Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
Mr Wrong
MR WRONG
ELIZABETH
JANE HOWARD
PICADOR
For Elizabeth Taylor
MR WRONG
Everybody – that is to say the two or three people she knew in London – told Meg that she had been very lucky indeed to find a car barely three years old, in such
good condition and at such a price. She believed them gladly, because actually buying the car had been the most nerve-racking experience. Of course she had been told – and many times by her
father – that all car dealers were liars and thieves. Indeed, to listen to old Dr Crosbie, you would think that nobody could
ever
buy a second-hand car, possibly even any
new
car, without its brakes or steering giving way the moment you were out of sight of the garage. But her father had always been of a nervous disposition: and as he intensely disliked going anywhere,
and had now reached an age where he could fully indulge this disapprobation, it was not necessary to take much notice of him. For at least fifteen of her twenty-seven years Meg silently put up with
his saying that there was no place like home, until, certain that she had exhausted all the possibilities of the small market town near where they lived, she had exclaimed, ‘That’s just
it, Father! That’s why I want to see somewhere else –
not
like it.’
Her mother, who had all the prosaic anxiety about her only child finding ‘a really nice young man, Mr Right’ that kind, anxious mothers tend to have – especially if their
daughter can be admitted in the small hours to be ‘not exactly a beauty’ – smiled encouragingly at Meg and said, ‘But Humphrey, dear, she will always be coming back to stay.
She
knows
this is her home, but all young girls need a change.’ (The young part of this had become emphasized as Meg plodded steadily through her twenties with not a romance in
sight.)
So Meg had come to London, got a job in an antique shop in the New King’s Road, and shared a two-room flat with two other girls in Fulham. One of them was a secretary, and the other a
model: both were younger than Meg and ten times as self-assured; kind to her in an off-hand manner, but never becoming friends, nothing more than people she knew – like Mr Whitehorn, who ran
the shop that she worked in. It was her mother who had given Meg three hundred pounds towards a car, as the train fares and subsequent taxis were proving beyond her means. She spent very little in
London: she had bought one dress at Laura Ashley, but had no parties to go to in it, and lacked the insouciance to wear it to work. She lived off eggs done in various ways, and quantities of
instant coffee – in the shop and in the flat. Her rent was comfortingly modest by present-day standards, she walked to work, smoked very occasionally, and set her own hair. Her father had
given her a hundred pounds when she was twenty-one: all of this had been invested, and to it she now added savings from her meagre salary and finally went off to one of London’s northern
suburbs to answer an advertisement about a second-hand MG.
The car dealer, whom she had imagined as some kind of tiger in a loud checked suit with whisky on his breath, had proved to be more of a wolf in a sheepskin car-coat – particularly when he
smiled, which displayed a frightening number of teeth that seemed to stretch back in his raspberry mouth and down his throat with vulpine largesse. He smiled often, and Meg took to not looking at
him whenever he began to do it. He took her out on a test drive: at first he drove, explaining all the advantages of the car while he did so, and then he suggested that she take over. This she did,
driving very badly, with clashing of gears and stalling the engine in the most embarrassing places. ‘I can see you’ve got the hang of it,’ Mr Taunton said. ‘It’s
always difficult driving a completely new car. But you’ll find that she’s most reliable: will start in all weather, economical on fuel, and needs the minimum of servicing.’
When Meg asked whether the car had ever had an accident, he began to smile, so she did not see his face when he replied that it hadn’t been an accident, just a slight brush. ‘The
respray, which I expect you’ve noticed, was largely because the panel-work involved, and mind you, it
was
only panel-work, made us feel that it could do with a more cheerful colour. I
always think aqua-blue is a nice colour for a ladies’ car. And this is definitely a ladies’ car.’
She felt his smile receding when she asked how many previous owners the car had had. He replied that it had been for a short time the property of some small firm that had since gone out of
business. ‘Only driven by one of the directors and his secretary.’
That sounded all right, thought Meg: but she was also thinking that for the price this was easily the best car she could hope for, and somehow, she felt, he knew that she knew she was going to
buy it. His last words were: ‘I hope you have many miles of motoring before you, madam.’ The elongated grin began, and as it was for the last time, she watched him – trying to
smile back – as the pointed teeth became steadily more exposed down his cavernous throat. She noticed then that his pale grey eyes very nearly met, but were narrowly saved from this by the
bridge of his nose, which was long and thrusting, and almost made up for his having a mouth that had clearly been eaten away by his awful quantity of teeth. They had nothing going for each other
beyond her buying and his selling a car.
Back in the showroom office, he sank into his huge moquette chair and said: ‘Bring us a coffee, duck. I’ve earned it.’ And a moony-faced blonde in a mini-skirt with huge legs
that seemed tortured by her tights, smiled and went.
Meg drove the MG – her
car
– back to London in the first state of elation she had ever known since she had won the bending competition in a local gymkhana. She had a car!
Neither Samantha nor Val were in such a position. She really drove quite well, as she had had a temporary job working for a doctor near home who had lost his licence for two years. Away from Mr
Taunton (
Clive
Taunton he had repeatedly said), she felt able and assured. The car was easy to drive, and responded, as MGs do, with a kind of husky excitement to speed.
When she reached the flat, Samantha and Val were so impressed that they actually took her out to a Chinese meal with their two boy-friends. Meg got into her Laura Ashley dress and enjoyed every
sweet and sour moment of it. Everybody was impressed by her, and this made her prettier. She got slightly drunk on rice wine and lager and went to work the next day, in her car, feeling much more
like the sort of person she had expected to feel like in London. Her head ached, but she had something to show for it: one of the men had talked to her several times – asking where she lived
and what her job was, and so forth.
