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Isobel has been teaching evening classes for a year now, and if there is one thing that she has learned in that time, it is not to take anyone for granted. The man in front of her in the canteen queue (God, she needs coffee) could be a tutor. He could be a student. He could be here to fix the computers, or he could be here to assess an assessor. Isobel doesn't really care. The woman in front of him... Could be a tutor. Could be a student. Could be here to fix the computers, could be here to assess an assessor. Isobel doesn't really care. She would very much like to take her picture. She has no idea why.
Since she turned sixty, Isobel has been concentrating mainly on landscapes. Technically, she's retired. She only started teaching as a favour to Ed and a change from the endless interviews and publicity stunts, and, though she enjoys it hugely, week after week of pointing out the obvious about composition and exposure does take it out of her. Everything she learned, so long ago that it feels that she's always known it, she's passing on, and it's exciting and rewarding and exhausting all at once. She hasn't had time to take pictures for herself in a while. There's something about that woman, though, that has Isobel's photographic instinct interested. In her mind's eye, she sees her alone, in the middle of a great open space, gazing upwards, a cloudy sky above, red hair streaming in the wind. A moor, perhaps, or a desert... Of course, there are not very many deserts in the suburbs of London.
Isobel looks at her watch. Does she really have time to queue for, buy, and drink coffee before her next class? Probably just about, given that she's already set up the darkroom. Does she have time to strike up a conversation with the red-haired woman and ask her to model for her? Probably just about, if the man in front can make up his mind about what he wants to drink. Isobel is not shy, never has been. It will take her thirty seconds to introduce herself, and five more to get to the point. Five minutes for her coffee to cool, and by that time she will have an answer.
The woman orders tea. The man orders coffee, milk, one sugar. (The college canteen has not yet learned the ways of latte, cappucino, espresso, and Isobel rather likes it that way. She has drunk enough Italian coffee in her time to resent pale British counterfeits hijacking the language.) Isobel does not even need to order – Luke behind the hatch has served her too often of a Tuesday evening not to know what she'll want, and he has her mug of black coffee ready as soon as she reaches the head of the queue; and she has ninety-five pence ready in her hand.
And that gives her time to overtake the man in front (stirring the sugar into his coffee) and fall into step beside the woman whom she would like to photograph. Isobel decides that she is a student; although she must be in her forties, she has a new-girl-at-school air to her. A vibe, Isobel thinks, with a certain degree of self-conscious irony. Words like 'vibe' do not sit well on a woman who remembers them from the first time around.
'Hello,' Isobel says, 'May I join you?'
'OK,' the woman says, and she looks wary, but pleased. They sit down at a table by the window, not that there's much to see – only the multi-storey car park. 'I've not got long, though.'
'Me neither. I've got a class starting in five minutes.'
She looks even warier. 'You a student? No, you can't be, you must be a tutor.'
Isobel nods. 'Photography. Isobel Watkins.' Either she'll have heard of her, or she won't, and Isobel doesn't mind much either way, but she'd rather get it out of the way now.
She hasn't heard of her. There is no flicker of recognition at the name – but no doubt she has had better things to do. 'Donna Noble. I' – she sips her tea – 'am a student. Maths and Physics.'
'Blimey – both at once? What are you going to do with it?' Isobel knows exactly as much maths as she needs to work out apertures and angles, enough chemistry to understand about silver nitrate, and enough physics to know how light works. Mostly she doesn't bother with how light works, though, just how she can use it.
'Dunno, yet.' Donna Noble grins as if studying Maths and Physics for no reason at all is the most logical thing in the world, and Isobel remembers, suddenly, painfully, a girl who outsmarted computers for the sheer hell of it. She can't help but grin back.
***
Donna is happy to sit, though Isobel suspects that she doesn't quite see the point of it. 'It's more fun than my bloody wedding photos, anyway,' she says, when she comes round to Isobel's studio one Saturday afternoon in mid-autumn.
Isobel can't help but glance at the left hand; there's an engagement ring there, but no wedding ring.
'Bloody hell, you're nosey,' Donna says.
'Have to be, in my job,' Isobel says unrepentantly. 'What happened, then?'
Donna looks confused for an instant. 'That wedding didn't happen. This,' she waves her left hand, 'is from the new guy.'
'Is he nice?'
Donna grins. 'I think so.'
'What happened to the last one?'
That same look of confusion. 'That wedding didn't happen,' she says again, in exactly the same tone. Isobel doesn't push it.
Donna is looking at the framed prints on the wall. 'These are yours?' she asks.
'Every last one of them.'
'Blimey,' she says. She looks at the shot of Lila Harrod on the swing, the one that made Isobel Watkins a household name – at least, a name among households that took the Sunday Times. Isobel doesn't think Donna reads the Times, but she evidently knows the picture. 'I didn't realise you were that Isobel Watkins.'
'The same.' Isobel does not comment on the fact that when they first met Donna had apparently been unaware of the existence of any Isobel Watkins. Perhaps, she thinks, she has done some research. 'Coffee?'
'Yeah. Please.' Donna is looking at a self-portrait from back when her hair was blonde and bobbed rather than silver and spikey, before she could afford to hire a model. Before Zoe.
'That's not one of my best,' Isobel says – which is an understatement: it's dire, 'but I keep it around to remind me what a long way I've come.'
'Fair enough,' Donna says. 'I wouldn't know. Not really my thing, art.'
The kettle boils, and Isobel fills the cafetière. 'But you know what you like?' she jokes feebly.
'I like this one,' Donna says, not joking. 'Who's that?'
Isobel has to turn and cross the room to see what she's looking at. 'Oh,' she says, 'she's a girl I knew – a long way back. Forty, forty-five years ago now, I suppose, probably before you were born.'
