The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

14

– Straight on at the roundabout – take second exit.

‘Well, Emma, this is just a great situation, isn’t it?’

– Exit coming up.

‘I now have a mental image of my father which I’m probably never going to be able to get out of my head.’

– In two hundred yards, right turn.

‘And just to cap it off, tomorrow night I’m going to be having dinner with the woman who put it there.’

– Right turn coming up.

‘I really didn’t think I could get any more angry with my father. I really couldn’t see how he could sink any further in my estimation. But – well done, Dad. You’ve managed it! Not just tossing yourself off over a picture of one of my friends, but managing to get caught doing it! Way to go, Dad. Way to fucking go. Are there any other ways you’d care to fuck up my life? Because you might as well finish the job off now that you’ve made such a good start.’

I pulled furiously on the steering wheel as I made the right turn, and took the curve much too fast. In the process I nearly clipped the bumper of a four-wheel-drive that was waiting to pull out from the road I was turning into. The driver tooted her horn at me. I glared back.

– Proceed for about four miles on the current road.

I had left Walsall behind, by now, and was making my way north-east along the A461. According to Emma, I was about eight miles away from Lichfield: nineteen minutes’ driving, at my current speed. It was another grey morning, slightly windy, slightly wet. The onscreen display told me that the temperature outside was 5 degrees Celsius. There was not much traffic on the roads. I had avoided the motorways so far this morning. Motorways, I realized, made you feel disconnected from the landscape around you. This morning I wanted to drive through real places: I wanted to see shops and houses and office blocks, I wanted to see old ladies pulling shopping trolleys along the street and clusters of surly teenagers gathered around bus shelters. I didn’t want to be like my father any more: hiding away from life and pleasuring himself in shameful secrecy while his wife and son were out taking a Sunday-afternoon walk. I wasn’t prepared to think of myself as a pathetic figure: not just yet.

I was driving too fast. I couldn’t keep my foot from pressing down on the accelerator. I had only averaged fifty-two miles to the gallon so far today.

– Proceed for about three miles on the current road.

What was I going to find when I opened the door to this flat, anyway? My father hadn’t been there for more than twenty years. Had anybody else been inside it in that time, apart from Mr and Mrs Byrne? All I knew was that somewhere in there I would find a blue ring binder, with the words Two Duets written on the spine, containing a bunch of incomprehensible poems and a story which would apparently explain why I wouldn’t have been born if it hadn’t been for the proximity of two London pubs both called The Rising Sun. Did I really want to discover any more, at this stage, about the circumstances of my birth or, worse still, my conception? I wasn’t sure that I did. I had already learned quite enough about my father and what he did with his bodily fluids to be going on with.

– Proceed for about two miles on the current road.

I glanced down at the map screen. There I still was, a little red arrow, pluckily making its way along the A461. Advancing upon my destination inch by inch. How insignificant it made me look, and feel. I thought of those satellites, thousands of miles up in the sky, looking down upon me and millions like me, looking down upon all those people rushing around here and there on their individual, everyday, ultimately pointless errands. The incomprehensibility, the horror of it suddenly came over me and made me shiver: I felt a momentary hollowness in my stomach, as if I was standing in a lift that had started to plummet.

‘Steady on there,’ I said – partly to Emma, partly to myself. ‘Don’t go down that route. You can go crazy thinking about stuff like that.’

I tried to concentrate on something more immediate – the landscape around me. Emma and I were entering Staffordshire now. We had left the urban dreariness of Walsall behind, and had entered upon more restful, leafier territory. The occasional houses dotted on either side of the road were built of that distinctive Staffordshire red brick, and every so often the road would rise gently and pass over a canal, its walls built of the same brick, part of an elaborate network which testified mournfully to a now vanished industrial past. My grandparents – that is to say, my dad’s mother and father – had lived in this area right up until their deaths (within a few months of each other) in the late 1970s, so I was dimly familiar with it. It was part of the lost landscape of my childhood. Not that we’d ever visited my grandparents very much. My father had never been close to his parents. He had kept them at a distance, just as he did with everyone else.

