by Marie Joseph
So that Friday evening, when Rufus called for me and strapped me into the passenger seat preparatory to our try-out run on the Ml, I was rehearsing what I was going to say. All my other boyfriends – and before Rufus there’d been quite a few – would have remarked on how gorgeous I looked, or asked me what was that fascinating perfume I was wearing.
But not Rufus . . .
I was asked to admire the wooden steering wheel, the walnut-faced dashboard, the natty little cigar lighter.
‘And it has a superefficient radio,’ he enthused. ‘Any station you want; you name it, I’ll get it,’ and he twiddled the nobs and nearly blasted Twinkle, my Pekinese, off the loudspeaker on the back shelf, where he’s trained her to sit in case she marks the covers on the back seat.
Then he demonstrated the instant flow of cold air, which at the touch of a button eddied all round us.
‘Hasn’t it got a heater?’ I asked, snuggling down further into my seat to avoid the draught sneaking down my neck.
‘It’s got the lot,’ Rufus said, and pressed a switch that filled the car with heat like the blast from a ship’s furnace.
‘Marvellous,’ I said automatically, and sat in gloomy silence, punctuated by the strains of what sounded like a pipe band from Outer Mongolia in order that Rufus could demonstrate the wide choice of programmes on his superefficient radio.
I didn’t speak again until we were on the motorway.
‘Goes like a bomb, doesn’t she?’ Rufus said, leather-glove-clad hands at the correct ten-to-two position on the wheel.
‘I’m not enjoying myself,’ I said, and that, for the record, was the understatement of the year.
Contrary to all the rules of the motorway, Rufus took his eyes from the road momentarily. ‘Say that again.’
‘I’m not enjoying myself,’ I said, loud and clear.
‘I thought that’s what you said,’ Rufus said, looking hurt and bewildered, and inadvertently allowing a Mini-Cooper to pass us on the right.
Rufus’s left hand left the wheel for a moment as he switched off the superefficient radio.
‘You mean to say you didn’t enjoy Brand’s Hatch?’ he said in astonishment, and I nodded my head violently.
‘That’s right. Tell me one girl you know who would enjoy standing all day in a bitter east wind watching cars following each other round a racetrack.’
‘I don’t know any other girls but you,’ Rufus said, missing the point as usual, but speaking the truth, because before me he had, I know for a fact, had a passionate love affair with a Simca, and a Riley Nine.
‘And what’s more, I didn’t care who won,’ I said.
By now the car was down to fifty miles an hour, and stealing a sideways glance I could see that his profile was set into lines of deep hurt, so I looked quickly away. Rufus has a beautiful profile, and the first time we met, at a car rally, where I was modelling the latest in leather trouser suits, I thought how nice his profile would look on my children. But I wasn’t going to think about the time we met. What mattered was here and now.
‘I flatly refuse to be married to a car fanatic,’ I said, all the carefully rehearsed words coming fluently into play. ‘I refuse to play second fiddle to a V4 engine, even if it has a twin-choke caruburettor, and I refuse to sit around whilst you crawl on the garage floor in a pool of oil.’
‘Neither of my present cars has an oil leak,’ Rufus said in an aggrieved tone, ‘and I must say, if you’re going to be in that kind of mood, I’ve a good mind to turn off at the next exit and make for home.’
‘You do that,’ I said, and in silence we drove back on the other side of the motorway.
And even then, in the middle of what was the first real quarrel we’d ever had, he couldn’t resist testing the brakes on the long slope down to the house where I live, and if it hadn’t been for the safety belt, would have almost catapulted me through the windscreen.
Outside the Victorian house where my small flat nestles on the topmost floor, he parked the car by the kerb with as much precision and accuracy as would have afforded him Driver of the Year title if there’d been such a thing.
Usually, well, always, I asked him in for coffee, but I knew that once he followed me up the stairs and took me in his arms, and I snuggled close to his jacket, which always smelled of gear oil and tobacco, my good intentions would be nullified.
So, ‘Come along, Twinkle,’ I said, and that was all.
‘I’ll ring you then,’ he said humbly.
