Twenty kilometres further on she gave a kind of squeak and started groping around the floor.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m awfully afraid I’ve lost my book.’
He pulled up. They searched the car.
Carrie, with a look of dreadful guilt, said, ‘I think I put it on the roof while we were packing the things up and forgot to take it off. Can we go back?’
‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we’d ever find it, Carrie. It could be anywhere.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘It wasn’t anything very special as an edition. You needn’t feel too guilty. I’ll get a nice replacement when we’re back in England.’
‘But I need it now,’ said Carrie. ‘Can’t we buy one here?’
‘Well … I don’t think it would be all that easy. We’ll get you something else to read.’
‘But I want to know what happens now I’ve started it.’
He suppressed the thought that if this had been Diana he would be taking a rather different line. ‘All right. We’ll stop in the next big town and find a bookshop. But I do rather doubt if we’re going to be lucky … I mean, an English edition of Jane Austen …’
‘French would do.’
He had entirely forgotten that of course she presumably read French. And spoke it. She had not, hitherto, opened her mouth to anyone but him. He recalled, with irritation, a tiresome exchange with the proprietress of the hotel stemming from his inability to catch something she was going on about to do with a surcharge. ‘Why didn’t you come to my rescue with that old harridan at the reception this morning?’
‘I thought you wanted to do it yourself,’ said Carrie, opening Michelin. ‘Do you think Le Mans would have a bookshop?’
He said he thought it very well might.
The place, of course, was jammed with cars and it took almost half an hour to find somewhere to park. The acreage of metal was unbelievable; Mark, blinking in the flash and dazzle of bumpers and windscreens, reflected that at this rate it wouldn’t be long before the entire continent vanished under the spread of it. He drove vainly round and round while Carrie pointed out bookshops. Eventually he slid gratefully into an empty space in a street some way from the centre.
The first bookshop could not help. The second, after some head shaking, produced a translation of Pride and Prejudice. ‘Actually,’ said Mark, ‘in point of fact I think you might well prefer that. I almost suggested it back at Dean Close.’
‘But I’ve started the other one,’ said Carrie.
They continued. There was not, he decided, a lot to be said for Le Mans. A somewhat featureless town. Still, any new experience has some point. They trudged around crowded shopping streets and found at last another librairie whose proprietor could not, alas, provide what was wanted but had a colleague in La Flèche with a small establishment specialising in foreign works. ‘We’re not actually going in that direction,’ said Mark. Carrie’s face fell. ‘Oh, all right, it’s not that far out of the way.’ They retraced their steps to the car. It was nearly four o’clock.
By the time they reached La Flèche and went through the parking process again it was after five. Carrie hurried into the shop and came out beaming. ‘They had it!’
‘Good,’ said Mark. ‘Splendid. Let’s get on – we’ll have to start looking for somewhere for the night soon.’
There were some difficulties on that front, also. The first place selected turned out when they got to it to be sited on a main arterial road. The second was full. The third, however, was pleasant enough and had a room. Mark, exhausted, made straight for the shower; at that moment even the sight of Carrie sitting on the bed peeling off her T-shirt could do nothing for him. Subsequently, though, he began to revive after an aperitif and then another aperitif in the café of a market square that really was quite bosky. He said, ‘Tell me about when you were in France with your mother.’
Carrie replied that she had forgotten most of it.
‘What exactly was she doing?’
‘Nothing, mostly. Finding things to do. Meeting people for lunch or drinks and getting tired of the place we were in and going off to another one.’
‘Was she married to anyone?’
‘No. She doesn’t often get married. Only once, actually.’
‘You should visit your father,’ said Mark.
‘Why?’ enquired Carrie.
‘Well … You should get to know him. He is your father, after all. It would be natural.’
‘Perhaps we wouldn’t like each other.’
‘Lots of parents and children don’t like each other. That’s neither here nor there, in a way.’
There was a pause. Carrie reflected. ‘I don’t quite see what you mean,’ she said politely.
‘Well … It’s a charged sort of relationship, with all sorts of obstacles built into it but most people feel there’s a lot to be got out of it.’
‘Like being married?’ suggested Carrie.
Mark swallowed. ‘Well … Yes. In a way.’
‘I see. I’m not sure about seeing my father and anyway it would mean going abroad again but I expect being married is nice, at least most of the time. The trouble is I could only marry someone who didn’t mind about me doing the Garden Centre. Still, I suppose some people wouldn’t … I just don’t seem to have met any yet.’
Mark was silent. The thought of Carrie marrying anyone, even in the most distant future, was violently offensive. Gloom filled him. He waved to the waiter and ordered another drink. Then he reached out and took her hand. They sat in silence, with Carrie’s hand lying rather limply in his. Presently she said, ‘Do you think we could go and have something to eat soon? I’m starving.’
