by Rosie Thomas
After a lot more circumlocutory talk from Tony I asked the question.
How much?
He chafed his beard with a hooked forefinger, a gesture I was to come to know well.
'Er, ha ha, it's not so easy to put a figure on it, off the top of my head.'
'You must have an idea. We've had one estimate, we just need an approximate comparison.'
At last, he came out with a price. It wasn't as little as half the Millchen figure, which was what I had been hoping for, but it was appreciably less than twenty grand. We told him that we'd think about it and get back to him, and we shook hands cordially all round.
Phil was off to the Yemen in the morning so we didn't have much time. I drove him to Euston in the Vauxhall Corsa courtesy car lent to me by the BMW garage while mine was having the extensive damage to its front end repaired. It was raining harder than ever and I couldn't find the demist or the rear windscreen wiper. Interior and external visibility dwindled to almost nil and I kept having to swerve and stamp on the brakes and then forgetting I wasn't driving an automatic and stalling in box junctions. It was as if I'd just passed my test, without having deserved the distinction. Phil's left foot pumped fruitlessly at the floor and I could see his fists were clenched. I kept up a flow of chat about Tony and Amazons to distract him.
'So, what do you think?'
'Um, I liked him. He really knows about Volvos.'
'Eats breathes and sleeps them.'
'I could work with him, I think. Easier than Millchen. And Noddy and Geza are good blokes.'
'Shall we go with Tony and the Amazon, then?'
'Yeah,' he said.
A decision at last.
We reached the passenger drop-off at Euston. For luck I gave Phil a chunk of turquoise that I had bought from a Tibetan street trader in Namche Bazaar. The Sherpas wear them around their necks, for protection in the mountains.
Phil seemed pleased to have it. Or maybe he was just glad to be getting out of the Corsa alive.
Things began to move. After some prompting, Tony sent me his typed specification. It was somewhat more gnomic than the Millchen version, with bald headings and bare lists of improvements and amendments as in Transmission: rebuild gearbox/rebuild overdrive/rebuild prop-shafl/rebuild limited slip diff/new seals in back axle/replace axle bearings where necessary/all new mountings/axle lugs strengthened/new clutch master cylinder/new slave cylinder/new clutch hydraulic hose/extended breather pipe on axle, and so on, under a dozen more headings. In Phil's absence I was in charge, so I read the document with wrinkled forehead and pencilled in the margin whatever questions or comments seemed apposite. I was very conscious that I knew nothing, and my bewilderment expanded in direct proportion to my anxiety. I went back to see Tony again, and showed him my queries.
'Yes, my love,' he would chuckle. 'Of course the brake pressure lines will be re-routed inside the car body. For extra protection, you see. Now, if we're going to do all this we'd better get started, hadn't we? There isn't much time to spare.'
There was no argument about that, at least. I took a deep breath and wrote a cheque, less than Tony wanted and more than I had planned to hand over as a down-payment. As he tucked it swiftly into his back pocket the Ancient Mariner took on the job of building a car that would get us from Peking to Paris – a responsibility that had swelled in my mind to megalithic proportions. We shook hands on the deal.
Down in Somerset, the work got under way. The rusty shell of our as-yet unseen Amazon SRR 64F was nudged on to the ramp, and stripping back and rustproofing began. Weak points were welded, new front inner wings and panels were fitted. Tony reported regularly. The brave new shell of the car was resprayed in the original colour, pearl white. With wonderful illogicality, once I knew my fate was in Tony Barrett's hands I relaxed. I slept at night for a full eight hours, and I went back to work on my neglected novel. Months stretched ahead until August; we were in the prudent and clued-up company of entrants whose prepping was under way. I reported to RO which car we had picked.
'Not a bad choice. Although you'd have done better with the Hillman. They still make them in Iran, you know.'
Chapter Three
At the end of February I sent off another fat cheque, this time to CARS UK, the shipping company that would transport the car out to Xingang, China, in time for the start of the rally. The final date for delivery of the car to the docks was confirmed as 10 July. Now there was a real ship somewhere, with real container space booked and paid for, for a car I had never seen, let alone driven. Tony Barrett kept up a flow of telephone news, coupled with suggestions that I might let him have a couple of grand more, to be going on with. I understood, belatedly, that entering a car rally is in the same order of experience as having the builders in to do some small and perfectly defined piece of work. It always turns out to be twice as complicated as the original worst case scenario, and costs exactly half as much again as you have budgeted for, still on the basis that the original budget figure was the absolute limit of what you knew you could possibly afford.
I did some fresh worrying, this time entirely about money.
I still didn't have the fifty thousand pounds of my own to spare, which was what I now calculated our entry would cost, and even if I had done I would have been unwilling to spend it on this enterprise. I had to find a way to make the rally pay for itself or it would feel like a guilty indulgence.
