His phone goes. The deep, quickening notes of the Jaws theme. Which means it’s his ex-wife. Not his joke. Isobel’s. She’s programmed his phone. His new wife making a point about how scary the old one was. Is. It’s been nearly ten years and he wonders when she’ll let it go.

Making an apologetic gesture to the girl behind the counter, he answers.

‘Hello, Margaret’

‘Martin. You alright? Can you talk? Where are you?’

Three questions fired off in the one volley and she doesn’t really care about the answers to any of them.

‘I’m in the station. In the queue at Giraffe. I’ve just ordered the Vietnamese curry.’

‘Get you.’ Margaret says as the girl hands him the wooden stick with his number on it. 17. He moves away from the counter to find a table. He wants to tell her that Giraffe is pretty reasonable actually: their food is filling, wholesome enough and its not outrageously pricey or anything, but she cuts him off. ‘Now listen, Martin, please. Really listen.’

And in half a dozen, brisk, sardonic sentences she tells him that she’s dy- ing, that she’ll be gone in six months, nine at the most. And once she’s told him all that she tells him that Suzannah is on her way over, that she’s about to break the news to her.

‘She’ll need a lot of support, Martin. I mean, really a lot. You up to that?’   

Is he? How can anyone know such a thing? ‘How much does she know already?’

‘Not much. She knows that I was going to have some tests. That it was just a precaution. That it was probably nothing.’

He feels sudden anger now. Feels it as a physical pain above his left eye, feels it as a hot watery sensation in his stomach. It’s good to feel something.

‘Why would you tell her that?’

‘Because I thought it was the truth.’

She tells him now about she’d been getting these pains in her back, but didn’t pay all that much attention. She tells him that she put them down to being nearly sixty-eight and sitting on her arse all day. She’s a writer after all. Not only this, but she is a writer whose only recreations are reading and watching television soap operas. She takes no exercise. She belongs to no gym. She does no step, no zumba, no aquarobics, she has no dog to walk, no allotment to dig. No garden either. She takes the car to the shops. She has led an almost entirely sedentary life. Of course her back hurts. It never occurred to her that it was cancer.

‘Gall bladder cancer. Strange cancer to get isn’t it? Pretty rare. Oncologist was quite excited. Me, not so much.’

‘And there’s nothing they can do?’

‘Palliative stuff. And, believe me, I shall be availing myself of every micro- gram of painkiller going. No sense in suffering unnecessarily. Where are you off to anyway?’

‘Scotland. Visiting mum, you know.’   

‘Ah, that. Yes, I do know. One of the minor blessings of our divorce was being released from that particular annual horror. How is she?’

He tells her. She’s clinging on. Defiantly not going gentle into that great good night. Seemingly determined to not go at all in fact. Nothing works. Not brain, ears, heart, liver, kidneys, bladder, stomach, bowels, eyes. She can’t walk, she can barely talk. Her whole body entirely useless. A spindly collection of twig-like bones and leaking organs, all inefficiently covered in skin so thin it’s almost translucent. But still she goes on. Ninety-five and she’s outlived all of her siblings. All her friends. Margaret laughs and it sounds genuine, relaxed.

‘And now she’ll outlive me too I reckon. She’ll like that. Unless I make a point of welcoming her. Be right there at the gate. First face she sees. That’s assuming we end up in the same place.’

His curry arrives and he rings off promising to call Suzannah as soon as he gets to Scotland. ‘No need to worry before then.’ Margaret assures him. ‘I’ve set the afternoon aside, got plenty of Kleenex in. Some good gin too.’

The girl with the food warns him that the plate is very hot. She asks him if he wants any sauces. He shakes his head. He finds that just now, right this minute, he can’t speak. The girl frowns worriedly and moves away.

In her Handal Street flat Margaret Munro replaces the receiver and stands thinking for a moment. She feels a bit bad. Martin’s day wasn’t going to be so great to begin with and she’s pretty certain that she hasn’t made it a whole lot better.

She looks around. The small flat is tidy, uncluttered. On the whole single life suits her. Actually no, there’s no ‘on the whole’ about it. It completely suits her. She feels no malice towards Izzy. In fact all these years down the line she can almost feel grateful towards her. It was Isobel’s arrival that liberated her from an increasingly dreary life with a man who grew more grumpy with each passing year. If she thinks about it now, she’s sure that it was Martin’s disappointing lapse into cliché that most annoyed her. A professor of philosophy, he was meant to be smart. Fucking a student. For Christsake how banal.

Her phone pings. There’s an irritating minute spent searching on all the surfaces before she locates it in the teabag jar. A very Alzheimery thing to do, she thinks and is grateful that her diagnosis has at least spared her from the journey towards the undead.

