The car was a cocoon of odours: the whiff of cigar smoke, a damp overcoat, and the reek of books that had been too long in cellars, garden sheds, Wendy houses, garages or attics. Some nights he dreamed of going into the sort of Nissen barrack he had done national service in, full of such tomes he had never hoped to find, dusty from motes continually shed by cobwebs and age. Eyes bedazzled, hands clasped with uncertainty as to what shelf he would go to first. He opened a nineteenth-century volume of travels to find coloured plates botched beyond definition, and maps – of no country ever heard of – falling to pieces while unfolding.
Headlights made little difference to the road. A grey Cortina shot into the dimness, twin brakes reddening at an unexpected bend, so far out that a car from the other direction flashed him rabidly because it almost went into the hedge.
Aaron felt a tremor at the stomach. The road was a linear battlefield, every month the same number of people killed and maimed as in the Falklands War. All you could do was take advantage of your age and, like an old soldier, never die, treating each journey as the first, and whatever route you chose as terra incognita.
Before he left on any trip Beryl was as shaky as if he was going off to the underworld and might never come back, not strange for the kind of person she was. No husband had been good enough for her, and he had been good enough for no wife. Village people had taken it that they were married, not brother and sister – as well they might, because on their walks she held his hand, would kiss him on his return even before he got through the door. Well, she was always anxious. Why do women worry so much? Beryl did because he couldn’t, so someone had to. The perfect couple, you might say. He would telephone in an hour when he turned off the main road, knowing she would be glad of that.
Stopped at a lay-by, he smelt snow in the air, a peculiar damp wind caressing the back of his head as he stood by the hedge hoping he was wrong. Beyond LBC range and the soothing rasp of Brian Hayes he buttoned onto long wave for a weather forecast whose threatening prognostications he hoped to foil.
Driving in the dark was a chore, but in winter you had no choice. He envied those in their safe houses, lights glowing, homely smoke from the chimneys. Half-past four seemed like midnight, but he would call at one last shop, branching fifteen miles off the trunk road to Morford, where the woman who ran the place didn’t pull down the shutters till six. He would be in plenty of time, but knew that whenever he made a special deviation he rarely found anything.
Every rule had its exception, and he could not afford to turn any chance down, uneasy when the turning came and he forked off like a somnambulist. He had no say in the matter, never had in anything of importance in his life. He had always liked it that way, because that was how things worked best and, reasoning in the process of an unreasonable act, he knew that what he had done must, happen what might, turn out to be right after all. Having come to the end of such zigzag cogitation, the toothache reasserted itself.
THREE
‘Do you always curse like that?’
She came into the light, a young girl wearing a bomber jacket and carrying a portable radio, with dark bubbly hair and a snub-nose, haversack hanging loose. She laughed at the tall, slightly stooped man looking at her, a rare specimen with his short-back-and-sides haircut. Some blokes are born that way – though he seemed a bit harassed. ‘You mean how you swore? I heard you effing and blinding like a trooper. “What a dirty-mouthed bastard,” I said to myself. You went on so long I thought you’d never stop.’
‘I suppose I did.’
She nodded at the handkerchief over his wrist. ‘Did you trap your hand in the door?’
He wasn’t happy at having her crash his privacy, damned if he would give her a lift. The only paradise in the world was to be on your own, encapsulated in a motor car and floating from point to point. Contact with people, even at parties and meetings, was hectic, nothing calm anywhere, the constant clatter of noise, pounding of torment. Yet he was known as being sociable, so had a right to claim at least that for himself.
He packed mug and stove into their wooden box, all things fitting neatly, and she was too interested in his painstaking movements to broach a request for help. ‘Are you a sales rep?’
‘Certainly not.’ He pushed by her, carrying the box to the boot. When he started the car she banged on the window, as he had known she would, and he smiled at her disappointed face and shouted message of abuse coming through the Plexiglas. He got out intending to pound her head into a pulp of turnip and blood, leave her dying under a drift of snow. No one would pester him from then on, except his conscience which, belonging to him alone, would also take a long time to discover. Spread fingers patted the side of his trousers, then opened a door to the rear seats. ‘Why didn’t you ask properly?’
