Collecting Thoughts

by Irene Davidson

Collecting Thoughts

  By Irene Davidson

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  Copyright © 2014 by Adrienne Irene Oaks

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organisations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter one

  Chapter two

  Chapter three

  Chapter four

  Chapter five

  Chapter six

  Chapter seven

  Chapter eight

  Chapter nine

  Chapter ten

  Chapter eleven

  Chapter twelve

  Chapter thirteen

  Chapter fourteen

  Chapter fifteen

  Chapter sixteen

  Chapter seventeen

  Chapter eighteen

  Chapter nineteen

  Chapter twenty

  Chapter twenty-one

  Chapter twenty-two

  Chapter twenty-three

  Chapter twenty-four

  Chapter twenty-five

  Chapter twenty-six

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Chapter twenty-eight

  Chapter twenty-nine

  Chapter thirty

  Chapter thirty-one

  Chapter thirty-two

  Chapter thirty-three

  Chapter thirty-four

  Chapter thirty-five

  Epilogue

  French-English translations

  About the Author

  Other titles by Irene Davidson

  Connect with Irene Davidson

  Acknowledgements

  A sample of Irene’s next title: Leaf on a Breeze, Book Two in the White Briars series

  Poem: In Flanders Fields

  Recipe links

  Dedicated to Scott and Bryony,

  Without a doubt the two most perfect creations of my life.

  Chapter one

  “Stay on the right, stay on the right, stay on the right,” Darcy intoned quietly, chanting the words with zombie-like regularity in time with the steady flip-flap of the front windscreen wipers as she stared fixedly out into the murk, searching for a road sign for the village.

  Without warning, the headlights of a daffodil-yellow minivan pierced through the misty drizzle, materialising out of nowhere like some fiery-eyed apparition from around the corner ahead of her. All Darcy saw was that the van’s wheels were well over the centre of the narrow asphalt lane, leaving her nowhere to go except up the banked verge of the slick-surfaced lane-that-was-barely-more-than-an-asphalt-footpath she’d been so carefully negotiating.

  Instantly, her muttered mantra morphed into a startled yelp of terror, “…Aargh! Get on your own side! Road-hog!”

  With a hastily indrawn breath and scrunching up her shoulders as if it would make her car instantly narrower: like some low-rent version of Harry Potter’s purple Knight bus, Darcy braked hard and hauled the steering wheel as far to the right as she dared. The last thing she wanted was to get marooned on the soft verge…and yeah, she’d heard all the bad jokes about not mentioning soft verges to the French.

  Right now she was far more concerned with avoiding a tragically premature end to the trip she’d spent so much time and energy selling to the children as a wonderful Normandy adventure by colliding with this obviously manic French driver.

  It would be such a shame, she thought fleetingly as she fought to keep the big green car under control, especially now that she was so close to getting herself and the children to the village alive and in one piece.

  “That’s if I can find the bleedin’ village,” she said under her breath, unaware she’d resorted to one of Patrick’s less-pithy expletives in her exhaustion and frustration at being lost in the French countryside. As someone who had previously never talked to herself and seldom swore, Darcy had found herself resorting to soliloquy and an invective-enhanced vocabulary in the weeks since Patrick’s abrupt departure from her and their children’s lives. Her best friend, Halley, had said the solo-conversation thing was a habit that was an early indicator of going off the deep end, sanity-wise, but as far as Darcy could see, imminent insanity was the least of her worries at this juncture in her life. The swearwords, she knew were merely a by-product of the heightened stress she’d been under and would disappear, she hoped, once they were more settled.

  The jolly green giant lurched part-way up the bank and back down intact as the van flashed by. Expelling her pent-up breath with relief at the near-miss, Darcy steered back onto the road. The male driver of the delivery van had not slowed even slightly; instead giving her a cheerily unrepentant grin and a cheeky parp from a horn that sounded as if at belonged more to one of Rosie’s Noddy DVDs than on any real road.

  Hugging the right-hand kerb and driving at an even more sedate pace than she had been travelling previously, Darcy spared a quick glance in her rear-vision mirror to check that her sudden manoeuvre hadn’t upset the children.

  She needn’t have worried. Connor and Rosie were still sound asleep in the back, with the overflow of toy-filled bags and other paraphernalia that Darcy hadn’t been able to fit in the trunk mounded between them to create a sort of travelling Great Wall of China; designed to separate the warring factions. Her little darlings normally got on well together but long car journeys such as this didn’t bring out the best in their divergent personalities.

  Her movements limited by the head rests of her booster seat and her seat belt, seven year old Rosie’s tousled curly mop that so resembled her mother’s bright red curls had lolled forward in what looked to be an awfully uncomfortable position. Connor, the elder of the two by four years, was snuggled cosily under his comforter with his blond head resting on his favourite pillow, complete with an appliquéd space rocket pillowcase that he’d insisted upon bringing with him.

  At the sight of them both still sleeping and safe from harm, Darcy took in another calming breath, expelling it through thinly pursed lips as she removed one hand off the steering wheel to rub briefly at her tired eyes.