The text is from Suzannah saying she is five minutes away and to put the kettle on. Here we go, thinks Margaret. Here we jolly well go.

****

Martin Munro is not going to Scotland to see his poor old mum. But he had to tell Margaret that’s what he was doing because he’d let slip he was in Kings Cross station. And, despite living so close, the only time he is ever there is when he goes back up to Fife. Curbing the tendency towards smoothing over difficult conversations with easy little lies is something he is continuing to work on in himself. It had always driven Margaret mad, eroded her trust in him to the point that he felt she was relieved when he got caught out in the big lie. The one that meant she was the final winner in the game of their marriage.

Why he is at Kings Cross is not actually any of her business now, but still, if he’d told her there would be a better than average chance of getting grief.

Martin and Margaret had split most of their possessions and assets equally in the divorce, but she’d definitely got the entirety of the moral high ground, which is why she also got most of the friends. And Suzannah too. Yes, if he was honest he had to admit that Margaret had got their daughter too. Su- zannah is definitely much more Margaret’s child than she is his these days.

Of course he did get Izzy. The beautiful, unpredictable firecracker that is Izzy. He wishes she were here now. She’d make it all easier. People were at their best around Iz, she had that quality of making people feel likeable, interesting, attractive. It had taken him a while to see that it wasn’t just him she worked that magic on, it was everyone – and by the time he did it was too late. He was lost.

And now as he eats his very reasonably priced, pretty decent actually Viet- namese curry Martin remembers the first time he ate in Kings Cross station. That was pretty decent actually too. And even more reasonably priced. 15th April 1961. Egg, chips, beans and a Players light bummed off the sailor at the next table. He was just eighteen, first time in London – first time in England – and he was still recovering from the porter’s wee joke.

He’d left home the day of the England v Scotland home international game and it had kicked off more or less as he left Waverley. First thing he’d done on getting off the train had been to find a porter and get the score.

‘Three goals to your lot.’

‘Three! At Wembley! That’s fantastic.’ Seems ridiculous to think of now but he remembers punching the air in his surprise and his delight. Hell, he had practically danced a jig.

Which is when the porter’s deadpan face broke into a grin. Clearly he’d got entirely the reaction he had been hoping for. ‘Thing is, Jock. Our boys scored nine.’

‘Nine three? We lost nine three?’

‘Yep. Welcome to England matey.’

He’d thought then that it might not be a brilliant omen for the start of his life in England. Had genuinely worried that it was a sign, that it meant something awful. Funny because Martin never bothered about football now. Couldn’t even tell you who was in the Scottish team these days.

After a moment, the porter had taken pity on him. He had stopped smiling at Martin’s stricken look.

‘Aw never mind matey. Don’t take it so hard. It’s not so bad. You’re in London, guv. You’re at the centre of the universe now. You know what they say. All the wonders of the world can be found within a stone’s throw of Kings Cross station.’

No, these days he never thinks about football but he does think of the por- ter. He can picture his face now, even after fifty odd years, impish if a lit- tle pinched looking, a little grey – but in Martin’s memory everyone over about thirty-five was pinched and grey back then. The whole world, even London, was a little pinched and grey looking in 1961. And these days, he knew who did actually say the thing about all the wonders. Arthur Machen in Things Near and Far first published in 1924. And who else remembered him these days? Hardly anyone.

That porter was probably about forty in 1961, probably a war veteran, test- ed in battle by Hitler’s guns and almost certainly dead by now. More and more of the actors in Martin’s favourite memories and anecdotes were al- most certainly dead by now. It was depressing. Almost unbearable. Some- times Martin could be driving on a mundane errand – to Tescos say – and he’d have to pull over as the knowledge of his own fragile and diminishing vitality struck him with sudden force. He’d have to sit there sweating by the side of the road and let the feeling pass. Only it never did pass, not com- pletely. Instead it sort of drained back into the substrate of his conscious- ness. Would sit there just waiting for some stray thought in an idle moment to cause it rise up and overwhelm him.

He notices the girl hovering by his table again, and assures her that every- thing is indeed okay for him and five minutes later he’s done with the curry. He’s standing, checking the time on his phone, wiping the dandruff from his shoulders, straightening his back.

Time to meet this secret daughter then.    

****

In the little kitchen of the Midland Road house Isobel Munro looks at all the lumpy Waitrose bags gathered around her feet. They remind her of the fat geese that have just started to hang out round the Battle Street basin. The ones that are so aggressively domesticated that they cluster close around anyone that passes demanding bread. Which they often get, despite all the notices they have telling people it’s bad for the birds. Maybe it’ll take an- other few years for the message to get through. Maybe little Stanley and his friends will be the last cohort of kids to feed stale bread to wild birds.

