ADAMS, Douglas - So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Page 7
umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.
The umbrella lay like a recently swatted daddy-long-legs,
expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a
little.
He picked it up.
"Er," he said. There didn't seem to be a lot of point in offering
the thing back to her.
"How did you know my name?" she said.
"Er, well," he said. "Look, I'll get you another one ..."
He looked at her and tailed off.
She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale
and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost
sombre, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a
formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than
what she looked as if she was looking at.
But when she smiled, as she did now, it was as if she suddenly
arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face,
and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was
very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.
She grinned, tossed her bag into the back and swivelled herself
into the front seat.
"Don't worry about the umbrella," she said to him as she climbed
in. "It was my brother's and he can't have liked it or he
wouldn't have given it to me." She laughed and pulled on her
seatbelt. "You're not a friend of my brother's are you?"
"No."
Her voice was the only part of her which didn't say "Good".
Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite
extraordinary to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly
away, that he could hardly think or breathe, and hoped that
neither of these functions were vital to his driving or they were
in trouble.
So what he had experienced in the other car, her brother's car,
the night he had returned exhausted and bewildered from his
nightmare years in the stars had not been the unbalance of the
moment, or, if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced
now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-
balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.
"So ..." he said, hoping to kick the conversation off to an
exciting start.
"He was meant to pick me up - my brother - but phoned to say he
couldn't make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look
at the calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided to hitch.
So."
"So."
"So here I am. And what I would like to know, is how you know my
name."
"Perhaps we ought to first sort out," said Arthur, looking back
over his shoulder as he eased his car into the motorway traffic,
"where I'm taking you."
Very close, he hoped, or long away. Close would mean she lived
near him, a long way would mean he could drive her there.
"I'd like to go to Taunton," she said, "please. If that's all
right. It's not far. You can drop me at ..."
"You live in Taunton?" he said, hoping that he'd managed to sound
merely curious rather than ecstatic. Taunton was wonderfully
close to him. He could ...
"No, London," she said. "There's a train in just under an hour."
It was the worst thing possible. Taunton was only minutes away up
the motorway. He wondered what to do, and while he was wondering
with horror heard himself saying, "Oh, I can take you to London.
Let me take you to London ..."
Bungling idiot. Why on Earth had he said "let" in that stupid
way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old.
"Are you going to London?" she asked.
"I wasn't," he said, "but ..." Bungling idiot.
"It's very kind of you," she said, "but really no. I like to go
by train." And suddenly she was gone. Or rather, that part of her
which brought her to life was gone. She looked rather distantly
out of the window and hummed lightly to herself.
He couldn't believe it.
Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he'd blown it.
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of
accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not
behave like this.
Taunton 5 miles, said the signpost.
He gripped the steering wheel so tightly the car wobbled. He was
going to have to do something dramatic.
"Fenny," he said.
She glanced round sharply at him.
"You still haven't told me how ..."
"Listen," said Arthur, "I will tell you, though the story is
rather strange. Very strange."
She was still looking at him, but said nothing.
"Listen ..."
"You said that."
"Did I? Oh. There are things I must talk to you about, and things
I must tell you ... a story I must tell you which would ..." He
was thrashing about. He wanted something along the lines of "Thy
knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular quill to
stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine" but didn't
think he could carry it off and didn't like the hedgehog
reference.
"... which would take more than five miles," he settled for in
the end, rather lamely he was afraid.
"Well ..."
"Just supposing," he said, "just supposing" - he didn't know what
was coming next, so he thought he'd just sit back and listen -
"that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very
important to me, and that, though you didn't know it, I was very
important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had
five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say
something very important to someone I've only just met and not
crash into lorries at the same time, what would you say ..." he
paused helplessly, and looked at her, "I ... should do?"
"Watch the road!" she yelped.
"Shit!"
He narrowly avoided careering into the side of a hundred Italian
washing machines in a German lorry.
"I think," she said, with a momentary sigh of relief, "you should
buy me a drink before my train goes."
=================================================================
Chapter 12
There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs
near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special
kind of pallor to the pork pies.
Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a
sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat
is something sinful that only foreigners do.
"Make 'em dry," is the instruction buried somewhere in the
collective national consciousness, "make 'em rubbery. If you have
to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week."
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that
the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have
been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't
want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to
know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for
by the sandwiches they make them
selves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the
sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle,
floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic
pin in the shape of a chef's hat: a memorial, one feels, for some
chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his
cats on a back stair in Stepney.
The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and
wish to atone for something specific.
"There must be somewhere better," said Arthur.
"No time," said Fenny, glancing at her watch. "My train leaves in
half an hour."
They sat at a small wobbly table. On it were some dirty glasses,
and some soggy beermats with jokes printed on them. Arthur got
Fenny a tomato juice, and himself a pint of yellow water with gas
in it. And a couple of sausages. He didn't know why. He bought
them for something to do while the gas settled in his glass.
The barman dunked Arthur's change in a pool of beer on the bar,
for which Arthur thanked him.
"All right," said Fenny, glancing at her watch, "tell me what it
is you have to tell me."