She was surprised as much as he at his change of mind. ‘It’s perishing out there.’
His expensive jacket and sweater had been like paper near Beagle Tarn. ‘For a few miles, then.’
‘My boy friend chucked me out.’ She sniffed, hugging her slimline knickerpink trannie. ‘He’s earning two hundred quid a week as a chippie, and thought I was too expensive because I asked for a gin. Some people are born rotten. I winked at one of his mates, as well, but it didn’t mean anything. Just a bit of fun. Anyway, you’ve got to show you’re alive now and again, haven’t you?’ She patted the seat and looked around. ‘It’s a lovely car, though.’
Wheels crunched onto the road, tarmac buttered with light. ‘Why didn’t you go back home?’
Her laugh ended as a squeal. ‘Home? What’s one o’ them? Oh yes, I used to hear people talking about such things. I wrote to Santa Claus asking for one at Christmas. I even saw one on telly once. It looked ever so funny.’
He drove as carefully with a hitchhiker in the car as he always had with Gwen and Laura. She didn’t know how lucky she was, finding someone who also had no home.
‘He didn’t even like me to talk. Whenever I said anything he told me to shut up. He talked, though. It was all right for him to open his mouth. But I like to talk as well, and when I said so he told me to wrap up or he would belt me one. I can’t think why I stuck him for so long. Three whole months, or near enough, but it felt like all my life. I would have left even if he hadn’t chucked me out. He’d got no consideration.’
He thought she was being sick, but she was retching out tears, the indigestible food of her spirit, hands gripping the back of his seat. The words, harsh as ice, were in his throat to tell her to shut up as well, but he crushed such resemblance to her loutish boy friend, and passed a clutch of Kleenex from the glove box.
Why am I crying? she wondered, at the shock of getting a lift when she thought she had been left to die, a change for the better that would break any heart. Getting into such a car was like climbing into heaven: two soft seats to herself, a smell of fags and leather, and a stranger’s breath.
Since he felt so superior to the poor waif he thought he was obliged to say something. ‘Are you hungry?’
She wiped her face, and passed the remaining Kleenex as if they were too precious not to be used again.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I don’t need them.’
She stuffed them in her pocket, and smiled. ‘I’m starving, if you want to know.’
‘You’ll find some biscuits and a bar of chocolate in that box on the floor.’ Her presence was disturbing, and he took a bend too sharply, treadling his way back onto a straight course. A rustle of paper as she burrowed around as if a hamster had got loose, her face in the rear mirror pale and oval, with regular features and dark untidy hair – nothing that a comb and a bar of soap wouldn’t improve. He wondered what her body was like under the baggy clothes.
‘I feel a bit sick, sitting in the back. That woman had me in front. We nearly hit a dead sheep on the road. But I’ll be all right in a bit. Have you got a wireless in your car?’
He wanted to stop, throw her out for being such trouble. ‘I have, but I won’t put it on, if you d
on’t mind. And don’t you put yours on, either.’
‘I can’t. The batteries are dead. It costs about a fiver to buy new ones.’
‘I like to concentrate on the road.’ Seeing a space by a gate he drew in so that she could sit beside him. Her smell of sweat was not unpleasant. He sweated too when he walked, ‘Is that better?’
‘Thanks. I had to traipse bloody miles before I got a lift.’
He slipped into first and eased out. She ate the biscuits. ‘I’ll try not to get crumbs in your nice car.’
He stopped by the theatre in Buxton. ‘Is this where you wanted to get to?’
‘I suppose so.’ She stared unmoving at the windscreen, while he lit a cigarette, seconds turning into minutes, ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
Shall I tell him? ‘Eileen Chettle.’
