Michael Ridpath
The Diplomat’s Wife
To the English country pub. May it open soon.
London, spring 2020
Part One
England
One
June 1979, Buckinghamshire, England
‘Mean bastard!’ Phil muttered as he reread the first page of what had over the last six months become his favourite book:
The thing is that the road takes you. You can’t dictate to the road. If you do you might as well be in a train. Hitch-hiking is the art of wondering what will happen to you between your starting point and your destination and taking from everything that does happen everything that you can.
He pitched the already tatty paperback on to the floor next to his bed and stared down at the cover. The words Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Europe stood proud above an enticing red rucksack with bulges containing maps, a sleeping bag and clever survival tools, its fabric scattered with colourful stickers that were almost legible.
He glanced across the floor at his own brand-new rucksack, green, with a small Union Jack poorly sewn on to its centre.
This had been Phil’s bedroom since the age of four. He was a bit of a hoarder, and a sucker for teenage nostalgia of lost childhood. He liked the random objects which traced his life dotted around the room: a Matchbox Ford Zephyr, a platoon of plastic Afrika Korps soldiers, an Airfix model of HMS Victory. Arsenal’s Liam Brady crossed a football from one wall towards the stick figures of Lowry’s satanic mills on the other. Phil’s bookshelf traced a similar path, beginning with Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome and Biggles, moving through a row of war comics, on to Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Georges Simenon.
The bottom right-hand corner of the bookshelf was devoted to the eclectic gifts from his grandmother over the years: Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, The Communist Manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, Njál’s Saga and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as well as his eighteenth-birthday present, a copy in French of Zola’s Germinal, a bleak story of coal miners in Northern France. He had read them all. That shelf was where the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide lived. Grams had given it to him for Christmas when he had told her of his plans to spend the summer holiday between school and university Interrailing around Europe with his friend Mike.
Phil loved the book. It was subtitled How to See Europe by the Skin of Your Teeth and it was full of tips for ways to travel around the Continent on as little money as possible. Everything about the book excited him. Phil was always hungry, and the Guide was like the menu of the biggest buffet Phil had ever seen. He could gorge himself on so many of the marvels of Europe in just a month: the impressionist paintings in Paris one week, the canals of Venice another, the sands of a Greek island the week after that.
But the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide also told of freedom. The freedom of the open road. The freedom from a plan. The freedom to wake up in the morning and not know where he would spend that night. The freedom to sleep on a beach, under a tree or in a hostel. The freedom to talk to other travellers from other countries, and to the random generous strangers who would give him lifts. The freedom to eat a meal of bread, cheese and wine on the banks of the Seine, or on the stone bench of a Roman amphitheatre.
The freedom to escape Wittingcombe, the village wedged into a fold of the Chiltern Hills in which he had spent the whole of his life.
Mike had shared Phil’s enthusiasm; they had decided to ditch the Interrail idea and hitch-hike instead.
They were leaving the following Saturday, taking the train to Sevenoaks in Kent and then hitching to the Channel from there. They had allowed themselves five weeks and three hundred pounds each, three hundred pounds that they had both saved toiling on a building site during the Christmas and Easter holidays.
Except now they weren’t going. Or at least Phil wasn’t going.
The mean bastard in question, Phil’s dad, had seen to that.
‘Phil! Grams is here!’
His mother’s voice snaked up the stairs and through his closed bedroom door.
It was Sunday, and Phil’s grandmother was dropping in for lunch before going on to London. She lived in Cornwall; Wittingcombe was on the way.
For a moment Phil considered staying in his room and sulking. But that wasn’t his style. Plus he always wanted to see his grandmother.
Plus, he was hungry and the roast beef smelled really good.
‘Coming!’
‘So, when are you off on your adventure, Philip?’
‘It looks like I’m not going,’ said Phil as neutrally as possible. He was too proud to sound sulky or angry, even if that was exactly how he felt.
There were five of them around the gleaming dining table: Phil’s parents, his grandmother and his sixteen-year-old sister, Mel.
‘Oh. What have you done?’
Grams had realized immediately that Phil must have done something wrong. She was looking at him in that all-too-familiar way she had. Not exactly enquiring, more interrogating. She wanted to know the answer.
Grams always wanted to know the answer.
She was young for the grandmother of an eighteen-year-old — in her mid sixties, Phil believed. Nor did she really look like a granny: she was tall and long-limbed, and her thick short hair was still dark with only the odd strand of grey. Her voice was husky, clipped and old-fashioned, like something out of a black-and-white movie. She couldn’t say her ‘r’s, a trait that had skipped a generation to her granddaughter, much to Mel’s frustration. Grams’s deep brown eyes, almost black, latched on to you over her large, imperious nose, and once they had fixed on you, they wouldn’t let go until you had answered her question.
‘I crashed Dad’s car last week.’
‘Oh dear. Was it your fault?’
‘The insurance company thinks so,’ said Phil’s father.
‘What do you think?’ asked Grams.
Phil had borrowed his father’s Rover to drive a couple of mates from school on a mini pub crawl around the best village pubs in the area. Phil had only drunk one pint at the first pub, the Three Castles in Wittingcombe, and that was going to be his lot for the evening. They were celebrating the end of A-levels and Elvis Costello was ‘Watching the Detectives’ as loud as the car’s tape deck would allow. Phil was turning right off a main road into a narrow lane to the second pub. The driver of a Marina had slowed and signalled for him to go ahead, but as he turned, a Bedford van sped out of nowhere and caught the rear of the Rover, spinning it off the road and into a wall. No one was hurt, Phil passed the inevitable breathalyser test, the van was scarcely damaged, but the Rover was a write-off.
He recalled the woman in the Marina who had urged him on. He hadn’t seen the van coming and perhaps he should have done. But wasn’t it driving too fast?
‘I don’t know,’ he said, honestly.
‘Phil hasn’t had much driving experience yet,’ said his father. ‘He only passed his test in February.’
‘So it wasn’t his fault?’ Grams said.
‘Oh, it was his fault all right.’
‘And you won’t let him go to Europe as a punishment, Caroline?’ Grams directed the question at her daughter, Phil’s mum.
‘It’s not that,’ said Mum.
‘We need him to pay for a new car,’ said her husband.
‘It’s all my savings,’ said Phil. ‘I can’t afford the trip now.’