I parked as far as I could from the lorries, and followed Bill in. He stood at the counter, eyes turned up to the menu as if it was the light from heaven. ‘What’ll you have?’
‘I’ve already decided,’ he said. ‘It don’t take me long to make up my mind when it comes to food.’
‘I like a man of decision and character,’ I said, in a sarcastic way which finally annoyed him.
‘You’re getting a bit too bloody familiar. If you want to eat alone, you can. If you want to drive on your own, you can do that as well, but you’ll end up walking to London with that wreck on your back.’ He laughed so loud at this that the girl behind the counter asked him what he wanted. He rattled off a poem to the empty stomach: ‘Tomato soup, my lovely, then liver, sausages, onions and mashed spuds. Then steamed pudding and custard, a couple of them jam tarts, a mug of tea, four slices of bread and butter, twenty fags and a knife, fork, and spoon.’
‘Steady on,’ I said, ‘I’ll be bankrupt.’ He didn’t hear me.
‘Is that all then?’ the girl asked.
‘Except for a bit of you,’ he said, jutting his scruffy, but confident face over the counter. She blushed at this, stepped back and smiled: ‘Cheeky devil! I’ll call you when it’s ready.’ She turned to me: ‘What about you, then?’
‘Beans on toast and a mug of tea.’
‘You won’t carry that car far on that!’ Bill laughed.
‘You’re getting a bit too bloody familiar as well,’ I snapped, paying out the best part of a quid on his monumental scoff. ‘Nothing’s gone right since I picked you up.’
We walked to a table and sat down in silence. A slim, dark-haired woman of about twenty-five was at the other end of it. The fact that she looked bored with her solitude made her more fascinating than she might have been if seated in a convivial atmosphere such as the midst of a gay family gathering. But in any case I was halfway struck by her as she smoked a tipped cigarette over the remains of an apple pie — while I waited for sufficient wit and perhaps courage before opening my mouth to say something. I knew I had to speak before the food came, because it would be bad manners to talk on a full mouth.
Bill Straw must have had similar ideas, for he opened with: ‘Will you pass the sauce, duck? I must have a lick of something or I shall die. That dinner I ordered’s taking ages.’ She slid the half-filled bottle along, smiling at his common and slimy wit. He took the newspaper out of my pocket and offered it to her: ‘Like to read this while you’re waiting?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ he said, drinking the sauce to the bottom. ‘It’s full of lies. Do you want a lift to London, with me?’
I hoped she’d get up and kick him in the shins, but she didn’t: ‘I am going that way,’ she said with what could only have been a smile of gratitude. ‘Is it in a lorry?’
‘Car. We’ve come from Grantham. I don’t know why the mean bleeders don’t put sugar on the table. I could have a dip if they did. That sauce just set me going.’ When the waitress arrived she set each plate before him so that most of the table was covered. ‘Will you join me?’ he offered. I might have said the same, but what can you do with beans on toast?
‘I’ve eaten already.’
‘Sure?’
‘Of course. I set out from Leeds, and so far I’ve made good time.’
‘Well,’ he said, ladling the soup into his lantern-chops, ‘we’ll get you there in a couple of hours, more or less, if we all get out and push. My name’s Bill Straw. What’s yours?’
‘June. Do you live in London?’
He didn’t answer till the soup was gone, then stabbed his finger towards me. ‘He does, I don’t.’ The further he got into his meal, the more clipped his answers were, though he still left space between his lips for questions to get out: ‘Are your parents alive?’
Her eyebrows wrinkled with surprise. ‘What do you want to know for?’
‘Just wondered, love.’ It was hard to say whether he was the greatest card of them all, or just plain stupid. He took life too easy for a wise man, it seemed to me, and that might be dangerous if we got too close, so I thought it would be best to avoid him when our mutual journey was over. ‘You live in London?’ he asked her.
‘When I can.’
‘That’s a funny answer’ — onions streaming out of his mouth.
‘It’s expensive. Makes it hard. But I like it there. Life’s interesting.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Hey,’ she cried, ‘who are you, anyway? You’re so genuine you act like a plain-clothes man.’ It was something I’d never have thought about.
‘That’s a lark, for somebody like me. The best joke I’ve heard in ten years. I just wanted to know what you did.’
‘I work,’ she said. ‘What’s your sweat, then?’
‘Painter and decorator. I’m fed up with Notts, so I’m going down south. Left my wife and kids in Mansfield yesterday. Spent last night with my girlfriend in Nottingham and now I’m off to fresh fields and pastures new. Where will I be tonight then, eh?’ he ended with a leer. She said nothing to this, as if to show that he had gone too far. He accepted it, but only because he could then devote complete attention to his meal, which he gobbled so that anyone would have thought he’d fallen in love with that now, in his flippant, one-sided way.
I don’t know what sort of car she imagined we had, but when she saw it she didn’t show too much interest at getting in. Bill said he’d better fill the radiator now, which would save us doing it during the next three miles. Still, she put her small valise in the back, and got in when I held the front seat forward. ‘It don’t look up to much,’ said Bill, ‘but it pulls itself along all right. Slow but sure.’
I turned on the ignition. ‘Let’s go.’ Nothing happened, so Bill leapt out and flung the bonnet up, taking a piece of rag from his pocket to dry the contacts, which he thought might have got wet from the water he’d splashed too freely when filling the radiator.
June drew her coat around her in the back as if sitting in a refrigerator. ‘Shall we give it a push? The road slopes a bit here.’
Bill’s trick worked, and the engine coughed into life. ‘Push the choke in as soon as we get going,’ he said, ‘or it might stall.’
‘Whose car is it?’ she asked, when we were trundling along at a fair forty.
‘Mine,’ I said, before Bill could put his false spoke in. ‘Or my brother’s, I should say. He lent it to me to go to London for a holiday. I work for an estate agent in Nottingham, and I’ve been so bored the last few weeks that I thought I needed a break.’ Every hundred yards a noise went out of the exhaust pipe as sharp as a pistol shot, shattering the nerves of any car or lorry driver who happened to be nearby.
‘The engine’s bunged up,’ said Bill. ‘It sounds as though we’re armed to the teeth. Anyway, you can tell me your life story now. I’ve told mine.’
‘I can’t talk while I’m driving. It puts me off.’
‘That’s a bloody fine get out, ain’t it? I was looking forward to it.’
‘Some other time. What about June?’
She said nothing. Bill, who had managed to forget her existence for a few minutes, passed her a lighted cigarette: ‘All for one, and one for all. It’s sheer communism in this car, ain’t it, Michael?’
‘Seems like it,’ I said. ‘What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is yours, but I’m the only one that’s got something.’
‘Don’t be like that. You’d be back there in the mud, trying to start this box if it weren’t for me. We all earn our keep. Eh, duck?’ he called significantly to June.
She stirred. ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better tell you all about myself, if that’s the way it is.’