Enchantment Read online

  ‘What will that be?’ Tim asked politely, eating all round the edges of a doughnut to delay the glorious moment when the jam burst into his mouth.

  ‘Well, there’s a lot of things I’d like to do,’ Harold said, not menacing, but in quite a chatty way. ‘The royal family, for one thing. I’d take them out, for a start.’

  ‘Why?’ Tim was quite keen on the royal family, but he did not like to say so.

  ‘Cost too much.’ The smoke finally came out through the snouty nostrils of Harold’s short wide nose that had not only a fuzz of hair inside, but two longer hairs sprouting from the middle of it, the same colour as the tufts of gingery hair on his cheeks. ‘Could be done at the Tower. Quite historical.’ He drew a finger across the sinews of his throat.

  Tim cleared his own throat, but no words came out.

  ‘Set a fire in the Lords, that would be quite nice. Westminster Hall, all those old beams. It would go up like a crematorium. Beautiful. You got to express your feelings, see. You get cancer else.’ He put a whole doughnut into his mouth and chewed on it, musing. The red jam oozed out of the sides of his mouth like blood.

  ‘Do you –’ Tim cleared his throat again. ‘Do you often think about that sort of stuff?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I …’ If this was to be a friendship, Tim could not say no, and sound like a wimp.

  ‘That’s right, of course you do. You don’t think about my wife, though, because you don’t know her.’ He wagged a thick finger, explaining. ‘My ex, that is, a real beauty, she is. And her family. If I had a gun, I’d blast the whole lot. You’d be the same.’

  Struggling to keep up his end of the conversation, Tim was tempted to tell him about the imaginary night sniper who crouched on the window-sill. ‘I sometimes I think – I think –’

  ‘That’s right, so do I.’ Harold saved Tim from the mistake. He brooded for a while, with his arms weightily on the table. His reddish eyebrows lowered. He might be asleep.

  Tim looked at his watch. He did not want Brian and Jack to come home and find Harold’s car blocking the door of the garage.

  Harold’s eyes were open. ‘Want me to go, or suthink?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I – no, of course not. I was just wondering …’

  ‘Wondering what, old son?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s all right.’

  ‘Wondering what?’ One of Harold’s bloodshot eyes was closed against the smoke from the cigarette clenched in his mouth. The other was fixed on Tim. There was a yellow ropey bit in the inside corner.

  ‘I was just wondering if – well, since you like to think about – you know, those – er, things – is that why you chose to be the Black Monk? I mean, hack and slay, and that?’ Harold’s eye was a bulging stare. ‘I mean.’ Tim had seen role-playing games denounced in the papers. ‘Does playing the games and that, does it make you feel, you know, vio – aggress – violent?’

  Harold grinned. ‘You missed the whole point. Keeps me out of trouble. Sublimates the urges, see. Keeps me from going out and chopping up babies.’

  There was a banging on the door. Tim jumped up. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Brian. Could you –’ Mumble mumble.

  Tim went to the door. Brian looked over Tim’s shoulder to get a sight of Harold.

  ‘Could you ask your friend to move his car? Sorry and all that.’

  ‘No, it’s – sorry, Brian.’

  Tim looked back into the room. Harold was up and approaching, doing his bear walk. Brian clattered his boots down the steps. Tim shut the door.

  ‘Got to go anyway, me old son. Thanks.’

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘All right, then?’ Harold shrugged into his overblown jacket, which made him look like an American football player, and dropped a hand on Tim’s shoulder. ‘You’re all right, considering.’

  He tore open the door and pitched out. On the stairs, the broken step cracked and yielded. Harold let out a hoarse shout, ‘Broke me bloody leg!’, and crashed down. By his car, he turned round and waved. ‘I’ll sue!’ he called up amiably. He went round the front of the car and fitted himself into it, backed out into the road and roared away. Tim shut his door before Brian drove in.

  Considering what?

  ‘Driving a car is erotic,’ Pocket Pickups announced. ‘You’re controlling a powerful machine. You can be gentle with it, or forceful at speed. Get a car – get a girl!’

  The powerful machine that Zara brought round before she left for Australia was a little old Fiat 650, known to her as Baby Bilious. The yellow paint had been patched in different shades, the bottom was fringed with rust, the aerial was a wire coat hanger, and bits of the interior had been eaten by dogs.

