Pumping Up Napoleon by Maria Donovan Page B

happen. Don’t worry, that can’t happen here and now. Not to us. Squeeze your eyes shut and hang on; hang on tight to the merry-go-round.
    So now I work somewhere else. It doesn’t matter where; it isn’t interesting work and neither are the people. I doodle on my telephone pad but I don’t write ‘help’ any more. People would think it strange.
    At the end of the long day, when the others leave together, I’ll go to a bar on my own and stand there at the counter, drinking, rubbing my wrists and pretending, or not bothering to pretend, that I’m meeting someone.
    Anything to put off walking to the station, that moment when I’m waiting in the crowd for the train.

Harvest
    Michael pulled up outside Vanessa’s flat in a shining four-wheel drive.
    â€˜Oh, my God!’ said Vanessa, as she struggled to climb up into the passenger seat. ‘When did you get this?’
    â€˜Well,’ said Michael. ‘We are going to the country.’
    â€˜We do have roads in Dorset, you know.’
    She didn’t say anything else for a while, which left him free to concentrate on getting out of London. Once they were on the M3, Vanessa said, ‘You don’t have to spend money to impress my parents’.
    â€˜I just want them to see that I’m taking this thing seriously.’
    â€˜This thing ?’ said Vanessa.
    Without taking his eyes off the road, Michael reached across and squeezed her hand. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘the you-and-me thing. I know how important your family are to you. I want them to like me. I want them to know that we’re prepared to go down at weekends; and they can come up to us.’
    She bowed her head and spoke through a blonde curtain. ‘Daddy doesn’t much like London, but mummy might like to get away sometimes.’
    Vanessa’s mother had been an actress, her father a Commander in the Royal Navy; they were not rich, but somehow managed to live in a large house overlooking the sea. In Michael’s mind’s eye they lived a grainy black-and-white existence, somewhere between Brief Encounter and The Cruel Sea .
    â€˜Had many girlfriends, Michael?’ the Commander was saying, in Michael’s head.
    â€˜I won’t deny I’ve lived the bachelor life.’ He must try not to sound too defensive.
    â€˜And what’s so special about my daughter?’
    How could he explain? Michael had not understood love before he met Vanessa. Love, and the way it made his old friends behave when it hit them, had seemed an odd kind of practical joke that some of them simply refused to acknowledge as such. One by one his bachelor friends had slipped into coupledom; some were sheepish about the way they changed, others shrugged it off. As far as Michael could see, love made them do things unnatural to their bachelor souls and he had enjoyed telling them so. But after Michael met Vanessa a crowded address book seemed suddenly worthless. He found himself saying that life had been ‘empty without her’ – and meaning it.
    All the way to Dorset Michael held a conversation in his head with Vanessa’s father, rehearsing his responses until the Commander, satisfied at last, clapped him on the back and shook his hand, saying warmly, ‘You’re a man after my own heart, Michael. I felt the same when I met Vanessa’s mother. It was in London during the Blitz….’
    â€˜Get ready!’ said Vanessa, sitting up. Hours and miles had passed and they were now on the last stretch of trunk road before their descent into country lanes. ‘It’s a sharp turn at the bottom of the next hill.’
    Just as the view on their left opened out all the way to the sea, Vanessa said, ‘This is it!’ Michael just managed a glimpse of green fields and dark woodland, church towers, clustered farms and the faraway shining water, before they plunged between the hedgerows of the Bride Valley.
    In