Enchantment by Monica Dickens Page B

ninety or more, by his reckoning, he expected to find them stopped farther on by a police car with flashing lights, or piled up in a tangled wreck. Then he would be called as a witness to testify to the speed of the grey Mercedes under the arrogant hands of the white-shirted driver whose suit jacket hung on a little hook over the back door.
    Once when he was tootling along doing no harm to anybody, a blue car which had been following him suddenly pulled out and passed him and then pulled in very sharply in front of him, as if expressing some sort of contempt. Tim had to brake. Anger rose in his throat like a hot undigested meal. Kill the brute! He was Harold, planning savagery he would never do.
    The road rose up a slight hill and the man in the blue car had the nerve to slow down. Cars were passing steadily in the middle lane, but as soon as there was a gap, Tim gritted his teeth and pulled out to overtake the hateful blue car.
    Buttercup didn’t like hills either. With the accelerator on the floor, she strained, Tim strained, but the most he could do was stay level with the blue car, while behind him an enormous lorry snapped and snarled at his heels, and flashed its lights like dragon fire.
    Getting back into the left lane behind the blue car, Tim struggled with fear and anger. He could not re-capture the poet-philosopher sense of relaxed superiority, so he turned off the motorway, to calm down on the back roads.
    Buttercup ate petrol. Tim found that out, and had to cut down his conquests of long distances. He drove to local beauty spots and parked and read the paper, as if he were a salesman taking a break from a long day on the road. Once in a while, he would keep on his work suit, so that he could stop Buttercup among the group of cars browsing outside a pub and go in for a beer in his character as sales rep. If anyone spoke to him, he would indicate that he was on the road with the back of his car full of catalogues. He did not mind if no one spoke to him. What mattered was his own feeling of being this travelling man.
    He took his mother shopping, because she could not drive now, nor get on and off the buses. Hanging on to the trolley, she could navigate the supermarket aisles, while Tim dodged ahead, getting things from the shelves and freezers for her.
    On their way back to her house, Buttercup’s gears jammed at a roundabout. Tim was sweating and desperate, but his mother sat there serenely, inventing reasons why the drivers behind them were getting hysterical (woman in labour, mercy dash with life-saving drug), and asking with curiosity, not malice, ‘Why doesn’t this happen with Sarah?’, which drove Tim insane.
    Growling in protest, the gears finally meshed, and they headed for home.
    â€˜Would it be too far to go round by the DIY, dear? I need a few things.’
    Tim thought she would be buying scouring pads and light bulbs, but she bought things like emery-paper and glue and varnish.
    â€˜Why can’t Dad get them himself?’
    â€˜He said he had to go off somewhere this afternoon. He’s still pretty busy, you know.’
    When Tim carried the shopping into 23 The Avenue, he found Wallace Kendall with his feet in narrow leather slippers on the table, watching a game of snooker on his wife’s kitchen television.
    What would it be like to have a father with whom you could joke in a pally sort of way, ‘Busy, eh? And Mum and me running round to get all your rotten stuff.’
    As it was, Tim unpacked and put away his mother’s shopping, and carried his father’s things out to the shed where he had his woodworking lathe.
    â€˜Be sure and lock up and bring me back the key.’ Wally’s shed was as sacred now as his superintendent’s hut – kettle and electric fire steaming up the windows, flap table covered with overflowing ashtrays and carping reports – had been, on the building sites.
    Jack was supposed to have mended the broken step on the