Carole wasn’t particularly interested in archaeology, but she thought visiting tombs might be a good way of giving her some sense of purpose on the holiday.
When they stepped out of the plane at Dalaman Airport, the heat hit them almost like a physical blow. They followed the crocodile of other passengers to the air-conditioned oasis of the terminal building.
Once inside, everyone seemed to whip out their passports and rush towards a couple of what looked like ticket booths. ‘What are they doing?’ Carole asked Jude.
‘Have to pay ten pounds for a visa to get into Turkey.’
‘Really?’ said Carole, who had not entered this sum into her detailed budgetary plans. ‘That’s daylight robbery.’
At the baggage reclaim it seemed, as it always does, that their bags were the last to emerge on to the carousel. Jude sat on the floor, serenely waiting, while Carole paced up and down, convinced that her luggage was on the way to Delhi.
There seemed to be no one in the customs control area as they walked through, and immediately they entered the airport foyer a voice said, ‘Hi. You must be Carole and Jude.’
EIGHT
Nita was tall and blonde, dressed in a pale-blue sleeveless cotton top and white shin-length cotton trousers, with brown leather flip-flops. She looked very trim and tanned. Minimal make-up, just mascara and pale-pink lipstick. There was a thin gold chain around her neck and a chunky gold ring on her wedding finger.
Though she glowed with health, a slight crinkling around her lips suggested that she was perhaps not as young as she appeared on first sight. But Nita looked supremely at ease in the alien environment into which Carole felt she had been thrust.
‘How did you recognize us?’ asked Jude.
Nita grinned. ‘Barney gave me very full descriptions.’
Oh yes, thought Carole, I can imagine how he described me: thin, awkward, anxious-looking, unused to foreign travel. The Burberry over her arm seemed suddenly ridiculous, a blatant symbol of her insecurity and lack of savoir faire.
‘And this is my friend Donna. Donna Lucas.’ She indicated a shorter woman at her side. Dark-haired, well-rounded, the outline of a dark bikini top visible under her white polo shirt. ‘Runs a restaurant in Hisarönü.’
‘The Dirty Duck. Do come.’ Donna’s voice was pure, unreconstructed cockney. ‘Full English Breakfast all day, Pub Favourites, Range of British Beers. And, what’s more, special rates for friends of Nita’s.’ Whipping a couple of flyers out of her bag, she handed one to each of the new arrivals.
‘Well, that sounds very nice,’ said Carole politely, though what she’d read in her guidebook about Hisarönü didn’t sound very nice at all.
‘Ooh, sorry, must rush.’ Donna Lucas was suddenly waving frantically. ‘There’s the person I’m picking up. Great to see you!’ And with that she dashed off into the crowd.
‘The car’s parked just over there,’ said Nita. ‘Can I help you with one of those, Carole?’
‘No, thank you, I’m fine,’ came the instinctive response, though in fact pulling the two wheeled suitcases behind her while still keeping hold of her Burberry made her look rather clumsy. It also drew even more imagined attention to her from the oblivious Turks around the airport.
Again the move from air conditioning to direct sunlight was a shock as they walked towards the car park. Carole could feel herself beginning to sweat, though she knew it was from nerves rather than the heat. But it upset her. Sweating was something that Carole Seddon just didn’t do.
Nita’s car was a Hyundai Accent. Silver. In fact, looking round the car park, Carole observed that most of the cars were either silver or white. On the back window was the logo of a travel firm, so presumably it was the car that went with Nita’s job. The boot was capacious enough for all their bags. Carole sat in the front, while Jude lolled dozily over the back seat. Now Jude felt she was genuinely on holiday and could begin to untwitch.
It would be a while, though, before Carole untwitched. Indeed, there was a question mark over whether Carole Seddon had ever in her life fully untwitched.
On the drive from Dalaman to Kayaköy, Nita demonstrated her background as a tour operator by keeping up a running commentary on sights they passed and the opportunities for tourism during their stay at Morning Glory. She did more of the second than the first because, although they went up and down some fairly impressive craggy mountains, the car stayed on the main D400 motorway and there weren’t that many sights.
But there were unfamiliar images that made Carole feel she was definitely in a foreign country. They went past a few mosques, the domes and minarets of which reminded her of a copy of The Arabian Nights she’d had as a child. At the roadside there were stalls piled high with watermelons and oranges. Cafés offered a variety of goodies which, though written in the Roman alphabet, bore no relation to English words. Instinctively, because of her long acquaintance with the Times crossword, Carole found herself trying to make anagrams from them. One particular delicacy, gözleme, appeared with such frequency that she asked Nita what it meant.
‘Pancakes. Kind of flatbread with fillings of meat, cheese or sometimes fruit or honey. Very good. Often in Turkish restaurants you see women in traditional dress squatting over big circular hotplates pouring out the batter and making endless gözleme. On menus with English translations you’ll sometimes see them described as “village pancakes”.’
‘Oh, thank you.’
‘You must try them.’
‘Yes,’ said Carole, not certain that she would. Did she really want to eat village pancakes? The whole concept of Turkish cuisine still rather worried Carole. In her mind she couldn’t separate the word ‘kebab’ from the adjective ‘dodgy’. And she felt glad she’d packed the Imodium.
Along the roadside they also passed a lot of posters attached to lamp posts or pasted to walls. Each featured large photographs of men with luxuriant moustaches.
‘What are those about?’ asked Carole.
‘They’re politicians. There’s an election coming up.’
‘Why have they all got moustaches?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Nita, ‘but it’s very Turkish.’
‘It looks as if it’s more a competition between the moustaches than political parties.’
‘You’re not wrong. Turkish politics are extremely complicated. Probably easier just to vote for your favourite moustache.’
The car slowed down as they approached a row of toll booths. ‘This is the tunnel,’ Nita explained. ‘You used to have to go right over the top of the mountain. This has cut a good half-hour out of the journey.’
But Nita didn’t have to pay any money to have the barrier raised. The journey was clearly one she made so often that she had a season ticket.
Carole looked round into the back of the car. Jude was asleep. How could she be so relaxed in a country she didn’t know, being driven by a person she didn’t know? Carole felt a familiar pang of jealousy, knowing that she would never experience the insouciance that Jude so often exhibited.
Some way after the tunnel they turned off the D400, following the signs to Fethiye and Ölüdeniz. Nita drove with practised ease, knowing where she could speed up and when to slow down. In Fethiye, the road ran alongside the sea with rows of restaurants flanking it. There were a lot of yachts moored in a marina, their masts in serried ranks. ‘Very popular with the sailing crowd, Fethiye,’ said Nita. ‘Are you into sailing, Carole?’
‘No.’ When she had been growing up, sailing, like skiing, was regarded by her parents as something rich people did.