‘Yes, do that,’ I said, and left him standing there, one arm draped disconsolately over the bonnet of my latest rival . . .
I suppose it sounds funny really. I mean to say, there are golf widows, and football widows, and they seem to be able to come to terms with life, but their problems don’t usually start until the first flush of the honeymoon is over. My disillusionment had set in even before the actual wedding day had been fixed.
We had talked about our honeymoon, naturally, and Rufus had decided that we would tour the highlands of Scotland, me acting as navigator and co-driver – only metaphorically speaking, of course. Rufus’s cars were never driven by any other than his own two fair hands.
No, we just weren’t compatible, I told myself as I sipped my solitary coffee and stared at the telephone, willing it to ring.
As a navigator I’d make a good cook. I had once astounded Rufus by map-reading us not only in the wrong direction, but into the wrong county to boot!
The next day, a Saturday, I had to be up before dawn had even started to crack, to drive into Sussex to model beachwear on the staircase of someone’s Ancestral Home. Having been a fashion model for three years, I showed no surprise at all in the fact that a beach would be the last place on earth on which to model the latest in bikinis.
I keep my well-worn Mini in a garage down the road, and backing it out that morning I heard the ominous scrape of the wing along a small concrete post I swore must have grown itself there overnight. Such a minor incident would have thrown Rufus into almost maniacal despair, but I merely settled Twinkle more comfortably on her blanket, and drove on. I put the incident down to one of the things that life sends to try us . . .
It wasn’t exactly foggy, more of a Scotch mist. ‘Too mean to rain,’ as someone once wittily said, and as I drove out of town and along the wet, cheerless country lanes, I tried to persuade myself that what I felt for Rufus was just infatuation. Love, real love, was blind, I told myself firmly. If I loved Rufus as much as I ought to love him, his all-enveloping interest in things mechanical – cars in particular – would have been written off in my mind as one of his more endearing qualities.
‘Why on earth did you become an accountant?’ I once asked him. ‘Surely a garage proprietor would have been more appropriate. Or a racing driver,’ I added, seeing myself cheering him on madly from the stands.
As usual, when I tried to tease him out of his obsession, he took me quite seriously.
‘That is, as a matter of fact, a pipedream I’ve always had,’ he said, and his dark brown eyes took on a dreaming expression. ‘One of these days, if and when I can raise the capital, I would like to buy a garage somewhere in the country. You know the kind of thing, Louise?’
Oh, yes, I knew the kind of thing all right. A petrol station on a highway with a forest of second-hand cars lined up for inspection, and me in a natty pair of overalls manning the pumps. I wouldn’t even be able to aspire to doing the books, that being Rufus’s line of country, and me knowing that two and two make four, but never quite believing it.
We were incompatible all right, I told myself as I drove up the long winding drive of the Ancestral Home to find that Dougie, the photographer for that day, had been waiting for me for over an hour, and was in one of his filthy moods.
‘You’d have thought they’d have switched the heating on today, or at least lit a log fire in that dirty great fireplace,’ I shivered as I climbed into a swimsuit consisting of two strips of material not much wider than shoelaces.
‘They a
re sunning in the Bahamas,’ Dougie said from the depth of his trendy raincoat, indicating the particular banister I was to drape myself over.
‘Bully for them,’ I said.
Dougie told me not to be vulgar, and to ‘Smile as if you meant it, darling, for honest to goodness’ sake.’
‘I’ve got goose pimples on my goose pimples,’ I said as Dougie clicked away, and behind a petit-point screen, I changed into a shocking-pink towelling number.
‘They told me they were sending Deirdre,’ Dougie said sulkily, and I put my tongue out at him just as he clicked the camera, and we had to start all over again.
As I let myself into my flat that evening, thinking longingly of the hot bath I was going to soak myself in, the telephone rang, and like a frustrated gold-medal sprinter I raced across the room to answer it.
‘Guess who?’ a deep masculine voice asked me, and because it wasn’t Rufus, and because I was in no mood for guessing games, I almost slammed down the receiver.
‘Nathan!’ the deep voice went on. ‘Nathan Marston as ever was. Back from the depths of the Congo, and longing to take a pretty girl out for the evening. How are you fixed, sweet Louise?’