She sighs, this food won’t put itself away. It’s mostly packets and tins. It annoys her that a capable person like Martin won’t cook properly. She’s left a good half dozen proper meals in the freezer, and with all this stuff as well he can’t accuse her of leaving him to starve. Leaving him yes. Starv- ing him no.

She could stay of course. Even now she could stay. She could call Nicky and call the whole thing off. After all it’s not as though she’s entirely certain about it all. Sometimes this passion seems too fierce to be quite real. When they’d been going out a few weeks, Nick had asked where she saw it all go- ing and the question had panicked Izzy a bit. Flustered, she had suggested that they keep it light, that they didn’t have to tear down the walls of their current lives. ‘No.’ Nicky had said, firmly. ‘All or nothing.’ And by that time she couldn’t bear the idea of nothing.

Martin would be alright, she’d make sure of that. She still cared for him for God’s sake. And there’s Stanley to think of. Stanley loves his dad. He’s only six, so he’ll get over the split. Children are resilient. That’s the one thing everyone says about children, how tough they are. How they bounce back even from major trauma. And these days does your parents splitting up even count as a major trauma? If the parents are civilised then it’s okay. A more or less routine rite of passage. Painful but not disastrous – it’s like falling off a bike or not getting a good part in the school nativity.  

She should never have got together with Martin. Everyone had told her it was a bad idea. Relationships between students and lecturers were very much frowned on. These days they could get the lecturer in question sacked. These days he’d be lucky to escape jail – abuse of power or some- thing. It hadn’t been as bad as that in 2005 but almost. It had helped that she had been a mature student, thirty-six rather than in her teens and straight from school. It had helped that she had been in her final year, that Martin had got divorced quickly and had then married her. It had helped that they had Stanley. It had helped that she had lots of friends, so that they didn’t really miss the ones that Martin couldn’t see any more. It had helped that Martin was close to retirement anyway. It had all helped.

Martin had told her about the time, not that long ago, that it had been seen as almost a perk of the job. That a relationship every year or so with a pretty young thing was as much part of the academic life as presenting papers at conferences or publishing articles in journals.

Izzy had teased him then about the parade of beauties he had wined and dined and taken with him on overseas trips. ‘There were one or two.’ He had admitted. ‘But only one or two.’

‘Yes, because I bet Margaret would have ripped your balls off if she’d known,’ she’d said. ‘She’d have shown no mercy.’ And she’d had done the Jaws tune. Which always made Stanley laugh. Which in turn always made Martin laugh.

Truthfully, Izzy wasn’t ever worried about Martin going off with any students. Not now. Not even the mature ones. He’d been appalled at the emotional carnage involved in splitting up with Margaret. She knew he wouldn’t go through all that again willingly.

But now she is going to make him go through it again. Still, it can’t be helped. Que sera. And it’ll be different this time. She’ll be kind. She’ll keep all the trauma to an absolute minimum.   

It’s awful to think, but sometimes she wishes she’d never met Nick. That she’d never gone to that bloody private view. And she does sometimes wonder what will happen if either of them wakes up somehow cured of love, if their thing, whatever it is, turns out to have been like an illness, or an enchantment that wears off. What if they were simply part of some passing cultural phenomenon? Women in their forties who out of nowhere have relationships with other women. It’s like an article you might see in Red or Marie Claire.

Izzy shakes her head as she stoops to the first of the bags. You can’t think like that. This is not the time to think about possible endings. She should put this shopping away and then she should make sure she’s only thinking about starts not finishes. Nicky and herself that’s what she should be think- ing about. Two people in love who happen to be women and who happen to be married to other people.

****

He has arranged to meet her outside the British Library but he sees her now on the concourse of the station. He’s come out of the toilets and happens to glance down from the gallery where Giraffe is and sees her. Definitely her, looking exactly like the jpeg she’d sent. She’s coming out of Watermark, which is good obviously. She’d said in her last email that she was into lit- erature – ‘a complete bookhead’ is how she put it – but nice to have some proof. She’s bought some books. She has a Watermark bag in her hand, so she must have done. Martin is like that himself. Always popping into bookshops intending to simply while away a few minutes idly browsing, but coming out having spent fifty quid. Maybe there’s no need for DNA tests and all that. He’s still going to insist on one though. It’s the least that Izzy would expect. If this girl is going to be part of their lives – his new daughter, her new step-daughter, Stanley’s new sister – then she’ll want to know she’s not just a con artist or a psycho nutjob freak.

He tracks her as she walks past the half-hearted Harry Potter exhibit. A bored student in a duffel coat offering collegey scarves to the little group of Chinese girls taking each others photographs with the trolley that is quite clumsily fixed to the wall as if it were disappearing into it. They could have done so much better with that, he thinks. Could have built a proper platform 9 and 3⁄4. It could have been a major income stream for TFL.

