Luke joined in and they did the last lines together, perfectly synchronised: ‘All of those moments will be lost. . in time, like tears. . in rain.’
Nicole and Sahra did a perfectly synchronised yawn.
After three hours they turned off the autoroute and stopped for petrol and lunch in a smallish town. Sahra was not a great parker. As she reversed into a space she thumped into the car behind. Luke got out and looked at the damage.
‘It’s pretty bad,’ he said.
‘Oh no!’
‘I’m afraid so. I thought it was going to be bad, from the noise,’ said Luke. ‘It was an amazing thump.’
‘Like this,’ said Alex, hitting the inside of the rear door with his fist, exactly as he had done a few seconds earlier.
‘Idiot!’
‘An English classic!’ said Luke, pressing his hand against the rear side window. Alex pressed his to the same spot on the opposite side of the glass: the prison visit handshake.
‘I’m paralysed from the neck downwards,’ said Alex as they prised him out of the back seat.
‘From the neck upwards you mean,’ said Sahra.
It was nice sitting cramped round a table, facing each other after sitting cramped in the car, in two rows of two. The menu had been translated into English of a sort. Luke ordered oeufs brouillés or ‘Scream bled Eggs’. The waitress was friendly and gave them several refills of American-style coffee. They also had a conversation about coffee which they all knew they’d had before, word for word, but this added to the pleasure of this particular rendition. They took it in turns to use the bathroom. Eager to get under way again, they paid for the meal out of the kitty (which made it seem as if no one was paying), pushed back their chairs and got up to leave. It was raining hard outside.
Nothing in the past has any value. You cannot store up happiness. The past is useless. You can dwell on it but not in it. What good does it do anyone, knowing that they once sat with friends in a car and called out the names of cinemas and films, that they ate lunch in a town whose name they have forgotten?
Alex drove the second half of the journey. Luke again insisted that his long legs meant he had to sit in the front and so the two women arranged themselves in the back.
‘This is more like it,’ said Luke. ‘Men in the front, women in the back.’
‘So has it always been,’ said Alex.
‘So will it always be.’
‘Can we have the heater on?’ said Sahra.
‘It is on.’
‘But is it full on?’
‘Affrmative,’ said Alex.
‘How about another round of Pariscope?’ said Luke.
After only half an hour’s driving the four of them fell silent. Luke glanced round and saw that Sahra and Nicole were asleep. He nudged Alex’s arm. Alex looked at the sleeping women in the mirror and smiled.
‘Sitting in the front seat of a car in winter, looking at our women sleeping in the back. That’s what we’re doing now,’ said Luke.
He was supposed to be navigating but soon he fell asleep too. Alex didn’t mind. He enjoyed being the only one awake in the car. It had stopped raining. The sky was clearing. On either side of the road were fields of ploughed corduroy. The landscape became steeper, emptier, colder-seeming. Trees adjusted themselves to the gradient. There was less and less traffic.
Nicole and Sahra woke, then Luke who consulted the map.
‘Are we there yet, Dad?’ said Sahra.
‘Negative,’ said Luke. ‘About ten miles from now we get off the main road.’ The sun was disappearing. The tops of the hills showed grey-white, whiter than the grey of the sky which began glowing pink.
‘I think we’ve come the wrong way,’ said Luke, soon after they had left the main road.
Alex manoeuvred the car around. Luke suggested another turning which also proved to be a mistake.
‘Your navigating has left something to be desired,’ said Alex.
‘I’ve done. . questionable things,’ said Luke, back in Rutger Hauer mode.
The light was fading quickly. Alex switched on the side-lights. They turned on to a minor road which climbed and curved back on itself. Trees appeared black and stark against the sky which was infused with a deeper flush of pink. Everyone in the car was looking out for signs now: it was important, Sahra said, to get to the house before dark. There was a narrow turning to the right and she shouted to turn down it: a single-lane track lined by trees, gloomy. Alex turned on the headlights. A rabbit scampered across the road.
At the end of the track they came to a house. It looked dark and unwelcoming. The sky was burning red through the trees.
Alex turned off the engine. They sat there, a little disappointed after the long drive. Luke cracked open the door and got out. The call of birds emphasised the silence. He tipped his seat forward so that Sahra and Nicole could get out.
‘So this is Colditz,’ said Alex.
The walls of the house were tinged green with moss. Drain pipes. Windows the colour of slate. A bird cawed across the sky. It was cold but this cold was less a reflection of the temperature as it existed than a premonition of the cold which would come at night. Puddles were tense, preparing to freeze.
They walked round to the back of the house. Following her uncle’s instructions Sahra took ten paces to the left, walked towards a tree and then looked for a large rock, beneath which the key was hidden. Allegedly. There were several rocks, none of them particularly big — and no key under any of them. All the ground floor windows were shuttered so Luke and Alex searched for ways of climbing up to the first floor where there were a couple without shutters. The only possibility was to get on to the porch round the side of the house, go up one of the drain pipes — risky — and move along a ledge — even riskier — to a window that might or might not be locked. They decided to attempt it. Alex was standing on Luke’s shoulders when Sahra came and asked what the fuck they were doing.
‘Going up to that window there,’ grunted Alex as he clambered on to the roof of the porch.
‘Oh OK. But you could come in through the door if you like. It wasn’t even locked.’
‘See you inside, Alex,’ said Luke, following Sahra.
It was dark and cold in the house, colder than outside. Sahra lit a couple of candles and got the paraffin lamps working. Luke began laying a fire in the huge grate in the living room. Fortunately there were some large logs and pieces of kindling by the fireside. The problem was that there were few small pieces of wood, nothing to bridge the gap between kindling and logs. Luke was secretly glad of the challenge. There were few tasks that he could perform well and he took great pride in his ability to lay fires. He placed sheets of newspaper in the grate and scattered kindling over the top. Then he rolled up pages of newspaper and tied them in knots, threw in more kindling and the few small pieces of wood that were around. Nicole began carrying things from the car while Alex, having scrambled down from the porch, went out to the woodshed in search of small logs. It was dark now.
Luke put a match to the fire. The paper blued into flame, then the kindling crackled and blazed. The heat was sudden, tremendous. A few minutes later the smaller blocks smouldered into life. Alex brought in some medium-sized logs, ‘almost dry’. Luke chucked them on and very soon the flames were replaced by smoke. Alex looked alarmed.
‘It’ll take,’ said Luke, unsure if it would.
Sahra, meanwhile, had turned on the water and electricity. The wiring in the house, her uncle had said, was ‘uncertain’ and should only be used for lights (as far as she could make out there were no heaters anyway). This was not a problem, he claimed, because once the fire was going the back boiler would generate plenty of hot water (‘enough at any rate’). In the kitchen there was a gas canister and a cooker with a kettle which she began to heat. Alex kept bringing in logs. Nicole had transferred everything from the car to the kitchen. By now the fire looked like it was going to stay lit though the living room was still chilly. The bedrooms were freezing, damp.