‘I bet it’s the armature. And the fan belt,’ he said.
They sat in the back seat, holding hands.
Darkness had closed in definitively when headlights appeared and a vehicle pulled into the lay-by. Billing jumped out and went over to the cab.
‘Watson’s garage?’
‘I’m Watson.’ The driver was a nondescript man in overalls with a mass of uncombed hair, his plain face made more shapeless by the cigar wedged into one corner of his mouth.
‘That smells like a good cigar,’ said Billing.
‘It’s a Fischer Florett, mate. You can’t buy them in this country. I buy a supply of them when I go on holidays in Switzerland.’
‘It makes a change to see a man smoking a good cigar nowadays.’
‘What’s the problem with your vehicle?’ As Watson spoke, he emerged from his cab. He was a disappointingly small person, his round head hardly coming up to Billing’s chest. Without waiting for an answer to his question, he stomped off to look at the car for himself.
Rose had emerged from the rear of the Austin and said hello to Watson.
‘You two been to a funeral, then?’ he asked, opening up the bonnet, again without waiting for an answer. Rose went over to Billing and took his arm. They stood helplessly while Watson shone his torch and peered about in the engine, muttering as he did so.
‘It’s the armature, I think,’ Billing told him.
Watson eventually slammed down the bonnet and went back to his truck. ‘Major trouble, mate. Didn’t you never have that thing serviced? It’s leaking oil from every joint and your cylinders have seized.’
He operated a series of levers on the side of his truck. A hook descended, which he secured under the Austin. He then hitched the car up until only its back wheels remained on the ground.
‘Better climb in the cab with me,’ he said. ‘’Less you want to stay here all night.’
They squeezed in the front beside him and had the benefit of the Fischer Florett all the way back to the garage, which stood on a bleak crossroads at the edge of a village.
It was late when they reached home in a hired car.
‘What a way to finish up a funeral!’ Rose exclaimed, as she made them some tea.
‘It turned out better for us than for Gladys,’ Billing said, grinning.
Prodding the teabags, Rose said, ‘Fancy the car breaking down. And two hundred pounds’ worth of repairs. I hope that man Watkins is honest.’
‘At least we didn’t come to any harm. Watson.’
‘Watson or whatever. Hugh, I think you enjoy breakdowns, I think your whole life is broken down.’
He was humble with her because she had really remade his life; but then he was humble with everyone.
‘I’ve never achieved smartness, like you. My physique wasn’t made for it. I admire the way you dress, Rose. Don’t let me drag you down to my standards.’
She kissed him as she handed over his mug of tea. ‘Must Do Better. Where are we going to find a spare couple of hundred pounds? We’ve still got to pay for this carpet.’
‘Something will turn up.’
‘I could cheerfully kill you, sometimes.’
He was already on his way next morning to the garden centre where he worked when the post arrived. It consisted in one letter only. Rose opened it. The letter came from a solicitor in Islington, announcing that the late Mrs Gladys Lee had left all her estate to Hugh Frederick Billing.
It was five years since Hugh Billing had first met Rose in the London supermarket where she worked. She left her husband when she discovered through a friend that he was having an affair with a woman in the next street.
‘The very next street!’ she kept exclaiming. Billing wondered if she would have forgiven George Dwyer had the other woman lived three streets away; but he held his peace and discovered to his delight that she was prepared to live with him. Which she did without fuss.
‘I’m a decent working-class woman and I don’t expect a fat lot, Hugh,’ she told him. ‘A bit of courtesy and kindness and I’m yours.’
He remembered how courteous she always was with the girls in the supermarket. Together they looked for somewhere to live. Rose wanted to escape from London and George and eventually they found a rented flat in a side street in St Albans. He was perfectly happy in an expanding garden centre just outside town, while she worked as supervisor in a supermarket in Watford. Every Saturday he caught a bus in to London to go and see Gladys and spend the afternoon with her.
In that way he had witnessed the old lady’s gradual physical deterioration. Her nature remained much as ever, calm and slightly inclined to give orders; she was always pleased to see him, and Rose too, when Rose appeared. Rose, at first inclined to resent this usurper of Hugh’s free afternoons, also grew fond of the old lady and took her boxes of Rose’s Chocolates from the supermarket.
‘Without doing much, I am good for her,’ Billing used to say. ‘As her doctor heals her, so do I. It’s the company, the attention. We all need it.’
‘So you keep telling me,’ Rose said. She had been born in Manchester, but her parents had come to London when she was eleven.
‘But you see it’s been good for me, Rose, being good for someone else. We’ve each got benefit from the friendship.’ It had crossed his mind once or twice that there might be more rewards for him when she was gone; he dismissed the thought as avaricious and distasteful.
Gladys’s mental deterioration, when it came, was sudden and unremitting. She saw her room filling up with snow. Soon there were men of snow closing in on her armchair, men who would not or could not speak to her. Gladys whispered about these things from a stricken face which looked as if it was even then isolated in the middle of a terminal blizzard. After she was discovered wandering in the streets in her nightdress they took her to hospital. There most things were white and she died of it, after a screaming fit.
‘Wandering, just as I’ve spent my life wandering,’ Billing said with a shiver. But he was anchored at last, anchored by Rose, by the flat, by the fact that he now wore clothes she chose for him, by the fact that they were saving up for a bungalow of their own, that they had rented a TV set, that she cared for him enough to seek out a suitable diet so that the bugles no longer shrilled in his head, calling him away.
It was part of his new rootedness that he took to reading while Rose was sitting in front of the TV watching quiz games. From a second-hand bookseller in town he bought the longest and heaviest novels he could find: The Apes of God, Confessions of Felix Krull, The Good Companions, Anthony Adverse, Don Quixote – Billing read them indiscriminately, knowing nothing of their standing in the world. Later he graduated to non-fiction, reading with the same lack of discrimination he had once shown in other fields of endeavour.
Both he and Rose felt they were educating themselves. The neighbours were nice people but talked only about the garden and home wine-making.
Their wine itself was passable. Rose particularly liked the turnip and tea wine. Billing stuck to the potato, which he christened ‘Spirits of Spud’.
His wandering had ceased. The phantom bugles were silenced. His dream of that long journey down the lane had not recurred for – Billing could not recall how long. He ascribed its absence to the way in which the Piranesi engraving had brought both dream and contents to the light of consciousness.
When Billing and Rose drove to London again in her old Austin, repaired at great expense, to claim the house in Shepherd’s Bush which was now theirs, he at once took her upstairs to look at the engraving in Gladys’s bedroom. Rose was not greatly impressed.