Guilt at the Garage

by Simon Brett

  ‘Mum, please. Jude doesn’t want to hear all this.’

  The Jude in question didn’t mind, actually. She was permanently curious about her fellow human beings, and constantly amazed by the diversity of their interests and behaviour. The work she did gave her unrivalled access to the lives of others.

  ‘Well, I speak as I find,’ said Rhona. Her daughter’s reaction showed it was another line she heard with considerable frequency.

  But Rhona hadn’t finished needling. She should have realized by now that nothing she said was going to bring down her daughter’s marriage, but she still had to keep chipping away at its foundations. ‘You know Billy’s plans for the garage, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Shannon wearily.

  ‘He was talking to me about them only yesterday,’ Rhona persisted. ‘He makes no secret of them. One of my Fethering friends heard him sounding off about them in the Crown and Anchor. When he gets control of Shefford’s, he wants to turn it into a dealership with one of the big companies; a foreign one – Nissan, Toyota, Honda, one of those Eastern ones. Billy reckons that’s where the money’s going to be in the future. He says there’s no profit in filling cars with petrol and doing repairs.’

  ‘Mum …’ said Shannon with a long-suffering sigh, ‘Billy’s told me all this. I know what his plans are.’

  ‘Yes, but Jude doesn’t know, does she?’

  Jude thought it rather strange that she was being brought in to help in the demolition of Rhona’s son-in-law. It wasn’t a position she particularly relished, but she kept quiet.

  ‘Anyway, it’s all going to change soon,’ said Shannon.

  ‘What’s all going to change?’

  ‘The motor industry. In twenty years’ time, there won’t be any fossil fuels. If Billy does get his dealership, he won’t be selling petrol-driven cars. They’ll all be electric.’

  ‘So they say,’ Rhona intoned darkly. ‘The politicians. Mind you, politicians will say anything if it’s going to squeeze out one more vote for them.’ Shannon’s face suggested this was also a view she’d heard expressed many times before.

  Her mother went on the offensive again. ‘And how do you reckon your Billy will manage, converting Shefford’s to all-electric? He’s never been good at change, has he?’

  ‘He’ll cope,’ said Shannon. ‘Anyway, the future at the garage is all rather in the air at the moment.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rhona. ‘Since Billy’s dad married the Chink, you mean?’

  As she left Waggoners, Jude could not help feeling a surge of sympathy for Billy Shefford, caught in a pincer movement between a wife who disapproved of the work he did and a mother-in-law who disapproved of him full stop.

  No wonder he spent a certain amount of time sounding off in the Crown and Anchor.

  FOUR

  Carole’s skills at blanking things out were finite. However determinedly she tried not to think about the attack on her Renault, nagging anxieties kept on invading her mind. It wasn’t the smashed glass that caused them – she had come to terms with that – it was the note through the kitchen door, the note that changed a random act of violence into targeted aggression. The temptation to talk about it, to tell Jude what had happened, was strong. Except, of course, that would probably have meant owning up to her inefficiency over the car insurance. Not to mention her stupidity in burning the vital evidence. No, she’d have to bottle it up. And Carole Seddon was very practised in bottling things up.

  She was also very practised in being slow to change her habits. Everything new she approached with suspicion. For many years, she had resisted computer technology. It was the same with mobile phones and, currently, using the camera function.

  Then again, for a long time, when in Jude’s company, the two of them had drunk Chilean Chardonnay. And when they came to the mutual conclusion that Sauvignon Blanc was much nicer, it still felt wrong to Carole. Although she wondered how they had apparently enjoyed the Chardonnay for so long, she did feel a pang almost of betrayal at a bar when ordering Sauvignon Blanc.

  It was the same with coffee. Carole’s instinctive Englishness and aversion to change had made her very suspicious of the invasion by coffees with foreign names. Resolutely resisting the siren calls of mochas, lattes and macchiatos, when offered a choice she would reply stuffily, ‘Just ordinary black coffee, please.’ And when Polly’s Cake Shop on the parade closed, Carole’s voice was strong in condemning the prospect of its being replaced by a Starbucks. The very idea was appalling. This was Fethering, after all. Fethering would never give way to the relentless march of the multinationals.

