Rough Cider (2 page)
“Alice Ashenfelter.”
“Well, she’s not one of ours. There’s no student of that name registered in the university.”
“Is that so?” I said. “I wonder what she was doing in here, then.”
“She didn’t leave a note on your desk or anything?”
“No.” I shifted my papers to check. “There’s nothing here.”
“Funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“Well, I mentioned her to Sally Beach, who runs the bookshop and knows just about everything that goes on in this place, and she said an American girl like that—blond, with glasses and a pigtail—was hanging around the union bar last night asking if anyone knew you.”
I frowned. “Asking for me by name?”
She nodded and gave a quick smile. “You’ve got a secret admirer, Dr. Sinclair.”
“Come off it, Carol. I’ve never clapped eyes on the girl before today. She happened to sit at my table in Ernestine’s this lunchtime.”
“Happened to?”
I fingered the knot of my tie, remembering how it had happened.
“She had a chance to talk to you, then,” said Carol. “Didn’t she say anything?”
“Her name, the town she came from, nothing else of consequence. I didn’t exactly encourage her. I mean, what does she want with me, a total stranger?”
“Perhaps she met you somewhere else, on holiday, for instance, and you’ve forgotten.”
“I wouldn’t forget. She’s, em, unusual. No, I swear I haven’t met her. Well, whatever she wanted, I seem to have frightened her off.”
“Don’t be so sure, Dr. Sinclair,” said Carol, staring out of the window. “It’s getting dark, I know, but isn’t that her down in the car park standing beside your MG?”
I
went down to the Senior Common Room to make myself a coffee. The place was deserted except for a couple of cleaning women who had Sinatra’s latest at full volume on the record player in competition with their vacuums. Strictly, they shouldn’t have been in there until five, but they were obviously used to having the place to themselves after four on Fridays. Like everyone else, they didn’t care to hang about at the end of the week. Everyone except me, apparently. They looked at me as if I were an agent of the head caretaker, but I gestured to them to carry on.
Carol Dangerfield would be at the window of her office, waiting to see the next scene played in the staff car park. Would I invite my blond pursuer into my car and drive into the night-with her, or would I hold her at bay with my stick? Well, Carol was in for a disappointment unless she was planning some overtime. I made the coffee, drank it slowly, and practiced snooker shots until well after five.
When I eventually walked out to the car park, it was deserted except for three cars and one girl, reclining against mine. There was a light drizzle on the wind, and you could feel the chill of an October evening. Whiteknights Park is pretty exposed. Alice Ashenfelter was wearing a coat, but she had to be persistent or dedicated or just mad to have stood there so long.
The possibility that she was mad hadn’t occurred to me before. There was a girl living next door to us once who developed a passion for our Conservative Member of Parliament. I mean, a real infatuation. It didn’t matter that he was happily married with three young children. She used to write him passionate letters at the House of Commons. He staunchly ignored them until she started sending them in larger envelopes with pairs of Marks and Spencer panties. Apparently people in public life are subjected to more of that kind of thing than most of us hear about. Anyway, this girl was schizoid. She ended up breaking into the MP’s house at night and getting put away for a few months. The last I heard, she was under permanent sedation.
I nodded to Alice Ashenfelter as if she were just the latest blonde who happened to be leaning against the bonnet of my car on a Friday evening.
She took a step away from the car, clasped her hands in front of her as if in supplication, and said. “Dr. Sinclair, I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, going up to your room like that.”
“It didn’t embarrass me,” I said. “Forget it.”
“I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance to you.”
“You’re not,” I answered with more hope than conviction. “But it’s kind of you to mention it. Good night, miss, er…”
“Where are you going now?”
“Where I generally go at the end of the day: home.” I had the keys out and was fumbling for the door, always an awkward procedure for me.
“Could we talk?”
“Here?” I made it sound like a straight no. I unlocked the door and pulled it open.
“Someplace else. Anyplace you want.”
“I don’t think so.” I dropped my bag and stick into the car and lowered myself onto the seat. The moment I let it take my weight, I knew that I was in trouble.
Alice Ashenfelter said innocently, “It looks like you have a flat tire.”
