As the PA system urged them to vacate the premises and follow the instructions of the police, Catherine noted that the travelling public had become ‘passengers’ again. She recalled the time during her late-eighties adolescence when, literally overnight, the announcements began referring to them instead as ‘customers’, in a conspicuously ideological manipulation of the language. ‘Customers boarding the train’; ‘Customers awaiting the express service to Carlisle’. You didn’t tell kids that people on a train were customers. It was such a cumbersome distortion as to make it an insultingly obvious and rather craven act of Thatcherite compliance. She couldn’t recall when they went back to being passengers again, but was glad that they had. You could tell passengers to get their arses out of the station in case it got blown up; ‘customers’ suggested that if they’d paid their money, they could take their chances.

Their task was more than just a matter of clearing the platforms and sweeping everyone out from the main concourse. There were now more shops, pubs and restaurants in Central station than there had been on Calderburn High Street when Catherine was growing up. There were sandwich shops, newsagents, hairdressers, chemists, a currency exchange, fashion accessories, a florist, a greeting card store, an M&S food hall and even a jeweller’s. It was an upscale one at that, rather pretentiously called Coruscate, and found itself the subject of some rather jaundiced speculation on the part of Laura as they approached the premises.

‘A jeweller’s in a railway station? One-stop guilty conscience shop for the man with more to atone for than the florist can cover. Fleeting moment of thinking about the missus on the way home that’s supposed to make up for never thinking about her the rest of the time.’

This would normally have provoked curious speculation as to what misadventures had coloured Laura’s past love life, but right then Catherine couldn’t think past how it might apply to herself.

A few months back, she had come perilously close to forgetting Drew’s birthday. She had been away overnight, at a meeting in London, so she’d unknowingly dodged the awkwardness of not having a card or present for him first thing that morning. It only occurred to her when she was killing time in Terminal Five, waiting for her flight home. She saw this gadgety watch and reckoned Drew would love it. She was aware she hadn’t been wife of the year of late, so thought she should buy him it just to prove she was thinking of him. Mind you, she thought, his birthday was coming up soon, so perhaps she should buy it and wait until … Oh God.