obviously been closed for years. Vince couldn’t imagine what kind of business Steve could have here.
‘Stay in the car, Vince,’ Steve said, leaping out athletically from the Discovery. ‘I’ll just be five minutes.’
It was turning into a long five minutes, Vince thought, as he waited for Steve to return. He suddenly found himself beset by another memory. It seemed as if the past was being peeled open before his eyes today. When he was a boy, a friend of his father’s had an allotment and in the summer he used to give them vegetables he couldn’t use from his over-abundant harvest – beetroot, runner beans, lettuces. Bob, that was his name. Uncle Bob. Vince’s father often drove over to Bob’s allotment in the evening in summer. They didn’t have a car, they had a van – Robert Ives – Plumber painted by a signwriter on the side. They were straightforward times, people didn’t feel it necessary to have clever names or slogans and straplines. (Strain the Drain he had seen on the side of a white van recently.)
One evening when Vince was perhaps six or seven years old, his father had taken him along in the van to Bob’s allotment.
‘See if he’s got any potatoes!’ his mother shouted after them as they pulled away from the kerb.
‘You wait in the van,’ his father said to Vince, parking at the entrance to the allotment. ‘I’ll just be five minutes.’ And Vince was left alone while his father went off, whistling, to find Bob in his shed on the far side of the allotments.
Late-summer twilight turned into dark. The allotments appeared to be deserted and Vince began to grow frightened. At that age he was easily scared by thoughts of ghosts and murderers and he was terrified of the dark. He sat there for what seemed like for ever, imagining all the dreadful things that might have happened to his father – and, worse, all the dreadful things that might be about to happen to him. By the time his father reappeared, still whistling, Vince was a quivering tearful wreck.
‘What you crying for, you daftie?’ his father said, his arms full with a huge lettuce and a bunch of Sweet Williams as well as the requested potatoes. ‘Nothing to be frightened about. You could have come and found me.’ Vince didn’t know that. Didn’t know he had free will or independence. He was like a dog – if he was told to stay, he stayed.
Bob was an older man, no family, and in return for the vegetables he was often invited for Sunday lunch. There were caveats from his father. ‘Don’t sit on Uncle Bob’s knee if he asks you to.’ It was true that Bob was always trying to cajole him into sitting on his knee (‘C’mon, lad, give your old Uncle Bob a cuddle’), but obedient Vince never did. His mother liked Uncle Bob – he was a laugh, she said. ‘Him and his shed, it makes you wonder what he gets up to in there.’
Vince hadn’t thought about Uncle Bob in years. He’d forgotten about the van altogether. Robert Ives – Plumber. He missed his father. Still, you shouldn’t leave a little child alone like that.
The clock on the Discovery’s dashboard informed him that Steve had been gone nearly half an hour. This was ridiculous, Vince could have walked to the Belvedere by now instead of sitting here like a lemon, twiddling his thumbs.
He had independence these days. He had free will. He didn’t always stay when he was told to stay. He got out of the Discovery. He left it unlocked and walked up the steps to Silver Birches. He went in.
Two-Way Traffic
Gdansk. Landed.
About time too, Andy thought. The plane had taken off two hours behind schedule and had made up hardly any of that time. He had seen its status drift from scheduled to delayed to estimated to expected as if it was stuck in some endless time-warp, a kind of cosmic holding-pattern. By eight o’clock in the evening Andy himself was in a black hole, having drunk four espressos and read the Mail from cover to cover in minutiae. He had even been reduced to attempting the Sudoku – at which he had failed miserably. It felt like days, not hours, since he had delivered the Thai girls to Silver Birches. One of them had struggled and Vasily had plucked her up and held her round her waist while she kicked and bucked in protest. She