‘Are we taking the Jag?’ she asked. ‘No offence, but your other car stinks.’
I told her yes, and she was buzzing on the entryphone fifteen minutes later. Obviously she’d been lurking about the West End already.
‘Mum’s got me sniffing around,’ she said as she climbed into the Jag. ‘Looking for your revenant.’ She was wearing a black embroidered bolero over a red roll-neck jumper and black leggings.
‘Would you know a revenant if you saw one?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s a first time for everything.’
I wanted to watch her tuck her long legs under the dash, but I figured the temperature was high enough already. My dad once told me that the secret to a happy life was never to start something with a girl unless you were willing to follow wherever it led. It’s the best piece of advice he’s ever given me, and probably the reason I was born. I concentrated on getting the Jag out of the garage and setting a course for the South-West and the wrong side of the river again.
In AD 671, an abbey was founded on the high ground south of the River Thames in what is now Chertsey. It was your classic Anglo-Saxon establishment, half centre of learning, half economic power house and a refuge for those sons of the nobility who thought there was more to life than stabbing people with swords. Two hundred years later the Vikings, who never got tired of stabbing people with swords, sacked the abbey and burned it down. It was rebuilt, but the inhabitants must have done something to piss off King Edgar the Peaceable because in AD 964 he kicked them out and replaced them with some Benedictines. This order of monks believed in a life of contemplation, prayer and really big meals, and because they liked to eat this meant they never saw a stretch of arable land they didn’t want to improve. One of their improvements, sometime in the eleventh century, was to dig a separate channel for the Thames from the Penton Hook to the Chertsey Weir to provide water power for their grinding mills. I say the monk’s ‘dug’， but of course they drafted in some peasants for the hard labour. This artificial tributary of the Thames is marked on the maps as the Abbey River, but was once known as the Oxley Mills Stream.
I hadn’t told Beverley where we were going, but she twigged what we were up to as soon as we swung off the Clockhouse Roundabout and headed down the London Road for glorious Staines.
‘I can’t be coming down here,’ she said. ‘This is off my patch.’
‘Relax,’ I said. ‘This is sanctioned.’
It’s a weird thing that, despite being born and raised in London, there are large stretches of the city that I’ve never seen. Staines was one of those, despite technically not being in London, and to me it looked low-rise and countrified. After we crossed Staines Bridge I found myself on an anonymous stretch of road with tall hedges and fences blinding me on both sides. I slowed down as we approached a roundabout and wished that I’d invested in a GPS system.
‘Go left,’ said Beverley.
‘Why?’
‘You’re looking for one of the Sons of the Old Man?’ she asked.
‘Oxley,’ I said.
‘Then go left,’ she said with absolute certainty.
I took the first exit off the roundabout with that weird sense of dislocation you get when driving under someone else’s direction. I saw a marina on my left – bobbing rows of white and blue cruisers with the occasional long boat to break up the monotony.
‘Is that it?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘That’s the Thames. Keep going straight.’ We crossed a short modern bridge over what Beverley assured me was Oxley’s river and reached a strange little roundabout. It was like driving into the land of the munchkins, an estate made of little streets lined with pink stucco bungalows. We turned right, parallel to the river. I drove slowly in case some little bugger jumped out into the middle of the road and started singing.
‘Here,’ said Beverley, and I parked the car. When I got out she stayed in her seat. ‘I think this is a bad idea.’
‘They’re really very nice people,’ I said.
‘I’m sure they’re very civilised and all that,’ she said. ‘But Ty is not going to like this.’
‘Beverley,’ I said. ‘Your mum told me to sort things out, and this is me sorting things out. This is you facilitating me sorting things out. Only that’s not going to happen unless you get out of the car.’
Beverley sighed, unbuckled and climbed out. She stretched and arched her back, making her breasts strain alarmingly against her jumper. She caught me staring and winked. ‘Just getting the kinks out,’ she said.