‘Maxwell was telling us that he is going to Shetland to sell toothbrushes. Beautiful, wooden toothbrushes.’
‘Wooden?’ she said, her concentration gradually appearing to return.
‘Perhaps this idea will … appeal to you,’ I said, hesitantly, trying hard to find the right words. ‘My company, you see, is not a big corporation. In fact we’re fighting against the big corporations. We’re a small company, and whenever we can, we commission our brushes from other small companies. This beautiful brush was made in Lincolnshire, by local craftsmen – part of a family business.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘May I see?’
I passed her the brush, and she turned it over in her hands, slowly, reverently, again and again, as if she had never seen such a wondrous object in all her seventy-nine years. When she gave it back to me – unless I was imagining it – her eyes had cleared, and were shining at me with a new, rejuvenated light.
‘You can … You can have that if you like.’
‘Really?’
Unexpectedly, she pulled back her top lip, to reveal teeth which were yellowing but otherwise complete, strong and healthy.
‘These are all mine, you know. I clean them three times a day.’
‘Here you are, then. Here you are – take it.’
Perhaps I am being fanciful now. Perhaps my memory of that day is playing tricks on me. But as that exquisite toothbrush was passed back from my hand to hers, in the rapt silence of Miss Erith’s flat high above the city of Lichfield, with Dr Mumtaz Hameed looking on benignly, smilingly, I felt that what was taking place was almost a religious ceremony. That we were doing something – what is the word? – that we were doing something you might almost describe as – yes, I know … sacramental.
There, I told you I was being fanciful. It was definitely time to say my farewells, and get back to the car. Back to Emma, to the motorway, and reality.
15
I had a late lunch at a place called the Caffe Ritazza at Knutsford Services. I’d driven slowly from Lichfield, trying to conserve petrol, and it was after 2.30 by the time I arrived there. The cafe (or should that be caffe?) was on the first floor, quite close to the bridge connecting the two halves of the service station, so I was able to get a small table near the windows and watch the traffic going by. While I was eating and watching the traffic, I thought about Dr Hameed and Miss Erith, driving to their country pub and enjoying a nice lunch together while lamenting the slow death of the England they both remembered. I wasn’t sure whether I agreed with them about that. I supported the ethos of Guest Toothbrushes, of course, but all the same – speaking personally – I really like the way you can drive into almost any city nowadays and be sure of finding the same shops and the same bars and the same restaurants. People need consistency in their lives, don’t they? Consistency, continuity, things like that. Otherwise everything just gets too chaotic and difficult. Supposing you drive into a strange town – Northampton, say – and it’s full of restaurants whose names you don’t recognize. So you have to take a punt on one, just on the basis of what the menu looks like and what you can see through the window. Well, supposing it’s shit? Isn’t it better to know that you can go to any random town in the country and find the nearest Pizza Express and have an American Hot with extra black olives? So that you know exactly what you’re getting? I think so. Maybe I should have gone for lunch with them and argued the point. In fact, why hadn’t I done that? It wasn’t true, as I had told Dr Hameed, that I was pushed for time. Actually I had at least two hours to spare. But again – just like last night, when Mr and Mrs Byrne had asked me to stay to dinner – I had fought shy of the chance to have a face-to-face meal with someone. When was I going to get over this? When would I start finding it easy to have a normal conversation again? As it happened, I’d attempted one just now, with the girl in Caffe Ritazza who had served me my lunch. She gave me a strange look when I asked for a tomato and mozzarella panino, so I launched into my explanation of how panini was actually a plural word and it was grammatically incorrect to ask for one, single panini. I’d become quite obsessed with this fact, recently (as well as by the fact that nowhere seemed to serve toasted sandwiches any more, only panini – even in Knutsford, for God’s sake). The idea was that it might trigger some lighthearted banter between us, perhaps about the way that England was slowly becoming more European, or declining standards in education or something, but her initial response was to give me such a hostile and suspicious look that at first I thought she was going to call Security. Eventually she did say something, but even then her only comment was ‘I call them paninis’, and that was an end of it. She obviously wasn’t the bantering type.
It was quite relaxing and hypnotic, sitting there watching the traffic going by under the motorway services bridge. It reminded me again of my friend Stuart, and how he’d had to stop driving because he was freaked out by the idea that millions of traffic accidents were only averted every day by a matter of inches or seconds. Watching the northbound traffic on the M6, you could see his point. Nobody seemed to think anything of taking life- threatening risks, just to shave a couple of minutes off their journey. I started to count the number of times people pulled out without indicating, or overtook on the inside lane, or tailgated someone remorselessly, or cut in on another car without giving it enough space. After I’d counted more than a hundred such incidents I suddenly realized that I had been sitting there for more than an hour, and it was time to finish driving up to Kendal.
I didn’t mind the repetition. I still liked just hearing the sound of her voice. I wasn’t feeling very talkative myself, so every few minutes I would throw out some casual remark to her – ‘Crossing the Manchester Ship Canal now, look’, or ‘those must be the Pennines over to the east’ – and would press the ‘Map’ button on the steering wheel to elicit her reply. The rest of the time, I preferred to be alone with my thoughts.
I thought about Lucy, first of all. Why did people have children in the first place? Was it a selfish act, or a supremely unselfish one? Or was it just a primal biological instinct that couldn’t be rationalized or analysed? I couldn’t remember Caroline and I discussing whether to have children or not. To tell the truth, our sex life had never been very lively, anyway, and after a couple of years’ marriage we just reached a tacit agreement that we would stop using contraception. Conceiving Lucy had been an impulse, not a decision. And yet, as soon as she was born, life without her became unimaginable. My own theory – or one of them – was that once you started to hit middle age, you became so jaded and unsurprised by life that you had to have a child in order to provide yourself with a new set of eyes through which to view things, to make them seem new and exciting again. When Lucy was small, the whole world to her was like a giant adventure playground, and for a while that was how I’d seen it too. Just taking her to the toilet in a restaurant became a voyage of discovery. Even now, for instance, when I saw all those trucks overtaking me (I was in the inside lane, with the cruise control stuck at 62 miles per hour), I felt a pang of longing to have the seven- or eight-year-old Lucy with me again, to play the game we always used to play on motorway journeys, the game where you had to guess which country the truck was from by looking at the writing on the side and trying to identify the names of the foreign cities. A game at which she had been surprisingly –
‘Oh, shit!’ I shouted out loud.
