3. The Gilchrist Boy

SO THERE I am, one whole week of holidays gone by, August the fourth now edging up to noon, sixteen and Stirling Moss, with co-driver-sister Jane ‘Madcap’ Gilchrist beside me, biting her lip and knuckles white against the dashboard, and here’s the turn and into it like Fangio, but not out of it like anyone very much, skid and wheel-spin, car aslant and rearing like a horse, impossible to hold, head bang against the roof, and then there we were, rocking slightly, but upright, gravel sounding still in our ears, in the field, and dirty tracks to betray us, but breathing and not a scratch, and Jane, Jane, we didn’t turn over, why are you crying?

‘Damn,’ I said. ‘Oh, damn and hell. If we hadn’t skidded like that we’d have clipped at least five seconds from the record.’

The record, established at four-thirteen the previous day, was forty-seven seconds from the end of the drive to the house.

‘Don’t blubber, Jane, for God’s sake.’ I was trembling myself, my wrists were as weak as rotten tree-stumps, moss-strangled, hollow, the marrow extracted, bone clean as a pea-whistle.

‘We might have turned over,’ said Jane. ‘We might have been killed.’

‘Nonsense.’

The car—a 1937 Ford Ten, with sliding-roof long stuck fast and leaking a little in the rain—started at the first attempt.

‘It still works, anyway,’ I said.

We moved backwards, then forwards, sedately, back on the drive, facing the house and who knew what music? We got out to repair the ravages of the gravel, kicking and scratching the yellow pebbles into the rut we’d made. Rain would help.

‘It doesn’t look too bad.’

‘There’s still the marks in the grass.’

Like tank-tracks, they were, deep, lush, indelible.

‘A harrow would get them out.’

‘A harrow!’ Jane laughed. Shakily, but laughed. ‘And where does Stirling Moss think he’s going to get a harrow?’

‘Shut up. Get back in the car.’

‘It’s sagging, look.’

She was right, too right. It sagged like a ship holed near the stern on the port side.

‘There’s no puncture.’

‘You’ve done something terrible, Teddy.’

‘The car still goes, doesn’t it?’

‘But look at it!’

‘Arthur will know what’s wrong.’

So back into the car, slow and steady, limping home to haven, a collision at sea, a man lost, alas, but under own steam, making harbour.

As I shut the garage doors I said to Jane: ‘If you tell anyone about this I’ll kill you.’

‘Oh, pooh,’ she said. ‘It’s so obvious I won’t have to tell anyone anything. You just have to look.’ She was quite recovered now, colour back, a mocking little-girl smile, and her fourteen. ‘You’ll be in awful trouble, Teddy. I told you not to go so fast.’

Treason, simple straight-forward treason, the co-driver is not to be trusted. But what can you expect from a sister—from any girl—girls understand nothing, nothing whatever, only Molly can understand me, Molly Simpson, and this is August the fourth and I still haven’t seen her this hols. Molly, when shall I see you?

Arthur the gardener said: ‘It’s a broken spring.’

‘Gosh. Is that expensive?’

‘I’d say so. Cost quite a bit.’

And so to lunch, and how to break the news, and there at the pit of my stomach is a pudding, all stodge, as chewy as wet cement, a huge disgusting pudding I can never absorb, which will sit there for ever, growing and growing, a cancerous black pudding swelling and swelling. People will think I am pregnant. But, no, I can’t eat a thing, honestly, Mummy, you know how I hate potatoes, and cold ham I used to like, but today, it’s odd, isn’t it, I’m just not hungry at all.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mother. ‘Of course you must eat. What’s the matter with you, Teddy? Is your liver all right?’

My liver is fine but my lights are low, Mother.

‘Nothing’s the matter. I’m quite all right. I’m not hungry, that’s all. What’s odd about that?’

‘What’s the matter with him, Jane? Where did you two go this morning?’

Blankness, blanched blankness.

‘Teddy, if you’ve been driving that car beyond the gate, you know what your father said.’

‘Oh, Mummy …’

‘What do you mean, “Oh, Mummy”?’

‘Of course I didn’t go beyond the gate.’

