The Sense of an Ending

I looked. A small group of people were coming along the pavement towards my side of the car. I counted five of them. In front was a man who, despite the heat, was wearing layers of heavy tweed, including a waistcoat and a kind of deerstalker helmet. His jacket and hat were covered with metal badges, thirty or forty of them at a guess, some glinting in the sun; there was a watch-chain slung between his waistcoat pockets. His expression was jolly: he looked like someone with an obscure function at a circus or fairground. Behind him came two men: the first had a black moustache and a kind of rolling gait; the second was small and malformed, with one shoulder much higher than the other — he paused to spit briefly into a front garden. And behind them was a tall, goofy fellow with glasses, holding the hand of a plump, Indianish woman.

‘Pub,’ said the man with the moustache as they drew level.

‘No, not pub,’ replied the man with the badges.

‘Pub,’ the first man insisted.

‘Shop,’ said the woman.

They all spoke in very loud voices, like children just let out of school.

‘Shop,’ repeated the lopsided man, with a gentle gob into a hedge.

I was looking as carefully as I could, because that was what I had been instructed to do. They must all, I suppose, have been between thirty and fifty, yet at the same time had a kind of fixed, ageless quality. Also, an obvious timidity, which was emphasised by the way the couple at the back were holding hands. It didn’t look like amorousness, more defence against the world. They passed a few feet away, without glancing at the car. A few yards behind came a young man in shorts and an open-neck shirt; I couldn’t tell if he was their shepherd, or had nothing to do with them.

There was a long silence. Clearly, I was going to have to do all the work.

‘So?’

She didn’t reply. Too general a question perhaps.

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

That didn’t seem a relevant reply, for all its acrimonious tone. So I pressed on.

‘Was that young chap with them?’

Silence.

‘Are they care-in-the-community or something?’

My head banged back against the neck-rest as Veronica suddenly let out the clutch. She raced us round a block or two, charging the car at speed bumps as if it were a show-jumper. Her gear-changing, or the absence of it, was terrible. This lasted about four minutes, then she swerved into a parking space, riding up on the kerb with her front nearside wheel before bouncing back down again.

I found myself thinking: Margaret was always a nice driver. Not just safe, but one who treated a car properly. Back whenever it was I had driving lessons, my instructor had explained that when you change gear, your handling of clutch and gear lever should be so gentle and imperceptible that your passenger’s head doesn’t move a centimetre on its spinal column. I was very struck by that, and often noticed it when others drove me. If I lived with Veronica, I’d be down the chiropractor’s most weeks.

‘You just don’t get it, do you? You never did, and you never will.’

‘I’m not exactly being given much help.’

Then I saw them — whoever they were — coming towards me. That had been the point of the manoeuvre: to get ahead of them again. We were alongside a shop and a launderette, with a pub on the other side of the street. The man with the badges — ‘barker’, that was the word I’d been looking for, the cheery fellow at the entrance to a fairground booth who encourages you to step inside and view the bearded lady or two-headed panda — he was still leading. The other four were now surrounding the young man in shorts, so he was presumably with them. Some kind of care worker. Now I heard him say,

‘No, Ken, no pub today. Friday’s pub night.’

‘Friday,’ the man with the moustache repeated.

I was aware that Veronica had taken off her seat belt and was opening her door. As I started to do the same, she said,

‘Stay.’ I might have been a dog.

The pub-versus-shop debate was still going on when one of them noticed Veronica. The tweedy man took off his hat and held it against his heart, then bowed from the neck. The lopsided fellow started jumping up and down on the spot. The gangly chap let go of the woman’s grasp. The care worker smiled and held out his hand to Veronica. In a moment she was surrounded by a benign ambush. The Indian woman was now holding Veronica’s hand, and the man who wanted the pub was resting his head on her shoulder. She didn’t seem to mind this attention at all. I watched her smile for the first time that afternoon. I tried to hear what was being said, but there were too many voices overlapping. Then I saw Veronica turn, and heard her say,

‘Soon.’

‘Soon,’ two or three of them repeated.