Standing there on my goatskin rug, I ranged my mind back over the past twelve months or so to my pre-Rufus days, and came up with a thickset man with ginger eyebrows and a penchant for wearing knitted waistcoats. A man who took me everywhere by taxi.
‘Nathan Marston!’ I said, and in two minutes flat had arranged to be picked up at eight, and to dine with him in a restaurant given top billing in every gourmet’s guide.
‘Serves you right,’ I told an invisible Rufus as I climbed into a bath so hot my entire skin surface prickled in protest. ‘Just you ring me now, and see if I care . . .’
But the phone didn’t ring, and I dressed carefully in one of my more offbeat outfits, consisting of a trouser suit in black satin, worn with a silver turban and long, candelabra earrings.
Nathan liked me to dress the part, I remembered, and it certainly made a change from the outfits I wore when I went out with Rufus. They consisted in the main of sheepskin car coats and printed headscarves that in my wildest dreams I had never considered as being even vaguely ‘me’.
‘You look marvellous, Louise,’ Nathan told me as he settled me in the back of the taxi and gave the driver his instructions. ‘It’s marvellous to be back in civilisation again. Girls out there can only wear things they don’t sweat in.’
‘Such as?’ I prompted, fascinated in spite of myself.
But he was too busy trying to put one hand round my waist, and the other one on my knee, to elaborate, and I spent the rest of the short journey trying to fend him off.
It wasn’t much of an evening, taken all in all. The food and wine were perfect, but I kept remembering the sandwich meals I’d eaten with Rufus in the summer, sitting on the car rug in some country spot whilst he busied himself underneath the bonnet of his car. And I kept remembering the sandwich meals I’d eaten with Rufus in the winter, snuggled beside him on the front seat, trying not to spill crumbs on his logbook as he entered in the latest mileage and fuel consumption.
I remembered, too, the adoration in his eyes as he looked at me, and if I was sometimes suspicious that the look incorporated the gleam on the Lagonda’s yellow body after he’d waxed it to perfection, I told myself that to be jealous of an inanimate object was a very unintelligent way to pass my time.
Guiltily I evaded Nathan’s kiss as we said goodnight, because after all, it had been an excellent dinner, and the cost of the taxi fares alone must have set him back a bit, and then I lay awake for hours not daring to go to sleep in case the telephone rang.
The next day, Sunday, I spent washing my hair, doing my nails, and staring at the telephone, and by what I thought was cruel irony, Monday was spent modelling bridal gowns.
As I trailed ten yards or so of satin and lace behind me, I had the queerest sensation that I was walking down a long aisle towards Rufus, only to see him get into his Lagonda, or it could have been his GT, and disappear from my sight in a cloud of dust.
I’ve never run after a man before, I’ve never needed to, but back home that evening the first thing I did was to dial Rufus’s number. He shares a flat with one Paul, a very civil servant, who, in happier times, had been destined to be our Best Man.
It was Paul who answered the telephone, and before I could say anything he said, ‘Louise, thank heavens. I’ve tried to ring you twice. Where the devil have you been?’
‘Work,’ I told him, ‘and I’d like to speak to Rufus, please.’
‘I was away for the weekend,’ Paul said, ‘visiting my aunt in Basingstoke.’
‘I hope she was well,’ I said, ‘and now, please, Paul, could I speak to Rufus?’
Paul wears dark suits and old school ties fastened down with little gold tiepins, and has a voice to match.
‘Rufus is in hospital,’ he said. ‘Steady on old thing, not exactly danger-listed, but when I got back tonight there was a message to say he’d had a slight accident on Friday, coming home in his car, and it seems he’s ever so slightly concussed.’
Holding the receiver clamped to my ear, I felt myself sway.
‘A car accident! Not Rufus! Why didn’t he tell me?’
‘Semiconscious, and not up to communicating,’ Paul’s voice told me, as though he were dictating the information in triplicate. ‘They contacted his home address – which is here,’ he added infuriatingly, ‘and I’ve only just got in, having been away and having gone straight to the office. I’ve been trying to ring you. As I said. Honestly, Louise, there’s no need to take on so.’