To go beyond the gate, to speed the three miles from Mendleton to Cartersfield, to seize Molly Simpson and carry her off in the old Ford Ten to bliss and heaven, world without end, amen. To drive at seventy-five (it couldn’t get up there, of course, poor battered old Ford) from Cartersfield to London, and there, in splendour, to dine out with Molly, and then to the theatre every night of our lives, and so to bed. Oh, bed with Molly Simpson, that endless scene for ever playing in my mind, the late late and the early early show, the morning, noon and night performance, We Never Closed, Molly Simpson and I——

But interrupted, from time to time, by newsreels, shots of racing cars, Ferraris, Maseratis, Bugattis, BRMs, the sensuous clash of gears, the high-pitched squeal of speed, panic in the pits, new goggles, four wheels changed in fourteen seconds flat, then off again, through the gear-box, Bristols, Jaguars, A.C.s and Frazer Nashes, the Lotus, the Cooper, the Climax, cars like free electrons buzzing in my head, and Saturday afternoons with the portable radio, Brands Hatch and Silverstone, and the commentator shouting above the roar of engines, the groan and snarl and rage and screech, of pistons’ hammer and brakes’ yelp and oil slicks and skids and maniacal cars, driven beyond endurance, charging the crowd like maddened bulls, snorting and spewing and bleeding fuel, into the bales of straw, against the barriers, and drivers wheeling in the air to fall flat and broken, Saturday afternoons and the race-track of life….

And there I am, with the garlands round my neck, and my arm round Molly Simpson, and the crowd is going wild, and the pits are hushed, the loudspeakers proclaim new records, new clipped seconds to add to my glory, and it’s Le Mans next, and Indianapolis and the Monte Carlo Rally, and after the race Molly and I sip Pernods by the Mediterranean, dark and blue as Molly’s night-dress….

But now there is this pudding in my stomach, and it is swelling. I am feeling not ill, exactly, but not too well, and frankly I shall have to confess, to tell her. Daddy will be furious, let her break the news to him, let her face him first, but I didn’t go beyond the gates.

‘Mummy, I’m afraid …’

‘What have you done?’

‘Arthur says it’s just a broken spring.’

‘A spring?’

‘At the back. I don’t think it’s serious.’

She stopped eating. ‘Why didn’t you tell me at once?’

Because you would be angry, because you might say I could not drive at all, not even as far as the gate, in an old beat-up Ford Ten.

‘I’m sorry.

‘Sorry? I should think you are. What do you think your father will say?’

Jesus Christ, is this why I pay for you to go to an expensive school? So that you can come home in the holidays and smash up my cars? What have I done to deserve a son who wants to drive racing cars for a living?

‘I’m really not hungry at all, Mummy. May I leave the table, please?’

‘Certainly not. How did it happen?’

‘Well, you see, we were just going along, and then there was this sort of bump, and …’

And Jane is watching me, her eyes growing rounder and rounder, and her mouth wide open to speak. Put something in it, Jane, a potato. I told you I’d kill you if you told. Eat, Jane, eat, please eat.

Jane took a mouthful and choked.

‘I don’t know what you children learn at school,’ said my mother. ‘Have you no manners at all, Jane? Don’t stuff yourself so.’

Dear Jane, the tears in your eyes, but you didn’t speak, co-driver and cohort, stuff yourself as much as you like.

‘And as for you, Teddy, I’ll have a look at the damage myself. I warned you, if you did anything to that car, you’d have to pay out of your own pocket-money.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it won’t cost much, Mummy.’

‘And we’ll have no more driving for a few days, if you don’t mind. I’m sick and tired of hearing you roar up and down the drive. There’s hardly a pebble of gravel left.’

‘We put it all back, honestly.’

‘So you were going too fast.’

Well, I didn’t mean to, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t want to go off the drive, you can’t think that, I was trying to break the record, that’s all, it’s perfectly simple and obviously I wouldn’t be able to break the record if I skidded off into the field, would I, so I didn’t mean to, and I’m sorry, but what can I do about it now? But no, all they can see is the gravel off the drive, and the tracks in the field, and they don’t know what it’s like, coming into that corner just a little too fast, they’d never dream of doing such a thing, of course not, they don’t understand what it’s like not being allowed to drive on main roads, but the pudding is going away, thank God, and it won’t be back till tonight, because Daddy’s away at the office and I wish I had an idea of how much he gets paid, because I’m sure he could easily afford to give me an Aston Martin for my birthday, my seventeenth birthday. How long will that be? Another five months and then I can take my driving-test, and then I’ll be free, in my Aston Martin, and zoom … But he’d never give me an Aston Martin, not in a million years, no, never, never, never.

