Blame It on the Bossa Nova

by James Brodie

  “No problem,” I said. He led me back inside and I showed him my driving licence and an old Cambridge membership card which didn’t impress him.

  “You a student?”

  “No.” I gave him ten pounds and he checked the mileage and told me that if anything went wrong he took no responsibility and that he’d take my word I was insured and if the police found out he’d say I nicked it. I agreed to all these onerous terms and in addition agreed to give him another tenner on Monday which I had no intention of doing. He was finally satisfied of my identity and address by production of my national insurance card, a dubious credential since it also certified my unemployed status. It gave my address as being Albert Bridge Road, which reassured him. An hour after I had first entered the mews I got in the van and started it up. “It’s out of petrol” were his parting words.

  I parked in a side street near Victoria station, just behind the Roman Catholic cathedral, and took the circle line to Sloane Square.

  Chris was in an almost hysterical state.

  “Did you get it?” he asked as soon as he saw me.

  “I got a van.”

  “A van!”

  “Yes. A van.” I was irritated by his petulance. “... Perhaps you’d prefer a police Wolsley.”

  “No, no, of course not. I’m sorry, Alex.”

  Christopher walked to the window, looked out at the coppers, shivered and walked away.

  “They’ve been particularly offensive today,” he said. “... Making no effort to conceal that they’re watching me. Pulling up with a screech of brakes, looking openly across at the flat. They even got out and leaned against the car at one time.”

  I agreed that it wasn’t a good sign. On the radio a news item reported Wilson’s sarcastic taunting of Macmillan in the defence debate. It was a good time for him to make a showing if he was seriously after the leadership.

  “When shall we go?” said Chris.

  “Have you been to the bank?”

  He nodded.

  “How much have you got?”

  He showed me the inside of his wallet. It was sufficient.

  “If we go tonight, they’ll get worried when you don’t get back….Set up roadblocks.” I conjectured wildly. “..... If you go tomorrow - Saturday - It gives us longer. It would be natural to be out all day.”

  He thought about it.

  “You’re right. Let’s go tomorrow - You didn’t bring it here did you?”

  “It’s in a side street in Victoria.”

  He looked relieved and almost relaxed.

  “You know, Alex, I do believe you’re beginning to get into the spirit of it.”

  The next morning as previously arranged Chris and I left the flat at different times and set off in different directions. In classic spy story tradition we had agreed to carry out a number of manoeuvres to throw off any possible tails. The first of these involved entering large department stores on one side and leaving on another. Chris went to Peter Jones, I to Harrods. I bought some Callard and Bowser’s nougat in rice paper in the food halls and left, forgetting to take a different door. I decided to leave out the bit about leaping from one passing bus to another as they waited at traffic lights. Instead I caught a taxi direct to the Cardinal pub from which I could see the parked vehicle. I was due to pick up Chris from the back of the Army and Navy stores at half past one. I had an hour to kill.

  At half past one precisely I was waiting at the appointed spot when he emerged from the store carrying a couple of Peter Jones’s bags and an Army and Navy bag. I leaned across and opened the door.

  “Been shopping?”

  “Only essentials.” He threw them in the back of the van and his eyes simultaneously took in the scene. A couple of bald tyres, a jack, a load of oily rags and carpeting and an array of tools and spare parts. Meanwhile his nose had been inhaling the first pungent draughts of grease, grime and general squalor that complimented the decor.

  “Is this the best you could do, Alex?”

  “This is the best I could do, Chris.”

  “Have you eaten?” he said.

  “Not much.”

  “Neither have I. Shall we stop for a bite?”

  “Let’s wait until we’re clear of the Smoke,” I said grimly, “... there’s coppers everywhere.”

  We pulled into Victoria Street and headed down towards the Abbey.

  “Which way are we going?” said Chris.

  “Through the City and up through Enfield.”

  “Can’t you go past Chester Square?”

  “Why?”

  “I said we’d pick up Pascale.”

  “You what?”

  “I phoned up Pascale and told her we were going. She said she’d like to come. I said we’d pick her up.”

  “You berk. You fucking berk..... Why her? When did you phone her up?”

  “This morning, from Peter Jones. Really, Alex, I think you’re slightly over-reacting.”

  We went round Parliament Square and headed back down Victoria Street.

  “Do you trust her?”

  “Of course, Alex, you introduced us. What higher recommendation do I need?”

  “Supposing she’s being watched.”

  “She’s not. She told me.”

  “And she’s an expert, is she?” Even as I said it I acknowledged to myself that she was an expert.

  “I...... don’t know.”

  “You don’t know...” I snorted contemptuously. We pulled into Chester Square, the scruffy end. Chris got out and rang on a doorbell. The door opened and he disappeared inside. I’d never got that far, I was obviously everybody’s poor relation. Five minutes passed, my fingers drummed an irritated rhythm on the steering wheel. They came out. Pascale looked well wrapped up for a cold weekend in the country. She was carrying a travelling bag. I got out of the van.

  “Hello,” I said aggressively.

  “Hello Alex. You don’t mind if I come along too, do you?” she asked with transparent lack of concern.

  “Of course he doesn’t,” said Chris.

