The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (22 page)

‘Well …’ I had never really thought about this, I must say. And besides, I wasn’t very interested in politics either. ‘We never really talk about stuff like that. Our relationship is sort of based on … other things.’

Miss Erith was closing her eyes, now. I wondered at first whether she was about to nod off, but it seemed that this was an attempt at recollection instead.

‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that I’m an old lefty, and always will be. Ever since I started reading George Orwell and E. P. Thompson and people like that. Whereas your father had no political awareness at all. That’s why it’s probably a good thing that we never went on our trip together, because we were going into it for completely different reasons.’

‘You were planning a trip?’ I asked politely, hoping this wasn’t going to trigger a long reminiscence.

‘There was a book called
Narrowboat
. Quite a famous book in its day. Rolt was the author’s name – Tom Rolt. I’ve still got it on the bookshelf over there. He and his wife bought this narrowboat back in the thirties and lived on it for a few months, going up and down the canals. Then he wrote all about it and he published this book in the 1940s and the amazing thing about it is that it mentions my father’s shop: because I grew up on the canals, you know, and my father used to have a shop at Weston, where all the barges used to stop every day. He sold everything: every kind of rope and line you could think of, every kind of food, all sorts of tobacco, and then lamps, crockery, saucepans, clothes – you name it. And shelves and shelves of sweets for the children, of course. Such an Aladdin’s cave, it was! And the boats used to be stopping all the time, we got to know all the canal folk – it was a whole world, a different world, a secret world, with its own codes and rules. Just a tiny little shop, the front room of a thatched cottage in a row of other cottages, and I must have served behind the counter from when I was about eight or nine years old. Dad would have been amazed to know his shop was mentioned in this famous book but of course he didn’t read books like that – or any sort of book, really – so he never knew anything about it. And I didn’t find out until years later. I left home when I was sixteen, you see, to be with this man – a bargeman he was, naturally – and a year later I’d had my first baby and we left the canals and started living not far from here, in Tamworth, but we never got married – that was a bit of a scandal, I can tell you – and a couple of years later we had another baby and then this man left me. Well, I booted him out, if you must know, because he was a dead loss, really, never got a job or anything, used to spend all his time down at the pub or chasing other women – after a while I decided he was more trouble than he was worth. So there I was, in the early 1950s, living all by myself in a poky little flat with two small children, and the only thing I could do to stop myself from going crazy was to start reading. Of course I’d hardly had any education to speak of, but the Workers’ Educational Association was very strong, in those days, and I used to go to lectures and meetings and all sorts of things. And actually I did manage to go to university in the end, but that was when I was almost forty and so that’s another story entirely. Anyway, that was how I started reading books and I can’t remember how old I was when I read
Narrowboat
but I know that my mum and dad were both dead by then because I would have loved to tell them that their shop was mentioned in the book and I never did.’

While she was pausing for breath, Mumtaz said: ‘Do try to keep to the point, Margaret. You were supposed to be telling us something about Max’s father. Now none of us can remember what you were talking about.’

She gave him a pointed stare. ‘Well,
I
can remember. The thing was that Harold and I made this plan, you see, that we were going to hire a narrowboat ourselves for a few weeks, and follow the same route that this man Rolt and his wife had taken. We were going to do it in 1989, exactly fifty years after they’d set off. The idea was that we’d visit all the same places and see how things had changed in the meantime. Well, that was
my
idea, anyway. All Harold wanted to do, I’m sure, was sit on the roof of the boat looking at the clouds and daydreaming and writing his precious poems. But for me, you see, the point about Tom Rolt’s book – and
this
’ (fixing Mumtaz with another stare) ‘is why I’m telling you about it – is that it’s not just a book about canals at all. It’s one of the most amazing books about England ever written. Rolt was a very interesting man – a man with very strong beliefs – and although I dare say he was a bit of a Tory in his politics he was also into green issues years before the term had been invented. And do you know what he saw – way back in 1939? He saw a country that was
already
quite happily allowing itself to be killed off by the power of the big corporations.’

Mumtaz rolled his eyes and gave a comically theatrical sigh. ‘Oh, I see. Now I get it. Watch this carefully, Maxwell,’ he said, holding up a finger in warning, ‘because you are about to see a woman climbing on board her hobbyhorse, and once that happens, you are never going to be able to get her off again. We are going to be here for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, I tell you.’

