Mrs. God Read Online Free

on your way.”
    Standish wondered if all over England people played tunes at you with their voices.

two
    D riving on the left, so counter to his instincts, elated him. Like all driving it was largely a matter of fitting in with the stream. Standish found that it took only a small adjustment to switch on the radio with the left hand instead of the right, to pass slower cars on the wrong side—but he was not sure how long this control would last in an emergency. If the car ahead of him blew a tire or began to skid … Standish saw himself creating a monumental crack-up, a line of wrecked smoking cars extending back a mile. His heart was beating fast, and he smiled at himself in the rearview mirror. He was tired and jet-lagged, but he felt foolishly, shamelessly alive.
    Only the roundabouts gave him trouble. The stream of traffic swept him into a great whirling circle from which drivers were to choose alternate exits marked by a great spoke-like diagram. At first Standish could not tell which of the spokes was his, and drove sweating around the great circle twice. When at last he had seen that he wanted the third of the exits, he found himself trapped in the roundabout’s inner lane, unable to break through the circling traffic. He went around once more, straining to look over his shoulder, and set the windshield wipers slapping back and forth before he located the turn indicator. As soon as he began to move out of his lane several horns blared at once. Standish swore and twisted the wheel back. Around once more he went, and this time managed to enter the stream of cars on the outer edge of the roundabout. When he squirted into the exit his entire body was damp with sweat.
    Twenty-five miles further north, the whole thing happened all over again. His map slipped on the seat, and he panicked—he was supposed to stay on this northbound motorway, but at some point he did have to turn off onto a trunk road, and from that onto a series of roads that were only thin black lines on the map. He drove around and around and doubt overwhelmed him. His turn indicator ticked like a bomb. Sweat loosened his grip on the wheel. At last he managed to penetrate the honking wall of cars and escape the roundabout. He pulled off to the side of the road and scrabbled amongst the maps strewn on the floor. When he had the proper map in his hands, he could not locate the roundabout he had just fled. It did not exist on the map, only in life. His earlier feelings of relaxation and purposefulness mocked him now. They were illusions; he was lost. At length the desire to weep left him and he calmed down. He found a roundabout on the map, an innocuous gray circle, which almost had to be the one he had just escaped. He was not supposed to get off the motorway for another sixty miles, where a sign should indicate the way to Huckstall, the village where he picked up the next road. He would not have to brave any more roundabouts. Standish pulled out into the traffic.
    After a time, the landscape became astonishingly empty. Dung-colored bushes lay scattered across flat colorless land. Far away in the distance was a gathering of red brick cottages. Standish wondered if this might be Huckstall.
    He looked at the tiny village through the passenger window and saw a pale face pressed against a second-floor window, a white blur surrounded by black just as if—really for all the world, Standish thought, just as if a child had been imprisoned in that ugly two-story building, walled up within the red brick to stare eternally toward the cars rushing past on the motorway. Smaller white blotches that might have been hands pressed against the glass, and a hole opened up in the bottom of the child’s face, as if the child were screaming at Standish, screaming for help!
    He quickly looked away and saw that a low black hill had appeared before him on the right side of the motorway. Bare of vegetation, the hill seemed to fasten onto the empty landscape