DURING the warm noon, Maitland slept inside his car. On the rear seat beside him were the water canister and a fresh bottle of Burgundy. He woke at two o'clock, as the driver of a dumper truck crossing the overpass switched his. air-brakes on and off in a series of sharp detonations. Although the exertion of crossing the island had re-inflamed his injured leg, Maitland's head felt clear. The sharp hunger pangs reached up from his abdomen into his throat like a steel hand, but he sat quietly in the rear seat. Resting through the early afternoon, he took stock of himself.
He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectations he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all. Given, too, the circumstances of his private and professional life, that once-so-convenient division between his wife and Dr Helen Fairfax, it might be at least a week before anyone was sufficiently suspicious to call the police. Yet even the most astute detective retracing Mait-land's route from his office would be hard put to spot his car shielded by this sea of grass.
Maitland loosed his trousers and inspected his injured thigh. The joint had stiffened, and the heavy bruising and broken blood vessels gleamed through the overlay of oil and dirt.
Nursing his injured mouth, he drank the last of the tacky water in the windshield reservoir. He scanned the office blocks visible through the haze over central London. A conference he had been due to attend would now be re-assembling after lunch – did any of the delegates have any idea what had happened to him? Even if he were rescued now, it would be several days at least, and possibly weeks, before he returned to work. He thought of the chain of appointments missed, cancelled client meetings, a committee on which he sat. Like a tocsin warning him reprovingly of all this, Maitland's leg began to throb.
‘Right – let's see what we've got…’ Maitland roused himself, mastering the mounting urge to sleep all the time. He swung himself round to the rear of the car. He could hear the traffic moving along the motorway, but he ignored the vehicles, knowing that he would only tire himself by trying to wave them down.
He lifted the lid of the trunk and opened his overnight case. The vivid scent of his after-shave filled the air. He took out his patent dress-shoes and dinner-jacket. The overnight case was almost literally a time capsule – he could easily reconstitute a past world from these scents and surface textures.
He unclipped the blade from his razor, and cut his blue towel into strips. He soaked one of the strips in his after-shave. The tart Cologne stung his injured hand, biting at the dozens of minute cuts and abrasions. Maitland cleaned away the dirt and oil that clotted the kidney-shaped wound running from the knuckle of his wrist to the ball of his thumb. He bandaged the hand with the towelling strips, locked the trunk and hobbled through the grass around the abandoned cars.
Five vehicles, wrecks left behind in the breaker's yard, lay in a semi-circle around the Jaguar. The grass grew through the gaps in the rusting body panels, sprouting through the empty engine compartment of the overturned taxi. Dented fenders, a pile of bald tyres, a single bonnet hood, lay among the nettles. Maitland moved among them, now and then looking up at the embankment as he estimated what he would need to build a ramp.
Rain fell across Maitland's neck. He swung himself back to the Jaguar. The sun was hidden by the darkening cloud. Already it was raining heavily over central London. As he stepped into the car the cloudburst broke across the island. The gusts of rain-filled air levelled the swirling grass. The cars moving along the motorway were lashed by the rain, their headlamps flaring in the liquid darkness.
Maitland sat back in the rear seat, watching the rain hit the window glass three inches from his face. He stared passively at the storm, grateful that he had even the minimal shelter of this crashed car. The rain striking the bonnet danced back through the open windshield, the motes of spray hitting his face.
‘Come on!’ Deliberately striking his injured leg, Maitland opened the rear door. The dark rain lashed at his head, soaking his torn clothes as he pulled out his leg and struggled with the crutch, twice dropping it to the ground. As he swung himself across the breaker's yard the whirling raindrops cut like shot through the thin fabric of his jacket and trousers. Maitland turned his head, catching the rain in his open mouth as he lurched along.
He stumbled over the bald tyres and fell to his knees. Seizing the loose bonnet hood he had noticed earlier, he struggled back to his feet. Ignoring the rain stinging his cold skin, and the sodden bandage on his right hand, he dragged the hood towards the Jaguar, lifted it on to the bonnet and jammed it upside down through the open windshield.
He stood back as the first water rilled down the greasy metal on to the instrument panel of the Jaguar. Leaning on the crutch, Maitland shouted soundlessly to himself, an exultant madman in the driving rain. His wet clothes clung to him like a dead animal. He climbed into the car and crouched over the front seat with the reservoir canister, steering the wavering stream of water that moved down the upturned hood. The rain slackened when there was little more than half a pint of bubble-filled water in the canister, but after five minutes began again in a steady torrent.
