The Scent of Dried Roses by Tim Lott

Author:Tim Lott
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141928425
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

I am around the same age, perhaps slightly older, and we are taking one of our pre-holiday camp trips, to a farmhouse in Scotland. We stop off first at Arthur and Olive’s council house in Acacia Avenue, Brentford, where they have recently moved from Chiswick. Inside, their house is more modern than ours – Ercol chairs with splayed beech legs, artist’s palette tables, a rod-and-ball sunburst clock. There is a Pacific maiden in the hallway and Tretchikoff’s Green Lady upstairs. In the bathroom, an Ascot water heater and pastel, multicoloured, wide-gauge Venetian blinds. Downstairs in the living room, a picture of a green sea that turns into white horses at the crest. A red soda siphon which is never used rests on the top of a miniature bar in the corner, decorated with sketches of cocktails. There is a ship in a bottle and a polished wood plaque that Jack and Jean gave Arthur and Olive as a souvenir from Tiverton or Swanage. It reads, ‘I may not always be right, but I’m never wrong.’

Olive and Arthur load Jilly and David into the car in which we are travelling, an Austin Cambridge shooting brake – it seems enormous to me. It is borrowed for the week and there are stickers in the shape of acute triangles on the back window that proclaim visits to Clovelly or Cowes or Folkestone.

The journey is arduous and boring. Jack drives; Arthur has not passed his test. The rest of us try to fill the hours by singing ‘Ten Green Bottles’, or ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, or ‘She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain’. We play games, I-Spy and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. The car radio plays Semprini, or Mantovani, or the Mike Sammes Singers, scatting blandly. We have to stop from time to time because Jilly becomes nauseous.

Half-way into the journey and we are driving across flat, endless moors touched by brushes of heather and rough grass. The car is in silence, as we have run out of diversions, and the sky, far larger than in London, is the colour of pencil lead. I stare out of the window at the electricity pylons strung out across the landscape like mechanical giants and thrill at the thought of the mysterious power that thrums down the lines from one tower to the next.

All of a sudden, it seems, there are two mysterious shapes on the horizon, so outrageously at odds with the surrounding landscape that they must have been placed there by the invading aliens that I have read about in imported copies of Amazing Stories, or Tales of the Unexpected. We draw closer and my eyes widen. Everyone else in the car seems indifferent or asleep. The shapes are clearer now; they are massive globes, metallic, which shine with reflected light. They unnerve me for some reason; they seem sinister. In their shadow, there are vast, rotating silver scoops pointed towards the sky.

I try to get someone to tell me what this apparition is amid the gorse and faint drumlins, this ridiculous conceit.

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