Gradually the bus worked its way out of town, taking a very, straight road that ran along the coast beside the sea. The wind blew strongly here: grass began to appear between houses, and trees became more frequent. The sun shone over the horizon, and the road was hard. Through the window Besson watched the landscape slip past, very fast in the foreground, then more slowly, till the distant scene appeared motionless, even perhaps shifting in the opposite direction. There were waste lots enclosed by wooden fences, with four or five wrecked cars inside them. There were mounds and hillocks and rows of bungalows, each with its watch-dog. There were brand-new white-painted apartment blocks, with endless empty balconies patterning their façades. There were gypsy caravans, and roofs bristling with television aerials, and telegraph poles, and washing-lines hung with women’s underwear. There were kitchen-gardens and clumps of rose-bushes or rhododendrons and sheds and rusty abandoned bicycles and parked trucks and cemeteries and blue-and-white filling stations. There was a high brick wall with the words U.S. GO HOME painted on it in white, and a grocer’s shop, and a café with several indistinct characters just emerging from it. There were more villas with shutters closed or open as the case might be, and children playing at cops and robbers. There was a church with a pointed steeple and a clock that had gone wrong and showed the time as twelve noon, or midnight. There was a naval dockyard and a general repair shop and a half-built apartment block beside the road, rising amid a curious scaffolding of planks and sticks. Two policemen who had parked their motorcycles and were taking somebody’s name and address. A woman with a goitre, looking on at them. An airfield, a hairdresser’s shop, and a restaurant with candles on the tables and its name written up in big red letters: LA FOURCHETTE. A group of five palm trees. More waste lots, fields lying fallow, patches of earth and rubble in which the flint sparkled like ground glass. And all these things were in continual motion, streaming back horizontally past the windows of the bus, merging and blurring, receding in a growing complexity of lines and angles. A long way off, behind the moving foreground of houses and tree-trunks, the hills floated, blue and magnified. On the other side of the road the sea’s surface revolved round its own axis, like a record. And somewhere ahead of them their destination was vaguely taking shape. Mountains rose up, headlands stretched out into the water, and one small light cloud hung motionless in the sky.
François Besson watched the landscape with eager curiosity. Through every window in the bus he could see it unrolling past them at a great rate, producing the oddest inverted reflections in the polished metal framework of each seat. The vehicle drove straight ahead, very smoothly on the whole, cleaving a path through the transparent air. They were caught in the still centre of movement, of advance without self-propulsion. What they had here was a small section of earth gliding across the earth, not in order to conquer anything at all, but simply floating on the level asphalt with four whirring tyres, cruising, drawn into the void, climbing hills, coming down faster the other side, skimming along on a straight flat road.
Sometimes the bus would stop by the roadside, generally beside a clump of houses; people would get up and leave the vehicle, and others would take their places. People stared at the newcomers for a moment or two, made fun of them in whispers, and then forgot them.
The conductor had by now worked his way down to Besson.
‘Terminus, please,’ Besson said, holding out a note.
The man counted out several coins, gave them to Besson, and turned the handle on his ticket-machine. With a ping! a little piece of paper emerged from the slot, and the conductor put it in Besson’s hand. ‘Next, please,’ he called.
‘Les Mimosas’, said the girl in the next seat, and the same process was repeated.
On his scrap of yellowish paper Besson read:
108576329
Route: A
F
00
325
1012
3
Thank you
He put the ticket in his raincoat pocket, and watched the conductor making his way along the central aisle. He was a man of about forty, with a heavy lined face and rounded shoulders. From time to time he would stoop down and peer through the window, and then whistle to the driver, who stopped the bus. When he whistled again, the bus would move off again, engine labouring.
It occurred to Besson that being the driver or conductor of a bus was by no means a bad job. You walked up and down inside this long metal tube, and turned the little handle which cut off so much paper a time. When you had collected all the fares you went up front and sat by the driver and kept a vague eye on the grey ribbon of road endlessly unwinding in front of you. Or else you were the driver, esconced in that little cabin-like enclosure of anti-glare glass, turning the steering-wheel, following the contours of the landscape. You pulled up at the halts, then let in your clutch and moved off again. You changed gear, first, second, third, fourth, down to third, up to fourth again. You braked violently to annoy the passengers. You could keep up a grumbling commentary the whole time on drivers who overtook you or pedestrians crossing the road, this sort of thing: ‘Well, get on with it, then — Jesus, will you just look at that! What the hell d’you think I was signalling for? Yes, you, want your face bashed in, then? Move yourself, you half-wit! And what about that clod on the island, is he going to cross or isn’t he? Come on, you stupid bugger, you clapped-out thing you—’ And so on. You could sound the horn, too, that clarion note which really made people’s hearts miss a beat if they weren’t expecting it. And you could look out for the pretty women all along your route, and whistle at them as you went by. There were the girls who hitched up their skirts as they clambered aboard at a stop, and those who just missed tipping over when you jammed the brakes on, and those who travelled standing, close to the door, and chatted you up, and were good for a laugh. In the evening you’d have a drink, and go to bed tired out, and dream all night of that never-ending road. You’d know the route by heart, of course, you could drive it without tiring yourself, and the days passed quickly. You made your own private map of this small section of the world. You learnt all the important things about it — the bits where you had to keep a sharp look-out, the bits where there were always lots of people around, the deserted stretches where you could relax. You knew every fountain and signpost and built-up corner and crossroads and bridge and level-crossing. You had your own landmarks. You knew exactly where you were going. Several dozen miles of wealthy and thickly-populated countryside, where something — the same sort of thing — was always happening.