– Heading slightly right at the roundabout, take second exit.

I wouldn’t go through Lichfield itself, not through the centre. I would skirt the city on its eastern side. In days gone by, before motorways, before by-passes, travelling through England must actually have involved visiting places. You would drive along high streets (or ride your horse along them, if we’re going to go way back) and stop at pubs in the town centre (or staging posts or coaching inns or whatever they used to be called). Now, the entire road network seemed to be set up to prevent this from happening. The roads were there to stop you from meeting people, to ensure that you passed nowhere near any of the places where humanity congregates. A phrase came to me, then – a phrase that Caroline was fond of repeating. ‘Only connect.’ I think it was from one of the fancy writers that she was always trying to get me to read. It occurred to me now that whoever designed England’s roads had precisely the opposite idea in mind: ‘Only disconnect.’ Sitting here in my Toyota Prius, with only Emma for company, I was cocooned from the rest of the world. Not only did I not have to interact with other people, the roads saw to it that I didn’t even have to see them if I didn’t want to. Just how my father would have liked it – the sad, miserable bastard.

‘Not that I give a flying fuck about him any more,’ I said to Emma. ‘Why should I waste any more energy thinking about him? The only thing that makes me angry is that he frightened Alison off. Supposing she and I had gone out together that afternoon? What would that have led to? She might have been my girlfriend. We might have got engaged. We might have got married and had children. My whole life might have been different.’

– Proceed for about half a mile on the current road.

‘Still, what’s the use? “Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve. The most painful words in the language.” That’s another quotation, isn’t it? Where did I get that one from?’

– In two hundred yards, left turn.

‘I remember – it’s from Caroline’s story. Christ, now I’ve even started quoting my own wife’s fiction back at myself. Although why I call it fiction I don’t know, since all the treacherous cow did was to take something from our life together – our shared life – something personal, something private, for fuck’s sake – and turn it into some nice bit of writing that all her friends at the Kendal creative writers’ group can ooh and aah over before they start knocking back the Pinot Grigio.’

My voice had risen to a shout. I knew it was wrong to have lost my temper in this way in front of Emma, so I pressed the map button and allowed her calming voice to take over for a while, guiding me with no fuss or difficulty to the road where my father’s flat was located. It was on the outskirts of Lichfield. Occasionally, out of my passenger window, I saw distant glimpses of the famous cathedral, but otherwise there was nothing to remind me that I was skirting around one of England’s more picturesque cities, the birthplace of Dr Johnson if I remember rightly. We had to drive for a long time down a monotonous, single-carriageway road, lined on both sides with terraced houses from the interwar years, until we reached a busy junction where Emma told me to go ‘Sharp left at the roundabout – take first exit’. This took you into a quiet backwater of residential streets, dominated by three imposing, eight-storey apartment blocks overlooking the main arterial Eastern Avenue. It was hard to say when these might have been built: postwar? They looked like council blocks, but good-quality council blocks. There were balconies on every floor and the buildings looked clean and well maintained. ‘Your destination is ahead,’ Emma told me, so I thanked her and parked the car in a bay at the side of the road and turned off the ignition. Then I looked up at the middle of the three apartment blocks. This was where my father’s flat was supposed to be. I felt a tightness in my whole body. I was stiff with apprehension.

Before walking over to the main entrance, I took out my video camera and filmed for about twenty seconds, panning all over the building, left and right, up and down. It was the first time I’d used the camera, but it seemed pretty easy to operate. I’m not quite sure why I did it, though: partly to calm my nerves, perhaps, and partly because I thought my father might like to see the footage the next time we met, whenever that would be. At any rate, it was hardly going to be of much use to Lindsay or Alan Guest for their promotional video. Afterwards I put the camera back in the glove compartment and locked the car.

It’s odd that when I think back to that morning, now, and remember myself walking across the expanse of asphalt in front of the tower block, it feels as though it was all happening in complete silence. And yet, obviously, there is no such thing as complete silence any more. Not in England. So there must have been the rumble of traffic from the Eastern Avenue, or the distant wail of police sirens, or the crying of a baby in a pushchair two streets away, but that’s not how I remember it. All was stillness. All was mystery.

