After a few minutes, we got to a posher bit: detached houses, front gardens, a hill. Veronica turned off and parked. I thought: OK, it’s your game – I’ll wait for the rules, whatever they might be. But part of me also thought: Fuck it, I’m not going to stop being myself just because you’re back in your Wobbly Bridge state of mind.
‘How’s Brother Jack?’ I asked cheerily. She could hardly answer ‘Driving’ to that question.
‘Jack’s Jack,’ she replied, not looking at me.
Well,
that
’s philosophically self-evident, as we used to say, back in the days of Adrian.
‘Do you remember –’
‘Waiting,’ she interrupted.
Very well, I thought. First meeting, then driving, now waiting. What comes next? Shopping, cooking, eating and drinking, snogging, wanking and fucking? I very much doubt it. But as we sat side by side, a bald man and a whiskery woman, I realised what I should have spotted at once. Of the two of us, Veronica was much the more nervous. And whereas I was nervous about her, she clearly wasn’t nervous about me. I was like some minor, necessary irritant. But why was I necessary?
I sat and waited. I rather wished I hadn’t left that free newspaper on the train. I wondered why I hadn’t driven here myself. Probably because I didn’t know what the parking restrictions would be like. I wanted a drink of water. I also wanted to pee. I lowered the window. This time, Veronica didn’t object.
‘Look.’
I looked. A small group of people were coming along the pavement towards my side of the car. I counted five of them. In front was a man who, despite the heat, was wearing layers of heavy tweed, including a waistcoat and a kind of deerstalker helmet. His jacket and hat were covered with metal badges, thirty or forty of them at a guess, some glinting in the sun; there was a watch-chain slung between his waistcoat pockets. His expression was jolly: he looked like someone with an obscure function at a circus or fairground. Behind him came two men: the first had a black moustache and a kind of rolling gait; the second was small and malformed, with one shoulder much higher than the other – he paused to spit briefly into a front garden. And behind them was a tall, goofy fellow with glasses, holding the hand of a plump, Indianish woman.
‘Pub,’ said the man with the moustache as they drew level.
‘No, not pub,’ replied the man with the badges.
‘Pub,’ the first man insisted.
‘Shop,’ said the woman.
They all spoke in very loud voices, like children just let out of school.
‘Shop,’ repeated the lopsided man, with a gentle gob into a hedge.
I was looking as carefully as I could, because that was what I had been instructed to do. They must all, I suppose, have been between thirty and fifty, yet at the same time had a kind of fixed, ageless quality. Also, an obvious timidity, which was emphasised by the way the couple at the back were holding hands. It didn’t look like amorousness, more defence against the world. They passed a few feet away, without glancing at the car. A few yards behind came a young man in shorts and an open-neck shirt; I couldn’t tell if he was their shepherd, or had nothing to do with them.
There was a long silence. Clearly, I was going to have to do all the work.
‘So?’
She didn’t reply. Too general a question perhaps.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘What’s wrong with
you
?’
That didn’t seem a relevant reply, for all its acrimonious tone. So I pressed on.
‘Was that young chap with them?’
Silence.
‘Are they care-in-the-community or something?’
My head banged back against the neck-rest as Veronica suddenly let out the clutch. She raced us round a block or two, charging the car at speed bumps as if it were a show-jumper. Her gear-changing, or the absence of it, was terrible. This lasted about four minutes, then she swerved into a parking space, riding up on the kerb with her front nearside wheel before bouncing back down again.
I found myself thinking: Margaret was always a nice driver. Not just safe, but one who treated a car properly. Back whenever it was I had driving lessons, my instructor had explained that when you change gear, your handling of clutch and gear lever should be so gentle and imperceptible that your passenger’s head doesn’t move a centimetre on its spinal column. I was very struck by that, and often noticed it when others drove me. If I lived with Veronica, I’d be down the chiropractor’s most weeks.
‘You just don’t get it, do you? You never did, and you never will.’
‘I’m not exactly being given much help.’
Then I saw them – whoever they were – coming towards me. That had been the point of the manoeuvre: to get ahead of them again. We were alongside a shop and a launderette, with a pub on the other side of the street. The man with the badges – ‘barker’, that was the word I’d been looking for, the cheery fellow at the entrance to a fairground booth who encourages you to step inside and view the bearded lady or two-headed panda – he was still leading. The other four were now surrounding the young man in shorts, so he was presumably with them. Some kind of care worker. Now I heard him say,
‘No, Ken, no pub today. Friday’s pub night.’
‘Friday,’ the man with the moustache repeated.
I was aware that Veronica had taken off her seat belt and was opening her door. As I started to do the same, she said,
‘Stay.’ I might have been a dog.
The pub-versus-shop debate was still going on when one of them noticed Veronica. The tweedy man took off his hat and held it against his heart, then bowed from the neck. The lopsided fellow started jumping up and down on the spot. The gangly chap let go of the woman’s grasp. The care worker smiled and held out his hand to Veronica. In a moment she was surrounded by a benign ambush. The Indian woman was now holding Veronica’s hand, and the man who wanted the pub was resting his head on her shoulder. She didn’t seem to mind this attention at all. I watched her smile for the first time that afternoon. I tried to hear what was being said, but there were too many voices overlapping. Then I saw Veronica turn, and heard her say,
‘Soon.’
‘Soon,’ two or three of them repeated.
The lopsided chap jumped some more on the spot, the gangly one gave a big goofy grin and shouted, ‘Bye, Mary!’ They began following her to the car, then noticed me in the passenger seat and stopped at once. Four of them started waving frantically goodbye, while the tweedy man boldly approached my side of the car. His hat was still clutched over his heart. He extended his other hand through the car window, and I shook it.