I embarked on a search for sponsors. At the outset I was blithely convinced that of course Volvo themselves would want to back our entry – how could they not? Yet they declined very briskly, even to help us with spares, and so did everyone else I approached. A friend of a friend who worked in PR for Mobil Oil advised me to forget about finding backing from anyone in the motor or oil business. Applications from Peking to Paris competitors were arriving on everyone's desks at the rate of half a dozen a week, and Phil and I were novices in an unglamorous and untried car and so could hardly hope to be on anyone's list of preferred candidates. Her advice was to cast our net wider and try to make more adventurous connections. Accordingly I sent an information pack and begging letter out to everyone I could think of, from Parker Pens to Norwich Union to PizzaExpress, but without success.
In the end the near-solution came from much closer to home. I wrote a book proposal, a diary of what I thought the rally might be like, and Mark Lucas negotiated a deal with Little, Brown. The advance would just about cover my immediate outlay, and I would worry about the deficit only when there was no alternative.
At last, Phil came back from the Yemen.
'How was it?'
'It was shit. They were all Saga Holiday types.'
I suppressed the retort that this age group would include me before the end of the year.
'No one to talk to?'
'You know me. I'll talk to a dog if I have to.'
But I didn't know him, and this was feeling like more and more of a problem. Once or twice we had arranged to meet and he had either been late or blithely changed the plans at the last moment, and another time we had agreed to travel to Yorkshire in an Amazon borrowed from Tony Barrett, to the reunion of our Everest group. I thought this was a good idea because it would give us a chance to spend a few hours getting better acquainted, as well as do some practice driving. I booked myself a hotel room, not wanting to sleep on the floor in someone's house as Phil and the rest of the Marines planned to do, and made the necessary arrangements about being away from home over the weekend.
But then Phil decided, at the very last minute, that he wanted to stay in London to see Philippa, his girlfriend, who had been away for a while. Rationally, I understood that he was young, materially unattached, and therefore had the freedom to live his life on an hour-by-hour basis, whereas I was professionally busy and had family responsibilities, and had to plan my diary well in advance and stick to my plans as they were made. He had the opportunity for last-minute flexibility and I did not, and that was just one of the dozens of inevitable differences between us.
But I still felt upset that he hadn't been more considerate, and the concern triggered a shock wave of anxiety about the rally itself. Before meeting any of them I convinced myself that most of the other competitors would turn out to be footloose thirty-year-olds too, and they would motor around the world in a carefree haze changing their minds twenty times a day and falling in love with each other, and I would feel ancient and out of place and lonely. What's more, I didn't care about old cars, and if I wanted to travel I had an affectionate husband and plenty of close friends in whose company to do it.
The old questions started up again. What was I doing, and why?
For a week, while I wrestled with the problem and the attendant fears, I avoided speaking to Phil. When he did reach me, he came right out with the question.
'You sound odd. What's wrong? Have I done something to upset you?'
This was disarming. I tried to explain my worries to him.
Again I could hear the scrape of him lighting a cigarette, an acknowledgement of the tension between us.
'So do you want to do the rally with someone else?'
I had thought about it. I'd come to the conclusion that Caradoc would hardly enjoy it; besides, I didn't believe it was the kind of challenge you could embark on with your partner. There was rather too much scope for marital discord. And if it wasn't to be Caradoc, I couldn't think of anyone else who had Phil's qualifications for the job. The thought of Ianto whisking up his trademark whirlpools of confusion all across China made me smile. Phil was practical, and resourceful, and I trusted him. At the bottom of myself I knew that he was the right partner for someone –I just wanted to be more convinced that the someone was me.
'Do you?' I countered.
'I've been trying to think who else I could do it with. I can't come up with anyone.'
This seemed an important admission to make to each other, and given the level to which we were now committed it was bizarre that we hadn't done so before.
'Good. It's just that I find you rather inscrutable. Difficult to get to know any better,' I told him.
'I feel the same about you.'
This really surprised me.
We agreed that we'd better make more of an effort to see and to understand each other. The result was a rainy-evening walk across Hampstead Heath to eat pizza in a local restaurant. I asked him questions, and he told me about his father, and his mother and sisters, and a bit about his history. He didn't ask much in return, and I suppose this was again a reflection of the difference in our ages. Probably you don't ply your mother's generation with questions about their prehistoric love lives and druggy days back in the sixties. And maybe this gap between us and the potential to bridge it would turn out to be part of the adventure itself.
Inevitably we also discussed progress on the car.
Phil was eager to start work on it, but of course it was still down in Somerset. Tony had spoken to the rally office about seats, and distance-measuring devices, and some of the technical regulations. He had found an engine which he planned to rebore completely to take account of the 70-octane fuel we would have to run on across Asia. All this was good. Phil agreed with me that Tony was garrulous and difficult to pin down, but soothingly insisted that this was for him to deal with.
'I'll look after everything to do with the car. That includes Tony Barrett.'
'Thank you.'
