The Man Who Travelled on Motorways Read online

  ‘The sun is shining, it’s a brand-new day,’ Tee remarked as I climbed into the car beside her. She had bathed, changed her clothes, and was as fresh and sweet as a summer flower. The muskiness of her perfume filled the car.

  ‘Before long you will see your family,’ I said rather nervously.

  ‘You can stay with us for a few days, can’t you? My mother will love to meet you.’

  ‘I have to go to the Exhibition,’ I reminded her. ‘You can come too, if you like.’ My hands on the wheel had the early morning quality of new pink life, the fine hairs vibrating in the slipstream from the open window. Tee was attending to her nails. They were long ovals, unpainted, and flecked here and there with white.

  ‘Did you happen to notice anyone in the hotel?’ I asked mysteriously. She flashed me her bright, brief smile. ‘Anyone in particular, I mean,’ I continued. ‘Someone on the staff maybe.’

  Tee showed no sign of having heard – or having paid the slightest attention – to my question. The words might have been simply words, without significance or meaning. Her head was bent, her eyelashes charmingly lowered, her whole attention on the task in hand. To cover my embarrassment I said:

  ‘If the sun keeps shining we can improve our tans,’ which amused her immensely; she was not without a certain sense of humour.

  There is nothing quite like riding down the neat clean roads of England in the morning sunshine. Greenery throbbed on either side, a powerful fecund cheeriness and good temper which arouses a sense of what it is to be uniquely English even in the leaden-hearted. This love of my land, of loving England, is much stronger and more substantial than I could ever feel for any person. It is a palpable reality of earth, grass, trees and sky, whereas people are intangible phantoms who only exist insofar as they populate the figments of our imaginations. How can Englishmen help but have pure souls when they inherit such a beautiful country?

  Tee had become silent (unusual!); could she be experiencing sadness at the end of an epoch at Hope? So many late-night meetings in draughty corridors with asthmatic radiators; so many giggling assignations in parked cars; the smell of hospital canteen food, warm and sickly sweet in the nostrils like the odour of small furry mammals herded together in winter quarters – it must have seemed to her that she had left the old dry husk of at least one life at the top of the stairs, third door along, right-hand side.

  Indeed, on closer inspection, it appeared that she was crying. I asked her quietly what was the matter and tried to cheer her up by saying that, never mind, she would soon be home. Evidently this was what I should not have said, for she started shaking and weeping harder.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘hey: I thought we were going to sunbathe.’

  A muffled snort of laughter came in the middle of her tears, and this made her undecided as to whether she should laugh or cry; for a while she did both, drawing in deep shuddering breaths and sniggering down her nose. Then, predictably, she blurted out, ‘I was thinking of the first time we met. That was going to London too. Now I shall be here for good and I shan’t see you again—’

  ‘Of course you will see me,’ I interposed gently.

  ‘But not very often!’ she wailed. ‘Not every week!’

  The handkerchief was held to her nose, pressed between her long pale nails. The skin was creased and puckered at the knuckles; how deeply I felt it then: the heart-felt pang that signalled the end of our relationship. Pointless to delude ourselves; yet if we constantly faced up to life’s realities we should have no desire to keep on living. I had a letter from her not long ago; she is married now, to a man whose first name is Richard.

  CHAPTER II

  BLACK DANCE

  Entering the municipality of Reading down Oxford Road, who should we see but Tee’s mother, a frail bent figure carrying two shopping-bags filled with groceries. Tee skipped across – her high spirits having returned (she was as irrepressible as a bobbing cork) – kissed her mother, and introduced me. The old lady smiled distantly, alone in her world of sickness and pain, weary with the thought that the sun shone so infrequently.

  The house reared up, straight-faced, behind a few square feet of scrubby garden: basement, ground floor, two upper floors and attic occupied by a number of people and children, all of them related to Tee by some devious ancestry, and all of them surprisingly friendly. There was no prejudice that I could detect.