‘It’s not a hobbyhorse,’ Miss Erith insisted, ‘and I’m not going to climb on board it. All I’m saying is that, if you read that book, you’ll understand a bit more of what’s going on in this country, and how long it’s been happening. What big business is doing to it. It’s not a recent thing at all: it’s been going on for years – centuries, even. Everything that gives a community its own identity – the local shops, the local pubs – it’s all being taken away and replaced by this bland, soulless, corporate –’

‘What she’s really saying,’ Mumtaz explained to me with a weary smile, ‘is that we’ve been trying to think of a nearby pub where we can go for our lunch, and she doesn’t like any of them any more.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Miss Erith. ‘And do you know why? Because they’re all the bloody same! They’ve all been taken over by the big chains and now they play the same music and serve the same beer and the same food …’

‘… and they’re full of young people,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Young people enjoying themselves – that’s what irks you! Young people who like it that way.’

‘They like it that way because they don’t know any other!’ Miss Erith said, her voice suddenly rising to an angry pitch. The good-humoured, bantering aspect of their conversation seemed to evaporate in an instant. ‘Mumtaz knows very well what I mean.’ She had turned to look at me directly, now, and I was amazed to see that there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m saying that the England I used to love doesn’t exist any more.’

A long silence followed, while these words were allowed to hang in the air.

Miss Erith sat forward and drank the remains of her tea, not saying anything more, looking straight ahead of her.

I looked down at my father’s blue ring binder, wondering if this would be a good moment to make my excuses and leave.

Mumtaz sighed and scratched his head. He was the first one to speak.

‘You’re right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I’ve been here. It’s a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others.’

‘Better!’ she echoed, scornfully.

‘Anyway,’ he said, rising to his feet, ‘I think we should try The Plough and Harrow again. It will be nice to get out into the countryside, and the piped music isn’t too loud, and the food is good.’ He turned to me and said kindly: ‘Why don’t you join us, Maxwell? We’d be glad to have your company.’

I stood up as well. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ I said. ‘But I think I’d better be getting on my way. I’ve got a long journey ahead of me.’

‘You’re going to Scotland, I think you said?’

‘That’s right. About as far as you can go – all the way to the Shetland Isles.’

‘Marvellous. What an adventure. And what takes you there, might I ask? Is it business, or pleasure?’

The simplest way to answer this, it seemed, was to reach inside the pocket of my jacket and fetch out another of the toothbrush samples I’d been carrying around with me since yesterday. I’d given my two IP 009s to Mr and Mrs Byrne – all the others were still in the boot of the Prius – so what I handed over to Mumtaz was the nice, plain, elegant model that Trevor had shown to me first of all – the ID 003, made of sustainable pine, with the boar’s-hair bristles and the non-detachable head.

‘I represent a company that markets and distributes these,’ I explained, surprised to find how proud I was to be saying it.

Mumtaz took the brush from me and whistled admiringly through his teeth.

‘Wow,’ he said, running his fingers along the shaft, ‘this is a real beauty. A
real
beauty. You know, I might even enjoy cleaning my teeth if I had one of these, instead of it being a chore. And you are going to sell some of these in Shetland?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Well,’ he said, giving the toothbrush back to me. ‘You will have no difficulty, that’s for sure. Margaret! Margaret, did you hear any of that?’

But Miss Erith was still in a kind of daze. She turned towards us slowly, almost as if she had forgotten that we were in the flat with her at all. Her eyes remained rheumy and unfocused.

‘Mmm?’

‘Maxwell was telling us that he is going to Shetland to sell toothbrushes. Beautiful, wooden toothbrushes.’

‘Wooden?’ she said, her concentration gradually appearing to return.

‘Perhaps this idea will … appeal to you,’ I said, hesitantly, trying hard to find the right words. ‘My company, you see, is not a big corporation. In fact we’re fighting against the big corporations. We’re a small company, and whenever we can, we commission our brushes from other small companies. This beautiful brush was made in Lincolnshire, by local craftsmen – part of a family business.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘May I see?’

