A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [161]
At the counter, an acne-soaked teenager in a purple hat takes our order for food. I pass Saul a five-pound note, but he wants to pick up the tab.
‘I’ll get it,’ he says, pushing my hand away.
Twenty minutes later and we are back inside the car, my mood flatly resigned to a long, dark journey with no end until well after midnight. Saul has a polystyrene cup of Coke wedged between his thighs and a post-burger cigarette hanging from his mouth. It’s my turn to drive. The Capri feels heavy as I reverse out, as if it too has eaten too much, too quickly. Saul clicks in The Bends again and sits back in the passenger seat with a deep sigh. Within ten minutes he is asleep and I just listen to the songs.
And if I could be who you wanted,
If I could be who you wanted
All the time.
The rain starts coming down at around eleven fifteen and it doesn’t stop all night. I worry that the heavy car will skid on the road surface and it’s a job to keep my concentration. The motor driving the windscreen wipers is sluggish, and as a consequence my vision is constantly blurred by the glare of oncoming headlights refracting through the water-covered glass. Saul naps through all of this with heavy catarrh snores and an occasional groan.
The traffic gradually evaporates the closer we come to Bodmin. Now and then a vast, speeding lorry will roar past in the wet, throwing up spray and mud, but otherwise I have the road to myself. There’s just a feeling now of wanting to get there, of the quest for sleep. For fifteen minutes on the Dorchester road I was tailed by a black Rover, the same make of car that Sinclair was driving when I first met Lithiby. But I am past caring. Let them waste their time. They know where I’m going. They know where to find me.
I wake Saul when we enter Little Petherick, the last village before the turn-off to Padstow. He makes a show of being disturbed, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles like a sleepy child.
‘Where are we?’
‘Hammersmith.’
‘Seriously.’
‘Nearly there. I need you to show me the way.’
‘Fucking rain,’ he says.
I have pulled the Capri over to the side of the road, the wipers flapping irregularly, left-to-right, right-to-left. The tired old engine turns over. Across the street there is a man loitering alone in a bus stop, trapped by the weather. He stares at us from under the peak of his baseball cap, colourless eyes in the wet gloom.
‘Take the second left after this village. Sign saying Trevose.’
‘Then what?’
He starts imitating Katharine’s voice.
‘Road forks so go real slow,’ he says. ‘Flirt with me awhile, turn right at the traffic lights, and then I’ll leave my husband and elope with you.’
I wheeze a fake laugh.
‘It’s easy from here,’ he says. ‘Just head down to the sea. I’ll show you.’
Saul makes coffee when we arrive and I smoke a cigarette in the kitchen as he busies himself finding blankets and towels. The house feels damp. In the distance I can hear steel halyards pinging in the wind against masts. Otherwise it is utterly quiet.
I like it down here. London makes you forget the simpler pleasures of being away from a city. The loose give of the warming sand after weeks of walking on pavements and hard floors. And in the summer that brilliant clean light, and the feeling of salt drying against the skin. Then evening sunsets blinking off the surface of the water, like flashbulbs in a floodlit stadium.
Saul comes back into the kitchen.
‘I’m not actually all that tired,’ he says.
‘Me neither.’
‘You want a drink? I think there’s a bottle of wine here somewhere.’
He finds it and sits down with two tumblers, a radio on in the background playing country music. I pour the wine and we toast the weekend, glasses clinking over the table. A car drives past outside, close to the house at a crawl,