Read an Excerpt
Mr. Wrong
Stories
By Elizabeth Jane Howard OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1975 Elizabeth Jane Howard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3669-6
CHAPTER 1
MR WRONG
Everybody – that is to say the two or three people she knew in London – told Meg that she had been very lucky indeed to find a car barely three years old, in such good condition and at such a price. She believed them gladly, because actually buying the car had been the most nerve-racking experience. Of course she had been told – and many times by her father – that all car dealers were liars and thieves. Indeed, to listen to old Dr Crosbie, you would think that nobody could ever buy a second-hand car, possibly even any new car, without its brakes or steering giving way the moment you were out of sight of the garage. But her father had always been of a nervous disposition: and as he intensely disliked going anywhere, and had now reached an age where he could fully indulge this disapprobation, it was not necessary to take much notice of him. For at least fifteen of her twenty-seven years Meg silently put up with his saying that there was no place like home, until, certain that she had exhausted all the possibilities of the small market town near where they lived, she had exclaimed, 'That's just it, Father! That's why I want to see somewhere else – not like it.'
Her mother, who had all the prosaic anxiety about her only child finding 'a really nice young man, Mr Right' that kind, anxious mothers tend to have – especially if their daughter can be admitted in the small hours to be 'not exactly a beauty' – smiled encouragingly at Meg and said, 'But Humphrey, dear, she will always be coming back to stay. She knows this is her home, but all young girls need a change.' (The young part of this had become emphasized as Meg plodded steadily through her twenties with not a romance in sight.)
So Meg had come to London, got a job in an antique shop in the New King's Road, and shared a two-room flat with two other girls in Fulham. One of them was a secretary, and the other a model: both were younger than Meg and ten times as self-assured; kind to her in an offhand manner, but never becoming friends, nothing more than people she knew – like Mr Whitehorn, who ran the shop that she worked in. It was her mother who had given Meg three hundred pounds towards a car, as the train fares and subsequent taxis were proving beyond her means. She spent very little in London: she had bought one dress at Laura. Ashley, but had no parties to go to in it, and lacked the insouciance to wear it to work. She lived off eggs done in various ways, and quantities of instant coffee – in the shop and in the flat. Her rent was comfortingly modest by present-day standards, she walked to work, smoked very occasionally, and set her own hair. Her father had given her a hundred pounds when she was twenty-one: all of this had been invested, and to it she now added savings from her meagre salary and finally went off to one of London's northern suburbs to answer an advertisement about a second-hand MG.
The car dealer, whom she had imagined as some kind of tiger in a loud checked suit with whisky on his breath, had proved to be more of a wolf in a sheepskin car-coat – particularly when he smiled, which displayed a frightening number of teeth that seemed to stretch back in his raspberry mouth and down his throat with vulpine largesse. He smiled often, and Meg took to not looking at him whenever he began to do it. He took her out on a test drive: at first he drove, explaining all the advantages _of the car while he did so, and then he suggested that she take over. This she did, driving very badly, with clashing of gears and stalling the engine in the most embarrassing places. 'I can see you've got the hang of it,' Mr Taunton said. 'It's always difficult driving a completely new car. But you'll find that she's most reliable: will start in all weather, economical on fuel, and needs the minimum of servicing.'
When Meg asked whether the car had ever had an accident, he began to smile, so she did not see his face when he replied that it hadn't been an accident, just a slight brush. 'The respray, which I expect you've noticed, was largely because the panel-work involved, and mind you, it was only panel-work, made us feel that it could do with a more cheerful colour. I always think aqua-blue is a nice colour for a ladies' car. And this is definitely a ladies' car.'
She felt his smile receding when she asked how many previous owners the car had had. He replied that it had been for a short time the property of some small firm that had since gone out of business. 'Only driven by one of the directors and his secretary.'
That sounded all right, thought Meg: but she was also thinking that for the price this was easily the best car she could hope for, and somehow, she felt, he knew that she knew she was going to buy it. His last words were: 'I hope you have many miles of motoring before you, madam.' The elongated grin began, and as it was for the last time, she watched him – trying to smile back – as the pointed teeth became steadily more exposed down his cavernous throat. She noticed then that his pale grey eyes very nearly met, but were narrowly saved from this by the bridge of his nose, which was long and thrusting, and almost made up for his having a mouth that had clearly been eaten away by his awful quantity of teeth. They had nothing going for each other beyond her buying and his selling a car.
