This Way Out (5 page)

‘Oh yes,' said Belinda. ‘And garage bills too. It really wouldn't matter about our not having much actual cash.'

He frowned. ‘It may not matter to begin with, but I don't intend to put up with it for very long. It's ridiculous for you to be expected to wait for your father to die before you can get hold of any capital. Once we're married, we shall have to set up a more satisfactory arrangement.'

‘I don't think', said Belinda, ‘that Dad's solicitors would allow it.'

‘There are always Ways and Means,' said Hugh significantly.

He put down his fork, and looked at his watch. ‘I've got to see a man at four … Come on, we'll go to my place for a screw, and then you can push off home.'

Belinda flinched. She hated it when he used such casually coarse expressions, the more so because she knew that he did it quite deliberately. It was one of his little cruelties, perpetrated precisely because he knew that it offended her. But today, at least, she had a valid reason to deny him any physical satisfaction. She leaned across the table and whispered it to him.

Hugh simply gave her a grin. She saw the sharpness of it and accepted with a downcast heart that she was engaged to a man who would always find ways and means of getting what he wanted.

‘Come on,' he said, rising. And Belinda picked up the bill.

On an unusually warm Friday afternoon in April, two heavy vehicles collided at a junction on the main Cambridge to Saintsbury road not far from Newmarket. One of the vehicles was a fuel tanker. Although the collision was relatively minor it left the damaged tanker slewed across both carriageways, spraying diesel over the tarmac and making the junction impassable for hours.

A massive traffic jam ensued. Before the police could set up official route diversions, some approaching drivers saw the congestion ahead, did U-turns and went off to find their own alternative routes. Among them was Derek Cartwright in his company top-of-the-range Ford Sierra.

He was well acquainted with the area, and knew exactly where he was going when he turned off the main road and almost immediately took a left fork in the general direction of Saintsbury, but it was obvious that the driver who was following him was lost. No one who knew that particular by-road, which crossed a grass upland between chalky banks that soon narrowed it to a single carriageway with occasional passing-places, would have attempted to drive along it in a vintage Rolls-Royce.

Even Derek cursed himself for a fool when he realized how many other motorists had decided to use the road. Whether they had taken it by design or in blind hope, the result was the same. He rounded a clump of Scots pine that crowned an ancient tumulus, saw the sun glinting on stationary traffic on the rising ground half a mile ahead, and knew that they were all stuck.

He groaned, but philosophically, knowing that there was nothing he could do but join the queue and wait. With the plum-coloured Rolls filling his rear-view mirror, he drew up behind a VW Golf, switched off his engine and got out to stretch his legs.

Many of the drivers ahead – male, one to a car; business executives or sales reps, shirt-sleeved in the unusually warm sun – were doing the same thing. One or two thrusters hurried up and down the line of vehicles courting early heart attacks in their attempts to get something or someone sorted out, but most drivers had resigned themselves to the wait and were passing the time by chatting to each other. Derek took off his jacket, leaned back against his car, folded his arms, and sunned his face while he mentally rearranged the remainder of his working day.

‘
Now
what?' The shirt-sleeved driver of the Rolls, a short, swarthy, good-looking man, approached him indignantly. ‘I thought you knew where you were going.'

Derek shrugged. ‘I know
where
,' he said. ‘It's
when
that's going to be the problem.'

‘But we can't just stay here waiting for something to happen! I've got my old father-in-law with me – I'm trying to hurry him home from a hospital appointment.'

Derek straightened, concerned. He looked towards the back seat of the massive car, where an elderly man appeared to be half-supported by a young woman. ‘Is he ill?' he asked.

‘No, not exactly
ill
,' said the driver of the Rolls impatiently. ‘Things would be a lot simpler if he were, then we'd know that he was either going to get better or peg out. As it is, he's more or less a cabbage as a result of a stroke. He had a fall this morning and hurt his good wrist, so I've just taken him to hospital for an X-ray.'

‘Any damage?'