I can cope with most of the functions necessary to maintain a car. I can change a tire. The only thing is that it involves more effort and more groveling on the ground than it would for a man with two good legs. On a damp surface in my gray worsted suit, it was a prospect that I think justified the mild obscenity I uttered.
The girl said, “I’ll fix it. Where do you keep your tools?”
I considered the offer. I had a pretty strong suspicion that she’d let down the tire. To accept her help would put me under some kind of obligation. Yet try to get a garage to send out a man on a Friday in the rush hour and see how long you have to wait.
I hauled myself upright and unlocked the boot, intending to do the job myself, but her two hands were quicker than my one at lifting out the jack. She didn’t need any help in assembling it, either.
“I can manage without your help,” I said.
“It’s too damn cold for that kind of he-man crap,” said she. “Would you hand me the wrench, please?”
I found myself smiling, and that was fatal. I succumbed to the logic of what she had said. She quickly and competently got on with the job. While she was jacking up the car I unfixed the spare and later I fastened the flat in its place, so I didn’t feel totally redundant.
Before she’d finished, I knew I had to offer her a lift at the least. I was prepared to bet she’d let the tire down in the first place, but after her Good Samaritan act, I couldn’t drive off and leave her standing in the rain in the deserted car park.
I offered to take her to a pub where she could wash her hands. She got in and we drove to one on the London Road where I was pretty sure we wouldn’t meet anyone from the university. When she came out of the ladies’, I bought her a lager and lime.
“Now, would you like to tell me what that was about?” I asked.
“Couldn’t we just pass a little time getting to know each other?”
“Is that important?”
She stared at me earnestly through her gold frames. “It’s normal, isn’t it?”
“All right. Tell me what you’re doing in England.”
“Vacationing.”
“In October?”
“A late vacation.”
“Catching up on the history or just the history lecturers?”
She reddened and looked into her drink. “That isn’t fair and I resent it.”
“You mean, there’s something special about me?”
She didn’t answer. She was fingering the end of her plait like a small, sulky girl. Her hair was parted in a perfectly straight line down the center of her bowed head. She was a true blonde.
“Maybe I imagined that you were pursuing me,” I suggested. “Is it the onset of paranoia, do you think?”
She answered in a low voice, “I think you’re making this hellishly difficult for me.”
“If I knew what it was, I might be able to help. If you’re in some kind of trouble, I can probably put you in touch with people who will help you.”
She looked away and said petulantly, “Give me a break, will you?”
So we lapsed into silence for an interval.
Finally I made signs of moving and said, “Where are you staying? Can I give you a lift?”
She shook her head. “There’s no need. I know where I am now. It’s no distance from here.”
“I’ll be away, then. Thanks for your work on the tire.”
She moved her hand a short way across the table, as if to detain me, then thought better of it and curled it around her glass. “I’ll come here at lunchtime tomorrow. Could we try again?”
I stared at her, mystified. “Why? What’s the point? What are we supposed to try for?”
She bit her lip and said, “You scare me.”
I didn’t know what response to give. Clearly it wasn’t meant as a joke. I shook my head to show that I was at a loss and got up.
“Lunchtime tomorrow,” she repeated. “Please, Theo.”
Y
ou know the impression Alice Ashenfelter made on me, so I’m not going to explain why I didn’t meet her at the pub in Reading on Saturday morning. It must have got through to you by now that I’m not your obliging English gentleman. I just eat like a gentleman. I drove into Pangbourne and did my Saturday shopping at the grocer’s (we still had one), half a cooked gammon, some duck pâté, a dozen new-laid eggs, and a fresh melon. Mindful of Saturday night, I picked up a bottle of champagne from the off-license and waited at the garage while my flat tire was inspected. As I had anticipated, they didn’t find a puncture. They suggested that there might be a fault in the valve, and I undertook to check the pressure in a day or two. I forgot all about it after that.
The rugby international on the BBC’s
Grandstand
occupied me agreeably for most of the afternoon. That evening I took my current girlfriend, Val Paxton, a staff nurse at Reading General, to the Odeon to see
A Hard Day’s Night.