So an explosion that evening when Father returns, like some furious giant, from London, and then it’s forgotten, but no driving for a few days, you hear me? So, what shall I do? And Molly is coming tomorrow, with her parents, for drinks, so I read all her letters, they’re on pink paper, and I think of the mornings at school when they used to come, Tuesday mornings, always Tuesdays. I’d be up and shaved a few minutes early, knowing a letter was coming, then wait, elaborately casual, for the post, and seize my letter before anyone could see the pink envelope or guess at the faint scent of the sheets, and off to my study to read it quietly and quickly, then in to roll-call and breakfast, heart fluttering, to kippers (this was Tuesday, Molly and kippers), and then after breakfast to read it more slowly in the lavatory, because now the study wasn’t safe, Jackson would be there, who shared it with me, Jackson with the tuft of red hair and pale eyes from whom no secrets were hid, who jeered and gibed, coarse humorist that he was, no sensitivity, none whatsoever, and no sense of privacy, opened my letters quite shamelessly, Jackson who made such lewd comments about my photo of Molly, I had to take it down. What a picture that was! Molly on Shylock, her pony, soaring over a gate at the Cartersfield gymkhana. Oh, my Molly! What earnest endeavour in that photograph (courtesy of the local paper, the nerve of them, to print my Molly without so much as a by-your-leave, and then to charge me for her!), what black-and-white attention to the matter in hand, though your hands reach forward, giving Shylock his head, just resting against his neck, ready to pull him up, to steady him, and your knees gripping him, squeezing him, one with the saddle, one with the pony. Oh, Molly, my Amazon, my pony-club heroine, we’ll have you co-driver before we’re done.

I walk beneath the yews, the avenue supposed to be haunted by a medieval lady. The branches meet. It is quiet and dark, smells rich and mysterious. I raise my head from the roots like anatomy lessons. You walk towards me, slowly and seriously, gentleness in your face.

But that is tomorrow. She must find me here, and we will stroll, watching the sun as it sets at the end of the avenue. (Does it really set there? It must.) The house looks fine from here, from the sunrise end (and will we be found here at sunrise?) it looks old and mellowed and English (all that’s best in Britain) and the old part, the Elizabethan part, with its one fine wide window, reflects the day, dying expansively in pale green and blue, one vapour trail, shaped like the whisker of a crab, orange across the sky.

They come at six and drink in the drawing-room. Molly and I go out to play croquet. Oh, the games we could be playing! What shots through what hoops, Molly, dear Molly! And then we stroll off the lawn and round the garden, past the roses, past the sweet peas, past the herbaceous border, and we have nothing to say. Yes, I was in the second eleven, and next year, perhaps, I will be in the first. No, she hadn’t done anything worth talking about. And here we are under the yews, their great thick trunks like the feet of some vast ancient animal, gnarled and wrinkled, rhinoceros-coloured, and the long sweeping branches of dark hard green. Did I know that yew was poisonous to horses? And how is Shylock? How many gymkhanas this summer? And she is rather bored with riding, it seems, because she doesn’t answer. She walks slowly beside me, and I listen to her skirt against her calves and think of the sea hushing itself in a golden cove in Scotland. We are going to Scotland in September—September the first—and are the Simpsons going anywhere?

And alas they are, and all too soon, on August the sixteenth the Simpsons are going to France, to the Loire valley.

We stop beneath the yews, and my arm, which has been fidgeting all this while against my side, reaches across, volitionless, and touches her shoulder, hovers there a moment, hesitates, then moves slowly to her waist, curls itself round it, settles down, holding her lightly, feeling her relax against it. And she says: ‘Then we won’t see much of each other, will we?’

And we stand there in silence, and my arm shifts, holds her more firmly against our absence from each other. We walk slowly on.

I say: ‘We could run away together. We could drive off somewhere and they wouldn’t find us for ages.’

She smiles, a little sad, says nothing.

‘We did Romeo and Juliet last term,’ she says, suddenly. We are near the end of the avenue, the sunset end, but the sun is still quite high, it won’t set for an hour or more, and she will be gone by then.

‘I played Mercutio.’

‘Romeo,’ I say, murmur rather. ‘Alfa Romeo.’

I’ll be your Alfa Romeo, sleek and fast, and we will go together all over Europe, across the Bosphorus to Turkey, and then on and on, at a hundred and fifty, to Syria, Persia, India, Siam, Indo-China …

‘You’re funny, Teddy,’ she says, and she slips away from me and leans against one of the prehistoric trunks and looks across the small dip which we call a valley to where the spire of Cartersfield church is like a finely sharpened pencil against the horizon.

‘I’ll be your Alfa Romeo,’ I say.

