Mrs. God (3 page)

Standish wondered if all over England people played tunes at you with their voices.

two

D
riving on the left, so counter to his instincts, elated him. Like all driving it was largely a matter of fitting in with the stream. Standish found that it took only a small adjustment to switch on the radio with the left hand instead of the right, to pass slower cars on the wrong side—but he was not sure how long this control would last in an emergency. If the car ahead of him blew a tire or began to skid … Standish saw himself creating a monumental crack-up, a line of wrecked smoking cars extending back a mile. His heart was beating fast, and he smiled at himself in the rearview mirror. He was tired and jet-lagged, but he felt foolishly, shamelessly alive.

Only the roundabouts gave him trouble. The stream of traffic swept him into a great whirling circle from which drivers were to choose alternate exits marked by a great spoke-like diagram. At first Standish could not tell which of the spokes was his, and drove sweating around the great circle twice. When at last he had seen that he wanted the third of the exits, he found himself trapped in the roundabout's inner lane, unable to break through the circling traffic. He went around once more, straining to look over his shoulder, and set the windshield wipers slapping back and forth before he located the turn indicator. As soon as he began to move out of his lane several horns blared at once. Standish swore and twisted the wheel back. Around once more he went, and this time managed to enter the stream of cars on the outer edge of the roundabout. When he squirted into the exit his entire body was damp with sweat.

Twenty-five miles further north, the whole thing happened all over again. His map slipped on the seat, and he panicked—he was supposed to stay on this northbound motorway, but at some point he did have to turn off onto a trunk road, and from that onto a series of roads that were only thin black lines on the map. He drove around and around and doubt overwhelmed him. His turn indicator ticked like a bomb. Sweat loosened his grip on the wheel. At last he managed to penetrate the honking wall of cars and escape the roundabout. He pulled off to the side of the road and scrabbled amongst the maps strewn on the floor. When he had the proper map in his hands, he could not locate the roundabout he had just fled. It did not exist on the map, only in life. His earlier feelings of relaxation and purposefulness mocked him now. They were illusions; he was lost. At length the desire to weep left him and he calmed down. He found a roundabout on the map, an innocuous gray circle, which almost had to be the one he had just escaped. He was not supposed to get off the motorway for another sixty miles, where a sign should indicate the way to Huckstall, the village where he picked up the next road. He would not have to brave any more roundabouts. Standish pulled out into the traffic.

After a time, the landscape became astonishingly empty. Dung-colored bushes lay scattered across flat colorless land. Far away in the distance was a gathering of red brick cottages. Standish wondered if this might be Huckstall.

He looked at the tiny village through the passenger window and saw a pale face pressed against a second-floor window, a white blur surrounded by black just as if—really for all the world, Standish thought, just as if a child had been imprisoned in that ugly two-story building, walled up within the red brick to stare eternally toward the cars rushing past on the motorway. Smaller white blotches that might have been hands pressed against the glass, and a hole opened up in the bottom of the child's face, as if the child were screaming at Standish, screaming for help!

He quickly looked away and saw that a low black hill had appeared before him on the right side of the motorway. Bare of vegetation, the hill seemed to fasten onto the empty landscape rather than grow from it. Other hills like it canceled half the horizon. They looked dead, like garbage piles—then he thought they looked like black blood-soaked sheets, bloody towels and pads thrown onto the abortionist's floor.

The air carried a sour metallic tang, as if it were filled with tiny metal shavings. Standish came up beside the first low hill and saw that it was a mound of some material like charcoal briquets—stony chips of coal. Now and then rock slides of the chips ran down the flanks of the hill. Between the black hills of coal dusty men rode toylike bulldozers. Completely ringed by the black hills was a world of men rushing around in blackened, murky air beneath strings of lights. Obscure machines rose and fell. Yellow flares burned beside the black mounds.
Slag heaps
, Standish thought, not knowing if he was right. What were slag heaps, anyhow?

