I watched the carriages pull away northwards towards Shirebrook and wondered whether Robin Hood would be waiting to waylay her.
For a long time Mansfield was the largest town in Britain without a railway station — one of the achievements of Dr Beeching. Now it has passenger services again, connecting southwards to Nottingham and north through some of the villages to Worksop and on to Sheffield.
This has helped to put a bit of life back into some of the old pit villages like Creswell, Whitwell and Shirebrook. But naturally tourism was foremost in the minds of the people who named it the Robin Hood Line. Perhaps they think loads of Americans and Japanese will come over and ride the diesel units backwards and forwards looking for signs of outlaws in green outfits with bows and arrows, lurking among the slag heaps and the fields of oilseed rape.
Actually, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if some of them did just that. A few years ago they put up signs on the A619 into Worksop warning motorists of speed cameras. You know those signs with a little illustration of a camera on them? Local folklore has it that there were Japanese tourists stopping their cars at each one they reached, thinking they were viewpoint signs telling them the best spots to take photos from. There must be a lot of baffling holiday snaps being shown around in Nagasaki and Kyoto with nothing on them but a few telegraph poles and the odd bored cow.
But I digress.
You might call me a bit of a bastard, but by the time I’d turned the car round at the station and was on my way back towards Medensworth, my thoughts had already left Lisa and were hovering around Nuala. But I’ve already explained that, haven’t I? It’s just the way I am.
I was hoping Nuala would be my senna pod. She could certainly talk the shit out of anybody I know.
I drove across Medensworth to the new estate, where they slung up some low-rise flats a few years ago and moved folk in from the grottier bits of Mansfield. These flats have got their own garages, private parking for residents and their own graffiti. It’s not a place for a miner to live — all miners want to be outdoors when they’re not working. But you can’t even do a bit of gardening here. Since the gardens are only ten years old, the grass hasn’t managed to force its way through the rubble left by the builders yet. Luckily, the folk who live here spend all day indoors watching soaps on the telly.
Nuala was waiting for me in the bus shelter near the flats. At first glance, she looked to be half naked. When I looked a bit closer, I could see she wasn’t wearing as much as that. Apart from the usual pelmet round her bum, she had on a low-cut top that hung away from her breasts at the side and failed to get anywhere near covering her navel. There was a gang of teenagers behind her, ogling her legs, but she pretended not to have noticed them.
“Hi, love. You look great.”
I gave Nuala my grin as she climbed in the car and got a quick kiss. I heard shouts and hoots behind me and turned to stare at the youths. One of them gave me the finger. There’s no respect in this part of town.
“Where are we going, Stones?”
“Well, I thought you might fancy something hot.”
She pouted at me. “You’ll never believe the sort of day I’ve had.”
“Yeah? You live such an exciting life, Nuala.”
“Too right. We had the accountants in from head office all afternoon. Going through the books, they were. And do you know why?”
“They wanted something to read?”
“Them at head office couldn’t believe that we’d made so much money this month. What do you think of that? It’s because of our bonus, of course. They think we’ve fiddled the books to make it look like we’ve reached our sales targets. But I told one of the blokes — you ought to see me selling holidays, mate. Then you’ll know why we’re so good. You can’t argue with that. They ought to be thanking us, not accusing us of fiddling.”
“It’s a disgrace.”
Nuala went on for a bit longer on the same theme. And then a bit longer again.
“Can we go to that Italian place?” she said after a while.
“What? Rome? Venice?” I thought she was still talking about holidays.
“Stupid. That Italian restaurant in Edwinstowe. Luigi’s or something.”
“Oh. You want to eat, then?”
She looked at me funny. “I want you to spend some money on me for once.”
“Come on, sweetheart.”
But the appeal got me nowhere.
“Well then, what’s it to be?” said Nuala. “Luigi’s, or I go straight back home. On my own.”
I looked at her, giving her a careful consideration. The seatbelt across her chest was pulling her top really tight in the middle, and her tits were bursting out at the sides like the corners of a bouncy castle. She uncrossed her legs, pushing her feet against the footwell so that her long thighs tensed and stretched. Tensed and stretched.
“I’ll spend the money,” I said.
And afterwards I took her to Clumber Park, which in the summer is like a sort of open air knocking shop and picnic site combined. Clumber is always a revelation for me. The Dukes of Newcastle lived there for a couple of centuries, until they eventually had to demolish it in the 1930s when even the ducal money bags couldn’t keep such a vast pile from developing dry rot in the joists and cracks in the plaster in the downstairs toilet.
Although there’s no house there any more, they’ve left nearly four thousand acres of wooded parkland — not to mention a big lake, a coach house, stables, estate offices, a brew house, vineries, a fig house, a palm house, a huge range of greenhouses, a walled garden, a family chapel, mock Roman and Greek temples, and pleasure grounds. You can’t say they didn’t know how to live, those dukes.
The best feature of Clumber Park, though, is the Duke’s Drive, three miles long and better known as Lime Tree Avenue because of the double row of limes. It’s around this area that you find most of the visitors who flock to the park to eat their picnics, run their dogs, take a walk through the woods, or just sit and do whatever people can think of to do together in a car in a secluded spot. Play Scrabble or listen to The Archers, for example.
Lime Tree Avenue is a public highway, so access is free. The rest of the park is National Trust property, and you non-members have to pay to get in. There are little sentry boxes manned by students and such, where cars are supposed to stop. They don’t all do that, of course. A quick burst of speed over the ramp can save you a bit of money, so why not? No student is going to leg it after you to demand a few pennies.
And there they are, all these cars. Practically abandoned in their little secluded corners, parked up on patches of grass, well hidden by trees and clumps of rhododendron bushes. These are cars owned by tourists and families out for the afternoon. This means they’re full of cameras, binoculars, radios and other items useful for doing a bit of business with. You will also, I swear, find wallets and handbags, cash and credit cards, and driving licences galore if you take the trouble to carry half a brick in a sock to smash the odd back window with.
Can you believe that people leave themselves and their property so vulnerable in this day and age? I can. All too easily. Because they never learn, remember?
These thoughts were going through my mind as I sat in the Subaru with Nuala. I just can’t help it. She was talking, of course, and my ears had kind of turned off. Shortly my body might pay attention, but my brain tends to remove itself from involvement. Even the squirrels that were coming down from their trees to pick up the debris from the nearest picnic looked fascinating to me just then. A squirrel is only a rat with a fluffy tail, after all. Fascinating, though.
Nuala is different from Lisa. It goes without saying, I suppose. It’s why I do this — for the change. She’s dark and somehow sort of mysterious. I don’t know how that can be when she talks so much, but it is. Maybe it’s because she talks a lot but says nothing. It leaves you wondering whether there’s anything really in there. That’s a kind of mystery. She has lots of dark hair, and where Lisa is slim she’s, well, what’s the word... voluptuous? Plenty of curves, know what I mean? Something to get hold of. When she talks, which is most of the time, her arms fly about and her sweater bobs and quivers violently as if she had a couple of bunny rabbits under there.