BACKING A LOSER

The rain hadn’t let up all morning. I parked the car in the municipal car park and went to buy the ticket. I didn’t recognise the place. It was supposed to be famous: Sherborne. The school. Yes, I remembered. A ‘Schools’ class 4-4-0 named after it. Fine. I pulled out a silly, skimpy folding umbrella and she pulled on her mackintosh. She spent some time in putting up the hood.
“I might as well have this soldered to my hat, the use it is,” I said, petulantly.
“We’ve been here,” she said, having taken a brief look around the car park.
“No, we haven’t,” I replied.
“Yes, we have,”
“No, we haven’t”.
“I’m telling you, we have”.
“Don’t let’s go through this pantomime farce business yet again,” I said. “We’ve seen 3,000 villages and towns and most of them look the same in this neck of the woods”.
“We’ve been here before,” was the firm rejoinder.
We walked on down the High Street. It sloped, was full of posh shops, and full of posh people, Hooray Henrys who guffawed loudly and said ‘Look, I say,” as if they were Bertie Wooster.
“See that café?”, she said.
“Yes”.
“We’ve been in it.”
“We’ve been in a thousand cafes.”
“We sat at the back. There’s a garden outside with some more tables. We had cream teas.”
“No we didn’t.” To tell the truth, I was losing the argument because I vaguely remembered the occasion she was talking about. It was only two years previously.
I tried to recover my position. I said; “I never walked along this part, though – I walked up…from the station.”
“I thought you said we’d never been here before,” she said, grimly.
“It wasn’t raining the last time. How can you expect me to remember a town that’s soaking wet when the last time I saw it it was bone-dry?”
“That’s right”, she replied, “I wouldn’t expect you to.”
“Anyway, I bet you don’t know in which century that bandstand thing over there was built,” I said.
“I bet you don’t know when it was built, either. Besides, it’s not a bandstand, it’s a shelter of some sort,” she replied.
“I know it’s not a bandstand – it’s a Latin word, or Greek – it’s on the tip of my tongue. Anyway, it’s clearly 15th century,” I said.
She said nothing. She walked over to it, looked for the omnipresent plaque, and read aloud: “Built by public subscription in 1848.”
“So now we’re an authority on bandstands, are we?” I said. “I’m going back to the car.”

I turned on me heel and strode briskly, and with great dignity, away. I scarcely noticed the rain dripping down the back of my neck and soaking my shirt. I soon left her trailing in my wake. It was important to me that I should clear off out of the place as soon as I possibly could. After all, I had been there before.