She sounded, as well she might, extremely sceptical, and Arthur's
heart sank. Hardly, he felt, the most conductive setting to try
to explain to her as she sat there, suddenly cool and defensive,
that in a sort of out-of-body dream he had had a telepathic sense
that the mental breakdown she had suffered had been connected
with the fact that, appearances to the contrary nonwithstanding,
the Earth had been demolished to make way for a new hyperspace
bypass, something which he alone on Earth knew anything about,
having virtually witnessed it from a Vogon spaceship, and that
furthermore both his body and soul ached for her unbearably and
he needed to got to bed with her as soon as was humanly possible.
"Fenny," he started.
"I wonder if you'd like to buy some tickets for our raffle? It's
just a little one."
He glanced up sharply.
"To raise money for Anjie who's retiring."
"What?"
"And needs a kidney machine."
He was being leant over by a rather stiffly slim middle-aged
woman with a prim knitted suit and a prim little perm, and a prim
little smile that probably got licked by prim little dogs a lot.
She was holding out a small book of cloakroom tickets and a
collecting tin.
"Only ten pence each," she said, "so you could probably even buy
two. Without breaking the bank!" She gave a tinkly little laugh
and then a curiously long sigh. Saying "Without breaking the
bank" had obviously given her more pleasure than anything since
some GIs had been billeted on her in the war.
"Er, yes, all right," said Arthur, hurriedly digging in his
pocket and producing a couple of coins.
With infuriating slowness, and prim theatricality, if there was
such a thing, the woman tore off two tickets and handed them to
Arthur.
"I do hope you win," she said with a smile that suddenly snapped
together like a piece of advanced origami, "the prizes are so
nice."
"Yes, thank you," said Arthur, pocketing the tickets rather
brusquely and glancing at his watch.
He turned towards Fenny.
So did the woman with the raffle tickets.
"And what about you, young lady?" she said. "It's for Anjie's
kidney machine. She's retiring you see. Yes?" She hoisted the
little smile even further up her face. She would have to stop and
let it go soon or the skin would surely split.
"Er, look, here you are," said Arthur, and pushed a fifty pence
piece at her in the hope that that would see her off.
"Oh, we are in the money, aren't we?" said the woman, with a long
smiling sigh. "Down from London are we?"
"No, that's all right, really," he said with a wave of his hand,
and she started with an awful deliberation to peel off five
tickets, one by one.
"Oh, but you must have your tickets," insisted the woman, "or you
won't be able to claim your prize. They're very nice prizes, you
know. Very suitable."
Arthur snatched the tickets, and said thank you as sharply as he
could.
The woman turned to Fenny once again.
"And now, what about ..."
"No!" Arthur nearly yelled. "These are for her," he explained,
brandishing the five new tickets.
"Oh, I see! How nice!"
She smiled sickeningly at both of them.
"Well, I do hope you ..."
"Yes," snapped Arthur, "thank you."
The woman finally departed to the table next to theirs. Arthur
turned desperately to Fenny, and was relieved to see that she was
rocking with silent laughter.
He sighed and smiled.
"Where were we?"
"You were calling me Fenny, and I was about to ask you not to."
"What do you mean?"
She twirled the little wooden cocktail stick in her tomato juice.
"It's why I asked if you were a friend of my brother's. Or half-
brother really. He's the only one who calls me Fenny, and I'm not
fond of him for it."
"So what's ...?"
"Fenchurch."
"What?"
"Fenchurch."
"Fenchurch."
She looked at him sternly.
"Yes," she said, "and I'm watching you like a lynx to see if
you're going to ask the same silly question that everybody asks
me until I want to scream. I shall be cross and disappointed if
you do. Plus I shall scream. So watch it."
She smiled, shook her hair a little forward over her face and
peered at him from behind it.
"Oh," he said, "that's a little unfair, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Fine."
"All right," she said with a laugh, "you can ask me. Might as
well get it over with. Better than have you call me Fenny all the
time."
"Presumably ..." said Arthur.
"We've only got two tickets left, you see, and since you were so
generous when I spoke to you before ..."
"What?" snapped Arthur.
The woman with the perm and the smile and the now nearly empty
book of cloakroom tickets was now waving the two last ones under
his nose.
"I thought I'd give the opportunity to you, because the prizes
are so nice."
She wrinkled up he nose a little confidentially.
"Very tasteful. I know you'll like them. And it is for Anjie's
retirement present you see. We want to give her ..."
"A kidney machine, yes," said Arthur. "Here."
He held out two more ten pence pieces to her, and took the
tickets.
A thought seemed to strike the woman. It struck her very slowly.
You could watch it coming in like a long wave on a sandy beach.
"Oh dear," she said, "I'm not interrupting anything am I?"
She peered anxiously at both of them.
"No it's fine," said Arthur. Everything that could possibly be
fine," he insisted, "is fine.
"Thank you," he added.
"I say," she said, in a delightful ecstacy of worry, "you're not
... in love, are you?"
"It's very hard to say," said Arthur. "We haven't had a chance to
talk yet."
He glanced at Fenchurch. She was grinning.
The woman nodded with knowing confidentiality.
"I'll let you see the prizes in a minute," she said, and left.
Arthur turned, with a sigh, back to the girl that he found it
hard to say whether he was in love with.
"You were about to ask me," she said, "a question."
"Yes," said Arthur.
"We can do it together if you like," said Fenchurch. "Was I found
..."
"... in a handbag ..." joined in Arthur.
"... in the Left Luggage Office ..." they said together.
"... at Fenchurch street station," they finished.