Mr Wrong (3 page)

‘Another thing. When she put out her arm to open the door, I saw her throat –’

His fingers stopped unwrapping the paper. She glanced at them: he had huge, ugly hands that looked the wrong scale beside the small sweet –

‘She had a large sort of birth mark at the bottom of her throat, poor thing.’

He dropped the sweet: bent forward in the car to find it. When, at last, he had done so, he put it straight into his mouth without attempting to get any more paper off. Briefly, the smell of
peppermint dominated the other, less pleasant odours. Meg said, ‘Of course, I don’t suppose for a moment you could have seen
that
.’

Finally, he said: ‘I cannot imagine who, or what, you are talking about. I didn’t see any
girl
in the back of
your
car.’

‘But there couldn’t be someone in the back of my car without my knowing!’

There seemed to Meg to be something wrong about his behaviour. Not just that it was unpleasant; wrong in a different way; she felt that he knew perfectly well about the girl, but wouldn’t
admit it – to frighten her, she supposed.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’

He seemed to be very bad at lighting it. Two matches wavered out in his shaky hands before he got an evil-smelling fag going.

Meg, because she still felt a mixture of terror and confusion about what had or had not happened, decided to try being very reasonable with him.

‘When you got into the car,’ she began carefully, ‘you kept saying “we” and talking about your secretary.
That’s
why I thought she must be.’

‘Must be what?’

A mechanical response; sort of playing-for-time stuff, Meg thought.

‘You must excuse me, but I really don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Well, I think you
do
. And before you can say “do what?” I mean
do
know what you are talking about.’

She felt, rather than saw him glance sharply at her, but she kept her eyes on the road.

Then he seemed to make up his mind. ‘I have a suggestion to make. Supposing we stop at the next service area and you tell me all about everything? You have clearly got a great deal on your
mind; in fact, you show distinct symptoms of being upset. Perhaps if we—’

‘No thank you.’ The idea of his being the slightest use to talk to was both nauseating and absurd. She heard him suck in his breath through his teeth with a small hissing sound: once
more she found him reminding her of a snake. Meg hated snakes.

Then he began to fumble about again, to produce a torch and to ask for a map. After some ruminating aloud as to where they were, and indeed where his garage was likely to be, he suggested
stopping again ‘to give my, I fear, sadly weakened eyes an opportunity to discover my garage’.

Something woke up in Meg, an early warning or premonition of more, and different trouble. Garages were not marked on her map. She increased their speed, stayed in the middle lane until a service
station that she had noticed marked earlier at half a mile away loomed and glittered in the wet darkness. She drove straight in and said:

‘I don’t like you very much. I’d rather you got out now.’ Again she heard him suck his breath in through his teeth. The attendant had seen the car, and was slowly getting
into his anorak to come out to them.

‘How cruel!’ he said, but she sensed his anger. ‘What a pity! What a chance lost!’

‘Please get out at once, or I’ll get the man to turn you out.’

With his usual agility, he opened the door at once, and slithered out.

‘I’m sorry,’ Meg said weakly: ‘I’m sure you did know about the girl. I just don’t trust you.’

He poked his head in through the window. ‘I’m far from sure that
I
trust
you
.’ There were little bits of scum at the ends of his mouth. ‘I really feel that
you oughtn’t to drive alone if you are subject to such extreme hallucinations.’

There was no mistaking the malice in his voice, and just as Meg was going to have one last go at his admitting that he
had
seen the girl, the petrol attendant finally reached her and
began unscrewing her petrol cap. He went, then. Simply withdrew his head, as though there were not more of him than that, and disappeared.

‘How many?’

‘Just two, please.’

When the man went off slowly to get change, Meg wanted to cry. Instead, she locked all the doors and wound up the passenger window. She had an unreasonable fear that he would come back and that
the attendant might not help her to oust him. She even forgot the change, and wound up her own window, so that nobody could get into the car. This made the attendant tap on her window; she started
violently, which set her shivering.

‘Did you – did you see where the man who was in the front of my car went? He got out just now.’

‘I didn’t see anyone. Anyone at all.’

‘Oh thank you.’

