those years ago, at the back of The Rose and Crown pub, on the edge of the municipal golf course. I suppose that’s what her laugh reminded me of, and perhaps that’s another of the reasons why the Chinese girl and her mother made such an impression on me that evening.) I don’t know what was making her laugh so much: something to do with the card game, which wasn’t a really silly, childish one like snap, but didn’t seem to be very serious or grown- up either. Perhaps they were playing knock-out whist or something like that. Whatever it was, it was making the little girl laugh, and her mother was playing along with her laughter, encouraging it, joining in, surfing on its waves. It was such a pleasure to look at them, but I had to ration my glances, in case they noticed that I was looking and the Chinese woman decided that I was some kind of creep. Once or twice she had noticed me looking at her and she had held my gaze for a couple of seconds, but it wasn’t long enough, I couldn’t read any kind of invitation into it and after those couple of seconds she looked away and she and her daughter would start talking and laughing again, quickly rebuilding that wall of intimacy, that protective screen.
Right at that moment, I would have liked to text Stuart, but I didn’t have his mobile number any more. I would have liked to text him to say that I understood, now, what it was that he’d been trying to tell me about cars. Cars are like people. We mill around every day, we rush here and there, we come within inches of touching each other but very little real contact goes on. All those near misses. All those might-have-beens. It’s frightening, when you think about it. Probably best not to think about it at all.
Can you remember where you were the day that John Smith died? I suspect that most people can’t. In fact I suspect that many people can’t even remember who John Smith was. Well, there have been a lot of John Smiths, of course, over the years, but the one I’m thinking of was the leader of the British Labour Party, who died of a heart attack in 1994. I realize his death doesn’t have the global resonance of a JFK or a Princess Diana, but I can still remember where I was, with absolute clarity. I was in the canteen of that department store in Ealing, having my lunch. Stuart was with me, and two or three other guys including one called Dave, who was an absolute pain in the arse. He worked in Electrical Goods and was just the kind of man I can’t stand. Loud and boring and much too sure of himself. And sitting at the table next to ours, all by herself, was this lovely woman in her early twenties with shoulder-length, light-brown hair, who looked lonely and out of place and kept glancing in our direction. Her name (as I was to find out, soon enough) was Caroline.
I’d only been working at this department store for a month or two. Before then I’d spent two or three years on the road selling toys for a company based in St Albans. It was a nice enough job, in a way. I became good friends with the other South-eastern rep, Trevor Paige, and we had some great times together, in those two or three years, but I never enjoyed being on the road as much as he did, and it wasn’t long before the novelty of all that travelling had well and truly worn off. I started looking for a chance to settle down. I’d recently put down the deposit on a nice little terraced house in Watford (not far from Trevor’s, as it happened) and was keeping my eyes open for a new job opportunity. The store in Ealing had always been one of my regular calling-points and I’d also made it my business to become friendly with Stuart, who ran the toy department. There’s always something rather artificial, I suppose, about friendships formed for business reasons, but Stuart and I did genuinely grow to like each other, and after a while I tried to make sure that Ealing would be my last call of the day, so that we could go out for a quick drink together after we’d had our meeting. And then one evening Stuart called me at home, outside work hours, and told me that he was being promoted to a job in the office upstairs, and he invited me to apply for his job running the toy department. Well, I hesitated at first, worrying how Trevor was going to react; but in the event, he was fine about it. He knew that it was just what I’d been looking for. So a couple of months later, I found myself working in Ealing full-time, and having lunch every day in the canteen with Stuart and his colleagues, and that was when I started to notice this lovely woman in her early twenties with light-brown hair who always seemed to be eating lunch by herself at the next table.
It all seems like such a long time ago, now. Anything seemed possible, in those days. Anything at all. I wonder if that feeling ever comes back?
Best not to go down that path.
OK, then: the death of John Smith. There was a bunch of us guys in the canteen that day, sitting at one of the Formica-topped tables having our lunch. It was early in the summer of 1994. Don’t ask me if it was sunny or rainy, though, because no sense of the weather outside ever managed to filter through to that dimly lit space. We took our lunches in a sort of perpetual twilight. What was different about that day, however, was that Dave – that’s the obnoxious guy from Electrical Goods, the one I couldn’t stand – had asked Caroline to join us. Clearly, his plan was to try chatting her up, but it was all rather painful to witness because he kept making all the wrong moves. After failing to impress her with a description of his sports car and the state-of-the-art stereo system at his fancy bachelor pad in Hammersmith, he turned to the subject of John Smith’s death – which had been announced on the radio that morning – and started using it as an excuse for a series of bad-taste jokes about heart attacks. Things like this: apparently, following Smith’s first heart attack in the late 1980s, the doctors had been able to revive his heart but not his brain – so was it any wonder that they’d made him leader of the Labour Party? Caroline’s response to this attempt at humour was to persist with the contemptuous silence she had maintained throughout the meal; and apart from some tepid waves of laughter there was no reaction from anyone until I heard myself saying – slightly to my own astonishment – ‘That’s not funny, Dave. Not funny at all.’ Most of the guys had finished their lunches by now, and it wasn’t long before people started getting up and leaving, but not me and Caroline: neither of us said anything, but we both decided to stay behind and linger over our puddings, as if by some sort of unspoken agreement. And so for a minute or two we sat there in awkward, somehow expectant silence, until I made some embarrassed comment about sensitivity not being Dave’s strong point, and then, for the very first time, Caroline spoke.
That was the same moment, I believe, that I fell in love with her. It was her voice, you see. I had been expecting something clipped and ultra-refined to go with her looks, but instead she came out with this really broad, down-to-earth Lancastrian accent. It took me so much by surprise – I was so enthralled by it – that at first I forgot to listen to what she was actually saying, and just let her voice play over me, almost as if she was talking in some mellifluous foreign language. Quickly, though, before I made too disastrous an impression, I pulled myself together and started to concentrate and realized that she was asking me why I hadn’t joined in with the jokes. She wanted to know if it was because I was a Labour supporter and I said, No, it was nothing to do with that at all. I just told her that I didn’t think it was right to make jokes about someone so soon after he had died, especially when he had always seemed to be a decent man and was leaving a wife and a family behind. Caroline agreed with me about that but she also seemed to be sorry about his death for a different reason: she thought that it had come at a terrible time for British politics and said that John Smith would probably have won the next election and might have turned out to be a great Prime Minister.
Well, I admit that this was not the sort of conversation you usually heard in the canteen of this department store, let alone the sort that I very often took part in myself. I’ve never been very interested in politics. (In fact I didn’t even vote in the last two elections, although I did vote for Tony Blair in 1997, mainly because I thought it was what Caroline wanted me to do.) And when I found out, as I soon did, that Caroline was only working in the maternity section of the department store as a temporary measure, while she began work on her first novel, I felt even more out of my depth. I hardly ever read novels, never mind trying to write one. But in a way this only fuelled my curiosity. I couldn’t work Caroline out, you see. After spending all those years on the road, cold-calling people and trying to sell them stuff, I was fairly satisfied with my ability to size people up and decide, in the space of a few seconds, what it was that made them tick. But I hadn’t met many people like Caroline. I’d never been to university (she was a history graduate from Manchester) and had spent most of my adult life in the company of men – businessmen, at that. The kind of people who never gave away much about themselves when they talked and tended to take the status quo for granted. Compared to them, Caroline was an unknown quantity to me. I couldn’t even begin to guess what had brought her here.
She gave me the explanation for that on our first date, and a very sad story it turned out to be. We were in a
