Longshot

As I walked back to Chiswick from Ronnie’s office, I hadn’t the slightest intention of ever meeting Tremayne Vickers again. I forgot him. I thought of the present book I was writing: especially of how to get one character down from a runaway, experimental helium-filled balloon with its air pumps out of order. I had doubts about the balloon. Maybe I’d rethink the whole thing. Maybe I’d scrap what I’d done and start again. The character in the balloon was shitting himself with fear. I thought I knew how he felt. The chief unexpected thing I’d learned from writing fiction was fear of getting it wrong.

The book that had been accepted, which was called Long Way Home, was about survival in general and in particular about the survival, physical and mental, of a bunch of people isolated by a disaster. Hardly an original theme, but I’d followed the basic advice to write about something I knew, and survival was what I knew best.

In the interest of continuing to survive for another week or ten days, I stopped at the supermarket nearest to the friend’s aunt’s house and spent my food allotment on enough provisions for the purpose: bunch of packet soups, loaf of bread, box of spaghetti, box of porridge oats, pint of milk, a cauliflower and some carrots. I would eat the vegetables raw whenever I felt like it, and otherwise enjoy soup with bread in it, soup on spaghetti and porridge with milk. Items like tea, Marmite and salt cropped up occasionally. Crumpets and butter came at scarce intervals when I could no longer resist them. Apart from all that I bought once a month a bottle of vitamin pills to stuff me full of any oddments I might be missing and, dull though it might seem and in spite of frequent hunger, I had stayed in resounding good health all along.

I opened the front door with my latchkey and met the friend’s aunt in the hall.

‘Hello, dear,’ she said. ‘Everything all right?’

I told her about Ronnie sending my book to America and her thin face filled with genuine pleasure. She was roughly fifty, divorced, a grandmother, sweet, fair-haired, undemanding and boring. I understood that she regarded the rent I paid her (a fifth of what I had had to fork out for my former flat) as more a bribe to get her to let a stranger into her house than as an essential part of her income. In addition, though, she had agreed I could put milk in her fridge, wash my dishes in her sink, shower in her bathroom and use her washer-drier once a week. I wasn’t to make a noise or ask anyone in. We had settled these details amicably. She had installed a coin-in-the-slot electric meter for me, and approved a toaster, a kettle, a tiny table-top cooker and new plugs for a television and a razor.

I’d been introduced to her as ‘Aunty’ and that’s what I called her, and she seemed to regard me as a sort of extension nephew. We had lived for ten months in harmony, our lives adjacent but uninvolved.

‘It’s very cold... are you warm enough up there?’ she asked kindly.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. The electric heater ate money. I almost never switched it on.

‘These old houses... very cold under the roofs.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

She said, ‘Good, dear,’ amiably, and we nodded to each other, and I went upstairs thinking that I’d lived in the Arctic Circle and if I hadn’t been able to deal with a cold London attic I would have been ashamed of myself. I wore silk jersey long-sleeved vests and long Johns under sweaters and jeans under the ski-suit, and I slept warmly in a sleeping bag designed for the North Pole. It was writing that made me cold.

Up in my eyrie I struggled for a couple of hours to resolve the plight of the helium balloon but ended with only a speculation on nerve pathways. Why didn’t terror make one deaf, for instance? How did it always beeline to the bowel? My man in the balloon didn’t know and was too miserable to care. I thought I’d have to invent a range of mountains dead ahead for him to come to grief on. Then he would merely have the problem of descending from an Everest-approximation with only fingers, toes and resolution. Much easier. I knew a tip or two about that, the first being to look for the longest way down because it would be the least steep. Sharp-faced mountains often had sloping backs.