Do you love me, Teddy? Oh, but I do, just ask me, please ask me, but she doesn’t move, her brown hair is curly and soft at the back of her neck, and her mouth is a serious straight line. The longest distance between two points, so I define our kisses, never yet kissed. And her eyes are hazel, and they look out across the water-meadow, with the cows strung out like amber beads from one of my mother’s old necklaces, and the sky is like the cyclorama in the school theatre, and she has been Mercutio and I am Alfa Romeo, and I want to say: ‘I love you with my whole heart and soul, Molly,’ but I don’t.

And we wander together again, holding hands, away from the avenue, into the beech wood that skirts the meadow, and high above us an aeroplane drones like a mosquito, and then we can’t be seen and I kiss her, the first kiss this holidays or ever, and her lips feel very soft and slippery, and my wrists feel weak again, and I tell her about how I skidded two days ago.

And then we walk slowly back again, because the Simpsons will be going soon, they can’t stay to dinner, they’re so sorry, they have to get back, but it was a lovely drink and so nice to see us again. And as they go, the car moving very slowly away, careful of the gravel on the drive, I see her face, turned back over her shoulder, watching me, grave as ever, and not so much as a smile, though I stand and watch the dust settle for five minutes, trying to pluck one from the air.

August the twelfth, grouse season opens, my diary informs me, it is a Saturday, there is a gymkhana.

There is a small crowd, local people only, watching their children compete. They sit on rugs and move picnic baskets about with an air of authority. The shells of hard-boiled eggs are snatched into paper bags. Apple-cores, of course, go to the ponies. The sun blinds from a hundred windscreens.

I sit in the car. My father is scornfully angry because I am listening to the radio. At Silverstone the Ferraris are leading. On the twenty-fifth lap Stirling Moss is in trouble. He pulls in at the pits, he withdraws from the race. I switch off, grief gnawing my hero-worshipping heart.

A single full-bellied cloud drifts majestically above the bending races. Next is the jumping. Already Molly has won a blue rosette. Shylock wears it on his bridle, not sure whether to ignore it or treat it as an excuse to misbehave. At first I had enjoyed myself, strolling among the cars, noting two Bentleys, a Hudson and Cartersfield’s only really interesting car, an Atalanta. Then I reached the Simpsons’ Rover. Molly was sitting down, picking at the grass by the rug, her jockey cap hiding most of her hair, though the soft curly down on her neck was visible, slightly ragged, like the first drifting seaweed that promises land. Shylock pawed at the ground near by, occasionally lifting his head to watch in astonishment as other horses minced and snorted by.

‘I hope you do very well.’

‘Thank you.’ The hand—I had held it how many times now? Still single figures—went on scrabbling at the dry short grass by the rug, a red-and-green tartan.

‘How are you doing so far?’

‘One second in the potato race.’

‘Terrific!’

‘We could have been first, but Shylock got so excited. He prances about so much as soon as we get in the ring.’

‘But second is jolly good.’

‘We could have been first, though.’

I squatted down beside her and said: ‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s no need to be sorry,’ she said. ‘It was my fault for not controlling him properly. But he can be such a pig.’

Molly nervous, plucking at the hard white dry grass, her cap on tears hovering about her face, eyes cloudy.

‘Can I do anything?’

‘No, thanks awfully.’

‘Well, good luck. I shall be watching you.’

No response, she missed her cue, eyes on Shylock, Molly in a world of horses, who wants horses? Silverstone starts in two minutes. I must be off. I get up.

‘I’m sure you’ll win.’

‘That’s me,’ she said, listening to an announcement, not to me. She jumped up—Molly in jodhpurs!—untied Shylock, led him away from the cars, put one foot in the stirrup, and then she was up. Molly vaulting, one leg flinging up and over, be careful, Molly, avoid violence, treat your body with tenderness, don’t do the splits, don’t have a fall.

And she was off to the parade ring. I went to the car, to the radio, to Stirling Moss. It could have been a big day for the BRM. Molly nearly fell off in the bending, fell dangling a-straddle Shylock’s neck, and I was out of the car before she’d grabbed his mane and slithered, me watching in outrage, back to the saddle. Such litheness, such a supple slither. Back in the car it was the nineteenth lap and the BRM was doing well, very well. But then the fatal twenty-fifth, and Moss retired. I got out of the car and stretched.

‘Is it over at last?’ said my mother.

‘Moss has been forced to retire.’

They looked at me as though I was mad. They understood an exact and perfect circle of nothing.

‘At least it’s better than listening to cricket,’ said the traitor Jane.

