Prim showered while I shaved, and so we were able to make it with about five seconds to spare. We both felt guilty about keeping the chef from his break, so we settled for cereal and coffee.
Peter, it seemed, had taken to us. He was sorry to see us go, but Prim cheered him up when she said we’d look in on the way back. I muttered that when we did, all the facilities had better be in working order. He stared at me for a few seconds, until at last he grasped my meaning. ‘Ah,’ he said, mournfully, ‘that’s the trouble with outside suppliers.’
Rather than head south straight away we drove back into Darlington. It’s a nice town, distinctive, with a market in its centre set out around a high tower. After I’d been to Boots, we found a travel agent and looked up ferry times from the south coast ports. ‘I’ve never seen St Malo,’ I suggested. The travel agent assured us that there would be plenty of space on a night crossing in midweek, so that was it.
We had nine hours to get to Portsmouth, and we used them all, driving at a steady pace, bypassing Leeds and circling south of Birmingham till we found the M40. We chatted as we travelled, when we weren’t singing along to Jan’s Abba tapes. (The woman’s never been the same since she saw Muriel’s Wedding.) We tried to talk about the future, but for both of us the crystal ball was obscured by the dark shadow of Ricky Ross, and our task in Geneva.
‘If you’ve finished with nursing, honey,’ I asked Prim as we crawled through Newbury, ‘what are you going to do? Not, I say again, that you need to do anything.’
She shook her head, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t All I do know is that I have to do something, but it has to be something really different.’
‘How about marrying me and having babies?’ The words jumped unbidden from my mouth. I twisted the mirror and stared in it to make sure that it was me who had said them.
‘Woah, Oz, woah,’ she said. ‘All in good time. It’s only been five days, and we haven’t even had that test drive yet. Your application still has to be approved.’
I must have looked downcast, because she squeezed my thigh. ‘A couple of years down the road, if we can still stand each other, then we can talk about things like that. But is that what you really want?’
I took a hand off the wheel and stroked her soft cheek. ‘Right now, Springtime, what I want is you. Anything else is a bonus.
‘Tell you what, let’s get the next few days over with. If we’re still alive in a week, we’ll have the rest of our lives in front of us!’
We drove on in silence for a while. Talk of test drives, and our developing, if frustrating, relationship made me think about ferry crossings. Jan and I went to London once. There’s something about making love in a British Rail sleeper. I wondered if it might be the same on a cross-channel ferry. My Dad’s house has cupboards that are bigger than railway sleepers but those narrow berths were an experience … especially with both of us crammed into the lower one.
We got to Portsmouth with two hours to spare. The travel agent was right, up to a point. There was plenty of vehicle space, with no buses booked on board. But there were absolutely no spare cabins. I looked at Prim as we stood at the booking window. ‘Am I being punished for something?’ I asked her. ‘Are you? Has your Mum had a word with the Bloke Upstairs?’
In terms of Grand Prix circuits, the Club Class lounge on a Channel Ferry is strictly a pedestrian precinct.
We sat side by side in our reclining aircraft-style seats, the Fetherlites redundant in my wallet, and held hands through the night, all the way to France.
In which we arrive on a movie set and thwart a daring escape bid
I like motoring in France. I don’t know my left from my right at the best of times, so driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road is no big deal for me.
There is this theory that to get to anywhere in France from the Channel ports you have to go through Paris. It’s rubbish, of course. We hung about in St Malo for a while, just to get the feel of it, then headed south to Rennes. Using a map which we’d bought at the terminal we plotted a route more or less alongside the Loire, until we picked up the Autoroute which led to Lyon.
We made a couple of stops along the way, and Prim gave me yet another surprise. I may like France, but when it comes to speaking the language, I’m about as useful as Harpo Marx. Prim turned out to be fluent. ‘It was Africa,’ she explained. ‘French was the main language where I was, so I had to pick it up.’
The day grew hotter as we went further south, until the information signs along the road were showing an outside temperature of 28 degrees. To make it tolerable we drove with the windows down and the sunroof open, but even at that, touching the steering wheel felt a bit like handling hot bread straight from the oven.
‘Where does your sister live?’ Prim asked as we pulled into a service area, to make another pit stop, and to buy food to take to Ellen’s. Arriving empty-handed is not the done thing in the Blackstone family.
‘A place called Perrouges. I’ve never been there, but she says it’s nice. Sort of old, she says.’
We found it without too much trouble, but when we got there we could barely believe our eyes. It turned out that my sister’s home is in a piece of living history, a walled townlet with cobbled streets narrow enough to offer shade nearly all day, and hardly a building that’s less than two hundred and fifty years old.
‘Jesus,’ said Prim. ‘It’s a movie set!’
Naturally, I’d forgotten to bring a note of Ellen’s address, but my tour guide solved the problem by going into the town’s tiny hotel and asking the receptionist where the Scots family lived. It wasn’t far — nowhere in Perrouges is far — just round the comer and down a twisty alley.
We knew the house before we got there. When they handed out the lungs, our Ellen was right up at the front of the queue.
‘Jonathan!’ The shout seemed to fill the narrow alleyway, bouncing back and forth off the stone walls. I jumped. It was pure reflex. When I was a kid, Ellen’s bellow could freeze my blood from two hundred yards away. Close up it could emasculate an elephant. The sound was still echoing, on its way, no doubt, to frighten distant wildlife, when my older nephew came diving head first out of a low window, about thirty feet away. He did a perfect rolling landing, winding up on his feet, and kick-started a sprint. His trainers threw up puffs of dust as he raced up the sloping pathway towards us. He made to shimmy round us, head down, but I grabbed his shoulder. At first he tried to wriggle out of my grasp, and only when he found it was too strong for him, did he look up.
‘Hello there, Wee Man. What have you been up to then?’
His mouth dropped open, answering my question in the process. It, and half of his face, was stained by the juice of berries.
‘Uncle Oz! Uncle Oz!’ He was so surprised that he forgot all about his escape bid, and his predicament. ‘Mum, Mum!’ he shouted, back down the alley. ‘See who’s here! See who’s here!’ Jonathan is only just turned seven, but he’s showing signs already that he’s inherited his mother’s lung-power. I let him go and he ran back to the house, crashing through the door this time, rather than the window. A second or two later there was the sharp, unmistakable ‘Splat!’ of palm on bare leg, and a second after that the sound of a howl being stifled as Jonathan gasped out his news through the string of retribution.
‘If you’re making up stories again …’ said Ellen as she stepped outside.
It had been over a year since I’d seen her. The first thing I realised was that there was more of her to see. Ellen’s always been a square-built sort of girl, but France had straightened out what curves she had. I wouldn’t say she’d got fat … no, to be honest, I would. She’d got fat.
She stared at me. ‘Oz, you bugger! You might have let me know!’ Jonathan appeared again by her side, sniffling and smiling at the same time, pulling his wee brother Colin along behind him.