By the time the storm ended, thirty minutes later, Maitland had collected a full canister of water. All this while, as he crouched forward in his soaked clothes, bruised hands fumbling across the front seat, Maitland talked aloud to himself, half aware that he was bringing both Catherine and Helen Fairfax into these monologues, sometimes mimicking their voices, allowing them to taunt him with his incompetence. To keep himself awake, he deliberately strained his injured leg, in some way identifying the pain with the image in his mind of these two women.
‘Good … nearly full, don't cut your mouth on this damned plastic. Not bad – two pints of water, enough for a couple of days. Catherine wouldn't be impressed, though … She'd see the whole thing as some kind of over-extended joke. “Darling, you always have driven rather too fast, you know …” I'd like to see her here, as a matter of fact, how long would she last…? Interesting experiment. Wait a minute, Maitland, they'd stop for her. Thirty seconds on that motorway and they'd be locked bumper to bumper all the way back to Westway. What the hell am I talking about? Why blame them, Maitland? The rain's going off … must get away from this island before my strength goes. Head hurts, might be concussion … cold here, bloody leg …’
As the sun came out again, its rays sweeping through the unkempt grass like the tines of an invisible comb, Maitland shivered in his soaked clothes. He drank frugally from the reservoir bottle. The rain-water was well aerated but tasteless, and Maitland wondered whether he had suffered some minor brain damage that had dulled his perception of taste. He knew that his physical strength was moving along a perceptible downhill gradient. Losing interest in the water which he had worked so hard to collect, he climbed from the car and opened the trunk.
Maitland stripped off his jacket and shirt. The wet rags fell from his hands into the pool of muddy water at his feet. It was now little more than twenty-four hours since his accident, but the skin of his arms and chest had blossomed into a garden of bruises, vividly coloured weals and markings. Maitland put on the spare dress-shirt, and buttoned on the dinner-jacket, turning up the collar. He threw his wallet into the trunk and locked down the lid.
Even in the sunlight he felt frozen. In an effort to warm himself, he forced the cork into the wine bottle and sipped at the Burgundy. For the next hour he hobbled between the breaker's yard and the embankment, carrying all the tyres and fenders he could find. The area around the cars soon became a quagmire in which he slid about like a scarecrow in his mud-spattered dinner-jacket.
Around him the last of the day's sunlight fell on the deep grass, drawing the stems even further into the air. This luxuriant growth seemed to Maitland an almost conscious attempt to inundate him. He set the tyres into the slope of the embankment, laboriously cutting the earth away with the crutch. The rain-washed soil liquefied around him in a soft avalanche. The fenders sank through the surface. As the first sounds of the evening rush-hour began, Maitland managed to climb half-way up the embankment, dragging the injured leg after him like a dying companion on a mountain wall.
The traffic drummed over his head, no more than twenty feet away, an unceasing medley of horns and engines. At intervals the high face of an airline bus sped past, the passengers visible behind their windows. Maitland waved to them as he sat in the shifting mud.
He was ten feet from the top, too exhausted to move forwards any further, when he saw that the palisade of wooden trestles had been replaced and strengthened. A few steps above his head, on the inverted beach that led up from the island, was the footprint of a steel-capped industrial boot, its stud-marks visible in the fading light. Maitland counted five other imprints. Had the highway maintenance staff repositioned the damaged trestles? The workmen had come down the slope, presumably looking for any injured driver or pedestrian at the time when he was hobbling about on the far side of the island.
The sun fell behind the apartment blocks at White City. Giving up for the time being, Maitland crawled back to the car. As he clambered into the rear seat he knew that he was showing the first signs of fever. Hunched in the mud-stained dinner-jacket, he clutched at the wine bottle, trying to warm himself. The traffic moved through the dusk, headlamps flaring under the route indicators. The siren of a police car howled its way through the dusk. Maitland waited for it to stop, and for the police crew to come down the embankment with a stretcher. In his aching head the concrete overpass and the system of motorways in which he was marooned had begun to assume an ever more threatening size. The illuminated route indicators rotated above his head, marked with meaningless destinations, the names of Catherine, his mother and his son.
By nine o'clock the bout of fever had passed. As the noise of the rush-hour receded, Maitland revived himself with several mouthfuls of wine. Sitting forward over the front seat, he stared at the rain-splashed instrument panel, concentrating whatever intelligence and energy were left to him. Somehow he could still devise a means of escaping from the island. Half a mile to the west, the lights were shining in the apartment blocks, where hundreds of families were finishing their evening meals. Any one of them would clearly see a fire or flare.
Maitland watched the glowing arc of a cigarette butt thrown down the embankment from a passing car. At this point he realized that he was literally sitting on enough signal material to light up the entire island.