‘I suppose tennis is exciting,’ I said. ‘Bang-bang, bang-bang, love-fifteen, bang, fifteen all, bang-bang, bang-bang, thirty-fifteen, bang-bang——’

‘Oh, be quiet, Teddy, for heaven’s sake,’ said my mother.

Jane had developed a passion for some ludicrous tennis player. I sat as far from her as possible to watch the jumping. She stuck out her tongue at me. I ignored her, superbly.

At last came Molly, trotting out of the parade ring, making a neat turn before breaking into a canter and heading Shylock into the first jump. As she went over, the white number tied round her waist (what a salmon-thin, salmon-sprung waist!), her body flat along Shylock’s withers and reaching neck, my right leg jumped with them, sympathetic magic. Oh witchcraft in white numbers, the girl jumped over the horse, and the moon shone for ever on Molly Simpson and Edward Gilchrist as they walked out into an eternal blaze of dawn and dusk, all midday and midnight vanished and banished, only the early morning and the evening left for our endless enjoyment of each other….

But now she had completed one side of the course, and she made the turn and came down towards the gate opposite our car—that gate over which she perpetually soars in my imagination, the same gate as last year, when the paper had caught her in mid-flight–and now she was over the brush fence and coming to the gate, and Shylock was cantering easily, easily, all in control, and heading now into the jump and over she—— No! Oh, Molly! Shylock refused, stopped dead, put on the brakes and skidded the last six feet and into the gate, carrying it forward on his chest, till he stopped and it fell, plunk, red and white, on the grass of the ring. But Molly stays on, she backs him out of the shambles, he is snorting now and picking his feet up high and his eyes are rolling, and men run out and put the jump together again, and here she comes again, those knees so tight against the leather of the saddle (such soapings, such tender polishings, to produce that burnish, as though it was a wedding-gown and every pearl had to be separately shone) and——Oh no! Humiliation squared and cubed! Shylock runs out, runs swerving away from the red-and-white monster he has suddenly found in the five-barred gate. Oh you coward and traitor, you animal, you despicable, insensate thing, you ingrate, you horse! But Molly has one more attempt, a final try, and she gathers him up, and she calms him down, she halts him and strokes his neck and speaks sweet nothings into his flat-back felt-like ears, and then she comes back, try again, Molly Simpson, and he prances a little as he walks, walks edgily, warily, and she talks to him all the time, too low to be heard, some magic incantation, no doubt, some witchcraft, and here they come again, up to the jump, oh please get over it, Shylock, for Molly and me, listen to what she is saying.

No. He stops dead. Molly flies over his head, over the jump, it is all so slow, so graceful, picks up her hat, takes Shylock by the reins (he is standing there quiet now, shocked at what he has done) and leads him out of the ring.

The crowd mumbles sympathetically, wipes its brow, there is a general feeling of exertion over. The jumping proceeds.

First Stirling Moss, and now this. It has been a bad day.

‘Gosh, what rotten luck, Molly.’

‘He can be such a pig.’ Her eyes red, searching for the handkerchief in her sleeve.

I look away. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’

Blow it all out of your nose, the whole world of those objectionable beasts, then come to me, Molly, I will console you.

‘I was afraid you might have been hurt.’

‘If only I had been!’ she cries, bursts into tears for her shameful graceful flying fall, for having been mocked by a horse, by her own Shylock.

‘Oh, go away, Teddy, please go away!’

August the fourteenth, a Monday evening, and the sun is striking back at the clouds, issuing purple and black summonses, writs, judgments, while the sky cringes away from the west.

I walk alone in the avenues of yews, muttering fragments of poems. Pigeons wheel, calling among themselves, like a family unpacking after a journey. A slow black rook flies ploddingly towards Cartersfield. God is unjust. There is no truth except there is no truth. Molly is going on Wednesday. Blackness is all. Very well, then, I am a man, I will have blackness. Give me blackness, blacker than black. And the telephone has not rung for me.

My mother calls me home across the quicksands of sixteen. Dinner. I am not hungry. I never want to eat again.

Perhaps I am hungry after all.

Tuesday morning, and I lifted the receiver and dialled the number and Molly was out but she would call when she got back. Into the dining-room for an orange, to the kitchen for a lump of sugar. Sucking the sweetness of an August morning, I walked round the garden, sniffing the fragrant exhaust-and-hay smell of the motor-mower. Arthur was spinning it round at the far end of the lawn. The noise was good, grew louder, deafened, died away again. I would never drive such a petty machine. No chance to double-declutch, no opportunity for fancy pedal-work.

