Colin Dexter - Last Bus To Woodstock

Several customers are standing along the right-hand side of the narrow shop. They flick their way through a bewildering variety of gaudy, glossy girlie magazines, with names that ring with silken ecstasies: Skin and Skirt and Lush and Lust and Flesh and Frills . Although the figures of the scantily clad models which adorn the covers of these works are fully and lewdly provocative, the browsers appear to riffle the pages with a careless, casual boredom. But this is the appearance only. A notice, in Mr. Baines's own hand, warns every potential purveyor of these exotic fruits that 'the books are to be bought'; and Mrs. Baines sits on her hard stool behind the counter and keeps her hard eyes upon each of her committed clients. The young man throws no more than a passing glance at the gallery of thrusting nakedness upon his right and walks directly to the counter. He asks, audibly, for a packet of twenty Embassy and slides his package across to Mrs. Baines; which lady, in her turn, reaches beneath the counter and passes forward a similar brown-paper parcel to the young man. How Mr. Baines himself would approve! It is a single, swift, uncomplicated transaction.

The young man stops at the Bookbinder's Arms across the road and orders bread and cheese and a pint of Guinness. He feels his usual nagging impatience, but gloats inwardly in expectation. Five o'clock will soon be here and the journey to Woodstock is infinitely quicker now, with the opening of the new stretch of the ring-road complex. His mother will have his cooked meal ready, and then he will be alone. In his own perverted way he has grown almost to enjoy the anticipation of it all, for over the last few months it has become a weekly ritual. Expensive, of course, but the arrangement is not unsatisfactory, with half-price back on everything returned. He drains his Guinness.

Sometimes he still feels guilty (a little) — though not so much as he did. He realizes well enough that his dedication to pornography is coarsening whatever sensibilities he may once have possessed; that his craving is settling like some cancerous, malignant growth upon his mind, a mind crying out with ever-increasing desperation for its instant, morbid gratification. But he can do nothing about it.

Prompt at 2.00 p.m. on Wednesday, 6 October, Mr. John Sanders is back in the formica shop, and once more the gyrating saw, whining in agony, can be heard behind the sliding doors.

On Wednesday evenings during term-time the Crowther household was usually deserted from 7.00 p.m. to 9.00 p.m. Mrs. Margaret Crowther joined a small group of earnest middle-aged culture-vultures in a WEA evening class on Classical Civilization; weekly the children, James and Caroline, swelled the oversubscribed membership of the Wednesday disco at the nearby Community Centre; Mr. Bernard Crowther disliked both pop and Pericles.

On the night of Wednesday, 6 October, Margaret left the house at her usual time of 6.30 p.m. Her classes were held about three miles away in the Further Education premises on Heading-ton Hill, and she was anxious to secure a safe and central parking-lot for the proudly sparkling Mini 1000 which Bernard had bought for her the previous August. Diffidently she backed out of the garage (Bernard had agreed to leave his own 1100 to face the winter's elements in the drive) and turned into the quiet road. Although still nervous about her skills, especially in the dark, she relished the little drive. There was the freedom and independence of it all — it was her car, she could go wherever she wanted. On the bypass she took her usual deep breath and concentrated inordinately hard. Car after car swished by her on the outside lane, and she fought back her instinctive reaction to raise her right foot from its gentle pressure on the accelerator and to cover the brake pedal. She was conscious of the headlights of all the oncoming cars, their drivers, she was sure, brashly confident and secure. She fiddled with her safety belt and daringly glanced at the dashboard to ensure that her lights were dipped. Not that she ever had them on full anyway, for fear that in the sudden panic of dipping them she would press the switch the wrong way and turn them off altogether. At the Headington roundabout she negotiated the lanes competently, and uneventfully covered the remainder of her journey.

When she had first considered committing suicide, the car had seemed a very real possibility. But she now knew that she could never do it that way. Driving brought out all her primitive instincts for safety and self-preservation. And anyway, she couldn't smash up her lovely new Mini. There were other ways. .

She parked carefully, getting in and out of the car several times before she was perfectly happy that it was as safely ensconced and as equidistance from its neighbours as she could manage, and entered the large, four-storied, glass-fronted building that ministered to the needs of the city's maturer students. She saw Mrs. Palmer, one of her classmates, starting up the stairs to Room C26.

'Hullo, Mrs. Crowther! We all missed you last week. Were you poorly?'

'What's wrong with those two?' asked James.

A quarter of an hour after Margaret's departure, Bernard Crowther had caught the bus down to Lonsdale College, where he dined one or two nights a week. The children were alone.

'Not unusual, is it?' said Caroline.

'They hardly talk to one another.'

'I 'spect all married people get like that.'

'Didn't used to be like that.'

' You don't help much.'

'Nor do you.'

'Wha' do you mean?'

'Ah — shut up!'

'You misery.'

'F— off!'

These days their conversation seldom lasted longer. With a few minor permutations and, in the presence of mum and dad, a few concessions to conventional middle-class morality, their parents had heard it many times. It worried Margaret deeply and infuriated Bernard, and each wondered secretly if all children were as vicious, ill-tempered and uncooperative as their own. Not that James and Caroline were uppermost in either parent's mind this Wednesday evening.

As one of the senior fellows of his college, Bernard had naturally been invited to the memorial jamboree for the ex-vice-principal who had retired the previous summer. The dinner was to begin at 7.30 p.m., and Bernard arrived in Peter's rooms with half an hour to spare. He poured himself a gin and vermouth and sat back in a faded armchair. He thought he liked Felix Tompsett — the old sod! Certainly he ate too much, and drank too much and, if many-tongued rumour could be believed (why not?), he had done a lot of other things too much. But he was a good 'college man'; it was on his advice that the college had bought up a lot of property in the early sixties and his understanding of interest rates and investment loans was legendary. Odd really, thought Bernard. He finished his gin and shrugged into his gown. Pre-prandial sherry would be flowing in the Senior Common Room, and the two friends made their way thither.

'Well, Bernard! How are you, old boy?' Felix's smile beamed a genuine welcome to his old colleague.

'Can't grumble,' replied Bernard lamely.

'And how's that lovely wife of yours?'

Bernard grabbed a sherry. 'Oh fine, fine.'

'Lovely woman.' Felix mused on. He had obviously begun to celebrate his own commemoration with pre-meditated gusto, but Bernard couldn't match his bonhomie. He thought of Margaret as the conversation burbled around him. . He tuned in again just in time to laugh convincingly at Felix's discovery of a recent inscription on the wall of the gents in the Minster bar.

'Bloody good, what?' guffawed Felix.

The party moved next door and sat down to the evening's feast. Bernard always felt that they had far too much to eat, and tonight they had far, far too much to eat. As he struggled his way through the grapefruit cocktail, the turtle soup, the smoked salmon, the tournedos Rossini, the gateau, the cheese and the fruit, he thought of the millions in the world who had not eaten adequately for weeks or even months, and saw in his mind the harrowing pictures of the famine victims of Asia and Africa. .