Marylebone Platform 3: Arrival

Over time their meeting was embellished and embroidered. The story was changed each time it was retold, contradicted by whomever was telling it, reshaped to suit the audience. Did it matter if the details weren’t true as long as the overall sense of it was? Did it matter if he thought she suggested the drink or that she insisted that he had? Whether they kissed? I’m pretty sure we kissed. No, we definitely didn’t kiss. That she had scrawled out her phone number on the back of a receipt with an eyeliner pencil or that he had run over to WH Smith to buy stationery just to make sure he could capture it. But didn’t you have phones? Did it matter if a little romantic license ran through the details of their first encounter? If the actual facts were correct? How it felt was the important part. What it signalled. What it started. Whether there was chemistry. Whether there were sparks.

This is how he tells it:

I think our eyes met across a crowded train. Obviously not that, I’m kidding. That stuff doesn’t really happen, just like all those ‘meet cutes’ you see in Rom Coms don’t really happen in real life. People bumping into each and spilling coffee, people rescuing other people from awkward situations by pretending that they know them, people agreeing, as total strangers, to car share across America. None of that stuff. Harry doesn’t meet Sally like that in real life and I didn’t meet Jane like that. She’s a lousy driver anyway so any hypothetical road trip we would have made would have ended in disaster. It’s hard to make witty small talk about the impossibility of platonic male-female friendships when you’re grabbing the wheel to swing the car out of the path of an oncoming truck. Even a hypothetical one.

It turned out, although I only found this out much later, that she really hated Meg Ryan in that movie. Thought she was a bit too much of a mess and a bit too ready to take Harry back at the end. She was right when she said he was just lonely. She should never have taken him back. I never would. This is not relevant to our meeting but is relevant to understanding Jane and why I liked her, eventually why I loved her. Not because she was right. She really wasn’t right – it’s a great movie and they’re clearly meant for each other – but because she had an opinion and she wasn’t budging. There was a certainty about her from the start that I was drawn to.

I didn’t have much choice but be drawn to her. Stuck behind her might be accurate. I was rushing to try and catch a train home and saw, unusually, that all the barriers to the platforms were fixed, all set with a red light indicating they weren’t in use. All except one where a woman, maybe late twenties, early thirties, with a shoulder length, black bob, pale green sweater, jeans, was arguing with a station official. He was blocking her path through the only working barrier and she, in turn, was now blocking mine. I’m not buying another ticket. I have bought a ticket, literally from that machine over there – wild gesture over her shoulder, her arm making contact with my chest – and you’re not ripping me off again. Brief pause as the contact registered. I’m sorry. This guy won’t let me through. She turned slightly to acknowledge me and apologise and I saw green eyes, some fairly heavily applied eye shadow, pale skin. A frown, lips pursed. And then she was back to berating the official as if I wasn’t there.

Jane is stubborn. As I said I found it attractive, then at least, and if she’d been less stubborn we never really would have met. I gently asked whether, maybe, I could just slip through as my train was right there and about to depart and the next one wasn’t for another hour. She either didn’t hear, didn’t care, or both, as she continued her lengthy and detailed explanation to her jobsworth train guy on how it was patently ridiculous that a ticket could change from off-peak to peak in the time it takes to walk from the machine that sold the ticket to the train. He dug in and just repeated that it was now peak travel time and her ticket wasn’t valid. I asked again. This time she did respond. Look, I’m sorry but it’s a principle now. I have a ticket and he has to let me through. I know it’s inconvenient but it just underlines how ridiculous he’s being and hopefully it will make him see sense. I didn’t entirely follow her logic but she had fully turned to face me this time and there was something compelling in the determination in her features, the way she opened her eyes slightly, nodded towards me, as if to pull me onto her side. I felt like I was being invited in to something. I picked a side. It wasn’t a fair fight: officious station man versus beautiful, intractable stranger. 

We didn’t win. I watched my train depart platform three, the hiss as it released its air brakes and a sudden, jarring blare from its horn temporarily drowning out the latest front in the argument which had now shifted to the inherent profiteering at the public expense by privately run rail networks. He had an RMT pin badge so perhaps she had thought this tactic might work, might eke out some solidarity, but, instead, he escalated things by radioing for security. 

I stuck around. I’m not sure if it was because I had a lot of time to kill now, wanted to see how it played out, or if I genuinely wanted to make sure security didn’t mess with her. It was probably a mixture of the three but I dial up the empathy and care angle now when I tell it. I needn’t have worried as something seemed to shift in her as a couple of guards wandered over, one muttering into an intercom on his lapel, the other smiling broadly as if he could defuse the whole thing through sheer optimism. And, weirdly, he did. Or something did. Jane backed up, offered a final, you know what, fuck this, and started to walk back across the concourse towards the tube barriers. She told me later that she had decided she’d rather not go at all than give them the satisfaction of buying another ticket.