  But it was a car. It was freedom, it was status, it was erotic. Tim loved it. He re-christened it Buttercup, and paraded about the local roads for a long, entranced time after he had driven his sister cautiously back to Rawley, and said goodbye.

  Erotic, eh? He was a man with wheels, like everyone else. He was in charge. He conquered the miles. He could detest pedestrians, or make a benevolent gesture of stopping even before they had put a foot into the road, waving a lordly finger to let them cross.

  Brian and Jack had said he could keep Buttercup in the space between the house and the garage, where there was just room by the foot of the outside staircase. Having fitted her in, he had to move his legs over the gear shift and get out of the passenger door. As he shut the door, which had a sticker on the window saying, EASY DOES IT, from Zara’s days in Alcoholics Anonymous, and turned to slide underneath the stairs to get to them from the garden side, he saw Brian’s girl friend with the rampant blonde hair watching him from inside the kitchen window. She was in the dark, but some light came through the doorway from the hall. She was wearing a pale suit with a pink scarf tied fussily at her neck; a rather nondescript type of woman, except for the hair.

  Tim could not take the car to work, because there was nowhere to park unless you had a permit. After work, now that the March evenings were lightening, he hurried home and changed into jeans and his bright-green sweater that would be noticed, and took the car out, as if it were a dog. Zara had had Buttercup for quite a while, and it had some irresponsible habits, which it must have picked up from her. The steering you couldn’t take chances with. The wiper often stuck, and the gears were as erratic as Zara. Sometimes you could not get into reverse. Sometimes reverse was the only gear that worked smoothly. Zara had taught Tim how to fiddle the clutch, and he could always get into gear eventually, but there were embarrassing times when cars piled up behind him while he pushed and struggled to get into first, when a traffic light turned green. Not so erotic.

  Sometimes he went on to the motorway and drove among the people sweeping along through the dusk to London, as if he were one of them, with an evening in town ahead. Buttercup could not reach any great speed, so he drove in the slow lane, making a serene face to show people that this was his choice. Any idiot could go fast, but there were philosophers and dreamers who did not need to compete in the self-destructive race.

  When cars passed him going 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.
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  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.

  ‘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.

  ‘Why can’t Dad get them himself?’

  ‘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.

  ‘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 staircase. He had not got round to it, so Brian came up to have a look.

  Tim thought he was coming to ask for the second half of the rent, which was missing this month, because Buttercup had eaten into his salary with her demands for petrol and a new exhaust pipe when the old one got knocked off, backing into a high kerb. When he heard Brian at the foot of the steps, he wanted to pretend to be out, but the lights were on and the radio playing, so he had to open the door, his head seething with a stew of possible excuses.

  ‘Need a whole piece of wood, that will.’ Brian came into the flat. ‘Your friend did it in, was it, the one in the white Escort with the pixie in the back window? He was a bit heavy for those stairs, if you ask me.’

  ‘That step was broken before,’ Tim reminded him.

  ‘So it was. I did ask Jack, but you know what he is. I’m sorry, Tim,’ Brian said, surprisingly for a landlord. ‘It’s not fair to neglect you, when you keep this place nice, and don’t give any trouble.’

  ‘That’s all right, Brian. I’ll tell my, er, my friend to be careful, next time he comes.’

  ‘Comes a lot, does he?’ Brian sat down on the bed that disguised itself as a couch with three cushions against the wall, and looked up at Tim thoughtfully, caressing his soft beard as if it were a lapdog carried high up.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, really. He’s a – sort of – new friend.’ Was it worse to know when a blush was crawling up the side of your neck, or would it be worse to have other people see you blushing when you didn’t know it?

  ‘I’m glad. Bit lonely here, is it?’

  Tim shook his head dumbly.

  ‘Bit hard to make ends meet?’ Brian held up a hand. ‘Don’t worry about the rent. We trust you. Sit down.’ He patted the bed. Panic rose. ‘You’re a good boy, Tim, a really nice boy, and I want you to know that if you ever need a friend – well, you’ve got your new friend and that’s fine – but if you ever need someone handy –’

  Tim had not sat down. A sledgehammer could not have made him. So Brian put both hands on his knees and stood up.

  ‘Well, on my way.’ He laid a shaggy woollen arm round Tim’s shoulders and gave him a one-armed sideways hug.

