Guilt at the Garage

SIX

‘Don’t get old, Carole,’ said Bill Shefford. ‘It doesn’t do you any good.’

‘I already am quite old,’ she said. She had always felt her age to the last second. Few things annoyed her more than contemporaries saying, ‘Oh, I still think like an eighteen-year-old’, or, even worse, ‘Age is just a number.’ Who did they think they were fooling?

‘Take my word for it, things don’t get easier with the passage of the years.’

‘What do you mean?’

It was rare to catch the garage owner in reflective mood. Rare, in fact, for him to talk to her about anything other than car-related matters. He looked unhappy, Carole thought, the heavy features of his freckled face weighed down with gloom.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he went on. ‘You think you have things sorted, you think you’ve got your life worked out, and then something totally unexpected comes in from left field and you realize it’s all chaos. Things happen at the wrong time. Good things happen when you’re in no position to take advantage of them. It’s all a mess.’

Carole wished she knew the right thing to say. Had it been Jude sitting on the plastic seat in Shefford’s reception area, she’d have come in with some formula of words that would have relaxed Bill, maybe encouraged him to further intimacies. Jude might even have been able to help him, soothe his despondent mood. Carole knew she didn’t have those skills.

She was tempted to ask how long he thought Billy would take replacing the wiper blades on the Renault, but she knew that would be copping out. For the first time in their acquaintance, Bill Shefford was opening up to her. She shouldn’t reject the overture.

‘Is there,’ she asked awkwardly, ‘some particular event that’s happened to throw your plans?’

‘Life’s happened.’ He grinned wryly. ‘Or perhaps I should say, death’s happened. Not that it’s happened yet. But it will.’

Though Carole didn’t know how to respond to this gnomic utterance, fortunately Bill continued without prompting. ‘I feel as if everything’s under threat.’

‘You mean someone’s threatening you?’

‘You could say that.’ He seemed to realize that they had strayed outside the normal parameters of their relationship. ‘Sorry, you don’t want to hear all this.’

‘No, I’m interested,’ said Carole, something of an understatement. Then she came up with a line she had probably never used before, but which would have made Jude proud of her. ‘Sometimes it’s better if you talk about things.’

Bill Shefford grinned wryly. ‘And sometimes it’s better if you keep your trap shut. No point in burdening other people with your problems. Though, on the other hand …’

He ground to a halt. Carole quickly posed to herself the what-would-Jude-do-in-these-circumstances question. And came up with the answer: nothing.

Her silence was rewarded by a slight shift in the expression on Bill’s face. He fixed his gaze on her. His eyes, she noticed for the first time, were a surprising, almost innocent, blue.

‘Sometimes in life,’ he began slowly, ‘you get into a position where there’s nothing you can do that isn’t going to hurt someone. There’s a decision you have to take and, though you know some people will be very happy with what you’ve decided, some other people are going to be absolutely devastated.’

‘And that’s the position you’re in at the moment?’

He nodded pensively. ‘So, it’s a kind of balancing act. A profit-and-loss account, if you like. Is the happiness I’m going to bring to one lot of people worth the pain I’m going to bring to the other lot? Not easy.’

‘No,’ Carole agreed very softly, afraid to break the fragile atmosphere of his confessional mood.

‘And also,’ he went on, ‘you never know how people are going to react, do you?’

Another scarcely breathed, ‘No.’

‘If you upset someone, what lengths will they go to … to be revenged?’

Silence again. Carole wasn’t certain what Bill was referring to, but her mind was teeming with possibilities. Was he talking about the fate of Shefford’s Garage, whether he should pass it on to Billy, as everyone expected? Or did he have plans to sell the site? It was a significant lump of real estate in Fethering, with space for a surprising number of new dwellings to be built on it. Yes, there might be an initial problem with organizing change of use, but the local planning authorities were very biddable when there was a prospect of more residential property becoming available.

‘And when you have thoughts like that,’ he continued finally, ‘you can feel very vulnerable …’

Yet another pause. Carole hung on his words. Bill Shefford opened his mouth as if for further confidences. But then he changed his mind. Abruptly, he said, ‘Anyway, I’ve got to remove a gearbox’, and went through to the workshop.

It seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time for Billy Shefford to change the windscreen wipers on the Renault. Carole felt she should go through to the workshop to chivvy him up, but somehow she couldn’t. Her role at Shefford’s had always been that of the supplicant, the woman who knew nothing about cars and needed help. Playing that role ruled out the assertiveness she displayed in other areas of her life.

And she did need the new wipers. She’d noticed recently, particularly if driving after dark in the rain, that she couldn’t see very well. It was even worse when facing oncoming headlights. She hoped it wasn’t her eyesight, so she’d opted for a change of wiper blades before she made an appointment with the optician.

Was it age catching up with her? Eyes … and, of course, the knee. As soon as she thought of it, she felt a twinge and shifted her position on the plastic chair.

As ever, to avoid the ignominy of looking purposeless, she had The Times crossword with her, but she couldn’t settle to it that morning. Bill Shefford’s gloom seemed to have infected her own mood. She looked across at the coffee machine, wondering if it might now contain something drinkable. But, deep down, she knew that such miracles didn’t happen.

Suddenly, from the workshop, she heard a heavy metallic thud which coincided with a scream of pain. She rushed through the door from the office.

Billy Shefford and Frankie (whose hair was now jet black) were looking down with horror into the inspection pit, above which a substantial car crouched. Over their shoulders, illuminated by the pit’s sidelights, Carole could see the body of Bill Shefford, crushed by a large metal object.

Billy’s next words identified it for her. ‘The gearbox,’ he said in a voice taut with shock. ‘It fell on him. He’s dead.’