Mr Wrong (6 page)

She drove for over an hour on the motorway, and there was no sound in the car, no agonized, laboured breathing – nothing. It was getting rather hot, but the heater cleared the windscreen
and she couldn’t do without it for long. The fog was better, too, although patchy, and in the clearer bits she could see the fine, misty rain that was falling all the time. She was sticking
to the left-hand lane, because although it meant that lorries passed her from time to time, she felt safer in the fog than if she had been in the middle, and possibly unable to see either side of
the road. She opened a crack of window because the car seemed to be getting impossibly hot and full of stale air. Another two hours, she thought, and decided that she might as well stop to take off her
thick cardigan – she could use the hard shoulder just for that – and perhaps she had made far too much of her nerves and anxiety about the whole journey. She drew up carefully, and then
saw a service area ahead – safer in one of those. ‘At least I didn’t give in,’ she thought, and thought also how ashamed of herself she would have been if she had.

As she drew up in the car-park, she was just about to get out of her cardigan, when a huge hand reached out in front of her and twitched the driving mirror so that she could see him. He was
smiling, his eyes full of triumph and malice. His breath reeked over her shoulder as she gave a convulsive gasp of pure shock. ‘You must be a ghost!’ She heard herself repeating this in
a high voice utterly unlike her own. ‘You must be a ghost: you
must
be!’

‘Only had to pick the car lock twice. You shouldn’t have locked it
again
in the middle of the day.’

She knew she should start the car and drive back out on to the road, but she couldn’t see behind her, and nearly lost all control when she felt something hard and pointed sticking into the
back of her neck.

‘They caught Mr Wrong, you see. But you seemed to know
so much
, and as you were driving the same car, I simply had to catch up with you somehow. Two birds with one stone, as it
were.’

She made an attempt to get the brake off, but a hand clamped over her wrist with such sudden force that she cried out.

‘Ever since you turned me out in that unkind manner, I have been trying to track you down. That is all I have done, but your advertisement was a great help.’ She saw him watching her
face in the mirror and licking the scum off his lips. She made a last effort.

‘I shall turn you out again – any minute – I shall!’

He sucked in his breath, but he was still smiling.

‘Oh no, you won’t. This time, it will all be done my way.’

She thought she screamed once, in that single second of astonished disbelief and denial before she felt the knife jab smoothly through the skin on her neck when speechless terror overwhelmed her
and she became nothing but fear – heart thudding, risen in her throat as though it would burst from her: she put one hand to the wound and felt no knife – only her own blood –
there, as he said:

‘Don’t worry
too
much: just stick to fear. The fate worse than death tends to occur after it. I’ve always liked them warm.’

The illusion that eating in the open air constitutes at least one aspect of the simple life is ancient and enduring, but now, if the contents of all three cars were unloaded on
to the lawn and somebody who didn’t know about the picnic was asked what it was all for, they might equally have thought that it was the blitz, or a bazaar, or the result of some mysterious
crisis like the
Mary Celeste
. Apart from immense quantities of provisions, the parents and their friends took rugs and mackintoshes, dark glasses, cameras and alcohol, cigarettes, writing
paper and newspapers, a trug and a trowel for moss-collecting (they were going to a wood), an air cushion and a collapsible bath-chair, and a huge umbrella like a vulture which opened inside or out
with impartial difficulty. The nannies took shopping baskets filled with white emergency baby equipment and slow constructive things like knitting. The children (divided roughly into two groups)
took a tent, electric torches, books whose lives hung on a single linen thread, butterfly nets, pen-knives that would either never open or never shut, wine gums, a few ravenous caterpillars in a
biscuit tin, a bottle filled with sea water and marked
POYSIN
, and a very battered game of Monopoly. The younger children and the babies took some string, a bunch of
dandelion heads, and the number of stuffed animals that their nannies thought good for them. The dogs were not allowed to bring anything.

Lalage, who had not had to prepare either children or food, who was not responsible for the weather or for the motor-cars, who had, in fact, arrived at the perfect picnic age of seventeen, had
spent two delicious hours hovering between a white dress and a yellow: brushing her yellow hair, polishing her Spanish sandals, and painting her nails; telling herself continually that she must
remain calm, perfectly calm, and that it could not possibly rain, at least not before they had all met everybody from the other house.