He woke up at four o’clock in the morning and knew with awful fatality that he would not be able to get to sleep again. Beside him, Carrie gently breathed. She was naked. She had apologised for this the first night, saying she didn’t own any nightdresses. He had been, at that moment, so overcome by the sight of her that the only thing he could think of to say was, ‘Don’t you get cold in the winter?’ ‘I borrow Bill’s pyjamas then,’ she replied.
He had the feeling that he might be hallucinating; this whole odd experience seemed to have been going on not for thirty-six hours but for an indefinable length of time. Since it was so very much the kind of thing that he, Mark, did not do, he could no longer see how it had happened. He tried to think of Diana; she had the affectionate familiarity of someone known well in the distant past. He told himself that he would be seeing her in five days’ time; the fact made no impression at all.
The hours inched past.
10
As they moved south, in strategic jumps across the map on her lap, Carrie began to suffer from an apparently impossible emotional schizophrenia. The closer they got to Hermione, the more her spirits sagged; but all the time her enjoyment was increasing. She hadn’t wanted to come in the least. She had agreed to because she had been pushed into it. And now it was all more interesting than she had expected. She held the map, obediently, and told Mark whether to go right or left and what name they should be looking for next on the road signs, and the cool dispassionate print of the map translated itself into sights and smells. In all the years with her mother, when she must have covered thousands of miles, she couldn’t remember ever having felt like this. Had she read maps then? Presumably somebody had; it was inconceivable that her mother had been capable of reading maps for herself. Carrie could remember many absorptions in private landscapes: places of retreat that she had found wherever they happened to alight – a hidden corner of a garden, a room, a favourite walk. But there had never been this rather heady sense of progress – of moving on and leaving behind. Travelling, evidently, was a state of mind quite as much as a physical undertaking.
Mark was less of a problem than she had expected. He seemed rather on edge and he had taken to swearing when other drivers did things he wasn’t expecting which was most of the time. But he didn’t start
embarrassing conversations as often as she had feared; she hoped he might be getting over it. Actually the making love part was fine. And he wasn’t often irritable (except about the driving) and didn’t mind her wandering off to look at things or find plants. He must be rather nice to be married to, she thought; Diana was lucky. But then Diana must be nice to be married to also – if you weren’t alarmed by her, which Mark presumably wasn’t. Even at this distance the thought of Diana was slightly disturbing, as though she might suddenly materialise in the car and demand to know what exactly was going on, as well she might. Carrie wriggled nervously.
‘What’s wrong? Do you want to stop?’
‘No. I’m all right. We’re coming to the Loire soon. The red book has masses of stars and exclamations and things.’
‘Yes,’ said Mark. ‘It would. We might pause and do some sightseeing.’
He stood in a room that had been restored with aggressive good taste and stared out and down through mullioned stone windows. The river wound in fat loops through a painted green landscape, like the background of a fifteenth-century portrait, seen over the shoulder of the subject. The guide was quite the most governessy fellow Mark had ever heard. Tendentious, with it. Clad as for a day at the Bourse, he funnelled his party through the château with sharp instructions about where and when to halt for enlightenment. He then harangued them loudly and with infuriating deliberation, as though taking an elocution class, the spiel of information larded with ‘voyez-vous’ and ‘vous comprenez’ and ‘écoutez bien’. Right now he was describing the middle ages as ‘un climat social très difficile’; one way of putting it, Mark supposed.
He looked round for Carrie. She waved from the far side of the room, swamped by a gang of Scandinavian adolescents. In the tapestry room she had said happily, ‘Isn’t it lovely?’ On the ramparts, to his horror, he had seen her leaning precariously over to investigate some plant leading a dangerous life in a crevice. He looked at his watch. This, clearly, would be about as far as they would get today. The guide was now going on about this being ‘un château sérieux’ – as opposed presumably to some Walt Disney set-up down the road.
And then later in the evening what now seemed to him this systematic traduction of history continued. ‘What’s son et lumière?’ asked Carrie, studying notices in the hotel entrance hall. He explained. ‘Oh … Can we go to it?’ And so with gathering resentment he sat in the floodlit forecourt of yet another meticulously face-lifted building while figures in wimples and surcoats and all the flummery of a theatrical costumier paraded up and down and a disembodied sepulchral voice intoned about ‘le passé … cette pays de mystère et de fantaisie’. Carrie appeared to be entranced. She sat on the edge of her seat and gazed around her. When he made a move to leave she said, ‘But there’s more. We haven’t seen it all yet.’ Resignedly, he sat. The pays de mystère et de fantaisie gave way to a lutte sanglante; cries and shrieks rang from within the castle walls, steel clashed, troops of phantom horsemen clattered past.
He drove back to the hotel through a musky velvet night out of which headlights hurtled at them like rockets. Carrie, undressing, said, ‘It’s been a really nice day.’
‘Good. I’m so glad.’
‘You didn’t like the play thing very much, did you?’