  But, of course, Fethering, like so many other places, did give way to the relentless march of the multinationals. And, though Carole at first condemned the fickleness of the locals who immediately flooded into the new Starbucks, she did occasionally find herself ending up in there. She had even been heard to order, ‘A black Americano, please.’

  There wasn’t a regular pattern to when she went out for coffee. Apart from mealtimes, the two fixed points of Carole’s day were Gulliver’s walks on Fethering Beach – as soon as it was light in the mornings and just before it got dark in the evenings. She had bought the dog initially so that she didn’t look lonely when out walking. After leaving the Home Office – slightly earlier than she had planned – and moving to Fethering full-time, Carole had hated the idea of locals conjecturing about her relationship status or, even worse, pitying her. So, she always looked busy – busy when walking with giving exercise to Gulliver, and busy when in Starbucks with doing The Times crossword. She had always been terrified of looking as if she had no purpose in life. In common with many shy people, Carole Seddon worried that other people were far more interested in her behaviour than any of them bothered to be.

  She rarely combined a visit to Starbucks with one of her Gulliver walks. Although the management did not object to dogs, some strange puritanism within her didn’t like the idea of pets in a venue that served food.

  The morning after Jude had visited Rhona Hampton, Carole decided she could justify a Starbucks coffee. It was a Thursday, when The Times crossword could be a stinker of a kind that required more than the customary twenty minutes over lunch.

  Sure enough, when she sat down with her ‘black Americano’ and perused the clues, for all the sense they made they might have been written in Serbo-Croat. Some days, she knew, the crossword was like that. The important thing was not to panic. Just calm down, look at the words, break them down into their component parts.

  ‘Well, good morning, Carole. Fancy meeting you here.’

  She recognized the voice and looked up to see Adrian Greenford, holding a mug of his customary flat white.

  ‘May I join you, or will I divert your focus from the crossword?’

  ‘Any diversion would be welcomed. It’s totally impenetrable today.’

  ‘It’d be totally impenetrable to me any day,’ he said as he moved a chair back with his leg and sat opposite her.

  Adrian Greenford was a large, red-faced man, dressed that day in a tweed overcoat and grey trilby hat, which he removed to reveal thick hair grizzled like steel wool. He had moved to Fethering some weeks before. Carole was usually resistant to meeting new people, but she had pointed out to him where the eggs were on his first encounter with Fethering’s uniquely inefficient supermarket Allinstore. He had then introduced himself, and they’d bumped into each other more than once on the parade or Fethering Beach.

  Adrian was one of those people, unlike Carole, who had no problem initiating conversation. He had the bluff, open manner of someone who’d never considered the possibility that people might not want to talk to him. His accent was from the North – he’d told Carole early on in their acquaintance that he and his wife had moved down from Ilkley – and she wondered if that had something to do with it. She shared the common Southern prejudice that people from the North were more outgoing. (In Carole’s lexicon, ‘outgoing’ was not necessarily a compliment. Its shades of meaning
moved closer to ‘brash’ than ‘congenial’.)

  ‘So,’ she asked, ‘how are you settling in?’

  ‘Oh, getting there, getting there,’ he replied. ‘Place was a bit of a tip when we bought it. Fortunately, a lot of the work was done before we took up residence. The lift’s in, which is the main thing, but there’s still more to do with ramps and what-have-you.’

  ‘“Ramps”?’ Carole echoed.

  ‘Oh, silly me, I hadn’t told you. Fact is, my wife Gwyneth is confined to a wheelchair, so there was a lot of sort of adaptation needed to be done to the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Carole curbed the natural instinct to ask what was wrong with her. Though she doubted whether Adrian would have minded answering, it did feel slightly indelicate. So, she moved the subject on. Though they had met a good few times, the encounters had been brief and a lot of the basic background questions hadn’t yet been asked. ‘Are you still working, Adrian?’

  ‘No. Retired. You?’

