And then the pause, which everybody fills in themselves.
And there is one line I have never varied, and it is the one that does the work.
***I only found out standing in that terminal.***
I have said that, in some form, about forty times. To my sister. To four women at the baby group. To the solicitor, who did not need it. To a neighbour in a shop in the December.
And it is the only untrue sentence in the whole of my account, and it is the load-bearing one.
Because a woman who finds out in a terminal and produces that line on the spot is magnificent.
And a woman who found out in April and booked two flights in June is something else, and I do not have a word for it that I am willing to write down.
And the last thing.
The fifty minutes.
That ship came in late and I stood by that barrier from about half ten.
And at some point in those fifty minutes, Opal started and would not settle, and Dinah came over from her pillar and took her and walked her up and down for about ten minutes and brought her back asleep.
And then she went back to the pillar.
She went back to the pillar.
A woman of fifty-nine, in an airport-terminal building a hundred and forty miles from her home, walked her own granddaughter up and down and then went and stood behind a pillar again, because that is where I had asked her to stand.
I had told her to wait there so that she would not be the first thing he saw.
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