Birthday (24 page)

His face was fluid of feature, uncertain in its age, and in a feat of control his hand was rigorously coaxed to normal. He looked into the distance as if hoping to get some comfort, not seeing the bar, or tables at which people were eating, or the farmer-like man who stopped on coming from the gents to stroke a big docile dog blocking his way. He turned back to them and gestured an apology for his weakness, as if to say I won't embarrass you anymore. Let's just carry on as if you didn't see anything.

‘It's still throwing it down.' Derek glanced at the windows. ‘I think February filldyke's got here in January. We might have to swim back.'

Arthur smiled, as if to face such mortal peril would be a pleasure. But whatever the weather, they were safe and warm and fed, and between puffs at his cigar he tackled the pint Brian set before him, listened to their chaff, returned some of it, and looked at the pretty waitress when they paid the bill, of forty-seven pounds made up to fifty because she had been so charming.

A waiter brought the receipt. ‘I thought I'd let you know there's water on the lanes, so look out for it on the way back. A chap just came in and told us.'

They got into their coats. ‘We'll take care,' Derek said.

Eileen coasted through the shallow floods, and even on the main road drove carefully under the rain, mindful that Arthur above all had to go on living.

FIFTEEN

Brian said to Jenny: ‘Let's go to Matlock. The weather's miserable, but we'll be all right in the car.'

‘Do you mean it?' – as if unable to believe he could suggest something so pleasant.

Every decision could be the wrong one, but he'd opened his mouth and it would be cruel to dim the light in her eyes, though in the old days she wouldn't have been shocked if he did. ‘I wouldn't say it if I didn't.'

‘I'd love to. I haven't been since I nearly went on the bike with you.'

‘I was sorry about that,' he said, as if it was yesterday.

She didn't want him to be sorry. ‘But I got to Matlock in the end, because you took me a month later on the train.'

He'd hoped she'd remember. ‘Did I?'

‘You know you did.'

‘Now I do.'

‘George always had to go the other way on his travels, to Skegness or Mablethorpe. He loved the sea.'

He hadn't come to hear about dead George. ‘We'll get there by one, and have something to eat. You won't need to cook dinner today.'

She gathered the cups and saucers. ‘Eunice was coming to see me, so I'd better phone and tell her I'm going out.' Laughter from the kitchen: ‘I'm not letting on where he's taking me. Don't worry, he'll bring me back. You think we're going to run away together? I should say not. See you tomorrow, then. I'll tell you all about it.' Another laugh. ‘Or I might not. I'll see you then, then.'

He held the umbrella over her to the car, and threw a couple of cardboard boxes into the back so that she could sit down. ‘Which way do we go?' she wanted to know.

‘We make for Cinderhill, get onto the A610, and head for Ambergate, through Langley Mill and Ripley.'

‘I love them names.'

He turned for the main road, feeling strange having her by his side in a car, the girl he had so intimately known turned into an unfamiliar old woman. What he wanted he couldn't say, nor knew why he was taking her to Matlock, but there was no turning back, so he decided to enjoy it.

‘I remember struggling up all the hills. It was so hard I didn't even feel good when it came to freewheeling down.'

Less traffic after the motorway turnoff, rain still splashing the windscreen. ‘Do you want a cigarette?'

‘I don't smoke, as a rule, though I will today. It's nice to puff on a fag now and again.'

He passed the packet. ‘Light one for me as well.'

‘George smoked a hundred a day sometimes. But you can understand that, can't you?'

He certainly could. ‘I usually smoke cigars, though not too many.' The rain stopped as he drove up the gentle slope into Derbyshire, usually the opposite. ‘Do you ever think of getting behind the wheel again?'

‘Sometimes. I've got a licence, but a few years ago I had a near miss coming back from Skegness, and I haven't been brave enough to drive since.'

‘You'd enjoy it, now there's less to look after. You won't have anymore near misses.'

