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 don’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.