‘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.
An owl hooted from the trees, and the stream rushed into a conduit under the muddy track which rose steeply beyond the dip. Then I saw a dark building to the left, a path leading to it through bushes and trees. There was space between the house and the stream to turn the car, but I was scared on each reversing manoeuvre that the back wheels would slip into the stream and get stuck, so that I needed ten minutes to get it facing outward bound.
I waded through a barrier of high nettles and, at the threshold, shone the torch on my watch. It was nine o’clock, and felt like two in the morning. I had been on the go for seventeen hours and was, to put it mildly, clapped out. Gun at the ready, I pushed the door open with my shoe, waited for a moment, and then jumped inside.
Nine
A large grey rat scuffled across the beam of my torch, and my senses immediately descended to a lower level of existence. The slug I fired knocked a crater in the plaster wall, ricochetted close to my head and went out leaving a hole in the window, spraying glass onto a truckle bed.