Going Away and Other Stories Read online

  Doreen couldn’t seem to move from the armchair. She crumpled the piece of paper and let it drop on the floor. Two minutes later she looked at it and wondered where it had come from.

  A little later Barry came through from the kitchen and stood and looked at his mother.

  ‘I heard you crying . . . Why are you crying, Mum?’ he asked. ‘Is it something to do with that lady?’

  The Sergeant was called in to see the Superintendent.

  ‘You’ve heard that the motorist has died and the cyclist is on the critical list?’

  The Sergeant nodded.

  ‘Potentially we have two actions against this police force. It’s a serious matter, Bill. Why on earth did you send young Kevin out with a speed gun and leave him unsupervised?’

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do with him, sir. He’s not very good at anything.’

  ‘My very point, Bill! And then why on earth did you park your car on a blind corner?’

  ‘It was in the course of duty, sir. I was rushing to the scene of an incident. I parked tight up against the hedge and put the hazard warning lights on!’

  The Superintendent sighed. Like many in positions of authority before him he could see himself taking the blame for all this even though he’d had nothing directly to do with it.

  Just before he went home for the evening, PC Kevin Long heard the terrible news that the cyclist had also died in hospital. He simply couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t thought that she was that seriously injured!

  When he got home, his mother thought he was very quiet. Eventually she asked him what the matter was.

  ‘Woman cyclist hit me while I was doing a speed-gun trap. She fell off and died later in hospital.’

  ‘Oh,’ said his Mum. ‘Well, not your fault!’

  ‘Suppose not. Just happened!’

  While his mother was washing up, he went quietly up to his bedroom and found the girly magazine he’d been looking at the previous night. He put it into an old plastic carrier bag and then crept down the stairs and out into the back yard. He stuffed it right down into the bottom of the rubbish bin and put the lid back on the bin. He then stood for several minutes as the darkness was falling with his eyes closed.

  Going Away

  The taxi fare from his flat to the Club was always about five bob. It seemed to stay at that for years. And then with metrication (or was it decimalisation?) it started to creep up and up and then it was about five pounds. He had started taking the tube a long time ago: much cheaper. And for ages now, it had cost him nothing at all as he had his pensioner’s travel pass. And the subscription to the Club had gone down too, as he was over 75 and had been a member for such a long time. Just as well, too, with interest rates being so low and the stock market at rock bottom, seemingly for ever!

  The walk through St James’s Park from the Underground station to The Mall was really most pleasant. He always stopped on the bridge over the lake and looked first to the left at the fountains and the Palace, and then to the right. And when he turned to the right he always thought of Churchill and the war. And now there was that funny wheel thing in the sky, called for some reason ‘The Eye’. Quite nice, really. But in the spring and in the summer, as it now was, there were all these tourists messing up the park. Hardly another English person to be seen. And smelly hot dog stalls, even though there was a big notice saying they were unauthorised and you were likely to get food poisoning from them. Funny that people still ate from them. It was because none of them could read English, he supposed. And their dress was appalling. For instance, baseball caps worn back to front, funny T-shirts and flappy shorts below the knee for the men. And all the females had on either jeans or tight black trousers.

  One had to keep up appearances in spite of what the rest of the world was doing. In the old days he’d always worn a bowler hat, of course, and when they went out of fashion, a trilby; never a panama, not to the Club. And the only concession for a heat wave, as was now the case, was to leave off the waistcoat. And a rolled umbrella always.

  An Indian girl in a very low-cut top and the usual tight black trousers rushed across his path laughing and giggling with two small Indian children. For a moment he was reminded of his divorce those long years ago. He’d been so stupid to fight it; but it had seemed so unfair. Accused of cruelty. In those days, everything had to come out in open court and he’d been terrified; but after the barrister had said to the judge, ‘There is, I’m afraid, some bad sexual evidence here, m’lud,’ he’d then fortunately continued, ‘Perhaps I could hand it up to you rather than read it out in open court? I gather that part of the evidence is not contested.’ Even though there’d not been much about it in the papers, he’d felt for years that people in the Bank had looked at him strangely. Nowadays! – well, it would have been quite different. Nobody would care. And after Marion’s departure and her money no longer available, it had been a sad do. But there was the MBE for his charitable work. The medal stood in its open case in the china cabinet in his flat.

