‘Yes. I’ve got a brother living in London, in Streatham, and I visit him every so often, and stay till he says I have to leave. There’s enough money for the bus, but I prefer hitch-hiking because when I speak to someone on the bus the conductor puts me off for disturbing the passengers.’ Grantham passed on the starboard and then Newark on the port bow. I lit one of my own cigars on crossing the Trent, always an obligatory and satisfying gesture at such a point. ‘My brother burst into the room at four this morning and said I had to get out or he would strike me with an axe. That’s why I’m on the road so early.’
‘Life’s difficult.’
‘I’m really beginning to think it is.’
‘You must be tired,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you get your head down?’
He sighed, like a boiler about to burst. ‘I can’t. Sometimes I’m unable to sleep for days. I’m in such a phase now. That’s why I’m going back to my wife.’
I felt like a cat having its fur rubbed backwards. Maybe I would murder him before he murdered his wife. ‘Do you have any children?’
‘Two daughters. Janet and Phyllis. Janet lives with another woman and Phyllis lives in Dover with two children but no husband. We don’t see them, but they write now and again. They’ve got their own lives. Like all of us. Phyllis’s two children are boys. She calls them Huz and Buz. When they last came to see us I told them a bedtime story, so she never brought them again.’
I was reminded of an incident from Bill Straw’s adventures, but couldn’t believe there was any connection.
‘Phyllis left home at sixteen. We had a blazing row one day because she’d been hanging around the docks. I didn’t receive a word from her for two years. Somebody told me she’d met an Irishman. Even the Salvation Army couldn’t find her. Then she wrote to say she was married and having a baby, and asked for money. Her mother sent five pounds, and it came back by return of post, cut in two — longways. I don’t know what we’d done to her. It’s amazing what people can be like. Have you ever seen people who are happy?’
‘I’ve seen them dead,’ I said, ‘so I suppose they were happy enough. But I’ve been happy from time to time.’
‘There should be a happy medium, don’t you think?’
‘A happy tedium, more like it,’ I said.
The smell of soot was in the air, the delectable breath of the north, which partly made up for the gloom descending on the car. It was impossible to throw him out. Nor did I want to. I was neither dead nor happy. There was a stage in between which he didn’t know about, and that was his trouble. I thanked God first, and Moggerhanger second, and myself a close third, for including me in on it.
‘If you had given me a lift right from the beginning,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have had this black eye.’
‘This is my employer’s car,’ I said wearily. ‘I’m not supposed to give lifts. In my own car I always do. But not in this one. Do you understand?’
‘And you switched off the music.’
‘It was driving me crazy.’
A beautiful cream Mercedes passed us, and I glanced at it.
‘You signalled to that car,’ he said.
‘You’re off your head.’ If he wasn’t, I was — or would be soon.
‘It must mean something — what you do.’
‘It does if you want it to.’
‘Everything means something.’
I’d never been so glad to see the Bawtry signpost, because it meant I would be back on the twisting arterial lanes and have to pay closer attention to driving. It also began to rain, big splashes coming at the windscreen, so I put on the wipers and hoped their rhythm would hypnotise him into sleep.
‘It means something whether you want it to or not,’ he said.
‘Oh, bollocks.’
‘Swearing reminds me of that horrible transport café.’
‘I’ll swear if I like.’ I overtook a coal lorry, so that we missed dying by inches. That would have meant something, but he was in no condition to notice. I could see the faces of drivers who were coming to pass me on the other side of the road. Those with their mouths open hadn’t yet learned to drink properly. The nipple still shaped them. One chap wearing a cap drove with a look of horror, as if death by fire could strike at any instant. Another man drove with so little of his face showing, he must have been three feet tall. Often the mouth was a circular hole in the middle of a plate of lard, just distinguishable between the dangling good luck charms and the India-rubber Alsatian behind. Most faces seemed angry, as if belonging to a body taking part in a bayonet charge, and set to kill every oncoming driver — unless it was the expression they put on at the sight of a Rolls-Royce. It was too common not to mean something, though I was inclined to think it their normal state. Those faces that didn’t look rabid were gritted tight in concentration. A fair proportion of phizzogs sported a benign idiot smile, looking about ten years of age and as if delighted to be at the wheel of a lethal machine. I didn’t know why, but most of the women’s expressions seemed more or less normal. I wondered with a smile what my face looked like to those able to take it in — and immediately took the smile off it and assumed a mature sternness befitting the captain of a ship.
‘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.’