‘Couldn’t we take the Chunnel?’

  I made a face. ‘I hate Chunnels. Anyway, the same thing could happen there. No, here’s my suggestion. We stop now for the night. Tomorrow we drive to Portsmouth and take a ferry to Brittany. Then we head across France and surprise my big sister. She and her man live near the Swiss border.

  ‘If Ross is following us, he’s bound to head for Dover, then for Geneva and Berners Bank, just as fast as he can. Let him. If we don’t go there ourselves until next Thursday, maybe, by that time, he’ll have decided we’re not coming.’

  ‘Some chance of that!’ I thought.

  ‘Some chance of that!’ Prim said. ‘But yes, I’ll buy that idea. We might as well travel in comfort. Let Ross do the chasing!’

  We turned off at Darlington, but as an added precaution, we decided not to stop in one of the hotels in town. Instead we headed for the outskirts, until we came upon a place not big enough to call itself a village, appropriately named Middleton-One-Row. It was big enough to have a nice roadside inn, the kind that’s always popular with reps. There was one room left, twin-bedded. I looked at Prim, questioningly. She nodded, so I booked us in. The owner was a cheerful chap, and his chef did a remarkably good salmon en croute, even at that time of night. Afterwards, we had a couple of pints with our host. His name was Peter and he seemed glad of the company, but at a quarter to midnight, we said goodnight and left him to close up.

  Our room was nicely furnished, with a real en suite bathroom, not one of those partitioned-off jobs in the corner, the kind in which you try to pee quietly so your partner won’t hear.

  We lay side by side on our twin beds, each of us staring up at the ceiling. ‘My brain’s still travelling at 100 miles an hour,’ said Prim. ‘What a day this has been! Pure mayhem!’

  I propped myself up on an elbow and gazed across at her. ‘Do you have any other kind? It occurs to me that since I met you, my feet have hardly touched the ground.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said, pushing herself off her divan and coming to join me on mine, ‘but I do know that this will be the fourth different bed that I’ve slept in in the last five nights.’

  I thought about that one, reached behind her, under her shirt, and unclipped her bra, one-handed. ‘True. It’s a bit like the Grand Prix circuit, isn’t it. D’you think we should start giving them marks out of ten?’

  She unzipped me and eased her hand inside my jeans. There wasn’t much room in there any more. ‘Not them, Osbert,’ she whispered ‘Us. I reckon it’s time for a test drive.’ She leaned over me, pinning me down, and kissed me, disengaging herself with difficulty from my Levis, and going to work on the buckle of my belt.

  ‘There is one thing, though,’ she said, as I began to ease her out of her clothes. ‘I’ve been off the pill for two years, and being a nurse, I know about cycles. Right now, if you even point that thing at me, I could get pregnant. So I hope that with all these propositions you’ve been throwing at me, you’re carrying a supply.’

  My face fell, just a second before hers. ‘Christ,’ she laughed. ‘Nineties man!’

  ‘Meets Sixties woman!’ I retorted.

  We lay there, half-undressed, shaking our heads and laughing, until Prim jumped up, half out of her tights, and hopped back across to her bed. She was almost there when I had a brainwave.

  ‘Hold on, this is a reps’ hotel. The Gents is bound to have a slot machine.’

  We rifled through our change until we found four pound coins. Silently, I padded downstairs to the gents’ toilet off the hallway. My heart rose as I saw the machine on the wall. It fell again, just as quickly.

  Peter’s is a popular hotel with reps; but just as popular, it seems, are the reps who use it. The machine was in perfect working order. It was also perfectly empty.

  In which we plan to score high marks on the high seas but end up cast adrift

  ‘I wonder where Ricky Ross is waking up,’ Prim said, as she stretched luxuriously, arching her back and squeezing the last of the sleep out of her body. She’s the best str-e-e-e-e-tcher I’ve ever seen. When she does it she looks like a lioness, with her blonde mane and her golden skin.

  ‘I hope the bastard’s been driving all right,’ I said, ‘and that right about now he drops off to sleep at the wheel and totals himself.’ I really meant it, and it must have sounded that way too, for Prim looked at me in surprise.

