Chase the Morning

Dedication

To John Jarrold

The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,
The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder…
That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:
Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea…

Flecker, Hassan

Chapter One

I braked hard and pulled up; but the car in front of me shot through the lights just as they changed. I sat cursing myself as I watched those tail-lights dwindle away into the gathering gloom, and the other endless lanes of traffic come swarming out after them. The idiot in the flash German sport behind me beeped his horn, but I was too irritated with myself to pay any attention to him. There had been time, the half-second or so before the other lights changed; I could have put my foot flat down and raced through. I’d been close enough to the lights to get away with it, but this was a difficult, twisty junction, with lousy visibility on all four sides. All it would need was somebody else as impatient as me … Damn it to hell, I’d done the safe thing! But then that was me all over, wasn’t it? Safe driver; safe car; safe job; safe life …

Then why was I so furious? At work it hadn’t been the sort of day that leaves you snarling; it rarely was. Momentarily, idiotically, I found myself wishing it had been, that I’d had something to snarl at, to tussle with, to put a sharper flavour into the day. I raised my eyes to the skies, and at once forgot all my irritation. The sun had already left the ground in gloom, but it was lighting up a whole new landscape among the lowering clouds, one of those rare fantastic sunset coasts of rolling hills, deep bays, stretches of tidal sands, endless archipelagoes of islands in a calm estuary of molten gold. This one was made even more convincing by the shallow slope of the road; I might have been looking down from some steeper hill onto the real estuary. Except that that was far less picturesque, a flat, grim industrial riverside first laid waste when ships and shipbuilding boomed, then stricken a second time when they collapsed. None of the goods I dealt with passed through the docks here now; they were as dead as that skyscape was alive.

A horrible blaring discord of horns jolted me out of my dream. The lights had changed again, and I was holding up the queue. With a touch of malice I stabbed my foot down and shot across the gap so fast the glittering brute behind me was left standing. But the ring-road opened out into two lanes here, and in seconds he’d overhauled me and gone purring past with ruthless ease. I had a terrible urge to chase him, to dice and duel with him for pride of place, but I refused to give in to it. What was the matter with me? I’d always loathed the kind of moron who played stock-car on overcrowded commuter routes; I still did, come to that. No question of cowardice – it was other people that sort put at risk. Anyway, we were coming back into speed limits again. Another car whined past me, the same make, model, year as mine, the same colour even. I had to look closely to be sure it really wasn’t mine – and swore at myself again. Was I feeling the strain, or something? It had leopard-skin seats, anyway, and a nodding dog on the parcel shelf. At least mine didn’t; but right then it might as well have had, the way I felt about it, and about myself. Christ, I ought to be driving a Porsche too! Or something less crass – a Range Rover, a vintage MG even, something to stir cold blood a bit more than my neat sports saloon. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford to. If I was the real high-flyer everyone said I was, the wonder boy, shouldn’t I at least be getting a little more fun out of it – instead of stashing all my cash away in gilt-edge and blue-chip and just a little under-the-counter gold?