I took the lift up to the fourth level and emerged into a dark, featureless corridor with a shiny linoleum floor and walls painted an intimidating shade of deep brown. The little windows at either end of the corridor admitted just a hint of the grey, late-morning light: two feeble glows in the distance to my left and my right, as I walked over to the doorway of my father’s flat, full of trepidation, my footsteps so light and measured that they barely made a sound. I took the keys that Mr Byrne had given me and tried to fit one of them into the lock – which in itself was quite hard to locate, in this gloom. The key didn’t seem to fit. Nor did the other two on Mr Byrne’s key ring. I tried each of them again, one after the other, but two of them didn’t fit at all, while the other one did – with a fair amount of forcing – but refused to turn.

I remembered Mrs Byrne’s comment, as we’d said goodbye yesterday evening, that she didn’t think I’d been given the right keys. I had taken no notice at the time, taking it simply to be the wittering of a confused old woman, but maybe she knew what she was talking about.

‘Shit!’ I said, out loud, and started trying the keys again. But it was no use. However hard I twisted the one key that seemed almost to fit, the lock refused to yield. After two or three minutes, there was no point in pursuing the attempt any further. I wrenched the key out of the recalcitrant lock, and threw it on the floor in frustration.

‘Shit!’ I said, again. Why was it that everything I tried to do, whenever it had anything to do with my father, always ended in disappointment and frustration? I thumped the locked door of his flat so hard that it hurt my fist and then stood in the darkness of the corridor for a few seconds, wondering where I could go from here. Surely it would be too anti-climactic just to give up, return to the car, and continue with my journey north?

Then I remembered the other thing that Mrs Byrne had mentioned: that there was another set of keys, belonging to a woman called Miss Erith who lived in the flat opposite. That had to be worth trying, surely.

I approached the door of the flat, and hesitated for a moment before ringing the bell. Supposing there was no one at home? Well, that would be the end of it, then. But no – I could hear voices, distantly, coming from inside. A man’s voice and a woman’s.

Quickly, before I had the time to tell myself that I was doing something foolish, I rang the bell. Almost immediately I regretted it, but there was nothing I could do about that now. After a couple of seconds I could already hear footsteps coming towards the door.

The door opened and I found myself looking at a small man of Pakistani origin, who seemed to be in his late sixties.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘I’m sorry – I think I must have called at the wrong flat.’

‘Who were you looking for?’

‘Miss Erith.’

‘No, this is right. Come on in.’

I followed him inside, down a short corridor and then into a bright but small sitting room, full of clutter. There were three free-standing mahogany bookcases, crammed with old hardback books and a few battered paperbacks, an ancient stereo system (dating from the 1970s, I would say, or maybe even the 1960s) with a whole lot of vinyl records and cassettes ranged around it (no CDs), at least a dozen pot plants, and a number of pictures on the walls, most of which even I recognized as reproductions of old masters. There were two armchairs placed opposite each other, and in one of them sat an elderly figure who I took to be Miss Erith. I guessed that she was at least ten years older than the man who had let me into the flat, although there was a liveliness in her eyes which belied her physical frailty. She was wearing brown slacks, and a navy-blue cardigan over her blouse, but the left sleeve was rolled up at the moment and, judging from the equipment on the table beside her, she was on the point of having her blood pressure taken.

When she saw me, her body gave a visible jolt and she almost jumped out of her chair in astonishment.

‘Good grief,’ she said. ‘It’s Harold!’

‘Don’t get up,’ I said, ‘I’m not Harold. My name’s Max.’

She stared at me more closely.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank God for that. I thought I was going mad for a minute. You do look like him, though.’

‘I’m his son,’ I told her.

‘His son?’ She looked me up and down, now, as if this information made it even more difficult to accept the reality of my sudden appearance – or indeed my existence. ‘Well …’ she continued, as if to herself, ‘Harold’s son. Who’d have thought it? Max, did you say your name was?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Your father isn’t with you?’

‘No.’

‘Is he still alive?’

