It was quite relaxing and hypnotic, sitting there watching the traffic going by under the motorway services bridge. It reminded me again of my friend Stuart, and how he’d had to stop driving because he was freaked out by the idea that millions of traffic accidents were only averted every day by a matter of inches or seconds. Watching the northbound traffic on the M6, you could see his point. Nobody seemed to think anything of taking life-threatening risks, just to shave a couple of minutes off their journey. I started to count the number of times people pulled out without indicating, or overtook on the inside lane, or tailgated someone remorselessly, or cut in on another car without giving it enough space. After I’d counted more than a hundred such incidents I suddenly realized that I had been sitting there for more than an hour, and it was time to finish driving up to Kendal.
– Proceed on the current motorway, Emma said, for the eighth or ninth time.
I didn’t mind the repetition. I still liked just hearing the sound of her voice. I wasn’t feeling very talkative myself, so every few minutes I would throw out some casual remark to her – ‘Crossing the Manchester Ship Canal now, look’, or ‘those must be the Pennines over to the east’ – and would press the ‘Map’ button on the steering wheel to elicit her reply. The rest of the time, I preferred to be alone with my thoughts.
I thought about Lucy, first of all. Why did people have children in the first place? Was it a selfish act, or a supremely unselfish one? Or was it just a primal biological instinct that couldn’t be rationalized or analysed? I couldn’t remember Caroline and I discussing whether to have children or not. To tell the truth, our sex life had never been very lively, anyway, and after a couple of years’ marriage we just reached a tacit agreement that we would stop using contraception. Conceiving Lucy had been an impulse, not a decision. And yet, as soon as she was born, life without her became unimaginable. My own theory – or one of them – was that once you started to hit middle age, you became so jaded and unsurprised by life that you had to have a child in order to provide yourself with a new set of eyes through which to view things, to make them seem new and exciting again. When Lucy was small, the whole world to her was like a giant adventure playground, and for a while that was how I’d seen it too. Just taking her to the toilet in a restaurant became a voyage of discovery. Even now, for instance, when I saw all those trucks overtaking me (I was in the inside lane, with the cruise control stuck at 62 miles per hour), I felt a pang of longing to have the seven- or eight-year-old Lucy with me again, to play the game we always used to play on motorway journeys, the game where you had to guess which country the truck was from by looking at the writing on the side and trying to identify the names of the foreign cities. A game at which she had been surprisingly –
‘Oh, shit!’ I shouted out loud.
– Proceed on the current motorway, said Emma.
‘I haven’t got her a present!’
And it was true: my morning adventure in Lichfield had driven paternal obligations clean out of my mind. But I couldn’t possibly turn up empty-handed. I would have to come off at the next service station, in about eight miles’ time.
Once I’d parked the car and dashed inside, I began to look around frantically. At first I could see very little that would impress her. There was the usual shop selling mobile phone accessories but somehow I didn’t think she would be too excited to be presented with an in-car charger or a bluetooth headset. (Which reminded me: I really would have to get the headset on my car working, as soon as possible. Maybe tonight.) Probably my best bet was W. H. Smith, but even there …Was she really likely to get much use out of fold-up garden chairs, even if they were on sale at two for £10? There were plenty of cuddly toys but even I could see that they looked horrendously cheap and ugly. A continental power adaptor, suitable for both Northern and Southern European countries, was practical but still not calculated to bring a grateful sparkle to a young girl’s eyes. What about a colouring pad? They had plenty of those, and she was keen on art, as I knew from the school pictures that she’d until recently been in the habit of sending me. They had pens to match, as well. Surely that would be fine. All children liked drawing, didn’t they?
I went over to pay, didn’t attempt to engage in any banter with the terrifyingly bored-looking guy in a turban sitting behind the till, and was back on the motorway within a few minutes.
– In two miles, exit left, towards South Lakes, said Emma, before very long.
The countryside was rugged and interesting, by now. Brown heritage signs had started to appear, reminding me that the delights of Blackpool were mine for the sampling, a few miles to my west, and hinting subtly that the nearby Historic City of Lancaster was well worth a short detour. We were emphatically in the North, at last. We had left Middle England far behind.
– In one mile, exit left, towards South Lakes.
‘God, I’m nervous, Emma. I won’t try to hide it from you. Well, I can’t hide anything from you, really, can I? You know everything there is to know about me. You’re the all-seeing eye.’
– Next exit left, towards South Lakes. Then a quarter of a mile later, heading slightly left at the roundabout.
‘I don’t know why I’m so nervous, though. Caroline’s been quite friendly, recently, when I’ve spoken to her on the phone. I suppose the problem is that it’s not friendliness I want. It’s not enough. In a way, it hurts even more when she’s nice to me.’
– Heading slightly left at the roundabout, take first exit.
‘And I really hope that Lucy hasn’t changed too much. She’s always been an affectionate girl. We were never as awkward together – nothing like as awkward – as Caroline makes out in that … rotten story of hers. Lucy’s simple, uncomplicated. You’ll like her – I know you will.’
– Proceed on the current road.
Dusk was falling as we drove along the A684 together. We passed a roadside café which consisted of little more than a Portakabin with a flag of St George flying above it, and numerous brown heritage signs inviting us to visit The World of Beatrix Potter, which would have to wait till another day, as far as we were concerned. Soon enough, through the rain and the encroaching dark, the lights of Kendal itself flickered up ahead.