‘We are going to the shop,’ he told me formally.
‘What are you going to buy?’ I asked with equal solemnity.
This took him aback, and he thought about it for a while.
‘Stuff we need,’ he eventually replied. He nodded to himself and added, helpfully, ‘Requisites.’
Then he did his formal little neck-bow, turned, and put his badge-heavy hat back on his head.
‘He seems a very nice fellow,’ I commented.
But she was putting the car into gear with one hand and waving with the other. I noticed that she was sweating. Yes, it was a hot day, but even so.
‘They were all very pleased to see you.’
I could tell she wasn’t going to reply to anything I said. Also that she was furious – certainly with me, but with herself as well. I can’t say I felt I had done anything wrong. I was about to open my mouth when I saw she was aiming the car at a speed bump, not slowing at all, and it crossed my mind that I might bite the end of my tongue off with the impact. So I waited till we had safely hurdled the bump and said,
‘I wonder how many badges that chap’s got.’
Silence. Speed bump.
‘Do they all live in the same house?’
Silence. Speed bump.
‘So pub night is Friday.’
Silence. Speed bump.
‘Yes, we did go to Minsterworth together. There was a moon that night.’
Silence. Speed bump. Now we turned into the high street, with nothing but flat tarmac between us and the station, as far as I remembered.
‘This is a very interesting part of town.’ I thought irritating her might do the trick – whatever the trick might be. Treating her like an insurance company lay well in the past.
‘Yes, you’re right, I should be getting back soon.’
‘Still, it was nice catching up with you the other day over lunch.’
‘Are there any Stefan Zweig titles you would particularly recommend?’
‘There are a lot of fat people around nowadays. Obese. That’s one of the changes since we were young, isn’t it? I can’t remember anyone at Bristol being obese.’
‘Why did that goofy chap call you Mary?’
At least I had my seat belt on. This time Veronica’s parking technique consisted of getting both nearside wheels up on the kerb at a speed of about twenty miles an hour, then stamping on the brakes.
‘Out,’ she said, staring ahead.
I nodded, undid my seat belt, and slowly got out of the car. I held the door open longer than necessary, just to annoy her one last time, and said,
‘You’ll ruin your tyres if you go on like that.’
The door was wrenched from my hand as she drove off.
I sat on the train home not thinking at all, really, just feeling. And not even thinking about what I was feeling. Only that evening did I begin to address what had happened.
The main reason I felt foolish and humiliated was because of – what had I called it to myself, only a few days previously? – ‘the eternal hopefulness of the human heart’. And before that, ‘the attraction of overcoming someone’s contempt’. I don’t think I normally suffer from vanity, but I’d clearly been more afflicted than I realised. What had begun as a determination to obtain property bequeathed to me had morphed into something much larger, something which bore on the whole of my life, on time and memory. And desire. I thought – at some level of my being, I actually thought – that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine – even if I didn’t put it more strongly than this – that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so. When she had emailed about ‘closing the circle’, I had completely failed to pick the tone as one of sardonic mockery, and taken it as an invitation, almost a come-on.
Her attitude towards me, now that I looked at it, had been consistent – not just in recent months, but over however many years. She had found me wanting, had preferred Adrian, and always considered these judgements correct. This was, I now realised, self-evident in every way, philosophical or other. But, without understanding my own motives, I had wanted to prove to her, even at this late stage, that she had got me wrong. Or rather, that her initial view of me – when we were learning one another’s hearts and bodies, when she approved of some of my books and records, when she liked me enough to take me home – had been correct. I thought I could overcome contempt and turn remorse back into guilt, then be forgiven. I had been tempted, somehow, by the notion that we could excise most of our separate existences, could cut and splice the magnetic tape on which our lives are recorded, go back to that fork in the path and take the road less travelled, or rather not travelled at all. Instead, I had just left common sense behind. Old fool, I said to myself. And there’s no fool like an old fool: that’s what my long-dead mother used to mutter when reading stories in the papers about older men falling for younger women, and throwing up their marriages for a simpering smile, hair that came out of a bottle, and a taut pair of tits. Not that she would have put it like that. And I couldn’t even offer the excuse of cliché, that I was just doing what other men of my age banally did. No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection on to the least likely recipient in the world.
That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to. I was alone with two voices speaking clearly in my head: Margaret’s saying, ‘Tony, you’re on your own now,’ and Veronica’s saying, ‘You just don’t get it … You never did, and you never will.’ And knowing that Margaret wouldn’t crow if I rang up – knowing that she would happily agree to another of our little lunches, and we could go on exactly as before – made me feel all the lonelier. Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?
Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way. So after a while, I rallied. I knew I must go back to how I had been before this silly, senile fantasy took hold of me. I must attend to my affairs, whatever they might be, apart from tidying up my flat and running the library at the local hospital. Oh yes, and I could concentrate again on getting back my stuff.
‘Dear Jack,’ I wrote. ‘Wonder if you could give me a spot more help with Veronica. Afraid I’m finding her just as mystifying as in the old days. Well, do we ever learn? Anyway, the ice flow hasn’t melted with regard to my old pal’s diary that your mother left me in her will. Any further advice about that? Also, another slight puzzle. I had quite a jolly lunch with V in town the other week. Then she asked me up the Northern line one afternoon. It seems she wanted to show me some care-in-the-community folk, then got cross when she’d done so. Can you shed any light on this one? Trust all’s fine with you. Regards, Tony W.’