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Our New Year’s Days have always been low-key. A late morning fry-up might drift into one of our less taxing afternoon strolls in the country, catching the last of the daylight before making our one nod towards to the calendar with a bottle of Moët et Chandon. It’s a chance to clear our heads, put another year behind us and begin the ritual of forgiving each other our indiscretions of the night before.
I gave up on resolutions long ago. When all is said and done, it’s just another day, and why make sacrifices when there are still three months of long, dark evenings ahead. Better to wait until the primroses reappear in the hedgerows, the buds return to the leaves and the blessed clocks go forward. Surely a better time to draw breath and make plans.
This New Year’s Day got off to a particularly slow start. Though we’d made it to bed before two, we neither of us had had much sleep. Nothing was said in the darkness, no emotions shared, no physical contact made, but I could tell from her breathing and later from her soft moaning that Natasha was having a troubled night.
The subject of the accident didn’t resurface until we were back in the lanes, ambling down to our favoured spot by the river. Apart from a dusting over the distant moors, the snow had now all but melted, leaving in its wake a horrid sundae of brown slush and tyre-tracks. Our steps were escorted by muddy rivulets, invisibly fed from the fields, hurrying from our left side to our right and back again in search of their escape, only to bubble in disarray around drains choked with flotsam.
Pushing a hand into mine, Natasha suddenly declared, “Let us send to him a card. No, in fact we must take it ourselves to him.”
I eyed her doubtfully. “You mean a sympathy card?”
“Well, no, I prefer it a thank-you card. For helping us from the grass. But we can have sympathy too, for sure.”
Though the suggestion was out of the blue, I suppose I should have foreseen it. Wasn’t this just Natasha all over? Coming from me, an idea like that would almost certainly have been guilt-driven. My cards tend to be hastily scribbled notes of apology, not considered messages of gratitude. But Natasha had no cause to feel guilty over our passenger. She’s a woman who sends cards in appreciation of dinner parties; cards for keeping an eye on the garden while we’re away – a woman who’d send a card in thanks for a thank-you card if someone didn’t occasionally intervene.
I felt nervous at the idea and sceptical as to the welcome it would receive. We could be stirring up unwanted emotions, intruding into the mourning of someone who, for all the events of the night before, remained a total stranger to us. In the end, it took two whole days for her suggestion to bear fruit, after she herself had repeatedly thought better of it. With the passage of time the whole experience was beginning to feel like a drunken dream, easier to forget than to follow up (garage bill for the Clio aside). If there hadn’t been a spare card in the drawer left over from some previous goodwill gesture that never saw the light of day I doubt that we would have ever gone through with it.
But now we are here, as I have remarked, parked once more before the line of terraced cottages. The last twenty minutes have been an experience from which we are still reeling. We stare ahead in disbelief. We cannot begin to acknowledge the implications of what has just occurred.
Which is what exactly? Well, Natasha has the card on her lap when we arrive. It has been a challenge to write, but now the job is done. Only the envelope remains blank, the man having never given his name.
My lap, on the other hand, is empty. In a mad moment I’d suggested a bottle of wine, then chocolates. How does the saying go – what do you give to someone who has everything? Or in this case, what do you give to a miserable sod who has lost everything and suddenly has nothing?
Then I know the moment has arrived. Down comes the passenger visor, the look to the vanity mirror, the flick to a hair out of place, the drop of the shoulders. Natasha turns to me and I am suddenly weak.
“You go,” I say. “I’ll just wave from here.”
She raises an eyebrow and her mouth tightens, but she thinks twice about an argument. Her hand reaches for the door handle and she is out and through the gate.
There’s no response at first to her knock. She’s all set to turn away and post the letter when a curtain shifts in a room above and a shape grows behind the window in the door. Not once have we considered the possibility of him having guests, nor how presumptuous it might be of us to write messages pitying him in his loneliness. As the door pulls open, there’s a small boy standing shyly behind. Natasha is now explaining something and shifting from foot to foot. He shakes his head and then looks up, calling. I can see enough of the hallway to catch a pair of feet descending the stairs. A woman draws up beside him, holding his shoulder, and listens intently as Natasha repeats her lines. Then the door is slowly closing, Natasha stepping backwards and turning in confusion. I draw down the passenger window and lean across.
“This is not the house,” she says. “They say there is no-one else lives there. You are sure to have the right place?”
And I remember that though he had stopped outside the gate, we’d never actually seen him go in. The house to the right had been hosting a party that night. So I suggest we try the house on the left. It seems to make sense. The front garden is neglected, the windows are curtained, the paintwork in poor repair. This looks to be a most unhappy home. Little wonder he’d tried to disown it when we dropped him off.
It feels only fair now for me to do my share. Together we head for the door and ring the bell. How would he react to seeing us again? He might be pleased perhaps. Or he might remember me as the arrogant shit who drove around drunk, no better than the bastard who’d butchered his wife and child. I find myself praying that he is not at home.
Footsteps approaching along an uncarpeted floor. A dog barking – not so completely alone then. Latches sliding back. We are confronted by the same drawn expression, but a myriad of lines where before the skin had been smoother, and fine silver threads around a bald crown instead of a full head of hair. These are the features of a septuagenarian, not those of our forty-something-year-old passenger.
“I am sorry we trouble you.” Again the words are Natasha’s. “We look for someone we did a lift the other day who lives in this street.”
The old man seems bemused by her awkward turn of phrase. I feel the need to move this forward quickly. “The family had been in a car accident about a month ago.”
Natasha smiles and shows him the blank envelope. “We want to give to...”
“Oh, that must have been our Sam!” he says. “How very thoughtful of you. You must come in.”
