Mumtaz rolled his eyes and gave a comically theatrical sigh. ‘Oh, I see. Now I get it. Watch this carefully, Maxwell,’ he said, holding up a finger in warning, ‘because you are about to see a woman climbing on board her hobbyhorse, and once that happens, you are never going to be able to get her off again. We are going to be here for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, I tell you.’
‘It’s not a hobbyhorse,’ Miss Erith insisted, ‘and I’m not going to climb on board it. All I’m saying is that, if you read that book, you’ll understand a bit more of what’s going on in this country, and how long it’s been happening. What big business is doing to it. It’s not a recent thing at alclass="underline" it’s been going on for years – centuries, even. Everything that gives a community its own identity – the local shops, the local pubs – it’s all being taken away and replaced by this bland, soulless, corporate –’
‘What she’s really saying,’ Mumtaz explained to me with a weary smile, ‘is that we’ve been trying to think of a nearby pub where we can go for our lunch, and she doesn’t like any of them any more.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Miss Erith. ‘And do you know why? Because they’re all the bloody same! They’ve all been taken over by the big chains and now they play the same music and serve the same beer and the same food …’
‘… and they’re full of young people,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Young people enjoying themselves – that’s what irks you! Young people who like it that way.’
‘They like it that way because they don’t know any other!’ Miss Erith said, her voice suddenly rising to an angry pitch. The good-humoured, bantering aspect of their conversation seemed to evaporate in an instant. ‘Mumtaz knows very well what I mean.’ She had turned to look at me directly, now, and I was amazed to see that there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m saying that the England I used to love doesn’t exist any more.’
A long silence followed, while these words were allowed to hang in the air.
Miss Erith sat forward and drank the remains of her tea, not saying anything more, looking straight ahead of her.
I looked down at my father’s blue ring binder, wondering if this would be a good moment to make my excuses and leave.
Mumtaz sighed and scratched his head. He was the first one to speak.
‘You’re right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I’ve been here. It’s a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others.’
‘Better!’ she echoed, scornfully.
‘Anyway,’ he said, rising to his feet, ‘I think we should try The Plough and Harrow again. It will be nice to get out into the countryside, and the piped music isn’t too loud, and the food is good.’ He turned to me and said kindly: ‘Why don’t you join us, Maxwell? We’d be glad to have your company.’
I stood up as well. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ I said. ‘But I think I’d better be getting on my way. I’ve got a long journey ahead of me.’
‘You’re going to Scotland, I think you said?’
‘That’s right. About as far as you can go – all the way to the Shetland Isles.’
‘Marvellous. What an adventure. And what takes you there, might I ask? Is it business, or pleasure?’
The simplest way to answer this, it seemed, was to reach inside the pocket of my jacket and fetch out another of the toothbrush samples I’d been carrying around with me since yesterday. I’d given my two IP 009s to Mr and Mrs Byrne – all the others were still in the boot of the Prius – so what I handed over to Mumtaz was the nice, plain, elegant model that Trevor had shown to me first of all – the ID 003, made of sustainable pine, with the boar’s-hair bristles and the non-detachable head.
‘I represent a company that markets and distributes these,’ I explained, surprised to find how proud I was to be saying it.
Mumtaz took the brush from me and whistled admiringly through his teeth.
‘Wow,’ he said, running his fingers along the shaft, ‘this is a real beauty. A real beauty. You know, I might even enjoy cleaning my teeth if I had one of these, instead of it being a chore. And you are going to sell some of these in Shetland?’
‘That’s the plan.’
‘Well,’ he said, giving the toothbrush back to me. ‘You will have no difficulty, that’s for sure. Margaret! Margaret, did you hear any of that?’
But Miss Erith was still in a kind of daze. She turned towards us slowly, almost as if she had forgotten that we were in the flat with her at all. Her eyes remained rheumy and unfocused.
‘Mmm?’
‘Maxwell was telling us that he is going to Shetland to sell toothbrushes. Beautiful, wooden toothbrushes.’
