“Here we are!”
He leaned to open the door for her, and closed it upon her as soon as she was settled. She was incorrigibly ignorant about cars, and worse, in the view of her family, she was completely incurious. Cars were a convenient means of getting from here to there, and sometimes they were beautiful in themselves, but they made no other impression upon her. This one was large but not new, and by no means showy, short on chrome but long on power under the bonnet, and he handled it as though he knew what to do with all the power he could get, and probably considerably more than he could afford. Bunty might have no mechanical sense at all, but she had an instinctive appreciation of competence.
“Have you very far to go?” she asked, watching the drawn profile beside her appearing and disappearing fitfully as they passed the last lights of the frontage and took the Comerford road.
“About three hundred miles. It won’t take me long. It’s a quicker run by night.”
“Maybe… but all the same I wish you’d go home to bed. I don’t feel happy about you setting off on a run like that, in the state you’re in.”
“There’s nothing the matter with my state. I’m not drunk,” he said defensively.
“I know you’re not. I didn’t mean that. But in any case, it isn’t going to be a very long week-end, is it, to be worth such a journey? It’s nearly Sunday already. And you did say there was no one waiting for you.” The silence beside her ached, but was not inimical. “Am I trespassing?” she asked simply.
“No!” It was the first time she had heard warmth in his voice. “You’re very kind. But I’ve got to go. I can’t stay here now. It won’t be such a short stay as all that, you see, I’m not due back till Wednesday. Don’t worry about me, I shall be all right.”
Abruptly she asked: “When did you last eat?” Astonished, he peered back into the recesses of his memory, and admitted blankly: “I don’t even know! Yes, wait… I did have a lunch… of sorts, anyhow. Opened a tin… one of those repulsive dinky grills.”
“Nothing since then?”
“No…I suppose not! I haven’t wanted anything.”
“No wonder you look sick,” she said practically. “You’d be wanting something before you got to the end of your journey, believe me. And those two whiskys will settle better with some food inside you. If Lennie hasn’t closed up his stall we’ll stop there and pick up some sandwiches or hot dogs for you, and a coffee.”
“I suppose,” he admitted, “it might be an idea.” The lights of Comerford winked ahead of them, orange stars against a moist black sky. Old Lennie’s coffee-stall always spent Saturday evening on the narrow forecourt before the old market cross, handy for the late crowds emerging from the Bingo hall and the billiard club. All the new estates and the commercial development lay at the other end of the town, and this approach across the little river might still have been leading them into the old, sprawling village the place had once been. A foursquare Baptist chapel, built a hundred years ago of pale grey brick, looked out across the water between pollarded trees. Once over the slight hump of the bridge, they could see the white van of the coffee-stall gilded by the street lamp above it, and with its own interior light still burning. The small, lame proprietor, hurt in a pit accident twenty-five years ago, was just clearing his counter.
“Pull in for a minute and drop me,” ordered Bunty, “and I’ll see what he’s got left. We can’t park here, but we can turn down by the riverside and find a place there for you to eat in peace.”
She was back in a minute or two with two paper bags and a waxed carton of coffee.
“It’s a good thing Lennie knows me so well, he wouldn’t have opened up again for everybody, not after he’s cashed up.”
The old man had come limping out from his stall to close the shutter, and stood looking after his customer now with candid curiosity, watching her tuck her long legs into a strange car, beside a strange young man. He stood stolidly gazing, with no pretence at other preoccupations, as the car took the right-hand turn that would bring it down towards the park and the riverside gardens.
“This is all right, anywhere here. This is only a loop road, it brings us back to the main one just before the lights. We shan’t be in anyone’s way here, there won’t be much traffic at this time of night.”
There were no houses along here, and hence no homeless cars parked overnight outside them, an inevitable phenomenon in every urbanisation. He halted the car with its hub-caps brushing the overgrown grass under the trees. A narrow path and a box hedge separated them from the park on this near side, and across the road, beyond fifty yards of ornamental shrubbery and trees, the Comer gleamed faintly. After he had stopped the engine it was very quiet, and unaccountably still, as if every necessity for measuring time had stopped. Nobody was waiting for either of them at the end of their journey.
Suddenly she felt him shaking beside her, the only shaken thing in all that stillness. It happened as soon as he took his hands from the wheel and let his concentration relax, and for a full minute of struggle he could not suppress the shudders that pulsed through him. Bunty tore open the waxed carton of coffee and put it into his hand, closing her own fingers over his to guide the cup to his lips. He drank submissively, and presently drew a long, cautious breath, and let it out again in a great, relaxing sigh, and she felt his tensed flesh soften again into ease.
“I’m sorry… I’m all right, just more tired than I realised.”
“At least get some food inside you and rest for a bit.” She dumped the paper bags of sausage rolls and ham sandwiches on his knees, and watched him eat, at first with weary obedience and little interest, then with sudden astonished greed, as though he had just discovered food. “You see, you were hungry.” She sat nursing the half-empty coffee carton, studying the shadowy form beside her with a frown.
“Look, you simply can’t go on with this, it would be crazy.”
“Maybe I am crazy,” he said perversely. “Did you ever think of that? You were right about the food, though. Look, I owe you for all this, you must let me…”
“My round,” said Bunty. “A return for the other half.”
He didn’t argue. He stretched himself with a huge sigh that racked and then released him from head to foot, and lay back in the driving seat, turning his forehead to rest against the glass. A large hand crumpled the empty paper bags and held them loosely on his knee.
“Better?”
“Much better!”
“Then listen! You shouldn’t go on to-night. It isn’t fair to other road-users to drive when you’re as exhausted as this. You might pass out on the motorway, what then?”
“I shan’t pass out on the motorway,” he said through a shivering yawn, “I can’t afford to.” The note of grim certainty sank into a mumble; he yawned again. “No choice,” he said distantly, “no choice at all…”
She sat silent for a while, though she had had much more to urge upon him; for after all, she told herself, he was not hers. And the moment that thought was formulated she knew that he was, that he had been hers since the moment she had accepted him. Now she didn’t know what to do about him. People to whom you have once opened your doors can’t afterwards be thrown out, but neither can they be kept against their will. If he would go on, he would, and she had no right to prevent him even if she could. Only then did it occur to her how completely, during this last hour and a half, she had forgotten about herself.
What drew her out of her brooding speculation was the rhythm of his breathing, long and easy and regular, misting the glass against his cheek. He was asleep. The hand that lay open on his knee still cradled the crumpled paper-bags; she lifted them delicately out of his hold and dropped them into the empty carton, and he never moved.