it seemed - she felt a blush suffuse her, spreading even to the soles of her feet. Finally he scribbled something on his notepad and covered it with his thumb. “And how old are you?” he asked.
He was cheating, obviously. Whatever age she told him, he would pretend that’s what he’d guessed. “Ninety-one,” she retorted in a defiant tone.
His eyes widened. “Good gracious! I was miles out.” He removed his thumb from the pad and showed her the figure he had written: seventy-four.
Astounding. Thirteen years gone at a stroke. She was a youngster in her seventies again. She still lived in the cottage; still had all four dogs; still dug the garden, mowed the lawn.
“And here’s your prize.” The man ducked below the table top to pick up a small silvery object - a key-ring with a tiny globe attached.
She closed her fingers round it; the whole world in her hand. She had never travelled
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