‘I might try next summer, roam around a bit.' Both at their ease, he was taking this old age pensioner out for the day. They were the same age, but he couldn't believe it, because there was no retirement for him, nor any pension either, since he had never bothered with stamps, though a private scheme was there to be milked if he stopped earning. ‘What happened to you after we split up?'

She needed time to think, as he weaved through Langley Mill and went towards Ripley. ‘It's going a long way back. Too far, maybe. We were different people then, weren't we?'

He shouldn't have asked. She might think he'd only brought her for that reason, and was taking advantage. ‘True, yet we're still the same people. It's just that such a lot's happened to us.'

‘We don't look the same,' she laughed. ‘Anyway, about a year later, I had an affair, as they call it now, and I got pregnant. The man didn't want to know. He told me to get rid of it, and when I said I couldn't do such a thing he ran away. He was married, though I didn't know at the time. Gordon was his name.'

‘It would be.' Yet he didn't want to denigrate someone she must have loved.

‘He was a draughtsman. He got a job near Bristol, and took his family because he didn't want his wife to find out.'

‘You didn't think of chasing her up and telling her?'

‘There wasn't any point. He wouldn't have come back. I had the baby. You've met her. It's Eunice, and she's fifty now.'

‘She wrote to me about the surprise party.'

‘A couple of years later I met George, and when he said he loved me, and I told him about Eunice, he said it didn't matter. He would take her in, and she would be all right with him. And she was. He looked on her like one of his own, and when I had six more she just blended in. So you can see how I had to care for him after the accident. Not that I thought I wouldn't, though I did sometimes wonder how long it was going to go on, mostly for his sake, especially near the end. Well, you would, wouldn't you?'

You would indeed. He thought about the tolerance and mutual affection between himself and the women he had been with, where it had always been a gamble as to who would flee first. Such signs as had been in the offing were mistaken for those of undying love which, as he well knew, never ran smooth.

‘I feel a lot better now,' she said, ‘even if the weather isn't very good. It's nice to come out, a real change from being stuck in the house.' She touched his arm as he overtook a gravel lorry on a few yards of dual carriageway. ‘I never thought you would be driving me around in a car.'

‘Nor did I.' He followed the white arrows, and got in front of the enormous lorry just before the road became a single lane, the perfect end if they were killed at the same moment, both so maimed they'd be shovelled into plastic bags rather than coffins, at least not divided in their deaths.

She pointed. ‘You can see blue sky and a bit of sun over there.'

‘I got God on the blower this morning and asked Him to make the weather good for us.'

‘Did you know by then that you were going to take me out?'

‘I thought about it, and hoped you wouldn't tell me to get lost.'

‘Well, I didn't, did I?'

He never knew whether he was more alive while thinking, or while talking, but now he was glad to be talking as he threaded four traffic islands to get around Ripley, where he had once abandoned her.

‘I know that after you left me,' she said, ‘you married Pauline Bates, and when you came out of the air force you left her and your little boy, and went off to France.'

He began the winding descent to Ambergate, knowing it hadn't been like that. Pauline had told him to go, and he went. She had been seeing someone else while he was abroad, but to explain would sound like dodging whatever responsibility had been his.

‘I met her one day while I was shopping, and she told me about it. Things don't often work, do they?'

‘No use going into whose fault it was.' They went under the train bridge and on to Ambergate junction, the Hurt Arms Hotel facing the road like a sentinel, as it had done for more than a century. A furniture centre and a Little Chef on the opposite corner were recent additions. There was more traffic on the trunk route to Matlock, a road in the old days empty except for the odd army lorry.

‘I didn't hear any more of you,' she said, ‘till we met at the station when I was going to visit George in Sheffield. And when I called on your mother she told me you were working for television.'

The grey stonewalls of Derbyshire gave a homely air, woods beyond Whatstandwell sleeving the road. He was reluctant to ask, in case she thought him wanting to tear her heart out and hold it up to the light: ‘When we split up all those years ago, how long was it before you forgot me?'

