Elizabeth tries to put these questions out of her head. She needs to concentrate on far more important matters.
‘Things like you wouldn’t believe,’ says Stephen. ‘Thousands of years old. Puts things into a bit of perspective. You ever touched something six thousand years old?’
‘No,’ says Bogdan. ‘Ron’s car maybe?’
‘We must go there, Elizabeth, we must all go. Get on to the old travel agent.’
‘They don’t have travel agents no more,’ says Bogdan, using a bus lane to bypass a line of traffic.
‘No travel agents,’ says Stephen. ‘News to me.’
‘I’ll look into it,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Baghdad.’ What she would give for that trip. Stephen with an arm around her waist. Cold vodka in the Middle Eastern sun.
Bogdan now drives onto the hard shoulder to undertake another car.
‘You drive terribly,’ say Elizabeth. ‘And illegally.’
‘I know,’ says Bogdan. ‘But I promised you we would arrive at 1.23.’
‘We have all the time in the world,’ says Stephen. ‘Time swirls about us, laughing at us.’
‘Tell that to Google maps,’ says Bogdan.
‘Where are we off to?’ says Stephen.
He has also asked this before.
‘London,’ says Elizabeth. ‘To see an old friend.’
‘Kuldesh?’ Stephen asks.
‘Not Kuldesh, no,’ says Elizabeth. She feels guilty. She has been asking Stephen about Kuldesh an awful lot. Known associates, that sort of thing. She even mentioned Samantha Barnes and Petworth, but not a flicker.
‘Old friend of mine, or old friend of yours?’ Stephen asks. ‘Can we pop into the Reform Club on the way back? They have a book I’m after in the library.’
‘A friend of mine, but someone you’ve met,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Someone who can help.’
Stephen turns in his seat to look at her. ‘Who needs help now?’
‘We all do,’ says Bogdan. ‘If we gonna make it by 1.23.’
The traffic doesn’t let up all the way to Battersea. London is clogged.
Elizabeth barely misses London now. She and Stephen would be up and down here all the time, exhibitions, plays, lunch at the club. They once saw Professor Brian Cox give a lecture at the Albert Hall. The majesty of the cosmos. We all come from stars, and we all return to the stars. She had enjoyed the lecture, but there were lasers she could have lived without.
Had she really understood then that those were the best of times? That she was in heaven? She thinks she did understand, yes. Understood she had been given a great gift. Doing the crossword in a train carriage, Stephen with a can of beer (‘I will only drink beer on trains, nowhere else, don’t ask me why’), glasses halfway down his nose, reading out clues. The real secret was that when they looked at each other, they each thought they had the better deal.
But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fibre starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.
And London? London is slow, grey and clogged. You have to wade through it now. Is that what life is to become without Stephen? A slow trudge of exhaust fumes and brake lights?
Bogdan tries every move in the book, while Stephen points out landmarks. ‘The Oval! The Oval, Elizabeth!’
‘That’s cricket, is it?’
‘You know full well it is,’ says Stephen.
Bogdan drives the wrong way down a narrow, cobbled backstreet.
They arrive at 1.22.
Ibrahim is beginning to despair. They have driven into the very centre of Petworth, with no parking spaces yet evident. The town is very beautiful – cobbled streets, flowers in the windows, antiques shops every five yards – but he is unable to enjoy it. What if there is simply nowhere to park? What then? Park illegally? No thanks, a ticket on the windscreen or, worse, the car towed away. Then how would they get home? They would be stuck. In Petworth. Which, charming as the guide books have made it sound, is alien to Ibrahim. Wherever he is, and whatever he is doing, the primary thought in Ibrahim’s mind is always ‘How will I get home?’ With one’s car impounded? Impossible.
He tries to control his breathing. He is about to say, ‘Well, there are no parking spaces, Joyce, so let’s go home and come back another day,’ when a Volvo reverses out from a bay directly on their right. Jackpot.
‘It’s our lucky day,’ says Joyce. ‘We should buy a lottery ticket!’
Ibrahim sighs but is glad to have the opportunity to teach Joyce an important lesson. ‘Joyce, that is precisely the opposite of what we should do. There are no “lucky days”, just individual parcels of “luck”.’
‘Oh,’ says Joyce.
The space is wide and open and welcoming. Even the wing mirrors can relax.
‘We have just had a single piece of luck: the parking space opening up. Expecting an immediate, second piece of luck is folly. Small bits of good luck, such as this, are actually, in the scheme of things, bad luck.’
‘Shall we get out of the car?’ asks Joyce.