‘Yes, he is. He’s very well, actually.’ With one thing and another, I seemed to have reduced her to speechlessness. To fill the silence, I said: ‘I was just passing through the area, so I thought …well, I thought it was about time someone checked up on the flat.’ Still no response. ‘I’m on my way to Scotland. To the Shetland Isles.’

Miss Erith’s companion stepped forward, at this point, and held out his hand.

‘Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Doctor Hameed.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Doctor,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘Maxwell Sim.’

‘Maxwell. The pleasure is all mine. Call me Mumtaz, please. Margaret, why don’t I make a pot of tea for your guest?’

‘Yes, of course. Of course.’ She slowly emerged from the daze into which my presence had thrown her. ‘Yes, where are my manners? Sit down, please, and have some tea. Would you like some tea?’

‘That would be lovely. But shouldn’t you finish … ?’ I gestured at the blood pressure monitor on the table.

‘Oh, we can do that afterwards. Come on, this is a special occasion.’

‘Very good,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I’ll make a pot for all of us.’

When he had disappeared on this errand, Miss Erith explained: ‘Mumtaz used to be my GP, until he retired. But he still comes and sees me, every couple of weeks, completely off his own bat. He gives me a quick MOT, and then we drive out somewhere for lunch. Nice of him, isn’t it?’

‘Very.’

‘You see, if there were more people around like him, we wouldn’t be in the state we are now.’

It wasn’t clear to me exactly what she meant by this remark, so I let it pass.

‘I haven’t seen your father,’ Miss Erith continued, ‘for more than twenty years. 1987, it was, when he left. He’d only been here a year or so. I was just getting excited about the idea of having him for a neighbour when he buggered off to Australia, without so much as a by-your-leave.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It was a bit of a surprise for me, as well.’

‘Well, I’m not sure I was surprised, exactly. Not in retrospect, anyway. It never struck me as being a very sensible thing to do, coming back here, to his home town, after his wife had died and everything. What he really needed was a fresh start. Still, I was very disappointed. He was good company, and we’re not exactly spoiled for that around here, I can tell you. He never wrote, or anything. Never got back in touch. Miserable sod. How old would he be now, seventy-something? He’s still in good shape, did you say?’

‘Yes. I saw him in Sydney last month. That was when he asked me to call in here. He wants me to find some … some items from the flat. Trouble is, I can’t seem to get in. I think I was given the wrong key.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ve got one somewhere. I still go in there every so often, to check the post. You know, it’s very irresponsible of him to leave that flat empty for so long. It could have been squatted by now. In fact, it should have been, really. If it had been anybody else I would have reported him to the housing association.’

Mumtaz returned, at this point, with a tray loaded with teacups, saucers and a plate full of biscuits. I fetched another chair from the corner of the room and offered him the armchair he must have been using before. Soon we were all settled again.

‘You never knew Mr Sim, did you?’ Miss Erith asked him. ‘From the flat across the corridor.’

‘No, I never had the pleasure,’ said the doctor. ‘A little before my time.’

‘Max has come to collect some of his things,’ said Miss Erith. ‘Though I don’t know what, exactly, because there isn’t much in there.’

‘I was told something about some postcards,’ I said.

‘Ah! Of course! Well I’ve got those, unless there’ve been any others in the last three weeks.’

Miss Erith began to rise effortfully to her feet, but Mumtaz tried to stop her.

‘Please, Margaret, don’t exert yourself –’

‘Give over,’ she said, brushing him away. ‘I’m not a cripple yet, you know. Now hang on, they’re in the spare room somewhere …’

While she was away, Mumtaz poured me some tea and handed me the cup, smiling in a confiding sort of way.

‘She has plenty of spirit, Margaret – still plenty of spirit. Mind you, her body’s not in such bad shape either. Would you have guessed that she’s seventy-nine? You should get her to tell you the story of her life. Fascinating. She was born on the canals, you know. Her father used to keep a famous shop for canal people, a few miles north from here at Weston. All that trade and traffic is gone now, of course. But just imagine! Imagine the changes she must have seen in her lifetime. Someone should fetch a tape recorder and keep her story for posterity. In fact, that’s what I should be doing. I’ve mentioned it to her, of course, but she’s too modest. “Oh, nobody wants to hear about a boring old lady like me,” she’ll say. But stories like hers need to be remembered, don’t you think? Otherwise, England has forgotten its own past, and once that happens, we’re in trouble, aren’t we? Even more trouble than we’re in at the moment.’

