1

Winter Journey

It was too early for birdsong. Harold lay beside her, his hands neat on his chest, looking so peaceful she wondered where he traveled in his sleep. Certainly not the places she went: if she closed her eyes, she saw roadworks. Dear God, she thought. This is no good. She got up in the pitch-black, took off her nightdress and put on her best blue blouse with a pair of comfortable slacks and a cardigan. “Harold?” she called. “Are you awake?” But he didn’t stir. She picked up her shoes and shut the bedroom door without a sound. If she didn’t go now, she never would.

Downstairs she switched on the kettle, and while it boiled, she got out her Marigolds and wiped a few surfaces. “Maureen,” she said out loud, because she was no fool. She could tell what she was doing, even if her hands couldn’t. Fussing, that’s what. She made a flask of instant coffee and a round of sandwiches that she wrapped in clingfilm, then wrote him a message. She wrote another that said “Mugs!” and another that said “Pans!” and before she knew it, the kitchen was covered with Post-it notes, like small yellow alarm signals. “Maureen,” she said again, and took them all down. “Go now. Go.” She hung Harold’s wooden cane from the chair where he couldn’t miss it, then slipped the Thermos into her bag along with the sandwiches, put on her driving shoes and winter coat, picked up her suitcase and stepped out into the beautiful early morning. The sky was clear and pointed with stars, and the moon was like the white part of a fingernail. The only light came from Rex’s house next door. And still no birdsong.

It was cold, even for January. The crazy paving had frozen overnight and she had to grab hold of the handrail. There were splinters of ice in the ruts between stones, and the front garden was no more than a few glass thorns. She turned on the ignition to warm the car while she scraped at the windows. The frost was rough, like sandpaper, and lay as far as she could see, slick beneath the street lamps of Fossebridge Road, but no one else was out. It was a Sunday, after all. She waved at Rex’s house in case he was awake, and that was it. She was going.

Road-gritters had already passed through Fore Street, and salt lay in pink mats all the way up the hill. She drove north past the bookstore and the other shops that would be closed until Monday, but she didn’t look. It was a good while since she’d used the high street. These days, she and Harold mostly went online, and not just because of the pandemic. The quiet row of shops became night-lit rows of houses. In turn they became a dark emptiness with a closed-down petrol station somewhere in the middle. She passed the turning for the crematorium that she visited once a month and kept driving. Now that she was on the road, she felt not excitement, but more a sense that, even though she didn’t know how to explain it, she was doing the right thing. Harold had been right.

“You have to go, Maureen,” he’d said. She had come up with a list of reasons why she couldn’t but in the end she’d agreed. She’d offered to show him how to use the dishwasher and the washing machine because he sometimes got confused about which buttons to press and then she wrote the instructions clearly on a piece of paper.

“You are sure?” she’d said again, a few days later. “You really think I should do this?”

“Of course I’m sure.” He was sitting in the garden while she raked old leaves. He’d done up his coat lopsided, so that the left half of him was adrift from the right.

“But who will take care of you?”

“I will take care of me.”

“What about meals? You need to eat.”

“Rex can help.”

“That’s no good. Rex is worse than you are.”

“That is true, of course. Two old fools!”

At this, he’d smiled. Only, something about the completeness of his smile made her miss him without even going anywhere, so that he could be as sure as he damn well liked, but she wasn’t. She had put down her rake. Gone to him and redid his buttons. He sat patiently, gazing up at her with his delft-blue eyes. No one but Harold had ever looked at her like that. She stroked his hair and then he lifted his fingertips to her face, and drew her down to his, and kissed her.

“Maureen, you won’t feel right unless you go,” he’d said.

“Okay, then. I’m going. I’m going, and nothing will stop me! Though, if you don’t mind, I won’t walk. I’ll take the more conventional route, thank you very much. I’ll drive.”

They’d laughed because they both knew she was doing her best to sound bigger than she felt. After that she went back to raking the leaves and he went back to watching the sky, but the silence was filled with all the things she did not know how to say.