Are you okay? I think that was what I said. It’s not a line Nora Ephron would have written for Billy Crystal, I’ll grant you, but we write our own scripts, in real time, and usually they’re pretty mundane. She stopped, turned, and looked at me for a moment. I think it was the first time she really saw me so if there were any eyes meeting across any crowds then it happened then. I’ve had better days. How about you? God, I’m sorry you missed your train, I get pretty, er, focussed when things go like that. 

It was impulse. I had a lot of time to kill and nothing to lose. Let me buy you a drink. I’m Paul. I’ll buy you a drink and you can tell me about rail privatisation. That stuff was pretty interesting.

She tilted her head, folded her arms. I sense you are teasing me, Paul. One drink. And if you thought that was interesting then just wait until you hear about what they did to the coal industry…

This is how she tells it:

I don’t even remember the argument now, if I’m honest. I’m someone that stands their ground so things like that happened to me all the time, especially with men in supposed positions of authority. It was usually bullshit and I was usually happy to call them on it. I know Paul tells that part of the story like it was the most important bit and super revealing about my essential character but, for me, it was just another minor infraction in my ongoing battles with nonsense. He would say that I later referenced the patriarchy but I doubt I did. Obviously it is all the patriarchy but I’m not sure, back then, that it was a phrase I used. I was through my Camille Paglia phase and I think I was channeling more of a PJ Harvey thing for both my look and my brand of feminism. 

The important bits all started after that. I mean I didn’t really properly look at Paul until I caught up to him afterwards and asked if he was okay, apologised for making him miss his train. He didn’t seem to realise I was behind him and so I reached for his arm, just enough to make him stop so that I could say sorry. He was attractive. Not my usual type at that point in my life, a little straight compared to my recent dates, but undeniably good looking. I wasn’t sold on his hair. He was rocking, or presumably thought he was rocking, a fringe that kept threatening to part in the middle like his eyes were the play and his hair were an elaborate set of curtains ready to reveal the main act. His eyes were the main act, though. A watery blue, thick, quite feminine lashes. They softened him, took the edge off a square jaw, high cheek bones, a narrow, sharp nose. Quite classically good looking. As I say, not my usual type at all.

We spoke for a bit, I asked him when his next train was and then offered to buy him a coffee while he waited, by way of a proper apology. I know when he tells it that he says that we had some banter about public sector privatisation but none of that was true. I guess it might be possible to flirt over Arthur Scargill and the betrayal of the British working class but, if it is, then it’s beyond my skills. I think he likes his version of it now because it made us sound clever and quirky and I’m okay with that. We were both pretty clever. He always saw my stubbornness as one of those quirks whereas I thought of it as who I was. They’re only quirks if you see them in someone else but not yourself.

The actual flirting happened over coffee in the very romantic surrounds of Marylebone station, pigeons pecking at discarded sandwich crumbs on the floor, the station PA periodically telling us not to leave baggage unattended, and the regular ebb and flow of people in transit. I don’t remember any lines but I imagine my plan of attack involved sarcasm and undercutting any of his bravado. That was my style and it tended to sort out the men from the boys. I was pleasantly surprised that he rose to the challenge – I had sort of assumed he wouldn’t which was, to be fair, an entirely biased misjudgement based on him being good looking. Despite my protestations of cleverness I was guilty of assuming that his looks were going to be offset by his personality. Stubborn and judgemental. He says quirks. I say solid character traits.

We jousted for a bit over the usual topics. Work, spare time, a conversational detour down cinema, music and a brief dip into cricket. Brief as he clocked, quickly, that I had zero interest in it. I think he clocked it when I said it was interesting that the only time large groups of men got together and dressed entirely in white was in cricket and at Klan rallies. Like I say, my plan of attack at the time was largely to attack. In retrospect it’s clearly not a fair comparison. Institutionalised racism on the one hand and the Klan on the other. I’m joking. Obviously I’m joking. He didn’t look like he found it very funny but also changed the subject pretty quickly.

There were sparks. That’s what everyone always asks when they ask how we met. Were there sparks? I fought against it but I liked him. He was self-deprecating but confident, listened to my attack lines, defended them valiantly. He was funny but not in an attention grabbing way, more in how he responded to the things I said. And he had those eyes. If I’d been measuring the sparks at the time it was more like someone striking flints together rather than one of those industrial lathes you see where there are just molten rivulets of fire running from them. So there were sporadic sparks, ones that had to be worked at a bit, ones that were going to need some time to catch light. 

I thought they were the best kind. It felt like cheating if it came easier than that. I didn’t believe in any of that love at first sight stuff. I wanted to work at it, wanted to fall into it gradually, wanted to fight it a bit with every ounce of my stubborn soul. Wanted it to set ablaze but didn’t want to get burned in the process. All of that happened but that was all later. For a while, for quite a while, we were nurturing sparks.

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Next Marylebone instalment which, for reasons that made sense in my head, I have elected to tell out of chronological order. Feel free to rearrange when I have finished, like you would with the Star Wars prequels.

Fundraising for Great Ormond Street continues here. I am close to half way through my target word count for July, aiming for 26,000 by the end.