  ‘Retired.’ It still caused an obscure pang to admit it. The Home Office had so much defined her life that she had never really found anything to replace it.

  ‘I was in the car business,’ Adrian volunteered. ‘Salesman for over forty years.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Maybe he read some criticism in the monosyllable, because he went on, ‘Yes, a car salesman, like they make all the dirty jokes about.’

  ‘I didn’t know they made dirty jokes about car salesmen.’

  ‘Oh, come on, surely you must’ve heard …’ He looked at her face. ‘No, maybe you haven’t, Carole.’ He sighed, then chuckled. ‘Actually, it’s quite a relief to meet someone who doesn’t immediately go into a routine of car salesman jokes.’

  ‘Do most people you meet do that?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Most women?’ she asked incredulously.

  His big face relaxed into a grin. ‘No, I suppose, to be fair, it is mostly the men. Yeah, the men tell the jokes … and the women decide which car they’re going to buy.’

  ‘Is that how it works?’

  ‘More often than you’d think, yes. Oh, the men come in with all the technical questions about spec and engine capacity and torque measurement and then, generally speaking, they go back home and ask their wives what car they’re allowed to buy.’

  ‘“Allowed”?’

  ‘That’s usually the way it goes, yes. Let me tell you a story about a man I once dealt with. Potential buyer … there was a car he was interested in … I had my own showroom back then, and mostly I was a one-man band. Well, I had a couple of boys helped me out part-time … and of course a “spivver” …’

  ‘Sorry? A what?’

  ‘A “spivver”. He tidied up the cars on the forecourt.’

  ‘“Tidied up”?’

  ‘Cleaned them. Kept them polished up. One thing you must never allow in the second-hand car business is a car to have a speck of dust on it. Whatever’s going on under the bonnet – and I can assure you I never sold a car that was dodgy under the bonnet, though there’s plenty of dealers who do – the bodywork must shine like it’s just been cleaned.’

  ‘By the “spivver”?’

  ‘Exactly. You’re catching on, Carole. He’s got one of the most important jobs. Nobody likes driving away from the showroom in a car that doesn’t gleam. Of course, within twenty-four hours, their new purchase will be covered with …’ He checked himself and selected a different word from the one he’d intended. ‘… covered with mud, but that’s not the point. When it left my showroom, it gleamed.’

  Carole reflected on the dusty second-hand offerings she’d seen on the forecourt at Shefford’s. They seemed symptomatic of the run-down nature of the business. ‘So, presumably,’ she said, ‘you’d never try to sell a car that’d got damage to the bodywork?’

  ‘No, most of those go to the auctions. That’s the place for the wedding rings.’

  ‘Sorry? “Wedding rings”?’

  ‘You call a car a “wedding ring”, because you’ll never get rid of it.’

  ‘Ah.’ Carole was rather enjoying her induction into car dealers’ patois. She was also enjoying Adrian’s company, though she suspected she wouldn’t have it for long. He’d just moved to Fethering, she was one of the first people he’d met. And she was useful to him as a source of local knowledge. Someone as sociable as he was would soon make other friends. Only a matter of time, she reckoned, before Adrian Greenford was the life and soul of the village party, holding court in the Crown and Anchor. Carole had never had any illusions about how interesting she was as a person.

  But, at least for the moment, she had his full attention as he continued his narrative. ‘Anyway, this guy I’m talking about, he comes in – just off the door, you know – there’s a car on the forecourt he’s really interested in. When you’ve done the job as long as I have, you recognize genuine interest when you see it. Do you want to know what make of car it was, Carole?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Didn’t think you would. No worries, doesn’t change the story. Anyway, in the front window it’s got the placard with the price on it. Ten thousand. And that was a fair price. I’ve always done fair prices. Bit of profit for me, obviously – car’s got to wash its face or it’s not worth the candle – but otherwise fair price. You try to squeeze too much out of the punters, word soon gets round and you lose your repeat trade. So, yeah, ten thousand is a good price. And I can tell this guy likes it. He checks everything out, he takes it for a test drive … he’s hooked. So, I get the paperwork ready to close the deal … but no, he says he’s going home to think about it overnight. And I’m fine with that, because I know he wants it. And a lot of buyers go through that kind of routine. It’s a big expense, buying a car, they don’t want to rush into it. Don’t want to give the impression they’re easily persuaded either. No one wants to look like a fool, like they’ve been done, do they?’

