years, was the one I’d needed at the time. The young heart betrayed, the young body toyed with, the young social being condescended to. What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? ‘As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.’ Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?
The time-deniers say: forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened—when these new memories suddenly came upon me—it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.
Of course, I was far too early, so I got off the train one stop before and sat on a bench reading a free newspaper. Or at least, staring at it. Then I took a train to the next station, where an escalator delivered me to a ticket hall in a part of London unknown to me. As I came through the barrier I saw a particular shape and way of standing. Immediately, she turned and walked off. I followed her past a bus stop into a side street where she unlocked a car. I got into the passenger seat and looked across. She was already starting the engine.
‘That’s funny. I’ve got a Polo too.’
She didn’t reply. I shouldn’t have been surprised. From my knowledge and memory of her, outdated though it was, car-talk was never going to be Veronica’s thing. It wasn’t mine either—though I knew better than to explain that.
It was a hot afternoon still. I opened my window. She glanced beyond me, frowning. I closed the window. Oh well, I said to myself.
‘I was thinking the other day about when we watched the Severn Bore.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Do you remember that?’ She shook her head. ‘Really not? There was a gang of us, up at Minsterworth. There was a moon –’
‘Driving,’ she said.
‘Fine.’ If that was how she wanted it. After all, it was her expedition. I looked out of the window instead. Convenience stores, cheap restaurants, a betting shop, people queuing at a cash machine, women with bits of flesh spurting from between the joins of their clothes, a slew of litter, a shouting lunatic, an obese mother with three obese children, faces from all races: an all-purpose high street, normal London.
After a few minutes, we got to a posher bit: detached houses, front gardens, a hill. Veronica turned off and parked. I thought: OK, it’s your game—I’ll wait for the rules, whatever they might be. But part of me also thought: Fuck it, I’m not going to stop being myself just because you’re back in your Wobbly Bridge state of mind.
‘How’s Brother Jack?’ I asked cheerily. She could hardly answer ‘Driving’ to that question.
‘Jack’s Jack,’ she replied, not looking at me.
Well,
‘Do you remember –’
‘Waiting,’ she interrupted.
Very well, I thought. First meeting, then driving, now waiting. What comes next? Shopping, cooking, eating and drinking, snogging, wanking and fucking? I very much doubt it. But as we sat side by side, a bald man and a whiskery woman, I realised what I should have spotted at once. Of the two of us, Veronica was much the more nervous. And whereas I was nervous about her, she clearly wasn’t nervous about me. I was like some minor, necessary irritant. But why was I necessary?
I sat and waited. I rather wished I hadn’t left that free newspaper on the train. I wondered why I hadn’t driven here myself. Probably because I didn’t know what the parking restrictions would be like. I wanted a drink of water. I also wanted to pee. I lowered the window. This time, Veronica didn’t object.
‘Look.’
I looked. A small group of people were coming along the pavement towards my side of the car. I counted five of them. In front was a man who, despite the heat, was wearing layers of heavy tweed, including a waistcoat and a kind of deerstalker helmet. His jacket and hat were covered with metal badges, thirty or forty of them at a guess, some glinting in the sun; there was a watch-chain slung between his waistcoat pockets. His expression was jolly: he looked like someone with an obscure function at a circus or fairground. Behind him came two men: the first had a black moustache and a kind of rolling gait; the second was small and malformed, with one shoulder much higher than the other—he paused to spit briefly into a front garden. And behind them was a tall, goofy fellow with glasses, holding the hand of a plump, Indianish woman.
‘Pub,’ said the man with the moustache as they drew level.
‘No, not pub,’ replied the man with the badges.
‘Pub,’ the first man insisted.
‘Shop,’ said the woman.
They all spoke in very loud voices, like children just let out of school.
‘Shop,’ repeated the lopsided man, with a gentle gob into a hedge.
I was looking as carefully as I could, because that was what I had been instructed to do. They must all, I suppose, have been between thirty and fifty, yet at the same time had a kind of fixed, ageless quality. Also, an obvious timidity, which was emphasised by the way the couple at the back were holding hands. It didn’t look like amorousness, more defence against the world. They passed a few feet away, without glancing at the car. A few yards behind came a young man in shorts and an open-neck shirt; I couldn’t tell if he was their shepherd, or had nothing to do with them.
There was a long silence. Clearly, I was going to have to do all the work.
‘So?’
She didn’t reply. Too general a question perhaps.
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘What’s wrong with
That didn’t seem a relevant reply, for all its acrimonious tone. So I pressed on.
‘Was that young chap with them?’
Silence.
‘Are they care-in-the-community or something?’
My head banged back against the neck-rest as Veronica suddenly let out the clutch. She raced us round a block or two, charging the car at speed bumps as if it were a show-jumper. Her gear-changing, or the absence of it, was terrible. This lasted about four minutes, then she swerved into a parking space, riding up on the kerb with her front nearside wheel before bouncing back down again.
I found myself thinking: Margaret was always a nice driver. Not just safe, but one who treated a car properly. Back whenever it was I had driving lessons, my instructor had explained that when you change gear, your handling of clutch and gear lever should be so gentle and imperceptible that your passenger’s head doesn’t move a centimetre on its spinal column. I was very struck by that, and often noticed it when others drove me. If I lived with Veronica, I’d be down the chiropractor’s most weeks.
‘You just don’t get it, do you? You never did, and you never will.’
‘I’m not exactly being given much help.’
Then I saw them—whoever they were—coming towards me. That had been the point of the manoeuvre: to get ahead of them again. We were alongside a shop and a launderette, with a pub on the other side of the street. The man with the badges—‘barker’, that was the word I’d been looking for, the cheery fellow at the entrance to a fairground booth who encourages you to step inside and view the bearded lady or two-headed panda—he was still leading. The other four were now surrounding the young man in shorts, so he was presumably with them. Some kind of care worker. Now I heard him say,
‘No, Ken, no pub today. Friday’s pub night.’
‘Friday,’ the man with the moustache repeated.
I was aware that Veronica had taken off her seat belt and was opening her door. As I started to do the same, she said,