  In the front room, on the mantel, on the radiogram, and on various shelves, hazy colour-retouched photographs in cheap gilt frames of the children accosted the visitor with wide-eyed innocence. Much of the bric-a-brac was second-rate, contrasting dramatically with the image that Tee herself presented: invariably she dressed in the best of taste and was meticulous in matters of grooming and personal hygiene. However, the room was clean, and it was there I waited, being visited at intervals by one or more of the children who peeped shyly round the door, stared unabashed for several moments, and then ran off squealing. Mock shrieks, whisperings and muffled laughter would ensue, followed by yet another pair of lustrous dark-brown eyes edging sideways round the woodwork, never more than three feet from the ground.

  Tee brought me two fried eggs, yolk-hard, on a plate; I made an attempt to eat them, though I wasn’t the least bit hungry. Shortly afterwards I was invited down to the basement where a meal awaited me consisting of chicken, rice, a type of bean with which I was not familiar, and for dessert, fried banana. The family sat round watching me eat – or pretend to eat, because of course by this time I had no appetite whatsoever, least of all for chicken, rice, a type of bean with which I was not familiar, and fried banana. If ever one could be killed by kindness, I was the one.

  A male cousin (uncle? nephew?) of Tee’s smiled at me with his wide mouth, a sympathetic sort of smile that for some unaccountable reason made me faintly uneasy. The presence of her family gave Tee an additional facet somehow out of keeping with the personality that had already jelled in my mind. Leaning against a car parked on the perimeter of a field in the dying days of summer, the grass waist-high, she had pressed herself to me with an absolute sensual abandon that caused white sparks to flash behind my closed eyelids; then running, slipping, stumbling through the long grass I had chased, caught her, and held her to the ground. The throat-catching smell of close-packed growth and insect-life was heavy in our nostrils. The air was like liquefied velvet. At that moment I had looked into her eyes and seen the inverted glassy dome of the sky, fringed by swaying stalks of grass with tops the shape of candle flames. And in that same instant I knew Tee as I had never known another human being; strangely, our ethnic differences seemed to aid rather than hinder my understanding. As darkness came on, the people in the room acquired the characteristics of humped, shrouded silhouettes, the chicken, rice, etc remaining virtually untouched, a centre-piece in the claustrophobic lower room.

  Later it was decided that we should attend a dance, Tee and I, a regular Saturday evening event held in what amounted to little more than a nissen hut. Darkness: I parked the car on a dirt-rutted track running alongside the railway lines and, holding Tee by the hand, danced nimbly round the black pools of water to the wooden entrance steps. Men in sharp suits and pointed shoes reclined hereabouts, eyeing Tee lecherously and me contemptuously, waiting, or so it seemed, for the opportunity to slide a knife between my ribs.

  The place was jammed to the door, a central clearing being used for the terpsichorean meeting of the sexes. Recalling this experience I am tempted to report that the interior of the hall was almost in complete darkness (so my memory informs me), but rationally I do not suppose this to have been the case. More likely it was the heat and sweat and sheer density of human bodies which fostered this impression and imprinted it on my memory cells. Tee, meanwhile, had disappeared to search out an old acquaintance, and I dawdled self-consciously by the door, ignoring the colour of my skin and lighting several cigarettes in rapid succession.

  It is moments such as these which are the stuff of nightmares. For who has not dreamed of
being surrounded, harrassed, encumbered by a multitude of faces ranging from the indifferent to the hostile? Is it any wonder that I hovered nervously near the door, afraid to enter the hall proper and yet too shamefaced to retreat outside to the rutted track and pools of black water with the moon in them?

  We didn’t stay long. When she returned I immediately took her arm and stumbled to the car: I knew what it was like to be a cowboy besieged by Indians.

  ‘You are a funny boy,’ Tee said to me when we had settled down with our drinks in the pub. Her nose and cheeks were shiny, her eyes alive and gleaming, and it hit me then that this was one of our few remaining occasions together. Within days we should see each other no more. The trouble was that I had no other means of revealing the depth of my feeling than by fornicating with her.

  ‘Your mother seems a very nice person,’ I said, enclosing her hand in mine.

  ‘She likes you: all my family like you,’ Tee replied.

  We sat gazing at one another. Her neck was vulnerable, tempting a caress. She read my thoughts: her silky lips parted ever so slightly.

