The shifts were from nine in the morning until five, sometimes six or seven, and James’s job was to sit behind a grille selling tickets, pushing them through a little hatch for hurried passengers to snatch. Cheap red blazer, white shirt that felt cold when he put it on in the morning; belt which dug into his expanding waist. The first time Steffi saw him in the uniform, he felt ashamed – like a massively overgrown schoolboy – and hurried out of the kitchen, spilling some of his coffee, which he then had to go back and mop up while she smiled sympathetically and busied herself with her phone.

There were some customers he enjoyed serving. Often they were tourists – perhaps elderly Americans, not in a rush, full of questions, and with no firm opinions on how much train tickets should cost. He enjoyed saying things like, ‘York is a lovely city’, or suggesting, ‘You might like to wait and get a cup of tea, because the one that leaves in half an hour is direct.’ But there was a heaviness in knowing that, even on those occasions he shared an enjoyable conversation with someone, he would almost certainly never see them again. You couldn’t meet people this way, like he had on the road. Besides, most visitors to his booth were not in the mood for conversation. They were in danger of missing the train, and snapped their destinations at him. Or they wanted to change their bookings. Or they were appalled by the price that he read out from the computer, as if James was a criminal mastermind who owned all the nation’s trains and had devised this grid of charges himself. Or they didn’t come to him at all; they went to the machines. Every task James was doing could be done by the banks of machines: in a few years, this job would probably not exist at all.

Days went by in which he spoke to no more than ten people, for less than half a minute each, and without learning a single thing about them other than the fact they intended to go to Peterborough. His colleagues muttered ‘All right?’ or ‘How you doing?’, as if they were cordial but non-intimate neighbours, passing on the staircase: because really that was what they were. This must be how some people spent their work lives – lots of people. This must be where you end up, he would think to himself. If you’ve got it all wrong. Done it wrong.