The Country Life

Chapter Eighteen

I opened my eyes on a day whose prospect was so alarming that it was some time before I could bring myself to get out of bed and begin it. Outside my window the tyrannical sky slyly proffered again its unnatural heat, as if from a never-diminishing wad of banknotes; but I knew that storms were being smuggled in for me beneath its innocent blue. Today was not a day like any other. Today, I felt sure, my luck with regard to the matter of driving would run out; and the whole edifice of my life in the country, which I had begun to believe to be secure, seemed to strain and groan beneath it. In the shadow of this great dread, other smaller concerns lurked: my forthcoming evening with Mr Trimmer; my muddled and inappropriate feelings for Toby, to which his moonlit visit had added an altogether dangerous dimension of fulfilment; and the vague but certain sense I had, which seemed to have been implanted in me while I slept, that despite Martin’s efforts I had been judged to have transgressed in wearing the cut-off trousers and would be made to pay for it, whether directly or later as part of a wider tally.

It surprised me that the last and least of these concerns should be the first to flower; but no sooner had I quietly entered the big house by the back door and begun to creep, soberly dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and trousers, up the passage, than the very thing I was hoping to avoid — an encounter with Pamela — rose up in my path.

‘Stella!’ she said, emerging furtively from the kitchen and closing the door behind her. ‘A word.’

She drew to my side in the gloomy corridor. From her air of emergency, I guessed that she had been waiting for me; and from her confidential tone and stem, decided expression that I was to be reprimanded. There are some women on whom authority sits violently, who can use it only as a tool of reward or censure. I had little sense of Pamela’s expectations of me between these two extremes, which was probably why I failed so frequently to meet them.

‘Forgive me for being bold,’ she said in a low, rapid voice. ‘But I didn’t like to say anything last night in front of the others and I feel I must get this clear.’

I saw that she was becoming agitated, in the way that she often did: like a bottle being shaken hard to stir up what was in itself disposed to settle.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ I began, in the hope of deflecting her.

‘Now I don’t mind if we’re out by the pool or whatever,’ she continued, apparently not having heard me. ‘But to dress provocatively in the evening when the men are about really isn’t on.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I interposed.

‘If you don’t have enough clean things then for God’s sake come and see me first and I’ll sort you out with something.’

‘It won’t happen again,’ I said.

‘It’s easy to forget,’ she persisted, ‘in this day and age that some things are still unacceptable. I know that you don’t know us very well, and perhaps that sort of thing is fine where you come from, but with young men in the house I really must ask that it doesn’t happen again.’

‘It won’t,’ I said.

‘All right?’ she finished, meeting my eye. ‘I’m sorry to have started the day off on such an unpleasant note, but I felt something had to be said. Let’s forget all about it, shall we?’

‘Fine,’ I weakly agreed.

‘Good. Now I think Martin is waiting for you upstairs, so off you go.’

She disappeared back through the kitchen door and shut it after her. Exhausted, I leaned for a moment against the wall, and then made my way heavily through the hall and up the stairs to Martin’s room.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said when I came in.

‘Nothing,’ I gloomily replied. ‘What do you want to do?’

Pamela’s assault had, I felt, put a fatal imprimatur of misfortune on the day. None of its gambles, after such an opening, could possibly go my way; not only because the theme had been set and the tone determined, but also in that so many of its uncertainties depended for their outcome on my own confidence, a quantity which now lay blighted and forlorn in some shameful corner of my heart. I cursed my own recklessness in my decision to wear the cut-off trousers, and Toby for inciting it. The thrill I felt when I thought of his visit to the cottage the night before was now doubly despicable. Why had he come to see me so late at night? Perhaps, it struck me, he had come so late with the express purpose of not seeing me; to visit his memories of the place rather than its new tenant, at an hour when I could be sure not to accost him. This new theory seemed in genuine danger of being accurate; until I remembered that I had distinctly heard him knock at the door, and that besides, even on such brief acquaintance as ours, I could see that he was not a man likely to be given to reminiscence or contemplation. I did not, even in the heat of gratification, believe that Toby really liked me. My earlier disappointment in the cottage garden was still too fresh to permit such an idea. It was the cut-off trousers, I felt sure, which had lured him and lit his path to my door; and having admitted this I found myself in belated and embarrassed agreement with Pamela for her fury.