Shall I answer?

‘I’m here!’

‘Telephone!’

The crew-cut grass scarcely feels the weight of my feet as I speed, through the gear-box and into top, brake at the door, in and slam, to the phone.

‘How are you, Molly? I mean, why don’t you—if you haven’t anything else on, that is—why don’t you come over?’

Pause. The line hums to itself, haws a little, like a cook mumbling over her pots on the stove. I have been too fast, I should have——

‘Well, that would be awfully nice. What are you doing?’

‘Nothing, really. It would be nice, I was thinking, with you going away tomorrow—I mean—we could think of something to do, couldn’t we?’

‘Yes, all right. I’ll just go and ask Mummy. Hang on.’

The line is now a choir, high up near the roof of a great cathedral, the basses and trebles soaring out, then the low continuo of alto and tenor. They are singing our song, Molly, they are singing our song.

‘She says all right. After lunch. I’ll be over about two, if that’s O.K.’

‘Yes, yes. Marvellous. I’ll think of something by the time you get here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something to do.’

‘Oh. Well, at two, then.’

‘Yes. And—Molly? I just wanted to say how sorry I was about the gymkhana. Really.’

‘But didn’t you stay?’

‘No, we went home after the jumping. What happened?’

‘Shylock and I won the bare-back jumping!’

‘You won!’ Bare-back, and jodhpurs, knee and thigh, against the bare animal back. And I missed it. Good. I could not have watched her pressing her knees into the bare back of Shylock, no, not that.

‘How marvellous! Congratulations. No one told me.’

‘It was rather nice, wasn’t it?’

‘Gosh, yes. Stupendous.’

‘Well, it was just my lucky day, I suppose. And after the proper jumping, I was just determined——’

‘You did very well. It wasn’t your fault. It was Shylock.’

‘No, it was me. The rosette—the one we got for the potato race—had got loose, and was flapping near his eye.’

‘What an awful shame. Rotten luck.’

‘He couldn’t see properly.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, see you this afternoon. Mummy says she wants to use the phone.’

‘O.K., Molly. I can’t wait.’

‘Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye.’

My mother is arranging flowers in the hall. Listening in, probably. No privacy, anywhere.

‘Who was that, Teddy?’

‘She’s coming over this afternoon.’

‘Oh? What will you do?’

‘Oh, things. You know.’

She tidies a final zinnia. ‘Good, darling.’

Molly arrives in the family Rover. Her mother says: ‘I’ll be back about six, darling. Have a nice time.’ She drives off without saying anything to me except ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye’.

‘What would you like to do, Molly?’

‘Could I have a drink, please? I’m terribly thirsty, I don’t know why.’

In the kitchen Mrs Clark, our cook, is finishing the washing-up from lunch. We get in her way, choosing among lime-juice, orange and lemon squashes, and cider. Molly takes orange. I fetch her ice, mix it for her with a silver swizzle-stick, help myself, to be bold, to cider. Then we go out to deck-chairs on the lawn. We sit and talk of this and that, mostly of her triumph at the gymkhana. I look covertly at her legs, swinging freely from under her dress, think of them clamped to Shylock’s back.

Then I say: ‘Would you like to go for a spin, Molly?’

‘You’re not allowed to drive, are you?’

‘Oh yes. To the end of the drive.’ And into the sunset with you, Molly Simpson. ‘Would you like to see what I can make the old Ford do?’

‘All right.’

The sun has gone briefly behind some dank-looking clouds. A small wind is testing itself in corners down at the garage. We look in the harness-room. Jane is there, polishing her bridle.

‘Are you going to let him drive you?’

‘Now you be quiet, Jane.’ I’ve had enough of your betrayals, sister, ex-co-driver. Silence.

‘He’s a maniac behind the wheel. You’d better take a crash-helmet.’

‘Oh, really, Jane. You know I’m perfectly safe.’

‘Is he a maniac?’ says Molly, her eyes grave and gay, daring me on, and timid.

‘Well, I won’t go with him any more,’ says Jane.

‘No, you’d rather play pat-ball or tennis, or whatever you call it. You’re too young to enjoy driving.’ That should crush her. ‘Let’s go, Molly.’

The back spring has been repaired. The car looks unusually dignified, I washed it this morning. It sits four-square and dumpy, reliable, like an old woman behind a market-stall.

I open the door for her, shut it gently. It has to be slammed to shut properly. ‘Excuse me.’ Slam. Skip round the nose, and in, slam, and ‘Here we are!’

