So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish - Douglas Adams [22]
Bungling idiot. Why on earth had he said “let” in that stupid way? He was behaving like a twelve-year-old.
She looked at him severely.
“Are you going to London?” she asked.
“Yes,” he didn’t say.
“And I’ve got to step on it,” he failed to add, omitting to glance at his watch.
“I wasn’t,” he said, “but…” Bungling idiot.
“It’s very kind of you,” she said, “but really no. I like to go by train.” And suddenly she was gone. Or rather, that part of her which brought her to life was gone. She looked rather distantly out the window and hummed lightly to herself.
He couldn’t believe it.
Thirty seconds into the conversation, and already he’d blown it.
Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction of centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.
Taunton 5 miles, said the signpost.
He gripped the steering wheel so tightly the car wobbled.
He was going to have to do something dramatic.
“Fenny,” he said.
She glanced round sharply at him. “You still haven’t told me how—”
“Listen,” said Arthur, “I will tell you, though the story is rather strange. Very strange.”
She was still looking at him, but said nothing.
“Listen…”
“You said that.”
“Did I? Oh. There are things I must talk to you about, and things I must tell you … a story I must tell you which would …” He was thrashing about. He wanted something along the lines of “Thy knotted and combined locks to part,/ And each particular hair to stand on end,/ Like quills upon the fretful porcupine” but didn’t think he could carry it off and didn’t like the hedgehog reference.
“… which would take more than five miles,” he settled for in the end, rather lamely, he was afraid.
“Well…”
“Just supposing,” he said, “just supposing”—he didn’t know what was coming next, so he thought he’d just sit back and listen—“that there was some extraordinary way in which you were very important to me, and that, though you didn’t know it, I was very important to you, but it all went for nothing because we only had five miles and I was a stupid idiot at knowing how to say something very important to someone I’ve only just met and not crash into lorries at the same time, what would you say …” He paused, helplessly, and looked at her.
“… I should do?”
“Watch the road!” she yelped.
“Shit!”
He narrowly avoided careening into the side of a hundred Italian washing machines in a German lorry.
“I think,” she said, with a momentary sigh of relief, “you should buy me a drink before my train goes.”
Chapter 12
here is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, a very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies.
Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches.
There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.
“Make ’em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.”
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunch-time that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.
The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.
“There