  An interminable wait at the traffic lights in The Mall and then up to the Marlborough Gate and into St James’s Street. Goodness, it was hot. He mopped his brow discreetly as he deposited his hat and umbrella in the cloakroom, and then again in the bar as the barman poured him his usual dry sherry.

  ‘Be closed in another week. Where are you going away to?’ the other man at the bar enquired.

  He had forgotten that the Club would be closed for an entire month so soon.

  ‘Don’t know yet. Have to get out of London for August, I suppose. Even more foreigners then than there are now, and that’s saying something!’

  ‘Dead right, old chap. Terrible, isn’t it? Not what we fought the war for. Invaded by everyone now!’

  ‘Too true.’

  He hadn’t really thought of it that way before; but old Smithy was right. But he didn’t want to go on talking to him for any longer than necessary and looked round hopefully for his friend, John. There he was, just coming into the entrance hall. He waved through the doorway to him and went and sat in an armchair. John would soon come in. But when John came into the bar he had a friend with him.

  ‘See you tomorrow – lunching with my old pal Peter Mills today. He’s come up from Brighton specially.’

  Ah, well! It would have to be the members’ table, then. He ordered his favourite, even though it was a bit heavy for the hot weather – cod’s roe followed by steak and kidney pudding, with a small carafe of the Club’s claret.

  A member he did not know at all came and sat beside him. He seemed quite young, must be a new chap, fifty at most, very dark, black pinstriped suit, black hair.

  ‘Going away soon?’ the young man enquired.

  ‘Hope to,’ he said. His mind wandered to the hotel he used to stay at in Devon. It had changed ownership two years ago and he hadn’t liked to go since. Last August, he’d gone to see his sister, but she had died in the spring.

  ‘I’m off to Tuscany with the family for three weeks. Wonderful! Ever been?’

  ‘Er … no,’ he said.

  ‘You should try it!’

  ‘I’d certainly like to get out of London in August with all these tourists here.’

  ‘Bit of a pain, I agree, but good for balance of payments, you know!’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He really must go away, he thought, as an hour later he walked down St James’s Street. The heat rose from the pavement into his face. His collar felt very tight and sweat began to trickle down his chest.

  In the park the tourists still milled around, it seemed in even greater numbers, and as he walked down the path he was beginning to feel slightly sick and his head was pounding. He came to the bridge and leant on the railings with his head down.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ a voice was saying.

  No, he didn’t really think he was. He shook his head.

  ‘Come over here where there’s a bit of shade and sit down on the grass, sir, and you will feel better.’

&nb
sp; He looked at the man who was leading him gently by the arm. He was Chinese!

  ‘Just sit down, or maybe you would prefer to lie. I will roll my jacket up and put it under your head.’

  How very kind, he thought. Yes, he did feel much more comfortable lying down with his hat off and something under his head.

  ‘I’m a doctor. May I please feel your heart and your pulse?’

  ‘Er, yes, of course. I don’t feel too good. Must be the heat. I think you’re a sort of Good Samaritan.’ But then he thought, silly thing to say – a Chinese chap wouldn’t know about the Bible.

  He saw the trees and the sky above his head and felt the doctor loosening his collar and saying something about he’d called for an ambulance on his mobile phone. But it didn’t really matter; he was going away and it would be all right then. The trees and the sky looked like Devon already. And he was definitely going … going away … Gone.