Back in the showroom office, he sank into his huge moquette chair and said: 'Bring us a coffee, duck. I've earned it.' And a moony-faced blonde in a mini-skirt with huge legs that seemed tortured by her tights, smiled and went.
Meg drove the MG – her car – back to London in the first state of elation she had ever known since she had won the bending competition in a local gymkhana. She had a car! Neither Samantha nor Val were in such a position. She really drove quite well, as she had had a temporary job working for a doctor near home who had lost his licence for two years. Away from Mr Taunton (Clive Taunton he had repeatedly said), she felt able and assured. The car was easy to drive, and responded, as MGs do, with a kind of husky excitement to speed.
When she reached the flat, Samantha and Val were so impressed that they actually took her out to a Chinese meal with their two boy-friends. Meg got into her. Laura Ashley dress and enjoyed every sweet and sour moment of it. Everybody was impressed by her, and this made her prettier. She got slightly drunk on rice wine and lager and went to work the next day, in her car, feeling much more like the sort of person she had expected to feel like in London. Her head ached, but she had something to show for it: one of the men had talked to her several times – asking where she lived and what her job was, and so forth.
Her first drive north was the following Friday. It was cold, a wet and dark night – in January she never finished at the shop in time even to start the journey in the light – and by the time she was out of the rush, through London and on Hendon Way, it was raining hard. She found the turn off to the M1 with no difficulty: only three hours of driving on that and then about twenty minutes home. It was nothing, really; it just seemed rather a long way at this point. She had drunk a cup of strong black instant at Mr Whitehorn's, who had kindly admired the car and also showed her the perfect place to park it every day, and she knew that her mother would be keeping something hot and home-made for her whatever time she got home. (Her father never ate anything after eight o'clock in the evening for fear of indigestion, something from which he had never in his life suffered and attributed entirely to this precaution.)
Traffic was fairly heavy, but it seemed to be more lorries than anything else, and Meg kept on the whole to the middle lane. She soon found, as motorists new to a motorway do, that the lanes, the headlights coming towards her, and the road glistening with rain had a hypnotic effect, as though she and the car had become minute, and she was being spun down some enormous, endless striped ribbon. 'I mustn't go to sleep,' she thought. Ordinary roads had too much going on in them for one to feel like that. About half her time up the motorway, she felt so tired with trying not to feel sleepy that she decided to stop in the next park, open the windows and have a cigarette. It was too wet to get out, but even stopping the windscreen-wipers for a few minutes would make a change. She stopped the engine, opened her window, and before she had time to think about smoking again, fell asleep.
She awoke very suddenly with a feeling of extreme fear. It was not from a dream; she was sitting in the driver's seat, cramped, and with rain blowing in through the open window, but something else was very wrong. A sound – or noises, alarming in themselves, but, in her circumstances, frighteningly out of place. She shut her window except for an inch at the top. This made things worse. What sounded like heavy, laboured, stertorous, even painful breathing was coming, she quickly realized, from the back of the car. The moment she switched on the car light and turned round, there was utter silence, as sudden as the noise stopping in the middle of a breath. There was nobody in the back of the car, but the doors were not locked, and her large carrier bag – her luggage – had fallen to the floor. She locked both doors, switched off the car light and the sounds began again, exactly where they had left off – in the middle of a breath. She put both the car light and her headlights on, and looked again in the back. Silence, and it was still empty. She considered making sure that there was nobody parked behind her, but somehow she didn't want to do that. She switched on the engine and started it. Her main feeling was to get away from the place as quickly as possible. But even when she had started to do this and found herself trying to turn the sounds she had heard into something else and accountable, they wouldn't. They remained in her mind, and she could all too clearly recall them, as the heavy breaths of someone either mortally ill, or in pain, or both, coming quite distinctly from the back of the car. She drove home as fast as she could, counting the minutes and the miles to keep her mind quiet.
She reached home – a stone and slate-roofed cottage – at a quarter past nine, and her mother's first exclamation when she saw her daughter was that she looked dreadfully tired. Instantly, Meg began to feel better; it was what her mother had always said if Meg ever did anything for very long away from home. Her father had gone to bed: so she sat eating her supper with surprising hunger, in the kitchen, and telling her mother the week's news about her job and the two girls she shared with and the Chinese-meal party. 'And is the car nice, darling?' her mother asked at length. Meg started to speak, checked herself, and began again. 'Very nice. It was so kind of you to give me all that money for it,' she said.
