‘Good gracious, Agatha dear, what is it? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost!’
‘No, dear Frances, I haven’t. I’ve just remembered what we said we would show the young man. You know…’
Miss Ponsonby, evidently used to such interruptions, put down her plate, and with a schoolmistressly tap on James’ knee, beckoned him to follow her.
‘I expect you’re wondering what it is you are to be shown,’ she said mysteriously, before a heavy door at the end of the hall. ‘Mind, Sir Rupert,’ this to a large Persian tom barring their way, as she adroitly moved him gently aside with her foot. ‘Agatha was most adamant that we find something of interest to a young man. We don’t get many visits from young men, you know, only the curate, and he’s scarcely a young man any more. Agatha thought you’d be bored by ladies’ chatter. Were you?’ She looked at him over her spectacles. Ladies’ chatter? James hoped he had not been transparent, and recollected guiltily his reluctant last-minute call to them only a few hours ago from a phone booth near Exeter. In that short time, the ladies must have moved heaven and earth to put this spread together in time.
‘Bored? Oh, no, not at all. It’s all…very interesting. And you have a lovely house– and wonderful food,’ he added, lamely, painfully self-consciously. It was what you said, wasn’t it, in the circumstances. Miss Ponsonby studied him.
‘Yes. Well…’ She sounded unconvinced. ‘Let’s see what you make of this. Watch your step. There’s no light in here.’
It was a garage. In the centre was a large shrouded vehicle, its tires just visible beneath a tarpaulin. Its shape under the sag of the cover suggested a car had been resident there for some time. The garage was clean; there was no oil on the floor. It could have been an exhibition room in a museum. Seeing James’ eyes light up, Miss Ponsonby lifted a corner of the tarp, and invited James to do the same. Revealed in all its glory was an immaculate jet black ‘Big Four’ twin-cam Riley Pathfinder, 2.4 litre with 110 horsepower on tap, twenty-two years old, barely ever driven, gleaming in chrome and rich in leather upholstery. Mounted on the ‘radiator’ grille then popular were twin RAC and AA badges, and beneath them, the distinctive number plate 29 AGA. For Agatha. How apt, he mused.
‘It has only 800 miles on the clock,’ said Miss Ponsonby. ‘We used to go to the shops in it, and once or twice to the seaside. Agatha never did learn to drive, and my arthritis made it necessary that I stop. I didn’t have the heart to sell it, despite many offers, so we keep it here. I show it to those who might appreciate it. You do like cars, don’t you?’
‘Like them? I love them!’ James caressed the car’s flank, seeing his reflection in the highly-polished paintwork. ‘Especially a car like this. They don’t make them like this any more. My first Pathfinder was a miniature Corgi police car. My dad bought it for me at Sears for my tenth birthday. I still have it somewhere. They were–are–lovely cars. May I?’ He opened the driver’s door.
‘Yes, of course. I’ll just see what Agatha is up to.’
James sat behind the outsize steering wheel. The car was so English in her understated styling, from her gleaming row of Smiths instruments, her bench front seat, which made it possible for three to sit abreast, unusual in a British car, to the idiosyncratic positioning of the floor-mounted gearshift beside the driver’s door. He imagined himself a Flying Squad officer like his English father, pursuing a stolen car, bell ringing and blue light flashing into the night. This avenging angel, this black beauty, Agatha, was defiantly female.
For years after that fateful encounter with the Riley, James was to cherish the memory of that moment. Long after his childless marriage to Cassandra had come to an acrimonious end, and the old ladies had been laid to rest beside Grannie in the village churchyard, James dreamt about the Pathfinder. He had learned of its owners’ deaths too late to enquire about her disposal, and had been too far away at any rate to intervene. Caught up in the whirlwind of opportunity a robust economy provided him in his native land, he proved to be highly successful at re-structuring businesses, masking a lonely sorrow with relentless activity. He had no reason to return to the land of his father’s birth until the opportunity arose to address fellow management consultants at a trade fair in London.
