“Don’t know.”
“Ah.” Henderson nodded vigorously, spun round on his heel, slapped his pockets as if searching for a missing wallet. This was some travelling companion Melissa had foisted on him: he’d have more fun with a Trappist monk. He resolved to drive south with the greatest possible urgency.
Melissa came in with the two dogs and they prepared to leave. Bryant crouched down and embraced the animals.
“Bye, Candice. Bye, Gervase. Be good, I’ll see you soon,” she said in a fake-sad voice. For an instant Henderson saw the young girl in her.
“Phone me,” Melissa said, hugging her daughter. “Lots. And you too,” she whispered in Henderson’s ear as she kissed his cheek. She glanced down. “Gervase, stop it!”
Henderson had imagined that the pressure on his lower leg had been caused by contact with the sofa edge, but looking down saw Gervase trying to fuck his ankle with slant-eyed, panting ferocity.
“Agh! Get off!” He sprang to one side stamping the animal free from his leg. For the second time that day he wished he had his sabre. Fleche attack: Pekingese kebab.
“I’ll be back next week,” Henderson said, turning back to Melissa. “I’ll see you the—Jesus Christ!” The mutt had somehow gained the arm of the sofa and was trying to bury its head in Henderson’s groin.
“What’s wrong with that dog?” he demanded. “Shouldn’t you have it seen to? Spayed or whatever?”
“Come on, Gervase. Don’t be a naughty boy.”
Bloody dogs! he swore to himself, picking up Bryant’s case and backing out of the door.
“Bye, Gervase! Bye, Candice! Bye, Mom!”
“Say goodbye, Gervase, Candice. Say goodbye to Bryant and Henderson.”
The most sensible women could be reduced to idiots when it came to animals, Henderson thought, contenting himself with a brief wave. There was not the slightest possibility of him actually vocalizing a farewell to those dogs, he vowed. He’d never be able to meet his eyes in the mirror again.
They hummed down in the lift, the faint barking soon lost to earshot, and with little fuss installed themselves in the car.
“Well,” Henderson said, hands on the wheel. “Here we are. Go South, young lady.” He looked round to see if she had caught the allusion, but Bryant was too preoccupied searching her multitude of pockets for something. She found it, and turned to face him, blowing hair out of her eyes.
“Smoke?” she said, offering him a squashed pack of cigarettes.
The Holland Tunnel plunged them beneath the Hudson River. They emerged on the far bank to drive through Union City to the mighty overlapping clover leafs of junction seventeen of the New Jersey Turnpike. Bryant was on to her third cigarette and Henderson saw the road ahead through a thin grey mist. His eyes smarted and his nose itched with incipient sneezes. Bryant sat with her legs folded beneath her, her head propped on a fist, looking emptily at the shabby cityscape passing by.
They motored south among a surge of large, surprisingly dusty and battered cars and truly enormous lorries, all changing lanes and shifting about the road — as fidgety and illogical as a school of fish. As Henderson became used to the eccentric driving conditions (so different from the impeccable lane-adherence on British motorways) his initial tension was slowly replaced by irritation. Why hadn’t he simply refused to take Bryant? Said it was impossible? It was typical, he saw, of his own particular weakness. He was too easily manipulated and put upon; too decent and obliging for his own good. He did everything Melissa asked of him and here was his reward: a rude, taciturn, chain-smoking ingrate as his travelling companion for the next two days. He was tempted to drive through the night to Richmond (home of the Wax grandparents) just to get rid of her. He felt a tear crawl from his left eye and squinted round to see Bryant lighting her fourth cigarette from the dashboard lighter. She lit the cigarette with the unreflecting professional ease of the habitual smoker, applying the little glowing hotplate to the end with barely a glance, inhaling and puffing smoke from the corner of her mouth until the tobacco caught.
“You can get lung cancer from cigarettes, you know,” he said.
“Sure. And emphysema and cardiac arrest and they kill cowboys. I know all that.” She sat back and smiled for the first time. “It’s a calculated risk. Don’t you ever take risks, Henderson?”
“Not if I can help it,” he said.
She looked at him. “No, I guess not.”
♦
They drove on through New Jersey. Sometimes the turnpike was raised high on stilts over a baleful marshy landscape, studded with small brown lakes and acres of tall reeds. Here and there a huge concrete and glass power station would rear up like an island, its cooling towers disgorging steam, humming wires looping out from its hot dynamos to feed the sprawling suburbs and distant cities — Edison, Metuchen, Plainfield, Sayreville. Power-lines, he saw, were everywhere. Electric cables had a prominence and visibility in America that was wholly unlike the neater, tidier Europe. Now he thought of the power stations as vast mills, churning out their miles of cable to enmesh the entire country with its warp and weft; cables that festooned every townscape and street-view, a great tangled net of fallen rigging over the land, holding it together. The effect was, he thought, to make everything appear messier and half-finished, ramshackle and rundown. American streets and roads looked, to his eyes, unnecessarily fussy, with wire and cable stretched all over the place.
There was generally, he saw, as he looked at the scene on either side of the turnpike, more ironwork of all kinds in evidence: from the gawky, teetering TV aerials to the criss-cross cantilevers of the road signs, most of which looked in need of a paint. In Britain, he thought, we maintain our street furniture to an extraordinarily high degree; everything looks new and neat on the roads. Gangs of men roamed the country furiously repainting the white dashes of the lane dividers. He thought of some of London’s streets with their multitude of lines and zig-zags: double yellow or single, the various flashes on the kerbs, the grids and arrows. You needed a dictionary to park your car these days.
But here everything looked well-used. The verges were dusty and ragged; where road ended and verge began was a matter of real ambiguity. In England edges were distinct. Kerbstone production had never seen such boom years. Verges were sharp, and well-defined: finished off, beaded, seamed. Sometimes in America you saw the same rectitude, but usually edges were frayed and worn. There was no manic energy expended in maintaining them.
So what? he thought later, suddenly bitter. Here energies were directed to making the important things work — like telephones, food production, heating and cooling — not dissipated in buffing up roadsigns or polishing cats’ eyes. By their verges and street furniture shall ye know them…
His sombre mood continued to darken as they bypassed Philadelphia. He was getting thoroughly disenchanted with the belching smokestack in the front seat beside him. For the most part he drove in tight-lipped silence. He could be as sulky and withdrawn as any spoilt teenager, he told himself with quiet satisfaction: no trouble in descending to that level at all. He contented himself with looking at the scenery and pondering on its strangeness: all the houses made of wood; the astonishing number of playgrounds, tennis courts and baseball diamonds scattered generously about.
Unfortunately his ill-humour seemed to make Bryant relax, as if it had been the very self-consciousness of the adult-child relationship that irked her. Now he was being selfish too, she seemed to unwind. She switched on the radio for a while and sang quietly along to some of the pop-songs. She proffered the odd remark: “Hey, look at that neat car!” or, “I spent a weekend in Philadelphia one night.”