6
Reunion
Despite it being perhaps the first train Grace had ever caught from Temple Meads that was officially on time, the journey down to Penzance seemed to take an age. Once they were through Plymouth the journey became one of frequent stops at little Cornish towns, many of which Grace and Joan had painted red over wild weekends of drinking and clubbing, back in their carefree teens when the responsibilities of adulthood had felt like a million years away. There were star shapes they had gouged out of a hotel’s flowerbed, a weathervane stolen from a town centre monument … there was the boot of a police car Grace had woken up in—to the bemused looks of a pair of local bobbies—after Joan had managed to pop the lid with a penknife. And in between the wild times there had been warm summer