‘Ah!’ I said aloud, an exclamation driven to the surface by a surfeit of inner torment.

‘What?’ said Martin plaintively.

‘Nothing. I just got off to a bad start today.’

‘I don’t understand it when people say things like that,’ he said; thinking, I didn’t doubt, of his mother. ‘I never feel that way. They make it sound like they’re giving a performance or doing an exam or something. I just decide what mood I’m going to be in and then see what happens.’

‘Are you going to the centre today?’ I enquired; partly, I’m afraid, to remind him of his misfortunes; but mostly to ascertain whether there was any chance of further avoiding the debacle which, curiously, had grown more insubstantial in my mind with every deferral. I had managed almost entirely to block the driving problem from my thoughts over the past few days; or rather, like a pilot in a small plane, I had been flying just above it, roundly aware of but not feeling the texture of its contours, pulling just in time out of every lurch of fear to skim its menacing peaks. I hoped at least that when the inevitable wall of hard and insurmountable fact rose up before me, my collision with it would be swift and painless; for although I felt that I wanted time to prepare myself for what no amount of meditation could alter, I knew that to be conscious of my fear would be to endure every torment it could devise for me.

‘I think so,’ said Martin. His vagueness was agony. ‘What day is it?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘Well I am, then. Are you taking me?’

‘Yes,’ I shrilled.

In moments of greater confidence than this, when I had dared to look down from the height of my denial, I had wondered what could possibly be so difficult about driving a car that the sheer force of my desperation would not overcome. I had sat beside people in cars often enough; so many times, in fact, throughout my life, that when I tried to recall the various manoeuvres I had, albeit half-consciously, witnessed, I found that I had unwittingly amassed enough images of the driving process to conduct a sort of lesson in my head. Steering was easy enough, a simple matter of instinct and clear vision. Acceleration and braking, once one had determined which levers caused them, could likewise not be hard. It was the gearstick which intimidated me; and the varying styles of using it which I summoned up from my memories of the passenger seat suggested that this, being the zone of personal embellishment, was also the kernel of difficulty. My mother had laboured over it with exaggerated caution; my father had flicked it carelessly from one position to the next; Edward, who drove, unlikely as it may seem, with a sort of epicurean pleasure, had almost caressed it in his manipulations. Mr Madden’s mastery of the process was the one which most interested me, given that it was his car I was going to drive. He changed gear with a rough confidence which I imagined experts would decry; but what disturbed me were peculiarities in his handling of the car which suggested that it was in some sense irascible or untamed, and required not only more than the average degree of skill but also some sort of personal acquaintance to drive it.

‘What time will we have to leave?’ I enquired, wondering if there was any way that I could slip out to the drive and examine my opponent in advance.

‘After lunch some time.’ Martin yawned. ‘Don’t make such a fuss.’

The morning fled by with alarming speed. Every time I looked at my watch, it seemed to have made impossible advances; and in the end my resistance to the passing of time in proportion to its velocity was such that I felt as if I were trapped in some fast downhill ride, with the world a blur around me and the wind buffeting my face, the crowd of my other concerns left far behind at the top. We kept to Martin’s room, it having been implicitly understood that the hot spell had endured beyond the point at which it was imperative to go outside to that where it was imperative to stay in. I had instructed him to do his homework, swatting away every attempt he made to engage me instead in conversation, and sat in the window seat in gloomy contemplation and dread. There are few things more unpleasant than the anticipation of some inescapable, solitary trial. What begins as a distant blot can feed on all the intervening hours until it becomes a vast obstacle, in whose shadow it is impossible to feel the warmth of any future consolation. I could not foresee a time when my unhappiness would be over. I knew that at some point I would have driven, and would no longer be driving; but even this certain statement housed a hundred different outcomes, which left no room in it for comfort. The fact that I not only had to endure the interlude, but must give the performance of my life in it, meant that sheer survival was of little use to me. I wished then with all my heart that I had confessed the truth to the Maddens when the opportunity had first arisen; a truth which was now inadmissible, given that it had since gathered to itself so many lies.

‘Finished!’ said Martin triumphantly, waving a book at me. ‘Let’s go downstairs. It’s lunchtime.’

‘We’re just having a light scratch lunch in the kitchen,’ said Pamela when we presented ourselves. I wondered if her need to give so long and descriptive a title to something whose essence was informality signified a skill at hospitality or a terror of what lay outside it. ‘Toby’s helping Piers on the farm today, so I gave them sandwiches to take with them.’