Even the sky seemed dirty. Rhythmic clanks and thuds as from underground machines filled the air. It was like driving through a hellish factory without walls or roof. Standish had not seen a road sign or marker for what must have been miles. There was nothing around him now but the shifting black hills and the dusty men moving between the flares. Suddenly the road seemed too narrow to be the motorway.

He decided to keep driving until he saw a road sign. The thought of getting out of his car in this brutal and desolate place made his throat tighten.

Then the entire world changed in an eye-blink. The black hills, strings of lights, men on toy bulldozers, and tiny flares fell back behind him, and Standish found himself driving through dense, vibrant green. On either side of the car fat vine-encrusted trees and wide bushes pushed right to the edge of the road. For ten or fifteen minutes Standish drove through what appeared to be a great forest. The interior of the car grew as hot as a greenhouse. Standish pulled up to the side of the road and wiped his forehead. Leaves and vines flattened against the side window. He looked at his map again.

Northeast from the second roundabout extended the road to Huckstall. The map indicated woodlands in green, but none of the green covered the roadway. Sickeningly, Standish thought that all this right-left business had so confused him that he had traveled south from Gatwick instead of north—by now he would be hundreds of miles out of his way. He groaned and closed his eyes. Something soft thumped against his windshield. Standish moaned in dismay and surprise, and reflexively covered his face with his arms.

He lowered his arms and looked out. On the upper right-hand side of the windshield was a broad smeary stripe which he did not think had been there earlier. Standish did not at all want to think about what sort of creature had made the smear. An insect the size of a baby had turned to froth and spread itself like butter across the glass. Death again, messy and uncontainable. He wiped his face and started forward again.

The woodland ended as abruptly as it had begun, and without any transition Standish found himself back in the empty burnt-looking landscape. Twice he passed through other, smaller outdoor factories with their slag heaps and dusty men wandering through flares. He felt as if he had been driving in circles. There were no signs to Huckstall or anywhere else. Unmarked roads intersected his, leading deeper into the undulating russet landscape.
Full of heaviness and no one to comfort
, Standish remembered from “Rebuke.” He longed for markers pointing to Boston or Sleaford or Lincoln, names prominent on the map Robert Wall had sent him.

In minutes a low marker, a small stone post like a tooth set upright beside the road, came into view before him. Standish pulled up across from it. He got out of the car and walked around to see the worn words carved on the marker: 12
MI
. Twelve miles? Twelve miles from what?

“Lost?”

Standish snapped his head up to see a tall thin man standing directly behind the little stone tooth. He might just now have jumped up out of the earth. His loose baggy brown trousers, spattered boots, and rumpled mackintosh were nearly the color of the landscape. He wore a dark cap pulled low on his forehead. The man slouched and grinned at Standish. He was missing most of his teeth.

“I don't really know,” Standish said.

“Is that right?” said the grinning man. His tongue licked the spaces between his teeth.

“I mean, I'm trying to figure it out,” Standish said. “I thought this marker might help me.”

“And does it?” The man's voice was a sly quiet burr, remarkably insinuating. “There's precise matter to be read here. A man might do a great deal with information as accurate as that.”

Standish hated the man's dry, insulting mockery. “Well, it doesn't do me any good. I thought I was on the motorway, going toward Huckstall.”

“Huckstall.” The man pondered it. “Never heard of Americans making their way to Huckstall.”

“I'm not really going
to
Huckstall,” Standish said, infuriated at having to explain himself. “I just thought I might have lunch there. I was going to pick up the road to Lincolnshire.”

“Lincolnshire, is it? You'll want to do a good bit of driving. And you thought you were on the motorway. Is this how motorways look in America, then?”

“Where
is
the motorway?” Standish cried.

“Kill a bird? Little baby?”

“What?”

“With your car?” He pointed his chin toward the smear on the windshield.

“You're crazy,” Standish said, though he had feared exactly this.

