When he reaches the bedroom he pauses, stands and looks at the urn in his hands for a long time before finally placing it amongst the black-framed pictures on the narrow mantel, sliding them left and right to make room. Past selves smile out at him in grainy colour and black-and-white, and he suddenly realises that he can’t remember the last time he looked at any of these photographs. He picks up one of them and tilts it so the light from the lamp can help him to pick out the detail. His eyes aren’t what they were.
They are on a beach that yawns away beneath a dark strip of sea. The sun is low in the sky and she is smiling broadly. She looks so young. His hair is thick and his forehead is smooth. It’s years ago.
Brittany. He remembers it. He’d picked up a lead on an exhaust in Rennes, and she’d suggested that they make it a long weekend away, so they’d taken the car over on the ferry from Portsmouth. After they’d picked up the exhaust and politely admired the man’s mausolitic fleet, they’d driven back through low countryside bruised with heather and found a sweltering room at the tiny Hôtel Petit Bretagne, then they’d eaten, slept and walked together until the sun was long dead. They were young then, not long married. He remembers enjoying the weekend.
He picks up another photo, but in this one she isn’t smiling. Not properly. She’s trying, but the sun is in her eyes and her hair is being whipped across her forehead by one of the winds that scour in off the Channel. The smile’s there, if you look, but she’s wearing it like a uniform. Where was it taken? Brighton? Hastings? He doesn’t remember.
Was he even there, behind the camera? Or was he in a van, being bullied by Parisians on the Périphérique, on his way to beg and barter a headlamp or a carburettor out of some pinched, mean-spirited collector?
Something begins to nag at him, a vague feeling that refuses to solidify and remains perceptible only on the fringe of his awareness.
Before he goes to bed he lays out a skirt and blouse on the back of the chair, like she used to before the chemotherapy dredged the strength from her limbs, and he wonders why he’d never done it for her before. Outside, a dog barks. He lies down, then he turns to the side and says goodnight to the space in the bed where she used to be.
He hunches his shoulders on the way to work, braces himself against the world. The wind has shifted, northerly, and it sends thick fleets of clouds scudding across the sky in its path. He arrives at the workshop after what seems no time at all, and he has to check his watch to convince himself that any time has passed since he left the house. He realises he has no memory of the journey.
The workshop reeks of a disappearing age, the heavy scent of grease sharpened by an overnote of thinners and a bass drone of cigarette smoke. Chipped workbenches hug the walls, covered in bolts and bulbs and fossilised spark plugs, while dark gargoyles of metal hide in corners and peer out from beneath heavy tarpaulins. Two fragmented cars occupy the centre of the workshop like ruined castles, one elevated on a lift to allow access to its underside. A third vehicle shelters beneath a soft cloth cover closer to the back. Terry crouches beneath the elevated car, working a wrench at its filthy belly. When he notices John, he lays down the wrench and wipes his hands with a rag.
“How are you doing?” he asks. His face is already streaked with grime, and when he frowns dark lines fire across his forehead.
“Oh, you know,” says John.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” says Terry, “We can manage without you if — you know, if you need some time. Craig says he can do Saturdays if we need him to.”
“No, no, I’m fine. Probably best if I keep busy.”
Terry’s an old friend. The oldest. He was the one who suggested they go into business together all those years ago.
You and me, buying old cars, fixing them up and selling them on! We’ll make a pile! We’ll get a workshop! It’ll be great! What do you say?
It’s a hobby for John, really. He put most of the money in up front, and he tinkers at the machinery, but Terry’s the one who really knows what he’s doing.
He climbs into heavy overalls and turns the kettle on.
“Craig in yet?” he says.
“Not yet.”
Craig is Terry’s son-in-law. They took him on last year, and they tell each other it was just to give him a chance, just to get him started on a career, never admitting to one other that the heavy lifting is starting to hurt the old back, that the close-in work is starting to strain the old eyes.
John brews two cups of strong tea and hands one to Terry, then he walks over and slides the tarpaulin off the car near the back of the workshop. Terry walks up and stands beside him, sipping his tea noisily.
“Got some good news for you,” says Terry, nudging him with his elbow.
“Oh?”
“Bill told me some Arab drove his Facel into the back of a lorry at about sixty over the weekend. Completely wrote it off. So I’ve got him to buy what’s left of it for us and ship it over. From what he says it’ll give you pretty much the rest of the bits you need.”
“Doesn’t he want to get it repaired?”
“Nah, he’s some oil sheikh; he’ll just buy something else. Bill says the guy told him he was getting bored with it anyway. Bored! Can you believe that?”
John looks at the car. Sleek and muscular, heavier than its size suggests, the chassis