‘What?’ said Martin gleefully, while I tried to work out whether the absence of Toby and Piers improved my situation or worsened it. I had certainly relied on Piers to promote calm during my first and inevitably chaotic manoeuvres on the drive, and on Toby to inspire panic; which left me, I decided, more or less where I had started.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Pamela was saying sharply. ‘I think it was jolly nice of him to offer.’

‘I bet he didn’t offer,’ said Martin.

‘Well he certainly didn’t refuse,’ snapped Pamela.

‘I bet he was pissed off.’ Martin caught my eye menacingly. ‘I bet he envisaged a day of chasing Stella around the swimming pool.’

This, although I suspected he didn’t realize it, was the worst thing Martin could possibly have said. Pamela’s whole frame tensed at the remark.

‘Well, I shouldn’t think Stella would have minded too much about that,’ she said quietly.

‘Whoah!’ said Martin, grinning. ‘Bitchy!’

Although I was upset by Pamela’s comment, and offended by the exchange in general, I did not feel capable of intervening; partly because my anxieties about driving held me in an inescapable clinch, and partly because this type of conversation was so alien to me that I did not know how to enter it. Instead, I did something I rarely do: I bore the affront silently, and with a very apparent air of injury. We sat down at the table, and after she and Martin had made one or two desultory observations on other matters, Pamela turned to me.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Stella, don’t sulk,’ she said, her voice poised between anger and humour. ‘It was only a bit of fun.’

This final outrage very nearly provoked me to fury. I remembered what Pamela had said earlier in the corridor about where I came from, as if it were, by implication and exclusion, a place of mysterious degenerations which I should, indeed must, concede in favour of the better sphere I now had the good fortune to inhabit; a place which, moreover, located as it was beyond the small circle of her concerns, could have no language of its own but merely an illiteracy in hers. I did not, in fact, think that Pamela regarded me as being beneath her; merely that she accorded such sovereignty to her own ideas about things, and those of people like her, that she took their authority to be a matter of universal agreement. Pamela, I saw, had been reared on the most general notions regarding people unlike herself; and with neither education nor acquaintance to fill in the detail, was possessed of that curious confidence which accompanies ignorance, and which is concerned more with keeping the world at bay than with understanding or even reforming it. Had it occurred under almost any other set of circumstances, she would not have been able to rebuke me for my appearance, nor draw from it the inference she just had; and it was here that her family, her house, and her station in life entered into a fatal collusion with her caprice. Pamela’s triumphs were not those of reason, religion, morality, or even etiquette; they were a mere triumph, though she didn’t know it, of numbers. She operated by a sort of inverted anomie; by which I mean that although she had rules, and plenty of them, their basis was the ever-shifting ground of what Pamela happened to find pleasing at the time, and their ultimate goal the proper delivery to Pamela of her own way. Where I come from, I wanted to say, we would never be so rude; but the mere thought brought on such a sudden ache of longing for the life I had left behind that I feared I would burst into tears if I articulated it.

‘I’m not sulking,’ I said instead. ‘I’m just thinking about something else.’

Pamela had opened her mouth, ready, I guessed, with some convenient stricture concerning the impropriety of thinking about something else, when Martin intervened.

‘Oh, leave her alone, you old bag,’ he said with his mouth full. ‘She’d tell you to sod off herself if she wasn’t so embarrassed.’

‘Stella can tell me to sod off if she likes!’ said Pamela, with a look of gay amazement. I felt that I would never fathom the process by which personal insult invariably manufactured good humour in her. ‘She knows we don’t mince our words around here.’

‘Sometimes I wish you’d mince them more,’ I said daringly, glad that I had managed to fit in some form of retaliation, however belated.

‘Oh dear!’ Pamela laughed, throwing back her head. ‘Do you think we’re all frightfully rude to each other? I did used to worry about that, but I’ve got so used to it now. Oh, stop! That’s disgusting!’ Martin had leaned towards her and was chewing deliberately with his mouth wide open. ‘Goodness, look at the time! You two’d better get moving.’

All at once my destiny was upon me. I had almost, in the second before Pamela noticed the time, forgotten what I had now to do; and as it rushed at me once more, I found my terror redoubled.

