Penny Vincenzi - The Best Of Times

“Please don’t go. I don’t want you to go.” And then, very quietly: “I don’t want to go either.” He put the car in gear, drove very fast out of the car park, down the road, towards Cirencester. He knew the whole area extremely well. Knew where there were lanes, quiet lanes, with gateways into fields where you could stop. And park. And turn to someone. And kiss them. Over and over again. And feel them kissing you back.

Later he said, “I knew, you know; I knew the minute I saw you.”

“Me too. ‘There he is,’ I thought, ‘there’s the One.’”

“And then what did you think?”

“I thought, ‘Oh shit.’ I said, ‘Oh shit.’”

“I thought the same. I thought, ‘There she is.’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, fuck.’ I said, ‘Oh, fuck.’”

“Because it’s rubbish, isn’t it? All that?”

“Course it is.”

“I mean, I’ve got Luke.”

“And I’ve got Amanda. I’m engaged to Amanda. Who’s…”

“Who’s beautiful. And so nice, I can tell.”

“Beautiful and so nice. But I don’t seem to love her. Not like I thought I did.”

“And then there’s Luke. Who’s such a dude and so nice. But I don’t seem to love him either. So… what do we do?”

“Explore it a bit,” said Barney. “We have to; it’s the only thing to do.”

They did; they explored each other. But quickly. One long evening, talking, talking, talking. One long night, making love, hardly sleeping, in Emma’s flat. One long day, walking, talking, kissing, worrying; another evening talking, and one hurried, wonderfully awful fuck in a room at the hospital.

Like all lovers, they developed jokes, codes, secrets.

“Thanks for calling” meant “I can’t talk now;”

“Maybe tomorrow” meant “I miss you;”

“My pleasure” meant “I love you.”

And every time, every meeting led them nearer to being sure that this relationship, shared between them, was the one that mattered, and the other ones could not go on; and almost equally sure that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together.

What must it be like to be one of these people? Freeman thought, looking at the obvious trappings of wealth, on display even here, in this hospital cubicle: the laptop, the iPod, the silver-framed photographs by his bed, the huge plate of grapes, the box of chocolates from Fortnum & Mason, the pile of new hardbacks…

To know that if you wanted something you could almost certainly have it? To have gone to the best schools, the best universities, to have no doubt travelled widely, to drive the best cars, to wear the best clothes?

Pretty bloody good, he supposed (having known little of any of those things), but did it make you happy? Did it create a conscience? Or did it make you arrogant, ruthless, greedy for more?

“Sergeant Freeman, do sit down.”

He gestured at the chair by his bed.

“Glad you’re feeling better, sir. And that your leg is mending.”

“Not as glad as I am. Still bloody painful, though, I can tell you. I should be home in another day or two. Thank God. Er… I thought there were going to be two of you?”

“There are, sir. Constable Rowe is on his way. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Ah, here he is now.”

They went through the formalities, the reasons for choosing the M4, the exact location of the church, the late departure… “I wasn’t too well-seemed to have picked up a stomach bug, kept throwing up. All you need on your wedding day!”

“Not a hangover then, sir?”

“Lord, no, we hardly had anything the night before. Well, Barney had a few; I simply wasn’t feeling up to it.”

He was cheerfully up-front about being stopped by the police:

“Barney was driving, of course, going a hell of a lick, but then, we were very late. If we hadn’t been stopped, we’d have made it in time. Still… even bridegrooms aren’t above the law, I suppose, Sergeant?”

“Indeed not, sir. But… you did also have to stop for petrol, I believe?”

“Yes, we did. And I… well, I had to go to the loo again.”

“But… you didn’t need anything else, no oil, anything like that?”

“No, no, just the fuel.”

“Although… the CCTV shows you in a queue for the air line.”

“Ah, yes. Yes, we did… That is, we were… there.”

“Were you worried about the tyres, sir? Did you have any reason to think they needed checking?”

“No, no, in fact, they were new tyres. I was just being careful.”

“Very wise. So you didn’t think one might be soft, something like that? Which could, of course, have contributed to the blowout.”

“No, nothing like that. I just thought we should check them.”

“Even though you were so late?”

“Well… yes.”

“I see. Well… we may be mistaken, but again, according to the CCTV, you drove away… apparently… without doing so.”

He was a good actor; he didn’t look remotely rattled.

“Ah. Well… well, maybe we did. I… I went in to pay for the fuel, you see. It was all a bit of a blur. We were pretty stressed out, as you can imagine.”

“Indeed. But… try to remember, sir, it could be important.”

“Yes, I suppose it could. Yes. Look, I… I don’t want to get anyone into trouble. The thing is… Barney… you know my best man, Barney Fraser? Did he… did he explain about what happened?”

“Not as far as I can recall, sir, no.”

“Ah. Well, actually, you see, I… I did want to check the tyres. As I said. But he was so worried about how late we were… Well, it was his main duty, after all, to get me to the church on time… Anyway, he said there wasn’t time to check them, that we couldn’t wait, that they’d be fine, persuaded me to carry on…”

“Perhaps you didn’t see the latest report from Forensics?” said Constable Rowe as they drove down the lane. “The one that came in last week, while you were away, about the fragment of tyre with the nail in it?”

“Oh, yes,” said Freeman. “I saw it. Very interesting.”

“But… if that was the cause of the blowout, as Forensics seems to think, what was all that about whether or not he checked the tyre pressures?”

“There have to be some perks in this job, Rowe,” said Freeman, “and seeing little shits like that squirm is one of them.”

It was a great pity, as Linda Di-Marcello remarked, that Georgia looked like she did and did what she did. The tabloids all tracked her down, and there were two or three nightmare days when the story ran in most of them. Her hauntingly lovely little face, with its great dark eyes and wayward cloud of hair, sat above the caption, “M4 Mystery Girl,” or in some cases, “M4 Mystery Girl Found,” and then informed the reader not only that the mystery girl in the lorry was Georgia Linley from Cardiff, but that she was an actress who had just won a part in a new Channel Four drama and that she was on her way to her audition in London when the crash occurred.

There was a quote from Georgia, composed by Linda with damage limitation in mind, saying how sorry she was for any problems she might have caused, that she was unable to answer any questions about the crash because it was still under police investigation, that she had visited Patrick Connell in the hospital several times, that he was recovering well, and his wife and she had become great friends. All of which, as Linda also remarked, was true.

Just the same, it was acutely unpleasant for Georgia, and she continued to feel ashamed of herself, and, most of all, dreadfully anxious about starting work on Moving Away , and about how badly the other members of the production team might think of her.