  “I don’t mind. I wonder if Chris minds slumming it in the back. You didn’t buy a set of denims as part of your survival kit did you, Chris?”

  He looked pissed off as I held the passenger seat forward so that he could clamber into his gloomy den.

  Pascale got in next to me. Chris put one tyre on top of another and leaned against the side of the van.

  “Where are we going?” said Pascale.

  “You really don’t know?” I said.

  “Alex, have you been in a fight of some kind?” she said.

  We travelled up through the depression that is the unremitting bleakness of the East End, north of Liverpool Street station, past the inaptly named Green of Bethnal, Heath of Cambridge, and Fields of London. Beyond lay Enfield with its false optimism born of improved material conditions. In its way it was more depressing; at least in the slums there can be hope for the future - Here was the future, or yesterday’s version of it. And it didn’t work. The gloom of the super-proles’ final destiny was relieved by the frequent watercourses of the Lea Valley, all now frozen solid - Fertile ground for some budding subtopian Constable. I pulled into a garage along an isolated stretch of the road to fill up the tank and check the tyre pressures and oil. Pascale got out and said she was going for a piss. If we wanted we could now keep going all the way to Norfolk without stopping. It was a cosy feeling. Even the oily atmosphere of the van was acceptable when heated up, it gave a feeling of survival. Eskimos have polar bear fat, Western Man, twenty/fifty multigrade. Chris and Pascale chatted as if they were on their way to a private viewing and I was the chauffeur.

  We passed through pleasant, undemanding countryside, undulating and dotted with Georgian and other villas. The landscape bleached white, it still gave off the vibrations that are the essence of English unspectacular rurality. But it gradually flattened out into the good air force base terrain whose irresistible convenience, for a while, threatened to get England blown off
the map. The going was tough, many side roads were frozen and blocked and the A10 itself was no great feat of road engineering in those days. More than once we slithered across the road spinning out of control, once coming to a halt facing back to London, half way up a grass bank. Chris in the back was ignorant of the problem until it was over, then typically, over-reacted wretchedly. I was forced to drive slowly and in many places, where the council gritting machines hadn’t yet ventured, very slowly. As we turned temporarily westward with a bend in the road we were all suddenly aware of a beautiful magenta sunset suffusing the whole of the Western sky. Even Chris in the back could see it. None of us spoke for a while, just taking in the scene of snow white fields stained slightly pink, the horizon of skeletal trees and the backdrop of slowly deepening purple. I thought of the first time we three had driven together - me in the back that time - on our way to the party on the night of the Cuba crisis. Chris and Pascale had hit it off that day too as we pulled away from London’s magnetic field.

  The road deflected slightly and we could now only see the sunset out of the side window. Chris couldn’t see it at all. It grew in intensity as its shades darkened imperceptibly until, before we had seen it go, it was night and black.

  Honey was off at Granchester but we were still hungry so we parked along Queen’s Road and Pascale and I stood blowing puffs of dragon’s breath into the freezing night air as Chris crawled out of the van and stamped hard on the ground to get the feeling back into his left leg. The wind rushed at us and buffeted us as we walked through the Backs and over the bridge to Queen’s College.

  “Makes you appreciate the van doesn’t it, Chris?”

  “You’re going in the back next time.”

  “Fine. I’m not the fugitive from justice.”

  The choir was practising in King’s Chapel and the occasional student crossed our path flitting into darkened recesses. It was nearly seven o’clock and the place was like a ghost town. We walked into the market square with its shoe shops and cinemas, through the other city where the work slaves did commerce and were entertained. Cambridge was hostile. There were people I could have looked up but the message in the air was ‘Don’t bother, you shouldn’t have come back, your place at the table is no longer laid.’

  Half way to the station, back in Real World we found a cafe where places weren’t laid, you served yourself and we all ordered our individual variations of a fry up - I think Pascale had an omelette with chips - and thick mugs of tea and slices of bread.

  “Remember you can be anything you want - RAF pilot, freedom fighter...” I said to Pascale as she looked at her omelette prior to eating. The atmosphere was gloomy. Chris shivered in his well-tailored long overcoat and Pascale, never the type of player to rally a losing side, withdrew into her own thoughts. I was hungry, I ate my grub, but as I did so I couldn’t restrain myself from imagining the tragic irony that I suspected Chris saw in his current circumstances. The peeling Pepsi Cola advert on the wall, the spelling mistakes on the blackboard menu, the pinball machine and its solitary player. All these were the final brush strokes of an unseen genius. In a way it was also my triumph. It was I who had introduced Pascale and Chris to this world of grubby cafes and oily A35 vans, previously as remote to them as the anthropological excursions of Levi-Strauss.

  We walked back quickly through the stricken city again encountering scarcely a soul. Chris persisted in his earlier intention of driving so I found myself in the back. Pascale got a half bottle of whisky out of her large bag and handed it round which made life temporarily a little brighter. Chris’s nervous state was brought into sharp relief by his driving which initially was far too fast. We skidded through some red lights while we were still in Cambridge as he jammed late and hard on the brakes, but there was nothing coming and we got away with it. I told him to keep on the A10 and head up to Kings Lynn through Ely. It was going round two sides of a triangle, because at Lynn we would have to turn sharp right, but it was better to keep to main roads. As the heater got going I relaxed in the back and for a long while didn’t notice the snow flurries that danced in the headlights. Chris calmed down as we got on the lonely open road and the countryside flattened even more - not that I nor any of us could see it. As we turned a corner the headlights picked out a pretty little mock gothic lodge.

