The Malcontenta

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Kathy could feel the tension in Gordon Dowling at her side, and it irritated her unreasonably. They were only going to London, for God’s sake. He had developed this frown as the landscape had changed from the rolling countryside of the green belt into the constipated clutter of the outer suburbs, and the frown had deepened and his nose developed a nervous twitch as they had worked their way further into south London. ‘Do you get up to London much?’ she had asked at one point, and he had answered in a tight monosyllable, ‘Once.’ It was unbelievable. He had spent his whole life in the southern counties, and he had only been to London once.

What really irritated her was that she was getting edgy too. She had probably made a mistake picking the B road across country to Westerham. She had done so because of the gleeful warnings on Radio I of jams on the M20, A21 and M25. Snow had begun falling during the night, just when everyone was beginning to feel that spring couldn’t be that far away. At first it had seemed charming, turning the brown countryside pristine white and the villages into winter postcards. But then the fall had become heavier, the sky blacker. By the time they reached the outskirts of London a dark gloom had settled, and the Saturday morning traffic, headlights blazing, had become paralysed in a morass of slush and minor accidents. When they reached the south circular and found it locked solid, they had come less than forty miles in one and a half hours and felt as if they had entered an alien country.

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