‘I had other things to think about. We were just kids, weren't we?'

He was glad the question hadn't disturbed her, as a similar one wouldn't have bothered him. ‘Yes, but you were the first woman I had, and I did think about you now and again,' which was no lie, otherwise why was he driving her to Matlock?

‘I've had lots of time to think,' she said, ‘about how it might have worked for us but didn't.'

Traffic lights held them on red before the turning into Cromford. ‘We'll have lunch at a pub here. They serve a good meal.' He parked by the kerb, and held her arm across a road in heavy use by gravel lorries.

‘Is it a long way?' She took his hand as in the old days. ‘I can't walk far.'

‘It's just up this narrow street.'

‘My legs feel like columns of lead. Maybe I should have them chopped off, then I wouldn't have to drag them everywhere. Even if I'd wanted to run away from George I wouldn't have got very far on legs like these.'

‘You got a long way from me, though, didn't you?' Banter had always been used, either to find out what each other truly wanted, or what they actually meant to say. Sometimes it was used to irritate, at other times to amuse. More often than not if served its purpose, though not sufficiently to keep them together so many years ago.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘but you didn't chase me very far. When I said I wouldn't want to see you again you didn't even argue. I don't think I knew my mind. I did want to see you again. I cried myself to sleep that night.'

‘I've never been one to do the right thing at the right time, either then or since.' Hardly an apology, but he hoped she picked up his enduring regret.

‘Nor me, if it comes to that.' He held the door of the low eighteenth-century Boat Inn and followed her into the long ceilinged room with its beams and plain tables, an untended juke box facing the bar, and a few books arranged on the window sills. She took in everything with hardly a glance, he noticed. ‘I suppose if we had done what you call the right thing we'd never have met up again like this, with you taking me out,' she said. ‘I feel a real old fogey sometimes, but at others I don't feel a day over eighteen, especially – and I've got to say it – now that George has gone.' They laid their coats along a spare seat. ‘It's nice and warm in here.'

Former girlfriends had found it quaint and picturesque. The place never changed. ‘I'll go for the drinks, while you look at the menu.'

‘What are you having?'

‘A tomato juice: I'm driving.'

‘Get me a gin and tonic, then. It's like being on holiday.'

A rugged farmer of the region standing at the bar remarked in a friendly voice that the weather wasn't much to write home about. ‘But you and your wife will be all right in here.'

Brian wanted to say she wasn't his wife and never would have been. ‘Yes, it's a snug place, right enough.'

He took the drinks back. ‘Your tomato juice looks cold,' she said. ‘You haven't even got Worcester in it.'

‘That bloke at the bar thought you were my daughter.'

‘A likely story.'

‘Well, what are you going to have to eat?'

‘Roast beef and all the trimmings.'

‘Me too.' The young woman who took their orders had pale and pleasing features, a slender figure, and though not for him he recalled, while following her progress back to the bar, that a virgin was put into King David's bed to hold him back from dying.

‘Do you know her?'

‘I've seen her before. Knock that back, and I'll get you another.'

‘Are you plying me with alcohol?'

‘I wouldn't get far with a couple of those.'

‘I don't want to do anything foolish.'

Maybe she had when she first got pregnant. ‘I can't see that happening.'

‘Nor me,' she laughed. ‘Whatever I did that was daft in my life didn't need drink to make me do it. Perhaps if I had been drunk I wouldn't have been so stupid.'

‘That goes for us all.'

‘You never know why you do anything, but when you've done it you're stuck. I often wish I could turn the clock back.'

‘After I left you,' he said, ‘I got married to Pauline because she was pregnant. A shotgun wedding, though no one needed to point the barrel at me.'

‘The one who got me pregnant ran away.'

‘It might have been worse if he'd stayed behind.'

‘I loved him enough for it not to matter. But you did the right thing by Pauline.'

‘And look where it got me. Maybe I should have bolted as well. It wouldn't have been any worse for either of us.'