  “What a lovely place, Chris,” said Pascale - Victorian and Edwardian is the only ace in our architectural history that could possibly even start to give a Frog a complex. Chris pondered on this for a moment or two.

  “D’you think so?...... Yes I suppose it is... The trouble is you can grow to hate the most beautiful place on Earth if you live in it long enough.”

  On this sobering reflection we drove on in silence and into Norfolk, pondering on the wisdom of Buddha.

  It was past ten o’clock when we arrived at the cottage, having eluded the police dragnet, real or imagined. Things had gone smoothly until just before Fakenham when we had turned left off the Cromer Road and started on the last ten miles of our journey up a narrow B Road. There had been no vehicles preceding us to make a safe track and we immediately hit black ice and skidded off the road. We all had to get out and push the van back on. It was the final shaft that shot Chris’s nerves to pieces. He went to get in the back but I stopped him and told Pascale to climb in. He was in a really bad way and for all our sakes I wanted him to get there without further deterioration. He was embarrassingly grateful for being allowed to sit in the front.

  I had only visited the cottage during halcyon Cambridge summers when the rural working classes are out winnowing or haymaking or whatever it is they get up to. Now, with the snow, everything was different and my only signposts were remembered pubs in the two villages we passed through and even then it was only the names that struck chords, the buildings themselves bore no resemblance to their casual outdoor hospitality in summer. I remembered that the cottage was in a row of five, detached from the north end of the village by a couple of fields, but when our headlights picked it out I got no pang of recognition. It was only after I’d pulled off the road onto the strip of gravel outside the front door and, peering through the windows, had identified the skulls of sheep and birds that adorned the window sill that I knew with certainty that we had arrived. I signalled to Chris that this was it, but he was too far gone to care. I went to the van and told Pascale I was going to get the keys from an old girl who lived in a detached house back down the road. I knew she’d give them to me without any problem, she had long been accustomed to the casual practice of people turning up without prior notification. However, I had reckoned without the traumatising effect of the severe winter, my ring on the door was greeted by cries from within of surprise and alarm.

  “Who is it?” a voice said. I knew they wouldn’t remember me.

  “Alex Marshall........ a friend of Damien’s. Remember me?”

  Satisfied that this was not the response of a thug with intent to burgle and rape, they opened the door. It gave access direct into the living room. An old boy was sitting with a smock on watching television, a middle-aged woman was cutting his hair.

  “Excuse us,” said the old girl with gratuitous servility, “... my daughter’s just cutting dad’s hair... You’ll be wanting the key then, though I can’t understand what’s brought you up in this weather.”

  As I walked back I saw Pascale had managed to get Chris out of the van. He was leaning heavily on the bonnet surrounded by the trappings of civilization, his shopping bags. He looked washed out and even Pascale was shocked, to the extent that she was whispering words of encouragement and pressing his hand in hers. We got him into the cottage, supporting him on either side as we made the twenty paces to the divan just inside the door. I was shit scared he was going to have a heart attack.

  The cottage itself was freezing of course, and Spartan in a way that suggested that holidays in the country are not meant to be enjoyed. Chris remained slumped on the divan and Pascale just stood around looking bored as I made the fire. I got it to catc
h with the last page of the Daily Mirror I had bought that morning outside Harrods. The sheet I was holding over the fireplace suddenly caught fire as the flames flared and the roar intensified behind it. Half digested strips of newsprint shot up the chimney, but after the flares had died down a tiny red glow of flame remained. For fifteen minutes I nurtured it until I was confident enough that it wouldn’t go out if I stopped looking at it. But it didn’t give out any real heat for over an hour. There were bedrooms upstairs but they were ice cold. Pascale made a cup of tea and I gave Chris three vallium. We got his shoes and coat off and spread the coat over him like a blanket and got a pillow from upstairs. He didn’t argue and very soon he slept. Pascale and I sat on the floor in front of the fire and looked at the flames and passed the whisky to each other without talking. Very slowly I felt myself getting warmer. I went outside to where I knew they kept the logs for the fire. They were covered in snow and hissed as we put them on.

  “He’s all in,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Is he still asleep?” I asked. She looked and nodded.

  “Don’t you think he’s a poor bastard?” I pursued the matter, wanting an answer.

  “Yes...... I suppose he is.”

  I watched the melted snow trickle down a log. There was still some left on top, not yet melted.

  “He shouldn’t have come up here,” I said. “... What’s the point?”

  “No point at all,” said Pascale. I passed the bottle back to her.

  “Still, I suppose at least he feels safe here. It’ll take some time to find him here.”

  “I shouldn’t think it will take them too long.”

  “Why not? Why should anyone come looking for him here?”

  “Perhaps because I telephoned them and told them where we were going.”

  “You did what?”