Free Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs by Victoria Clayton Page B

tinge presaging dusk. While dreaming about taking the Met by storm in the jazzy, flashy Rubies section of Balanchine’s Jewels , I finished the rest of Bobbie’s picnic. Siggy deigned to eat some of the hazelnut chocolate, which could not have been good for him but the nuts kept him busy. I enjoyed looking at the white hills and dales that formed graceful parabolas like giant elbows and knees carved from marble.
    A ticket inspector came aboard at Durham, so I dropped my shawl over the front of Siggy’s cage. When I removed it later he had eaten half the fringe, this despite my having given him an old jersey for this very purpose, which as far as I could see remained untouched.
    ‘You really are a naughty boy!’ I said with some heat, because the shawl was a fine wool paisley printed in lovely colours of rose and ochre which I had been delighted to find in an Oxfam shop.
    A man sitting opposite, wearing a dog collar, glanced at me with an expression of alarm and then stared sternly out of the window, slowly reddening.
    It was nearly dark when we chugged into Newcastle. The rawness of the weather had stolen the colour from people’s lips and cheeks and restored it to their noses. Each light had its own murky halo and every cold surface a silvery sheen of condensation. Our train was late, which left me five minutes to catch the connection to Haltwhistle. With my bag slung round my neck and Siggy’s basket in one hand, I tried with the other to pull my suitcase from where Bobbie had stowed it between the seats.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said to the clergyman. ‘I’m awfully sorry, would you mind …?’
    He pretended not to hear me and made a bolt for the exit, coat flapping.
    ‘Give it here, pet.’ A small stout woman in a grey gabardinemackintosh took hold of the handle of my case and tugged it into the aisle, along the carriage and down on to the platform. Luckily, a cool-looking porter sauntered up with a trolley.
    ‘I’m so grateful,’ I said to the woman, whose forehead glistened with perspiration.
    She glared at the other passengers who were flowing around us like a torrent round a boulder. ‘It’s come to something if we can’t help a poor bloody cripple.’
    I smiled. ‘It’s only temporary.’
    She clicked her tongue. ‘I hope so, I’m sure.’ She trotted away on fat little legs.
    My porter was waiting patiently by an open carriage door at a platform on the far side of the station when I hobbled up on my crutches, feeling feverish with anxiety and exhaustion.
    The carriage was one of those old-fashioned ones with a corridor and compartments seating six. An old lady sitting by the door drew back her legs to accommodate my elephantine limb. I fell into the window seat and brushed my damp hair from my forehead with a glove beaded with moisture. The porter put Siggy’s basket on the seat beside me and my suitcase into the rack. I gave him a twenty-pence piece, which I could ill afford. He looked at it as though I had handed him something phosphorescent with putrefaction. A whistle blew and the train began to crawl out of the station.
    While I waited for my breathing to return to normal, I ran a cursory eye over my fellow passengers. Opposite me was a wispy blonde with magenta lipstick. She was studying a magazine with intense concentration, holding it at an angle that made it possible for me to see photographs of the princess of Wales peeping shyly from beneath the brims of various neat little hats. The marriage of Charles and Diana the summer before had provided the stuff of dreams for every woman in the land. She turned to a picture of the balcony kiss, put her head on one side and pursed her lips slightly, perhaps imagining what it was like to be kissed by a prince of the blood royal.
    Next to her was a small boy, who fixed his eyes on my plastered leg. The corner seat diagonally opposite mine was taken by a dark-haired man who wore a coat with an astrakhan collar. He was reading the New Scientist . The