So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [21]
He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his galactic travels had dragged him.
He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.
He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things.
The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a small umbrella.
His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.
“Fenny!” he shouted.
Having narrowly avoided hitting her with the actual car, he hit her instead with the car door as he leaned across and flung it open.
It caught her hand and knocked away the umbrella from it, which then bowled wildly away across the road.
“Shit!” yelled Arthur as helpfully as he could, leaped out of his own door, narrowly avoided being run down by McKenna’s All-Weather Haulage, and watched in horror as it ran down Fenny’s umbrella instead. The lorry swept along the motorway and away.
The umbrella lay like a recently swatted daddy long-legs, expiring sadly on the ground. Tiny gusts of wind made it twitch a little.
He picked it up.
“Er,” he said. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in offering the thing back to her.
“How did you know my name?” she said.
“Er, well,” he said, “look, I’ll get you another one.”
He looked at her and tailed off.
She was tallish with dark hair which fell in waves around a pale and serious face. Standing still, alone, she seemed almost somber, like a statue to some important but unpopular virtue in a formal garden. She seemed to be looking at something other than what she looked as if she was looking at.
But when she smiled, as she did now, suddenly, it was as if she had just arrived from somewhere. Warmth and life flooded into her face, and impossibly graceful movement into her body. The effect was very disconcerting, and it disconcerted Arthur like hell.
She grinned, tossed her bag into the back, and swiveled herself into the front seat.
“Don’t worry about the umbrella,” she said to him as she climbed in, “it was my brother’s and he can’t have liked it or he wouldn’t have given it to me.” She laughed and pulled on her seat belt. “You’re not a friend of my brother’s, are you?”
“No.”
Her voice was the only part of her which didn’t say “Good.”
Her physical presence there in the car, his car, was quite extraordinary to Arthur. He felt, as he let the car pull slowly away, that he could hardly think or breathe, and hoped that neither of these functions was vital to his driving or they were in trouble.
So what he had experienced in the other car, her brother’s car, the night he had returned exhausted and bewildered from his nightmare years in the stars had not been the unbalance of the moment or, if it had been, he was at least twice as unbalanced now, and quite liable to fall off whatever it is that well-balanced people are supposed to be balancing on.
“So …” he said, hoping to kick the conversation off to an exciting start.
“He was supposed to pick me up—my brother—but phoned to say he couldn’t make it. I asked about buses but the man started to look at a calendar rather than a timetable, so I decided to hitch. So.”
“So.”
“So here I am. And what I would like to know, is how you know my name.”
“Perhaps we ought to first sort out,” said Arthur, looking back over his shoulder as he eased his car into the motorway traffic, “where I’m taking you.”
Very close, he hoped, or a long way. Close would mean she lived near him, a long way would mean he could drive her there.
“I’d like to go to Taunton,” she said, “please. If that’s all right. It’s not far. You can drop me at—”
“You live in Taunton?” he said, hoping that he’d managed to sound merely curious rather than ecstatic. Taunton was wonderfully close to him. He could…
“No, London,” she said, “there’s a train in just under an hour.”
It was the worst thing possible. Taunton was only minutes away