‘We ’aven’t all got t’brass you ’ave,’ he says, putting on his phoney Yorkshire accent to amuse her. They stump along a quay, past vehicles are already queuing to drive on once the ferry had been emptied.
‘Look,’ Ellie says pointing. ‘Ringo.’
‘Ringo?’
‘There.’ In the queue of cars is a VW Beetle bearing the name on the bonnet. A face watches them from the driver’s seat as they walk past. A pretty little girly face. Blonde and blue-eyed and rosebud-mouthed. ‘Ringo. For a Beetle. Now is that funny, or just naff?’
‘What’s naff?’
Ellie affects surprise. ‘Don’t you know anything? You are, my dear, you are. So where do we go now?’
‘South,’ he says, not caring if he is naff, feeling, for the moment, like Ernest Shackleton but without the icebergs – an explorer making his first, tentative steps in unexplored territory, although a slow plod through the purlieus of Zeebrugge, passed by overloaded cars bearing GB stickers on their rear ends, doesn’t quite match Antarctica.
‘Why’s no one stopping?’ Ellie demands petulantly.
‘Because they’re bloody full. Can’t you see? And they’re English, which means they’re on holiday, which means they’re not going to pick up hitchers in a foreign country.’
They pause to examine the map that they bought in Dover. ‘We’re here,’ he says, pointing. ‘And that’s where we want to be, at the Ostend to Brussels road.’
Ellie launches into a silly game, ratcheting up her accent to sound like an army officer in a 1950s war film, stabbing the map with a spiky finger. ‘We are he-are and Jerry is they-are.’
‘Piss off,’ he tells her. She sulks. He folds the map away and they plod on through the early morning, Ellie stumping on ahead as though she isn’t with him. He watches her, liking her and loathing her at the same time; a strange combination of emotions. Spoilt brat, is what he loathes. What he likes is more difficult to explain – something about the sharp flights of her mind, her knowledge and her self-confidence. On the ferry she told him something about the weeks she spent in Paris last May, sleeping on someone’s floor, going out during the daytime to throw cobblestones at the CRS and spending the evenings at a student bar with music and beer and hash. She was even arrested and spent a night in a police cell with half a dozen other girls. In the morning she was let go because she was British and they didn’t want the bother of dealing with the embassy. That Ellie seems like an emissary from another continent, far from Yorkshire, far from England even.
The countryside south of Zeebrugge is flat and dull, smeared with rain, named with Zs and Ks: Dudzele, Zuienkerke, and the hip Koolkerke. Only ‘Bruges’ is familiar. ‘Let’s go to Bruges,’ Ellie calls over her shoulder. ‘I’ve heard it’s lovely.’
‘I thought we were going to Italy. If we stop off at every place that—’
‘All right, all right.’
Cars pass by full of smiling families off on their continental hols, but the one that does stop isn’t one of them. The driver is on his own, an undistinguished man as grey as the morning. He winds the window down. ‘Autostop?’ he asks.
‘Er… no,’ James answers.
‘Yes!’ shouts Ellie, running back. ‘Yes! We’re doing autostop. Autostop means hitching, you idiot.’
‘I thought it meant our car had broken down.’
Gratefully they clamber into the car.
‘Where you go?’ the driver asks.
‘To Italy. And Greece.’
He laughs, as though Italy and Greece are figments of the imagination, like the land of Cockaigne. ‘I only go to Oostkamp. I drop you on the Brussels road. Maybe there someone take you to Italy.’
In the car they examine the map again, Ellie leaning over the front seat and reaching out to trace a line past Bruges, past Brussels towards Luxembourg and the Rhine. She looks up with a sudden grin, as though a single lift of no more than a few miles has made all the difference. Her face, rubbed plain by lack of sleep, is suddenly immensely desirable. Not a spoilt brat at all. ‘Hey,’ she says, looking at James with that intensity of gaze that she has, ‘we’re on our way. And you’re really not naff.’
Throughout that morning they move through the Flanders landscape, elated by their successes, stunned by tiredness, and, in James’s case, thrilled by the novelty: foreign road signs, foreign place names, foreign cafés and shops. Even the design of houses. How could you make something different out of a row of terrace houses constructed of bricks and mortar? Yet the Flemish had achieved that very thing.
On the outskirts of Brussels they take a tram with a conductor sitting behind a desk just inside the door, dealing out tickets with a mangled stump of a hand and complaining about life to anyone who will listen and many who won’t. Around them people talk in a blizzard of French, and, to James’s surprise, Ellie talks back at them. ‘Skiing holidays,’ she tells him by way of explanation. ‘And summers in Juan-les-Pins.’
‘Sounds posh.’
‘How could I help it?’ she asks, as though it had been some kind of indignity that her parents subjected her to.
They leave the tram at the end of the line and walk through the last, characterless suburbs. On the south side of the city, other hitchhikers stand like anglers on the banks of a river waiting for a bite. Some hold up cards with their intended destinations, as though these might attract their prey. James knows what to do here – walk upstream and take whatever is coming just to get away from the crowd. And soon enough Ellie lands a catch, a Peugeot driven by a young man in a grey suit who might be a travelling salesman. ‘Namur?’ he asks.
‘Namurça va,’ Ellie replies because it is okay; almost anywhere in the general direction of south is okay. They clamber in, triumphant, and set off. Dull, terrace houses, a supermarket and a filling station give way to farmland. A sign announces Waterloo and shortly a great mound rises like a Neolithic tumulus out of the farmland ahead. People are gathered at the summit beneath the statue of a lion. ‘You want to see?’ the driver asks.
He parks the car amongst the tourist coaches. There’s a memorial stone telling anyone who bothers to read that La Butte du Lion was constructed by some king or other to celebrate the fact that his son, Prince someone or other, was wounded during the battle.
‘Typical imperialist crap,’ Ellie decides. ‘No one gives a shit about the slaughter of common soldiers, but they built a bloody great monument like this because Prince William got knocked off his horse.’
‘You’re judging the past by the standards of the present.’
‘No, I’m not. I’m judging it by the standards of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.’
‘So you’d bring the guillotine back?’
‘Some people deserve the guillotine.’
Arguing, they climb the steps up the side of the mound while people coming down push past. Up on the top, in the shadow of the pedestal, a cool breeze blows. An information board gives the layout of the battle. It is weather-beaten like the battlefield itself, the colours faded, the names – Napoleon, Wellington, Blücher and all the others – partly worn away. They look from the board to the landscape before them, to the shallow slopes of farmland that at the time meant such a lot. A mile deep and a couple of miles wide, that’s all; a few square miles of open fields and scattered woods, with an occasional farm. James tries to picture the chaos of an early nineteenth-century battle: drifting palls of musketry smoke; the scythe of canister shot; comic opera uniforms; horses plunging and whinnying. Europe tearing herself to pieces, as she always seems to do.