  ‘If only life was that simple,’ she said. She propped herself up on an elbow and grinned across at me. ‘What’s the game plan for today, lover-boy? Want to look around the shops this morning before we head south. Like Boots, maybe?’

  ‘I could nip out now, if you like,’ I said, experimentally.

  She snorted. ‘The Grant Prix circuit’s closed. What time’s breakfast?’ I looked at my watch. It was almost quarter past nine.

  ‘We’ve got about fifteen minutes to get down there.’

  Prim showered while I shaved, and so we were able to make it with about five seconds to spare. We both felt guilty about keeping the chef from his break, so we settled for cereal and coffee.

  Peter, it seemed, had taken to us. He was sorry to see us go, but Prim cheered him up when she said we’d look in on the way back. I muttered that when we did, all the facilities had better be in working order. He stared at me for a few seconds, until at last he grasped my meaning. ‘Ah,’ he said, mournfully, ‘that’s the trouble with outside suppliers.’

  Rather than head south straight away we drove back into Darlington. It’s a nice town, distinctive, with a market in its centre set out around a high tower. After I’d been to Boots, we found a travel agent and looked up ferry times from the south coast ports. ‘I’ve never seen St Malo,’ I suggested. The travel agent assured us that there would be plenty of space on a night crossing in midweek, so that was it.

  We had nine hours to get to Portsmouth, and we used them all, driving at a steady pace, bypassing Leeds and circling south of Birmingham till we found the M40. We chatted as we travelled, when we weren’t singing along to Jan’s Abba tapes. (The woman’s never been the same since she saw Muriel’s Wedding.) We tried to talk about the future, but for both of us the crystal ball was obscured by the dark shadow of Ricky Ross, and our task in Geneva.

  ‘If you’ve finished with nursing, honey,’ I asked Prim as we crawled through Newbury, ‘what are you going to do? Not, I say again, that you need to do anything.’

  She shook her head, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t All I do know is that I have to do something, but it has to be something really different.’

  ‘How about marrying me and having babies?’ The words jumped unbidden from my mouth. I twisted the mirror and stared in it to make sure that it was me who had said them.

  ‘Woah, Oz, woah,’ she said. ‘All in good time. It’s only been five days, and we haven’t even had that test drive yet. Your application still has to be approved.’

  I must have looked downcast, because she squeezed my thigh. ‘A couple of years down the road, if we can still stand each other, then we can talk about things like that. But is that what you really want?’

  I took a hand off the wheel and stroked her soft cheek. ‘Right now, Springtime, what I want is you. Anything else is a bonus.

  ‘Tell you what, let’s get the next few days over with. If we’re still alive in a week, we’ll have the rest of our lives in front of us!’

  We drove on in silence for a while. Talk of test drives, and our developing, if frustrating, relationship made me think about ferry crossings. Jan and I went to London once. There’s something about making love in a British Rail sleeper. I wondered if it might be the same on a cross-channel ferry. My Dad’s house has cupboards that are bigger than railway sleepers but those narrow berths were an experience … especially with both of us crammed into the lower one.

  We got to Portsmouth with two hours to spare. The travel agent was right, up to a point. There was plenty of vehicle space, with no buses booked on board. But there were absolutely no spare cabins. I looked at Prim as we stood at the booking window. ‘Am I being punished for something?’ I asked her. ‘Are you? Has your Mum had a word with the Bloke Upstairs?’

  In terms of Grand Prix circuits, the Club Class lounge on a Channel Ferry is strictly a pedestrian precinct.

  We sat side by side in our reclining aircraft-style seats, the Fetherlites redundant in my wallet, and held hands through the night, all the way to France.

  In which we arrive on a movie set and thwart a daring escape bid

  I like motoring in France. I don’t know my left from my right at the best of times, so driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road is no big deal for me.

  There is this theory that to get to anywhere in France from the Channel ports you have to go through Paris. It’s rubbish, of course. We hung about in St Malo for a while, just to get the feel of it, then headed south to Rennes. Using a map which we’d bought at the terminal we plotted a route more or less alongside the Loire, until we picked up the Autoroute which led to Lyon.

