Life Goes On (15 page)

‘You should be there by tea time.' It was hard to think of anything lively to say. ‘I'll drop you on the M1, so you'll soon get a lift. I'm making for Shropshire.'

‘I'll go there, then.' I detected a powder trail of uncertainty, almost hysteria, in her voice. ‘I'll go anywhere, in fact, to get away.'

‘Is it that bad?'

She leaned forward and said in my ear: ‘You've no idea.'

The words chilled me. ‘I probably haven't.'

‘I can talk to you because you seem such a nice person. I can't say I've had a hard life, except insofar as I've been married to someone who is highly strung, if not actually poorly. I come of Irish stock.'

Such quick turnabouts got on my wick. ‘So do I.'

‘That's what most people say when I tell them. But I suppose it's what's given me the strength to support all I've been through. In our family there were five daughters which meant, going by popular belief, that my father was more of a man than most.'

Her expression of bitterness was not inborn, and I assumed it would go away with an alteration in her life. ‘In the nineteen-thirties,' she said, ‘he could afford to be, couldn't he? I rebelled, but against all the advantages, because I didn't know any better. He wanted me to go to University, like Amy Johnson, he said, but I got a job instead, and left home to do so. I went south and worked in the council offices, and there I met my husband, who was in the borough engineer's department. No one was happier than me when we got married, and no one, I thought, was more contented than him. Neither of us had to join up in the war. We stayed at work, and managed to save a bit of money. I had two daughters, and after the war we moved up here. You may well ask why.'

‘Why?' I asked.

‘I'll tell you. It's nice of you to give me a lift and let me talk to you as well. My husband had been very strange, right from just after we were married. I don't know why. His family was as right as rain. That was why they disowned him when he started going funny. One day he disappeared. It wasn't like him to do that. He'd always said when he was going out, even if only into the garden to water his onions. After a week he came back, filthy and in rags, his eyes glowing. “We're leaving,” he said. “We're going to live near a place called Goole.” “Where's that?” I asked. He got out the atlas and showed me. “Why Goole?” I wanted to know. He glared at me, and then he struck me. I struck him back – I was so shocked. Perhaps I shouldn't have returned the blow. He just wanted to do it once, and then life would have gone on normally. But life isn't like that. Well, we didn't go to Goole just then. He got stranger and stranger, until he lost his job. They called it voluntary redundancy, or premature retirement, but I knew what it was. They look after their own in this country, for better or worse.'

I was about to go off my head. First one, on the way up, and now the other, on the way down. If it hadn't been true I wouldn't have believed it. I was beginning to feel eaten, like the main course in the workhouse, as my grandmother used to say when I wouldn't stop talking as a kid. I decided to get rid of her as soon as possible, though while the rain belted down it was out of the question.

‘Our married life has been decades of misery. He goes away for a day or two at a time, but the peace I get when he sets out is ruined by the thought that he could be back any minute. In fact I never know he is going till he's been gone twenty-four hours, and he could show up in the next twenty-four, though often, thank God, he stays away longer than that. But just as I begin to hope he's never going to come back, he kicks the door open and comes in like a whirlwind. This morning I could stand it no longer. After half an hour's raving he fell asleep on the couch, so I got out by the kitchen door, and decided that this time I would be the one to go.'

I couldn't believe it was the first time.

‘It is,' she said. ‘Up to now I've regarded sticking by him and making sure he doesn't go into an asylum as a test of character. That's what my father drummed into all us girls. “The harder life is,” he said, “the more it tests your character, and the more you should be thankful it does because then you know it's doing you good.” Growing up hearing things like that, and trying to believe in them, has ruined my life to such an extent that though I'll soon be sixty I don't feel older than thirty. I feel my life is yet to come, even though I may look worn out.'

She did, but only to a certain extent, because the more she talked the softer and more clear her features became, until she seemed nowhere near sixty. She folded her cloak and laid it on the seat beside her, and smoothed her grey hair which went in a ponytail down her back. ‘Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?'

I pulled two from my pocket and gave her one. ‘Are you going to stay in London, or will you go back to Goole?'

