The street ran downhill in a long, gentle curve, and he could see the station from the end of it, or at least the footbridge over the tracks, and the dark ironwork of the canopy above the entrance. That was something. He'd half expected to spend ten minutes wandering in the wrong direction before anyone took pity on him.
Lewisham was already busy. The morning rush was getting properly underway, and the pavements had a purposeful, Monday-morning feel to them. Jon walked and tried not to stare, but it was difficult.
The women were everywhere, of course, they always were in any street scene, but it was the details that kept catching him off-guard. Cropped hair, almost universally: short back and sides on older women in sensible overcoats, neater side-partings on the younger ones, a few with the kind of slicked, brilliantined finish he associated in his own world with Cary Grant. Suits and trousers and collared shirts with ties. School blazers on the girls walking in groups of two and three, satchels on their shoulders, ties slightly askew in the way of schoolchildren everywhere and in every era. None of them appeared to have much on their chests. The overall effect was brisk, practical, unadorned.
And the men. That took more adjusting to. So far he'd only seen himself and his father, but out here, in numbers, it was striking. Long hair, every one of them, worn down or pinned up or rolled into styles that required the kind of infrastructure he was now beginning to understand from the inside. Skirts and dresses in the muted, practical colours of a working-class London morning. Heels on most of them, low and sensible for the commute. And the coats couldn't disguise what was underneath, the fuller silhouette across the chest that was just part of how men were built in this world, the way a flat chest was simply how women were apparently now built. He found himself looking at a man of about his father's age in a long dark coat, and trying to compute it. The man had his hair in a neat roll at the back of his neck and was reading a folded magazine as he walked, barely watching where he was going. He had the comfortable self-possession of someone who had never once thought anything was odd about the way he looked, because there had never been any reason to.
Jon turned his gaze back to the pavement ahead of him and kept walking.
The station concourse was crowded and echoey, smelling of coal smoke and the particular industrial warmth of steam railways. Jon joined the queue at the ticket window and tried to prepare himself.
He'd noticed the handbag was heavier than expected, with the particular solid weight of a purse inside it. He'd have to open it, find the purse, find the right money. He hadn't had a chance to look at any of it properly yet and the queue was moving faster than he'd have liked.
When he reached the window, the woman behind the glass had already turned to him with the efficient, slightly bored expression of someone who has sold several hundred tickets this morning and would like to sell several hundred more without incident.
"Single to Charing Cross, please," Jon said.
"One and tuppence."
He unclipped the handbag and found the purse without much difficulty. Opening it, he looked down at a small collection of coins and was for a moment entirely lost. He recognised the general shape of them, the chunky coppers and the silver, but the numbers meant nothing to him. He spread a few out on his hand, then hesitated.
The woman at the window waited.
He turned the coins over in his palm, trying to look less blank than he felt. He could see a coin that said Six Pence on it and some pennies and what might be, a shilling? He also noticed, as his eye passed over them, that the portrait on the coins was unmistakably the Queen. The same profile he knew from his own world, young and clear-featured and fine. But with short hair, cropped close to the head and without a crown or any sort of diadem. Just a clean, modern profile, the way a head of state looked in a world where women simply got on with being head of state.
He picked out what he thought was a shilling and a sixpence, and pushed them under the glass uncertainly.
"One and tuppence," the woman repeated, in the tone of someone explaining something to a mildly confused Labrador, "Not two and six". Presumably she could see in Jon's hand that he had exact change, even if Jon didnt know it. Jon looked at her blankly for a couple of seconds and then she clearly worked out it would be quicker to just make the change. She slid three coins back to him under the glass and a small paper ticket along with them
"Sorry," Jon said, taking the ticket and the coins. "Thank you."
He moved away quickly, feeling the back of his neck go warm.
The platform was long and grey and partially sheltered by a soot-darkened canopy. A few dozen people were waiting, spread along its length in the habitual way of commuters everywhere, each standing their precise preferred distance from everyone else. A group of women in matching dark overcoatsand bowler hats stood together near the far end talking animatedly, their short hair almost identical in cut. A young man of about Jon's own age was standing a little apart from them, a large leather bag at his feet, looking straight ahead with the self-contained blankness of someone deep in their own thoughts. His hair was chestnut brown and dressed in careful waves, and he wore a good coat not unlike Jon's own, in a warm rust colour.
The train arrived in a rush of steam and noise, its carriages dark green and slightly grimy, and everyone moved forward with the practiced shuffle of people who have done this five days a week for years.
Jon found a window seat in a half-empty carriage and settled himself carefully, conscious of the hat, which held, and the coat, which he left buttoned against the cold. The carriage smelled of cigarette smoke and damp wool. A woman in a pinstriped suit took the seat across from him and immediately opened a briefcase on her lap and began working through a sheaf of papers without looking up.