‘Night.’ He went thankfully back to his brightly lit and doubtless scorching booth.

Before she drove off, Meg looked once more at the back seat. There was no one there. The whole experience had been so prolonged, as well as unnerving, that apart from feeling frightened she felt
confused. She wanted badly to get away as fast as possible, and she wanted to keep quite still and try to sort things out. He
had
known that the girl had been in the car. He had enjoyed
– her fear. Why else would he have said ‘we’ so much? This made her more frightened, and her mind suddenly changed sides.

The girl
could not
have got out of the back without opening and shutting– however quietly – the door. There had been no sound or sounds like that. In fact, from the moment the
girl had got into the car she had made no sound at all. Perhaps she, too, had been frightened by the horrible man. Perhaps she had
pretended
to get in, and at the last moment, slipped out
again.

She opened her window wide to get rid of the smells in the car. As she did so, a possible implication of what the petrol attendant had said occurred. He hadn’t seen
anyone
; he hadn’t emphasized it like that, but he had repeated ‘anyone at all’. Had he just meant that he hadn’t looked? Or had he looked, and seen nobody? Ghosts
don’t talk, she reminded herself, and at once was back to the utterly silent girl.

Her first journey north in the car, and the awful breathing sounds coming from its back, could no longer be pushed out of her mind. The moment that she realized this, both journeys pounced
forward into incomprehensible close-ups of disconnected pictures and sounds, recurring more and more rapidly, but in different sequences, as though, through their speed and volume, they were trying
to force her to understand them. In the end, she actually cried out: ‘All
right
! The car is haunted. Of course, I see that!’

A sudden calm descended upon her, and in order to further it, or at least stop it as suddenly stopping, she added: ‘I’ll think about it when I get home,’ and drove mindlessly
the rest of the way. If any spasm about what had recently happened attempted to invade her essential blankness, she concentrated upon seeing her mother’s face, smelling the dinner in the
kitchen, and hearing her father call out who was there.

‘. . . thought he might be getting a severe cold, so he’s off to bed. He’s had his arrowroot with a spot of whisky in it and asked us to be extra quiet in
case
he gets a
wink of sleep.’

Meg hugged her without replying: it was no good trying to be conspiratorial with her mother about her father; there could never be a wink or a smile. Her mother’s loyalty had stiffened
over the years, until now she could relate the most absurd details of her father’s imaginary fears and ailments with a good-natured but completely impassive air. ‘Have we got anything
to drink?’ she asked.

‘Darling – I’m sure we have somewhere. But it’s so unlike you to want a drink that I didn’t put it out. It’ll be in the corner cupboard in the
sitting-room.’

Meg knew this, knew also that she would find the untouched half-bottles of gin and Bristol Milk that were kept in case anyone ‘popped in’. But the very few people who did always came
for cups of tea or coffee at the appropriate times of day. Her parents could not really afford drink – except for her father’s medicinal whisky.

When she brought the bottles into the kitchen, she said, ‘You have one too. I shall feel depraved drinking all by myself.’

‘Well dear, then I’ll be depraved with you. Just a drop of sherry. We needn’t tell Father. It might start him worrying about your London Life. Been meeting anyone interesting
lately?’

Meg had offered her mother a cigarette with her sherry, and her mother, delighted, had nearly burned her wispy fringe bending over the match to light it, and was now blowing out frantic streams
of smoke from her nose before it got too far. It was all right to smoke if you didn’t inhale. On a social occasion, that was. Like it being all right to drink a glass of sherry at those
times.

‘This
is
nice,’ her mother said, and then added, ‘Have you been
meeting
anyone nice, dear? At all your parties and things?’

It was then that Meg realized that she could not possibly – ever – pour out all her anxieties to her mother. Her mother simply would not be able to understand them. ‘Not this week,’ she said. Her mother sighed, but Meg was not meant to hear, and said that she supposed it took time in a place like London to know people.