Another enigmatic remark; but before I had time to think about it, Miss Erith re-entered the room, saying, ‘I’m sorry they’re not in a box or anything,’ and dragging a large black bin liner behind her.

‘What the – … ?’ I said, opening the bag and peering inside.

‘You see, I never sorted them, or anything like that,’ said Miss Erith, ‘because I had no idea whether your father was ever coming back or not. And he specifically told me not to forward anything.’

The bag was full to the brim with picture postcards. I reached inside and pulled out a handful at random. They were nearly all from places in the Far East – Tokyo, Palau, Singapore … They all had my father’s address written neatly in block capitals on the right-hand side, while the other half was filled to the very edges with cramped, intense handwriting. And they all bore the same signature: ‘Roger’.

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘This is beginning to ring a bell.’

And yes, it was true: I remembered, now, that similar postcards used to arrive at the family home in Birmingham every so often. They would be scooped up from the doormat along with the rest of the post, either by me or my mother, and placed without comment on my father’s desk in the dining room, to be read by him when he returned home from work in the evening. Like everything else that took place in our uncommunicative household, this practice was hardly ever discussed or even remarked upon. Although I did recall saying to my mother, at least once, ‘Who is Roger, anyway?’, to which she had simply replied, ‘I think he was some old friend of your father’s.’ And that had been an end of it.

‘I’ve seen this handwriting before,’ I went on. ‘And always on postcards like this. All through the seventies, my dad used to get these.’

‘They come about once a month, generally,’ said Miss Erith. ‘He doesn’t get anything else. A bit of junk mail sometimes.’

‘I’ll take them away with me,’ I said. ‘Is that all right?’

‘Of course it is. Oh, and the key’s over there, while I remember. In the fruit bowl, on top of the bookcase.’

I got up to retrieve the key and, while I was on my feet, said: ‘I’ll just pop across and look for the other stuff, I think. Shouldn’t take a minute or two.’

To tell the truth, I was dreading going into the flat, and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. So I left Miss Erith and Dr Hameed drinking their tea, and stepped back into the gloom of the corridor. And this time my father’s door unlocked easily.

Have you ever been inside a place that has not been lived in for more than twenty years? If not, you will find it difficult to understand what it feels like. Just then I tapped out a couple of sentences but I decided to delete them again because they didn’t seem to do justice to the atmosphere in there: I used words like cold, sparsely furnished and eerie, but somehow that’s not enough. There’s another word I could have used, of course. Perhaps rather an over-dramatic word. Dead. Does that seem over the top to you? Well, never mind – it may be a little blunt, but still, this is exactly what my father’s flat felt like: like a place that belonged to someone who had died a long time ago.

After I’d been in there for about two minutes, I couldn’t wait to get out.

There were two bedrooms. One contained a single bed (with mattress but no linen), while the other – much smaller – was dominated by a desk and a large self-assembly bookcase made of artificial wood. Thick dust everywhere – that goes without saying. There were about a dozen books on the shelves – all the ones my father hadn’t wanted to take to Australia with him – and a few papers and items of stationery in the desk drawers. The precious ring binder was sitting on the third shelf of the bookcase and was easy to find. It was pale blue and on the spine my father had stuck on a label which said Two Duets: A Verse Cycle and a Memoir. You could tell that he had stuck the label down with double-sided sellotape, because the paper had faded and now you could clearly see the two strips of sellotape coming through underneath.