Neither of us enjoyed it much. The best I can say is that the facile story line was made bearable by some memorable songs and witty dialogue. Val, who wasn’t crazy about the Beatles, would have opted for Losey’s
King and Country
at the ABC movie theater, but I didn’t want to spend my evening at a court-martial. If you think that’s a deplorable attitude for a history lecturer to take to one of the most powerful dramas ever made of the first world war, you’re dead right, chum. You’re right and I’m honest, okay?
Afterwards, over a drink, Val told me she’d been thinking about our relationship, and we didn’t have much going outside the bedroom. Plain speaking: that’s what you get from a nurse. She said her time off-duty was too precious to fritter on things she didn’t enjoy. She’d been thinking all through the film that something was badly wrong if we both sat there bored for a couple of hours. I asked her what she’d rather have been doing and she said dancing. A great suggestion to make to a guy with a stick.
After that I passed a few comments on the nursing profession and their priorities, and we were soon trading insults. It got worse. This wasn’t one of those evenings when a stand-up row ends in a passionate reconciliation. It ended with a curt good night at the gate of the nurses’ residence.
It was some time after eleven-thirty when I put the car away and came around the front of the house. When I mentioned earlier that I live by the river at Pangbourne, you probably made the reasonable assumption that I meant the Thames. Anyone hearing of the River Pang would probably place it in China or Burma, but believe me, it has its source in the Wessex Downs and takes a gentle U-shaped course through rural Berkshire for twelve miles or so before joining the Thames from the south at Pangbourne. The Pang is the river that runs past the end of my garden. “River” is perhaps an exaggeration; in reality it’s more of an ancient trout stream. The point of telling you this is that my location is more remote than you might have imagined. I’m not isolated, mind—there are three houses within shouting distance—but we don’t see many strangers. Which is why I was surprised when my stick touched an obstruction on the garden path that turned out to be a rucksack.
I might easily have fallen over the thing. She’d left it against the mud scraper that I keep by my front door. You’ll have gathered that I was not in much doubt about the ownership. Even by moonlight I could see a handkerchief-size Stars and Stripes stitched to the flap. Yet Alice Ashenfelter wasn’t in sight.
With my Saturday night already in ruins, I wasn’t feeling well disposed towards the fair sex. I took a long breath, found my key, and let myself in without bothering to check whether she was somewhere in the garden. Didn’t look round or call out. Closed the door behind me, went into the kitchen, and put on the kettle for my coffee.
I didn’t expect her to go away. If for some reason she hadn’t seen me come in, she’d certainly notice the lights go on. She’d knock at the door any second, and I’d have to be mentally tough to ignore her. The trouble was that I’m easy prey to her sort of tactics. I knew that if I didn’t respond, I’d spend the rest of the night wondering how she’d cope in the open on a Saturday night in my remote corner of Berkshire.
My imagination turned morbid. I pictured myself in the Coroner’s Court at Reading trying to explain why I’d callously closed my door on a young visitor to England who was known to me, had helped me change a wheel only the evening before, and had asked nothing more from me than a civil conversation; who, in consequence of my inhospitality, had taken to the road, hitched a lift with a vanload of drunken pop musicians, been sexually abused, and then thrown from the moving vehicle, fatally fracturing her skull. I could even see her parents, over from Waterbury, Connecticut, for the funeral, red-eyed with grief, staring at me across the grave, unable to understand how any fellow human could be so stony-hearted.
To break this unproductive chain of thought, I switched on the television and got a bishop giving the epilogue. It was so timely that I laughed out loud. For God’s sake (as the bishop had just remarked), just when I’d been given the elbow by one girl, another was at my door. What was I bellyaching about?
I turned off the bishop, took a sip of coffee, and considered the options. Already it was midnight. If Alice Ashenfelter had come on a visit, she was planning to stay the night. You’ve heard of the swinging sixties, but, believe me, for Reading in 1964, she was far ahead of her time.
Was it my manly charm that had brought her here? I was once told that some women are powerfully attracted to cripples—and who was I to object?—only I’d yet to have it confirmed. I’d always assumed it was dreamed up by some guy with a game leg.