So here she was, with Harold in her head, while she traveled further and further away from him. Only last night he had cleaned her driving shoes and set them, side by side, next to the chair with her clothes. “I won’t wake you in the morning,” she’d promised, as they got into bed and said good night. He had held his hand tight round hers until he fell asleep, and then she had curled up close and listened to the steady repeat of his heart, trying to take in some of his peacefulness.

Maureen drove slowly but there was hardly any traffic. If a car came toward her with its headlights shining, she saw it in plenty of time and pulled over in the right place—she even waved a polite thank-you—then the lanes were dark again, just the swing of hedge and tree as she passed. From there, she joined a dual carriageway and that was even better because the road was straight and wide and still pretty empty, with lorries parked in lay-bys. But as she got closer to Exeter, there were lots of roadworks, exactly as she’d dreamed during the night, and she got confused by the detours. She was no longer on the A38, but instead a chain of bypasses and residential roads, with many mini-roundabouts in between. Maureen drove for another twenty minutes before it occurred to her that the yellow diversion signs had stopped a while back and she had come to the edge of a housing estate. All she could see were blocks of flats and bony trees growing in spaces between paving slabs. It was still dark.

“Oh, well, that’s great,” she said. “That’s marvelous.” It wasn’t just herself she spoke to. She also had a habit of talking to the silence as if it were deliberately making things difficult for her. Increasingly she could not tell the difference between what she thought and what she said.

Maureen passed more flats and more tiny trees and cars parked everywhere, as well as delivery vans on the early shift, but still no sign of the A38. She turned down a long service road because there was a row of bright street lamps in the distance, only to find herself at the bottom of a dead end, with a large depot to her left that was surrounded by a set of open gates and spiked fencing.

She pulled over and got out her road map but she had no idea where to start looking. She turned on her mobile but that was no use either, and anyway Harold would still be asleep. For a moment she just sat there. Already confounded. Harold would say, “Ask someone,” but that was Harold. The whole point of driving was that she wouldn’t have to deal with people she didn’t know. “Okay,” she said firmly. “You can do this.” She would take her map and be like Harold. She would ask for help at the depot.

Maureen got out of the car, and at once she felt the cold against her face and ears and inside her nose. As she crossed the car park, security lamps snapped on to her left and right, almost blinding her. She could make out light from a prefab cabin to the left of the main building but she had to go cautiously, with her arms shot out to keep her balance. Maureen’s driving shoes were those flat suede ones with a bar across the top and special gripper soles; they were good on wet pavements but nothing was good on black ice. There were notices with pictures of dogs, warning that the premises were regularly patrolled, and she was afraid they might come running out. When she was a child, the local farmer had let his dogs roam freely. She still had a little scar beneath her chin.

Maureen rapped at the window of the hut. The young man on night duty wasn’t even awake. He was hunched in a fold-out camping chair, the turban on his head crushed against the wall, his mouth agape and his legs sprawled all over the place. She knocked again, a bit louder, and called, “Excuse me!”

He rubbed his eyes, startled. He pulled himself out of his chair and seemed to grow and grow. He was so tall he had to duck as he stumbled to the window, putting on his mask only as an afterthought. He had a thick brown beard, with hefty shoulders like a boxer’s, and his hands were so large he had a problem undoing the catch on the window. He slid it open and crooked his neck sideways as he blinked and stared down at her.

“I’m not going to pretend. I’m lost. I’m trying to get to the M5 but all those roadworks on the A38 sent me off in the wrong direction.” Her voice was louder than she’d intended because of the window, which she had to reach up toward, but also because she was anxious and he might not understand. Besides, she hated admitting she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know the route.

He gazed at her another moment, trying his best to wake up. Then he said, “You’re lost?”

“It was the roadworks. Normally I’m fine. Normally I have no problem. I just need to get to the M5.” She was doing it again. She was shouting.

He moved away from the window and opened the door at the side. She waited, not knowing what he expected her to do, just worrying about those dogs, until he called, “Excuse me?” So she put on her mask and went round.

