‘What are you laughing at me for?’ Percy Blemish said sharply.
There were pools of water in the fields, pylons crossing the road and colliery headstocks in the distance. I was too tired to give him a run-through of what I’d been thinking. ‘There was something stuck in my teeth.’
‘I’m sorry to have to insist, but you were laughing.’
If I ignored him I could expect a savage blow at the back of the head. If the car hit a pylon and exploded he would be laughing – for a split second. It was unjust that so many advantages should be on his side, and even more that he saw them as being only on mine. ‘Would you like to tell me in what way you consider me to have been laughing?’ If talk wouldn’t calm him, nothing would.
‘It wasn’t so much your face, as the gesture of your body.’
I had met such people before, often worse than him, as well as a few marginally better (like myself), but in no case had I been imprisoned with one in a motorcar that wasn’t my own and travelling along a road by whose side it was forbidden to stop, a road so narrow and winding that if you did stop a fully laden coal lorry would crush you within half a minute. I could drop him at the cop shop in Bawtry, double yellow lines in front of it or not, yet I was reluctant to because putting up with him till the end of the journey was a test of character I ought to be able to pass. If I had been old enough to fight in the War I don’t suppose I would have survived with such sentiments. I decided that a little sharp talking-to was the only fitting response. ‘You’d better be quiet, or I’ll black your other eye. If I want to laugh I’ll laugh, and if I want to cry I’ll cry. It’s fuck-all to do with you.’
He was offended by bad language, as I’d hoped he would be, so kept quiet till we were past Bawtry. On the other hand I was offended by the moral tone of his silence. He looked on me not as the personal agent of Lord Moggerhanger, but as a common chauffeur for someone whom he, with his superfine sensibility, was bound to scorn, in spite of the fact that he had hardly got two ha’pennies for a penny.
The country was flat, desolate, newborn, as if it had no right to be land at all. I thought that if I lived there I’d be suffering in no time from Backwater Fever. I got nervous if I didn’t see rising ground, even if only a slagheap or a pimple with a tree on top in the distance. I had crossed some kind of frontier, and it didn’t seem the right type of country for me.
Percy slept, or at least dozed, and I envied his ability to turn himself on and off like a well-oiled spigot, though even with closed eyes he didn’t look peaceful. Tremors over the lids and flickers at the left corner of his downturning lips told of torments I would never have to put up with. But then I wasn’t Percy Blemish, and I wasn’t fifty-eight years old. I hoped I never would be, though when a souped-up black Mini with four young men inside, hooter going and headlights full on, came screaming around a bend, I took sufficient evasive action to suggest that my subconscious, such as it was, might have other ideas about that. Blemish stirred. ‘You may set me down soon. I’ll have only a short walk.’
I thought he was going to be with me forever. ‘Is your wife expecting you?’
His laugh didn’t seem quite real. ‘She always is, though she hopes I’ll never arrive. When I’m not there she sits by the telephone waiting for the police to call and say I’ve been killed. Or that I’ve been found by the roadside with a heart attack. It’s understandable. I don’t know what I’d do without her.’
‘Why don’t you get a divorce? Maybe it would make things more exciting.’
‘We’d only marry again.’
‘At least you’d have another date to remember. You can’t have too many. The more you have, the longer your life will be. After all, you’ve only got one. You might as well make it as long as possible.’
The line of his lips straightened. A half-second glance in the mirror gave me a fully developed snapshot image to add to my vast store of underground photographic material, many of them taken from as far back as I could remember. His eyes were glazed, and as he stroked his olive-drab cheek they became sadder. ‘You make me sick.’
It was as if he had hit me. My foot accidentally slid off the clutch. I recovered, said nothing, and maintained my harmony with the bends of the road. Rain stopped, so I switched off the windscreen wipers.
‘They were getting on my nerves,’ he said. ‘I suppose I’ll sleep when I get home. Anyway, it was good of you to give me a lift. You see that house just ahead? Set me down there, if you would be so considerate.’
