The Last Weekend by Blake Morrison Page A

than she does — Em, who’s as tall as I am, scrunched up with her in the back. At university, Ollie had craved a car like this, with leather seats, a walnut dashboard and a soft top. But it seemed a bit desperate for a barrister with a late-teenage son. Had he bought it knowing or suspecting he was ill — a last indulgence?
‘Slow down, Ollie,’ Daisy said, her hair streaming behind her, ‘it’s blowy back here.’
‘I’m only doing sixty.’
‘It’s the last time you buy a sports car,’ she said, nearer the bone than she knew.
‘My dad used to drive an MGB,’ Ollie said, turning to me. ‘This could be his, in fact.’
‘The same model?’
‘The exact same car. They only made about 350. You see the chip in the glass of the oil gauge, there — I can remember that from childhood. That’s why I bought it, to tell the truth. Paid over the odds but it was worth it. Me sitting where my father sat — can you imagine?’
I couldn’t. But if deluding himself this was his father’s car made Ollie feel better, that was fine by me.
He was taking the back roads to avoid speed cameras, he said. All the roads round Badingley seemed to be back roads anyway, as if the budget for road-building had run out twenty miles inland. The landscape changed between each village — from deciduous woodland to pine forest, from scrubby heath to lush farmland, from reed beds to rolling hills. The sun sank in the west over Ollie’s shoulder. Side-on, circled by light, he looked like an emperor on a Roman coin. And Daisy, in the back, was a minted empress, her hair flying behind her.
I’d imagined big windows overlooking an expanse of sea. But the restaurant was in a side street, half a mile from the harbour, and our table was a corner table, under low rafters, with a view of a small walled garden run to seed. The tables were imitation-marble Formica, with knives and forks so flimsy a breeze might have blown them away. It was no more Daisy’s kind of place than the cottage was, but Ollie, who said he’d eaten here with his parents when they last came, seemed perfectly at home.
‘White?’ he said. I suggested a New Zealand Marlborough, but Ollie, hogging the wine list, said the only wines worth having were French.
‘Let me treat you,’ he said, before conspiring in whispers with the maître d’, who, despite the modest surroundings, wore a white jacket and black tie. I know nothing about winebut when the bottle was uncorked I turned the label my way: Château Laville Haut-Brion 1986, it said.
‘Christ, Ollie, it must be expensive.’
‘Not really,’ he said, then leaned across in a whisper. ‘I don’t think they realise what they should be charging.’
‘Tastes good,’ we all agreed.
I hadn’t noticed the other diners till then but they had certainly noticed us. They were mostly couples — men in white shirts and ties (their discarded tweed jackets hanging over their chairs), women in floral dresses with pinched waists and conical bosoms. Why were they staring? Had we made too much noise? Did they consider us underdressed? Or was it just me they’d taken against, a lowlife who didn’t belong with the likes of them? I clenched my fists beneath the table — then realised that what they were staring at was the blackboard above my head: Today’s Specials, chalked in a looping script. The prawn cocktail and scampi already had lines through them.
‘What do you fancy?’ I said to Em.
‘Guess,’ she said. ‘I know what you’re having.’
‘What?’
‘The tomato soup to start. Then the tuna.’
I nodded. It wasn’t hard for her to guess, since all the other starters involved shellfish and tuna was the nearest thing to steak.
‘And you’ll have the beetroot salad followed by cod,’ I said.
Beetroot salad being the only vegetarian starter apart from the soup, and cod being cod, even if it didn’t come with chips.
‘Spot on,’ Em said.
‘God, how sickening of you,’ Daisy said. ‘I can never predict