“Fenny!” he shouted.
Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car, he hit her instead with the car door as he leant across and flung it open at her.
It caught her hand and knocked away her umbrella, which then bowled wildly away across the road.
“Shit!” yelled Arthur as helpfully as he cold, leapt out of his own door, narrowly avoided being run down by McKeena’s All-Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as it ran down Fenny’s umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.
The umbrella lay like a recently swatted daddy-long-legs, expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a little.
He picked it up.
“Er,” he said. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in offering the thing back to her.
“How did you know my name?” she said.
“Er, well,” he said. “Look, I’ll get you another one…”
He looked at her and tailed off.
She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost sombre, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at.
But when she smiled, as she did now, it was as if she suddenly arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.
She grinned, tossed her bag into the back and swivelled herself into the front seat.
“Don’t worry about the umbrella,” she said to him as she climbed in. “It was my brother’s and he can’t have liked it or he wouldn’t have given it to me.” She laughed and pulled on her seatbelt. “You’re not a friend of my brother’s are you?”
“No.”
Her voice was the only part of her which didn’t say “Good”.
Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite extraordinary to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly away, that he could hardly think or breathe, and hoped that neither of these functions were vital to his driving or they were in trouble.
So what he had experienced in the other car, her brother’s car, the night he had returned exhausted and bewildered from his nightmare years in the stars had not been the unbalance of the moment, or, if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.
“So…” he said, hoping to kick the conversation off to an exciting start.
“He was meant to pick me up – my brother – but phoned to say he couldn’t make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look at the calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided to hitch. So.”
“So.”
“So here I am. And what I would like to know, is how you know my name.”
“Perhaps we ought to first sort out,” said Arthur, looking back over his shoulder as he eased his car into the motorway traffic, “where I’m taking you.”
Very close, he hoped, or long away. Close would mean she lived near him, a long way would mean he could drive her there.
“I’d like to go to Taunton,” she said, “please. If that’s all right. It’s not far. You can drop me at…”
“You live in Taunton?” he said, hoping that he’d managed to sound merely curious rather than ecstatic. Taunton was wonderfully close to him. He could…
“No, London,” she said. “There’s a train in just under an hour.”
It was the worst thing possible. Taunton was only minutes away up the motorway. He wondered what to do, and while he was wondering with horror heard himself saying, “Oh, I can take you to London. Let me take you to London…”
Bungling idiot. Why on Earth had he said “let” in that stupid way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old.
“Are you going to London?” she asked.
“I wasn’t,” he said, “but…” Bungling idiot.
“It’s very kind of you,” she said, “but really no. I like to go by train.” And suddenly she was gone. Or rather, that part of her which brought her to life was gone. She looked rather distantly out of the window and hummed lightly to herself.
He couldn’t believe it.
Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he’d blown it.
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.
Taunton 5 miles, said the signpost.
He gripped the steering wheel so tightly the car wobbled. He was going to have to do something dramatic.
“Fenny,” he said.
She glanced round sharply at him.
“You still haven’t told me how…”
“Listen,” said Arthur, “I will tell you, though the story is rather strange. Very strange.”
She was still looking at him, but said nothing.
“Listen…”
“You said that.”
“Did I? Oh. There are things I must talk to you about, and things I must tell you… a story I must tell you which would…” He was thrashing about. He wanted something along the lines of “Thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular quill to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine” but didn’t think he could carry it off and didn’t like the hedgehog reference.
“… which would take more than five miles,” he settled for in the end, rather lamely he was afraid.
“Well…”
“Just supposing,” he said, “just supposing” – he didn’t know what was coming next, so he thought he’d just sit back and listen – “that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn’t know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I’ve only just met and not crash into lorries at the same time, what would you say…” he paused helplessly, and looked at her, “I… should do?”
“Watch the road!” she yelped.
“Shit!”
He narrowly avoided careering into the side of a hundred Italian washing machines in a German lorry.
“I think,” she said, with a momentary sigh of relief, “you should buy me a drink before my train goes.”
Chapter 12
There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.
Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
“Make ’em dry,” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.”
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.
The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.
“There must be somewhere better,” said Arthur.
“No time,” said Fenny, glancing at her watch. “My train leaves in half an hour.”
They sat at a small wobbly table. On it were some dirty glasses, and some soggy beermats with jokes printed on them. Arthur got Fenny a tomato juice, and himself a pint of yellow water with gas in it. And a couple of sausages. He didn’t know why. He bought them for something to do while the gas settled in his glass.