I passed her the brush, and she turned it over in her hands, slowly, reverently, again and again, as if she had never seen such a wondrous object in all her seventy-nine years. When she gave it back to me – unless I was imagining it – her eyes had cleared, and were shining at me with a new, rejuvenated light.

‘You can … You can have that if you like.’

‘Really?’

Unexpectedly, she pulled back her top lip, to reveal teeth which were yellowing but otherwise complete, strong and healthy.

‘These are all mine, you know. I clean them three times a day.’

‘Here you are, then. Here you are – take it.’

Perhaps I am being fanciful now. Perhaps my memory of that day is playing tricks on me. But as that exquisite toothbrush was passed back from my hand to hers, in the rapt silence of Miss Erith’s flat high above the city of Lichfield, with Dr Mumtaz Hameed looking on benignly, smilingly, I felt that what was taking place was almost a religious ceremony. That we were doing something – what is the word? – that we were doing something you might almost describe as – yes, I know … sacramental.

There, I told you I was being fanciful. It was definitely time to say my farewells, and get back to the car. Back to Emma, to the motorway, and reality.

15

I had a late lunch at a place called the Caffè Ritazza at Knutsford Services. I’d driven slowly from Lichfield, trying to conserve petrol, and it was after 2.30 by the time I arrived there. The café (or should that be caffè?) was on the first floor, quite close to the bridge connecting the two halves of the service station, so I was able to get a small table near the windows and watch the traffic going by. While I was eating and watching the traffic, I thought about Dr Hameed and Miss Erith, driving to their country pub and enjoying a nice lunch together while lamenting the slow death of the England they both remembered. I wasn’t sure whether I agreed with them about that. I supported the ethos of Guest Toothbrushes, of course, but all the same – speaking personally – I really like the way you can drive into almost any city nowadays and be sure of finding the same shops and the same bars and the same restaurants. People need consistency in their lives, don’t they? Consistency, continuity, things like that. Otherwise everything just gets too chaotic and difficult. Supposing you drive into a strange town – Northampton, say – and it’s full of restaurants whose names you don’t recognize. So you have to take a punt on one, just on the basis of what the menu looks like and what you can see through the window. Well, supposing it’s shit? Isn’t it better to know that you can go to any random town in the country and find the nearest Pizza Express and have an American Hot with extra black olives? So that you know exactly what you’re getting? I think so. Maybe I should have gone for lunch with them and argued the point. In fact, why hadn’t I done that? It wasn’t true, as I had told Dr Hameed, that I was pushed for time. Actually I had at least two hours to spare. But again – just like last night, when Mr and Mrs Byrne had asked me to stay to dinner – I had fought shy of the chance to have a face-to-face meal with someone. When was I going to get over this? When would I start finding it easy to have a normal conversation again? As it happened, I’d attempted one just now, with the girl in Caffè Ritazza who had served me my lunch. She gave me a strange look when I asked for a tomato and mozzarella panino, so I launched into my explanation of how panini was actually a plural word and it was grammatically incorrect to ask for one, single panini. I’d become quite obsessed with this fact, recently (as well as by the fact that nowhere seemed to serve toasted sandwiches any more, only panini – even in Knutsford, for God’s sake). The idea was that it might trigger some lighthearted banter between us, perhaps about the way that England was slowly becoming more European, or declining standards in education or something, but her initial response was to give me such a hostile and suspicious look that at first I thought she was going to call Security. Eventually she did say something, but even then her only comment was ‘I call them paninis’, and that was an end of it. She obviously wasn’t the bantering type.

It was quite relaxing and hypnotic, sitting there watching the traffic going by under the motorway services bridge. It reminded me again of my friend Stuart, and how he’d had to stop driving because he was freaked out by the idea that millions of traffic accidents were only averted every day by a matter of inches or seconds. Watching the northbound traffic on the M6, you could see his point. Nobody seemed to think anything of taking life-threatening risks, just to shave a couple of minutes off their journey. I started to count the number of times people pulled out without indicating, or overtook on the inside lane, or tailgated someone remorselessly, or cut in on another car without giving it enough space. After I’d counted more than a hundred such incidents I suddenly realized that I had been sitting there for more than an hour, and it was time to finish driving up to Kendal.