‘Which hospital?’ I said grimly.
And less than five minutes afterwards, I was backing my Mini out of the garage down the road, and speeding back towards town.
It was all my fault, I tortured myself. Rufus was an excellent driver, a perfectionist. It was true that he could speed when he wanted to, but usually he nursed his cars along – especially the Lagonda – with the care that their age and condition warranted.
Then I remembered he hadn’t been driving the Lagonda that night. He had been at the wheel of the powerful GT, and we had quarrelled, and I had made it clear that I didn’t care if I ever saw him again . . .
I swung the car into the hospital parking ground with a screech of brakes that would have made Rufus turn pale, and although it was past visiting time, a nurse with red hair and a kindly smile showed me a door in a long corridor of identical doors, and whispered that I could stay five minutes and no more.
‘How bad is he?’ I asked her, and she said that he was fully expected to live, in fact he was being allowed home the very next day, and if he took it easy for a week he would be good as new.
‘Can’t say as much for his car,’ she said over a blue-striped shoulder. ‘Apparently it’s almost a complete write-off. He skidded into a lamppost. They say he took the corner far too quickly.’
‘Because I had upset him,’ my mind said loud and clear, and when I opened the door she had pointed out, and saw Rufus lying there with a bandage round his head, and his black hair sticking up above it, I felt a pang of love so intense I could almost have died of it.
‘I only just heard,’ I whispered, in the tone of reverence once reserves for sickrooms, and he smiled palely at me.
‘It is good to see you, Louise. What a thing to happen. But the road was wet, and I took the corner by the big roundabout too fast. I admit to being all kinds of a fool.’
Then his hand came out from where it was folded neatly beneath the sheet, and gripped mine so hard I winced. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said again.
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never stopped loving you,’ I added.
‘I’m afraid she’s bashed about a bit,’ he said, ‘but the one thing I was glad about when it happened – at the moment of impact as it were – was that you weren’t with me. I couldn’t have borne it if you’d been hurt.’
‘Your lovely
new car,’ I said, and he actually dismissed his latest proud acquisition with a nonchalant wave of his hand, the one that wasn’t gripping mine.
‘What does a car matter compared with you?’ he said. He actually said that, and tenderly I held his poor bandaged head between my hands, and kissed his bruised cheek.
Then, just before our lips met, and we claimed each other for better or worse, for ever and ever, he said:
‘And anyway I have another, you know.’
‘Oh, Rufus,’ I laughed, and I didn’t care one bit that he couldn’t see the joke.
I’ll Ring You Tomorrow
WHEN HE RINGS I won’t answer straight away. He mustn’t guess that I’ve been here, lying on my bed ever since I came in at six o’clock, just staring at the telephone, willing it to ring.
And it’s only eight o’clock. Early really. He said he had a train journey. I remember that because he told me how he played this game, staring at the person sitting opposite him and trying to guess what they’d be doing with their evening.
Women’s Institute. Flower arranging, he’d think. And that would be a middle-aged woman wearing a hatty hat, reading the recipes in a glossy magazine.
Checking on the day’s figures, with his papers spread out on the dining-room table, he’d think, and that would be a worried little man clutching a briefcase on his knee.
‘You should be writing a book with an imagination like that,’ I told him, and he laughed.
I’ve never seen anyone laugh quite like he did. Every single part of his face laughed, not just his mouth. His dark eyes twinkled, and his nose crinkled, till you had to laugh with him. And that was funny, because I’m not really a laughing-out-loud kind of person . . .
I made him laugh, too. He said so.
‘You are funny, Judith,’ he said. ‘You have a way of saying things that makes them sound funny.’
And I felt gay and witty, and I don’t think he ever guessed how shy and awkward I usually am when I’m talking to someone for the first time.
He said I was pretty, and I know that’s not true. Oh, I’m not exactly ugly. No girl needs to be ugly nowadays, with hairpieces and false eyelashes, and I know I look OK in mini-skirts, because I have good legs. But I’m not pretty in the way that Glynis is pretty, or Joanna, and they were at the party too. But he didn’t talk to them. He talked to me.
