‘Your earth-shaking news from last night makes that prospect seem about as exciting as a fishing trip to the Sago Sea. You can’t expect me to carry on as if it didn’t mean anything.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Go to a nice quiet town on the coast for a few days,’ he said, ‘then wend our way north. It’ll be holiday enough.’
He didn’t have to remind her that they were in Italy, but the word had a loving and homely sound when he did. She wanted to get to a town so that she would really know where they were, instead of being encased in a metal shell and taken somewhere not exactly against her will but in a direction which up to a few hours ago had not seemed possible. She fastened her safety belt, and saw the faint smile. He wanted to please her. His will had changed to hers. He thinks that at forty I’m more fragile than a young woman, which is ridiculous. Being the first time for him made him young again, and apprehensive. She laughed to herself, felt fewer years pressing her down. She wanted to please him. ‘We don’t need to run back so soon. I feel fine. There’s plenty of time before I have to take care.’
He stared at the road, intent on keeping them alive but locked in his purpose of covering distance by nightfall. She saw, side-glancing, that he was not only fearful of the road but was fleeing as if before demons, on his way to a place where he thought safety lay. Demons would be waiting for him there also. They had driven him out and would beckon him in, the same with her. She read it clearly in his features, that they were leaving a point on the earth like refugees, and felt that her own soul was built into the same escape plan. She was as much the power of their progress to wherever it was to be, as he was the mechanism of hers. They were set on a combined course towards what both had wanted since the beginning, yet neither knew what it was. She touched his wrist gently.
‘There’ll be plenty of time for roaming, afterwards,’ he said. ‘We can always put the baby in the car and take off, spend a few years on the road before he or she has to go to school.’
She was blocking his escape route, turning him back by her revelation. If they stayed somewhere long enough she would take a specimen of her water and get her pregnancy confirmed. She was sure, but wanted to be certain. She wanted it to be female, yet was glad there was no way of knowing. It was sufficient for the moment that she had caused him to change plans. Perhaps he was happy that her condition had made him want to, because he was now part of her more than he could ever have been before. If he had not said anything, she would have gone wherever he wanted, though the pride that would insist may have been no more than supine behaviour. Something more important than either of them tampered with his decisions. She resented the interference for her own sake, but not for his. For him it was the appearance of a storm in mid-ocean, an inconvenience to be circumvented. He would alter course. He knew a routine for dealing with it. That part of his temperament she could never affect – just as there was much about her that he couldn’t change.
She could have told him she was pregnant before leaving England, but such an early switchback of his aims wouldn’t have had the significance of the alteration he was making now. She had left telling him, to see whether or not he would do so. It had to mean something, and he had passed the test – her test. Maybe he was scorching with resentment, and she would never know how hard the decision had been for him. But his happiness was obvious. She didn’t know whether to be glad that he wasn’t angry. Now that she had told him, and he wasn’t, had she really wanted him to cosset her as a fragile girl? She could only accept that for the moment she had. The tune would be called by her, or not at all, though perhaps it was just as well that the situation was bigger than either of them.
South of Milan the speedometer read nearly a hundred. The southern hills were showing themselves out of the haze. ‘We’ll take off in a bit.’ But she wasn’t afraid.
‘Over those mountains we’ll get to the Mediterranean.’ He slowed down. ‘There’s a long way to go yet.’
He parked in a picnic place under trees, and topped up the radiator with cool water from a tap. He refilled the supply in his container, and washed dead insects from the windscreen. The air was humid. Birds and butterflies flitted over a meadow. A few families at benches ate an early lunch. Tom took off tie and jacket, and rolled his sleeves. There was food she had bought in Arras: rye bread, pâté, hard-boiled eggs, salt and spring onions from an icebag, and some congealed cake. He took a small stove from the car, boiled water and made tea, putting lemon and sugar-lumps into two mugs.
She laughed. ‘You should have brought a table and chairs.’
It was close to midday. ‘I could take a sight on the sun with the sextant.’
‘Have fun. Where are we?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Italy.’ Her mouth was full. ‘Wonderful!’
He nodded. ‘No place like it – to hear such news. It didn’t really sink in in France.’
Steam from the tea smelled of citrus, and mingled with her sweat. She leaned against the car, void of speculation. The sky was blue. She undid two buttons of her blouse. The intense heat cut her feeling of exhaustion. She wanted to describe everything aloud in case it vanished, but to pull words from her mind would be a negation of life in this idyllic place.
A British car, luggage topped with plastic ripped by the slipstream, was full of kids and coloured buckets. He passed all but the sportiest vehicles. At such a rate it was possible to see the fuel gauge sliding to zero. The straight road crossed the plain of Lombardy, a hundred kilometres flowing while she leaned her head and dozed. She awoke, startled but not alarmed at her dream of rainy streets. They stopped for petrol, black coffee, and to use the toilet.
The wide road curved into the hills. Milky white ribs of cloud looked like the pale x-ray plates of a ghost. There were grey outcrops, and chestnut trees near farmhouses. He drove to make distance, and to get away from the pull of the place he had set out from – before having to get back to it, as if circling the calm exterior of the storm while gathering courage to steer into the middle. She also felt that life wasn’t like this, and she was sure that he also knew. He looked haggard about the eyes, with a tenseness at the mouth she had not noticed before, though when driving by cliff-like menacing lorries his features softened.
‘I dreamed of your aunt last night,’ she said.
‘What about?’
‘I don’t know. I just saw her. She was trying to tell me something. She was screaming, and upset. So was I. A bit frightened, I think. She was in the flat, in the bedroom. Funnily enough, I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but it was more than just trying to get me out of the place.’
‘I suppose one could figure it out,’ he said, ‘though I’d rather forget it.’
‘So would I. It was only a dream. I’d forgotten it until now.’ She searched for a Kleenex to wipe her face. ‘After a night on the train, and all day on the road, I’m going to need a bath.’
‘We’ll find a hotel on the coast.’ He pushed in the cigarette lighter at the dashboard. ‘I’ve pencilled places on the map where there’ll be accommodation.’
The road descended towards the signposted smoke of Genoa. ‘I can smell the sea already.’ He was joyful at the prospect.
It was easier to love a happy man. He must have been marking the map last night while I was asleep, using a pen-torch in his upper bunk to change routes from those he had intended. In the cardboard box she had seen tourist pamphlets on Greece and Israel.
He tuned in to her thoughts. ‘“Thalassa” is the only Greek word I know. Hard to forget, if you’ve read the Anabasis. One of the masters made us read Xenophon’s piece at school, but I’ve read it again since. I actually liked it, even though I was forced into it.’