Now she wandered restlessly from room to room watching the car being methodically packed by one of her parents, and as methodically disarranged and repacked by the other: waiting for the exact
moment to appear when she would neither be subjected to torturing minutes of heat in an immobile car, nor squeezed in unmercifully because she had been forgotten . . . but she felt they would be
hours yet. The rooms already had that empty sunlit air, when a bluebottle or even a butterfly trapped between the sashes of the windows seemed to make an enormous noise, and heavy petals fell
momentously on to tables of mahogany and satinwood, exposing the charming freckled hearts of mid-summer roses . . .

Lalage’s mother edged her back cautiously against the tree which she had chosen rather because it commanded the scene than afforded her comfort, and extracted a drowning insect from her
cider. Her chief anxieties were over: food was unpacked; banks of sandwiches were being demolished; little pools of salt and of lemonade lay on the groundsheets; hard-boiled eggs and leaves of cos
lettuce winked and wilted on the elegant turf. Nannies were manœuvring the significant contents of sandwiches into the petulant and indiscriminate mouths of their charges; and the children
– Lalage’s mother glanced at the little sunbaked clearing where they had elected to picnic, shuddered, and thought very hard about Andrew Marvell’s restoring poem.

Lalage, on the other hand, lay on a mossy bank of dark delicious green, with her hands clasped behind her golden head, while that nice young man who drove too fast peeled her a nectarine, and
told her about motorcars. Suddenly, Lalage’s mother remembered reclining in a punt on the Thames (oh the agony with one’s corsets until one had adjusted the seat either bolt upright, or
almost flat) in her best white flannel skirt and poplin blouse, and her boater tipped over her eyes in a way that Mamma had condemned as unbecoming, while another nice young man had broken off an
enthusiastic monologue about horses to stammer that she was so splendid to talk to, and might he, could he, could he possibly call her Lillian? He had only enjoyed the delectable advantage for one
afternoon: Lillian’s Mamma had hurriedly sent her to Scotland, where she was expected to fly as high as the grouse and marry a peer. But she had married a commoner, and her Mamma had
acquiesced (after all there were five daughters and no means). Mamma was now possibly asleep. The fact that she sat upright in her bath-chair meant nothing. She had lunched off cold turtle soup and
Bath Oliver biscuits, and was now immobile; reeking gently of white violets, and with her diamond rings glaring on her cold, freckled fingers – she was always cold . . . Her eyes were
shut.

The young man leapt to his feet, held out a hand to Lalage, and pulled her up beside him. The sudden ease of the impulse made them both smile faintly at one another, as they stood for a moment
before strolling away down one of the bridle-paths. Lillian glanced apprehensively at her Mamma, and then at the children, who appeared to be on the brink of a quarrel, which, considering the
conditions in which they were picnicking, was hardly surprising. They had pitched a dark brown tent on a baked cart-track. Inside, swathed in car-rugs, they were eating, and playing Monopoly, a
game which its perpetrators would barely have recognized – so personal and complex had it become. Occasionally, a younger child would be sent for reinforcements of food. It was sweating so
profusely, and so incapacitated by its car-rug, that it was hopelessly inefficient. Lillian had suggested to one of them that they might like to explore the wood, but it had looked at her with
purple streaming contempt, and hobbled away. At frequent intervals the tent collapsed upon its occupants and any incipient quarrel was shelved while they feverishly restored their airless
gloom.

One of the babies began to cry. He had lunched lightly off dandelion heads, some milk chocolate, and a Monopoly card, and was now quite properly resisting any further nourishment. He was hurried
away into the wood by a nurse, but not, Lillian feared, before he had had ample opportunity to waken Mamma . . .

Lalage’s grandmother, however, was awake, although since lunch she had successfully persuaded everybody to the contrary. In reality her mind had played upon the scene before her and
receded into the past, very much as the chequered streaking sunlight trembled and shifted over the leaves on their branches on the trees, and apparently back into the woods. So she reflected upon
the people she could see, and more that she could remember; upon present and past picnics, and the unchanging behaviour of picnickers – pretending the moment they arrived in some romantic or
beautiful place that they were in fact at home, only in houses without furniture, which made them either somnolent and dull, or grumpy and restless. The men were almost all asleep, and the women
were clearing the debris of the meal. In her young days – sixty-odd years ago – one had really eaten luncheon in the open air. Picnic food had been properly exotic; had by no means
degenerated to the mere sandwich. She remembered very young broad beans cooked and frozen in their butter; little tailor-made cold roast birds; delicious claret cup; elaborate galantine; cold
soufflés
; an entire Stilton; trifle such as those poor children in the tent had never seen; and quantities of fruit the perfection of which seemed mysteriously to have vanished today
– with the handsome man and good dinner-table conversation. It was better now to be very old, or the age of that granddaughter escaping into the woods to discover whether she liked being
kissed.

