Just seeing them together casts my mind back to when Kate and I met for the first time. We were seventeen, what now seems an absurdly young age to be about to embark upon the relationship we had. Barely old enough to express ourselves. It was at a party in the school holidays. I remember a lot of weak beer and girls in miniskirts. Kate came right up to me, just seemed to know it was the right thing to do. We were standing over a bale of straw, surrounded by people dancing to Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and within minutes were hidden in some dark quarter of a vast garden, kissing. Everything was new back then; all we did was react to things.
For some reason, we started climbing a tree, Kate first, me right behind her, just the rustle and scrape of the two of us against the branches and among the leaves. She lost her footing. Flecks of sooty bark puffed into my eyes. I lifted my hand to catch her in case she was about to fall.
“You okay?” I asked, calling up at her.
Even then, within moments of our meeting, I wanted Kate to feel safe. It happened immediately.
“Yes,” she said, and there was a certain stubbornness in her voice that I noticed, and liked, right away. “I’m okay.”
And she kept on climbing.
Saul is talking Mia through the route to Cornwall. When they’re done, I shake her hand, she wishes me well, and he walks her back to the street.
“See you at the weekend,” she calls back to me.
“Yeah. Looking forward to it.”
And five minutes later, we are on our way.
Saul is driving his wideboy Capri, a dark blue V-reg with seventy thousand miles on the clock and a bonnet the size of a Ping-Pong table. Gradually we shunt our way through the preweekend traffic, which has clogged up the M3 from Sunbury right out to Basingstoke. The Capri feels low and heavy against the road. When I lean back in the passenger seat, the darkening sky entirely fills the windshield.
After an hour, the traffic starts to free up and we move at a steady seventy-five. I put on a tape-Radiohead’s The Bends -and watch the flat suburban heartlands flick by.
“You want to get something to eat?” Saul asks, overtaking a caravan. “I was going to stop at the next place we see.”
“Sure.”
It is the first time I have felt like eating in twenty-four hours.
“There’s a McDonald’s at Fleet services,” he says, winding down his window and letting a half-smoked cigarette firework on to the road. “You feel like McDonald’s?”
“Whatever.”
Two miles later, I spot a glowing yellow M hanging low over an off-ramp encased in black trees. Saul comes off the motorway. The passenger-side mirror is not aligned, so I turn around sharply in my seat and look out through the back windshield.
Three vehicles follow us up the exit.
In the car park, Saul swings into a space alongside a gray BMW. The Capri gives a growling cough as he shuts off the engine. Two of the vehicles behind us went straight on to get petrol. The third, a hatchback Volkswagen, has parked seventy feet away, disgorging young children who run gleefully into the building. An Indian woman wearing a sari is stretching nearby, rolling her neck in a slow clockwise loop.
The restaurant is as bright and sterile as the Abnex offices. There are no shadows. People drift about in the white light, fetching straws and napkins. They queue up four deep at the tills, munch Big Macs at clean-wiped tables. Kids are greedy for plastic figurines and pots of ice cream threaded with furls of chocolate sauce. There’s a constant noise of demand.
A middle-aged man standing near me is looking around the place with a flinching bewilderment, as if he has been deposited here by accident from another era. The queue moves quickly. We are flanked by young couples and boys in shell suits, overweight salesmen, and girls in bright pink, too young to be wearing makeup.
At the counter, an acne-soaked teenager in a purple hat takes our order for food. I pass Saul a five-pound note, but he wants to pick up the tab.
“I’ll get it,” he says, pushing my hand away.
Twenty minutes later we are back inside the car, my mood flatly resigned to a long, dark journey with no end until well after midnight. Saul has a polystyrene cup of Coke wedged between his thighs and a postburger cigarette hanging from his mouth. It’s my turn to drive. The Capri feels heavy as I reverse out, as if it, too, has eaten too much, too quickly. Saul clicks in The Bends again and sits back in the passenger seat with a deep sigh. Within ten minutes he is asleep and I just listen to the songs.
And if I could be who you wanted,
If I could be who you wanted
All the time.
The rain starts coming down at around eleven fifteen and doesn’t stop all night. I worry that the heavy car will skid on the road surface and it’s a job to keep my concentration. The motor driving the windshield wipers is sluggish, and as a consequence my vision is constantly blurred by the glare of oncoming headlights refracting through the water-covered glass. Saul naps through all this with heavy catarrh snores and an occasional groan.
The traffic gradually evaporates the closer we come to Bodmin. Now and then a vast, speeding lorry will roar past in the wet, throwing up spray and mud, but otherwise I have the road to myself. There’s just a feeling now of wanting to get there, of the quest for sleep. For fifteen minutes on the Dorchester road, I was tailed by a black Rover, the same make of car that Sinclair was driving when I first met Lithiby. But I am past caring. Let them waste their time. They know where I’m going. They know where to find me.
I wake Saul when we enter Little Petherick, the last village before the turnoff to Padstow. He makes a show of being disturbed, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles like a sleepy child.
“Where are we?”
“London.”
“Seriously.”
“Nearly there. I need you to show me the way.”
“Fucking rain,” he says.
I have pulled the Capri over to the side of the road, the wipers flapping irregularly, left to right, right to left. The tired old engine turns over. Across the street there is a man loitering alone in a bus stop, trapped by the weather. He stares at us from under the peak of his baseball cap, colorless eyes in the wet gloom.
“Take the second left after this village. Sign saying Trevose.”
“Then what?”
He starts imitating Katharine’s voice.
“Road forks, so go real slow,” he says. “Flirt with me awhile, turn right at the traffic lights, and then I’ll leave my husband and elope with you.”
I wheeze a fake laugh.
“It’s easy from here,” he says. “Just head down to the sea. I’ll show you.”
Saul makes coffee when we arrive and I smoke a cigarette in the kitchen as he busies himself finding blankets and towels. The house feels damp. In the distance I can hear steel halyards pinging in the wind against masts. Otherwise, it is utterly quiet.
I like it down here. London makes you forget the simpler pleasures of being away from a city. The loose give of the warming sand after weeks of walking on pavements and hard floors. In the summer that brilliant clean light, and the feeling of salt drying against the skin. Then evening sunsets blink off the surface of the water, like flashbulbs in a floodlit stadium.
Saul comes back into the kitchen.
“I’m not actually all that tired,” he says.
“Me neither.”
“You want a drink? I think there’s a bottle of wine here somewhere.”