– Proceed on the current motorway
, Emma said, for the eighth or ninth time.

I didn’t mind the repetition. I still liked just hearing the sound of her voice. I wasn’t feeling very talkative myself, so every few minutes I would throw out some casual remark to her – ‘Crossing the Manchester Ship Canal now, look’, or ‘those must be the Pennines over to the east’ – and would press the ‘Map’ button on the steering wheel to elicit her reply. The rest of the time, I preferred to be alone with my thoughts.

I thought about Lucy, first of all. Why did people have children in the first place? Was it a selfish act, or a supremely unselfish one? Or was it just a primal biological instinct that couldn’t be rationalized or analysed? I couldn’t remember Caroline and I discussing whether to have children or not. To tell the truth, our sex life had never been very lively, anyway, and after a couple of years’ marriage we just reached a tacit agreement that we would stop using contraception. Conceiving Lucy had been an impulse, not a decision. And yet, as soon as she was born, life without her became unimaginable. My own theory – or one of them – was that once you started to hit middle age, you became so jaded and unsurprised by life that you had to have a child in order to provide yourself with a new set of eyes through which to view things, to make them seem new and exciting again. When Lucy was small, the whole world to her was like a giant adventure playground, and for a while that was how I’d seen it too. Just taking her to the toilet in a restaurant became a voyage of discovery. Even now, for instance, when I saw all those trucks overtaking me (I was in the inside lane, with the cruise control stuck at 62 miles per hour), I felt a pang of longing to have the seven- or eight-year-old Lucy with me again, to play the game we always used to play on motorway journeys, the game where you had to guess which country the truck was from by looking at the writing on the side and trying to identify the names of the foreign cities. A game at which she had been surprisingly –

‘Oh, shit!’ I shouted out loud.

–
Proceed on the current motorway
, said Emma.

‘I haven’t got her a present!’

And it was true: my morning adventure in Lichfield had driven paternal obligations clean out of my mind. But I couldn’t possibly turn up empty-handed. I would have to come off at the next service station, in about eight miles’ time.

Once I’d parked the car and dashed inside, I began to look around frantically. At first I could see very little that would impress her. There was the usual shop selling mobile phone accessories but somehow I didn’t think she would be too excited to be presented with an in-car charger or a bluetooth headset. (Which reminded me: I really would have to get the headset on my car working, as soon as possible. Maybe tonight.) Probably my best bet was W. H. Smith, but even there …Was she really likely to get much use out of fold-up garden chairs, even if they were on sale at two for £10? There were plenty of cuddly toys but even I could see that they looked horrendously cheap and ugly. A continental power adaptor, suitable for both Northern and Southern European countries, was practical but still not calculated to bring a grateful sparkle to a young girl’s eyes. What about a colouring pad? They had plenty of those, and she was keen on art, as I knew from the school pictures that she’d until recently been in the habit of sending me. They had pens to match, as well. Surely that would be fine. All children liked drawing, didn’t they?

I went over to pay, didn’t attempt to engage in any banter with the terrifyingly bored-looking guy in a turban sitting behind the till, and was back on the motorway within a few minutes.

–
In two miles, exit left, towards South Lakes
, said Emma, before very long.

The countryside was rugged and interesting, by now. Brown heritage signs had started to appear, reminding me that the delights of Blackpool were mine for the sampling, a few miles to my west, and hinting subtly that the nearby Historic City of Lancaster was well worth a short detour. We were emphatically in the North, at last. We had left Middle England far behind.

–
In one mile, exit left, towards South Lakes
.

‘God, I’m nervous, Emma. I won’t try to hide it from you. Well, I can’t hide anything from you, really, can I? You know everything there is to know about me. You’re the all-seeing eye.’

–
Next exit left, towards South Lakes. Then a quarter of a mile later, heading slightly left at the roundabout
.

‘I don’t know why I’m so nervous, though. Caroline’s been quite friendly, recently, when I’ve spoken to her on the phone. I suppose the problem is that it’s not friendliness I want. It’s not enough. In a way, it hurts even more when she’s nice to me.’

–
Heading slightly left at the roundabout, take first exit
.

