I’m drunk, Mark thinks. Poor Mark’s a drunk. And self-pitying; nobody has it as hard as I do. They’ve all got essences and I haven’t! Here am I surrounded by soft centres; I’m an empty shell and nothing in my life will be resolved.
He is resenting the other three so steadily that he is alarmed when Richard gets up suddenly and flees the room.
Iris looks at Mark as if from a mile away. At first he thinks he sees reproval in her face. Perhaps she has heard him thinking. My thoughts, he thinks, must be written all over my face. But Iris hasn’t heard or read a single thing. She smiles and shrugs and says, “I think the poor thing’s gone to throw up. Bless him.”
Peggy is lying on the pleated mat at Iris’s feat. Mark notices she has trodden Stilton into the carpet and has some stuck to the bottom of one shoe.
“He’s such a sweet boy,” Iris adds.
Upstairs a door bangs.
THE KEEN GLARE OF THE SERVICE-STATION RESTAURANT WAS LIKE WALKING into a headache. They had decided they must stop somewhere because Sally had woken up and, although she never said anything, Sam knew she must be starving. It was late. Sam didn’t want to think of herself as a bad mother. When the sign came at them out of the gloom, blue with a knife and fork, she told Bob they ought to stop for a bite to eat before pressing on.
It was bleak inside and the restaurant was high up above the desolate, near-invisible fields. The skeleton staff were wearying and obviously convinced they wouldn’t see home tonight.
Sam slid their trays down the self-service counter, determined to sod the expense. Bob and Sally sleepwalked after her down the yellow tiling. If adults had a full meal, apparently, children could eat their fill for just a penny. It seemed a good deal.
The baked beans had grown a thick, overheated skin and the fish-shaped burgers were slumped in one corner of their sweating glass cabinet.
“It looks lovely,” Sam said. “I’m gagging, aren’t you?”
Tiredly Sally smiled and pretended to ask her Kanga and Roo what they wanted to eat. Heartened by this, Sam quietly asked Bob how much further they had to drive.
He grimaced. “Bloody miles yet. We’re not even half way there. We’ve done about a third of the trip.”
“But we’ve been driving hours!”
“Slowly. And—” his face darkened— “while you were napping I took a couple of wrong turns.”
“I wasn’t napping. Fish, chips and beans three times, please. One’s a child’s portion. I was wide awake the whole time.”
Bob shrugged. He was too tired to argue. By now he knew Sam well enough to know that it would become something to argue about. She was no longer the demanding manageress beside the cardboard crusher. He was learning how that demanding, demonstrative nature exerted itself in all areas of her affairs. So he gave in.
But as Sam shunted their trays up the line, and stung her fingers on the hot plates as they were passed across the counter to her, she realised that he was right. She had been dreaming that she was on a boat. A strange sort of boat, low down, on black water. More of a raft, really, and she was lying down, with two others. There was room only for three of them, and they had to paddle with their hands. It rocked wildly and for some reason they were in a hurry to get somewhere. Sally was beside her, fast asleep, and so she had to paddle harder. Someone else was on Sally’s other side, but Sam couldn’t see. She had to concentrate. The water was oily and the night was grim. The dream went on without rhyme or reason, without narrative. They paddled and held on for dear life.
When they sat at their table and Sam did her usual trick of packing her handbag with packets of sugar and the cheap, bendable cutlery, Bob said, “We might have to turn around.”
“What?” Sam was thinking about how she always ended up in motorway services. Wherever she went, no matter how much of a good time she thought she might have, she always arrived somewhere like this. They went, not on holidays, but on coach trips for the day. And days always ending with a sleepy cup of tea and fiddling under neon strip lights with cartons of UHT milk. The plastic lips always broke off in her fingers and she had to risk a nail to puncture the lid.
“We might have to give up. Turn round and go back to Leeds for tonight.”
She looked at Bob and she realised he looked hounded. What would he be doing, she thought, if he weren’t here with us? Beside him Sally was suddenly alert, listening. But was she distressed or hopefully? Sam couldn’t tell.
“There’s a motel-thing here,” Sam said, hitting on a brain wave. “If we can’t go on.” She wasn’t going back to Leeds. What was the bloody point? She certainly wasn’t going to that Tony’s house and knocking on the door. Not back to the enemy, because that was what he was. And not back to where Mark was, either, because…because Mark had suffered enough.
The thought was a novel one. She knew Mark would be delighted to see them, cold and soggy on the doorstep, asking to come in. It wasn’t to deprive him of his joy or triumph that she wouldn’t do it. It was because, she realised, she couldn’t bear to wrest Sally from him again.
“A motel?” Bob was saying, an edge to his voice now. “Sam, I’m not made of money.”
She felt this like a slap. It hit a raw nerve. Of course she never thought that, never assumed that, never really wanted that. Now the look on his face said he thought she had. That all she wanted was a nice motel. The sign outside had said en suite bathrooms,