I plucked down the ring binder and carried it through with me into the kitchen. Here there was a French window leading out on to a little balcony and, with a bit of effort, I managed to turn the latchkey and push it open. It was good to get out into the fresh air. From up on this balcony I could see traffic circling endlessly, purposelessly on the orbital road and, beyond that, rural Staffordshire stretched out towards the horizon in grey waves of gentle, unremarkable countryside. A light but persistent drizzle had started to fall. I could see the A5192 ribboning away into the distance, and suddenly felt a strong desire to be driving on that road, back towards the motorway, just me and Emma again, heading north, on my way to Kendal, where this evening (God, this was such a wonderful prospect, until now I had barely allowed myself to contemplate it) I would actually be seeing Caroline and Lucy again, for the first time in months. Perhaps the most important evening of my life, in some ways. Certainly a chance to prove – once and for all – that I was not going to repeat my father’s mistakes; that I was capable of having a relationship with my daughter based on something more than mutual toleration and the prolonged accident of sharing the same living space. I was not (I intoned the words to myself, in silence but fervently) going to end up like this. My memorial was not going to be an empty, unloved, unlived-in apartment on the forgotten outskirts of a Midlands city.

Full of resolve, now, I went back into the kitchen, locked the French window, took one more pitying look around the sitting room as I passed through it, and then left the flat for good, locking the door behind me. I felt a strange, irrational flood of relief, as if I’d just had a narrow escape from the jaws of some fate so imprisoning and nightmarish that it couldn’t even be defined.

‘Mumtaz and I were just trying to decide where we should go to lunch,’ Miss Erith said, as I rejoined them and took a welcome sip of my still-warm tea. ‘We can’t just go to any old place, you see. I don’t know what he thinks about it, but it’s a date, as far as I’m concerned, and a girl expects to be taken somewhere special.’ She glanced at the blue ring binder on my lap. ‘So – did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Yep. I think these are some of Dad’s poems and things. Apparently he’s lost the other copy and now this is the only one.’ I glanced through the pages, and saw that there were two sections: one in verse, the other in prose. ‘Don’t know why it’s so important. I suppose I’d better hang on to it. Weird title,’ I added, looking at the first page. ‘Two Duets.’

‘Hm, I see,’ said Miss Erith. ‘Half of Eliot.’

‘Half of Eliot?’

‘T. S. Eliot. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’

‘Of course I have,’ I said, defensively. Then added, just to make sure I was thinking of the right person: ‘He wrote the lyrics for Cats, didn’t he?’

‘His most famous poems are the Four Quartets,’ she said. ‘Have you never read them?’

I shook my head. ‘What are they about?’

She laughed. ‘You’d have to read them to find that out! Oh, they’re about time, and memory, and things like that. And they’re all themed around the four elements – air, earth, fire and water. Your father was a great admirer of Eliot’s. We used to argue about him all the time. Not my cup of tea, you see. Not my thing at all. He was an anti-Semite, apart from anything else, and you can’t forgive something like that, can you? At least I can’t. But that sort of thing wouldn’t have bothered your father. He’s got no interest in politics, has he?’

‘Well …’ I had never really thought about this, I must say. And besides, I wasn’t very interested in politics either. ‘We never really talk about stuff like that. Our relationship is sort of based on … other things.’

Miss Erith was closing her eyes, now. I wondered at first whether she was about to nod off, but it seemed that this was an attempt at recollection instead.

‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that I’m an old lefty, and always will be. Ever since I started reading George Orwell and E. P. Thompson and people like that. Whereas your father had no political awareness at all. That’s why it’s probably a good thing that we never went on our trip together, because we were going into it for completely different reasons.’

‘You were planning a trip?’ I asked politely, hoping this wasn’t going to trigger a long reminiscence.