‘Only a sprain, but even so he's going to be more helpless than ever until it heals.' The man – in view of his small size and their nearness to Newmarket, Derek took him for a successful jockey – ran his hands despairingly through his curly black hair. ‘I've only been married a couple of weeks and I had no idea what a hell of a responsibility I was taking on.'

Derek gave a short, grim laugh. ‘Have any of us, with elderly relatives?' he said. ‘I'm lumbered with a mother-in-law …'

‘Lumbered' was not an expression he would normally allow himself to use of Enid. On the rare occasions when he spoke of her to friends or colleagues, it was always in terms of loyalty. She was wonderful for her age, he told them cheerfully; no trouble at all. But out here, at least forty miles from Wyveling and in the fortuitous company of a complete stranger who was similarly lumbered, he found it a relief to be able to uncurb his tongue.

‘Is your mother-in-law decrepit, too?' asked the man.

‘Far from it. Strong as a horse, and planning to live to a hundred.'

‘God, I hope we get rid of Sidney long before then! Not to mention getting him home this afternoon before he starts to stink.' The man fidgeted up and down, and cursed the traffic ahead. ‘
Move
, can't you!'

Derek, preferring to avoid stress where he could, was admiring the Rolls, though he was careful not to infringe the privacy of the occupants by looking towards the interior. ‘That's magnificent,' he said. ‘I don't think I've ever seen one except in old films. What year is it?'

‘A 1959 Silver Cloud. It's my father-in-law's bus, not mine. If I had this sort of money I'd get something racier. Sidney bought it new and still loves to be driven in it, according to my wife. Though God knows how she can tell,' the man added savagely, ‘because the noises he makes are unintelligible. Take my word for it, if your mother-in-law's articulate and able-bodied, you've got no problems worth mentioning.'

‘I have, you know!' Derek had worried in secret for so long that he was thankful for this opportunity to unburden himself verbally. ‘My wife has had a cancer operation. They say she's clear now, but we know it could attack her again at any time. That's what I'm desperately afraid of, and why I resent our being lumbered with her mother. But there's absolutely nothing I can do about it – short of knocking my mother-in-law on the head.'

The man gave a sympathetic grimace, drawing back his lips to expose one narrow canine tooth. ‘There's always that solution,' he agreed with a laugh.

‘Don't think I haven't contemplated it,' said Derek bitterly. He pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and stared at the line of stationary cars far ahead. Sunlight struck glass and chrome; hot air shimmered over radiators, distorting the figures of the drivers as they moved round their cars in boredom or impatience. He felt totally frustrated by his domestic situation. He was immobilized by it, as incapable of getting rid of Enid as he was of unjamming the traffic …

‘Well, I'm damned if
I
'm going to hang about indefinitely waiting for something to happen,' said the driver of the Rolls. ‘This is bloody ridiculous! I'm going to find out why we're not moving.'

He set off abruptly, jog-trotting up the road without so much as a glance at his passengers. Derek, thinking that it was a charmless way for a newly married man to behave, looked back at the Silver Cloud. The pale-haired young woman was gazing worriedly through the open window after her husband, and Derek felt that the least he could do was to give her a nod and half a smile. Surprised, she coloured a little and smiled shyly in return.

He reopened his own car door. The interior was unbearably stuffy. He opened all the windows and then, while he stood waiting for the temperature inside the car to drop, he stretched and took a few deep breaths of sunwarmed air.

It was oddly peaceful on the by-road, now that the engines of the nose-to-tail cars had all stopped and the forceful stranger had jockeyed off. The sun was so warm that a tall hawthorn bush growing singly on the roadside bank was not merely coming into leaf but erupting almost as Derek watched. Celandines and dandelions made cheerful blobs of yellow on the grass, a blackbird sang, and for a few unthinking moments he felt his spirits rise.

Then he remembered: Christine's cancer; his mother-in-law.

Ineluctably burdened, he sighed, hitched his waistband, settled himself in his seat, opened his briefcase and made a start on the day's paperwork.

