‘It’s rare for me to get tea when I ask for it. I’m on my way to Lincoln.’
‘Why Lincoln?’ She spoke well, smoked as if she smoked a lot, and seemed always about to laugh at him, which he sensed and was amused at.
‘To get to Sheffield. I’m just tramping around the country.’
‘You don’t look like a tramp. When I opened the door just now I thought you were an ordinary young man from the village to see about some carpenter’s work I want doing.’ He had that sort of build — yet now he didn’t seem like that to her at all. Maybe that’s what put that bastard’s back up who thought I was begging his lift, he thought. He didn’t know what I looked like, out on the road with rucksack, but dressed in smart enough jacket and trousers, travelling in heavy and well-polished shoes, a short haircut, and a tie on. If I’d snivelled and was clobbered up like a tramp, that would have been O.K., but it worried him that he couldn’t place me — private, corporal, sergeant. He thought back again to giving the soldier a lift. After dropping him at a house in Loughborough he had headed north again, the day opening wider as his car drove into it, black trees and green hills of the Trent hemming around the curving road. Summer was poleaxed: the sapjuice smell of wild flowers and dead wheat soaked in sun was giving place to spent grass and barren trees. September was playing it cool, and the first subtle change of season rolled a desperate message up from the turning tyres, whispering it was time to light out to the unlit far-and-wides felt to exist with such potency only by a man more than fed-up to the teeth.
A policeman was flagging him to a halt by a barrier of black cars and cycle-cops, plainclothes men and brasshats talking together as if the word had gone out to get Bertrand Russell. He slowed down and a black cyclop swung towards him: jackboots crunching, helmet unstrung above a red, vacant face, in truth the timid Midlands visage of a man who should have been serving behind the Co-op counter, joshing with the women in some collier’s town. He stood by the car window and Frank twisted the ignition off, tempted to let the wheel roll over his boot and end his days in prison. ‘A man’s got out of Upton Asylum, and he’s dangerous. You haven’t given anybody a lift today, have you? He’s a young feller of nineteen. Got out early this morning. Wearing a soldier’s uniform, and stutters a bit.’
Frank lifted his face, hand on chin as if truly thinking, yet instinctively answering: ‘I didn’t see anybody.’
He was waved on. It must have been that soldier I picked up. Maybe tonight he’ll be raping little girls or coshing an old couple for their pension books. Perhaps I said I hadn’t seen him because it would have kept me back from a drink for an hour while they checked my answers. I suppose it’s no good, though, not to be bothered, but in most things that’s how they like you to be, to watch the telly or have a few drinks and not be bothered, because if I was bothered I wouldn’t put up with the death camp I’m living in. So they’ve got to be satisfied when I can’t be bothered to help them to capture some poor soldier who has jumped the looneybin. I couldn’t be bothered to tell the police where that soldier was because I couldn’t be bothered to be bothered. But they’ll get him because thousands of others can be bothered to be bothered, but maybe this dangerous soldier will get his hands on the throat of some fleshhead who can be bothered to be bothered and drop him dead in some dark corner, because those who can be bothered to be bothered are bothered about the wrong things and never bother to get bothered about things that really matter.
Still, it worried him that he hadn’t told them where he’d driven that soldier to in Loughborough, and now so long afterwards it seemed much more a crime that, in his lunacy of the last day, he had committed without thought, worrying him more and deeper even than his departure from wife and kids.
He looked around the room, at the writing desk, bookcase loaded, mirror above the fireplace. ‘It’s good furniture you’ve got.’
‘It belonged to my mother. I brought it up from Surrey, and some of it came from auction rooms around here. What else do you want to know?’
He played along with her light-hearted mockery, unused to the idea of eating in such silence. ‘I didn’t think you came from the norm. How did you end up in Lincolnshire?’
‘I hope I don’t end up anywhere. By marriage I lived in London, and by appointment I got this job here. It’s a hard one, but I like it. Have another cup?’
‘I will. You’ve set me off, with such good tea’ — and again she gave a smile as if to say: ‘I might have taken you in out of the goodness of my heart, but you don’t have to say anything nice for it. I’m in charge here.’ She laughed at these thoughts: wrinkles beginning around the eyes, but her skin was white and smooth. The dress was buttoned to her neck, and the cardigan didn’t hide completely the small swell of her breasts. ‘I’d better be on my way,’ he said. ‘Knock a few more miles back.’
‘I don’t imagine you’ll get to Lincoln tonight.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll sleep somewhere snug. I’m glad of the healthy life for a while. It’s not too cold yet, and a barn will do me.’
‘Why are you on the run?’ she asked. ‘I’m curious.’
That makes two of us, he thought. ‘I’d had enough of married life. It was getting to be like that play on in London, “The Rat Trap” — now in its fifth year. It kept going along, dead as a doornail, and then, all in the space of a day I’d decided everything, packed in and left, as if those five years were only a sizzling fuse leading to a load of dynamite that suddenly exploded.’ All in a day, and the shell-shock was rippling. Out in his fast car he’d had nowhere to go, except home to say it was all finished. He was on the main road after the soldier’s lift, doing ninety and dashing around like a tomcat after its own bollocks, tart wild and pub crazy after a stretch of high-fidelity that he’d stood so long because he was temporarily dead, thinking: ‘I go round in circles, as if in some past time I’ve had a terrible crash, and the more I drive in circles the more I’m bleeding to death. I don’t feel this bleeding to death because it’s slow and painless (almost as if it’s happening to another man and I’m not even looking on, but am reading about it in a letter from a friend hundreds of miles away) but I know it’s happening because my eyes get tired and I’m fed up to my spinal marrow, while the old rich marrow I remember is withering and turning black inside me. But perhaps it isn’t completely bad, because if I thought it was I’d flick this steering wheel enough to hit that fence or pillar box and flake myself to a scrap of cold meat under the soil and greenwood tree. Maybe you can get better from it, because I can’t have lost enough blood if I could get in with that woman last night and hump into bed with her. And perhaps I’ve still got blood in me if I feel it running out of me.’
A paraffin upright stood in the corner, warming the room, perpetuating the smell of tea just made and drunk. Someone walked along the road, whistling. A van drummed by. ‘It’s quiet here,’ he said.
‘I don’t notice it usually, but when I do, I like it.’
‘I’ve never been in a house so quiet. I worked in a factory where you can’t even hear yourself shout. I had a wife and two kids, and a house where you couldn’t even hear yourself think above the news being read, or someone yapping about Homo or Wazz.’
‘That’s modern life,’ she said. ‘Would you rather work in a field?’
‘That ain’t why I’m on the run. I don’t mind noise at work — though I notice you haven’t got a television set.’ Out of the factory his face had changed, away from Nottingham and the pubs. It wasn’t that his expression had lost self-assurance or his body its confident walk, but his actions were slower, his smile more uncertain. It made him look older, as if thought preceded even the movement of his hands bringing the cigarette up to his mouth, as if his smile or frown was backed by an unfathomable depth of reasoning. ‘Maybe I’m on the run to find out why I’m on the run,’ he grinned, feeling foolish at making such a twisted statement.