When Mother came in that night she wanted to know: ‘Whose is that car outside?’
‘Mine.’
‘Don’t be bloody silly,’ she said. ‘I asked you a civilized question: whose is it? If you don’t know, say so.’
‘It’s mine,’ I told her. ‘I bought it this morning’ — explaining how I’d got the money from Clegg.
‘You are a dark horse,’ she said. ‘Has it got lights?’ I told her it had, and she asked me to take her out in it. We drove to Grandma’s at Beeston. There was a great wind going, and at one place along University Boulevard I felt it bumping the car side-on, as if with a bit more strength it would push us over. Mother enjoyed the ride so much she was singing all the way.
I bought some drink at a beer-off, and we supped a few pints in Grandma’s warm kitchen. ‘Be careful’, my mother said. ‘Don’t put too much back.’
‘I can only drive well if I’m drunk. Otherwise I’m frightened to death.’
‘I’ll do the boozing,’ Grandma said. ‘And you do the driving. That’s fair, ain’t it?’ We laughed and stewed over it, and after the booze came tea and sandwiches as part of Grandma’s generous service.
Halfway through this we heard a rending of rotten wood, the sound of a thousand twigs biting themselves in half, followed by a dull impacted crunch outside the house. Grandma screamed that hell was coming down on us. My heart almost burst, and I thought a bomb had fallen or a gasometer had gone up. A vision of my crushed and mangled car flipped over my eyes, and I charged like a madman for the scullery door, from which side most of the noise had come.
People were shouting, cars stopping, lights flashing. I felt the wind licking my face with its cold tongue. I couldn’t get out for a wall of dry and tangled branches held me back. I was frantic, ripped and clawed my way to the garden where the greater part of the trunk had fallen. Much of the tree had smashed on to the wall, spliced halfway down it.
Mother was by my side. ‘I hope no one was walking along the pavement. If they were, they’ve had it.’
‘Sod them,’ I cried, almost in tears. ‘What about my car?’ We pulled at the gate, but due to the buckling of the wall it wouldn’t open. Grandma was laughing behind us. ‘You sound as if you’re off your head,’ I shouted.
‘Your grandad’s tree’s gone down at last!’ she said, and went back to laughing so that I could have killed even her when I thought about my car.
It was buried under the rammel of branches. I held on to the wall to stop the stars going round. People were pulling at brittle wood and taking it back to their houses for kindling. I scrabbled like a maniac to get to the car, and a man said: ‘Look at that greedy sod. Some folks aren’t satisfied till they get the lot.’
‘’Appen it’s his car,’ another voice chipped in.
‘Serves him right, then. Good job it struck the rich and not the poor.’ But I reached it, and in no time the top was freed. The main weight of the tree had been taken by the wall, and far from the car being a write-off, it now seemed that apart from a couple of bad dints in the roof only one of the front lamps was smashed. Trying to hold back my rage so that all the nosy-parkers shouldn’t have a good show for nothing, I got inside and saw that some split branches had punctured two jagged holes in the roof, as if God had fired two anti-tank shells for spite, vertically down from his stony heaven. I could have cried my heart out at such a disaster on the first day of my owning it, but later on, totting back a half-bottle of Grandma’s Irish whiskey (that I’ll swear blind she brewed herself) I didn’t mind joining in the general laugh though only because I was drunk.
Next morning I got to work, and wiped up the water that had dripped inside during the night. I hammered the ragged lips of the holes as closed as they could get, then put a crisscross work of stickypaper strips inside and out, and painted them from a tin of enamel I bought at a bucket shop. That made it as watertight as it would ever be again, and with the lamps fixed, the car was once more roadworthy.
I covered hundreds of miles in the next few days, till I was as good a driver as the rest of them, if not better, judging by the number of near-misses I had due to other people’s carelessness. I went past Cleggy’s house one day and saw a couple of removal vans outside, but didn’t go in to say hello in case he’d missed the pocket-watch, which I now wore proudly from my jacket lapel. I thought that perhaps I’d look him up one day in Leicester (I could get his address from the library) and give it back to him. This good intention agreeably stifled whatever guilt I felt, and even made me feel happy for the next half-mile. After the accident of the tree my car didn’t look as spick and span as it had the morning I bought it, but my affection for it had grown accordingly. Such a vegetable baptism was all it would ever suffer, and I hoped that from now on whoever might be in heaven would look after us. I felt comfortable in it, safe, enclosed, as if it were more of a home than my own room. If I curled up in the back I could even sleep, and in fact often dozed there, parked by some narrow lane of north Notts when I was fagged out from the mental effort of steering it along. I had food in the car, a blanket, fags, tools, maps, and a Thermos filled with tea before setting out. I felt like a gipsy, but always went back home at night, as if I were still tied at the ankle by an invisible rope.
Driving through town at just gone five one afternoon I saw Miss Bolsover walking towards her bus stop. ‘Gwen,’ I called, using her first name now that we didn’t work together. She heard me, I’m sure, but kept her head up and went right on, her broad arse shaking inside her loose grey coat. A van was hooting for me to get a move on, and she thought this was me also signalling her. So I flicked on my indicators as if I was going into the kerb to stop, but still crawled along it slowly, turned my window to the bottom and called: ‘Miss Bolsover!’
She came over with a smile: ‘Hello, Michael!’
‘I’ll drive you home,’ I said. ‘Get in.’ The car sagged, not that she weighed more than most, but it seemed that the springs weren’t in the best condition. Gwen Bolsover was what might be called a well-built woman of more than thirty, with touching grey hair above her delicate pink ears. Her pear-shaped face was always full of concern for others, and as far as I understood from office gossip she had gone through a succession of boyfriends, all of whom were said to have let her down. Why they had, nobody knew, but that was her claim, and such was the honesty of her face when she said it that no one dreamed of disbelieving her. This fact certainly made men go for her like flies when they heard of it.
Perfume filled the car, and I had to brace myself so as not to swoon under it because traffic was heavy, and I couldn’t swear while she was in the car in case such words were misunderstood. I had hoped, in my over-optimistic way, that Claudine would be the first to waft perfume and smear lipstick over the upholstery. I’d intended calling on her when the month was up to see if we couldn’t get back to our senses. And now Miss Bolsover had beaten her to it, a free gift suddenly out of nowhere, when she hadn’t been in my mind for weeks. I knew already that you never got what you expected — or even what you deliberately didn’t expect in the hope that you’d get it. That’s why I lived on the minimum of hope and never expected anything. I certainly did as well as anybody else out of this system, and maybe, in some ways, a whole lot better.
Miss Bolsover asked where I’d got the car, and I told her I’d bought it out of my savings, that I’d been putting money by for exactly this since I was fifteen. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I do admire such steadiness of purpose in a man. And you’re still so young. I wonder what sort of a person you’ll be in ten years’ time? Or in twenty years?’ She lived at Wollaton, and we were already caught in the rush hour to get around Canning Circus. ‘How well you drive,’ she said. ‘It was good of Mr Weekley to give you those driving lessons.’