‘She’s like married. That was all a long time ago.’
‘It’s about time you got someone else mate. You’re pulling in enough money. You want to get yourself a girlfriend before you do your eyesight some permanent damage. How are we getting there? Tractor? Coracle?’
‘I’m driving,’ I said.
‘Count me in. I’ve always wanted to spend a night with the yokels. Can I dress casual?’
‘Do you ever do anything else?’
‘Not for your sake mate. I just wouldn’t want to give poor old Roger too much of a shock.’
‘I think he can cope with you,’ I said.
‘You never know,’ said Dermot, with an evil little grin.
IV
Bewdley is a fairly large town masquerading as a small village. The river Severn runs through it, and over it at some times of year. After crossing the Severn by way of the old narrow bridge I drove around the church. You have to, as the church was built in the middle of the road, with one lane on each side of it. For Bewdley, it’s not inconvenient enough to have a river running through the middle of the town. They also have to have a church in the middle of the main road.
Thanks to the river, which allowed goods to be transported from other towns, Bewdley was one of the major English towns until those new-fangled canals were invented. Compared to rivers, canals had the advantages of going to the right destination and not breaking their banks. As canals – and then railways – became the main mode of transporting goods, Bewdley dwindled and Birmingham grew like a tumour.
In response, Bewdley reinvented itself and became picturesque. Now every shop sells antiques, most of them good-quality new ones. The roads are narrow, as they were designed for traffic with hooves, and there are often long queues. When the river floods people come from Kidderminster and Kingswinford to stand and watch water misbehaving. The houses closest to the river are always up for sale.
I left the car on the Pay and Display car park, which was free in the evenings, and Dermot and I walked along the river to Tina and Roger’s house. Their house was Georgian and damp, as are most of the riverside houses. It had a step up to the front door, but not a high enough one to avoid the floods. Twice a year they’d have to move everything to the top floor and then spend a week going through the house with the scrubbing brushes and the detergent. Whenever the river Severn visited it brought a lot of things with it, and it left a lot of them when it went. There was a tidemark on the outside wall at about waist height. When it rained heavily in Wales, Tina and Roger would start hauling furniture upstairs.
It often rains heavily in Wales. I know that from my time in Borth. Sometimes there would be more water in the sky than in the estuary.
Dermot was unimpressed with Bewdley.
‘I thought it’d be more, you know, more countryside. It’s like Stourbridge.’
‘It’s Georgian.’
‘It’s like Stourbridge but older. And what’s with these fucking shops? They all sell antiques. Do they eat antiques round here? Or are they all off in the fucking fields hunting down potatoes? Who lives out here?’
‘Tina and Roger.’
‘I notice you always put them in that order. Here,’ he said, alarmed. ‘There are ducks in the road.’
‘There’s a river there,’ I said, pointing to it.
‘I can see the fucking river. Why aren’t the ducks down there in the water?’
‘Maybe they fancied a change.’
‘I’m happy for them. Do they bite?’
I looked at him.
‘Are you scared of them?’
‘I’m scared of nothing.’
Despite his claim, he gave the ducks – a couple of mallards – a wide berth.
‘You’re scared of ducks,’ I said. ‘How are ducks going to hurt you?’
‘You’re scared of mirrors,’ he said. ‘That makes more fucking sense does it? Where are the trees? We’re in the countryside and all I can see is shops and a river. Where’s all the nature?’
‘All directions. You have to walk to it.’
‘Where are we, the middle fucking ages? No one walks anymore. Even you don’t walk. We’re in the nineties now, nature wants to get its arse in gear.’
‘This is their house.’
Dermot checked it out.
‘Looks alright,’ he said.
Tina let us in. She was wearing a loose flowing thing from the Gap. Roger was dressed in a collection from French Connection, as usual. He didn’t look anything like a lecturer; all of the other ones I’d encountered were of the leather-elbow-pad variety.
They’d painted the inside of their house the colour of gentlemen’s studies in old films. It looked warm and amber, with a density of light you almost had to push your way through. Tina went in for rugs with a lot of dark red in the patterns. Carpets were pointless as you couldn’t get them upstairs quickly enough when the river came in unannounced. They seemed to have a lot of dark wood furniture, until you looked more closely and realized how little there was. A table with four ladderback chairs, a cabinet with a small television (they only had terrestrial channels, and only four of those), a small chest of drawers with framed photographs on the top. There was no sofa, no armchairs, nothing that’d take a lot of hoisting up the stairs when the Severn started getting too lively.
I’d seen the kitchen on previous visits and I knew that all of the cupboards were mounted at head height, well above the high-tide mark. They kept the fridge/freezer on the upstairs landing and the washing machine in a spare room upstairs. The small electric oven could be manhandled up the stairs with the help of the neighbours. Even after everything had been moved above the high water mark, the house was uninhabitable until the water level dropped. There would be no electricity until the river stopped having its fun and got itself back where it belonged. The presence of three feet of water dropped the temperature by several degrees, and the water wasn’t clean.
In the film Titanic, when the sea finally pops in it’s a nice fresh shade of blue. It looks chlorinated. The floodwaters in Bewdley were the colour of shit, not without reason.
It all seemed a lot of trouble to put up with for the sake of living somewhere picturesque.
Dermot settled himself into one of the ladderback chairs.
‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘Got a touch of the Sherlock Holmes to it. Sorry, we haven’t been introduced, our Mickey doesn’t do manners. I’m Dermot, a friend of Mr. Aston here. I know you’re Tina and you’re Roger, and you knew him when he was a student. Did he have any manners then?’
‘No,’ said Tina. ‘He was hopeless. Wouldn’t hold a door open for you, wouldn’t offer to carry things.’
‘It was 1983,’ I said. ‘Men weren’t allowed to hold doors open. It was sexist. It was politically incorrect.’
‘And that died a death, didn’t it?’ asked Dermot. ‘Now we’re right back where we were before all that. Still, kept us on our toes for fifteen years.’
‘We’ve had plenty of things doing that,’ said Tina. Roger arrived with an open bottle of wine, an aged French one. The name meant nothing to me. No doubt he’d had it breathing somewhere. Roger knew his wines. If they’d lived somewhere less