‘Right,’ I said, standing up. I was alarmed to notice a feeling of lightness in my legs. Nothing, in that moment, seemed quite real. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Mm.’ Martin stuffed in a last mouthful of food.

‘You know the way, don’t you?’ said Pamela, to me; evidently having been ignorant of the whole silent drama of deferral and relief in which I had been engaged over the past few days. She did not remember, I saw, that I had so far escaped driving Martin to the centre myself.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Martin can help if we get lost.’

With no further excuse for lingering in the kitchen, I was forced to grasp the handles of Martin’s chair and begin wheeling him to the door. I was profoundly worried by the feeling of physical weakness which had started in my legs and now spread down my arms. I could barely push Martin’s chair, and the room seemed to tilt this way and that before my eyes. Once out in the hall, I realized to my horror that Pamela was hovering behind us. I wondered if she intended to see us off, and tried desperately to think of some means of detaching her.

‘We’ll see you later, then,’ I said.

‘Have a good time, darling,’ she said, still on our trail.

‘Fat chance,’ said Martin.

‘Goodbye,’ I said, more firmly, as we reached the door.

‘Do you want a hand getting him in?’ Pamela persisted, lingering in the doorway as Martin shot off down the ramp.

‘No!’ I cried. ‘We’ll be fine.’

I put my hand on the door as if to close it. Pamela stood her ground. Our eyes met.

‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ she said finally. She looked at me rather suspiciously; and then, to my relief, turned and made her way back down the hall.

I closed the door firmly after her, and went feebly down the steps to where Martin sat in the sun beside the car.

‘Open the door, then,’ he said.

I opened the door and he levered himself into the passenger seat. I closed the door after him and made my way round to the other side, feeling as if I were walking on something yielding, like marshmallow.

‘You forgot my chair,’ he said, when I opened the other door.

‘Oh. Sorry.’

I returned to the passenger side, where the chair sat abandoned on the gravel. Martin wound down the window.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ he said.

‘I don’t know how to collapse it.’

‘You put your foot on that thing at the back. That’s it.’

The chair folded flat and I carried it to the boot. I had never in my life felt less competent than I did in that moment. I opened the boot and laid the chair in it.

‘Get a move on, Ste-la!’ cried Martin from the front.

I realized that I had been performing every action in slow motion, so as to delay the moment when I would have to get in the car. The chair now stowed, there was however nothing else that I could do. I went back to the driver’s side and got in.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ said Martin plaintively.

Before my eyes was the most alarming panorama I had ever seen. Across the entire vertical axis of my side of the car extended a vast control panel, a cryptic ridge of dials and switches, knobs and graphs, teeming not merely with numbers but also abbreviations (‘m.p.h.’, ‘k.p.h.’, grunts redolent of a prerequisite familiarity), coloured squares, ruled lines, and a whole register of hieroglyphics telling of strange vehicular adventures: a small petrol pump, a group of waving lines like rising steam, three lamps whose beams shone three different ways. From this background rose the mute black circle of the steering wheel, bristling with levers. Pedals lay at my feet like waiting irons. Through the windscreen, beneath the long flank of the bonnet, the engine sat coiled, waiting to burst into life.

‘I can’t drive,’ I said.

There was a long silence. Beside me, Martin sat looking straight ahead.

‘Right,’ he said, finally.

‘If your parents find out,’ I continued, ‘they’ll send me home.’

‘Probably.’ He nodded. ‘They did say driving was essential, Stel-la.’

‘I know.’

It seemed futile to explain the process by which, conveniently or otherwise, I had neglected to take notice of this requirement at the time, or to draw this neglect to anyone’s attention afterwards. What concerned me in that moment was what Martin intended to do about it. Having confessed to him, I had put myself entirely in his hands. Although I had been aware that our intimacy had gathered strength since the moment of our first meeting, it had never occurred to me to test it. Now I had a sense of my bond with Martin vying with that of his parents; and as he sat beside me in the car, pulled in either direction by these conflicting loyalties, his ruling took on for me an importance beyond the merely expedient. My heart lay hollow, waiting to be filled by his regard; and the thought of his refusing me, and turning me over to be dealt with by the familial authorities while he withdrew into their ranks, was unbearable.

‘It can’t be that hard,’ he observed presently. ‘I know how it works. I’ll just tell you what to do.’

‘All right,’ I said recklessly. ‘If you’re sure you won’t be frightened.’

