FCE 1 - TEST 2 - READING 1

 

On the very last day of a bad year, I was leaning against a pillar in the Baltimore railway station, waiting to catch the 10.10 to Philadelphia. There were a lot more people waiting than I had expected. That airy, light, clean, polished feeling I generally got in the station had been lost. Elderly couples with matching luggage stuffed the benches, and swarms of college kids littered the floor with their bags.

 A grey-haired man was walking around speaking to different strangers one by one. Well-off, you could tell: tanned skin, nice sweater, soft, beige carcoat. He went up to a woman sitting alone and asked her a question. Then he came over to a girl standing near me. She had long blond hair, and I had been thinking I wouldn´t mind talking to her myself. The man said, ‘Would you by any chance be travelling to Philadelphia?’ 

‘Well, northbound, yes,’ she said. 

‘But to Philadelphia?’ 

‘No, New York, but I’ll be ...’ 

‘Thanks, anyway,’ he said, and he moved toward the next bench. 

Now he had my full attention. ‘Ma’am,’ I heard him ask an old lady, ‘are you travelling to Philadelphia?’ When the woman told him, ‘Wilmington,’ he didn’t say a thing, just marched on down the row to one of the matchedluggage couples. I straightened up from my pillar and drifted closer, looking toward the platform as if I had my mind on the train. 

Well, I was going to Philadelphia. He could have asked me. I understood why he didn’t, of course. No doubt, I struck him as unreliable. He just glanced quickly at me and then swerved off toward the bench at the other end of the waiting area. By now he was looking seriously stressed. ‘Please!’ he said to a woman reading a book. ‘Tell me you’re going to Philadelphia!’ 

She lowered her book. She was thirtyish, maybe thirty-five – older than I was, anyhow. A school-teacher sort. ‘Philadelphia?’ she said. ‘Why, yes, I am.’

‘Then could I ask you a favour?’ 

I stopped several feet away and frowned down at my left wrist. (Never mind that I don’t own a watch.) Even without looking, I could sense how she went on guard. The man must have sensed it too, because he said, ‘Nothing too difficult, I promise!’ 

They were announcing my train now. People started moving toward Gate E, the older couples hauling their wheeled bags behind them like big pets on leashes. Next I heard the man talking. ‘My daughter’s flying out this afternoon for a study year abroad, leaving from Philadelphia. So I put her on a train this morning stopping for groceries afterward, and came home to find my wife in a state. She hardly said “hello” to me. You see my daughter’d forgotten her passport. She’d telephoned home from the station in Philadelphia; didn’t know what to do next.’

The woman clucked sympathetically. I’d have kept quiet myself. Waited to find out where he was heading with this. 

‘So I told her to stay put. Stay right there in the station, I said, and I would get somebody here to carry up her passport.’ 

A likely story! Why didn’t he go himself, if this was such an emergency? 

‘Why don’t you go yourself?’ the woman asked him. 

‘I can’t leave my wife alone for that long. She’s in a wheelchair.’ 

This seemed like a pretty poor excuse, if you want my honest opinion. Also, it exceeded the amount of bad luck that one family could expect. I let my eyes wander toward the two of them. The man was holding a packet, not a plain envelope, which would have been the logical choice, but one of those padded envelopes the size of a paperback book. Aha! Padded! So you couldn’t feel the contents! And from where I stood, it looked to be stapled shut besides. Watch yourself, lady, I said silently.