The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

They inched through the town, the pavements jostling, the cheap bars flashing their signs, and Phil said, as she knew he would, “I think we made the right decision.” A journey of an hour lay ahead, and they speeded up through the sprawling outskirts; the road began to climb. When she was sure that the driver did not want conversation she eased herself back in her seat. There were two types of taxi man: the garrulous ones with a niece in Dagenham, who wanted to talk right the way out to the far coast and the national park; and the ones who needed every grunt racked out of them, who wouldn’t tell you where their niece lived if they were under torture. She made one or two tourist remarks: how had the weather been? “Raining. Now I smoke,” the man said. He thrust a cigarette right from the packet into his mouth, juggling a lighter and at one point taking his hands from the wheel entirely. He drove very fast, treating each swerve in the road as a personal insult, fuming at any holdup. She could feel Phil’s opinions banking up behind his teeth: now that won’t do the gearbox any good, will it? At first, a few cars edged past them, creeping down to the lights of the town. Then the traffic thinned and petered out. As the road narrowed, black and silent hills fell away behind them. Phil began to tell her about the flora and fauna of the high maquis.

She had to imagine the fragrance of herbs crushed underfoot. The car windows were sealed against the still, cool night, and she turned her head deliberately away from her husband and misted the glass with her breath. The fauna was mostly goats. They tumbled down the hillsides, stones cascading after them, and leapt across the path of the car, kids running at their heels. They were patched and parti-colored, fleet and heedless. Sometimes an eye gleamed furtive in a headlight. She twitched at the seat belt, which was sawing into her throat. She closed her eyes.

At Heathrow Phil had been a pain in the security queue. When the young man in front of them bent to pick laboriously at the laces of his hiking boots, Phil said loudly, “He knows he has to take his shoes off. But he couldn’t just have slip-ons, like the rest of us.”

“Phil,” she whispered, “it’s because they’re heavy. He wants to wear his boots so they don’t count as baggage.”

“I call it selfish. Here’s the queue banking up. He knows what’s going to happen.”

The hiker glanced up from the tail of his eye. “Sorry, mate.”

“One day you’ll get your head punched in,” she said.

“We’ll see, shall we?” Phil said: singing it, like a child in a playground game.

Once, a year or two into their marriage, he had confessed to her that he found the presence of small children unbearably agitating: the unmodulated noise, the strewn plastic toys, the inarticulate demands that you provide something, fix something, though you didn’t know what it was.

“On the contrary,” she said. “They point. They shout, ‘Juice.’”

He nodded miserably. “A lifetime of that,” he said. “It would get to you. It would feel like a lifetime.”

Anyway, it was becoming academic now. She had reached that stage in her fertile life when genetic strings got knotted and chromosomes went whizzing around and reattaching themselves. “Trisomies,” he said. “Syndromes. Metabolic deficiencies. I wouldn’t put you through that.”

She sighed. Rubbed her bare arms. Phil leaned forward. Cleared his throat, spoke to the driver. “My wife is chilly.”

“Wear the cardigan,” said the driver. He slotted another cigarette into his mouth. The road now ascended in a series of violent bends, and at each of them he wrenched the wheel, throwing the car’s back end out toward the ditches.

“How long?” she asked. “About?”

“Half hour.” If he could have concluded the statement by spitting, she felt he would have.

“Still in time for dinner,” Phil said encouragingly. He rubbed her arms for her, as if to give encouragement. She laughed shakily. “You make them wobble,” she said.

“Nonsense. There’s no flesh on you.”

There was a cloudy half-moon, a long scoop of fallen land to their right, a bristling treeline above them, and as he cupped her elbow, caressing it, there was once more a skid and slide, a rock shower rattling inconsequentially to the road before them. Phil was just saying, “It’ll only take me two minutes to unpack.” He was beginning to explain to her his system for traveling light. But the driver grunted, wrenched the wheel, stabbed the brakes and brought them lurching to a halt. She shot forward, jarring her wrist on the seat in front. The seat belt pulled her back. They had felt the impact but seen nothing. The driver swung open his door and ducked out into the night. “Kid,” Phil whispered.