I back with circumspection. There are tell-tale traces on the door of the garage. We turn in the yard. We are off. First gear, a brief harrumph, second gear down to the house, grinding a little. Now, safely beyond recall, we rev up and into third (three gears only, but good ones) and now St Stirling Moss and the blessed Mike Hawthorn and the venerable Donald Campbell be with me, and the gravel begins to spit against the mudguards.

‘Ah!’ The corner is nicely judged, just a whisp of a skid, and then, oh dullness and boredom and the end of the drive.

‘I’m not supposed to go any further.’

Two dull spots of rain on the windscreen. Big splatters of frustration. The white gate hangs open. Beyond is the river of life, the black magic of a tarred road.

‘Let’s go for a little drive. Just round the lanes. No one will know.’

‘But, Teddy——’

But it is too late, we are off, we move cautiously to the very edge of the gravel, the frontier-post of sixteen. I am a spy in the adult world of public highways, this slim black line between hedgerows, wandering past the Thomsons’ farm and the three cottages which are Mendleton, and the little chapel where the rector comes once a month to preach to himself between the cramping walls of a nineteenth-century manorial ambition.

‘Teddy, you shouldn’t have, you know you shouldn’t have!’

‘But I’m perfectly safe, Molly. No one will know. We’ll just go down to the crossroads and then come straight back.’

The crossroads are a whole long mile away. I drive with great caution, thirty-five—‘Look, I’m only going thirty-five’—then, well, yes, perhaps a little faster, and the needle creeps up to fifty and Molly says: ‘That’s too fast,’ so I slow down a little, and the road curves and winds like a stream searching for a river, and there, suddenly, is the crossroads.

Molly looks scared. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

I take her hand. ‘Don’t be silly, Molly.’

But she takes her hand away again and says: ‘Now don’t be stupid. I want to go back, please.’

‘We are going back.’

It is raining now, and the wipers are on, thlap, thlap, across the glass. As we round a bend, just before we are on home ground again, we see someone in the road, walking.

‘It’s Miss Spurgeon!’

Miss Spurgeon, Miss Spurgeon, your’re seventy and hale, walking your afternoon walk as every day of your long-nosed life, you have to be here, and it coming on to rain, and, naturally, to stop us and: ‘Why, if it isn’t Teddy Gilchrist and Molly Simpson.’

‘Do you think an old woman can trouble you young people to give her a lift back to Cartersfield? It’s raining quite hard and I came out not thinking….’

Disaster. Stark as the finger of God.

‘Of course, Miss Spurgeon, please get in.’

‘Thank you so much. You are sure you aren’t going anywhere, are you?’ and chatter and spinster and blather and oh God damn it why did this have to happen all the way, all the long black illegal way to the town, and please God, if You’re there, don’t let me be seen, I’ll never spray gravel again like gunshot, I’ll be good to my mother and father, just this once, God, please let me get away with it, I know I shouldn’t have, God, are You listening, and don’t let Molly say anything to give us away (‘Yes, Jane is fourteen now, Miss Spurgeon,’ ‘My, how you children do spring up, and your mother?’) and there’s only another mile, and, dear Christ in Heaven, I’d forgotten, there’s the main road to cross, and the traffic, my hands are slipping and sweating on the wheel, and it has, by God it has, stopped raining.

‘Oh, stop a moment, Teddy. I think it’s stopped.’

I believe in You, God, I really do.

‘Do you know, I think I’ll walk on again, if it’s really stopped. I don’t like to miss my walk. And you’ve been so kind already.’

‘Just as you like, Miss Spurgeon, but you mustn’t get wet.’

Get soaked to the skin, die of pneumonia tomorrow, Miss Spurgeon. All your long malicious life you have been spreading the vilest gossip, and often you’ve been right, though always for the most disturbing reasons, poking in muck-heaps and love-nests, Miss Spurgeon, and if you tell anyone about this … But of course she will. The damage is doomed, the sky has collapsed, it’s a leaky roof, patched up with blue, treacherous blue, blue holes, and God, I’m not quite convinced yet.

‘Yes,’ she is saying, ‘it was only a shower, there won’t be another for half an hour or so. I have plenty of time.’

And out she gets, all smiles and thank-yous, and she’s right, women like that always are, the sun is soothing down the rain-rumpled feelings, and the shower has gone off to London to see the queen and her people.

We turn in a gateway and go slowly, oh so slowly, back.

‘She’ll tell the whole town,’ I say.