Now we are standing in his hallway. The place smells of bereavement. It already feels like a desperate intrusion, but we are led through to the sitting room and offered a sofa.
“The kettle’s on. You’ll join me for tea, won’t you?”
He’s in the kitchen by this time and the question seems purely rhetorical.
“Are you old college friends of Sam’s, or work colleagues of Leslie’s? Please forgive me if we’ve met before.”
I’m beginning to wonder whether this might be another case of mistaken identity, until I see the face that had judged me so absolutely in the car mirror. The same searching eyes, but here with the faintest trace of a smile. It condemns me again, mockingly this time, from within a photo frame on the coffee table.
The little old man is returning with a tray.
“How rude of me. I’m Leslie’s father. Were you at the funeral?”
So I’d been wrong about the likeness. Father to the casualty, not to the survivor. He lays down before us two tea cups and a plate of biscuits and offers me a shaky hand.
“This is my second spell of mourning in this house. Sam and Leslie insisted on me moving here shortly after my wife passed on. I hadn’t wanted to impose upon them. But I could see it was a sensible arrangement. I could be useful to them, you see, not just a burden, looking after Thomas when his mum and dad were at work. An
d it does get lonely being a widower, you know.”
I have been avoiding his eyes so far. But something draws me to them now and I see water mustering behind the lids.
“But then... oh dear. All this.” His eyes fix on Natasha’s card, still homeless within her hand.
“We are very sorry for your lost,” she responds, gently.
“Thank you my dear.”
We are left for a moment in an impotent silence. I want to get on with it, track down our man, hand him our card and be on our way. We’ve become gatecrashers into a father’s private grief for his daughter. We are impostors who have accidentally broken into an inner-circle.
“Did you know that the driver was drunk?” he suddenly asks. It’s as though a cloud is crossing his face and unleashing a rainstorm of words. “The police prosecuted him for manslaughter, but if you ask me it was out and out murder. Sam was lucky to escape with whiplash and bruises. But young Thomas’s injuries were much worse – the poor little fellow, with those glass cuts all over his face.”
I see Natasha react oddly to this.
“They hope he won’t lose an eye. Sam wouldn’t normally be the one driving, but Leslie wasn’t feeling well that day.”
I’m becoming a little confused. We’d been told the accident had claimed two lives.
“But wasn’t there another child? One who didn’t quite...”
“Oh no, thank Heaven, no-one else was hurt.”
My search for comprehension takes in the sweep of the room, from my wife to the old man, to the deriding photo beside him.
“Your son-in-law – that is him in the picture?”
The old man’s eyes narrow with a hint of suspicion. “You mean my son. Yes, that’s Leslie. I’m sorry, who did you say you were? Not his friends then?”
“It is a long time,” Natasha interjects before I can speak again. The man gathers up the photo with a sigh, staring into it as though craving forgiveness.
“You see, this is my real agony. As a loving father, I am bound to think, ‘if only’. If only my Leslie had not been poorly; if only Sam hadn’t insisted on taking the wheel. But if I rescue my son, I immediately condemn my daughter-in-law. And I could never wish to see harm come to Samantha. Nor see my grandson robbed of his mother.”
Natasha is first to pick up his shift of focus to a point behind our heads. When I turn around she is already transfixed by a second photo on the sideboard: our passenger flanked by a woman and small boy – the neighbours to whom she had spoken just minutes before.
“Do you know,” he continues, “it took them twenty minutes to cut his door away, and all the time he was still conscious.”
There is no air in this room. We’re all affected by it. I find myself at the door, loosening my collar with no memory of having got up. He is standing too and becoming agitated.
“And that – you’ll pardon my language miss – that beastly driver, breathing his foul fumes all over my son, begging with the police to let him stay at his side till the bitter end. Disgusting. Forgive me for saying so, but I hope that man prayed for his own soul as well as for my son’s when Leslie finally passed away at the roadside.”
Natasha can sometimes be amazing. Occasionally she can exercise a self-control at which I can only wonder. Something no doubt in her Russian blood. With fingers trembling, she is now handing him the card. Undaunted by her flawed English, she’s able to convince the old man that there has been a misunderstanding, that the message inside is for him and that he should pass our condolences on to his daughter-in-law and grandson. With a single look she stops me from objecting or saying anything. Somehow she holds her decorum to the last, even down to replacing my cup on its saucer and thanking him for the tea. Her walk from the house is measured and she is careful to close the gate.
But now alone, the two of us back in the car, we have no need of such social mores. We are safely hidden from the outside world. And yet still we do not disintegrate. We are silenced. No matter how much we might trawl through the events of two nights ago they simply don’t fit with what we have just heard. I am sure we will soon invent an account to rationalise it all away, but for now we just sit and stare.
The keys rattle as they’re pulled from my pocket. The sound reminds us to breathe. I exhale slowly, the air of defeat, as her breath is snatched with an air of authority. It feels important that the balance between outside and inside air is preserved – to stop our whole world from imploding.
“Wait,” she says. Two fingers of her left hand are hooked around the door handle and the palm of her right is on my shoulder even before I’m done fumbling with the ignition. I’m left with an arm half raised towards my seatbelt mooring. Like a brush into paint, it sinks back onto my lap. Not once have we taken our eyes off the windscreen.
Wait. Wait for what? Is she going back to demand answers? To ask how we could possibly have given a dead man a lift home? I feel her eyes on me now, sizing me up.
“I will drive,” she insists.
For a moment the words are not hers. I sense a late November’s chill. I am a child watching as an ailing father and an adamant mother swap seats in front of me.
Whatever fate Natasha’s words have likewise just sealed, I do not protest.
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