The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

endless stretch of road, he was standing dressed entirely in black. Apparently unafraid.

I tried to re-start my engine, but my hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t get a grip on my keys.

He knocked on my passenger-side window and I screamed.

I grabbed at the ignition for my keys again, and this time I got them. The engine made a whining sound, but nothing happened. I pressed the accelerator and turned the key again, but nothing happened.

Then he was bending over and smiling at me. He knocked again. His face was not the face I thought it would have been. He was probably around fifty, with a ruddy nose, and a fisherman’s hat on. His hair was greying at the sides and sticking out in tufts from underneath.

‘Hallo!’ he shouted. ‘Terribly sorry to have scared you!’

I didn’t say anything. I turned my key hard, and a dry grunting came out of the bonnet.

‘I think you might have flooded the engine!’ he shouted at me through the window.

I still didn’t speak.

‘Try letting go of the keys a minute – the engine needs to rest before you try again.’

I did as he said. I was so full of adrenalin I probably could have abandoned the car and run home.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked, peering through the glass and smiling inanely at me as though I were a zoo animal.

I nodded, hoping he would go away.

‘The name’s Humphrey!’ he cried, pointing to himself. ‘Humphrey James!’

‘What were you doing in the road?’ I shouted from the driver’s seat, finding my voice at last.

‘Sorry?’

‘The road, what were you doing in the road?’

He beckoned for me to get out of the car and join him.

I must have looked unsure.

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of, I don’t bite!’ he said. And then he laughed.

‘What were you doing in the road?’ I asked again.

He pointed up. I glanced at the ceiling of my car.

‘Not that,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘The stars!’

I leant forward in my seat to peer through my windscreen, but it was so fogged with my own breath that I couldn’t make anything out.

He knocked on my window again.

‘What?’ I snapped.

‘Come and have a look!’

I shook my head. ‘No, thanks, I’m fine!’

I tried to start my engine again, but the whining noise continued.

‘What’s your name?’ he shouted.

I sighed. ‘Margot.’

‘Margot, I think you’ve flooded your engine!’

‘Yes, you said!’

‘Well, I can’t fix it while the engine’s hot. If we wait twenty minutes or so, I can have you back on the road.’

‘You can fix my car?’

‘I can indeed! We have to wait for the engine to cool, though!’

‘Oh.’

‘Would you like to see the stars, Margot?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime astral event!’ His face was so wide with excitement and his enthusiasm so earnest that I put my hazard lights on, checked my wing mirror and got out of the car. The February air was freezing; it stung my cheeks.

‘Come with me,’ he said, and he walked back into the middle of the road, illuminated now by the headlights of my car and the dancing rays of my hazards. ‘Look’ – he pointed – ‘look.’

I followed him down the embankment, but I didn’t go onto the road. I looked up and I couldn’t believe it. There were stars. More stars than I thought possible.

A Van Gogh sky hung above us. It seemed to wrap right around the earth.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘See how the trident there and the bow are almost on top of one another?’ he said. ‘This almost never happens. It’s to do with the axis of the earth.’

‘So this is why you were standing in the middle of the road?’ I asked.

‘Of course. It’s once in a millennium that you get to see something like this.’

‘I might’ve hit you. You were just … right there, no torch, nothing. You might’ve been killed.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘I find that people always stop.’

We stood watching the stars in silence. I almost expected them to start moving, as though we might be able to actually see the earth rotating. All that time in London with the smog and the light pollution had knocked the idea of stars right out of my head; I couldn’t quite believe that what I was seeing was real and not in fact a series of bright bulbs shining through dark blue velvet.

‘I’m awfully sorry about your car,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the sky. ‘Please know I will pay for any damage.’

I thanked him.

‘And I’m sorry to have scared you,’ he said. ‘I don’t meet many drivers on this road, but I must say, I am out earlier than usual.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Margot,’ he said, ‘it is, as I told you, a once-in-a-lifetime astral event!’

The night was still, and the fear and dread from nearly hitting him had been drained out of me by the mere sight of the sky.

‘I can see how you got carried away looking at it,’ I said.

‘Oh, I could watch the stars for ever,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even bring my telescope. I just wanted to see it. As it is for me to see.’

My car waited behind us. The battery was probably being run down by the headlights.

‘What if another car comes?’ I asked.

‘Then it will be an expensive evening of repairs for me!’ He laughed as though this were the funniest thing anyone had ever said.

‘Do you do this every night?’

‘Often my roof will suffice, but this deserved proper attention. It was worth it, don’t you think?’

‘But don’t you feel scared out here all alone in the dark?’

He smiled at me then. ‘Not at all, Margot. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’

He didn’t fix my car. After twenty minutes of quiet stargazing, he lifted the bonnet and tinkered, umm-ing and ahh-ing while I shivered and stared at him and at the sky.

In the end, he took off the handbrake and wheeled my poor car up onto the grassy embankment, promising he would have it towed in the morning by