The weekend passed with almost comforting dullness, and Meg did not begin to dread returning until after lunch on Sunday. She began to say that she ought to pack; her mother said she must have tea before she left, and her father said that he didn't think that anyone should drive in the dark. Or, indeed, at all, he overrode them as they both started saying that it was dark by four anyway. Meg eventually decided to have a short sleep after lunch, drink a cup of tea and then start the journey. 'If I eat one of Mummy's teas, I'll pass out in the car,' she said, and as she said 'pass out', she felt an instant, very small, ripple of fear.
Her mother woke her from a dreamless, refreshing sleep at four with a cup of dark, strong Indian tea and two Bourbon biscuits.
'I'm going to pack for you,' she said firmly. She had also unpacked, while Meg was finishing her supper on Friday night. 'I've never known such a hopeless packer. All your clothes were cramped up and crushed together as though someone had been stamping on them. Carrier bags,' she scolded, enjoying every minute; 'I'm lending you this nice little case that Auntie Phil left me.'
Meg lay warmly under the eiderdown in her own room watching her mother, who quite quickly switched from packing to why didn't Meg drink her tea while it was hot. 'I know your father won't drink anything until it's lukewarm, but thank goodness, you don't take after him. In that respect,' she ended loyally, but Meg knew that her mother missed her, and got tired and bored dealing with her father's ever-increasing regime of what was good or bad for him.
'Can I come next weekend?' she asked. Her mother rushed across the room and enfolded her.
'I should be most upset if you didn't,' she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
When Meg left, and not until she was out of sight of home, she began to worry about what had happened on the journey up. Perhaps it could have been some kind of freak wind, with the car window open, she thought. Being able even to think that encouraged her. It was only raining in fits and starts on the way back, and the journey passed without incident of any kind. By the time Meg had parked, and slipped quietly into the flat that turned out to be empty – both girls were out – she really began to imagine that she had imagined it. She ate a boiled egg, watched a short feature on Samantha's television about Martinique, and went to bed.
The following weekend was also wet, but foggy as well. At one moment during a tedious day in the shop (where there was either absolutely nothing to do, or an endless chore, like packing china and glass to go abroad), Meg thought of putting off going to her parents: but they were not on the telephone, and that meant that they would have to endure a telegram. She thought of her father, and decided against that. He would talk about it for six months, stressing it as an instance of youthful extravagance, reiterating the war that it had made upon his nerves, and the proof it was that she should never have gone to London at all. No – telegrams were out, except in an emergency. She would just have to go – whatever the weather, or anything else.
Friday passed tediously: her job was that of packing up the separate pieces of a pair of giant chandeliers in pieces of old newspaper and listing what she packed. Sometimes she got so bored by this that she even read bits from the old, yellowing newsprint. There were pages in one paper of pictures of a Miss World competition: every girl was in a bathing-dress and high-heeled shoes, smiling that extraordinary smile of glazed triumph. They must have an awfully difficult time, Meg thought – fighting off admirers. She wondered just how difficult that would turn out to be. It would probably get easier with practice.
At half past four, Mr Whitehorn let her go early: he was the kind of man who operated in bursts of absent-minded kindness, and he said that in view of her journey, the sooner she started the better. Meg drank her last cup of instant coffee, and set off.
Her progress through London was slow, but eventually she reached Hendon Way. Here, too, there were long hold-ups as cars queued at signal lights. There were also straggling lines of people trying to get lifts. She drove past a good many of these, feeling her familiar feelings about them, so mixed that they cancelled one another out, and she never, in fact, did anything about the hitchers. Meg was naturally a kind person: this part of her made her feel sorry for the wretched creatures, cold, wet, and probably tired; wondering whether they would ever get to where they wanted to be. But her father had always told her never to give lifts, hinting darkly at the gothic horrors that lay in wait for anyone who ever did that. It was not that Meg ever consciously agreed with her father; rather that in all the years of varying warnings, some of his anxiety had brushed off on her – making her shy, unsure of what to do about things, and feeling ashamed of feeling like that. No, she was certainly not going to give anyone a lift.
She drove steadily on through the driving sleet, pretending that the back of her car was full of pieces of priceless chandeliers, and this served her very well until she came to the inevitable hold-up before she reached Hendon, when a strange thing happened.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mr. Wrong by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Copyright © 1975 Elizabeth Jane Howard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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