‘You are an awful fool,’ says Molly.

‘She’ll tell everyone.’

‘About how kind we were.’

‘How she met us in the rain.’

‘So fortunately.’

‘Damn her.’

‘Thank goodness I’m going away tomorrow.’

Unkindest cut! In silence we pass the customs at the white gate hanging open. To slam it behind us, keep out the story, fight all Spurgeons to the death. Sentries, be at your keenest, keep her out, keep her quiet, kill her. Put up a huge notice: MISS SPURGEON KEEP OUT. Cut out her tongue.

No sap now to lock brakes and tail-spin at the corner, the gravel susurrating smug and fat beneath the wheels, the puddles smacking their lips together. To the garage. So, disheartened, not even the trace of a manner left, Molly opens her own door, I am too lacklustre to notice.

‘I hope it’ll be all right,’ she says.

To the house. Mooning about, looking at old papers, The Tatler, no one we know, Country Life, The Field. My mother comes in two or three times, smiles brilliant and thin, goes out again.

‘You’re leaving tomorrow.’

I stand by the window. It begins to rain again. Too late, Miss Spurgeon is already telling it, over her tea. True love is always fettered. We are the victims of an environment. What am I going to do for the rest of these intolerable holidays?

‘It’s so sad,’ I say.

‘Oh, everything.’

A merciful release, the Simpsons’ Rover, black as a hearse, shushes to a stop at the front door. In the back seat a riding-crop, a jockey-cap.

‘I’d love to stop for a drink, but really we have so much packing to finish tonight.’

‘It’s very good of you to bring Molly out,’ says my mother.

‘I shall be thankful when they can drive themselves,’ says Mrs Simpson.

Gone the grave face, perhaps she has some deadly sickness, that is why she is so pale, I shall never see her again, this is my last glimpse of her, the rain settling in for the night and all eternity.

Oh, Molly, beware of the French with their sneaky ways, their easy greasy charm, the oil in their hair and their little black moustaches, for you are mine, Molly, and one day soon we will be married in Cartersfield church, and there will be twelve bridesmaids in silver-grey dresses for this day of rain.

But she is dying. They are taking her away to die. Of consumption, perhaps? Oh, don’t waste away, Molly, waste not and want not, love must not wither on a foreign soil. I shall treasure my last glimpse of your face so grave, carry it to the grave, mine or yours—no, yours alone—and there I shall kneel and weep for our love which might have been, which lasted a thousand reels and more in my projecting head.

Heat-wave. August the twentieth. I am sunbathing in the garden, reading Dylan Thomas. He understood life. ‘Never until the mankind-making flower-fathering and——

Shall I answer?

‘Come here. I want to speak to you.’

Sluggishly I go.

‘What is this I hear from Miss Spurgeon?’

‘What, Mummy?’

‘She says she met you in the road in the car and you took her more than half-way home.’

‘Well, yes. You see——’

‘I shall tell your father.’

Ostracized from home and love, I sink with the sun, the exhausted day, chased from a heat-wave heaven by the fury of my black father, the night.

My heart swells. My finger-tips sense every breadth of breeze. The yews huddle about me, sighing their traditional lament of evergreen darkness and death. Stillness like the moment before the world was made. There is no God, no Justice. You say I have no manners. Was it not well-mannered to help an old lady in a storm? Well, then …

The spire of Cartersfield church points a forensic finger at the stars. The cows stand absorbed in evening beneath the first scatter of twinkles. One bright glimmer. Perhaps it is Venus. She is going out, once and for all.

A draught of air, cool, like an inhalation of the earth. I walk back up the avenue of yews. Their roots are like the knuckles of skeleton giants. Dust beneath my feet. Where is the medieval lady who walks here? They say she is weeping for her lover, trampled beneath some Cypriot castle’s walls.

I will console you, lady. I too know what it is to suffer, to taste the bitter rind of misunderstanding, to be unloved. You may take my hand.

But you are not here.

I dawdle, stray wisps of music in my head, like a wind sighing among the cobwebs in a deserted attic. I stop. I sink to the earth, stretch out, close my eyes. My lips meet a knuckle of root. Yews are poisonous. I kiss, but I do not bite.

After a hot day, after a hard day, what coolness beneath the yews. They have endured, they are insensate, not even animals. To live beyond the unendurable, that is the lot of man. I open my eyes to a deep grey dusk, here under the yews. Stars shine at the sunset end of the avenue. I roll over on to my back and stare up at the black impenetrable branches.