‘Like a dream,’ I said, my arm warm where she went on holding it.
‘Let’s go somewhere, then. I’ve got the key to one of Dad’s hideaways in Kent.’
‘Why not?’ I said, but playing it cool.
‘Sit in the lounge and pour a drink, while I go up and dress.’
‘I’ll watch if you like.’
She kissed me quickly: ‘No, I don’t feel like it now.’ Her bare pale legs went up the stairs, and I unlatched a tin of tomato juice, thinking of William trying to barter his way out of some Lebanese copshop with bars of gold, and of his poor old mother worrying herself daft as she knocked back shorts with her Chesterfield friends, while I’d been talked by feckless Polly into some mad adventure with Moggerhanger’s house on wheels.
We sat high in the front as I stepped on the power over Hammersmith Bridge and went towards the South Circular, the tape-recorder playing Tales from the Vienna Woods, and me smoking one of the Moggerhanger’s big cigars kept in the glove-box for special friends. Through Clapham a bowser was blocking the road, but there was no way of overtaking. ‘That Cooper just did it,’ Polly said.
‘I want to live. I’ll do it in my own good time.’
‘The exhaust’s giving me a headache,’ she complained.
I put on the winkers, swung out, and swept forward. The bowser seemed a mile long, and travelling fast, but I got straight up to fifty, then saw a bus coming full on towards me. It was too late to brake. Headlights flashed me, and I couldn’t go back. The bastard driving the bowser was set on getting me killed, didn’t slow down, or go in even an inch. I supposed he was a good honest worker who thought that rich pigs who drove around in such expensive cars should be put up against a wall and shot — or crumpled to death under a bus.
Polly clutched me, and I thought what a wonderful way to die, but by twelve inches, a single foot and no more, I was in front of the bowser and just about safe, trembling in every inside limb, my tongue hollow, Polly half fainting against her seat, wondering how other people could be so rotten.
The road was empty up ahead, and I left the bowser behind, until at a traffic light on stop he drew in between me and the kerb. I leaned across Polly and wound down the window: ‘Are you trying to kill me then, mate?’ I said in my best Nottingham accent.
He wore a cap, and his broad face grinned: ‘Yes.’
‘Better luck next time, then,’ and I shot forward as the lights changed to yellow. ‘His eggs were fried too hard for breakfast.’
‘I was scared to death,’ she said.
‘That’s his idea of a joke. I grew up with people like that. Worked with them — for a little while. He just wanted to see if I’d lose my nerve and pull back. I could have done, but didn’t. Still, it’s not often we get a thrill like that, is it, love?’
She held my arm: ‘Take care, though.’
‘I wouldn’t do anything else with you in the car. Myself I don’t care about. I’m neither here nor there. Easy come, easy go. I’ve had a good time up to now, and if the Big Door suddenly fell on me I might have time for a grin before the blackout made a fossil of it.’ This was the last thing I felt, but I needed to say it in case she’d seen how frightened I’d been when the bus nearly got me. ‘I think you must have had a fairly awful life to get into that state,’ she said. ‘Are you still on that gold-smuggling job?’
We were on a dual carriageway, traffic thinner: ‘I gave it up.’
‘Since when?’
‘My best friend got caught. So now I’m going straight, waiting to meet an honest girl to keep me on the right path.’
‘That’s not me, then,’ she laughed, and I was surprised when, instead of saying how good it would be for me to give it up, she said I shouldn’t really weaken and pull out just because my best friend had been caught, that now was the time to go on, because maybe no one else would be pulled in for a long time, like it was always safest to travel by plane just after a big air disaster. I hadn’t lost my nerve overtaking a petrol lorry — and she did admire me for it, after all — so why lose it at something far less dangerous? For my part, it was all talk, because I never seriously intended resigning my lucrative position, and as far as not losing my nerve between the lorry and the bus, once I got there I had no option but to go on and get out of the trap. I hadn’t lost my nerve, not totally, but all my fibres had melted, and my bones had been under the hammer, I knew that now, a handshake with my final moment that hadn’t been final after all. Polly was out on a limb. She wasn’t in my guts. I was sailing towards trees and hills, sorry the sea was but forty miles off, otherwise I’d have driven on as far as I could get around the world. ‘You don’t know me,’ I said. ‘I give nothing up. That’s what makes me stupid, and lets me, live high. I had a chip on my shoulder but it turned into a bird and it wasn’t a budgerigar, either. Nor a vulture, come to that. Just a kite to keep me a few inches off mother earth.’
‘You’re so funny,’ she said, ‘have you read any good books lately?’
‘I thought it would come to this,’ I laughed, taking her hand. ‘Ever since I told you I loved you.’ We went through a traffic jam in Tonbridge with the windows down and the radio sending out Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. I forgot for a while the sort of car I was in, but realized it when I saw the other faces looking at me. ‘When do we get to this place in the country?’
She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth: ‘Don’t lose patience. That would be even worse than losing your nerve. Another half-hour.
‘I feel like an unlucky pilgrim, caught in the trap of England’s arterial lanes. We’ll get a dose of arterial sclerosis if we’re not careful. All those other screw drivers seem to have it already.’ In my right mind I might have sung a song to them, but with Polly by my side an obsession kept twisting in my trousers, and the smell of summer grass didn’t calm it beyond noticing. Where be ye, my love? She was by my side, but sitting apart and not sweetly under me, looking ahead at the green tunnel and tarmac track. ‘It’s a change from the lake,’ I said.
She guided me on to a minor road, then along an unpaved track. ‘Dad’s never been here by Bentley. He usually comes in the Land Rover.’
The wheels sank into a rut. ‘It’s understandable.’ Grey clouds made it feel like rain through the open windows. The soil on the track had been churned by tractors, and when I went too fast on what seemed a level place I hit a water-filled rut and red slosh flew as high as the windscreen, while bushes on both sides scraped the windows and paintwork. ‘You should have told me,’ I said, ‘and we could have left the car by the road.’ Even Moggerhanger didn’t deserve this done to his car, though it was too late now, as we went into another dip. ‘Much farther?’
‘Not much.’ A tractor came round the bend, a man perched on top wearing a cap and khaki raincoat, and having the smallest possible stump of fag between his lips. I crushed in the brakes, waited for the small smash, the sort that hurts no one and does no damage, until you try to stand up, when you fall down before you’ve had time to realize that forty blood vessels are ruptured, or the car itself drops to pieces bit by bit in the weeks that follow and you never know what was the cause of it. But I slithered up to the tractor and stopped a few inches short. The man took off his cap, and smiled: ‘Hello, Miss Moggerhanger! Is your father coming today?’
‘I don’t think so, Bill. Everything all right at the house?’
‘Well, it’s still there,’ he said, as I began to back away. He turned into a field and left the track free, so on I went, splashing over the humps and hollows till I came to an asphalted space in front of a plain two-storeyed brick cottage. The garden was fenced off with white palings, and had a bird bath in the middle of the lawn. At the front door Polly felt in her handbag for the key. It wouldn’t fit in the lock. ‘Let me try,’ I said, but it was soon plain that she had brought the wrong one. ‘Never mind,’ I said, calmly, boiling with rage at such a mistake, ‘we’ll get in somehow.’