As the train lurched out of the station, Jon rested the handbag on his lap and decided to make use of the next twenty-five minutes.
He opened it properly and looked inside.
The purse he'd already met, to mixed success. He set it aside. Beneath it was a small compact mirror in a powder blue case which matched, he noted, the coat and hat, and a tube of lipstick, a clean folded handkerchief with a small embroidered initial in the corner that he couldn't quite make out without lifting it to the light. A comb. A small bottle of scent. A packet of Polo mints. All of it so familiar from a thousand films and a thousand glimpsed images that he half felt he was looking at the contents of a prop department.
Then, folded flat and tucked into the interior pocket behind the purse, two pieces of paper.
The first was a formal-looking certificate, cream coloured and slightly stiff, printed in a neat typeface he associated with official documents and headed with the name of a secretarial college. He scanned it. It was issued in his name. It listed qualifications in filing, shorthand, and typewriting, and the grades were good, above average across all three, with a note at the bottom in slightly smaller print: Typewriting speed recorded at 60 words per minute, a particularly commendable result for a student of this age.
He read that line twice. He'd never typed anything at speed in his life. He supposed he'd have to trust to muscle memory on that front as well. At least he knew how to type, on a computer keyboard at least.
The second document was a letter. He unfolded it carefully.
The paper was good quality, thick and cream, with a printed letterhead at the top: McMillan and Daughters, Solicitors. 14 Exeter Street, London WC2. Below that, in the kind of formal, slightly stiff prose that letters of this sort always employed, he was invited to present himself on the morning of Monday the 25th of April, 1955, at nine o'clock, to take up the position of junior pool secretary. He was to ask for the office manager on arrival. Standard terms and conditions applied. The firm looked forward to his contribution and trusted that the association would prove mutually beneficial.
It was signed at the bottom in a confident, angular hand: Susan McMillan QC.
Jon read the name and then sat back against the seat.
McMillan.
The thought had been at the back of his mind since he'd first read the calendar this morning, hovering at the edge of things without quite presenting itself. He'd been too busy with shoes and hats and the geography of Lewisham to let it surface. But now it came forward clearly.
McMillan! That's Sarah's surname. The same Sarah who yesterday - was it yesterday? For him, yes, but not for tohets. So much had happened since - had been the source of Karyn's disdain and her accidental wish. In his own world, Sarah McMillan had been the specific kind of person who seemed to have been put on earth to make other people feel bad about themselves. She was self-important, casually unkind, and had been responsible for making Karyn's life noticeably unpleasant for about a year and a half. Jon had his own reasons to find her tiresome. Was this McMillan related to Sarah? He was pretty sure that Sarah's mother in his world had been called Susan too. She wasn't a lawyer though. Something else. A model, maybe? Or an actress? One of those names that appeared in gossip columns for reasons he'd never paid enough attention to understand.
He looked at the letterhead again. McMillan and Daughters. A firm, presumably, founded by an earlier McMillan and now run by this one.
He thought about that for a moment, watching the south London terraces sliding past the window, the back gardens and their washing lines and their cats on walls.
He wondered if he'd find that Sarah McMillan existed in this world too. And if she did, what would she be like?
The train slowed and stopped at London Bridge. The woman with the briefcase got off without looking up from her papers. New passengers filed in, women in suits and overcoats, a young man in a pale green dress who was knitting with the focused calm of long habit.
The train moved on.
Jon refolded the letter, replaced both documents in the interior pocket of the handbag, and clipped it shut.
Nine o'clock. He checked the clock on the wall of the last station as it receded behind the window. He still had fifteen minutes. Charing Cross couldn't be far now.
He straightened his hat, it had held, but it felt right to check, and turned back to the window, watching London arrive around him.
Charing Cross was vast and loud and smelled powerfully of steam. He came out through the main entrance, blinked in the grey April light, and turned right.
The Strand was broad and busy, the pavements thick with the morning rush, the road full of black cabs and delivery lorries and the occasional red bus. He walked with the flow of it, trying to look like someone who knew exactly where they were going, and found, after perhaps three minutes of walking and a moment of genuine uncertainty at a junction, the left turn onto Exeter Street.
It was a quieter road, narrower, lined with the kind of solid, unshowy Victorian buildings that housed solicitors' offices and chartered accountants and the kind of professionals who had no need to advertise. Number fourteen had a polished brass plate beside the door. McMillan and Daughters. Below it, in smaller lettering: Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths.
Jon stood on the pavement for a moment and looked at it.
He thought of his father's voice that morning. Don't let them intimidate you.
He took a breath.
Then he went up the steps and rang the bell.