  We made a couple of stops along the way, and Prim gave me yet another surprise. I may like France, but when it comes to speaking the language, I’m about as useful as Harpo Marx. Prim turned out to be fluent. ‘It was Africa,’ she explained. ‘French was the main language where I was, so I had to pick it up.’

  The day grew hotter as we went further south, until the information signs along the road were showing an outside temperature of 28 degrees. To make it tolerable we drove with the windows down and the sunroof open, but even at that, touching the steering wheel felt a bit like handling hot bread straight from the oven.

  ‘Where does your sister live?’ Prim asked as we pulled into a service area, to make another pit stop, and to buy food to take to Ellen’s. Arriving empty-handed is not the done thing in the Blackstone family.

  ‘A place called Perrouges. I’ve never been there, but she says it’s nice. Sort of old, she says.’

  We found it without too much trouble, but when we got there we could barely believe our eyes. It turned out that my sister’s home is in a piece of living history, a walled townlet with cobbled streets narrow enough to offer shade nearly all day, and hardly a building that’s less than two hundred and fifty years old.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Prim. ‘It’s a movie set!’

  Naturally, I’d forgotten to bring a note of Ellen’s address, but my tour guide solved the problem by going into the town’s tiny hotel and asking the receptionist where the Scots family lived. It wasn’t far — nowhere in Perrouges is far — just round the comer and down a twisty alley.

  We knew the house before we got there. When they handed out the lungs, our Ellen was right up at the front of the queue.

  ‘Jonathan!’ The shout seemed to fill the narrow alleyway, bouncing back and forth off the stone walls. I jumped. It was pure reflex. When I was a kid, Ellen’s bellow could freeze my blood from two hundred yards away. Close up it could emasculate an elephant. The sound was still echoing, on its way, no doubt, to frighten distant wildlife, when my older nephew came diving head first out of a low window, about thirty feet away. He did a perfect rolling landing, winding up on his feet, and kick-started a sprint. His trainers threw up puffs of dust as he raced up the sloping pathway towards us. He made to shimmy round us, head down, but I grabbed his shoulder. At first he tried to wriggle out of my grasp, and only when he found it was too strong for him, did he look up.

  ‘Hello there, Wee Man. What have you been up to then?’

  His mouth dropped open, answering my question in the process. It, and half of his face, was stained by the juice of berries.

  ‘Uncle Oz! Uncle Oz!’ He was so surprised that he forgot all about his escape bid, and his predicament. ‘Mum, Mum!’ he shouted, back down the alley. ‘See who’s here! See who’s here!’ Jonathan is only just turned seven, but he’s showing signs already that he’s inherited his mother’s lung-power. I let him go and he ran back to the house, crashing through the door this time, rather than the window. A second or two later there was the sharp, unmistakable ‘Splat!’ of palm on bare leg, and a second after that the sound of a howl being stifled as Jonathan gasped out his news through the string of retribution.

  ‘If you’re making up stories again …’ said Ellen as she stepped outside.

  It had been over a year since I’d seen her. The first thing I realised was that there was more of her to see. Ellen’s always been a square-built sort of girl, but France had straightened out what curves she had. I wouldn’t say she’d got fat … no, to be honest, I would. She’d got fat.

  She stared at me. ‘Oz, you bugger! You might have let me know!’ Jonathan appeared again by her side, sniffling and smiling at the same time, pulling his wee brother Colin along behind him.

  I gave her a bear-sized hug. It’s only when I see Ellen after a break that I realise how much she means to me. She hugged me back and looked up at me. If it had been anyone but Ellen, I’d have said there was a tear in the corner of her eye.

  ‘Hi, Sis. I know we should have called, but it was a spur of the moment thing. Ellie, this is Prim Phillips, my girlfriend.’

  You know right away how my sister feels about someone. If she has doubts, it shows in a narrowing of her eyes that she doesn’t even know is there. She looked at Primavera, wide-eyed, and grinned. I have to say that even after a day’s drive through France, Prim looked fantastic. The sun had given her skin an extra glow, and had picked out shiny highlights in her hair.