  Stiff as an iron bar, Tim stood still while Brian let himself out and ran down the steps, whistling. Tim remained rigid, his hands at his sides, staring at nothing. Help! he thought. I’d better borrow for the rent till I get my pay cheque. My God, he thought. I never knew.

  So if Brian … Then was that why he and Jack … But Jack had that woman Janet Fox at work, who … Was he both? Were they both both? ‘Good boy, Tim.’ Did he really think that Harold …? And so he thought that Tim … But what about the girl friend with the yellow hair? Total confusion.

  When he could move again, Tim tiptoed to the door and fastened the chain across.

  Better get myself a girl friend. Out of the confusion, that thought emerged. Well, and why not? Having a car would make it easier. ‘Your car can be transport, music centre, picnic venue, speed, excitement, privacy, bedroom. Get a car – get a girl!’

  Frog-princess Lilian was married to a toad, but Gail was unattached, and had been reasonably friendly to Tim of late. They shared a few familiar jokes about Mr D. and Fred and the worst of the customers. That would be something to talk about, for a start.

  Tim picked his time. Gail was quite passable, really, if you liked pointed noses with short upper lips pulled up towards them. She smelled clean too, and had a nice little way with customers, jollying the wobblies along towards the decision she had already made for them.

  She had high pointed bosoms, like her nose. One day, she came to work in the same sort of pink jumper that Helen Brown had worn at the theatre, but it looked quite different.

  ‘I was wondering.’

  Tim took a deep breath and said it when they came out of Mr D.’s office together, after morning clothes brushing and collar straightening and Orders of the Day: ‘Linens are going to be big this summer. When customers come in looking for cotton prints and nylon dress fabric, it’s worth calling their attention to the pastel linens. Demonstrate the crush-proof qualities.’ Mr D. made a crumpling movement with his hand, then fixed them with a no-nonsense eye. ‘But be sure it’s non-crush before you do that.’

  ‘I was wondering, Gail – er, Gail.’

  ‘Use her name often,’ Pocket Pickups advised, ‘as if you like the sound of it.’

  ‘You were wondering, Tim – er, Tim?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got a car now, well, it’s my sister’s, really, but I’ve got it for six months.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Gail said brightly.

  ‘Yes. And I was wondering if you – I mean, if you’d like to …’

  She did not help him. She stood there outside Mr D.’s office with her head on one side and a slight smile hiding whatever she was thinking.

  ‘I mean – I know you go out and I’m sure you’ve got loads of men, but perhaps you’d come – perhaps you’d have the time –’

  ‘Ten past nine.’ She looked through the glass door of the office at the clock on the wall, then back at Tim, with a grin.


  ‘Don’t, Gail. I’m saying, would you like to come for a drive sometime?’

  She looked him quickly up and down. She was taller than Tim, and she made it clear that there wasn’t far to look.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Why not?’ Don’t blush, don’t blush.

  ‘You must be joking.’

  He saw now that it was inevitable she should say that. It was one of those retorts available on a plate for a girl like Gail who could not even find an original remark to hurt you with.

  Take off her head at the Tower, Harold. Tim pushed past Gail and walked ahead of her to an early customer at the rack of glazed chintz curtains with triple pleated headings.

  ‘Can I help you, madam?’

  So it would have to be Helen Brown. He had known that all along, and he had nothing against her, except that Val would take all the credit if he asked her out.

  He did not know where Helen lived. He only knew that she worked at the Hall School. Something to do with the kitchen. He would go down there and look for her. What time would she come out? He could just see himself hanging about outside the chainlink fence and getting arrested as a child pornographer.

  He thought about Helen, imagining her as better than she really was. He had to pretend that she was better than Gail. When he had worked her up into something quite passable, he took courage and asked Valerie where he could find her.

  ‘I promised I’d lend your friend Helen Brown a book,’ he said, when he went round to Val and Colin’s place for a Sunday morning coffee. If you telephoned Val, she was always rushing off some where, or putting a meal on the table, and ringing off before you had said what you wanted.

  ‘A book?’ Her vampire’s top teeth had been filed down and pulled back years ago, but she could still make them stick out over her chin when she wanted. ‘You and she talked about books?’ Val read books, you see, Val and Colin did. No one read books but them.

  ‘She was interested in this particular book.’

  ‘What book is that?’