Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [26]
not me.”
Stuart was silent. Irene glanced at him with satisfaction. “Try to remember the journey back,” she said. “You would have come in on the Corstorphine Road, would you not, and driven back through Murrayfield? Did you turn off at the West End? Did you come along Queen Street? Try to remember.”
Stuart remained silent, looking up at the ceiling. Then he looked down at the floor.
“Well?” pressed Irene. “Did you come back that way?”
Stuart turned to her. “I came back by train,” he said quietly.
“I remember it because I saw the Minister on the train, eating a banana muffin, and he said hello to me and I was impressed that he had remembered me. I remember thinking how nice it was of him to make the effort. He sees so many civil servants.”
“Yes, yes,” said Irene. “The Minister. Banana muffins. But the car. What about the car?”
“Are you sure that I drove there?” asked Stuart weakly, Bertie Goes to School Eventually
51
although he knew the answer even as he asked the question. Irene would remember exactly; she always did.
For a few moments there was complete silence. Then Irene spoke. “I saw you get into it,” she said. “You waved goodbye and drove off. So what does this mean?”
When Stuart replied his voice was barely audible. “Then it’s still in Glasgow,” he said. He waved a hand in a westerly direction. “Somewhere over there.”
Irene’s tone was icy. “You mean that you have left the car –
our car – in Glasgow? That it’s been there for several months?
And you completely forgot about it?”
“So it would appear,” said Stuart. He sounded wretched. He was in awe of Irene, and he hated to be the object of her scorn.
“I must have caught the train without thinking.”
“Well, that’s just fine, then,” said Irene. “That’s the end of our car. It’ll be stripped bare by now. Or stolen.”
Stuart attempted to defend himself. “I’m sure that I parked it legally,” he said. “Which means that it’s probably still there. Perhaps the battery will be flat, but that may be all.”
Irene failed to respond to his optimism. “When you say it will still be there,” she said evenly, “what exactly do you mean by there? Where precisely is there?”
“Glasgow,” said Stuart.
“Where in Glasgow? Glasgow’s a big city.”
“Near the Dumbarton Road,” said Stuart. “Somewhere . . . somewhere there. That’s where my meeting was. Just off the Dumbarton Road.”
“Well, I suggest that you go and find it as soon as possible,”
said Irene, adding: “If you can.”
Stuart nodded miserably. He would go through to Glasgow next weekend, by train, and take a taxi out to the Dumbarton Road. He had a vague recollection of where he might have parked, in a quiet cul-de-sac, and there was no reason why the car should not still be there. People left their cars for months at the roadside, and the cars survived. It was different, of course, if one had a fashionable or tempting car, like the car that Domenica Macdonald drove – that sort of car would be bound 52
Bertie Goes to School Eventually
to attract the attention of joy-riders or vandals – but their car, an old Volvo estate, would be unlikely to catch anybody’s eye. And then it occurred to him that when he made the trip over to Glasgow, he would take Bertie with him. He would take him away from whatever classes Irene had planned for him – Saturday was saxophone in the morning, if he remembered correctly, and junior life-drawing in the afternoon – and he would take him with him on the train. Bertie would love that. He had hardly ever been on a train before, Stuart realised, and yet that was exactly the sort of thing that a father should do with his son. He felt a momentary pang. I’ve been a bad father, he thought. I’ve left the fathering to Irene. I’ve failed my son.
No more was said about the car that evening and the next morning Irene was too busy getting Bertie ready for school to talk to Stuart about cars, or anything else. She had awoken