He could be charming when he liked, and I was sorry for him. I wondered which of the two cottages in the distance he would head for. ‘I hope you go on all right.’
There was a bit of cinder-ground for me to park in, so I got out and opened the door as if he was Edward VII. He walked along an unpaved lane, while I sat in the car and looked at my map before driving the last few miles to Goole. This took almost as much time as doing fifty miles on the A1 because a car in front pottered along at twenty and it was impossible to overtake with so many lorries coming from the opposite direction. But as soon as we got to the outskirts of Goole, and past a thirty mile an hour speed limit, he increased his rate to fifty and left me behind, a phenomenon I’d often come across.
Caught in the usual scrag-end outskirts at a red light I watched a woman with grey hair and a blue overall-coat flicking a yellow duster at her door knob. She looked at me as if I ought to be at work instead of driving a Rolls-Royce. That’s how they are around here, I thought. Then I got caught in a gaggle of Volvo lorries going over a wide bridge by the docks. Before I knew where I was I was across the river into Old Goole. Then I had to turn back, whereat a similar gaggle of Volvos swept me west again.
I turned right into the centre and pulled up not far from the town hall, where I oriented myself from the map and got to an unprepossessing thoroughfare on the outskirts called Muggleton Lane, on which I was to wait. It was nine thirty, so I set my alarm clock for five to ten, then put my head back and dozed. The sun shone on me, and I faded from the world, but after what seemed a few seconds the gentle pipping brought me back to life. Following instructions, I got out of the car, opened the boot and sat in the rear left seat reading a newspaper with the headline ‘Terrorists state terms’.
Two minutes after ten o’clock (bad marks for being late) a powder blue Mini-van with a coat of arms on the side drew parallel. To my surprise Eric Brighteyes (otherwise Alport) who I had met a few days ago on the train into Liverpool Street, got out and opened the van door. He wore a blue boiler suit and a yachting cap, and gave no sign that he knew who I was, though I would have recognised him anywhere. ‘Give me some assistance with these dog powders,’ he said.
We took ten square packages, done up in brown paper and post office string, and laid them in a double row in the boot of the Roller. As I was signing the form on his clipboard he rubbed an open hand down over his face – once. ‘Forget you’ve seen me. Right?’
I slammed the boot. ‘No problem.’
We’d been together for two minutes, and he drove away in a cloud of blue smoke. All I had to do was exit from Goole the same way I had come, and though I anticipated getting lost in the maze of waterways and lorry routes, I was soon in the clear and on my way towards Doncaster.
Eight
Relieved at the completion of phase one, I lit a cigarette. The staff work had been exemplary, otherwise it might not have been such a skive. I was obviously working for a good firm. It was hard to believe that the British economy was in such a parlous situation with talent like that around. There was more of it in the country than was needed to compensate for the bone-idle, happy-go-lucky, feckless, come-what-may, jaunty, fuck-you-jack, how’s-your-father, let’s-have-a-lovely-strike sort of person which I had been up to a few days ago, and with which this country at any rate will always be overrun and no doubt affectionately remembered, at least according to the newspapers.
Fortunately the situation is generally saved by those with flair, improvisation, creative abilit
y, hard work, love of money, flexibility, lack of panic in a tricky situation, luck (of course), a refusal to regard long hours as anathema and imaginative attention to detail when drawing up a plan or programme – which I hoped was the sort of person I was fast becoming.
Then of course there was the third type, which no country could afford but which England had somehow learned to tolerate, the one (he or she) who mixed up these qualities but was only held in check by a job that cradled them from start to pension and kept them out of harm’s way. It certainly made it a cosy and exciting country to live in, I thought, wondering which category I fell into and not really caring as I set out on an intelligently planned route to south-central Shropshire where I was to offload Moggerhanger’s batch of packages from abroad.