  I Blamed the Oysters

  Driving off Le Shuttle at Calais I started to regret what I was doing. It so disturbed me that I almost took the wrong autoroute, the A16 southwards instead of the A26 eastwards. My sudden change of direction prompted a great deal of Gallic hooting and I could hear Jean’s voice in my head saying crossly, ‘Why on earth don’t you get a satnav?’ I quickly blocked her voice out and tried to enjoy the views of the French countryside. It was early May and everything looked beautifully fresh and green. But glimpses of lines of crosses marking the war cemeteries reminded me of what I had come to do.

  I arrived at the hotel I had been aiming for in Châlons-en-Champagne just in time for dinner. In spite of its wonderful wines, I had never thought much of the countryside of Champagne. But I’d been told that the food at this hotel was excellent and indeed it proved to be and the whole evening cheered me up considerably. The head waiter who took my order spoke almost perfect English so I did not have to struggle with my very limited and rusty French. The dinner proceeded slowly. I had pâté de foie gras, a veal dish with a creamy sauce, cheese and a chocolate dessert; very bad, no doubt, for my cholesterol at the age of 45 but meticulously and elegantly served by a beautiful waitress. Well, she seemed beautiful to me; she might not have appealed to everyone. She was short and thin and had long black hair, which kept falling over her small dark face as she leant over to serve, so that she had to keep brushing it back. Why didn’t she use a hairclip? I wondered. I suppose because she thought the falling hair made her attractive. As she pushed it back she always smiled at me and from time to time she spoke a word or two of English, such as, ‘You’re welcome’. But I had the feeling this was all supposed to be a joke between us. At the end of the meal I asked her her name.

  ‘They call me Mimi,’ she said and laughed. Was this another joke? I wondered.

  Pleasantly fortified by the meal and a large Armagnac afterwards, I lay in bed and thought about Mimi for some time before I went to sleep.

  In the morning I awoke with a terrible headache. Whether this was caused by having too much to drink or the anxiety of what lay ahead of me I was not sure. I had hoped to see Mimi at breakfast but she was obviously not on duty, so I consoled myself with three cups of black coffee and a yoghurt. But when I came to pay the bill, my dinner, I noticed, had proved rather expensive!

  And so, rather later than I had intended, I set out for my destination; an obscure village somewhere to the south and east of Troyes. I inevitably got lost and had to stop and buy one of those yellow-covered Michelin local maps before I found it. Why didn’t I buy a satnav? I suppose because I just like map-reading; although it is difficult when driving on your own.

  I assumed the graveyard would be somewhere near the church but I could see no sign of it as I stopped in the village square. An old lady dressed in black was locking the church door, as it was just after midday. She waddled across the square and went into into a small house, slamming the door behind her. I did not feel an enquiry about the whereabouts of the graveyard by knocking on her door would be at all welcome. Several people were, however, disappearing through the doorway of a bar/restaurant on the other side of the square. I could ask in there. It looked a run-down sort of a place from the outside and, even worse as I entered through a small cloud of buzzing flies. It was already crowded. A lady approached me and before I could ask the whereabouts of the cemetery, snapped, ‘Pour déjeuner, Monsieur? Ici, s’il vous plaît,’ and I was almost pushed down into the third of four chairs at a table covered with a plastic tablecloth at which an elderly French couple were already seated, starting to eat plates of soup. They both gave me a faint smile. A few seconds later a large carafe of red wine and a jug of water were plonked in front of me together with a metal dish of sliced French bread, followed rapidly by a bowl of soup.

  Ah well! I hadn’t had much breakfast. The soup was delicious. By the time I’d eaten a meat course and some cheese I realised I’d drunk the whole carafe of wine. It was replaced by another. I thought of what I had to do and drank two more glasses. Then all I wanted to do was to go to sleep. I even wondered if they had bedrooms to let upstairs but then a fly alighted on the cheese I was eating and I looked at the plastic tablecloth and the shabby wall coverings and decided against it. So, when the serving lady came and asked me for what seemed a trivial amount in Euros for the meal, I asked the whereabouts of the cemetery. It was apparently about half a kilometre down the lane which led off the left of the square.