A man wore a Russian-style fur hat, bundled up against the wind. When a bull terrier (though it had floppy ears) sniffed the wheel, a woman carrying a chain-lead called it away in a tone that threatened butchery if it didn’t obey. After the mistake of picking her up he wanted to be on his own and get to where he didn’t know where. ‘I think you’d better go, then.’
Every time she swore she knew she shouldn’t, but it just came out, and he looked the sort who didn’t like women – or men, for that matter – who swore, which was why he was going to ditch her. ‘The weather’s bitter.’
‘Is it?’
She wiped crumbs from her face. ‘Don’t you know?’
Make yourself at home, he ought to say, but resisted: an Englishman’s car was his castle. ‘Won’t your parents be worried?’
‘Parents?’ He might as well have stuck a pin in her. ‘Aren’t they the funny people who live in homes? The man smokes a pipe, and the woman cooks cakes and boils eggs. They lean arm in arm at a window, looking at kids in the garden getting their clothes dirty? I’ve seen them on telly, as well.’
No wonder they threw her out.
‘I never wanted to come here. Fucking Buxton! What a dump. The rubbish men must be on strike or they’d have taken it away. You should have left me on the moors, then death would have come quicker. Or I could have had breast o’ mutton for breakfast.’
Open the door and prise her loose. ‘Where do you want to go? Don’t you have any idea?’
She couldn’t move because her feet ached, only chilblains warming them, which hurt. ‘I’ve got a sister in Norwich. She’s married, but I expect she’ll put me up for a night. I’ll get a living-in job at a hotel if I can.’
‘They’re all closed in the winter. Do you know where Norwich is?’
‘It’s about a hundred miles away, isn’t it? East, I suppose. I did geography for O Levels, but failed, didn’t I? I liked it, though. I learned a lot. I’m just no good at passing exams. I know where Norwich is because Trevor, my boy friend, was in Borstal that way. Porridge in Norwich. He’d say it every day, the fat rat. Porridge makes you a rat, though, don’t it?’
He wouldn’t know. A scrap of fire ash flowed across the windscreen as if it had wings. The weather was about to deteriorate – or deter’iate, as he’d heard Kinnock say before the elocution mob got onto him. Eight o’clock, and a deadly night wind, two snowflakes hurrying after the first, a perfect time to put her out, though it was clearly impossible to do so in the middle of Buxton. In any case, whenever there was a time for something, that time was not yet. The engine went like a clock, wheels and steering, lights and wipers in unison. ‘On your own head be it. I’m going in that direction for a while. But as soon as I alter course you’ll have to get another lift, whatever the weather.’
She felt the big laugh inside her, then let it out as a sigh of relief. He noticed how much stronger her hands looked than Gwen’s. She must have worked in a factory – or mill, where she came from.
‘Fair enough.’ She seemed even more lost than he was, but that was impossible. All he had for the moment was the familiar cocoon of the car to stop his spirit spreading so extensively into nothingness that he would lose all idea of himself. She had had no such glove around her on the moors, and for most of her life it had no doubt been the same, a sense of camping, nothing permanent, no certainty from one day or even hour to the next, her perceptions so dulled that she would live quite cheerfully within other people’s limits as long as she had food, a roof, a coat. Being put out in the middle of Buxton hadn’t really alarmed her, which was maybe why he had changed his mind and let her stay.
FOUR
We do not know what we look like till someone tells us, Sally thought. If they tell us what they see – which they won’t, for fear of offending us, unless they want to offend, in which case what they say may be only half true – then so much the better, though even in friendship how can we know if it’s true? We still have to match it with what we see in the mirror, and with what we already know of ourselves, which is just as likely to be distorted. Then again, does it matter what we – or I, anyway – look like? unless it has some connection to the inner temperament, then of course it matters a lot.
Now what made me think funny things like that? Driving at night, she supposed, and an ominous clarity in the decreasing light, hedges and walls in sharp detail, as if someone she very much would not like to see lurked behind each.
