“Marge!” called the woman again. “It’s me!”
Margery wondered if it was too late to pretend she was someone else. A woman who happened to be carrying an insect net on behalf of another person altogether. She shoved it inside her coat until a helpful man called, “Don’t suppose you’ll catch much in there.”
Well, everyone thought that was hilarious.
Meanwhile, the short woman tottered across the concourse, her luggage so heavy she could only wave at Margery with her foot. Her hair was a stiff puff with the perky hat pinned on top: about as useful in terms of sun protection as a beer mat on her head. She wore a bright pink two-piece travel suit that accentuated her round bust and hips, tiny sandals with a pom-pom at the toe, and her nails were painted like juicy sweets. A blond bombshell, twenty-five if she was a day, and Margery was old enough to be, if not her mother, then at least her maiden aunt.
“What are you lot all staring at?” the woman said to the crowd, at which point it wisely stopped staring and moved on.
Being close, and also half Margery’s size, she had to tilt her face upward to speak. She wore so much makeup that her face was orange. Her mouth, by contrast, was bright pink, her eyelashes thick and black. And then there was her hair, which was such a luminous shade of yellow you could have shut her in the dark and still found her. Only her eyes were natural: dark green with tiny gold flecks.
“Enid Pretty,” she said merrily, as if announcing her arrival at a party. Margery was speechless. There was less chance of this woman blending into the background than there was of Margery winning a beauty pageant. The humiliation she had suffered while waiting and the terrible hurt that had been dealt her by Miss Hamilton, along with something else, something so old she couldn’t even name it, all these things now regrouped themselves into a base longing to lash out at Enid and humiliate her, as if it was completely normal to wear safari helmets in railway stations and completely odd to go without them.
She pointed at Enid’s tiny excuse of a hat. “What is that?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What are you wearing?”
Enid blinked. “Clothes and stuff,” she said, all question mark.
“This isn’t a cheap holiday to Butlin’s. It’s a field trip to the South Pacific. The post is no longer available.”
She was turning to pick up her luggage when Enid grabbed Margery’s elbow. She had shocking strength for someone so small and brightly colored. “Please,” she hissed. “Don’t do this to me, Marge.”
The way she said it implied they had been friends for a long time and what Margery was about to do was the kind of thing she always did, and for once in her life she should try doing something better. Margery pulled herself free. She reached for her Gladstone bag.
But in her desperation to get away she made the move too fast, igniting a flash of pain right through her hip. Her body pitched forward and, for a terrible moment, she thought her leg was coming off. It hurt just to breathe. Enid bent close.
“Marge? Why aren’t you moving? We need to hurry.”
“It’s nothing. Only my hip.”
“Your hip?” Enid shouted, as if Margery was not only disabled for the moment but also deaf as a post.
“It gets stuck.”
“Do you want me to whack it?”
“No. Please. Please do not whack my hip. I might fall over.”
Enid cast a terrified look toward the platforms. “We’ve got to hurry, Marge. We can’t miss our train.” Then something seemed to click in her mind and she said, “Right. I’ll sort this out. Wait.”
Before Margery could object, Enid had gone again, legs moving like scissors—her pink skirt was no wider than a sleeve—but not with her abundant luggage: this she left behind. A paper boy bawled out the headlines: “Norman Skinner to hang for murder of call girl!” A flock of people surged forward to buy the latest edition. The story had been in the papers for weeks and still no one could get enough.
“Marge! Marge!”
Here came Enid, pursued by an enthusiastic young porter with a trolley. Swiftly he loaded Margery’s equipment and suitcase, followed by Enid’s luggage. “Oh, you are so clever, oh, you are so strong! How could we possibly manage without you?” she sang, though she snatched up the lightest one—the red valise—before he could get his hands on it.
“Your train leaves in five minutes,” he said. “We’re going to have to make a dash.”
Dashing would have been a very good idea, except that Margery was stuck.
“Still?” said Enid.
What came next verged on assault. Enid sprang behind Margery, buckled her round the waist with the strength of a bear, and yanked upward. It was like being seared. But then—by some miracle—the pain was simply not there. It was as though a hole had opened all the way from Margery’s head to her foot, and the pain had spat through the end of her toes.
“Better now?” said Enid, dusting off her gloves.
“I think so.”
“We need to hurry. We have three minutes.”
They made a ridiculous pair, as they chased the porter, like a brown ostrich coupled with a pink-hatted canary. Gulping for breath, Margery noticed the way men caught sight of Enid and stared, as she wiggled past at high velocity, clutching the handles of her valise with both hands as if it were a motor propelling her forward, either oblivious to attention or so used to it she took it as read that men would stop and watch. The guard was already raising his flag as they fled past the barrier and reached the train.
“Here you go, ladies,” said the porter, swinging open the first door they came to. “Are you sure I can’t take that suitcase?”
“No, ta,” said Enid, taking it in one hand so that she could help Margery. (“Thank you, but I can manage,” said Margery, hoisting herself upward with difficulty.)
The door was barely closed. The whistle went. The train pulled out.
* * *
—
“So, the thing is, you should have seen it. I said to him, I said, ‘You don’t think I’m going to buy that, do you? Because that hat, I said, that’s not a hat! That’s a helmet! I can’t wear that!’ ”
Or: “I knew this woman, this is true, Marge, and when she died, she had a worm in her belly the size of a hosepipe!”
Margery had never been a talker: she always felt she came across better if she stuck to letters and cards. She’d had a correspondence once with another beetle enthusiast that had gone wrong only when they’d met for tea. “I thought you were a man,” the woman had said. (“But I’m called Margery,” said Margery.) After that she didn’t even want to talk beetles; she just crumbled her scone and left. But Enid Pretty was Margery’s polar opposite: now they were safely on the train, she wouldn’t shut up. It was as though she had a button set to “on,” and unless Margery found “off,” Enid would continue forever. Talk, talk, talk. Half the time there wasn’t any hint of a connection—she just leaped like a mad woman from one subject to the next. She didn’t even pause for periods. As well as saying multiple times that she couldn’t believe Margery was a real-life explorer from the Natural History Museum—no time to correct her—and that they were going to the other side of the world, Enid also covered safari hats, terrifying parasites, the weather, Mr. Churchill, rationing, the weather again, and her own personal biography. Her mother and father—lovely people!—had both died of Spanish flu when Enid was tiny—so sad!—and Enid had been brought up by neighbors. Worse: she still couldn’t get the hang of Margery’s name. She was calling her “Marge” as if she was a highly processed alternative to butter. Then a woman squeezed past with a toddler, and Enid changed tack all over again.