‘Excuse me –'

The young woman from the Rolls had come to speak to him through his open window. As she leaned forward her straight fair hair swung across her face, and she drew it away from her mouth as she spoke. Her flushed skin looked almost transparent, her large pale eyes were anxious, her voice was breathy. ‘Did my husband by any chance tell you where he was going?'

‘Not exactly, no.' Derek looked at his watch and found that twenty minutes had elapsed. ‘I expect he's talking to someone further ahead. He went off to find out why we're not moving.'

The woman sighed. ‘He can't bear having to wait for anything,' she said. She straightened to look up the road, and Derek realized that she was a good deal larger than her husband; a magnificent figure like hers, he couldn't help thinking, was surely wasted on that man.

‘Is anything wrong?' he asked. ‘Your husband told me about your father. I know you're anxious to get him home as quickly as possible.'

‘It's Dad I'm worried about,' she agreed. ‘He's distressed by the heat in the car, and I'd like to get him outside. I've set up his folding chair in the shade of that hawthorn – he'll be able to walk those few steps. But now that his left arm's temporarily as useless as his right, I don't think I can get him on his feet by myself.'

Derek put aside his calculator and papers and, as he would have done for anyone, offered to help. Now that they were both standing, he realized that the young woman – to think of anyone so statuesque as a ‘girl'would be entirely inappropriate – was not far short of his own five-eleven height. And she, evidently conscious of the difference in size between him and the man she had married, added defensively, ‘My husband's very strong. He's a great help to me with Dad.'

Dad – heavy, balding, his left arm strapped and in a sling – sat and perspired in the back seat of the Rolls surrounded by a litter of tissues and white terry towels. His daughter had already eased off his jacket, loosened his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt. The car's built-in cocktail cabinet was open, but empty apart from a bottle of diabetic orange juice and a plastic non-spill cup.

The need for the cup was all too evident. Derek, who had never before made contact with the victim of a severe stroke, was disturbed and repelled by its visible effects on the right side of the man's body: the fallen eyelid, the slack arm and hand, the twisted mouth from which emerged an occasional gobble of words.

He felt pity for the old man, of course; but even more for the daughter. God knew how she coped, but her calmness and patience were admirable. She was so evidently expert at moving her father, and the Rolls was so roomy that between them they had comparatively little trouble in getting the old man out, and on to the chair she had set for him in the shade.

Derek felt almost ashamed when she thanked him for the little he had done. As he watched her position the old man's limbs, wipe his chin and mop his forehead, talking positively to him all the time, he realized that her husband had been right: by comparison, thank God, his mother-in-law was no problem at all.

‘If there's nothing else I can do –?' he said, beginning a thankful retreat to his car. He was conscious of a patch of damp on the front of his shirt where the old man's head had lolled, but courtesy prevented him from wiping it in their view.

The woman looked up with a distracted smile. ‘Well, I
would
be grateful if you'd be kind enough to stay with Dad for a moment, while I fetch him his drink. The chair's unstable on grass, and I'd hate him to have another fall.'

‘Of course.' Derek lowered himself to his haunches, the better to steady the arm and the back of the chair, and found that for the first time he was on the old man's good left side. It seemed unmannerly not to attempt some kind of friendly communication, and so he smiled and nodded. ‘Feeling better?' he asked, realizing too late that the question was fatuous.

The afflicted man looked at him with his one good eye.

Derek was an old-film buff. He knew instantly that he had seen such an eye, such a look, on celluloid, and after a moment's thought he identified the actor: Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in the late 1930s version of
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
. The rest of Laughton's face had been made so hideously immobile that he could act only through that single eye, and its eloquence was masterly.

And now here was this old man producing just as much of a
tour de force
. There was no mistaking the anguish and frustration that his one eye conveyed – but then, of course, he wasn't acting.

Shaken, Derek rose rather too abruptly to his feet. The chair lurched sideways. The young woman, approaching with the lidded cup, sprang forward just as he grabbed the chair again, and the two of them collided.