  No two ways about it: driving in a foreign country in the rain with dusk approaching and no one to help navigate was no picnic, Darcy thought gloomily. She frowned through the rain-spattered front windscreen of the car while she attempted to work out where she’d gone wrong.

  They had left England enjoying a balmy autumn morning, complete with sun and clear blue heavens and arrived into patchily grey skies that had become increasingly murky on the journey south. It was one of the disadvantages, Darcy mused crossly, of travelling underneath the English Channel instead of floating on top of the waves. There was no gradual sense of any changes in the weather and no visual warning of what to expect when you popped out the French end of the Chunnel.

  On the plus-side, she reasoned, there had been nada in the way of sea-sickness either, so on balance perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Disembarking, they’d continued their journey south. The thickening rainclouds that had been gathering overhead ever since they approached Abbeville had finally opened as they departed Rouen and intermittent showers had been falling for the past thirty minutes with a predictable repetitiveness that showed little signs of relenting any time soon; certainly not before they were due to arrive at their destination.

  Glancing upwards at the endless ranks of blue-black clouds that marched across the darkening Normand
y skies like World War Two troops preparing for battle, Darcy didn’t relish the thought of unpacking in the wet and fervently hoped that they’d arrive in one of the short dry spells between showers.

  She’d been caught out by the first cloudburst. After years of big-city living with the London Underground or local buses as her regular daily transport and lacking practice at driving, she had been concentrating hard on steering an unfamiliar car on unfamiliar roads. It had crossed her mind that as an American driving in France, she should have, theoretically, found this easier than driving about London but ironically, having belatedly sat her licence in Britain and having never driven in the U.S. she felt every bit as daunted as any other Brit. confronted with the continental road network and French driving habits.

  Distracted for a moment by the sight of her newly ringless left hand gripping the steering wheel in white-fisted concert with her right, locked in a precise ten to two position that would have made her London driving instructor proud, she hadn’t noticed the oncoming storm. As the first light raindrops had turned into an unanticipated deluge requiring high-speed wipers, Darcy, unprepared for this added difficulty and having just driven down the on-ramp onto the busier A13 autoroute, had frantically pulled, prodded and punched just about every switch on the dashboard until she finally found the one that operated the front windscreen wipers.

  Just in time, as it was by then, near-impossible to see through the rain-smeared glass. Well, she’d thought happily as she adjusted the wiper’s speed to something more effective than the spasmodic snail’s pace they had come on at, she now knew which buttons operated the rear wipers, the windscreen wash, the heating and the emergency lights, should they ever be required.

  Terribly useful. Not. She planned to return the jolly green giant (so-christened by the children on first sight of its eco-green paint job), back to the rental company as soon as she bought something else to replace its sorry green ass.

  Looking on the bright side, Darcy thought, having left the autoroute and the route nationale for narrower country lanes, the car’s windscreen wipers had provided the perfect metronome-like backing band for her sing-song chant.

  She had noted on some level that things had gone very quiet in the rear of the car as they’d approached Rouen but had been too busy negotiating the heavy afternoon traffic and deciphering incomprehensible French road signs to enquire if her passengers were content. By the time traffic had at last thinned enough to allow her a moment to glance back, both children had been fast asleep.

  Out like lights, she’d noted happily. They were tuckered out by the pre-dawn start from London and the day’s driving as well as their channel crossing. For them, the journey had been exciting (leaving the house and London), boring (the painfully slow drive out of the city and down to the Chunnel train station at Folkestone), briefly exciting again (driving onto the double-decker train carriage and the first five minutes of the crossing) and dead-boring (more driving, this time from the Calais terminal to Rouen).

  For Darcy it had all just become increasingly tiring and painful….so that by now, she wanted nothing more than to arrive at their destination and remove her poor aching body from this uncomfortable car seat that she had decided hours ago must have been fabricated by some sadistic synergy of evil design professionals to have resulted in such terribly unergonomic seating. After, in a moment of honesty, she had conceded that some of her discomfort might have been partially her own doing. She wasn’t exactly the most relaxed of drivers, and hours of tight shoulders and clenched hands had taken their toll.

  Mindful of this, she rolled her shoulders as much as driving would allow, hoping to relieve some of the pressure. The exercise did nothing discernible; the pain in her neck wasn’t going away that easily. Then she tried clenching and unclenching her buttocks in a vain attempt to get some circulation back into her tender flesh but that wasn’t entirely successful either.

  Doing her best to ignore her aches and pains she acknowledged with a small glow of what she thought of as justifiable pride that she’d only gotten (ever so slightly) lost once on the entire trip. And that had been in the centre of Rouen…hardly surprising when she’d never driven through the city before and all the road signs were in French, a language in which she’d never progressed much beyond schoolgirl level. And, since the children had slept through that part of the journey and therefore knew nothing about it, it hardly counted at all…after all, as the saying went… if a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around to hear it, and …yadda-yadda…however that ended…she was too pooped to think anymore.

  Anyway, she thought tiredly but with satisfaction, not bad for a first time driver in France with no one else to gripe at for screwing up the navigation …as Patrick had always done with her whenever he drove.