'She's pretty. What's with the catsuit?'
Isobel laughs, remembering. 'God knows. Of course, she wasn't from around here. She wore it a lot.'
'Girlfriend?'
'I suppose so. She – she wasn't around for long.'
'What happened?'
Isobel flinches, but it's only fair; she grilled Donna about her non-wedding, after all. She crosses back to pour the coffee, and says, over her shoulder. 'Just that, really: she wasn't around for long. She was never going to be. One of those people that drops in and drops out again, and you've had so much fun with them that you can't stay cross with them for going for long.'
'I'd be cross,' Donna says. 'I'd be bloody furious.'
'Life goes on,' Isobel says. 'It has to. You can't just sit around waiting for someone to come back from -' she was about to say 'outer space', but she'd rather Donna didn't think she was crazy. She chuckles. 'You just get on with it. I went out with one of her friend's friends, actually – he asked me before she'd even gone – that was a disaster. We're still friends, though.' She jerks her head towards another print. 'There he is. Last portrait of my dolly soldier before he retired.'
'I like a man in uniform,' Donna says. 'In theory, anyway.'
Isobel laughs. 'Here's your coffee.'
'You seeing someone at the moment?'
Isobel points to yet another photo. 'Top, middle one there. With the black hair and the loopy grin. That's Helena.'
Donna looks. 'She looks nice.'
'She is,' Isobel says, 'She is.'
***
Isobel uses Donna a lot. She puts her in woodlands, parks, industrial graveyards; sometimes they drive out for a weekend to find a proper blasted heath. She likes to put her in the middle of bleakness, a red, vital streak. Donna doesn't seem to mind, though it must be eating into her free time, what with the evening classes and the wedding planning, and actually earning a living in the middle of it all, though of course Isobel's paying her rather more than the going rate (she can afford to, after all), and it sounds as though the temp work has dried up recently.
She still doesn't know quite what to make of Donna. On one level she's simple enough: just an ordinary woman, earning enough to keep herself going, doing enough of what she enjoys to keep herself sane, looking forward to the rest of her life with the person she loves. Just like Isobel.
But there's something else there, something that Donna doesn't even seem to be aware of – and it's the thing that reminds Isobel of Zoe.
It's the thing that makes her want to make Donna a small but significant figure in a big landscape, to show her looking up at some star invisible in the daylight. Because, abrasive loudmouth that she is, Donna seems to know her place in the universe, and that's a rare gift.
***
Isobel doesn't take Donna's wedding photos. Donna says, 'I would ask, but A, we couldn't afford you, and B, it would feel really weird.' And, while Isobel protests that A wouldn't be an issue, and of course she'd do it as a wedding present, she recognises that B is actually a very good point. The two of them get on so well that it would put the balance out; Donna needs a photographer who will make her feel as uncomfortable as everyone else in the shot.
Besides, she never does weddings. So she goes along just as a guest, and she enjoys it. She bawls along with the hymns (she has always been tone deaf, and it has never bothered her), and she laughs at the jokes in the sermon, and she wanders around outside while some other poor sap takes the photos.
And that's when she sees it: a blue phone box, of the sort you never see any more, because of course the police all have mobiles. And besides, half-blocking off the lychgate would be a stupid place to put one, and she's damn sure it wasn't there when she came in. But she remembers half-seeing one in the middle of a field of cows, and that was a stupid place to put one, too, and now it all makes sense.
She watches a man in a long brown coat step out of it, stride over to Donna's granddad and give him something. He's not the same man that Isobel remembers, Zoe's friend, but then she supposes that there's no reason why there shouldn't be more of them. Having believed something once makes it easier to believe it twice.
He doesn't speak to Donna – he looks at her, briefly, but he doesn't go over to the wedding group. Donna's mum looks upset. This, Isobel thinks, is some piece of bygone Noble family history, and maybe Donna doesn't even know about it. She decides that it's wiser not to ask.
***
So she doesn't ask. But, that night, after the party, she goes home sober, and cries in Helena's arms, and finally tells her everything about Zoe, because, after all, it was true.
'I always wondered what happened to her, why she never came back. Whether – whether she even remembers me.'
'Why should she not?' Helena asks, gently. 'You remember her.'
'She'd seen the stars; she'd walked on planets the other side of the galaxy. What am I beside that? Of course it was easy to believe that I was the most interesting thing in the universe when I was nineteen, but these days – I don't feel very memorable.'
'Sweetheart,' Helena says, quietly, seriously, and Isobel knows that she's looking straight at her through the dark, 'believe me. If she's anything like me, if she remembers anything, she remembers you.'
***
Isobel doesn't see Donna for a couple of months after that. There's the honeymoon, of course, and then her aunt dies and she takes compassionate leave from the college. When she gets back she learns that the photography and physics lectures are no longer on the same night, so they wouldn't have run into each other anyway. Then they get moved back again, and one night Donna's in the queue at the canteen.
Isobel has heard the big news, of course, but Donna tells her anyway. 'It's fantastic, Isobel! It wasn't the jackpot, that would just have been freaky, but it's enough to let me stop worrying and do what I always wanted to do! I can pay Mum back, and get Gramps a better telescope, and we can put down a deposit on a house, me and Shaun, and take a holiday, see the world, and - '
'Yes?'
'I can do that degree! I'm going to do an Access course, and I've already sent off for some prospectuses... prospecti... you know what I mean. I can go anywhere I like – everywhere does Maths! It'll be brilliant. I can't wait!'
Isobel shakes her head in mock disbelief. 'Maths, for fun? Where are you from, outer space?'
Donna grins. 'Nope. Right here.' And off she goes to her lecture, a woman with all the future to enjoy.