Margot and the Road
Warwickshire, February
1971 Margot Macrae is Forty Years Old
The A4189 between Redditch and Henley-in-Arden is winding, long and lonely. It’s worse in the dark. The winters in London were never as cold as those I experienced in the countryside. In London there are all those tall buildings and bright lights to protect you, whereas out in the country you are exposed and vulnerable. If the pin in the map on the wall of Meena’s bedsit was still there, it pierced a spot just a few miles from where I was now driving, where I had found myself a job in a local library and settled into a small, quiet life.
I caught my own eye in the rear-view mirror and surprised myself with the fact that I now looked like a grown-up. I didn’t feel twelve years older than the Margot who had stepped off the train at Euston, alone and grieving, but I was.
And there I was, on the road, completely alone and in darkness. There were no cars ahead to follow and no cars behind to reassure. I went up a steep hill where leafless trees clawed up to the sky like grasping hands. I followed my headlights around another corner, and noticed briefly that the grass either side of the road was being blown about by the wind. A leaf flew past my window and I wondered for a moment if it were a bird, thrown out of control by the heavy winds. Spots of rain announced themselves on my windscreen and I turned on my wipers. Wipe, wipe. I kept my eyes on the road; I wasn’t far from Henley now. There was nothing to be afraid of. Wipe, wipe. I drove on, curling around another corner and past the old church. In the night, the place looked haunted.
The darkness rose up around my little car, and anything not illuminated by my headlights waited in the black unknown.
Around another corner – the empty hedgerows shivered against the wind and I leant closer to the steering wheel. I reached a straight section – the last part of the journey before Henley would be in sight. I was just starting to relax when my headlights lit up the dark figure of a man standing in the middle of the road. A man I was about to hit with my car. He didn’t move and for the briefest of seconds, neither did I. The shock of seeing him arrested my brain, but then my foot took over, pushing the brake with all my strength. My car swerved to the left. I jabbed at the horn, trying to gain control of the wheel. He turned then, and took a large step onto the grassy embankment by the side of the road. My engine stalled, or cut out, and I stopped, my front left wheel joining him at the edge of the road.
It must not have taken more than a few seconds for all that to happen, but it felt like it happened very, very slowly. I sat motionless for a moment. On this empty, seemingly endless stretch of road, he was standing dressed entirely in black. Apparently unafraid.
I tried to re-start my engine, but my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t get a grip on my keys.
He knocked on my passenger-side window and I screamed.
I grabbed at the ignition for my keys again, and this time I got them. The engine made a whining sound, but nothing happened. I pressed the accelerator and turned the key again, but nothing happened.
Then he was bending over and smiling at me. He knocked again. His face was not the face I thought it would have been. He was probably around fifty, with a ruddy nose, and a fisherman’s hat on. His hair was greying at the sides and sticking out in tufts from underneath.
‘Hallo!’ he shouted. ‘Terribly sorry to have scared you!’
I didn’t say anything. I turned my key hard, and a dry grunting came out of the bonnet.
‘I think you might have flooded the engine!’ he shouted at me through the window.
I still didn’t speak.
‘Try letting go of the keys a minute – the engine needs to rest before you try again.’
I did as he said. I was so full of adrenalin I probably could have abandoned the car and run home.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, peering through the glass and smiling inanely at me as though I were a zoo animal.
I nodded, hoping he would go away.
‘The name’s Humphrey!’ he cried, pointing to himself. ‘Humphrey James!’
‘What were you doing in the road?’ I shouted from the driver’s seat, finding my voice at last.
‘Sorry?’
‘The road, what were you doing in the road?’
He beckoned for me to get out of the car and join him.
I must have looked unsure.
‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, I don’t bite!’ he said. And then he laughed.
‘What were you doing in the road?’ I asked again.
He pointed up. I glanced at the ceiling of my car.