Chapter 4

There Jennifer sat, broken down on an isolated country road on the outskirts of her home town, where she had been trying to find Mum’s new house in the dark without the aid of a satellite navigation system which, of course, she couldn’t afford. The engine died, the car slowed to a stop and it got quite cold in her little car very quickly. She tried to restart the engine, but it refused to fire and, in a short spell of a couple of attempts, her battery died on her. It was then that she realised that the only breakdown cover she had had for the last few years, was Scott’s. She snuggled down in her coat, but she didn’t feel any warmer. What was she going to do now?

She heard a tap on the window. She must’ve closed her eyes for a few moments and almost fallen asleep in the miserable cold. Now she could see that there was bright light all around her, that she hadn’t noticed until the knock on the window. A face, a man’s face, was peering through her car window. She stared at him blankly, barely registering his presence, not sure whether she was dreaming his existence or not. She felt very, very cold. She breathed out and her breath was misty.

He tapped on the window again. He was twirling his hand around in a circular motion. She asked herself, what did that mean? She never learned sign language at school. He did it again and it dawned on her that maybe he was indicating that he wanted her to wind down the window. There was no power left in the battery to open the window, so she opened the door a crack, and an icy blast blew in, loaded with stinging snow flakes. She shivered even more than simply from the cold.

“Hello, have you broken down?” he asked cheerfully. More cheerfully than any man other than an Eskimo should in such conditions.

“Yes,” she answered automatically, “I don’t know what’s wrong, the engine just stopped and now it won’t start again.”

“I’ll have a look at it, would you like to pop the hood for me?”

“Er, what? Where?” She tried to feel around in the dark without finding the lever that she had never ever pulled before in her life and had only a vague idea where it was. Somewhere under the dashboard, wasn’t it?

“Let me,” he said gently.

His voice was warm, and gentle, trustworthy even. He seemed familiar to Jennifer somehow, like she had known him before, from somewhere. His voice was reassuring, reminiscent of her father in the time before his marriage broke up. In fact the voice was so patient that Jennifer was also somehow reminded of her kindly grandfather. This stranger was a combination of all the really good guys she’d ever known. She tried to focus on this stranger’s face but he was much too close to her, so close that she would need to change into her reading glasses to see him clearly. He seemed young, but was somehow blessed with a mature voice, one full of quiet confidence and empathy for her predicament.

“OK,” she agreed automatically.

“Look, you’re freezing,” he noted, “why don’t you get up into my cab and sit there. The heater’s on and it’s really nice and warm in there. You could wait there perhaps while I get your car going?”

“I don’t know you ... do I?” He did seem so familiar, but she had no idea why she would think so.

“No, of course you don’t,” he replied in his cheerfully upbeat voice, as though all was well in the world, in his world anyway, “or at least I’m pretty sure we’ve never been introduced to each other before. I am a delivery driver, and I work for Webster’s Haulage? They are a small local firm with a very good reputation around here. They only employ the most trustworthy staff to haul valuable stuff around these parts, you know, so you could think of me as a reliable person. I’m actually Webster’s leading charge hand.”

“Yes, yes, I do know them, Webster’s. Yes, of course I do. I, er, I’m Jennifer Webster. Andy Webster is my father.”

“Oh, great, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Webster. Your Dad talks about you all the time. In fact, it gives him so much pleasure talking about you that I tend to encourage him.” His smile was so welcoming that Jennifer would have smiled too, if she wasn’t so reserved.

He laughed at his own little disclosure and Jennifer thought it was a sweet, gentle laugh, full of gentle remembrances of pleasant conversations, imprinted with the humanity of indulgent friendship between this young man and her father. His laugh was so infectious that Jennifer would have smiled too, if she hadn’t been trying to hard to stop her teeth chattering in the cold.

He continued, “That means that I can therefore trust you to sit on your own in my cab, and by the same token you can trust me with the care of your car. Your Dad wouldn’t take on a driver he wasn’t one hundred percent happy with, now, would he?”

“No,” she had to agree, nodding involuntarily, “I’m sure he wouldn’t.”

“Come on then, let’s get you sitting up in the warm. Then I’ll see if I can fix this car for you and get you on your way. You’re staying up here for the next two or three nights, over the Christmas holidays, aren’t you?”

She nodded in lieu of ‘yes’.

As she stiffly climbed out of her seat, she realised how cold she had become in such a short time. Her rescuer peeled off his thick, heavy high visibility jacket and draped it over her shoulders. She felt his body warmth inside that coat immediately. It was snowing quite thickly now and she noticed that the car was now completely covered in a thick layer of fluffy snow. With his firm arms guiding her, she was up and into the passenger seat of his cab in moments. It was only she reached the outside the passenger door that she could see the company name boldly painted on the side, “Webster’s Haulage”.

The lorry driver removed his jacket from her shoulders and stepped down from the cab, shutting the door, and keeping the heat in. She breathed out the breath she had been holding all that time since exiting the car. He was right, it was really warm in that cab compared to her car, and there was even comforting Christmas music playing softly from an iPod plugged into the cab’s dashboard.