‘How can I tell? Maybe if he'd been in an institution years ago, as he deserved to be, he would have been out by now.'

‘That would have been worse.'

She laughed, a pleasant surprise, showing good teeth. A pair of gold earrings shook. ‘You seem to have had your troubles as well, the way you talk.'

‘Who hasn't?'

‘It's a pity wisdom only comes to those who suffer,' she said. ‘I used to believe in progress, but I don't anymore.'

‘That's a shame.'

‘I suppose it is. Maybe I'll believe in it again as time goes on. I'll get a job in London.'

I was almost beyond caring. ‘What sort?'

‘Who'll give someone like me a job?'

‘You never know.'

‘That's true.' She sounded more cheerful. ‘I have a bit of money in my post office book, so I can look around. I'll get something, even if I go from door to door asking for work.'

‘I'd never go back if I were you,' I said.

‘I don't think I will.'

‘Maybe he'll cure himself. Maybe he won't. But if you go back it'll be two lives ruined, instead of one. Troubles shared are troubles doubled.'

‘You almost talk as if you know him.'

‘I've just got a good imagination.' I didn't want to complicate matters. I was making headway towards Doncaster, and soon came within the suction area of the M1. It had stopped raining, and she seemed full of wonder as I scooted silently down the motorway. I couldn't resist going up to eighty.

‘I can see why he likes getting lifts in fast cars,' she said. ‘He often told me how it soothed him to be speeding along a wide straight road.'

‘A pity life isn't like that all the time.' We had a good laugh over the fact that it wasn't. I quite took to her, and I think she liked me. I pointed out Hardwick Grange, a wonderful building up a hill to the left. ‘A woman called Bess built it in the sixteenth century.'

‘Hardwick
Hall
,' she retorted. ‘I visited it with my father.'

Perfect signposting sometimes foxed me when I was tired and hungry, and coming off the motorway into a service area west of Nottingham I ended up behind the kitchens – though I soon got back to the proper place. In the cafeteria we sat with plates of steak and chips, sweet cakes and tea. She would be on her own from now on, because I was heading for Shropshire. ‘You'll easily get a lift from the exit slip road,' I said. ‘Anyone will stop for a respectable looking person like you.'

‘I wish you'd let me stay with you.'

‘It's more than my job's worth. But if things get desperate in London, here's how to find me.' I dribbled with the idea of sending her to Upper Mayhem, but couldn't guarantee Bridgitte's reception, so I gave her my address, care of Moggerhanger.

‘I know you can't take me, and I didn't really mean to ask. Maybe I was testing your kindness again. I shall try not to contact you in London. I'm a very proud woman.'

We parted like old friends. I couldn't understand why I felt depressed after I left her by the slipway. Yet a mile down the road and she was out of my mind. I thought of nipping into Nottingham for an hour or two, to drive around the old haunts in my opulent maroon Roller. Maybe I'd see Alfie Bottesford cleaning school windows; or Claudine Forkes, now married with three more kids on top of the one I'd inadvertently given her before lighting off; or Miss Gwen Bolsover with her latest incompetent and tongue-tied lover. Or I might run into – or over, if I could – old Weekly of Pitch and Blenders the estate agents who gave me the push after I'd sold Clegg's house to the highest bidder and claimed an unofficial deposit of my own.

Business came first. I hadn't seen any of my Nottingham cronies for a dozen years. They could wait a bit longer for the pleasure, and so could I. Past midday I got onto the A52, and after the tangle of Derby was doing a header down the dual carriageway as far as Watling Street. Stirling Moss would have been proud of me. I was in my element at the wheel of such a car. Britain can make it. I sucked my way past two Minis and a lorry. A girl stood at an intersection thumbing a lift, black slacks and red hair, but even that didn't tempt me to stop. In any case she was no doubt a policewoman acting as a decoy to find clues as to who had murdered a girl hitch-hiker last month.

