Their talk moved on to more everyday matters – work, their respective kids, her family in Bristol, his ex, places they’d been and people they knew – but he felt that reproach still, lurking there behind everything else she said. She’d seemed to enjoy his company on their last two meetings, but this time, there was no doubt about it, Gerry was getting on her nerves. In fact, having developed a feel for the life cycle of these encounters, he thought it quite likely that this would be the final date. It was as if he was a new shoe, which Judy had found quite comfortable when she first put it on, but now was starting to pinch and chafe. Most probably she’d ask the assistant to take it back and fetch her another pair. He felt sad about that.
After a couple of miles, the dyke was bisected by a busy dual carriageway, which they crossed via a footbridge. Engines snarling, tyres hissing, cars and trucks hurtled beneath them at 70, 80, 90 miles an hour, half of them rushing eastwards, the other half heading west with equal urgency. This struck Gerry as mildly amusing.
‘All this self-important haste, in two opposite directions!’
When Judy smiled faintly but didn’t answer, he felt a moment of mild panic. ‘I’m sorry if I’m boring you,’ he almost burst out, ‘but I’m just trying to have a conversation.’
That would have been silly of course. It wasn’t as if they’d been walking in silence all this time. They’d been having a perfectly reasonable chat about their kids and holidays and so forth, and Judy really wasn’t obliged to respond to every one of his observations about their surroundings, particularly the rather dull ones which were all he’d managed so far. What really was his point, for instance, about the dual carriageway? That roads should only go one way? That no one should go anywhere at all? That everyone should travel round together in a herd? (It was typical of Gerry that he enumerated these alternatives in his mind, and briefly weighed each one.)
On the far side of the bridge, there was a stile in a hedge, and beyond that, suddenly and, to Gerry, completely unexpectedly, there was a large and very famous race course, with hundreds of acres of mown grass, and miles and miles of white railing.
A bit of the dyke had been levelled out to let the race track through, and they had to cross over there to climb back onto the earthwork. Once they were up on top again, they could see a starting gate, only about fifty yards ahead of them to their left. It was a long metal structure with rubber tyres which had been towed into place by a tractor and, to Gerry’s surprise, racehorses were trotting up to it right now, with jockeys in multicoloured liveries casually chatting to one another as they brought the animals round into the stalls. Gerry knew nothing whatever about horseracing, but it seemed to him oddly informal and off-hand that a race should begin in this way, over here by the dyke, with no one to watch the horses set off other than him and Judy who just happened to be passing. And the jockeys didn’t seem at all like the intense gladiatorial competitors he’d seen in sports page photos. They reminded him more of those delivery drivers whose job was to deliver cars to showrooms. They simply brought horses over here, it seemed, batch by batch, rode them back again as quickly as they could, and then fetched another lot.
But then again, he thought, who’s to say that gladiators themselves didn’t chat as they waited to enter the arena?
‘You alright, Septimus?’
‘To be honest, Lucius, I really could have done without this today. My bloody tooth is killing me.’
‘I keep telling you, mate, you need to get that pulled! It won’t get better by itself.’
‘I know, but have you ever watched it being done? It must hurt like shit.’
‘Of course it hurts, you wus, but then it’s over and done with, isn’t it? And you can stop thinking about it.’
‘Yeah, but knowing my luck, I’d get the old thumbs down in the next fight, and then it would all have been for nothing.’
He didn’t mention this imaginary exchange to Judy. He would have done on their previous dates – he would have put on accents and everything to make her laugh – but his instinct was that it just wouldn’t work today. It wouldn’t be funny enough. It would come over as grey and 2D, like everything else.
A simple admission of ignorance, however, would surely be in order.
‘This is going to sound stupid,’ he said, ‘given that I now live only about ten miles from here, but I’d always assumed that a race course would be lined with excited spectators all along its length.’
It just seemed all wrong to him that, apart from himself and Judy, who hadn’t even come here for the race, and a couple of officials beside the gate, the horses and jockeys were completely on their own. The white rails of the track headed diagonally away from the dyke across a great empty expanse of mown grass. And yes, now that he looked he could see in the distance a big concrete grandstand full of people, but it was a mile away from here, a different place entirely, the people just dots, the stand itself like a toy.
But then the gates opened and the horses were off, running together in a group between those lonely white rails, and Gerry realised he’d been wrong to imagine that there was no one here to take an interest. Almost at once a strange sound started up in the distance from the far side of that empty expanse of grass. It was brutal and primitive, an apelike hooting, harsh and violent, that rose in intensity to a kind of peak, and then stopped completely all at once, as the horses passed the distant stand, and crossed the finishing line.
In the silence afterwards, giant amplified voices boomed out, soothing the crowd and instructing it. He couldn’t hear the words – they were all scrambled up by being repeated by many different loudspeakers that were out of sync with one another – but their authority was unmistakable.
Gerry turned to Judy with a smile.
‘Who needs science fiction, eh? Who needs imaginary planets? What could be more alien than planet Earth?’
She glanced at him, but then looked back at the distant stand. He was really getting on her nerves that afternoon.
‘Oh come on, Gerry. It’s just people. Just a bunch of ordinary people, having a bit of fun with their friends. What’s so wrong with that?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with it, Judy. Nothing at all. That wasn’t my point at all. I was just noticing how strange it was.’
Good God, he had no objection to people having fun! People needed all the fun they could get in this grey, flat, empty world. And if they could cheer and yell and get excited even in this dreary place, about something so fundamentally dull and trivial as a bunch of running animals with men on their backs, well, all credit to them.
He turned to face her.
‘You’re finding me irritating today, aren’t you, Judy?’
There were more announcements from the loudspeakers in the distance. These voices that they could hear from a whole mile away were truly giant-like in their reach, and yet they seemed small and inconsequential in this great hollow space under the sky, just as the race track itself did.
‘Not really, but I just don’t see why you have to mock everything all the time.’
More horses and riders were already trotting out towards them across the grass.
‘Mock? I certainly don’t mean to mock.’
‘Well, okay, maybe mock isn’t quite the right word. But you always seem to want to drill down through everything that people do, examine it, take it to pieces, and you never seem satisfied until you’ve got to the point where whatever thing it is you’re talking about just looks silly and meaningless. It’s… I don’t know… It’s as if someone were to show you a book, and you couldn’t help yourself from pointing out that it was really just wood pulp and ink, or that words were really just arbitrary sounds. Why not just read the words and enjoy what they have to say?’