The attendant said he would wake me at six but I was up for a shave at half past five. A knife of daylight lay along the bottom of the window. I knew better than to wake Sophie for a good morning kiss, so flicked up the blind on the clear blue sky and rich vegetation on the slopes of Lombardy, hearing the sound of birds when the train halted at an outlying station. An elegant old man on the platform, wearing a grey suit, a panama hat, and carrying a briefcase, was about to cross the rails and try getting on our train, when a railway official got up like a field-marshal in Ruritania warned him not to. I wondered what business the dapper man had to do in Milan so early.
The train went through suburbs and into the station at half past six. I took up Sophie’s case in the corridor before the conductor could get his hands on it. “Meeting you has been very special,” I said. “But how are you feeling?”
“Sore, thanks to you. Otherwise fine. What about you?”
“Wonderful. Slept like a log.”
“You’ll see me again?”
She looked as perfect as if after a month at a health farm. “I certainly shall.”
I walked in front with her case to the station entrance. Tickets had been given out on the train for a free breakfast at the buffet, but the waiters were on strike and it was closed, a line of pickets across the front. My nose led us to a kiosk outside where delicious brioche and coffee was on sale. I was never up to much in the morning, and we ate in silence, till I said: “All that Lord Dropshort stuff is nonsense. It was only to amuse you.”
She took my hand. “I knew it was, and I love you all the more for it.” She put my card into her bag. “Drive safely on the road, won’t you?”
“I shall. And you do, as well,” I said, a last kiss before walking to the railway yard and up the ramp, to get into our cars. We waved in passing, and I turned off into a different break of the traffic.
Chapter Eight
The car draped itself around me like a cocoon of velvet; good to be on the road and back in my mobile house. Even though my faculties were sharpened to follow motorway signs I strayed into Monza, but the streets were empty, and wayposting so frequent I was soon out and steering in the right direction.
The road was fairly free of traffic, so I mulled on Sophie, and wondered what sort of family she was from, what schooling she’d had and what job, though by her accent, manners and dress she was obviously of high quality. All I’d gathered was that her marriage was on the drift. I would have fished for more, but there hadn’t been time, with all we’d found to do. The further I got from the picture of her driving alone in the Rover, the more intense and longing were my thoughts. Never having been in thrall to the fact that ‘distance makes the heart grow fonder’ made me more determined to see her on my way back from Greece.
Traffic increased, so I sharpened my senses for safety. Other drivers drew level in the cut and thrust to look at the Roller, a rare car on the road. In driving long distance the first three days were the most dangerous, and any bad or fatal mishap was likely to take place in that period. So being still on the second day I drove as carefully as possible. By the third my intuition and body clock would have become synchronised, and thereafter I’d be in fair trim to finish the trip with neither accident nor incident.
A little black hatchback, tall aerial waving that could be used for sending as well as receiving communications, had been in my mirror almost from Milan, but I supposed some car had to be. Now and again he dropped behind. Suddenly he overtook. Then I got by him with a gaggle of other cars. A vehicle of any shape or colour would allow my paranoia to get a toe hold, so I stopped thinking about whoever it might be.
My speed was a sedate seventy, cars rocketting by with ease and delight at ninety or more. Even the lizziest tin lizzie could do such a speed, and when a motorist cut in too close I didn’t worry, dangerous though it seemed, knowing the driver to be laughing at the spectacle of plutocrat me in a trilby hat smoking a cigar at the wheel. I assumed every Italian was a good driver and knew what he was doing.
Signs for Bergamo slid by, Brescia and Verona as well, and I was sorry at being unable to call at such famous places and see what they were like, but I was under Moggerhanger’s orders and couldn’t wander. Also, the more time saved on the outward trip the longer I’d be able to dawdle up the Adriatic and stay a couple of days with sublime Sophie on my way home.
Famished after the meagre breakfast, I drove into a lay-by near Vicenza, a green hill rising towards the distant town, and a meadow over the fence pullulating with birds and insects, the day turning hot. A pick-up truck with a Fiat 500 on the back and, above that, a small speed boat on a specially constructed rack, didn’t seem too secure, so I parked some distance away should a wobble send the whole contraption onto the roof of Moggerhanger’s pet Rolls. A woman was followed out of a Gogomobile by a large Dalmatian which she addressed sharply as Caesar, and the dog immediately set about doing its business so copiously I expected it to deflate into a puppy and get back into the car with less trouble than it had taken on its exit.
I cut into bread, cheese, pickles and salami with my genuine lambfoot clasp knife, becoming hungrier the more I ate. I threw a round of sausage to Caesar, but he sniffed and turned away as if my name was Brutus.
Manoeuvering out, and thinking all was clear, a Lancia steaming up at a hundred and twenty — maybe my cigar had blocked him from the line of sight — missed my front bumper by an inch. Where the fuck did he come from? I could only suppose he waved good naturedly before getting ahead, but my hands trembled at the wheel for a few miles at such a stupid near miss. Deciding it might be better to go faster, at a hundred I felt like a Brand’s Hatch veteran recruited by the Foreign Office to show continental drivers that not all the British were sixty-mile-an-hour plodders, with cars full of kids, and yellow buckets, red spades, and luggage on the roof rack fastened down with flapping plastic.
The little black hatchback, emerging from a lay-by beyond the one I’d stopped in, came right behind me again, the same aerials swaying up from the bonnet fair and square in my rear mirror. He was behind me till he overtook and turned off for Trieste. It might not have been trailing me after all, though I regretted the car hadn’t passed close enough for me to see who or what was inside.
Off the motorway I handed the man in the booth a hundred-thousand lira note thinking it was a tenner, but he smiled at my mistake and gave the right change. If he hadn’t I might never have known, such honesty not to be forgotten, but telling me not to be so careless from then on.
At the Jugoslav border I tanked up with petrol, had four cups of muddy coffee, and set off up the winding road between green and rounded hills. By four o’clock I’d reached Postojna and, fearful of nodding at the wheel after my short night, and sufficient distance having been clocked up for the day, I pulled into the forecourt of the Hotel Sisyphus for a nightstop which Alice Whipplegate had marked on the map. Who was I to dispute such wisdom and forethought?
I showed my passport and was taken to a cabin between the trees, parking the car where it would be visible whenever I twitched the curtains. A notice on the wall said that after ten p.m. it was expected that silence would be maintained in all the rooms. Guests were kindly requested to cooperate. This endeared me to the place, for I had long thought that the curse of the twentieth century was noise, and the less there was the better.
With much sleep to make up for I flopped on the bed and, to the singing of birds and an ambrosial breeze coming from eucalyptus trees, was unconscious in seconds.