On Watling Street, the old Roman road, the A5, the London to Holyhead, that military ribbon laid out to keep the ancient Brits in order, I watched my compass needle swing back on the straight and narrow, heading towards more bucolic horizons. The day wore on through rain, shine and back to rain again, and beyond Shrewsbury into hilly pastures mottled with sheep.

I stopped to buy provisions in a village shop that was so small you could hardly move, but there was a pile of supermarket baskets for you to help yourself while the woman sat at the till waiting for you to stagger over and pay. She looked sulky, thinking I only wanted a bar of chocolate, but thawed on seeing me pick up milk and bread and cheese and bacon and eggs and sausages and oranges and tea and chocolates and sugar and fags and vegetables – all to go on the expense sheet – sufficient for forty-eight hours of incarceration at Peppercorn Cottage where I was to hole up till the ten parcels were collected.

By three o'clock I seemed to have been on the road forever, and wanted to sleep, but a downpour of hail and sleet, perfect spring weather, made me fearful of being slid off the hillside or sinking without trace in the mud if I went too far up the track to find a more hidden position where I could switch off for an hour. This was the time, I supposed, for a benzedrine or valium, or other such tablets that people swallow to keep them alert, but I had nothing like that with me and in any case had never taken drugs except an aspirin now and again. All through the sixties I thought people were crazy, the way they popped pills like Dolly Mixtures or Smarties. If I wanted to relax or blow the mind or have a great experience or find a new horizon I would either get it by my own head of steam or not at all.

I chewed a bar of chocolate and had a smoke, comfortingly protected in the car, watching a man in oilskins and wellingtons walk along the hillside with a collie dog towards a huddle of sheep by a distant gate – a biscuit-tin picture come to life. The freezing washdown was so intense he almost disappeared. I felt deprived, looking at a man and his dog battling their way to a cottage which became visible when the hail stopped. A luminous green gap between the clouds showed the outlines of the hills and the sheen on their flanks, and I felt more at home than in the Dutch flat lands around Upper Mayhem.

I stared at the network of lanes on the map till the approaches to my cottage-rendezvous were clear. The obvious way was to reach it from the east, but I preferred – since there weren't so many farms on that side – to come on it from the west, which meant doing a few extra miles. By seven the light was draining away. Rain washed dead gnats off the windscreen. I was at my worst because, in spite of the Royce's dazzlers, I was prone to see double or to see solids where there was only shadow. Pale sky above the turning drew me along a valley whose damp air I could sense but not feel, across a river, into a side valley, over a col and down again. Beyond Bishop's Castle and Clun I did a sharp sweep to the west and, when it was dark, drove through a tunnel of light with nothing but the black sides and the roof visible. I switched off the radio and counted junctions, forks and crossroads. There was a pub at one, a telephone call box at another, a farmhouse at a third. I passed Dog End Green, Heartburn Mill, Job's Corner, Liberty Hall, Lower Qualm and Topping Hill – or so I called them – and finally, after one wrong turning and a look at the map, I found the lane leading to Peppercorn Cottage.

I drove through a strip of wood and along a hillside. A rabbit panicked in my headlights, but saw sense and zigzagged under a bush. The track was two bands of asphalt, grass in between brushing the underbelly of the car. A gate blocked my way and I disembarked to open it.

The lane rose gently for a further half-mile, then came out of another scattering of trees. At the top of the slope the stars were vivid, and I wanted to get out and walk, but dipped headlights and crawled along the narrowing track, worried that if the car broke down there would be no space to turn.

With the window down, flecks of rain hit my face and fresh air revived me. A bullock called from a field. A panel of tin clattered at some trough or hutch – from how far away I couldn't tell. Village lights glistened like orange tinsel on a hillside. The lane descended steeply. I was close to my reference point on the large-scale map, but no house was visible.

I got out, torch in one hand and the heavy airgun cocked in the other, hoping to catch a rabbit in a beam of light. A slug at close range, aimed in the right place, would blind or knock flat anyone posing danger. The noise of running water covered my approach. Behind, the Roller's shadow blocked out part of the sky. No human being was near for miles. I swore at getting my trousers splashed.