1

The world is full of little towns that people want to leave, and scarcely know why. The hills crowd in too closely, they say, or the plains which stretch around are too featureless, or the freeway runs through, or doesn’t run through: you can hardly put your finger on the source of their discontent, or indeed your own. There’s a doctor, a school, good neighbours, kindness and even friends — it’s just you know you have to get out of there or die: let the name of the place be Dullsville, Tennessee, or Borup, Denmark, or Newcastle, New South Wales, or EI Ain in the United Arab Emirates, or Fenedge, East Anglia, a kind of sorrow creeps along the streets and drags you down; you can hardly lift your feet to shake it off. The shops in the High Street are forever closed for lunch, or would be better if they were: the houses in the centre may be old, veritable antiquities, but still lack resonance: a tuning fork that declines to twang, dead in the face of all expectation. And if nothing happens you know you’ll soon be dead as well, or your soul will be. Some marriages are like this too, but that’s another story.

Now it is dangerous to speak these thoughts aloud in case the Devil, in one of the many forms he takes, is flying by; and he often is, especially in such places, for it’s here he locates his safe houses, which in its turn may be why you register the place as desolate. By ‘a safe house’, for those of you not familiar with thrillers, I mean a house maintained by our security services to offer immediate safe haven for anyone under threat or duress. Houses belonging to the Devil will be on the outskirts of town (though sometimes the town creeps up to engulf them); they will be large, ramshackle, damp and crowded by trees but nevertheless have a kind of seedy status. Woe betide anyone who buys such a house, and sometimes the nicest people do, but that too is another story.

Not so long ago three young girls were rash enough to have a dangerous conversation as they walked down a country road just outside Fenedge, East Anglia, England (The World, The Universe, Space, The Cosmos, etc.). They were on their way home from school. Their names were Carmen, Annie and Laura. All three were sixteen, all three had been born in the same week in the same small-town labour ward, all three were close friends, and restless, and all three were virgins. (I know because I know everything that goes on round here.) Not that I necessarily attribute their restlessness to their virgin state, but I do see it as a contributory factor. And the Devil scents restlessness as a dog with its head out of the car scents a rabbit in amongst a thousand other reeking aromas.

‘This place is the pits,’ said Carmen. She was their leader.

‘Dullsville, Tennessee,’ said Laura. She was the pretty one.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Annie, who was always desperate.

And on they walked, shuffling the white dust of the autumn road all over their shoes, because they were school shoes and who cared? And the Devil, who just happened to be driving by in his big black BMW, picked up the scent of discontent and entered it into his mind for reference. God may have eyes in the back of his head so everything you do is known to him, but I tell you the Devil is worse. He just observes and presses Enter and there you are, your weakness, your vices, sealed into his awareness for ever, available for instant recall any time he chooses. And he accepts no excuses; he offers no leniency for youth, inexperience or stress. That’s you! Too bad!

The Devil, or this particular version of him, for indeed his name is legion, didn’t hang around to hear what else the girls might have to say. He’d heard enough. He just stopped alongside them, as if to ask directions, startling them, and then accelerated away, with a throom, throom more evident in racing cars than in BMWs; he was an old-young man with startlingly blue eyes; he wore a navy blue military-style uniform and a chauffeur’s cap which cast a shadow over a strong, bony face.

‘That driver was a bit of all right,’ said Laura. She had a sweet face and a gentle air, and was altogether unalarming. She felt it was her role and her duty to make the best of things.

‘Well, that driver wasn’t my type,’ said Carmen, though she had little idea what her type was. She just felt like contradicting Laura, whose determination always to look on the bright side she saw as dangerous. Carmen had been born with a sense of the dark and terrible profundity of things. If the country roads were awash with men whom Laura thought a bit of all right, how were they ever to get out of Fenedge? Because Annie was right. They had to watch out for themselves and each other, because no one else would do it. The whole world, except for a teacher or two, conspired to keep them exactly where they were for ever, plus a baby or two or three.