Meg had a second, strong gin, and then said that she would pay her mother back, but she was tired, and needed a couple of drinks. She also smoked four cigarettes before dinner, and felt so
revived that she was able to eat the delicious steak-and-kidney pie followed by baked apples with raisins in them. Her mother had been making Meg Viyella nightgowns with white lace ruffles, and
wanted to show them to her. They were brought into the kitchen, which was used for almost everything in winter as it saved fuel. ‘I’ve been quite excited about them,’ her mother
said, when she laid out the nightgowns. ‘Not quite finished, but such fun doing each one in a different colour.’

She listened avidly when Meg told her things about Mr Whitehorn and the shop: she even liked being told about the
things
in the shop. She laughed at Meg’s descriptions when they
were meant to be in the least amusing, and looked extremely earnest and anxious when Meg told her about the fragility and value of the chandeliers. When it was time to go to bed, and she had filled
their two hot-water bottles, she accompanied Meg to the door of her bedroom. They kissed, and her mother said: ‘Bless you, dearie. I don’t know what I’d do without you. Although,
of course, one of these days I shall have to when Mr Right comes along.’

Meg cleaned her teeth in the ferociously cold bathroom and went back to her – nearly as cold – bedroom. Hot-water bottles were essential: Viyella nightdresses would be an extra
comfort. From years of practice, she undressed fast and ingeniously, so that at no time was she ever naked. Whenever her mother mentioned Mr Right she had a vision of a man with moustaches and wearing a bowler hat mowing a lawn. She said her prayers kneeling beside her high, rather uncomfortable bed, and the hot-water bottle was like
a reward.

In the night she awoke once, her body tense and crowded with fears: ‘I could
sell
the car, and get another,’ she said, and almost at once relaxed, the fears receded until they
fell through some blank slot at the back of her mind and she was again asleep.

This decision, combined with a weekend of comfortingly the same ordered, dull events made her able to set aside, almost to shut up, the things – as she called them – that had
happened, or seemed to have happened, in the car. On Sunday morning she found her mother packing the back with some everlasting flowers ‘for your flat’, a huge, dark old tartan car-rug
‘in case you haven’t enough on your bed’, and a pottery jar full of home-made marmalade ‘to share with your friends at breakfast’.

‘There’s plenty of room for the things on the floor, as you’re so small, really, that you have your driving seat pushed right forward.’

When she said good-bye and set off, it was with the expectation of the journey to London being uneventful, and it was.

The trouble, she discovered, after trying in her spare time for a week, was that she
could not
sell the car. She had started with the original dealer who had sold it to
her, but he had said, with a bland lack of regret, that he was extremely sorry, but this was not the time of year to sell second-hand cars and that the best he could offer was to take it back for a
hundred pounds less than she had paid for it. As this would completely rule out having any other car excepting a smashed-up or clapped-out Mini that would land her with all kinds of garage bills
(and, like most car-owners, Meg was not mechanically minded), she had to give up that idea from the start.

She advertised in her local newspaper shop (cheap, and it would be easy for people to try out the car) but this only got her one reply: a middle-aged lady with a middle-aged poodle who came
round one evening. At first it seemed hopeful; the lady said it was a nice colour and looked in good condition, but when she got into the driver’s seat with Meg beside her to drive it round
the block, her dog absolutely refused to get into the back as he was told to do. His owner tried coaxing, and he whimpered and scrabbled out of the still-open door; she tried a very unconvincing
authority: ‘Cherry! Do as you are told at once,’ and his whimpering turned to a series of squealing yelps. ‘He
loves
going in cars. I don’t know what’s come
over him!’

Out in the street again, all three of them, he growled and tried to snap at Meg. ‘I’m sorry dear, but I can’t possibly buy a car that Cherry won’t go in. He’s all
I’ve got. Naughty Cherry. He’s usually such a mild, sweet dog. Don’t you dare bite at Mummy’s friends.’

And that was that. She asked Mr Whitehorn and her flat-mates, and finally, their friends, but nobody seemed to want to buy her car, or even wanted to help her get rid of it. By Friday, Meg was
in a panic at the prospect of driving north again in it. She had promised herself that she wasn’t going to, and as long as the promise had seemed to hold (surely she could find
someone
who would want it) she had been able not to think about the alternative. By Friday morning she was so terrified that she did actually send a telegram to her mother, saying that she had ’flu
and couldn’t drive home.