Mr Wrong (5 page)

‘Oh dear! Shall I keep it till the evening? The chicken will be cold, but the other—’

Val interrupted her by saying with slight embarrassment that she wouldn’t be back to dinner, either. ‘
You
eat it,’ she ended, with guilty generosity.

When she had gone, the flat seemed very empty. Meg tried to comfort herself with the thought that anyway, she
couldn’t
have gone to the cinema with Val, as she would have to stay in
the flat in case the telephone rang. But she had been looking forward to lunch. If a person sat down to a table with you and had a meal, you stood a much better chance of getting to know them.
Sundays only seemed quieter in London than they were in the country, because of the contrast of London during the week. As she sat down to her leg of chicken with bread sauce, gravy and potatoes
done as her mother did them at home, she wondered whether coming to London was really much good after all. She did not seem to be making much headway: it wasn’t turning out at all how she had
imagined it might, and at this moment she felt rather homesick. Whatever happened, she’d go home next weekend, and talk to her mother about the whole thing. Not – the car – thing,
but Careers and Life.

Two more people rang during the afternoon. One was for Samantha, but the other was about the car. They asked her whether she would drive it to Richmond for them to see it, but when she explained
why she couldn’t, they lost interest. She kept telling herself that it was too long a chance to risk losing other possible buyers by going out for such a long time, but as the grey afternoon
settled drearily to the darker grey evening, she wondered whether she had been wrong.

She wrote a long letter to her mother, describing Samantha’s clothes and Val’s kindness, and saying that she was already feeling better (another lie, but how could she help it?):
then she read last month’s
Vogue
magazine and wondered what all the people in it, who wore rich car-coats and gave fabulous, unsimple dinner-parties and shooting lunches and seemed to
know at least eight ways of doing their hair, were doing now. On the whole, they all seemed in her mind to be lying on velvet or leather sofas with one of their children in a party dress sitting
quietly reading, and pots of azaleas and cyclamen round them in a room where you could only see one corner of a family portrait and a large white or honey-coloured dog at their feet on an old
French carpet. She read her horoscope: it said, you will encounter some interesting people, but do not go more than half way to meet them, and watch finances – last month’s horoscope
anyway, so that somehow whether it had been right or not hardly counted. When she thought it must be too late for any more people to ring up, she had a long, hot bath, and tried to do her hair at
least one other way. But her hair was too short, too fine, and altogether too unused to any outlandish intention, and obstinately slipped or fell back into its ordinary state. It was also the kind
of uninteresting colour that people never even bothered to describe in books. She yawned, a tear came out of one eye, and she decided that she had better get on with improving her mind, to which
end she settled down to a vast and heavy book on Morocco that Val said people were talking about . . .

All week she packed and packed: china, glass, silver and bits of lamps and chandeliers. On Wednesday, someone rang up for her at the shop while she was out buying sausage rolls
and apples for Mr Whitehorn’s and her lunches. Mr Whitehorn seemed very vague about them: it hadn’t seemed to be about the car, but something about her weekend plans, he thought. He
thought
, he reiterated, as though this made the whole thing more doubtful. Meg could not think who it could be – unless it was the very shy young man with red hair and a stammer who
had once come in to buy a painting on glass about Nelson’s death. He had been very nice, she thought, and he had stayed for quite a long time after he had bought the picture and told her
about his collection of what she had learned to call Nelsoniana. That was about the only person it could be, and she hoped he’d ring again, but he didn’t.

By Wednesday, she had long given up hope of anyone buying the car as a result of the advertisement. Val and Samantha told her that Bruce and Alan both said it was the wrong time of the year to
sell second-hand cars, and she decided that she had better try to sell it in the north, nearer home.

