The Only Story(13)
But I don’t feel part of a generation, for a start; and, moved as I am by her story, her history, her pre-history, I still don’t want to go into politics.
We were driving somewhere in my car, a Morris Minor convertible in a shade of mud-green. Susan said it looked like a very low-level German staff car from the war. We were at the foot of a long hill, with no traffic in sight. I was never a reckless driver, but I pushed hard down on the accelerator pedal to get a good run at the gradient. And after about fifty yards I realized something was seriously wrong. The car was accelerating at full throttle, even though I’d now taken my foot off the pedal. Instinctively, I rammed it on the brake. That didn’t help much. I was doing two things at the same time: panicking, and thinking clearly. Don’t ever believe those two states are incompatible. The engine was roaring, the brakes were screaming, the car was beginning to slew across the road, we were going between forty and fifty. It never occurred to me to ask Susan what to do. I thought, this is my problem, I’ve got to fix it. And then it came to me: take the car out of gear. So I put in the clutch, and moved the gear stick to neutral. The car’s hysteria decreased and we coasted to a halt on the verge.
‘Well done, Casey Paul,’ she says. Giving me both names was usually a sign of approval.
‘I should have thought of that earlier. Actually, I should have just switched off the bloody ignition. That would have done it. But it didn’t cross my mind.’
‘I think there’s a garage over the hill,’ she says, getting out, as if such an event were entirely routine.
‘Were you scared?’
‘No. I knew you’d sort it out, whatever it was. I always feel safe with you.’
I remember her saying that, and me feeling proud. But I also remember the feel of the car as it raced out of control, as it resisted the brakes, as it bucked and slewed across the road.
I must tell you about her teeth. Well, two of them, anyway. The middle front ones at the top. She called them her ‘rabbit teeth’ because they were perhaps a millimetre longer than the strict national average; but that, to me, made them the more special. I used to tap them lightly with my middle finger, checking that they were there, and secure, just as she was. It was a little ritual, as if I was taking an inventory of her.
Everyone in the Village, every grown-up – or rather, every middle-aged person – seemed to do crosswords: my parents, their friends, Joan, Gordon Macleod. Everyone apart from Susan. They did either The Times or the Telegraph; though Joan had those books of hers to fall back on while waiting for the next newspaper. I regarded this traditional British activity with some snootiness. I was keen in those days to find hidden motives – preferably involving hypocrisy – behind the obvious ones. Clearly, this supposedly harmless pastime was about more than solving cryptic clues and filling in the answers. My analysis identified the following elements: 1) the desire to reduce the chaos of the universe to a small, comprehensible grid of black-and-white squares; 2) the underlying belief that everything in life could, in the end, be solved; 3) the confirmation that existence was essentially a ludic activity; and 4) the hope that this activity would keep at bay the existential pain of our brief sublunary transit from birth to death. That seemed to cover it!
One evening, Gordon Macleod looked up from behind a cigarette smokescreen and asked,
‘Town in Somerset, seven letters, ends in N.’
I thought about this for a while. ‘Swindon?’
He made a tolerant tut-tut. ‘Swindon’s in Wiltshire.’
‘Is it really? That’s a surprise. Have you ever been there?’
‘Whether I have or not is hardly relevant to the business in hand,’ he replied. ‘Look at it on the page. That might help.’
I went and sat next to him. Seeing a line-up of six blank spaces followed by an ‘N’ didn’t help me any the more.
‘Taunton,’ he announced, putting in the answer. I noticed the eccentric way he did his capital letters, lifting the pen from the page to make each stroke. Whereas anyone else would produce an N from two applications of pen to paper, he made three.
‘Continue mocking Somerset town. That was the clue.’
I thought about this, not very hard, admittedly.
‘Taunt on – continue mocking. Taunt on – TAUNTON. Get it, young fellermelad?’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said nodding. ‘That’s clever.’
I didn’t mean it, of course. I was also thinking that Macleod must certainly have got the answer before he asked me. So then I added an extra clause to my analysis of the crossword – or, as Macleod preferred to call it, the Puzzle. 3b) false confirmation that you are more intelligent than some give you credit for.
‘Does Mrs Macleod do the crossword?’ I asked, already knowing the answer. Two could play at this game, I thought.
‘The Puzzle,’ he replied with some archness, ‘is not really a female domain.’
‘My mum does the crossword with my dad. Joan does the crossword.’
He lowered his chin and looked at me over his spectacles.
‘Then let us posit, perhaps, that the Puzzle is not the domain of the womanly woman. What do you say to that?’
‘I’d say I don’t have enough experience of life to come to a conclusion on that one.’ Though inwardly I was reflecting on the phrase ‘womanly woman’. Was it uxorious praise, or some kind of disguised insult?