So she crouched to pick up her bag and left him there. Her heels on the marble floor were nothing in the crowd but all he could see was the swing of her hair as she walked away, then the blank faces passing between them, one, two, a family, then the crowd had her and she was gone. He stood for ten minutes with the same thought in his mind and the same expression on his face. A police officer touched him gently on the elbow and he looked around, innocently thoughtless, as though waking.
“You’ll have to move along, sir.”
“Right, sorry.”
A few slow steps in no direction at all and he stopped looking after her. The departures board wasn’t showing the details of her train any more. A couple of pigeons fluttered to ground between him and the red brick wall and scattered instantly as a heavy man with a rolling suitcase paced through the gap. James looked up at the roof and down to the ground and took up a place in the movement of people, between a small woman in a scarlet sari and a scruffy teen in a velvet jacket. He made his way around with the slow-stirred flow of the station and stepped out of the wide doors into the cool grey air of the evening.