  ‘You poor lassie,’ said Ellen, ‘come on in.’

  The house was fantastic. Not huge, but big enough for a young family. It had a stone floor and walls, which made it wonderfully cool, and beamed ceilings, yet the important parts were modem. The kitchen, to which we followed Ellen, was lined with hand-built cupboards, and fitted out with every available appliance. A Pyrex bowl sat on the work-surface, half full of strawberries. Around it there lay piles of green husks.

  Ellen pointed at it, still outraged. ‘See that wee so-and-so. They were for tonight.’ She glowered at her older son. ‘So help me God!’ Jonathan, reckoning he was on safer ground with me around, chanced his arm by smiling.

  ‘It’s all right, Ellie,’ I said. ‘We’ve got some more in the car.’ I cuffed Jonathan, very lightly, around the ear. ‘None for you though, pal.’

  ‘Allan still at work?’ I asked, innocently, and was concerned to see a shadow cross her face.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Allan works every hour God sends. Allan volunteers for extra work. Last week he was away so early and home so late that he didn’t see his kids at all.’ She tried to sound casual, but she didn’t fool me. My sister was not a happy lady.

  I didn’t want to get into the domestics, so I changed the subject. ‘How are you getting on with the language?’

  ‘Bloody awful,’ she said. ‘Stuff that, though. How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s great. I might as well tell you straight off; he’s got a new interest in life. Auntie Mary.’

  Ellen’s face lit up again. ‘That’s great. I’ve been hoping that would happen. And how about Jan? Is she still with the German?’ Ellen did not approve of Jan’s relationship.

  ‘Slovakian, Sis. She’s Slovakian. Aye, they’re still going strong.’

  ‘And you two. How long have you been …’

  We were still talking in the kitchen when Allan came in a couple of hours later, just after nine, but by that time the kids were in bed, our kit was in the spare room, and a meal had been prepared. ‘Coq au Vin’ Ellen called it, muttering something about ‘shaggin’ in a Transit’, but it looked like chicken in red wine sauce to me.

  I try to make excuses for my brother-in-law, especially to my Dad, but I always wind up admitting that he’s a selfish, boring get. Allan is not the sort of guy you’d invite out to the pub. He was surprised to see us, of course, but not the sort of surprise that gives way to a big smile, like Ellen’s did. He barely hid his irritation at our disruption of his routine.

  We ate outside in their small courtyard. Ellie asked Prim about Africa, and to be polite, I asked Allan about his job. He gave me a lecture on the state of the oil industry; I told him that I always judged the state of the oil industry by the number of rigs tied up idle in the Firth of Forth. Finally, as soon as half-decent manners allowed, my brother-in-law offered the ‘early start’ excuse and went upstairs.

  Later, as Prim and I undressed in the tiny guest room, we thought we heard the sound of my sister’s raised voice. ‘See if I ever get like him, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Make sure you shoot me before you leave, will you.’

  In which an unhappy sister lends us her car and plots her own escape

  We decided that French Grand Prix should be postponed until another night.

  Neither of us said anything, but we knew that it just wouldn’t have been right in that unhappy house, under that roof. Instead, we lay together in the big iron-framed bed which almost filled the room, Prim in her nightshirt, me in my boxers, making our plans for the last stage of our journey, and trying not to dwell on the danger which might be lying in wait for us.

  Next morning, when I wandered downstairs at seven o’clock for a glass of water, Allan was gone.

  Over breakfast, with Jonathan packed off to school and Colin sent into the courtyard with a bun and a football, Ellen tried to keep her brave face on it, and I tried to go along with it. But it was no use.

  ‘What is it, Ellie?’ I asked her. ‘D’you feel homesick, or what?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, wee brither. I feel bored. I feel uncared for. I feel abandoned. Try to imagine what it’s like living here. The place is lovely, sure, but so what. It’s in the middle of nowhere, the natives are unfriendly. Bloody Hell, the place even has a wall round it. It’s a place to visit, not to live, and yet I’m stuck here full-time with nothing to do but eat pastries and go quietly out of my mind. Look at the size of me, Oz. I’m like a bloody bus.