‘Well … Not a lot, no.’
‘It was all right for me because I don’t know any history. I suppose they’d got everything wrong?’ She took off her bra and pants and got into bed.
‘Pretty wrong, to my mind.’
‘Oh well … I did rather like it, I’m afraid. Is it tomorrow we’ll get to Ma’s?’
‘The day after, I should think.’ He went into the bathroom, where he was numbed by the sledgehammer realisation that there was one more day and night of this at the most. He would never be with her like this again, ever, in all probability.
‘Are you all right?’ she said solicitously, as he got into bed.
‘I s’pose so.’
‘You looked a bit peculiar. I thought p’raps you’d got something wrong with your insides. That’s the thing I remember most about abroad – nearly always having something wrong with one’s insides.’
‘I’m perfectly well. I was simply thinking that when we get to your mother’s it’s not going to be like this any more.’
‘No,’ said Carrie. ‘I s’pose it won’t be.’ After a moment she added cautiously, ‘Are you … sort of getting over it at all?’
‘No. Frankly.’
‘Oh. Oh dear, I thought you might be.’
There was a silence. ‘We might at least,’ said Mark in distant and injured tones, ‘make the most of what there is.’
Carrie moved across the bed to him.
He lost her, the next day, twice. Once she vanished up a hillside on yet another plant-hunting expedition and later he mislaid her in an abbey and found her eventually in the market-place, wandering among stalls of fruit and vegetables. She looked absorbed and content and gave a start of surprise when he came up to her, as though she might have forgotten all about him.
She wrote a postcard to Bill. Mark, furtively reading it upside-down across the café table, saw that she had said ‘Having a lovely time …’ and then something about not forgetting to check the alpines.
‘Aren’t you going to send Diana one?’
He said he doubted if it would get there before Diana left London.
When they were on the road she was frequently silent. He realised that she had no compunction about silence; if she had nothing to say, she did not speak. He was never able to decide if this was restful or faintly unsettling. The latter, probably, since he found himself impelled to make conversational overtures to which, equally, she did not always respond. He told her about the Albigensian crusades and then realised with unease that he had pursued this topic over some ten kilometres in the face of Carrie’s more or less persistent silence. He said, ‘All this has bored you stiff, I don’t doubt.’
‘No. I wasn’t not saying anything because I was bored but because I hadn’t got anything sensible to say. Go on.’
‘That’s all,’ said Mark, somehow dampened. The curious thought came to him that whatever it was he derived from her company it wasn’t exactly pleasure. So far as company went there were half a dozen or so people who would rate a good deal higher; Diana very much amongst them. Did he enjoy being with her? He mulled over this, as sunflowers unreeled gaudily at either side of the road. Enjoy, in fact, was not the relevant word; he had to be with her – a good deal of the time she exasperated him but he had no choice in the matter; she was essential now, like some addictive substance.
He continued to examine his attitude and found that it did not bear inspection. He was a married man yearning for a woman who was not his wife; his main preoccupation was that he could not have her and his secondary one was that given that he couldn’t, then he could not endure the idea that anyone else should. Betrayal and selfishness, all in one go. He didn’t even want her to be happy, since any presumed happiness of hers would exclude him. It is far from true, he thought bitterly, that love is an ennobling emotion.
‘I’m hungry,’ Carrie announced. She had taken to eating copiously, saying that she hadn’t quite realised that she liked food – ‘I mean apart from it being something you’ve got to have.’
‘We’ll stop and have some lunch, then.’
Over the meal he said, ‘I suppose if we pushed on hard we could in fact get there this evening.’
She looked up in alarm. ‘Oh … Do we have to?’
‘No. You’d rather not?’
‘Much rather.’
The shadow of Hermione, he assumed, rather than the charms of his company. ‘Then we’ll take it slowly.’
They were now deep in a landscape that made its living by neatly exploiting two different kinds of natural resource. It grew things, lavishly – sunflowers and vines and maize and prosperous-looking cattle and other less identifiable but equally picturesque crops – and it cashed in on a
ll this in a more elusive way also. Regional menus, historic sites, scenic routes, châteaux, abbeys and notable towns clamoured from all sides. Woods and river valleys were bright with tents, latter-day fields of Agincourt. Every other car was topped with a plastic-wrapped mound of belongings or a glittering bicycle, as though an army of refugees was on the move. Flocks of cyclists sprawled on the verges or spun head down along the narrow roads. The rivers were busy with canoes. You could buy pâté de foie gras in every conceivable kind of container, postcards and T-shirts and washing-up towels printed with prehistoric paintings. It was as though, Mark thought, the manifold pasts of the area had fused into one lush and inexhaustible crop. A trading commodity that required neither factories nor raw materials nor a labour force.
They ate in a small town that offered a monastery, visits to the caves and several menus gastronomiques. Carrie worked her way through four courses. ‘That was lovely.’