‘Wooden?’ she said, her concentration gradually appearing to return.
‘Perhaps this idea will … appeal to you,’ I said, hesitantly, trying hard to find the right words. ‘My company, you see, is not a big corporation. In fact we’re fighting against the big corporations. We’re a small company, and whenever we can, we commission our brushes from other small companies. This beautiful brush was made in Lincolnshire, by local craftsmen – part of a family business.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘May I see?’
I passed her the brush, and she turned it over in her hands, slowly, reverently, again and again, as if she had never seen such a wondrous object in all her seventy-nine years. When she gave it back to me – unless I was imagining it – her eyes had cleared, and were shining at me with a new, rejuvenated light.
‘You can … You can have that if you like.’
‘Really?’
Unexpectedly, she pulled back her top lip, to reveal teeth which were yellowing but otherwise complete, strong and healthy.
‘These are all mine, you know. I clean them three times a day.’
‘Here you are, then. Here you are – take it.’
Perhaps I am being fanciful now. Perhaps my memory of that day is playing tricks on me. But as that exquisite toothbrush was passed back from my hand to hers, in the rapt silence of Miss Erith’s flat high above the city of Lichfield, with Dr Mumtaz Hameed looking on benignly, smilingly, I felt that what was taking place was almost a religious ceremony. That we were doing something – what is the word? – that we were doing something you might almost describe as – yes, I know … sacramental.
There, I told you I was being fanciful. It was definitely time to say my farewells, and get back to the car. Back to Emma, to the motorway, and reality.
15
I had a late lunch at a place called the Caffè Ritazza at Knutsford Services. I’d driven slowly from Lichfield, trying to conserve petrol, and it was after 2.30 by the time I arrived there. The café (or should that be caffè?) was on the first floor, quite close to the bridge connecting the two halves of the service station, so I was able to get a small table near the windows and watch the traffic going by. While I was eating and watching the traffic, I thought about Dr Hameed and Miss Erith, driving to their country pub and enjoying a nice lunch together while lamenting the slow death of the England they both remembered. I wasn’t sure whether I agreed with them about that. I supported the ethos of Guest Toothbrushes, of course, but all the same – speaking personally – I really like the way you can drive into almost any city nowadays and be sure of finding the same shops and the same bars and the same restaurants. People need consistency in their lives, don’t they? Consistency, continuity, things like that. Otherwise everything just gets too chaotic and difficult. Supposing you drive into a strange town – Northampton, say – and it’s full of restaurants whose names you don’t recognize. So you have to take a punt on one, just on the basis of what the menu looks like and what you can see through the window. Well, supposing it’s shit? Isn’t it better to know that you can go to any random town in the country and find the nearest Pizza Express and have an American Hot with extra black olives? So that you know exactly what you’re getting? I think so. Maybe I should have gone for lunch with them and argued the point. In fact, why hadn’t I done that? It wasn’t true, as I had told Dr Hameed, that I was pushed for time. Actually I had at least two hours to spare. But again – just like last night, when Mr and Mrs Byrne had asked me to stay to dinner – I had fought shy of the chance to have a face-to-face meal with someone. When was I going to get over this? When would I start finding it easy to have a normal conversation again? As it happened, I’d attempted one just now, with the girl in Caffè Ritazza who had served me my lunch. She gave me a strange look when I asked for a tomato and mozzarella panino, so I launched into my explanation of how panini was actually a plural word and it was grammatically incorrect to ask for one, single panini. I’d become quite obsessed with this fact, recently (as well as by the fact that nowhere seemed to serve toasted sandwiches any more, only panini – even in Knutsford, for God’s sake). The idea was that it might trigger some lighthearted banter between us, perhaps about the way that England was slowly becoming more European, or declining standards in education or something, but her initial response was to give me such a hostile and suspicious look that at first I thought she was going to call Security. Eventually she did say something, but even then her only comment was ‘I call them paninis’, and that was an end of it. She obviously wasn’t the bantering type.