She changed gear to get uphill, flicking mainbeams in case some idiot came shearing round the elbow bend. Stanley had been away a fortnight, and being on your own disorientated the senses, till you got used to it, which she almost had, but driving to the airport to meet him brought a little of the feeling back.
The funniest of all was the notion that she wouldn’t recognize him as he came out of the Customs, though they had been married eighteen years. She laughed, knowing she would spot the Antler luggage pulling at each arm, though the suit he would be wearing wouldn’t much differentiate him from other Identikit businessmen. At one time he had tried to dress as much as he could in the young fogey style because he thought it impressed the men overseas, but she put a stop to that. When it came to the finer harmonies of dressing he hadn’t much sense at all, so it was always she who packed his case and kitted him out for his trips, and even for their sojourns at the house in France, choosing ties and shirts and shoes and hoping he would remember which to wear with each. Her ‘action man’, she smiled, whenever he tried to object.
Yet what if she didn’t in fact recognize him, and picked up someone who wasn’t Stanley at all? A personable man so quick in understanding he would play up to it, and off they would blithely go to have fuck after fuck in an anonymous hotel room, so well matched as never to part. And Stanley would be greeted by the wife of the man she had gone with, so that their future would change as well.
She played the game for a while, working out even shadier permutations, certain areas so exciting she wobbled the steering and burred a hedge. Such luggage wasn’t so uncommon but neither was Stanley. Nor, come to that, was she. He made the trip twice a year to inspect the firm’s factories in the Far East, though thoughts like these hadn’t popped into her mind before. They had been married so long that maybe similar thoughts, as he stared up the long sardine box of the aeroplane, bothered him as well, and he wondered whether or not he would know her as he strolled out of the Customs.
Life was funny when it wasn’t boring. He had said: ‘Don’t meet me at the airport,’ and she answered: ‘All right, I won’t,’ knowing he expected her to be there nevertheless. ‘I can get a train,’ he said, ‘and then the bus,’ but the pathetic vision of him shifting two cases, raincoat and sundry bits from point to point burdened her heart, if only because he had met her when she flew back from Nice after her brother’s accident.
Anyway, he earned enough to be brought home in style, deserved it after his nonstop nerve-racking wining and dining which was even more exhausting, he said, than the technical discussions. She once teased him about the ‘bedding’ as well, but he put on his especially hurt look (no less genuine for that, she hoped) saying that even if he was inclined that way there was
neither time nor energy to indulge.
Nor, in any case, was it offered, everyone was so scared of Aids, condoms or not, apart from which he supposed that the managerial element he mixed with, well accustomed to reading character, and taking hints in response to theirs, did not, he went on, push matters onto that particular stage, and this was proved by his extreme randiness the minute they got into the house, which induced her, always before leaving to meet him at the airport, to put the tube of K-Y Jelly on the shelf above the Aga so that it would not be so icy, because though the house was blessed with full central heating the odd tucked-away corner could nevertheless be bracing. Another vital item was a bottle of Moët et Chandon in the fridge. Absence made the heart grow fonder, but after a fortnight hers had to be cosseted back into life for the reunion.
Sleet came against the windscreen as if a bag of sago had burst somewhere above the car. Cleared, it rattled again, changed to grated coconut, then settled to a steady veil of wet and grainy white. Hell! There were twenty miles to the motorway, and then, she supposed, an open run. Would the car cope? Chains for the wheels were rusting in the garage, and in any case they clattered so bothersomely when the roads were unexpectedly free.
Snow played hide-and-seek, here one mile and gone the next, which made her nervous, a bad sign. Luckily, she had taken the green Volvo, instead of her dented Mini, from the driveway. Except for a bit of rust around the left headlamp the Mini was the best little runabout she’d ever had, but on a night like this the Volvo was more the job, though Stanley was always fidgety when she drove it, and might even use his god-given right to get at the wheel in the airport car park.