She said, ‘Do you want to talk about it any more?’
‘I don’t see much point. Do you?’
‘If I were you,’ she said, ‘I’d want … I’d feel …’
‘But you aren’t,’ said Don. ‘And as far as I am concerned, unpleasant as it is, the best thing now for both of us is to let things be. I take your word for it that it’s blown over. I don’t see the point in harping on what’s done with. I’m not saying it doesn’t make a difference, because of course it does. I think,’ he said, ‘you’ve been under rather a strain, this year, with your father’s illness; I’d prefer to put this down, in part at least, to that, and regard the matter as closed. I don’t want to make a meal of it, which I suppose some men might.’
Anne said, ‘Yes. I think they might.’
‘I assume it isn’t going to become a habit?’
Is this a joke? She scans his face, but Don is not, on the whole, in the habit of making jokes, though sarcasm is not unknown. No, he is asking a question, because presumably he wishes to know the answer, and she replies that she is not planning to make a habit of it. Don nods and stares across the table at her; for an instant their eyes meet, before they both look away. The waiter brings change for Don’s ten pounds, at which he quickly glances before he puts it in his pocket, leaving the appropriate tip in the saucer. ‘Ready?’ he says, and gets up. He goes towards the door, and Anne, taking her coat and following, finds that she is shaking all over, so convulsively that she cannot cope with putting on the coat, and has to carry it over her arm.
The road to Cuxing unreeled before the car, the headlights stripping away the darkness length by length – as far as the next corner, the top of the hill, the end of that line of trees. The road-signs, briefly illuminated, were according to expectation; Edgehill, Aynho, Abingdon. The landscape itself, diminished to the patch of light before the car, kept throwing up surprises; a bridge, a house, a tree, un-noticed on other journeys. The night both concealed and revealed. Anne thought: I knew this road, or imagined I did, but now it seems different – of course I ve not done it at night before. She had stopped shaking. Don drove in silence except to remark once, at the Deddington traffic-lights, that he preferred driving by night. ‘Do you?’ she said dully. ‘I don’t. You see nothing but the road.’ ‘That’s the point. It’s the road you need to see. Quicker, too. Though I must admit this seems further than I’d thought.’ Yes, she wanted to say, places have this way of being unreliable, never quite as constant as you think they are going to be. You think you have them under control, and then find that you have not. But there was a road-sign now, swimming into view at the Oxford roundabout, and Don, slowing for the junction, said ‘Thirty-two miles now, give or take a bit, so we know where we are.’ ‘Yes. We shan’t be too late back.’ The car swept on, channelled as though by tramlines, and she sat looking ahead, seeing nothing, thinking backwards through the day, the year.
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First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1977
Published in Penguin Books 1983
Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1977
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ISBN: 978-0-241-96032-5
Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield
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