  ‘At any rate you will be near her,’ I said abstractedly, lost in futile wonder at the way this thing suddenly clamps down and shuts off forever an episode of one’s life that will continue to be enacted and re-enacted over and over again, endlessly, ad nauseam. Tee would never advance beyond this point: my memory would trap her in a window-reflecting bubble, a creature of time and space suspended in amber.

  ‘You have made the last two years bearable,’ she said.

  ‘But all thing must come to an end,’ I said inanely.

  ‘You can’t have all your eggs …’

  ‘… on one plate …’

  ‘… and eat them,’ Tee finished, and we burst out laughing. Her command of English had always been suspect, and – because of my profession – the subject of a private joke. That she would from now on be sharing private jokes with other, unknown persons depressed me more than I can say. (She had not, as yet, met Desmond.)

  ‘Never mind, one day you will meet someone and marry him and you will forget the nightdrive to Reading, the hotel, the bell-boy, the dance, the pub, this conversation, me.’ Would this have the calculated effect or would she misconstrue my meaning?

  ‘I don’t remember the bell-boy,’ Tee said out of the blue.

  ‘Of course you remember the bell-boy. He touched your leg, or at least tried to. There was rape in his eyes; you must have noticed.’

  ‘At the dance?’ Tee said, bewildered. Her very pale nails traced the rim of the glass. The moisture gathered under her pink fingertips and she licked it off with a pointed tongue. Her jaw line was firm, almost square from the front: her long brown cheeks were flat planes, raising her cheekbones to support slightly elliptical eyes: her long-limbed stance possessed the awkward grace of a baby gazelle. And above all, what attracted me most powerfully was her complete lack of self-consciousness. In a universe populated by script-readers she ad-libbed her way through life with remarkable facility, never forgetting a line, never missing a cue.

  An old lady came into the bar balancing a hat on her head like a bowl of cherries. The cherries quivered with each faltering step. Tee held her hand in front of her face, laughing politely. However, this old woman reminded me of her own sick mother, whom Tee must have forgotten was at this moment lying in pain in the back room on the ground floor of the house at 312 Oxford Road.

  Difficult to state, but in that instant I really believed that it was our destiny never to be parted; she belonged to me, and I to her, and it was a crying shame that our lives were to diverge at this point.

  Hardly had this thought had time to grow stale when Tee – characteristically one would have thought – rested her head on my shoulder and put her arm around my waist, saying, ‘If you think I’ll ever forget you, you’re mistaken. But what future is there for us? You have a wife and two children; if we had a child it would be a beautiful baby boy with big brown eyes, I would call him Edmund, and our two lives would be merged into his. Two wonky, wriggly paths creating a straight hard road. Can you imagine what he would be like, his two eyes looking out at the world, one yours, one mine, and our two brains combined into one? He would be half me, half you; in a sense we should be sharing the same skin, the two of us sitting in each others’ laps and looking out through the eyes of our child.’

  CHAPTER III

  THE EXHIBITION

  Press Day at Earls Court was a veritable cacophony of scraping, sawing, banging, clanging. Unusually for such a large open area the air was humid, saturating the gangs of workmen roaming the stands in search of a nail to hammer, a terminal to connect, perhaps a cleat-line to adjust. Everything was false-fronted whitewash, with the names picked out in hysterical day-glo. TV cameras on low-slung dollies rolled silently on fat rubber wheels, lenses glinting viciously in the glare of the movable lighting, earphoned lackies carrying thick writhing lengths of cable and following clipboard instructions with their miming lips. Above it all in the lifeless air hung the wrinkled satin flags emblazoned with the manufacturers’ names: Norton, AJS, Honda, Triumph, BSA, Suzuki, Yamaha, etc.

  The stand with which I was involved was nearly, but not quite, finished. The aficionados would see gleaming machines that had taken weeks to polish and bring to this state of perfection, yet the startling fact was that, unbeknown to anybody, nobody had so far ridden any such machine without it getting dirty. Moreover, the ratio of dirt to gleam was 4:1; that is to say that somewhere in an oily workshop a vast amount of filth and rubbish had accumulated – the penalty for having so many immaculate specimens on display. I must confess that this notion choked the breath out of me. The amount of slime requiring disposal in order to produce one clean, decent, respectable human being must be staggering; one wonders where they hide it all.