On Wednesday evening she had a sudden, irrational attack of fear. However much she reasoned with herself, she simply did not
want
to drive up the M1 alone in the car that she was now
certain was haunted. She couldn’t stand the thought of hearing the sounds she had heard, of seeing the girl again in the same place (possibly, why not? – ghosts were well known for
repeating themselves): and when Samantha and Val came in earlier than usual and together, she had a – possibly not hopeless – idea. Would either or both of them like to come home for
the weekend with her?

Their faces turned at once to each other; it was easy to see the identical appalled blankness with which they received the proposal. Before they could
say
that they wouldn’t come,
Meg intercepted them. ‘It’s lovely country, and my mother’s a marvellous cook. We could go for drives in the car –’ but she knew it was no good. They couldn’t
possibly come, they both said almost at once: they had dates, plans, it was awfully kind of her, and perhaps in the summer they might – yes, in the summer, it might be marvellous
if
there was a free weekend . . .

Afterwards, Meg sat on her bed in the very small room that she had to herself, and cried. They weren’t enough her friends for her to plead with them, and if she told them why she was
frightened, they would be more put off than ever.

Next morning she asked Mr Whitehorn if he had ever been up north to sales and auctions and things like that.

Yes, he went from time to time.

‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to come up this weekend to stay? I could drive you to any places you wanted to go.’

Mr Whitehorn looked at her with his usual tired face, but also with what she could see was utter amazement.

‘My dear child,’ he said, when he had had time to think of it, ‘I couldn’t possibly do anything,
anything
at all like that at such short notice. It would throw out
all my plans, you see. I always make plans for the weekend. Perhaps you have not realized it,’ he went on, ‘but I am a homosexual, you see. I thought you would know; running this shop
and the states I get into. But I
always
plan my free time. I am lunching with a very dear friend in Ascot, and sometimes, not always, I stay the night there.’ The confidence turned him
pink. ‘I had absolutely no intention of
misleading
you.’

Meg said of course not, and then they both apologized to each other and said it didn’t matter in the least.

On Thursday evening both girls were out, and Meg, who had not slept at all well for the last two nights, decided that she was too tired to go on her own to the cinema, although it was
A Man
for All Seasons
that she had missed and always wanted to see. She ate a poached egg and half a grapefruit that Samantha said was left over from her diet, and suddenly she had a brain-wave. What
she was frightened of, she told herself, was the idea that the poor girl would be waiting for her again at Hendon. If, therefore, she
avoided
Hendon, and got on to the M1 further north, she
would be free of this anxiety. There might still be those awful sounds again, like she had heard the first time, but she would just have to face that, drive steadily home, and when she got there,
she decided, she would jolly well tell her mother about the whole thing. The idea, and the decision to tell her mother, cheered her so much that she felt less tired, and went down to the car to
fetch the map. There, the car rug that her mother had given her in case she did not have enough on her bed pricked her conscience. She had managed to toil up the stairs with the flowers and
marmalade and her case, but she had completely forgotten the rug; this was probably because her mother had put it in the car herself, and it now lay on the floor in the back. She would take it
home, as she really didn’t need it, and usually her father used it to protect his legs from draughts when he sat in or out of doors.

She found a good way on the map. She simply did not go left on to Hendon Way, but used the A1000 through Barnet and turned left on to the St Albans road. She could get on to the M1 on the way to
Watford. It was easy. That evening she packed her party dress so that her mother could see it. She always packed the night before, so that she didn’t rush too much in the mornings, got to
work on time, and parked her car, as usual, round the corner from the shop. Mr Whitehorn had simply chalked ‘No Parking’ on the brick wall, and so far it had always worked.

