Taunton 5 miles, said the signpost.
He gripped the steering wheel so tightly the car wobbled. He was going to have to do something dramatic.
“Fenny,” he said.
She glanced round sharply at him.
“You still haven’t told me how …”
“Listen,” said Arthur, “I will tell you, though the story is rather strange. Very strange.”
She was still looking at him, but said nothing.
“Listen …”
“You said that.”
“Did I? Oh. There are things I must talk to you about, and things I must tell you … a story I must tell you which would …” He was thrashing about. He wanted something along the lines of “Thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular quill to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine” but didn’t think he could carry it off and didn’t like the hedgehog reference.
“… which would take more than five miles,” he settled for in the end, rather lamely he was afraid.
“Well …”
“Just supposing,” he said, “just supposing” – he didn’t know what was coming next, so he thought he’d just sit back and listen – “that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn’t know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I’ve only just met and not crash into lorries at the same time, what would you say …” he paused helplessly, and looked at her, “I … should do?”
“Watch the road!” she yelped.
“Shit!”
He narrowly avoided careering into the side of a hundred Italian washing machines in a German lorry.
“I think,” she said, with a momentary sigh of relief, “you should buy me a drink before my train goes.”
=================================================================
Chapter 12
There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.
Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
“Make ’em dry,” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.”
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.
The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.
“There must be somewhere better,” said Arthur.
“No time,” said Fenny, glancing at her watch. “My train leaves in half an hour.”
They sat at a small wobbly table. On it were some dirty glasses, and some soggy beermats with jokes printed on them. Arthur got Fenny a tomato juice, and himself a pint of yellow water with gas in it. And a couple of sausages. He didn’t know why. He bought them for something to do while the gas settled in his glass.
The barman dunked Arthur’s change in a pool of beer on the bar, for which Arthur thanked him.
“All right,” said Fenny, glancing at her watch, “tell me what it is you have to tell me.”
She sounded, as well she might, extremely sceptical, and Arthur’s heart sank. Hardly, he felt, the most conductive setting to try to explain to her as she sat there, suddenly cool and defensive, that in a sort of out-of-body dream he had had a telepathic sense that the mental breakdown she had suffered had been connected with the fact that, appearances to the contrary nonwithstanding, the Earth had been demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass, something which he alone on Earth knew anything about, having virtually witnessed it from a Vogon spaceship, and that furthermore both his body and soul ached for her unbearably and he needed to got to bed with her as soon as was humanly possible.