Raw Silk (9781480463318) by Burroway Janet

Author:Burroway, Janet [Burroway, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6331-8
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-12-19T22:55:00+00:00

14

THE MINI BROKE DOWN on the way back to St. Margaret’s. It had been coughing and stalling for a few weeks, scarily sluggish passing on an uphill grade, corroding gangrenously at the points and in need of nightly transfusion from the recharger. But this time it quit dead. I’d pulled out around an empty farm truck to find myself facing an articulated lorry lumbering over the rise. There was time to get back but not through, which ought to have been evident to the farmer; it was not. He leaned on his brakes, which meant I had to slam mine, pump at them and snake back behind his swinging tailgate. I overshot and stalled on the grass verge, and the mini wouldn’t start again.

“The battery’s dead,” Jill opined.

“It can’t be. We’ve been on the road for twenty miles, and that recharges it, see? It’s more likely to go dead when it’s been sitting.”

“We’re out of gas?”

“Filled it yesterday.” I pumped, choked and revved, let it sit in case I’d flooded it, then pumped and revved again until the battery ran down like a record player and came finally round to Jill’s first opinion.

“It doesn’t want to,” she emended now.

“Honey, I think you’re right.”

I raised the bonnet, a purely formal matter, since I did not really expect to see more than a mucky maze of inert guts.

“Well, it looks to me like we’re going to hitch. Are you up to it?”

“Sure.”

There was a choice to make. We were four or five miles from the village of Plunkton Green and fifteen from St. Margaret’s. We could either take the bags and hitch ponderously all the way, or we could leave them and go just as far as a tow truck. I put it to Jill.

“I’d miss assembly if we wait to get it fixed, wouldn’t I?”

“You may miss it anyway, but we can try if you like.”

“Yes, please.”

I slammed the bonnet and dragged out the two-suiter, the overnighter and the carrier bag. “Look, honey, do you mind missing assembly, or do you just think you ought to be there?”

She considered, one toe scratching an ankle, pigtails hanging like streamers from the monk-ugly shape of the St. Margaret’s hat. “I’d be embarrassed,” she conceded. “So I’d mind.” A real answer.

“Let’s go, then.” I took the suitcases and she the bag, and we started off through brown furze that was alternately bristly and puddly. At the first rise I dug out clean socks and Wellingtons for Jill, but I had no change of shoes, and began to feel the foam lining of my loafers squish like cold sponge. It did not seem to me a matter for serious belief that passing drivers, of whom there were a dozen in ten minutes, should race on by the spectacle of a fraught matron trying to close a suitcase on a country stile, and a uniformed gamin in plaits waving a Wellington boot. But then I was raised in California.

“Sod bugger!” I yelled after the dozenth. Jill ignored me and pulled on the boot.

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