‘Do you have family in London?’
‘Friends. At least I hope I have. I haven’t seen them for a long while. Maybe they don’t live there anymore. I also have a daughter, but she won’t want to see me. Nor do I want to see her. The last time I heard, she was working in a vegetarian restaurant near Covent Garden.’
‘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.’