Harry felt a familiar tug on his heart whenever he saw the shape of a Triumph Herald. There was something about the way the rear quarter windows terminated in an acutely angled sloping point of glass that seemed to resonate within him indescribably. Besides, Harry felt no need to describe such a sensation because it did not encounter him all that often anymore. At least, that was the case until the first Thursday of January, when he finally acknowledged the faded burgundy Triumph that was parked at the end of his road, a few doors down from the house, since the morning of New Year’s Day. He had passed it six times on the way to the high street to fetch mother’s shopping.
Triumphs aren’t made anymore and Harry guessed that the car he could see from between the lace curtains that were drawn across the lounge bay windows was probably assembled towards the end of the cars’ twelve-year production lifespan, as it boasted the angular headlamp formation and horizontal grille slats that were not introduced until 1967.
To say that Harry was obsessed by the production history of the Triumph Herald would be an overstatement. It wasn’t fair to say that he was anything of a car enthusiast of any sort. His knowledge of automobiles was precisely confined to the Triumph on account of the fact that his older brother was killed in one some forty years ago. Different people grieve in different ways and Harry, who was ten at the time, chose to channel his into an interest with the vehicle, which, to his young eyes possessed an innocence that seemed to betray the very nature of the brutality of the accident.
He blinked away his momentary lapse into the past when he realised he could hear mother calling from her bed upstairs. Letting the curtain fall back to the vertical, Harry checked his watch. It was five after four in the afternoon, and mother always liked her cup of tea at four.
He called out ‘Tea’s nearly ready mother,’ before making his way to the kitchen, passing a pocket of warmth where the bar heater tried in vain to banish the chill from the house.
Somebody had been sitting in the car.
It was an aspect of the scene, framed by the window, that had somehow escaped him until now, and as he filled the kettle from the tap at the sink by the back window that looked out into a garden full of skeletal trees, he blinked quickly a few times, as through such a process would enable him to recreate the image of the old faded burgundy car in his head.
That someone had been sitting in the old Triumph Herald was not exactly much of a curiosity, but for the fact that now he thought about it, that person had been sitting in the car every time Harry had passed it, which had been several times over the last three days.
He placed the kettle on the sideboard and switched it on.
The occupant of the car had been a young man, sitting at the wheel. His face obscured by the reflection of the low winter sun that cut its way across the January sky to paint endlessly long shadows of trees, cars, people and houses onto the street.
Mother called out again but this time it wasn’t Harry’s name that slid weakly down the stairs, stripped of any tonal dynamism. It was Thomas, the name of her ex- husband, Harry’s father, who now lived in South America of all places. She didn’t remember things very well anymore. She had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for four years now, and had been bed-bound for four months, and sometimes she called her husband’s name instead. Occasionally she would call Harry a liar when he reminded her they were not together anymore. The symptoms of forgetfulness were to be expected, Harry thought. People grieve in different ways, and despite the debilitating disease that stole her powers of recognition, it may have been a truth she deliberately denied herself.
‘Just coming mother,’ Harry called back, as he dropped two spoonfuls of loose tea into the floral china pot that had been a part of the family for decades. In fact, Harry thought to himself; that teapot had been in the family for longer than his brother had. The very thought made the corners of his mouth turn down and caused a lump to develop in the depths of his throat.
A certain number of busy things need to fill one’s life in order for it to later become empty, Harry thought. He had always known this was true because everything exists in balance. To witness his mother’s once full life descend into a void and become a void itself was saddening. In a way the same was beginning to happen to him. With a bit of money put aside, he had quit his job at the Standard West Paper Company to look after his ailing mother. A single man throughout his life he often wondered how things would have been different if his brother had lived through the accident all those years ago. Would brotherly courage and buoyancy have created in Harry a more assertive character?
The kettle whistled now and he let it sit a moment before filling the pot. The hollow filling sound was as familiar to him as the sound of the engine of a Triumph Herald starting up. He found himself longing to hear that engine sound again, and wondered absently if he would be around when the owner of that car outside chose to put the key in the ignition and turn it.
After giving the tea a gentle stir and replacing the lid, Harry placed it onto a wooden tray. Also upon the tray he placed a small jug of milk, a strainer, a teaspoon and a china cup. Picking the tray up, he made his way through the house to the stairs.
As he passed the living room he paused, looking at the window in there, feeling that he would like to look out at that Triumph just one more time.
Instead, he went up the stairs.
'Mother there’s an old…’ he used his foot to push the bedroom door open wider so that he could fit through with the tray, ‘…an old Triumph Herald outside. It’s a little like the one he used to drive. Though I think his was a little older, and the colour is different. Mother?’
Mother lay still in her bed, her eyes staring blankly at the door as though she had been so eager to receive a tray of tea that she could force it to come quicker by sheer willpower alone. Harry dropped the tray when he realised what this meant. He barely registered the destruction of the old china pot as it hit the edge of the dresser and smashed into three or four large fragments. Tealeaves and brown water spilled onto the carpet, mixing with the toppled jug of milk to form a very unfortunate helping of tea indeed.
Mother was still and silent. He took her hand. It was warm. Her last breath had escaped from her lungs only moments ago and had he not been so slow and laboured about preparing her tea he would been here sooner. But, he thought, it was not the tea that held him up. It was the sight of the old Triumph sitting outside which had caused him to be late in its preparation. And as he looked at his mother, he realised deep down that her death was of course inevitable, and that bringing her tea on time would only have caused him to witness her sad passing first hand, not alter its inevitability.
Then a sound outside. The first sound he had heard in the last ten minutes, for no vehicles had driven along the quiet street outside in such a time. The sound was so very familiar, and expected, and timely.
Harry went to the window, his back to the room, and parted the lace curtains to look out to the street below. Though he could recognise the sound of the Triumph’s engine, the only other way to know it was coming from that car was the thin dark billowing smoke emanating from the fragile oscillating exhaust pipe.
Mother was standing on the pavement at the passenger side door. She was dressed in her gown, looking away in the direction of the high street.
Even though Harry could not clearly see, he was able to make out the young man inside the car as he reached over and opened the door for her. She eased it open wide, ducked her head slowly, smiled at the driver, and climbed in.
Once she was seated with the door closed, Harry watched as the driver put the car in gear, pulled out and accelerated smoothly away up the street.
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