‘You’re so picky,’ said Laura, ‘you’ll cut yourself,’ which meant Laura and Carmen weren’t talking.

‘What would someone like that want with one of us?’ asked Annie.

‘He took one look and just drove off. Why? Because we’re small-time, small-town girls and it shows.’ It was in Annie’s nature to diminish herself if she possibly could, which was just fine, so long as she didn’t include Carmen in her self-assessment.

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Carmen, and then Annie and Carmen weren’t talking.

‘You keep bumping me when you walk,’ said Laura to Annie, and that was them gone too.

But that’s what happens when the Devil passes by. He searches out discontent and then leaves a whole great surging wake of it behind to make things worse, so even friends feel friendship less, and become scratchy and disagreeable with one another.

The three girls walked in silence until they reached Landsfield Crescent, where they lived. Annie was the tallest: she had a long thin body, and knobbly knees and elbows, and a cross unpretty face and short straight brown hair which became greasy unless she washed it every day, and her mother Mavis not only controlled the hot water but maintained that hair should be washed only once a week: Annie looked, and was, a difficult girl. But she was not like anyone else, which was why Carmen kept her company. And Laura could confide in her and trust her to listen and keep secrets, and Carmen and Laura were best friends and thus the three of them combined to form their own special pact against the world.

Carmen was shorter than Annie but taller than Laura. Her legs were not as long as they could have been, her nose was too large for comfort, her brown eyes so large you could see the whites beneath the pupils, her hair dark and profuse, her complexion sallow, and her mouth sulky. This, at least, was what she saw when she stared at herself in the mirror, as she did a great deal, trying to relate the sense of herself as ‘I’ to the notion other people had of her as ‘you’, or, more remotely still, as ‘she’. Others saw something different.

Bernard Bellamy did, as the black BMW, Driver at the wheel, Mr Bellamy in the back, returned along the road just as the girls, still in their sulky silence, turned into Landsfield Crescent.

‘Hey, stop, Driver,’ he said. ‘Back up a bit.’ And Driver did, the car obeying him like magic, smooth and silky even in reverse, and Bernard Bellamy looked straight into Carmen’s eyes, and saw something there that made him think this is the girl I am going to marry, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his having been married three times already and being older than Carmen by God knows how many years.

‘That’s the girl for me,’ said Bernard Bellamy, and Driver said, ‘Oh yes? Well, there’s one or two things we have to get straight first,’ and they drove on.

They had a strange relationship, these two. If you see Driver as Mephistopheles and Bernard as Faust you’re getting somewhere near it, though since the century is what it is, Bernard was not so much a man weary of intellectual achievement as bored with plain straightforward money-making, a talent which in the contemporary world is not as well regarded as you might think. Friends drink your champagne and sneer, and your soul shrivels up. To Driver, a shrivelling soul is as mad a waste as letting a £5 peach from Harrods wither forgotten on the shelf. Better gobble it up while it’s soft and fresh and delicious.

It was dusk, and Driver switched on the headlights, and the back lights glowed red in the autumn air as the car departed, and seemed to hang around a long time, and crows, rising in flocks from the trees that lined the road as the car passed, flapped black wings edged with red.

Around here the land is flat and drained. The people of Fenedge — a place smaller than a town, larger than a village, altogether indeterminate, in fact — will say, ‘The sea? A couple of miles away.’ Or ‘five miles away’ or ‘just down the road’, depending on what they think you want to hear, and because they are themselves unsure. The margins between sea and land are unclear. Personally I prefer seas which crash and wallop against a high shore, so you can be absolutely certain where water and earth collide, and appreciate the tumultuousness of their meeting: beaches where the tides rush up and rush out again over rocks, leaving crabs scuttling for cover, and anemones battered but waving their applause. Not for us, not in Dullsville, Somewhere-Near-The-Sea.