  Carole focused on him sharply. Surely he couldn’t know about her error with the car insurance, could he? But she was being paranoid. There was nothing sly about the way Adrian continued his narrative.

  ‘So, next day he comes in early, just after I’ve opened … which is good news for me. Means he’s made up his mind and can’t wait to get the deal sorted. But no, he says, “I do like the car very much and I want to buy it, and I think ten thousand’s a reasonable price. But I was talking to my wife about it last night, and she thinks we should only pay nine thousand.”

  ‘So I says to him, quick as a flash, “Well, I’d love to sell it to you at that price, but I talked to my wife last night and she said we shouldn’t accept anything under ten thousand!”’

  He roared with laughter, which petered out when he noticed Carole wasn’t joining in.

  ‘So did your wife say that?’

  ‘No, of course not. I made it up.’

  ‘Oh.’ Carole sounded mystified. She knew she had never been very good at recognizing jokes. ‘Did he pay the ten thousand then?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adrian, a little deflated by the failure of his anecdote. It had been a sure-fire laugh-generator on many other occasions. But clearly not on occasions when his audience was Carole Seddon.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, recognizing the moment had come to move the conversation on, ‘you’ve been so helpful to me since we met, recommending local services and so on … I wondered if I could pick your brains again …?’

  ‘Of course. You’re welcome to anything you can find there.’

  ‘Well, it’s a matter of garages. I drive a BMW 3 Series Convertible …’ He looked at her and grinned. ‘That probably doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?’

  ‘I have heard of BMW,’ she ventured cautiously.

  ‘And I was looking for someone round here where I could get it serviced. I mean, obviously I can find the listing for BMW agents, but my car has a … slightly unusual service history … and I’ve found you generally get a better job done – and often a cheaper one – at some local gara
ge. Is there anywhere in Fethering?’

  So, of course, Carole gave him the details of Shefford’s.

  Returning to High Tor, she felt quite pleased with herself. She felt she’d made a new friend. While recognizing that it wasn’t difficult to strike up a friendship with someone as outgoing as Adrian Greenford, it was still a source of satisfaction.

  The fact that he was a man played no part in that satisfaction. Carole Seddon had long before written herself off as a romantic prospect. Indeed, sometimes she found it incongruous to think that she had stayed married to David for so long. Since, following divorce and retirement, she had moved permanently to Fethering, there had been – except for one brief, unlikely involvement with Ted Crisp, landlord of the Crown and Anchor – no special men in her life. And she found that a pleasingly uncomplicated state of affairs.

  Unworthy though the thought was, Carole also drew satisfaction from the fact that Adrian was a friend she’d made without the involvement of Jude. With Carole, jealousy of her more laid-back neighbour was never far below the surface.

  FIVE

  As she walked across the gravel driveway to Troubadours, Jude wasn’t convinced she was doing the right thing. She never felt quite at ease in the Shorelands Estate. She wasn’t sure whether it qualified as a ‘gated community’ or not. There were gates at the main entrance, but she had never seen them closed. That in itself seemed to say something about the place. Yes, we do have the exclusivity of a gated community, but we’re quite laid-back about it. Except, in Jude’s experience of the residents, they weren’t very laid-back at all.

  What they were, all of them, was rich. The Shorelands Estate, built along the coast to the west of Fethering in the 1950s, was highly sought-after. The residents were people of the professional classes – solicitors, doctors, dentists, a few retired diplomats and naval officers. The houses, all huge, were built in a variety of architectural styles – or it might be more accurate to say ‘based’ on a variety of architectural styles. Black-beamed early Tudor, fancy-bricked Elizabethan, geometrical Georgian, villa-style Victorian were all represented. Thatched roofs were juxtaposed by Mediterranean terracotta tiles. Italian pergolas vied with Spanish wrought iron.