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I said something about it being a shame, that it must have been nice once.
‘They’ve all got several identities,’ he said. ‘So that they get a few cheques each week from the social security.’
Having expressed my pride in being a taxpayer, I asked him the crucial question for any taxi-driver about his job: did he work nights? He reacted as the Transylvanian peasants in Dracula reacted to the approach of dusk. ‘A friend of mine’s just got over his broken leg,’ he said. ‘Broken in three places it was when his passenger stamped on him because he didn’t want to pay the fare.’
‘Couldn’t he just have run away?’ I asked. A brief survey of the taxi-drivers of Torquay had convinced me that there were not many athletes among them who would catch up with a lamentably healthy young psychopath.
The driver hadn’t returned to work, even though his leg had healed. Who says that deterrence doesn’t work?
I found the only second-hand bookshop in Torquay. The man at the counter, who was about as healthy as the taxi-driver, and for the same reasons, was discussing the state of the book trade with a customer who had asked for the best price possible on a book marked at £1.50. He spoke with a dyspnoeic rotundity, gasping between phrases.
‘We’re closing down in a month’s time,’ he said. ‘We’re the last of ten shops in Torquay to go. It’s the internet that’s killed the trade.’ That, and the vile distractions of the younger generation.
A man came in who did not look so much unemployed as someone for whom the question of employment had never seriously arisen in the first place.
‘Have you got any books by Evelyn Waugh’s husband?’ he asked.
‘Who’s that?’ asked the man at the counter noncommittally.
‘Alec Waugh,’ said the potential customer.
‘Evelyn Waugh was a man.’
‘Was he? I thought he was a woman.’
‘No, he was a man.’
‘Funny name for a man, Evelyn. I always thought he must be a woman.’
Oh my country, how I love thee!
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