‘There was a book called Narrowboat. Quite a famous book in its day. Rolt was the author’s name – Tom Rolt. I’ve still got it on the bookshelf over there. He and his wife bought this narrowboat back in the thirties and lived on it for a few months, going up and down the canals. Then he wrote all about it and he published this book in the 1940s and the amazing thing about it is that it mentions my father’s shop: because I grew up on the canals, you know, and my father used to have a shop at Weston, where all the barges used to stop every day. He sold everything: every kind of rope and line you could think of, every kind of food, all sorts of tobacco, and then lamps, crockery, saucepans, clothes – you name it. And shelves and shelves of sweets for the children, of course. Such an Aladdin’s cave, it was! And the boats used to be stopping all the time, we got to know all the canal folk – it was a whole world, a different world, a secret world, with its own codes and rules. Just a tiny little shop, the front room of a thatched cottage in a row of other cottages, and I must have served behind the counter from when I was about eight or nine years old. Dad would have been amazed to know his shop was mentioned in this famous book but of course he didn’t read books like that – or any sort of book, really – so he never knew anything about it. And I didn’t find out until years later. I left home when I was sixteen, you see, to be with this man – a bargeman he was, naturally – and a year later I’d had my first baby and we left the canals and started living not far from here, in Tamworth, but we never got married – that was a bit of a scandal, I can tell you – and a couple of years later we had another baby and then this man left me. Well, I booted him out, if you must know, because he was a dead loss, really, never got a job or anything, used to spend all his time down at the pub or chasing other women – after a while I decided he was more trouble than he was worth. So there I was, in the early 1950s, living all by myself in a poky little flat with two small children, and the only thing I could do to stop myself from going crazy was to start reading. Of course I’d hardly had any education to speak of, but the Workers’ Educational Association was very strong, in those days, and I used to go to lectures and meetings and all sorts of things. And actually I did manage to go to university in the end, but that was when I was almost forty and so that’s another story entirely. Anyway, that was how I started reading books and I can’t remember how old I was when I read Narrowboat but I know that my mum and dad were both dead by then because I would have loved to tell them that their shop was mentioned in the book and I never did.’

While she was pausing for breath, Mumtaz said: ‘Do try to keep to the point, Margaret. You were supposed to be telling us something about Max’s father. Now none of us can remember what you were talking about.’

She gave him a pointed stare. ‘Well, I can remember. The thing was that Harold and I made this plan, you see, that we were going to hire a narrowboat ourselves for a few weeks, and follow the same route that this man Rolt and his wife had taken. We were going to do it in 1989, exactly fifty years after they’d set off. The idea was that we’d visit all the same places and see how things had changed in the meantime. Well, that was my idea, anyway. All Harold wanted to do, I’m sure, was sit on the roof of the boat looking at the clouds and daydreaming and writing his precious poems. But for me, you see, the point about Tom Rolt’s book – and this’ (fixing Mumtaz with another stare) ‘is why I’m telling you about it – is that it’s not just a book about canals at all. It’s one of the most amazing books about England ever written. Rolt was a very interesting man – a man with very strong beliefs – and although I dare say he was a bit of a Tory in his politics he was also into green issues years before the term had been invented. And do you know what he saw – way back in 1939? He saw a country that was already quite happily allowing itself to be killed off by the power of the big corporations.’

Mumtaz rolled his eyes and gave a comically theatrical sigh. ‘Oh, I see. Now I get it. Watch this carefully, Maxwell,’ he said, holding up a finger in warning, ‘because you are about to see a woman climbing on board her hobbyhorse, and once that happens, you are never going to be able to get her off again. We are going to be here for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, I tell you.’

‘It’s not a hobbyhorse,’ Miss Erith insisted, ‘and I’m not going to climb on board it. All I’m saying is that, if you read that book, you’ll understand a bit more of what’s going on in this country, and how long it’s been happening. What big business is doing to it. It’s not a recent thing at all: it’s been going on for years – centuries, even. Everything that gives a community its own identity – the local shops, the local pubs – it’s all being taken away and replaced by this bland, soulless, corporate –’

‘What she’s really saying,’ Mumtaz explained to me with a weary smile, ‘is that we’ve been trying to think of a nearby pub where we can go for our lunch, and she doesn’t like any of them any more.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Miss Erith. ‘And do you know why? Because they’re all the bloody same! They’ve all been taken over by the big chains and now they play the same music and serve the same beer and the same food …’

‘… and they’re full of young people,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Young people enjoying themselves – that’s what irks you! Young people who like it that way.’

‘They like it that way because they don’t know any other!’ Miss Erith said, her voice suddenly rising to an angry pitch. The good-humoured, bantering aspect of their conversation seemed to evaporate in an instant. ‘Mumtaz knows very well what I mean.’ She had turned to look at me directly, now, and I was amazed to see that there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m saying that the England I used to love doesn’t exist any more.’