On Friday morning, she and Mr Whitehorn met each other elaborately, as though far more had occurred between them than had actually happened: the first half hour was heavy with off-handed good
will, and they seemed to get in each other’s way far more often than usual. They used the weather as a kind of demilitarized zone of conversation. Mr Whitehorn said that he heard on the
wireless that there was going to be fog again, and Meg, who had heard it too, said oh dear and thanked him for telling her. Later in the morning, when things had eased between them, Mr Whitehorn
asked her whether she had been successful in selling her car. Trains were so much easier in this weather, he added. They were, indeed. But she could hardly tell him that as she lived seventeen
miles from the station, and her parents didn’t drive, and the last bus had left by the time the train she would be able to catch had arrived, and her salary certainly couldn’t afford a
taxi . . . she couldn’t tell him any of that: it would look like asking, begging for more money – she would never do it . . .

But the train became a recurrent temptation throughout the long cold and, by the afternoon, foggy day. She banished the idea in the end by reminding herself that, with the cost of the
advertisement, she simply did not have the money for the train fare: the train was out of the question.

Mr Whitehorn, who had spent the morning typing lists for the Customs (he typed with three fingers in erratic, irritable bursts), said that he would buy their lunch, as he needed the
exercise.

When he had gone, Meg, who had been addressing labels to be stuck on to the packing cases, felt so cold that she fetched the other paraffin heater from the basement and lit it upstairs. She did
not like to get another cardigan from her case in the car, as in spite of its being so near, it was out of sight from the shop, and Mr Whitehorn hated the shop to be left empty for a moment. This
made her worry, stupidly, whether she had locked the car. It was the kind of worry that one had like wondering if one had actually posted a letter
into
the letter-box: of course, one would
have, but once any idea to the contrary set in, it would not go. So the moment he came back with hot sausages and Smith’s crisps from the pub, she rushed out to the car. She had, in fact,
left one back door open: she could have sworn that she hadn’t, but there it was. She got herself another cardigan out of her case in the boot, and returned to her lunch. It was horrible out;
almost dark, or at any rate opaque, with the fog, and the bitter, acrid air that seemed to accompany fogs in towns. At home, it would be a thick white mist – well, nearly white, but certainly
not smelling as this fog smelled. The shop, in contrast, seemed quite cosy. One or two people came to ‘look around’ while they ate; but there was never very much to see. Mr Whitehorn
put all the rubbish that got included in lots he had bid for on to trays with a mark saying that anything on the tray cost ś0p, or £1. Their serious stuff nearly always seemed to go
abroad, or to another dealer. Mr Whitehorn always made weak but kindly little jokes about his rubbish collectors, as he called the ones who bought old photograph albums, moulded glass vases, or
hair-combs made of tortoiseshell and bits of broken paste.

While she was making their coffee, Meg wondered whether perhaps Mr Whitehorn would be a good person to talk about the haunted car to. Obviously, asking him to stay had been a silly mistake. But
he might be just the person to understand what was worrying her; to believe her and to let her talk about it. That was what she most wanted, she realized. Someone, almost anyone, to
talk
to
her about it: to sort out what was honestly frightening, and what she had imagined or invented as fright.

But immediately after lunch, he set about his typing again, and got more and more peevish, crumpling up bits of paper and throwing them just outside the wastepaper basket, until she hardly liked
to ask him, at five, whether she might go.

However, she did ask, and he said it would be all right.

He could not know how difficult she found it to leave: she said good night to him twice by mistake, started to put her old tweed coat on, and then decided that with the second cardigan she
wouldn’t need it, took ages tying on her blue silk head-square, and nearly forgot her bag. She took out her car keys while she could find them easily in the light, shut the shop door behind
her and, after one more look at him, angrily crouched over his typewriter, went to the car.

Once she got into the car, her courage and common sense returned. It was only, at the worst, a four-hour journey: she would be home then, and everything would be all right. She flung her
overcoat into the back – it was far easier to drive without it hanging round the gear lever – had one final look at her map before she shut the car door, and set off.

It was more interesting going a different way out of London, even though it seemed to be slower, but the traffic, the fog, and making sure all the time that she was on the right road, occupied
her mind, almost to the exclusion of anything else. She found her way on to the M1 quite easily; the signs posting it were more frequent and bigger than any other sign.