She walks past his other favourite food place, Leon. She walks under the departures board towards the exit. Martin stirs himself, moves to the escalator.

****

Margaret pours two generous gins into tall glasses adds ice and a slice and tonic. She never skimps on things like ice or lemon. She always buys proper tonic, not the slimline stuff. Never drop your standards, that’s her mantra. Never accept second best.

She carries the drink from the tiny kitchen through the living room where her daughter Suzannah sits bleak and pale on the grey Habitat sofa. Just a two seater so as to make the room seem that bit more spacious than it actu- ally is. Margaret is good at interior design tricks like that.

Suzie sniffs into a hankie. Poor girl. Poor, poor girl. Margaret thinks that not-quite-thirty is too young to lose a mother. Kids these days grow up so slowly. They hurt for longer. Margaret’s mother would have considered thirty well on the way to middle age, the kind of age where you thought about having all your teeth out and replaced with sturdy, long-lasting pain- free false ones. Margaret’s experience is that thirty-year-olds are almost- but-not quite grown-ups. Only halfway there. And certainly looking at her now with her ruined make up and air of aggrieved abandonment her girl looked way more like a small child than the RE teacher she was meant to be. Her heart aches for her sad little girl on the grey sofa.

‘Come on, love.’ She said softly. ‘You’ll feel better with this down you. And then maybe you should call your dad.’  

‘He’ll be no help.’ says Suzannah shortly. ‘He never is.’

‘Give him a chance. He might surprise you.’ Margaret says. And maybe he will, she thinks. Maybe this once he’ll rise to the occasion and put his old- est daughter first. Stranger things have happened.

****

In her kitchen, Izzy begins a note. Dear Martin she writes, by the time you get this I will be in. She stops. She can’t write that. It’s way too much like the opening of By The Time I get To Phoenix for a start. One of Martin’s favourite records. He’s got a vinyl seven inch of Glen Campbell doing it which he loves. She starts again.Come on, Isobel, she urges herself. Don’t overthink it. Just do it. Go for it. Martin, this is such a hard thing to write… You’re not kidding, she thinks gloomily. It’s too hard. In the end she simply scrawls Call Me! on a post it and sticks it onto the fridge amid the wild gal- lery of Stanley’s pictures that are on show there, held in place by little mag- nets. Is she being cowardly, she wonders? Yes, probably. But it’s excusable. And then she just can’t think about it any more. Time to pick the little man up from school and then go to Nicky’s place. She has an ex-council flat on Judd Street. Noisy but lovely. Great views.

****

As she approaches the automatic doors that lead from the station Eileen York changes her mind. Or maybe gives in to nerves. Whatever, she de- cides she won’t be meeting her birth father today. So what if he is her real dad? What does that even mean? She has a dad. Patrick York has always been lovely to her. Why complicate things? No, she’ll just go home, read her new books. Ring her mum and dad – arrange to meet up with them on Sunday. Maybe go to a gallery, buy them a pub dinner after, make a little impromptu Father’s Day of it.

She hesitates for just a second before heading away from the British Li- brary up Pentonville Street and hurrying into the crowd. She’ll text Martin. 

He’ll understand.

Martin Munro doesn’t see her change direction. He is just a dozen yards behind her when his phone goes and he stops to concentrate on what the very Scottish voice is telling him. In the second before he finally gets it, he has time to think how strange it is that he should struggle to understand the accent that was once his own. Then he’s answering questions. Yes, it is Martin Munro speaking. Yes, Heather Munro is his mother. And so it turns out that she doesn’t outlive Margaret after all. Wherever they are going, Heather gets there first.

Now the voice is saying it must be a shock, she’ll leave him to gather her thoughts. She’ll text him her number.

Martin comes back to himself and looks around. He is, at last, a motherless child. And the world has, of course, not noticed. Around him people hurry past him out of the doors and towards the taxis. Or they come in from the outside, anxious eyes already scanning the departure board trying to see if they have time for the toilet, time or maybe to eat a tasty, reasonably priced Vietnamese curry in Giraffe.

She was ninety-five, he reminds himself. Ninety-five. She’d done well. Bloody well. A good innings. A bloody good innings.

Strangely energised Martin turns down Euston Road towards an appoint- ment that will never be kept, but at this moment anticipating being able to tell his newly discovered daughter all about the grandmother she’s just missed. And then later there will be the consolations of a poignant dinner with Izzy and Stan. Putting on a brave face, explaining the circle of life and death to his son.

And as he leaves Kings Cross he thinks again about the porter all those years ago. All the wonders, he’d said. Well, he’d seen a precious few of them and that was going to change. Stanley, Isobel, Suzannah, Eileen, even Margaret if she’s willing – he is going to make damn sure there are wonders in all of their lives every day from now on. All the wonders. All the time.