Now that she was in the cabin, the young man seemed even larger. The top of her head would barely reach his chest. He stood with his neck at an angle and his body hunched to make it smaller. Even his shoes—a pair of solid black lace-ups, the kind they used to put on children to correct their feet—couldn’t get enough space. And it was obvious why he’d been asleep. An old electric fire blazed out orange heat from beneath the window. It was like being spit-roasted from the ankles upward. Anyone would have fallen asleep next to that. Maureen swallowed a yawn.

He said, “You don’t want to go shouting at random strangers that you’re lost. It’s not safe. They might take advantage of you.”

His English was perfect. If anything he had a Devon accent. So there you were. That was another thing she’d been completely wrong about. “I don’t think anyone would want to take advantage of me.”

“You never know. There are all sorts of people in the world.”

“You are right, of course. But can you help me or not?”

“Yeah. Okay. I think so.” He tip-tapped a few things into his phone and held it out for her. It was no use: it was a map but tiny. He showed her where she was and all the roads she needed to take to get to the M5. “See?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I don’t see. That makes no sense to me.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t.”

“Do you have a GPS?”

“We do have a GPS but I don’t use it.”

He seemed confused but she wasn’t going to enlighten him. The fact was she’d had the GPS disconnected. She couldn’t bear that nice voice urging directions at her and telling her last minute that she’d missed the turn. Maureen was of the generation who had grown up with the phone on the hall table, and a map in the glove compartment. Even online shopping was a stretch. Twenty lemons instead of two, and all that kind of thing.

He said, “Will you remember if I tell you?”

“I don’t think I will.”

“I don’t know what to do, then. What do you want me to do?”

“I would like you to read out the directions from your phone and I will write them down on a piece of paper. I’ll take my route from that.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. He touched his beard and realigned his feet, as if this was going to take a whole different kind of posture in order to make it work. “I see. Okay.”

Patiently, he told her to go to the end of the road, turn left, take a right, the second exit at the roundabout, and she wrote it all down on a page he had torn from a notebook. He paused at the end of each new instruction, to make sure she’d written it down. By the end she had twelve in all, and every one of them numbered.

“Do you know where you’re heading after that?”

“Yes.” She pointed at the place on her road map.

“That’s a very long way.”

“I know.”

“At least you’ll get a change of scene.”

“I’m not looking for a change of scene. All I want is to get there.”

“Do you know your way after the M5?”

“Yes.”

“The junction numbers?”

“I think so.”

He looked at her for a moment, without saying anything. She got the feeling he didn’t believe her. Then he said, “Why don’t you write those down, too? You don’t want to get lost on a motorway.”

He pulled his phone close to his face as he squinted a little and slowly read out the motorway exits she needed, plus the directions from there. There was no irritation in his voice. If anything, he seemed worried that he might get one of them wrong and mislead her. He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe she was going to drive all that distance by herself, and in one day. “It’s so far,” he kept saying.

“Thank you,” she told him, once he finished. “And I’m sorry if I woke you.”

“That’s okay. I shouldn’t be asleep.”

She thought he might be smiling behind his mask, so she smiled too. “You’ve been kind.”

“Huh.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned to gaze out of the window. She was still on one side of the cabin and he was on the other, but their reflections were caught against the dark outside, like two see-through people, he so big, and she so short and trim, with her cap of white hair. “That’s not what most people call me.”

It came out of the blue. An honesty she didn’t expect. She would have liked to be able to say something to make him feel better—she would have liked to be that kind of person, if only so that she could get back into her car and drive on with his instructions, without feeling she had failed. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t find it. That fleeting moment of goodness. People imagined they might reach each other, but it wasn’t true. No one understood another’s grief or another’s joy. People were not see-through at all.

Maureen pursed her mouth. The young man gazed sadly at something or nothing in the dark. The silence seemed to go on and on. She looked at the floor and took in his black lace-ups again. They were such earnest shoes, like someone trying really hard.

“Well,” he said, “I guess you should be okay now.”

“Yes,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Mrs. Fry.”

“I’m Lenny.”

“Goodbye, Lenny.”

“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Fry. Just don’t go shouting at people that you’re lost. And drive carefully. It’s cold out there.”

“I’m going to see our son,” she said. Then she left and got into the car and made a U-turn to get back to the road.