I saw someone standing close to where I had put down Percy Blemish, and my spine turned to ice at the idea that it might be him again, this time heading south. I didn’t want any more hitch-hikers in the car. Moggerhanger and I were now absolutely in one mind on the matter, though in my old Home Rule banger I gave plenty of lifts, which was no great sacrifice since I was never going very far. However, I decided to make an exception for an elderly woman of about sixty, because by the time I got close I hadn’t the heart to shoot off and leave her, especially as a sudden squall of icy rain from Siberia clattered against the car. ‘Where are you going?’
I hoped it would be to the next village.
‘London.’
‘I can take you as far as Doncaster.’
‘It’s very generous of you.’
‘Get in the back.’
I glided on my way.
‘It’s a very uncertain kind of day to be out on the road,’ I said.
She had lovely features, but her face was haggard and lined. I’d never seen anyone who looked less like a hitchhiker. She wore a travelling cape and carried a good leather shoulder-bag. ‘I suppose the bus services around here are lousy.’ Silence between two people seemed more and more difficult to maintain. ‘It doesn’t seem a very convenient area to me.’
‘It’s not London, I agree,’ she answered, ‘but I’ve lived here for some years, and I don’t think I have much reason to complain about the amenities. There’s a certain starkness in the scenery, but it can be very beautiful at times.’ It pained her to speak, as if she was made for better things than talking to someone from whom she had begged a lift.
‘Do you have family in London?’
‘Friends. At least I hope I have. I haven’t seen them for a long while. Maybe they don’t live there anymore. I also have a daughter, but she won’t want to see me. Nor do I want to see her. The last time I heard, she was working in a vegetarian restaurant near Covent Garden.’
‘You should be there by tea time.’ It was hard to think of anything lively to say. ‘I’ll drop you on the M1, so you’ll soon get a lift. I’m making for Shropshire.’
‘I’ll go there, then.’ I detected a powder trail of uncertainty, almost hysteria, in her voice. ‘I’ll go anywhere, in fact, to get away.’
‘Is it that bad?’
She leaned forward and said in my ear: ‘You’ve no idea.’
The words chilled me. ‘I probably haven’t.’
‘I can talk to you because you seem such a nice person. I can’t say I’ve had a hard life, except insofar as I’ve been married to someone who is highly strung, if not actually poorly. I come of Irish stock.’
Such quick turnabouts got on my wick. ‘So do I.’
‘That’s what most people say when I tell them. But I suppose it’s what’s given me the strength to support all I’ve been through. In our family there were five daughters which meant, going by popular belief, that my father was more of a man than most.’
Her expression of bitterness was not inborn, and I assumed it would go away with an alteration in her life. ‘In the nineteen-thirties,’ she said, ‘he could afford to be, couldn’t he? I rebelled, but against all the advantages, because I didn’t know any better. He wanted me to go to University, like Amy Johnson, he said, but I got a job instead, and left home to do so. I went south and worked in the council offices, and there I met my husband, who was in the borough engineer’s department. No one was happier than me when we got married, and no one, I thought, was more contented than him. Neither of us had to join up in the war. We stayed at work, and managed to save a bit of money. I had two daughters, and after the war we moved up here. You may well ask why.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you. It’s nice of you to give me a lift and let me talk to you as well. My husband had been very strange, right from just after we were married. I don’t know why. His family was as right as rain. That was why they disowned him when he started going funny. One day he disappeared. It wasn’t like him to do that. He’d always said when he was going out, even if only into the garden to water his onions. After a week he came back, filthy and in rags, his eyes glowing. “We’re leaving,” he said. “We’re going to live near a place called Goole.” “Where’s that?” I asked. He got out the atlas and showed me. “Why Goole?” I wanted to know. He glared at me, and then he struck me. I struck him back – I was so shocked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have returned the blow. He just wanted to do it once, and then life would have gone on normally. But life isn’t like that. Well, we didn’t go to Goole just then. He got stranger and stranger, until he lost his job. They called it voluntary redundancy, or premature retirement, but I knew what it was. They look after their own in this country, for better or worse.’
