Of an Evening on a Decking, With Strangers

The Master and the Mrs had, by mid-afternoon, decided we were going somewhere. This was apparent from a number of telling signs: the great suitcase had been brought down from its high cupboard; the Mrs had put on what she calls travelling clothes, which are indistinguishable from her other clothes; and the rolling box had been brought to the front of the house in an attitude of forthcoming use. I was placed in it at twenty-seven minutes past three, with the alertness one reserves for events whose significance one has not yet established.

The journey ought to have been short. It was not. The small glowing tile, in a turn of events that has been the subject of subsequent commentary, had been instructed by the Master at some previous moment to avoid all roads requiring payment. The tile, being a literal-minded creature, obeyed. Each time it tried to deliver us, it was overruled. The journey grew steadily longer, in a manner resembling, to my untrained eye, a sort of unending. Eventually the Master, after a particularly grand declaration of being right about everything, examined the tile more closely and emitted a sound which I shall not reproduce here. The setting was re-twiddled. The world resumed its proper proportions.

We arrived at a hotel by the sea. There was no chef. There had not been a chef for some hours. The other guests had, in the absence of a chef, fetched bags of food from a place that smelled, on inspection, of the very particular brown-bag joy of chips that come thin and salty and not at all from these islands. The Mrs and the Master collected a pale wine, which the Mrs pronounced cheap and cheerful, yet not unpleasant — a verdict that contains, on reflection, the entire philosophy of her people.

We sat on a decking. The decking proved to be popular.

A couple from Bradford arrived with their own brown bags and a pair of dogs of compound design — a springador, the Mrs explained, being a creature that is part spaniel and part Labrador, which is to say a creature that combines a Labrador's appetite with a spaniel's susceptibility to it. Their names were Maisie and Monty. Maisie was the senior. Monty deferred. There was, between us three, the kind of brief and total understanding that the Master and the Mrs, for all their cleverness, have never quite managed with anyone.

After the people from Bradford came a couple from Liverpool with a labradoodle of advanced years, and then a number of people who turned out to know places the Master also knew, which is the way of these decks. Finally a Geordie arrived. The Master could not understand most of what the Geordie said, but the Geordie loved me with great clarity, and that, in the end, is all that matters.

Earlier in the afternoon, at a shop where the Master had purchased shirts he ought to have brought from home, we had been recommended a walk by a woman with a broken leg and three spaniels of her own. The walk was for tomorrow. Tonight was for the decking.

The Master, by his second glass, had pronounced no verdict on the wine. In his vocabulary, that is the verdict reserved for hotel Pinot Grigio. The decking compensated handsomely.