‘It would be an honour,’ said Martin, ‘to die with you, Stel-la. Turn the key.’

I found the key, which was already in the ignition, and turned it. There was a stutter of life from beneath the bonnet, and then the car slowly began to tremble around us.

‘Is it on?’ I said. I had expected a roar of some kind.

‘Of course it’s on. Now, there are three pedals at your feet. On the right, the accelerator. Press it.’

I pressed it with my foot, my hands gripping the wheel. The noise of the engine did grow louder, but the car did not move. Thinking this to be because I had not pressed hard enough, I put down my foot until it would not go any further.

‘Stop!’ shouted Martin, above the scream of the engine.

‘Why didn’t we move?’ I said as it died away.

‘Because we’re not in gear. I only asked you to press it so that you’d know which one it was. The middle one is the brake. Press that.’

I did so.

‘The pedal on your left is the clutch. You press the clutch when you want to change gear.’

‘OK.’

‘When you press the clutch, you take your foot off the accelerator. Then, when you’ve changed gear, you put your foot back on the accelerator again.’

‘How do you change gear?’

‘You just — look, I’ll tell you what. I’ll change gear for you. I’ll just shout clutch, and you put your foot on the clutch, OK? You concentrate on steering.’

‘OK.’

‘OK. Clutch.’

I looked through the windscreen at the remote spectacle of the drive. The car was pointing directly down it, for which I was grateful.

‘Clutch, Stel-la.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

I pressed the clutch and Martin manoeuvred the gearstick beside me with his left hand.

‘Good. Now, keep your foot on the clutch for the time being. Release the brake.’

‘I’m not touching the brake,’ I said, bemused.

‘No, the handbrake. It’s beside you. You press the front bit and it goes down.’

‘Like that?’

‘Fine. Now, hands on the wheel, Stel-la. Put your foot on the accelerator, and very slowly take your foot off the clutch.’

I pressed the accelerator and the noise of the engine mounted.

‘Not that much!’ shouted Martin. ‘Just a little bit. That’s right. OK, very slowly off the clutch.’

It is difficult for me to convey my surprise, despite the advance warning I had received, at the way in which with the command of my feet the whole world became a blur of noise and motion. Had I been able to drive entirely with my hands, I would probably have applied more natural instincts to the business of pulling away from the house. As it was, the simplicity of Martin’s instruction had been profoundly deceptive; for I had no premonition of the chaos my gentle paddling would unleash. I took my foot off the clutch and the car bolted forward at such speed that I pressed indiscriminately at the pedals in panic, while the jolting scenery bore down on us and Martin shouted vainly beside me above the roar of the engine. I had no time in this onslaught of events even to think about controlling them. All I could do was to try and recall, with a contrasting lassitude at once terrifying and inalterable, how to stop the car. Very slowly, my mind dimly remembered that ceasing to press the accelerator would have some effect on the speed at which we were travelling. Even slower, my foot responded; against its will, I should add, because instinct told it to press harder the faster we went. The car veered off the gravel drive and chugged across the grass. It heaved once, twice, and died.

‘Not bad,’ said Martin in a high voice. ‘Let’s try again.’

‘I don’t know if I can.’ Now that we had come to a blessed halt, I found that I was shaking with terror and relief. ‘I’m terrible at it. I should just accept that I’ll never be able to drive.’

‘Don’t be silly. No one can just drive. You have to learn.’

Looking around, I was surprised to see that we had only come a few yards. The house stood patient and contemptuous behind us.

‘I can’t.’

‘You have to, Stel-la. Besides, if you don’t get a move on, my mother will be out to investigate.’

This proved the greatest spur to action yet. I turned the key again.

‘Now go a bit faster this time,’ advised Martin. ‘Then you won’t stall.’

‘I was going fast!’ I cried.

‘You were going about five miles an hour. Clutch.’

My second attempt proved rather more successful than my first. Less afraid now of the accelerator, I was able to focus on the steering wheel as the guiding principle of the exercise. I directed us back onto the gravel, and with a thrill of confidence realized that I was able to propel the car in a straight line down the drive.

‘Clutch!’ shouted Martin.

Stabbing about with my foot, I found the pedal. As I pressed it, the engine reared with a horrible shriek.

‘Take your foot off the accelerator, stupid! OK, now let go of the clutch and put the accelerator back on.’

The car lurched forward as the engine began to sing in a new key.

‘We changed gear!’ cried Martin.