I was about to go off my head. First one, on the way up, and now the other, on the way down. If it hadn’t been true I wouldn’t have believed it. I was beginning to feel eaten, like the main course in the workhouse, as my grandmother used to say when I wouldn’t stop talking as a kid. I decided to get rid of her as soon as possible, though while the rain belted down it was out of the question.
‘Our married life has been decades of misery. He goes away for a day or two at a time, but the peace I get when he sets out is ruined by the thought that he could be back any minute. In fact I never know he is going till he’s been gone twenty-four hours, and he could show up in the next twenty-four, though often, thank God, he stays away longer than that. But just as I begin to hope he’s never going to come back, he kicks the door open and comes in like a whirlwind. This morning I could stand it no longer. After half an hour’s raving he fell asleep on the couch, so I got out by the kitchen door, and decided that this time I would be the one to go.’
I couldn’t believe it was the first time.
‘It is,’ she said. ‘Up to now I’ve regarded sticking by him and making sure he doesn’t go into an asylum as a test of character. That’s what my father drummed into all us girls. “The harder life is,” he said, “the more it tests your character, and the more you should be thankful it does because then you know it’s doing you good.” Growing up hearing things like that, and trying to believe in them, has ruined my life to such an extent that though I’ll soon be sixty I don’t feel older than thirty. I feel my life is yet to come, even though I may look worn out.’
She did, but only to a certain extent, because the more she talked the softer and more clear her features became, until she seemed nowhere near sixty. She folded her cloak and laid it on the seat beside her, and smoothed her grey hair which went in a ponytail down her back. ‘Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?’
I pulled two from my pocket and gave her one. ‘Are you going to stay in London, or will you go back to Goole?’
‘How can I tell? Maybe if he’d been in an institution years ago, as he deserved to be, he would have been out by now.’
‘That would have been worse.’
She laughed, a pleasant surprise, showing good teeth. A pair of gold earrings shook. ‘You seem to have had your troubles as well, the way you talk.’
‘Who hasn’t?’
‘It’s a pity wisdom only comes to those who suffer,’ she said. ‘I used to believe in progress, but I do
n’t anymore.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘I suppose it is. Maybe I’ll believe in it again as time goes on. I’ll get a job in London.’
I was almost beyond caring. ‘What sort?’
‘Who’ll give someone like me a job?’
‘You never know.’
‘That’s true.’ She sounded more cheerful. ‘I have a bit of money in my post office book, so I can look around. I’ll get something, even if I go from door to door asking for work.’
‘I’d never go back if I were you,’ I said.
‘I don’t think I will.’
‘Maybe he’ll cure himself. Maybe he won’t. But if you go back it’ll be two lives ruined, instead of one. Troubles shared are troubles doubled.’
‘You almost talk as if you know him.’
‘I’ve just got a good imagination.’ I didn’t want to complicate matters. I was making headway towards Doncaster, and soon came within the suction area of the M1. It had stopped raining, and she seemed full of wonder as I scooted silently down the motorway. I couldn’t resist going up to eighty.
‘I can see why he likes getting lifts in fast cars,’ she said. ‘He often told me how it soothed him to be speeding along a wide straight road.’
‘A pity life isn’t like that all the time.’ We had a good laugh over the fact that it wasn’t. I quite took to her, and I think she liked me. I pointed out Hardwick Grange, a wonderful building up a hill to the left. ‘A woman called Bess built it in the sixteenth century.’
‘Hardwick Hall,’ she retorted. ‘I visited it with my father.’
Perfect signposting sometimes foxed me when I was tired and hungry, and coming off the motorway into a service area west of Nottingham I ended up behind the kitchens – though I soon got back to the proper place. In the cafeteria we sat with plates of steak and chips, sweet cakes and tea. She would be on her own from now on, because I was heading for Shropshire. ‘You’ll easily get a lift from the exit slip road,’ I said. ‘Anyone will stop for a respectable looking person like you.’