April showers I hate especially.
However noncommittally Arthur grunted, the man seemed determined to talk to him. He wondered if he should get up and move to another table, but there didn’t seem to be one free in the whole cafeteria. He stirred his coffee fiercely.
Bloody April showers. Hate hate hate.
Arthur stared, frowning, out of the window. A light, sunny spray of rain hung over the motorway. Two months he’d been back now. Slipping back into his old life had in fact been laughably easy. People had such extraordinarily short memories, including him. Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped from the TV and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch.
One effect that still lingered though, was his joy at being back. Now that the Earth’s atmosphere had closed over his head for good, he thought, wrongly, everything within it gave him extraordinary pleasure. Looking at the silvery sparkle of the raindrops he felt he had to protest.
Well, I like them, he said suddenly, and for all the obvious reasons. They’re light and refreshing. They sparkle and make you feel good.
The man snorted derisively.
That’s what they all say, he said, and glowered darkly from his corner seat.
He was a lorry driver. Arthur knew this because his opening, unprovoked remark had been, I’m a lorry driver. I hate driving in the rain. Ironic isn’t it? Bloody ironic.
If there was a sequitur hidden in this remark, Arthur had not been able to divine it and had merely given a little grunt, affable but not encouraging.
But the man had not been deterred then, and was not deterred now.
They all say that about bloody April showers, he said. So bloody nice, so bloody refreshing, such charming bloody weather.
He leaned forward, screwing his face up as if he was going to say something about the government.
What I want to know is this, he said, if it’s going to be nice weather, why, he almost spat, can’t it be nice without bloody raining?
Arthur gave up. He decided to leave his coffee, which was too hot to drink quickly and too nasty to drink cold.
Well, there you go, he said and instead got up himself. Bye.
He stopped off at the service station shop, then walked back through the car park, making a point of enjoying the fine play of rain on his face. There was even, he noticed, a faint rainbow glistening over the Devon hills. He enjoyed that too.
He climbed into his battered but adored old black Golf GTi, squealed the tires, and headed out past the islands of petrol pumps and on to the slip road back towards the motorway.
He was wrong in thinking that the atmosphere of the Earth had closed finally and for ever above his head.
He was wrong to think that it would ever be possible to put behind him the tangled web of irresolutions into which his galactic travels had dragged him.
He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.
He drove on, humming, being wrong about all these things.
The reason he was wrong was standing by the slip road under a small umbrella.
His jaw sagged. He sprained his ankle against the brake pedal and skidded so hard he very nearly turned the car over.
Fenny! he shouted.