Alarmingly quickly, the gates at the bottom of the drive loomed into view.

‘What do I do now?’

‘Foot on the clutch. Other foot on the brake.’

I put my foot on the brake, and the car stopped so suddenly that both Martin and I were thrown forward.

‘Do it gently! OK, we’re turning right here. Clutch.’

One way or another, before long we were out on the tarmacked road. My feelings were a curious mixture of the drunken excitement of achievement combined with the more sober consciousness of how fragile my control of the situation really was. Like someone walking a wire, I sensed that the moment in which I became aware of my feat would be the moment I ceased to accomplish it. I wasn’t quite sure, in other words, how I was driving the car. All I knew was that everything depended on my continuing to do so.

‘Clutch,’ said Martin.

I was fortunate, at least, in that the remoteness of the narrow roads meant that there was little chance of meeting anybody else travelling along them. This did not particularly strike me at first — I was interested only in my own progress, and had not considered the fact that the realm I had entered was communal and open to invasion by others — but when after some time the fringes of Buckley came into view, replete with obstacles, I felt the force of my presumption in taking the wheel.

‘We’ve got to stop.’

‘Now just stay calm,’ said Martin anxiously. ‘It’s not far to go now.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. At the sight of houses and other cars, I had surrendered my authority over the car. I took my feet off the pedals.

‘Stella!’ shouted Martin. ‘We’re in the middle of the road! You can’t just stop!’

The car slowed down and then shuddered violently to a halt. I could hear the whirr of a fan in the silence.

‘OK,’ said Martin, more gently. ‘Turn the key.’

‘No.’

‘You have to. We can’t stay here. Turn the key.’

My sudden consciousness of my own incompetence, and my retrospective astonishment at the fact that I had driven the car almost to Buckley, was effecting a sort of paralysis in my limbs. I had lost, I knew, the nerve on whose buoyancy I had delivered us to this inconvenient place. I had also experienced an abrupt attack of amnesia, and could not remember anything at all that Martin had told me about how the car worked.

‘Look, there’s someone coming behind us. Turn the key.’

Wildly I turned the key, against every internal protest. We were facing directly into the sun, and it beat down on my face through the windscreen. In the thick glare, the road beyond was a group of indistinct shapes.

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Fuck. Hang on.’ He reached across me and flipped down the sun shield. ‘Is that better?’

‘A bit.’

‘Right. Clutch.’

‘Which one’s the clutch?’

‘On the left!’

The car surged forward and I clung to the wheel, steering this way and that while Martin shouted indistinct warnings beside me. Several times as we entered the town I closed my eyes and gasped, for the body of the car seemed so broad to me that an intake of breath was required to get it through apertures of impossible narrowness.

‘Slow down a bit,’ said Martin shrilly. ‘That’s right. We’re going to turn left in a minute.’

The astonished faces of passers-by flashed past me in a blur of houses and shopfronts and parked cars. I had no sense whatever of my own control over what was happening.

‘Left!’ yelled Martin, gesturing wildly with his arms.

My body responded only to the direction of the command rather than the proper procedure for executing it. I slewed the wheel automatically to the left, without slowing down, and there was a tremendous shrieking all around us as we shot into what was evidently a car park and came to a timely, if unintentional, halt.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Martin.

‘Sorry.’

I felt drained of all life and could only sit limply behind the steering wheel. Martin, when I looked at him, wore a blanched expression of exhaustion.

‘You’d better get me out,’ he said. ‘I’m late.’

When I opened the car door and stepped out, my knees gave way beneath me and I staggered, almost falling over. Clinging to the car, I inched my way round to the boot and opened it.

‘Stella,’ called Martin from the front. ‘How are you going to get home?’

I had not given any consideration to this question, but it was immediately obvious to me that I could not drive the car alone.

‘You’ll have to stay,’ continued Martin, who had evidently reached the same conclusion.

‘Stay here? What will I do?’

‘I dunno. Help out or something. Meet my interesting friends.’

‘What about Pamela?’ I heaved the chair unsteadily out of the boot. ‘She’ll be expecting me back.’

‘There’s a remarkable invention,’ said Martin, ‘called the telephone.’

I got Martin into his chair and then, my hands shaking, locked the car. On the far side of the car park was a low modem building made of red brick. Releasing the brake with my trembling foot, I began slowly to wheel him towards it.