There were several people inside, all of them with their backs to me, for they were forming a queue at a counter at the end. Behind the counter stood an elderly woman and man, both separately busy, but matched in a way — like a pair of dolls — which made it obvious that they were a married couple. The woman wore a blue housecoat, like a school dinner lady or cleaner. The man was thin, as his wife was correspondingly plump, and had grey hair slicked neatly back from his forehead. From behind, the people in the queue did not look entirely real. They were all very quiet — their silence surprised me, for I had thought that country people were invariably acquainted with one another — and stood patiently, rooted to the spot, the purchases clutched in their arms giving them from behind the appearance of strange, goods-bearing plants: a spray of newspaper here, a box of eggs there, a carton of milk depending from white fingers. Their bodies did not look at all normal — they were all different shapes, as if they had been cut from paper — and gave the impression of being, beneath clothes which again had that ‘cut-out’ look and came uniformly in shades of dove grey and pale blue, made not of human flesh but of something extraneous: mattress ticking, perhaps, or whale blubber, or cardboard. The woman behind the counter talked fairly continuously, but I could not make out anything that she said. This was not because she possessed an unusual accent; rather, I could not distil the meaning of her words because their subject was unfamiliar to me. I have often found this to be the case when people are talking about other people I don’t know, or places to which I have not been.
The shop was long and narrow, and had shelves arranged along the walls to either side. Their contents represented a miniature supermarket, a hurried alphabet of human needs reduced to basic principles. I had passed cleaning fluids, washing powder, and personal hygiene in only one or two steps, and having arrived at foodstuffs gained an immediate impression of the dominion of instant coffee, which, of course, I already possessed. I was, I soon saw, out of luck. It was hard to decipher the spirit in which the goods before me had been selected; aside from the coffee, they appeared to cater neither for emergency nor desire. Almost everything was in tin cans, which had the air of not being for sale; as if they had been there unwanted for so long that they had been adopted, or permitted to stay, like old and infirm people in a home. The overwhelming presence elsewhere in the shop of newspapers, greetings cards, and the cleaning fluids mentioned above threatened the status of this section still further, as if, over time, the boundaries between the shelves had gradually been eroded and their distinctions become a vague matter of packaging rather than content. The day was too hot for even the more acceptable among these rations, such as tinned soup, to have any appeal; and yet I was so hungry that a choice must perforce be made.
I had, by this time, been standing there for so long that the whole human contract underlying the existence of the shop, and distinguishing its customers from its owners, was in danger of collapse. The queue had been processed and dispersed. I was, in fact, alone, with the savage eyes of the woman and her husband trained upon me. Their gaze made me uncomfortable, as if all this time I had in fact been standing in their house, mistaking it for a shop. I doubted that the section of shelf before which I stood had ever received so much attention, and this in itself was enough to arouse their suspicions. They did not, however, address me, although the very air around me seemed to vibrate with the suggestion that they might. They had every right and reason to enquire as to whether I needed any help, and this eventuality, predictably, took on in my mind the menace of the newspaper and bell. Keen, then, to be away before ill luck caught me in its talons, I snatched a tin from the shelf and bore it before me to the counter. Once there, I saw something that I had missed: a rack of various breads wrapped in Cellophane packaging. My heart leaped with relief at the prospect of eating something fresh, and I took a package of rolls and placed it on the counter beside my tin.
The woman examined the two purchases — the man had disappeared by this time, through a doorway hung with a long fringe of plastic, behind which I could just make out a narrow corridor leading to a small room containing a table, at which the man was now sitting reading a newspaper — and began to write laboriously with a plastic pen on a small pad of lined paper in front of her. She was, I saw, doing a sum. Her hair, which was grey and set in a neat, rigid basin of florets, like a brain or a cauliflower, bobbed up and down as she inscribed the figures.
That’ll be two pounds exactly,’ she said, still with her head down.
I gave her the money, brushing her dry palm as I did so, and she turned with it to the till. Not requiring any change, I was free to leave, but the transaction appeared to be incomplete. I felt that more was expected of me — or of her — before I could go. She did not seem to agree, however, and was busying herself with her back still to me. Eventually she turned around, and looked surprised to see me still standing there.
‘Would you like a bag?’ she said.
‘Oh yes, thank you!’ I cried, aware that she had solved the puzzle.
She produced a small blue plastic bag, and there was a moment of tension — for me, in any case — while I wondered who would do the work, in this now fragile situation of role-play, of putting the food into it. I extended a hand, but she stolidly shook out the bag, subtly fending me off with uninterruptible motions which rolled smoothly one upon another, and placed the rolls and tin carefully in it.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said, impressed. ‘Goodbye!’
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
I made the walk home quite cheerfully, pleased with the way things had worked out. Several times, as I strode along in the sunshine, I forgot more or less entirely who and where I was: so compelling was the rhythm of my legs going back and forth, and my lungs in and out, that it appeared to drown out my consciousness. Remembering the Maddens, as I did now and then between these phases of oblivion, gave me a slightly unpleasant feeling of temporary, but indefinite, enclosure; not unlike the feeling of being in a doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room and looking up from a magazine to see unfamiliar walls, briefly forgotten.
Eventually I became quite tired; a profound fatigue, which intensified at the thought that I was near, but not yet arrived at, my destination. It being now late morning, the sun was high and very strong. Up until that point I had imagined that my white skin was being gradually toughened up by its exposure to air and light; but presently I sensed the relationship between sun and skin take a nasty turn, most particularly around the left side of my neck and face, and along my bare left arm, where the heat was most brutally concentrated. The road was without shade, and even twisting my body as I walked, I could not shield the afflicted areas from the direct and now aggravating beams of light. I could see that the gates to the drive were not far off, and with no alternative open to me, was forced to turn around so that the sun shone to my right and approach them walking backwards. This may seem ridiculous — it is easier, in fact, than might be thought — but I have always considered it important to protect one’s own body from injury, even at the risk of offending etiquette. From an early age, for example, to my parents’ horror, I developed the habit of spitting out food immediately from my mouth if I found it too hot. I am not, however, insensible to embarrassment, and when I heard the sound of a car engine behind me — or in front of me, strictly speaking — had every intention of righting myself momentarily while it passed. Unfortunately it was going too quickly for me to respond to the warning in time, and passed me still striding confidently backwards. Seeing it speed off along the road in front of, or behind, me, I gained the distinct impression that the car had been of a type remarkably similar to the Maddens’. I gave a moan of shame as I considered the possibility that a member of the family had seen my strange promenade, and this prospect, combined with the feeling of rawness down the left side of my body, dampened the sprightly cheer with which, only moments earlier, I had been going about my business.