  As I made my way to the car I wondered if I was fit to drive; but there was not far to go!

  The cemetery was on the left-hand side of the lane and surrounded by a low wall. I parked just beyond the cemetery wall on a patch of grass beside a vast field of maize which stretched almost as far as I could see. There was a faint noise from an autoroute in the distance beyond it. Apart from that everything was quiet.

  I opened the metal gate which led from the lane through the wall of the cemetery. There was a lady on her knees by the side of the path that led between the graves, arranging flowers on one of them. Where did I start to look? I kept walking down the path but everyone seemed to have died in the last century. Had I come to the wrong place? Then I saw that the end of the path led into a newer bit of the cemetery. Eventually I found it. There was a small headstone inscribed in English, ‘Rose. Taken from us aged 5’. No surname, just the date of her death. This was what I had come to see. But all I could feel, no doubt fuelled by the amount of wine I had drunk, was absolute rage. The faint noise of the autoroute in the distance annoyed me still further.

  ‘You miserable bitch!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Taken from us? You took her from me, you cow!’

  I went and punched the wall of the cemetery in my fury and then licked my grazed and bloody knuckles. I leant against the cemetery wall and thought of Rose, aged maybe 2½, shrieking with laughter as she slid down the back of our sofa and Jean and I laughing too to encourage her to do it again. Rose’s chubby little legs were so sweet then and now they were rotting away in that grave over there. I realised I should have bought some flowers, but I hadn’t. I went and picked five daisies from a patch of grass and put them on the grave but the wind blew them away almost at once so I had to pick five more and put a stone on top of the stems. Had Jean done the wording deliberately? Probably. She’d done everything to keep me from Rose in life after she’d taken her away and until a week ago had even kept the whereabouts of her grave a secret. I thought bitterly about the email I’d received at my office last December.

  ‘Regret Rose died today. Jean.’

  I leant against the cemetery wall, gazed over the field of maize and remembered the day two years ago. For months previously Jean had become more and more critical of me. She said that I ate and drank too much, was indecisive, weak and self-deluding and didn’t stand up to other people. Also, I spent too much time running my architectural practice and not enough time with her and Rose. Some of the criticism was undoubtedly true. But I’d always been like that and Jean never seemed to mind when I first knew her and we spent the w
eekends together. I suppose it’s when you live with someone all the time that they start annoying you.

  It was Rose’s birthday. We were sitting at home in the kitchen having breakfast. It was raining very hard outside. Jean was reminding me yet again that she expected me home early by four o’clock in time for Rose’s birthday tea. She was having a few small friends round and there was to be a cake with candles.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, ‘it’s in my diary.’

  And then my mobile rang. It was the sort of call that any architect dreads. The office block I had just designed and had built for a very well-known public company was leaking. Not just through the roof but on every one of the eight floors there was water falling like rain through the ceilings. The staff who had arrived early for work had been sent home. Computers, desks and carpets were all going to be ruined. I remember looking at the red and white checked tablecloth and the squares seemed to dance before my eyes.

  ‘I must go,’ I said to Jean. ‘There’s been a disaster at that new office block; water is pouring through all the ceilings.’

  Jean gave me what I would call a ‘steady’ look. It was not at all sympathetic.

  ‘Well, mind you’re back in time for Rose’s party,’ she said.

  Unfortunately the office block was thirty miles away from where we lived and it took me two hours to get there as the roads were flooded. When I arrived it was worse than I’d feared.

  The Managing Director of the company greeted me with, ‘Ah, here you are at last! Frankly, I’ll kill whoever is to blame for this. The builder’s late too. For God’s sake sort it out between you!’

  I thought – I must be to blame. I had designed the building and supervised the builders. There would probably be a negligence claim against me for millions of pounds! I paced through the building floor by floor with an umbrella over my head and my feet squelching on the soaking carpets while the builder’s men removed panels from the false ceilings and swore a great deal.