She remembered doing exactly the same thing on a picnic, only then it was far more difficult, and consequently exciting; and afterwards telling her younger, plainer, sister (Oh Laura! How could
you? Oh Laura!): and she remembered that she had been far more excited at telling about it than at the event itself. She had had to escape from the party with its perimeter of servants and ponies,
and stroll away up the glen path picking wood anemones which were certain to die even before they reached the carriages which awaited their return down on the road. She had walked, and picked her
anemones, until she could no longer hear the party but only the cool frenzied rush of the stream pouring down the glen, below her path. Then the effort of carrying her flowers and her parasol had
seemed too great, and she had selected a clean grey boulder in the shade on which to settle carefully. She had hovered for hours that morning between a white frock and a yellow, and had chosen the
white muslin as more becoming; but already her skirts were marked with green round the hem from bruised bluebell leaves.

He had surprised her exactly when she had expected him; and she had confirmed her imagination of his kissing her to the accompaniment of a hectic streaking kingfisher, and the faint seductive
smell of wild garlic. Their promises had seemed as endless as the golden silver stream: but the following week he had been sent to India with his regiment; and she had never heard what became of
him. She had married a gentle impoverished baronet . . . And here was Lalage returned with her young man; both in an elaborate state of flushed indifference . . .

In the car going home, Lalage’s grandmother suddenly gave her an immense diamond ring.

Lalage held the hand that wore the ring with the hand that didn’t for the rest of the journey, and wondered whether any picnic could be more perfect than this picnic, which had, in fact,
altered her whole life, only nobody would understand that, any more than they remembered or understood that she was now seventeen . . .

Lillian, driving another car home – not too fast because it was overloaded, but fast enough to allow the child who was always sick in cars to be sick at home for a change, wondered in an
exhausted manner why people described anything difficult or nerve-racking as ‘no picnic’.

Lalage’s grandmother, after giving away her ring, settled to pretending to be asleep; reflecting sadly on the sad and lonely thought that there was nobody left alive to stare at the
ringless finger and say, ‘Oh Laura! How could you? Oh Laura!’

‘Well, here we are anyway,’ Alan said as he edged the Rover into a meagre slot of the car-park.

Nobody answered him. Ruth, his wife, was so exhausted by having tried to prevent an embarrassing row in front of the girls – their sixteen-year-old daughter and a friend – that she
literally couldn’t think of anything to say. Julie didn’t want to prolong any of the interminable grown-up talk that seemed to accompany the slightest grown-up plan, and Christine, the
friend, was examining with her compact mirror something on her cheekbone that was either a mosquito bite or worse, possibly a spot of some kind.

They got slowly out of the car. It was intensely hot, and the tall trees that edged one side of the park were so dusty that they were hardly green at all. Throngs of people in holiday clothes,
dark glasses and irrelevant hats wandered to and fro from the cars, the tourist stall placed under a bluff of the rocky cliff by the road, and the road to the river. The moment that they were all
out of the car, they started to separate: the girls gravitated to the stall where hideous wares were constantly stared at and fingered, but seemed hardly ever to be bought. Ruth looked beyond the
trees at the place below – like a large village square laid out with trees and tables for picnickers, and wondered whether they could buy wine for their meal. Alan was struggling with the
boot of the car that went on being difficult to open whatever the garage did to it. ‘Streuth!
Christ!
’ he was screaming inside. He looked round. Of course they had all gone off
and left him to it: as usual. One of the things you’d expect with a woman you were – whom you weren’t in love with any more – was that they should be
practical
. Even
more practical and reliable than you’d thought of them as being when you
were
in love with them. But Ruth seemed to have got worse. Sometimes she almost behaved as though she was
bored
with him! It was a bit much when he was making such an effort not to feel that about her. ‘Ruth!’ he called, as heartily as he could. ‘The boot’s open!
Ruth!’