After I’d finished eating, I booted up my laptop and inserted the little gadget that connected me to the mobile broadband network. I checked my emails, and checked Facebook. Nothing. As I turned the laptop off again I noticed that the battery was almost empty.
Feeling guilty that I had barely used it so far, I took the digital video camera outside and shot some footage of the service station and the surrounding mountains. Only about thirty seconds’ worth. As before, when I’d taken some film of my father’s apartment block in Lichfield, I could sense that this wasn’t at all what Lindsay would be wanting, and it would probably never make the final cut.
*There are also delays on the northbound side of the M6 – the problem is a stranded lorry between Junctions 31 and 31a, it was in Lane 3 and there are queues back to Junction 29. Stranded lorry in the roadworks on the M1, northbound after Junction 27 north of Leicester – that’s now been recovered, but our problems continue on the M1, which is blocked southbound at Junction 11, which is at Luton – being diverted via the sliproads, queues though – thanks to Mike and Fiona for this one – those folks say it’s back to Junction 14, which is Milton Keynes, loads of traffic using the A5 into Dunstable which is now very heavy on that southbound side. Northbound the M1 was closed for a while, it was to allow an air ambulance to land – that has landed and taken off, so that road is fully open again. There was a vehicle blocking the M25, Junctions 18–17, that’s anti-clockwise from Chorleywood to Rickmansworth – that’s all been cleared but it’s left quite a long delay, in roughly the usual place but it seems heavier today – this is anti-clock from Junction 23, which is the A1(M) to Watford at Junction 19. There’s also an accident which has just been picked up from the M25 anti-clockwise, from Junction 5, which is the M26 turn. Cambridge, there’s an accident on the northbound A11, it’s closed northbound at Papworth Everard, that’s north of the A428 at Caxton Gibbet …
‘Sorry about that, Emma,’ I said, turning the radio off. ‘It’s not that I’m getting bored of listening to you, it’s just that – you know, sometimes a man needs a change of scene, some different company …’
– In three-quarters of a mile, slight left turn.
‘I knew you’d understand,’ I said, gratefully. Emma’s voice sounded gracious and calming after the traffic announcer’s strident, hectoring monologue.
We were just a few miles from Edinburgh now. According to the car’s information screen, we had travelled only 410 miles since setting off from Reading two days earlier, but somehow, hearing all those familiar names – Rickmansworth, Chorleywood and (of course) Watford – it felt as though we were about to arrive at a place that was unimaginably remote. Darkness had already closed in and we were a part of a long line of cars threading steadily along the A702, a funeral cortège of tail-lights and occasional brake-lights as far as the eye could see. A few minutes ago we had passed a sign saying ‘Welcome to Scottish Borders’, and now we passed another saying ‘Welcome to Midlothian’. It was nice to know that we were welcome. I wondered if I would be made equally welcome at Alison’s house.
Soon we had crossed the ring road and were driving into the outer suburbs. Alison lived in an area of Edinburgh known as The Grange, which I had already guessed would turn out to be quite wealthy. I didn’t know what her husband did for a living, exactly, but I knew that he ran a large, successful company with offices in many different parts of the world, and that he spent a lot of his time travelling. All the same, I was surprised when Emma continued to guide me – as though she had known this city all her life – into ever wider, quieter, more sequestered and more exclusive streets. Most of the sandstone properties here seemed to be more like mansions than houses. And Alison’s, when we pulled up outside it, was by no means the smallest.
– You have arrived at your destination, said Emma, betraying no sense of triumph, or boastfulness; just quiet satisfaction in a job well done. The route guidance is now finished.
17
I never expected to be single at the age of forty-eight. But now that it had happened, and now that it was obvious that Caroline had no intention of coming back to me, I realized that I was faced with a very specific problem. Sooner or later, if I didn’t want to end up a lonely old man, I was going to have to find myself another partner. The trouble was, younger women (such as Poppy) were apparently not going to look at me, and I didn’t find older women attractive.
Perhaps I should define ‘older women’, at this stage. I’ve been thinking about this, and I reckon that an ‘older woman’ is any woman who is older than your mother was when you were a teenager. Say that you start getting really sexually preoccupied – to the point of not being able to think about anything else – at the age of sixteen. (I know it’s younger than that for kids nowadays, by all accounts. The Western world is so sexualized that most boys are probably all at it by the time they’re fourteen or so. And I read in the paper the other day about a woman who was a grandmother at the age of twenty-six. But my generation was different. We were the last of the late developers.) OK then, when I was sixteen, my mother was thirty-seven, and I can tell you now that she appeared ancient. It would never have occurred to me that she might have had a romantic life, or an internal life, let alone a sex life (except with my father: and I wasn’t even sure about that, if Alison’s essay was anything to go by). Sexually and emotionally, she was a non-person, as far as I was concerned. She was there to provide for me, for my physical and emotional needs. I know it sounds shocking, put like that, but teenagers are selfish and self-absorbed, and that was how I saw her. And even now, at the age of forty-eight, I find it hard to come round to the idea that women of my mother’s age – OK then, women of my age, if you want to put it that way – can be regarded as sexual beings. Of course this is illogical. Of course this is wrong. But I can’t help it, and I’m only trying to be honest about it. This, after all, was why I was so mortified on the night of Poppy’s dinner party, when I realized that she had only invited me along to meet her mother.
All of which, I suppose, is by way of explaining my feelings when I pressed the electronic security buzzer at Alison’s house, and she opened the door to me. The last time I had seen her was more than fifteen years ago. The time that was burned most strongly in my memory was almost twenty years before that, when she was seventeen, and my pervy father had taken that photograph of her wearing a tiny orange bikini. And now here she was, standing before me again: as stylish, as confident, as good-looking, as elegant as ever. And fifty years of age. Quite a bit older than my mother had been when I was sixteen and we all went to the Lake District together. Older, for that matter, than my mother had been when she died.
‘Max!’ she said. ‘How gorgeous to see you.’
She offered me her cheek, and I kissed it. The skin was soft and powdery. I breathed in a distinct but not unpleasant scent, somewhere between honey and rosewater.
‘It’s lovely to see you too,’ I said. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’ (Isn’t this what people are supposed to say, whether it’s true or not?)
‘What a bit of luck that you should be passing by. And Mum said you were on your way to Shetland, is that true?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘How thrilling! Well, come on in!’
She led me through the hallway and into what I took to be one of two or three downstairs sitting rooms. Somehow it managed to combine minimalism and opulence at the same time. There were modern paintings on the walls, thick velvet curtains drawn against the unfriendly night, and different areas of the room were subtly illuminated by hidden spotlights. A large L-shaped sofa with deep, comfortable cushions was arranged around a glass coffee table tastefully strewn with books and magazines. In the hearth, a cheerful fire was burning. I assumed it was a real fire, until Alison said, ‘Is it too hot for you? I’ll turn it down if you like.’