She was here to meet Paul. His flight from Zurich had already been delayed by an hour. She wondered if it would be allowed to land at all. If not, where would it be diverted to? Shannon, most likely, or even somewhere in England. If Paul were here, and not up in the sky somewhere, he would touch her elbow with his fingers and tell her, smiling, that she should go home and wait for him there. Paul was the soul of considerateness. She should have been glad of it, but instead his unflagging thoughtfulness annoyed her a little.

And was it thoughtfulness, anyway? Was it not something else, something that assured him of being always in control?

She had already drunk three cups of tea and eaten two sausage rolls. The first roll had tasted all right, probably because she was hungry, but the second was a serious mistake. It had given her a stomach ache, and there was a horrible, mucus-like scum coating the inside of her mouth.

The metal line of numbers on the arrivals board high up behind her clattered through a new set of changes. She turned expectantly, but no, the Zurich flight was still due to land late, at noon. She looked out at the mist again. When did mist stop being mist and become full-blown fog? In the hour that she had been waiting so far, not a single flight had taken off or landed. She was torn between the wish for Paul to be here, now, and the worry that the pilot would run out of patience and decide to risk coming down, and would lose his way because of poor visibility and the plane would crash.

She looked at her watch, and thought it must have stopped. But it hadn’t – the spear-shaped second hand was sweeping around the dial with what seemed to her infuriating smugness. It was only five minutes past eleven. If there was another delay, she would go to the bar and have a drink, and let the people, especially the women, glare at her in disapproval if they wanted to. Unescorted young ladies weren’t supposed to sit on high stools in airport bars with their legs crossed, drinking gin. Only certain girls did that kind of thing.

Paul had been attending a conference in Zurich on the campaign to stem the spread of smallpox in the Horn of Africa.

Waiting for him, she had a sense, only slightly guilty, of her superiority over the people around her. There were businessmen’s doll-like wives, in white gloves and pillbox hats, and couples up from the country, seeing off their emigrant sons or daughters, and rough-faced fellows returning to their jobs on building sites in England, cardboard suitcases at their feet, their wives beside them with red-rimmed eyes and five or six screaming kids hanging on to their coat-tails. They would all look so dowdy, even those pampered wives, compared to her boyfriend.