A long silence followed, while these words were allowed to hang in the air.

Miss Erith sat forward and drank the remains of her tea, not saying anything more, looking straight ahead of her.

I looked down at my father’s blue ring binder, wondering if this would be a good moment to make my excuses and leave.

Mumtaz sighed and scratched his head. He was the first one to speak.

‘You’re right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I’ve been here. It’s a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others.’

‘Better!’ she echoed, scornfully.

‘Anyway,’ he said, rising to his feet, ‘I think we should try The Plough and Harrow again. It will be nice to get out into the countryside, and the piped music isn’t too loud, and the food is good.’ He turned to me and said kindly: ‘Why don’t you join us, Maxwell? We’d be glad to have your company.’

I stood up as well. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ I said. ‘But I think I’d better be getting on my way. I’ve got a long journey ahead of me.’

‘You’re going to Scotland, I think you said?’

‘That’s right. About as far as you can go – all the way to the Shetland Isles.’

‘Marvellous. What an adventure. And what takes you there, might I ask? Is it business, or pleasure?’

The simplest way to answer this, it seemed, was to reach inside the pocket of my jacket and fetch out another of the toothbrush samples I’d been carrying around with me since yesterday. I’d given my two IP 009s to Mr and Mrs Byrne – all the others were still in the boot of the Prius – so what I handed over to Mumtaz was the nice, plain, elegant model that Trevor had shown to me first of all – the ID 003, made of sustainable pine, with the boar’s-hair bristles and the non-detachable head.

‘I represent a company that markets and distributes these,’ I explained, surprised to find how proud I was to be saying it.

Mumtaz took the brush from me and whistled admiringly through his teeth.

‘Wow,’ he said, running his fingers along the shaft, ‘this is a real beauty. A real beauty. You know, I might even enjoy cleaning my teeth if I had one of these, instead of it being a chore. And you are going to sell some of these in Shetland?’

‘That’s the plan.’

‘Well,’ he said, giving the toothbrush back to me. ‘You will have no difficulty, that’s for sure. Margaret! Margaret, did you hear any of that?’

But Miss Erith was still in a kind of daze. She turned towards us slowly, almost as if she had forgotten that we were in the flat with her at all. Her eyes remained rheumy and unfocused.

‘Mmm?’

‘Maxwell was telling us that he is going to Shetland to sell toothbrushes. Beautiful, wooden toothbrushes.’

‘Wooden?’ she said, her concentration gradually appearing to return.

‘Perhaps this idea will … appeal to you,’ I said, hesitantly, trying hard to find the right words. ‘My company, you see, is not a big corporation. In fact we’re fighting against the big corporations. We’re a small company, and whenever we can, we commission our brushes from other small companies. This beautiful brush was made in Lincolnshire, by local craftsmen – part of a family business.’

‘Really?’ she said. ‘May I see?’

I passed her the brush, and she turned it over in her hands, slowly, reverently, again and again, as if she had never seen such a wondrous object in all her seventy-nine years. When she gave it back to me – unless I was imagining it – her eyes had cleared, and were shining at me with a new, rejuvenated light.

‘You can … You can have that if you like.’

‘Really?’

Unexpectedly, she pulled back her top lip, to reveal teeth which were yellowing but otherwise complete, strong and healthy.

‘These are all mine, you know. I clean them three times a day.’

‘Here you are, then. Here you are – take it.’

Perhaps I am being fanciful now. Perhaps my memory of that day is playing tricks on me. But as that exquisite toothbrush was passed back from my hand to hers, in the rapt silence of Miss Erith’s flat high above the city of Lichfield, with Dr Mumtaz Hameed looking on benignly, smilingly, I felt that what was taking place was almost a religious ceremony. That we were doing something – what is the word? – that we were doing something you might almost describe as – yes, I know … sacramental.

There, I told you I was being fanciful. It was definitely time to say my farewells, and get back to the car. Back to Emma, to the motorway, and reality.