‘Not that,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘The stars!’
I leant forward in my seat to peer through my windscreen, but it was so fogged with my own breath that I couldn’t make anything out.
He knocked on my window again.
‘What?’ I snapped.
‘Come and have a look!’
I shook my head. ‘No, thanks, I’m fine!’
I tried to start my engine again, but the whining noise continued.
‘What’s your name?’ he shouted.
I sighed. ‘Margot.’
‘Margot, I think you’ve flooded your engine!’
‘Yes, you said!’
‘Well, I can’t fix it while the engine’s hot. If we wait twenty minutes or so, I can have you back on the road.’
‘You can fix my car?’
‘I can indeed! We have to wait for the engine to cool, though!’
‘Oh.’
‘Would you like to see the stars, Margot?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime astral event!’ His face was so wide with excitement and his enthusiasm so earnest that I put my hazard lights on, checked my wing mirror and got out of the car. The February air was freezing; it stung my cheeks.
‘Come with me,’ he said, and he walked back into the middle of the road, illuminated now by the headlights of my car and the dancing rays of my hazards. ‘Look’ – he pointed – ‘look.’
I followed him down the embankment, but I didn’t go onto the road. I looked up and I couldn’t believe it. There were stars. More stars than I thought possible.
A Van Gogh sky hung above us. It seemed to wrap right around the earth.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.
‘See how the trident there and the bow are almost on top of one another?’ he said. ‘This almost never happens. It’s to do with the axis of the earth.’
‘So this is why you were standing in the middle of the road?’ I asked.
‘Of course. It’s once in a millennium that you get to see something like this.’
‘I might’ve hit you. You were just … right there, no torch, nothing. You might’ve been killed.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I find that people always stop.’
We stood watching the stars in silence. I almost expected them to start moving, as though we might be able to actually see the earth rotating. All that time in London with the smog and the light pollution had knocked the idea of stars right out of my head; I couldn’t quite believe that what I was seeing was real and not in fact a series of bright bulbs shining through dark blue velvet.
‘I’m awfully sorry about your car,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the sky. ‘Please know I will pay for any damage.’
I thanked him.
‘And I’m sorry to have scared you,’ he said. ‘I don’t meet many drivers on this road, but I must say, I am out earlier than usual.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Margot,’ he said, ‘it is, as I told you, a once-in-a-lifetime astral event!’
The night was still, and the fear and dread from nearly hitting him had been drained out of me by the mere sight of the sky.
‘I can see how you got carried away looking at it,’ I said.
‘Oh, I could watch the stars for ever,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even bring my telescope. I just wanted to see it. As it is for me to see.’
My car waited behind us. The battery was probably being run down by the headlights.
‘What if another car comes?’ I asked.
‘Then it will be an expensive evening of repairs for me!’ He laughed as though this were the funniest thing anyone had ever said.
‘Do you do this every night?’
‘Often my roof will suffice, but this deserved proper attention. It was worth it, don’t you think?’
‘But don’t you feel scared out here all alone in the dark?’
He smiled at me then. ‘Not at all, Margot. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’
He didn’t fix my car. After twenty minutes of quiet stargazing, he lifted the bonnet and tinkered, umm-ing and ahh-ing while I shivered and stared at him and at the sky.
In the end, he took off the handbrake and wheeled my poor car up onto the grassy embankment, promising he would have it towed in the morning by a mechanic friend who owed him a favour. So we walked towards Henley-in-Arden through the darkness. I kept to the grassy knoll at the side of the road, but Humphrey James, stargazer, strolled right in the centre, straight down the white line of the middle of the road like a tightrope walker, one foot in front of the other. I kept turning to check behind us, to make sure that a car wasn’t silently approaching.