Chapter 10: The Drive Back
He did not usually collect me. That is the first thing.
The usual arrangement was that I took the ten past four bus into the town and walked the last mile and a half up the lane, and I liked all forty minutes of it.
The bus went the long way by the reservoir, and there was a stretch of four minutes where you could see the whole valley and nobody knew where I was.
I had made that journey a hundred and six times.
I would have made it in a blizzard.
Twice in two and a half years somebody had come for me, both times Julian, both times because there was a dinner.
There was no dinner that Wednesday.
He leaned across and pushed the passenger door open from the inside rather than get out.
I want to be careful here, because a great deal was made later of how I described that journey.
He was not aggressive. He did not raise his voice.
He did not touch me.
Nothing he did would look like anything written down, and I have written it down, for several people, and watched it look like nothing.
He drove well.
He drove, in fact, considerately, and slowed for the horses at the top of the lane.
The car was warm and smelled of the air freshener that comes with a valet, and there was a hard hat on the back seat and a folder with a valuation on it.
I got in and put my bag between my feet and said thank you for coming.
He said, You were in the porch.
I said, I was.
He said, With Mrs Prosser.
That is a small thing and I noticed it and put it away.
He knew which resident, from a car, from the far side of a car park, through rain.
We came out of the gates and turned left.
The wipers were on the fast setting and did not need to be.
He asked how she was. I said she was well.
He said, Good, good, in the voice of a man agreeing with an invoice.
Then, at the roundabout by the garden centre, without any change of tone:
“Don't tell people you go there.”
The wipers went twice.
I said, Sorry?
“Willow Bank. Don't go telling people you're in there on Wednesdays.”
He was watching the roundabout. He indicated.
He took the third exit.
I had been going into that building for two and a half years with his signature on my form and a badge with my photograph on it.
I have gone over the whole of that sentence many times, including the word people, which is doing more work than any of the others.
Not don't go. Not stop. Not I'd rather you didn't.
Don't tell people you go there.
I could give you the exact position of everything in that car at that moment, because that is what I do and I cannot stop doing it.
His left hand at the top of the wheel, the right hand down by the gearstick.
Twenty centimetres of console between us.
Seatbelt across the chest, which takes about a third of a man's ability to turn.
My own hands were in my lap, right on top of left, and I looked at them and thought, quite clearly and without any drama: this is the safest place in the county.
A moving car is the safest room there is.
Nobody can be thrown in a moving car.
Nothing can happen in a moving car that anybody would ever have to explain to a court.
That is the sort of thought I had, in traffic, about my husband's brother, on the way home from cutting an old woman's fingernails.
I have never been able to make that sound like an ordinary life, and it was my ordinary life for three years.
We went up the lane. He slowed for the horses.
The rain got heavier and then stopped altogether about a mile from the house, the way it does under a hill.
He parked in the yard and switched off and neither of us moved for a second, and the engine made the noise engines make.
I said, Why not?
He got out.
Not in a hurry, not to avoid the question.
He got out the way you get out of a car when you have arrived somewhere.
He took the hard hat and the folder off the back seat, and he stood with the door open, one hand on the roof.
The shingle in that yard is loose and moves under the foot, and he shifted his weight onto the back leg, which is what a man does before he says something he has already decided to say.
And then he answered, and I will give the answer its own chapter, because it turned out to be the most important thing anybody said to me in three years.