Her first drive north was the following Friday. It was cold, a wet and dark night – in January she never finished at the shop in time even to start the journey in the light – and by
the time she was out of the rush, through London and on Hendon Way, it was raining hard. She found the turn off to the M1 with no difficulty: only three hours of driving on that and then about
twenty minutes home. It was nothing, really; it just seemed rather a long way at this point. She had drunk a cup of strong black instant at Mr Whitehorn’s, who had kindly admired the car and
also showed her the perfect place to park it every day, and she knew that her mother would be keeping something hot and home-made for her whatever time she got home. (Her father never ate anything
after eight o’clock in the evening for fear of indigestion, something from which he had never in his life suffered and attributed entirely to this precaution.)
Traffic was fairly heavy, but it seemed to be more lorries than anything else, and Meg kept on the whole to the middle lane. She soon found, as motorists new to a motorway do, that the lanes,
the headlights coming towards her, and the road glistening with rain had a hypnotic effect, as though she and the car had become minute, and she was being spun down some enormous, endless striped
ribbon. ‘I mustn’t go to sleep,’ she thought. Ordinary roads had too much going on in them for one to feel like that. About half her time up the motorway, she felt so tired with
trying not to feel sleepy that she decided to stop in the next park, open the windows and have a cigarette. It was too wet to get out, but even stopping the windscreen-wipers for a few minutes
would make a change. She stopped the engine, opened her window, and before she had time to think about smoking again, fell asleep.
She awoke very suddenly with a feeling of extreme fear. It was not from a dream; she was sitting in the driver’s seat, cramped, and with rain blowing in through the open window, but
something else was very wrong. A sound – or noises, alarming in themselves, but, in her circumstances, frighteningly out of place. She shut her window except for an inch at the top. This made
things worse. What sounded like heavy, laboured, stertorous, even painful breathing was coming, she quickly realized, from the
back
of the car. The moment she switched on the car light and
turned round, there was utter silence, as sudden as the noise stopping in the middle of a breath. There was nobody in the back of the car, but the doors were not locked, and her large carrier bag
– her luggage – had fallen to the floor. She locked both doors, switched off the car light and the sounds began again, exactly where they had left off – in the middle of a breath.
She put both the car light and her headlights on, and looked again in the back. Silence, and it was still empty. She considered making sure that there was nobody parked behind her, but somehow she
didn’t want to do that. She switched on the engine and started it. Her main feeling was to get away from the place as quickly as possible. But even when she had started to do this and found
herself trying to turn the sounds she had heard into something else and accountable, they wouldn’t. They remained in her mind, and she could all too clearly recall them, as the heavy breaths
of someone either mortally ill, or in pain, or both, coming quite distinctly from the back of the car. She drove home as fast as she could, counting the minutes and the miles to keep her mind
quiet.
She reached home – a stone and slate-roofed cottage – at a quarter past nine, and her mother’s first exclamation when she saw her daughter was that she looked dreadfully tired.
Instantly, Meg began to feel better; it was what her mother had always said if Meg ever did anything for very long away from home. Her father had gone to bed: so she sat eating her supper with
surprising hunger, in the kitchen, and telling her mother the week’s news about her job and the two girls she shared with and the Chinese-meal party. ‘And is the car nice,
darling?’ her mother asked at length. Meg started to speak, checked herself, and began again. ‘Very nice. It was so kind of you to give me all that money for it,’ she said.
The weekend passed with almost comforting dullness, and Meg did not begin to dread returning until after lunch on Sunday. She began to say that she ought to pack; her mother said she must have
tea before she left, and her father said that he didn’t think that
anyone
should drive in the dark. Or, indeed, at all, he overrode them as they both started saying that it was dark by
four anyway. Meg eventually decided to have a short sleep after lunch, drink a cup of tea and then start the journey. ‘If I eat one of Mummy’s teas, I’ll pass out in the
car,’ she said, and as she said ‘pass out’, she felt an instant, very small, ripple of fear.
Her mother woke her from a dreamless, refreshing sleep at four with a cup of dark, strong Indian tea and two Bourbon biscuits.
‘I’m going to pack for you,’ she said firmly. She had also unpacked, while Meg was finishing her supper on Friday night. ‘I’ve never known such a hopeless
packer. All your clothes were cramped up and crushed together as though someone had been stamping on them. Carrier bags,’ she scolded, enjoying every minute; ‘I’m lending you this nice
little case that Auntie Phil left me.’
Meg lay warmly under the eiderdown in her own room watching her mother, who quite quickly switched from packing to why didn’t Meg drink her tea while it was hot. ‘I know your father won’t drink anything until it’s lukewarm, but thank goodness, you don’t take after him. In that respect,’ she ended loyally, but Meg knew that
her mother missed her, and got tired and bored dealing with her father’s ever-increasing regime of what was good or bad for him.
‘Can I come next weekend?’ she asked. Her mother rushed across the room and enfolded her.
‘I should be most upset if you didn’t,’ she said, trying to make it sound like a joke.
When Meg left, and not until she was out of sight of home, she began to worry about what had happened on the journey up. Perhaps it could have been some kind of freak wind, with the car window
open, she thought. Being able even to think that encouraged her. It was only raining in fits and starts on the way back, and the journey passed without incident of any kind. By the time Meg had
parked, and slipped quietly into the flat that turned out to be empty – both girls were out – she really began to imagine that she had imagined it. She ate a boiled egg, watched a short
feature on Samantha’s television about Martinique, and went to bed.