  I was greeted by Alan Kimber, a man I liked because I respected him. He had a capable, understated manner which gave one immediate confidence in his ability and integrity. As usual he was dressed in the best of professional taste: pale green shirt with unblemished collar and cuffs, a discreet striped tie in the same shade, expertly pressed suit upon which a faint sheen gleamed, and, of course, the essential attribute, the remains of a tan acquired in Cyprus. His voice was calm and well-modulated, bearing the traces of an accent I had never been able to identify.

  Alan liked women (what marketing manager doesn’t?) and cocked an eyebrow as we shook hands. ‘A cousin of yours?’ he asked humorously.

  ‘Distant,’ I replied, playing the part of man-of-the-world-womanising-rake with all the aplomb of the confirmed neurotic.

  ‘The machines look grand,’ I said, sticking my hands in my pockets and placing one foot on the stand. The stiff satin flag hung above our heads, the Japanese word for ‘Smith’ spelled out in crumpled silver letters eleven feet high. ‘It always seems to me,’ I continued, ‘that year after year we arrive here, never progressing or making any headway other than the accumulation of prosperity.’

  Alan stroked his chin with his nicely-kept hand. ‘There’s technical innovation,’ he pointed out. ‘Last year we didn’t have Posi-Force; this year we do. Six gears too. Not many two-strokes can boast the same.’

  A shambling horde of press photographers passed by, scouting for subjects to fill tomorrow’s newspapers. One of them, a slim, small, darkly complexioned man did a double-take on Tee and scuttled across. By this time I had been invited to step behind the make-believe wall of the stand to have a double whisky, but you can bet I drank the whisky with both eyes fixed on what the photographer was doing to Tee. In fact what he did was this: sat her on a machine, made her cross her legs, knelt down himself and clicked away from several different angles. Her legs looked a pasty kind of grey in the stockings she was wearing; but she conjured up the most dazzling of smiles, as though to the manner born, smiling into the black pin-prick pupils of his eyes. He then gave her a card and asked her to call him (this I surmised) at his home number, and maybe – who knows? – step out f
or a drink and a bite to eat one evening. Is there nothing that photographers won’t stoop to?

  ‘… in this industry,’ Alan was saying, ‘it’s very difficult to keep one step ahead of public demand. All the time they want more chrome, more gleam, more gadgetry—’

  ‘Which means more production line wastage,’ I put in, keeping an eye on Tee and the photographer.

  ‘Exactly. Do you know, in Birmingham we have several workshops in which it’s impossible to move because of the filth? All that oil and muck and waste, tragic.’

  ‘Isn’t it the same with human beings?’ I said, pressing home a line of thought. ‘We see immaculate people in the street, sitting in restaurants, riding on buses, and we take it for granted that that’s the natural human condition – but it isn’t. You’ve only got to see a human being after a single night’s sleep: hair matted, eyes congealed, mouth foul, pillow marks on their face, and needing to urinate, defecate, and so on. The amount of work it takes to bring us anywhere near perfection is quite remarkable, if not incredible.’

  ‘You must have rather an odd idea of human beings,’ Alan said, narrowing his eyes and regarding me curiously. ‘Or is that how you yourself look in the morning?’ This last was said gently, with a slightly mocking yet good-natured tone, and it struck me that what in the mouths of some people would be taken as an insult, from others we accept with good-humoured equanimity. Such is the strange magic of personality, or perhaps one should really say ‘character’.

  Enough time had now elapsed for the fact to have sufficiently impressed itself on Tee that I was a person of some importance at the Exhibition. She had had her doubts, even when I had presented my complimentary pass to the commissionaire at the door; though now, surely, the matter was beyond question. I beckoned her to me, knowing that her presence lent my image a romantic flavour. A great number of people live out their lives in the pallid glory of borrowed light, and I more so than most.