‘And I really hope that Lucy hasn’t changed too much. She’s always been an affectionate girl. We were never as awkward together – nothing like as awkward – as Caroline makes out in that … rotten story of hers. Lucy’s simple, uncomplicated. You’ll like her – I know you will.’

–
Proceed on the current road
.

Dusk was falling as we drove along the A684 together. We passed a roadside café which consisted of little more than a Portakabin with a flag of St George flying above it, and numerous brown heritage signs inviting us to visit The World of Beatrix Potter, which would have to wait till another day, as far as we were concerned. Soon enough, through the rain and the encroaching dark, the lights of Kendal itself flickered up ahead.

‘Hello, Max,’ said Caroline.

On the doorstep, she leaned forward, put one arm around me, and kissed me on the cheek. I held the kiss for as long as I thought I could get away with, breathing in her scent, hugging the contours of the body I had once known so well.

‘Ooh – is that your car?’ she said, breaking free and wandering down the front garden path to get a closer look. ‘Very nice. You don’t see many of those round here.’

‘It’s the company’s, actually,’ I said.

She nodded her approval. ‘Impressive. You must be coming up in the world.’

The rain had stopped now, more or less. I turned to get a closer look at the front of the house. It was small,
bijou
, semi-detached and built of local stone. I suddenly wished with all my heart that I was staying the night here, and not at the local Travelodge, where I was already checked in. But no such invitation had been forthcoming.

‘Brr. Let’s get out of this cold,’ said Caroline, and led me inside.

‘Nice haircut, by the way,’ I said, risking a compliment as I followed her into the kitchen. For years, her hair had been a disaster area. She had never known what to do with it – the way she wore it was always not quite long, not quite short; not quite curly, not quite straight; not quite blonde, not quite brown (even the colour was indeterminate). But now, somebody had given it a serious going-over, and she looked more stylish than I’d ever seen her. Brown with blonde highlights – such an obvious way to go, when I thought about it. Following her retreating back, I could see that she had lost quite a bit of weight, too: maybe a stone, maybe a stone-and-a-half. She was wearing a tight cashmere top and skinny jeans that hugged the curve of her hips and buttocks. She looked great. She looked about ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. She could easily have passed for someone in her mid-thirties. I felt flabby, old and unfit by comparison.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she said.

‘Great.’ I’d been hoping that she might offer me a glass of wine or something, but it was going to be tea, apparently. ‘Where’s Lucy?’

‘She’s upstairs. Beautifying herself. She’ll be down in a minute.’

‘Great.’

In the car on the way over, I’d been building up a mental image of Lucy rushing down the stairs to throw herself into her dad’s arms. Looked like I was wrong about that one, as well. In fact the warmest welcome I seemed to be getting was from the little brown Dachshund puppy who now ran over from the other side of the kitchen, yelping at me and trying his best to jump up as high as my knees. I caught him in the middle of one of his jumps and held him to my chest.

‘So you’re Rochester, are you?’ I asked, stroking his head as he nuzzled against me eagerly. ‘What a cute little thing you are, eh?’

‘How did you know he was called Rochester?’ Caroline asked, putting my cup of tea down on the kitchen table next to me.

‘Pardon?’

‘How did you know he was called Rochester? We only got him a couple of weeks ago.’

Of course, I had made a stupid mistake: the acquisition of this new pet was something Caroline had only mentioned to me in my guise as Liz Hammond. In the circumstances, there was only one lie I could tell. ‘Oh, I heard it from Lucy. She told me in an email.’

‘Really? I didn’t know Lucy had been emailing you.’

‘Well, you don’t know everything, do you?’

‘No, that’s true.’ She scraped the two used tea bags off a saucer and into the compost bin. ‘I don’t even know what you’re doing up here. Did you say you were on your way to Scotland?’

‘That’s right. Shetland, actually.’

‘Selling toothbrushes?’

‘Sort of.’

‘You’ve moved on a bit, then. I thought you’d never leave that job.’

‘Well, I suppose you need to get a kick up the arse every so often. Which is exactly what you gave me. When you and Lucy went, it … well, it brought a few things into focus, shall we say.’

Caroline looked down into her teacup. ‘I know I hurt you.’

I looked down into mine. ‘You were within your rights.’