‘Do you like it here?’ said the father.
‘It is so beautiful.’
The mother said, ‘Rather like Normandy, I expect you find.’
‘Oh, it is nicer here,’ said Bastien, and smiled outrageously at the girl, the seducer’s smile of self-love, filling Johnny with contempt and envy. Bastien stood with his hands clasped in front of him, like a child wanting to pee, though that wasn’t of course the reason now.
‘Well, we mustn’t keep you from your friends!’ the mother said. Bastien came back, undecided if he was sulking or quietly triumphant, to the car.
‘Here he is!’ said Johnny. As he slid past him into the back seat Bastien thrust against him. Johnny’s father started the car, and Bastien said quietly to Johnny, without looking at him, ‘My friend, now you see why God created woman.’
‘Church seems to have gone to his head,’ said his father, turning, tongue on lip, to reverse out through the gate. And his own mood had changed – the unplanned ten minutes at Treterrian had filled him with a weird but familiar urgency, as if to make up for the time lost. ‘We can get back this way,’ he said, taking the road that ran on, past the church, and appeared to rise, three-quarters of a mile away, a grey line on the high moorland slope beyond. They went down very steeply, to a farm at a crossroads, a fast narrow stream under a bridge. Johnny’s instinct was to turn right, and work back eastwards towards the main road they had left. His father, after a second’s hesitation, went straight on. But the road ahead had its own long-established ideas, slowed them down with a sequence of right-angled bends, which resolved, after four or five minutes, in a clear steady climb to the west. ‘Well, this’ll join the Truro road,’ his father said.
‘Your father’s never lost,’ said his mother, more boldly than he would have dared to.
When they reached the main road ten minutes later, the Jensen asserted itself, down the open expanse, in a punching ascent through the gears (‘Here we go,’ said Johnny’s mother), up the first long hill, overtaking a lorry, two cars, cutting in, a second lorry, until, just over the crest, they dropped fast in three roaring descents to take their regretted and ignoble place as the last and then not the last vehicle in a queue that stretched round the bend and out of sight: in half a minute the second of the lorries drew up with a great sneeze of its brakes two feet behind them.
Well, they were familiar with holiday queues – they’d been held up for an hour on the drive down from Nuneaton, Johnny’s father humorous but far from patient. Some of these old crates didn’t even have synchromesh: you saw the panicky backsliding gear-change on a 1-in-4 hill and from time to time, down one hill and up the next, the immense glinting line of cars behind a stalled and steam-wreathed Morris Minor which should, as his father observed, have been sent to the crusher ten years ago. The crusher was the ultimate weapon in his peacetime arsenal. They sat looking out at cows behind a hedge, breathed the local warmth of the place through the open window; then ran forward a bit, even moved into second gear, before slowing again to a halt. It appeared there was a narrow lane to the right up ahead. Johnny’s father looked in brief concentration at the road map, closed the book, and driving in a sudden stately spurt up the empty other side of the road, swung off at the turning – a wild road to a small high village, with the plunge beyond to the next oddly named place. What happened wasn’t nearly an accident, thanks to his fighter-pilot reactions, but in the high-hedged lane, with its breathtaking drops and sharp bends and only occasional passing places, you needed to be quick and agile as he was to avoid the odd slow-witted trippers in their ancient jalopies. And now there was a nick, just a brush, but they felt it, with a toiling Austin Cambridge, driven by a little old man who lacked David Sparsholt’s instinct for timing and space – he just kept coming. The two wives stayed in the cars, while the men all gathered by the blue off-side fin, Johnny’s father drily practical, Johnny joking but lightly frightened saying there was no scratch at all, while Bastien dropped his head from side to side as if to say he thought the old man had a reasonable case. The old man of course was the frightened one, and not quite in control of his temper. ‘Ruddy playboy,’ he said. ‘And your children with you too.’ This was something they laughed about more than seemed quite explicable once they’d got back in the car.
5
The next day the Haxbys, who’d come up the hill for tea, stayed on for a drink and kept starting up the talk with jocular remarks when the Sparsholts had let it run down. ‘Have I got to make them dinner?’ said his mother, when Johnny joined her in the kitchen. She ran her hand through his hair and pulled him to her abstractedly as she made up her mind. ‘You don’t have to, Mum,’ Johnny said. At 7.30 it was Take It or Leave It, which she always reckoned to see. She went back into the living room, went round topping up with the gin in one hand and the tonic in the other, and then switched on the set. Clifford took his drink into the hall and shut the door; in a minute he was heard using their phone. The TV at ‘The Lookout’ was a portable, brand new, but the reception, through a long red-tipped antenna, was unsatisfactory. The problems with the picture and the sound compounded the trickiness of getting anyone to watch a programme they didn’t know; but his mother made no apology and said nothing about Robert Robinson and the rest. Johnny helped her – the thing was that touching the aerial or even standing near the set affected the picture, which tore people’s faces sideways in zigzags the moment you sat down again; or it milled mechanically downwards at two-second intervals. ‘You’ll just have to stand there,’ said Norma, lighting a cigarette.
Johnny sat on the floor against his mother’s knee; he always watched the programme with her, his father not interested or not home yet, and her love of books shown off in his absence to her son, who loved the ritual of the questions, read out by an actor from a wing-backed chair, and of his mother’s groans, hand raised as if to stop him from saying the answers himself, while she stared at the screen. Often she got them right, or it turned out she’d dismissed the right answer on her way to the wrong one. Just as the theme music started, Johnny’s father got up to pull the curtains across, since the evening sun made it harder to see; and as he did so slipped behind them through the French windows into the garden. ‘God, I never look at this,’ said Norma, as the music ended and the four contestants were revealed as if in the depths of a smoke-filled bar. Each of them was introduced in turn, stared at the camera and after a strange pause said graciously, ‘Good evening.’ ‘Oh, jolly good evening to you too!’ said Norma, and waggled her head. This week there was John Betjeman, Johnny’s favourite, who always knew a lot, and the man called John Gross from Cambridge, who made even the rare times he didn’t know the answer into darting displays of what he did know. On the other team were a man and a woman he hadn’t seen before. Bastien said, ‘Excuse me, Madame, erm . . . I am hungry,’ clutching his tummy and rocking his head, but he’d picked the wrong moment, and had to sit down. ‘Have a Twiglet,’ said Norma, pointing sternly at the bowl.