And so it is arranged he will follow with Mary, who will drive Justin’s superannuated Jaguar, if it will move, after six months in the garage. Mary likes the idea, and spends a happy afternoon getting it purring over again; she turns out to be a competent mechanic. Vanessa will drive up tomorrow as planned: Justin and Mary, two days later. “And Mary, for God’s sake, don’t forget your glasses!” Vanessa sounds as sharp as before the attack.
Vanessa leaves in the morning, waving manfully, and yet she has a mournful, anxious look. Mary and Justin feel touched and guilty, seeing Vanessa’s small stiff figure manoeuvring herself into the driver’s seat, with two suitcases of what she calls ‘essentials’, plus bags of food, clinking bottles, rolls of wrapping paper, carrier bags of presents, a holly wreath, and a great hollow box of crackers, shining with cellophane, a cube of decorated air, two dozen titivations of crepe and gold paper in which a few paltry plastic giftlets rattle. She is so small compared to the bulk of her possessions. They wave to her as she shrinks down the road.
“So when will you tell her that she is a grandma? Of the most beautiful baby in the world?” Mary asks Justin, hugging him. “Poor Miss Vanessa, I am sorry for her.” It tempers the faint pleasure of outwitting her employer (but the baby, in himself, is so glorious: pinkish-skinned, though it will darken later, red-lipped, stormy, but easily comforted, topped with a shock of straight dark hair).
“I’m going to tell her. All in good time. Once we’re sorted out, I shall bring them both to see her.”
The next day, the weather’s sharply colder. There are alerts of imminent snow. The bookies taking bets on a White Christmas close their books, and exhausted housewives fight back into the shops to buy more thick soups, more Christmas puddings. Now all the furry hot-water bottles have sold out. There is a miniature run on bedsocks.
Vanessa, in Sussex, starts to worry. “If it gets any worse, you are not to come,” she instructs Justin, when she gets him on the phone, though for the past two days he has hardly been at home. “Mary is not to drive if it’s snowing. She isn’t used to snow. She’s African.”
“Oh, Mary and I aren’t frightened by snowstorms,” says Justin, grandly. Yet it keeps getting colder. Zakira has the baby in a soft cocoon of blankets. He and Mary shiver as they pack the car. He does not want to leave his woman, his baby, but he still can’t say so to his mother. Will he ever learn to say ‘No’ to her? One day, he thinks, I shall just be myself.
But it isn’t so easy to be himself. Maybe having a family of his own will help; a new family, to escape the old one.
They had firmly intended to leave before dark, but Justin receives a call from Zakira: her nipples are hurting; she needs something from the chemist. With a stricken expression — she must not be in pain — he shoots out of the house before Mary can take him and does a tour on foot around the three local chemists, who sell him half a dozen useless remedies, and then Mary drives him to Zakira’s. It isn’t easy to leave his new family; Zakira seems fretful, almost reproachful, so by the time they are really on the road, it is sunset.
The air is full of Christmas petroclass="underline" it has a poisoned, leaden feel. The sunset is magnificent but also lowering, red flames shooting between mountainous clouds which are the brownish purple that presages snow.
As they turn out of their street, the white dance begins, first big light flakes, individual as flowers, and then slowly quickening, multiplying, twisting, till within thirty minutes their car has been sucked into a sifting forest of grey-white shapes, as soft and thick as if cut from flannel, which burst into brightness at every street lamp, then fade again, instantly, whiten then darken, so everything looks different, hides and shifts, and the solid stream of traffic melts and blurs into a series of whispering spectres, and deepening the white is the indigo evening as night blues over the afterglow.
“Your mother said I shouldn’t drive if it was snowing, but it didn’t snow till we had already left,” says Mary, smiling, but she isn’t quite happy, though Mary believes in being happy.
Firstly, her glasses, though nearly new, bought from a friend who no longer wanted them, keep steaming up, and pinch her nose. She has to take them off and wipe them, and on one occasion, nearly loses control, and Justin reaches across to grab the wheel. “Be careful, Mary,” he says, crossly, sounding suddenly unpleasantly like Vanessa.
Secondly, Mary had forgotten snow. Her memory had turned it into something minor, something sweet and flat and docile, like icing. She is taken aback that it is eating the world, surging up all round her, in four dimensions.
Thirdly, her kabito hasn’t called. Four weeks ago, he telephoned to tell her he was coming, he had the tickets and was ‘sure of a visa’, but since Ugandans don’t believe in a visa until it is in their jacket pockets, he promised to call again to confirm; but the second phone-call has never come, and she’s been unable to track him down.
So Mary is doomed to spend Christmas with strangers, in a village a world away from her own village, far from her church and her friends in Kampala, away from her beloved friend the accountant, who grows more dear now she isn’t going to see him. She misses him badly, longs for him. For the first time she thinks, “I might marry Charles.” But she cannot marry him until she locates him. Will she ever see him, or Uganda, again?
“Read me the signs,” she says sharply to Justin, who is humming and staring in a blissed-out fashion.
“It’s cool, Mary, we’re heading for the motorway.”
On the motorway, thinks Mary, things will seem more normal, the lights will be brighter, the traffic streams steadier, and I will get my bearings again. Unconsciously, she starts to drive faster. Soon she is going very fast indeed, revving at the lights, overtaking, and she bombs on to the motorway without a pause, and Justin wakes up and sits bolt upright.
He remembers, with a shock, Zakira and the baby.
“Look, Mary, you’d better slow down, since it’s snowing. See, the overhead signs are saying 40.”
Mary shoots a glance across at him. He is a young, fit man. He should be driving. At any rate, he should not be taking it for granted that driving will be done by someone else, while Justin sits there handing out instructions. Mary feels safer when she drives faster, in control at last, skating through life, leaving everything behind, the mess, the exhaustion, the years of slow, insurmountable work, going inch by inch, a snail with a duster. If Mary can stay in the fast lane, she will, and in any case, today the roads are dream-like, the whole of England has become insubstantial, her early feelings of doubt and panic have been replaced by a dreamer’s calm: nothing will stop her, nothing can hurt her.
But Justin’s voice nags in her ear. She manages to stop herself snapping at him.
“Justin, I love you, but soon you must start driving. You will see later, with the baby. It will be useful if you are driving.”
His full red lips, so like the baby’s, look suddenly sulky, lower lip jutting. He has made an effort; he has got better; he is working hard, he has become a father, he’s making an attempt to please his mother, he’s trekking to the back of beyond for Christmas…
Now Mary expects him to drive the car!
“Mary, I love you, but you are my driver.”
She looks at him narrowly through newly wiped glasses, which show every pimple, every flaw. This tall young man with his pout like a baby. That greedy mouth which had dragged at her nipples.
“Mr Justin, I am not your driver.”
But he only laughs, in his Justin way, a charming cherub, and pats her dark hand, stroking it as it clutches the wheel, the hand of the woman who has mothered him, served him, cleaned up his vomit, given him her breast, this black woman guiding him through a snowstorm, in the midst of a reindeer herd of cars, all chafing forwards in the snowy darkness, their headlights dipped on the new white like eyes.