He started the car, drove out of the car park. I followed him home.
Home? Where was that for Bob Nash, that night?
We threaded the tangle of roads inside the airport—where you might circle around for ever—then took the tunnel out under the runway.
Can you tell from the way a car is driven what the driver is thinking? Can you read a car like a face? Maybe not. He didn’t speed—the opposite. The slow lane again. I should have thought: this is good, he knows he has to take care—given the state he’s in. He’s making sure he makes it safely.
When we came off the motorway onto the slower elevated section, I dared to drive right on his tail.
Did I want him to know I was there—urging him, escorting him?
If he hadn’t been thinking of other things, his head might have jerked to his mirror. Who’s this joker behind me who can’t keep his distance?
A Monday evening. The traffic, in this direction, quiet by now. He might have been back in Beecham Close in half an hour. But at the exit for the North Circular—the first option for Wimbledon, via Kew Bridge—he carried straight on, and when he took the Hammersmith exit he didn’t take the second option—via Hammersmith Bridge—but continued round the Hammersmith roundabout and took the Fulham turn.
Still an option—via Putney—for Wimbledon. But he wasn’t thinking beyond Fulham (I’d guessed it by now). He was retracing his route of two hours before, as if to turn time around.
I’ve never told Sarah this: that he went to Fulham first, on the way back. It wasn’t that he was caught in traffic, that he took it slowly, had to stop, even, to collect himself. He went back to the flat.
And I’ve never told Sarah what happened before that—right there, on Fulham Palace Road, just a little way down from the Hammersmith turn.
There was a set of lights that had just switched to red: nothing between him and them except fifty yards or more of road. But he didn’t slow down. For the first time that night he suddenly accelerated. For the first time that night he drove like a madman.
It’s not a busy intersection, a minor road to left and right, but a long, high-sided truck had already started to lumber its way across. He speeded up—I’d swear it—when he saw the possibility. When he saw the side of the truck about to straddle the road like a wall.
A mistake? He hadn’t seen the lights, his mind just wasn’t on the road? No. I’m a trained observer—observation’s my job. He speeded up, he went for it.
And only slammed on his brakes at the point where if his tyres hadn’t been good, if the road had been wet, it still might have turned out bad.
Fulham Palace Road. Junction with St. Dunstan’s and Winslow.
A cop again, composing an accident report, even before it had happened. The standard notebook phrases. Distance, direction, speed. It’s your job—you stay detached. It was only when he stopped short and the truck lurched on, clearing the main road, that I noticed where we were. Charing Cross Hospital. Just south of Hammersmith. On the left, just ahead, on the far side of the lights: Charing Cross Hospital.
I never told Sarah. Or Marsh.
A necessary moment? A moment of truth? A self-administered shock? The life that used to be his, right there, about to pass in front of him.
They might have had to carry him in. It might have been handy. Accident and Emergency. Someone might have realized who he was. My God—that’s Bob Nash.
But he came to a halt.
She might have had to go and visit him. She might have been the visitor. Never knowing how lucky she was—that this was really incredible luck in disguise. It might have saved them both. The danger list, then off it. It might have glued them together again as surely as his mending bones.
“Lucky to be alive.” Oh, but more than that. Doubly that.
And I’d have been nowhere to be seen.
Or he might have died. That way too. She’d never know. Never have to know—what she was capable of. Thinking it the cruellest possible thing (and where could she have turned for comfort?). A “tragic accident”—at that point. Thinking even—it had been her “concession”—it was all her fault.
But she wouldn’t have to be in this place now. Visiting time, like a hospital ward. Neither of us would.
A screeching, bucking halt. Pedestrians froze, turned, looked, walked on. But I don’t think the truck driver, up in front in his cabin, even noticed what had happened.
Charing Cross Hospital: staring him in the face.
The lights were still on red. He’d stalled. He restarted. The lights went green. And now—if he was himself again, if the shock had worked—he might have driven straight on (I wished it, truly, willed it): Fulham Palace Road to Putney Bridge, then Putney, Putney Hill, Wimbledon Common … home.
But he turned left at Lillie Road and I followed him back to the flat.
Yes, I’m the lucky man.
• • •
The street just as before. Streets don’t change, they don’t breathe a word, they don’t tell a soul. He parked, got out, walked to the front door and, as he’d done so many times before (did he keep a count?), let himself in.
Ten minutes to eight. I’d slipped into a space on the far side, twenty yards or so back. Now, more than ever, it could hardly have entered his head that he was being watched.
So—should I have stopped watching? Got out, crossed the street, tapped him on the shoulder? Made it my business?
Mr. Nash? Robert Nash? Police. Would you step this way?
The front door closed behind him. The light went on upstairs. It might still have meant nothing: he had charge of the flat, after all. There might have been something he’d left there. Some simple unimportant matter. (After nearly driving into a truck?)
But anyway, could you begrudge it, if he couldn’t resist it? A last look, on his way home. A last look while the room, the bed, still had a trace of warmth. While the scent of her was still there.
Nearly eight o’clock. She was in the air.
And here perhaps anyway he could truly say his farewell. Settle the balance of his life. Turn himself back into the husband of his wife.
I don’t think Sarah would have begrudged it, if that was all it was.
But how long do you give it? How much time? A farewell. Just to that flat, to all it had meant? And I’d seen his face at Departures—his face like a departure itself. I’d seen him speed up at a red light.
Even so, I didn’t move, I didn’t leap from my car until at least ten minutes had passed. It’s true, I just sat there. I let whole minutes pass. Settling, maybe, the balance of my own life. I didn’t take prompt and decisive action based on reasonable suspicion and surmise, I didn’t take due initiative—prepared, if necessary to arouse neighbours to gain entry. Police. Police, open up.
It’s true, Marsh. I sat there. Not being a policeman any more. Nothing to do with me. I may even have clutched the steering wheel as if I was clinging to a rock.
Five, ten—fifteen minutes. Dinner was cooking. The wine was breathing. Sarah was looking at the minutes ticking too.
You cross a line.
I opened my door, sprinted across the street. And it was then he would have seen me—seen me and not seen me—for the second time that night. I’ll never know. He appeared at the front door just as I reached the front gate. I had to stop short, just like he’d done at the lights. Turn myself into some chance passer-by—acting a little oddly it’s true, catching my breath. But he came up the front path as if he hadn’t seen me, brushed past me, heading for his car as if he might have stepped right through me.
And that’s what he looked like, already, a ghost.