The man blinked and stepped backward. His tongue slid into one of the spaces between his teeth. Now he seemed uncertain and defensive instead of insolent. He was crazy, after all—Standish had been too startled to see it.

“Where are you from?” he asked, hoping that the man would answer: Huckstall.

The man tilted his head back over his shoulder, indicating wide empty blankness. Then he took another backward step, as if he feared that Standish might try to capture him. The stranger came into focus for Standish: he was not at all the ironic, almost menacing figure he had seemed. The fellow was deficient, probably retarded. He lived in that empty wilderness and he slept in his clothes. Now that he was no longer afraid of the man, Standish could pity him.

“Killed something, that'll do you,” the man said. His eyes gleamed like a dog's, and he edged a bit further away. “That'll be bad luck, that will.”

Standish thought the bad luck was in meeting an oaf straight out of Thomas Hardy. “Where is Huckstall, would you know?”

“I would. That I would. Yes.”

“And?”

“And?”

“And where is it?” Standish shouted.

“Up there, up there, right up that road, which is the very road you're on.”

Standish sighed.

“They flee from me,” the man said.

Standish put his hands in his pockets and began to move around the front of the car without quite turning his back on the vagrant.

“That sometime did me seek,” the man said. “With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.”

Standish stopped moving, aware that he was, after all, in England. No addled American tramp would quote Thomas Wyatt at you. The English teacher in him was piqued and delighted. “Go on,” he said.

“I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not once remember, That sometime …” He paused, then intoned, “
Timor mortis conturbat me
,” quoting from another poem. Evidently he was a ragbag of disconnected phrases.

“Hah! Very good,” Standish said, smiling. “Excellent. You've been very helpful to me. Thank you.”

The man closed his eyes and began to chant. “In going to my naked bed as one that would have
slept
, I heard a wife saying to her child, that long before had
wept
, She sighed sad and sang full sweet, to bring the babe to
rest
, That would not calm but cried still, in sucking at her
breast
.”

“Um, yes,” Standish said, and quickly got into the car. He turned the key in the ignition and glanced sideways at the man, who had come out of his trance and was shuffling toward the car, reaching for the handle of the passenger door. Standish cursed himself for not locking the doors as soon as he had gotten in. The engine caught, and Standish pulled away before the man reached the handle. He looked in the mirror and saw the creature staggering up the middle of the road, gesturing with both hands. Standish looked ahead quickly.

He drove through the emptiness for perhaps five minutes before coming to a small green sign which read
HUCKSTALL
10
MI.

It was, when he came to it, a village of narrow lanes lined with brick cottages, so ugly and uninviting that he nearly decided to pass through it and continue on. But the next village appeared to be at least twenty miles away, and it would take forty-five minutes to drive that distance over the country roads. And when he came up to the market square in the center of town, Huckstall did not seem so grim.

Triangular plastic pennants on strings marked off separate areas of the cobbled square—on market days, each area would belong to a separate stallholder. Beyond the strings of pennants lay reassuring signs of civilization, a bow-fronted shop called Boots the Chemist, the imperial stone facade of a Lloyds Bank, and the plate-glass window, filled with brightly colored paperbacks, of a W. H. Smith bookstore. On the corner opposite Standish and his Escort crammed with luggage stood a large double-fronted half-timbered building with bay windows, a small blue sign with the words
TAKE COURAGE
below a golden rooster, and a much larger sign depicting crossed dueling pistols which bore the legend
THE DUELISTS
. The windows sparkled, the blue paint and white trim gleamed. Standish had a sudden vision of a roasted pig on a serving platter, thick wedges of crumbly yellow cheese, overflowing tankards of ale, a fat smiling man in a toque carving slices of rare roast beef and pouring thick brown gravy onto Yorkshire pudding.

He could make it to Beaswick and Esswood in another three or four hours.
Stopped off for a pub lunch, he would say. Beautiful little place in Huckstall called The Duelists. Do you know it? Ought to be in the guidebooks, if you ask me
.