We took the Tube back home from Hampstead, and separated on cordial terms. Everything was going to be all right.
The next assignment after the get-to-know-you pizza dinner was to meet RO at a hotel in Paddington. Because we had entered the list so late in the day we had missed all the early briefings, and so RO had consented to fill us in on background information. We were also to hand over all the completed application forms for our Chinese visas, and the details of the car: chassis number, all-up weight, height, length and width, engine number and capacity, which we had extracted from Tony with the ease of drawing unanaesthetised teeth. The Paddington arrangement was the second attempt at a rendezvous: Phil and I drove down all the way to Oxfordshire one Saturday morning, at RO's suggestion, to see him at his office. Unfortunately he forgot to come to his own meeting.
He did appear for tea and scones at the Great Western Hotel. He turned out to be a weighty man with oddly dense black hair and a face like a surly baby's. Phil was supporting himself by supply-teaching at a tough school in the East End and he arrived at the meeting looking exhausted. It was the first time I had detected any sign of physical vulnerability in him. He was wearing the Namche turquoise on a thread around his neck.
RO went through Tony's specification.
'You're spending some money, aren't you?'
I told him about the book deal, and he pulled down the corners of his mouth dismissively.
'You'll have to sell a lot of books to earn that back.'
'We'll do our best.'
RO was evidently a man's man, like Tony Barrett. In my experience man's men don't like women who defend themselves. Phil made a better impression, of course. He was always good at establishing easy, blokeish relationships. RO warmed up as he polished off the scones, and leaned across me to tell Phil indiscreet stories about some of the other entrants. There was a Land Rover enthusiast who was unhealthily obsessed with his vehicle, for instance.
'Probably sticks his dick up the exhaust every night,' RO muttered.
The duke was taking his butler as his co-driver, in a Ford Galaxy estate. On camping nights the butler would get the tent and the duke would lay out his silk sheets on a mattress in the back of the car.
I had a sudden image of all of us, disparate individuals in a hundred different cars, drawn up on a bleak plateau for the night. Trying to sleep under a cold moon. A premonition of the camaraderie touched my spine and made me shiver.
At the end of the meeting RO took our forms and details, and handed back the specification. He seemed, grudgingly, to approve of our efforts.
'You could end up in the medals,' he pronounced.
After he had lumbered away Phil and I clapped hands. There was nothing more we could do now except hold on to our high spirits, chivvy Tony about the car, and continue our fruitless chase for sponsorship.
More time went by and more cheques were written. I worked at finishing the novel, and embarked on the promotion of that year's paperback. Down in Somerset the new engine was rebored. The roll cage was fitted inside the shell of the car and the thought of having this tough-sounding protection reassured me somewhat. I imagined the Amazon planing off some mountain bend and somersaulting through cracking saplings, our dummy-figures neatly unscathed within the branches of steel. I knew this was a cosy fantasy but I let it linger on in my mind. Eventually Phil went down to Somerset himself to work alongside John, Tony's other mechanic. He telephoned every day to give me updates about how much he was learning, sounding high on the excitement of acquiring new expertise. I tried to follow his explanations through the thickets of mechano-speak. We had new pistons, special shock absorbers and heavy-duty springs specially made in Sweden, a competition clutch. Tony said that he was building us a real contender's car, a car capable of winning. My personal antipathy to him dissolved a little. He was an enthusiast and he did love Amazons with a real passion, as Phil had understood from the beginning. It was precisely his tight focus on cars that caused his awareness of the rest of the world to be a little shaky.
One wet and windy Saturday morning in April Caradoc and I drove down to Somerset to be introduced to my car. The garage was housed in a big, red-brick building that had once been a woollen mill. Tony's part of the out-buildings was immediately identifiable by the phalanx of variously decaying Amazons drawn up outside, and by Tony himself who popped out a second later and beckoned us within, in full mad-eyed Ancient Mariner style. This second nether-world of cars and car entrails was even darker and oilier than the one under the arches at Stamford Brook. But in the middle of it all, enthroned on a ramp and looking surprisingly pristine, was our car. I had
begun to be afraid that it would be as broken-down and moss-covered as some of the models outside. John came out from underneath it, ready to shake hands, proud of what he and Phil had been doing.
Caradoc and I stood on either side of it as the car was winched down to our level. It had been resprayed. The bodywork was flawless pearly white.
We opened the doors and looked inside. There was bare metal, a jungle of wiring, holes in the floor pan where the pedals would emerge. The engine lay on a bench to one side, covered by a cloth, like an organ awaiting transplant. Tony gave a commentary about what had been done and what was still to be attended to. It sounded like a lot in a very short time.
Then Phil and I slid inside and sat in our places. Without debating it, he took the driver's side and I got the navigator's.
We shifted in the old seats – the special rally ones had yet to be bought and fitted – and peered ahead through the windscreen. It was surprisingly small, and squared-off like a '50s TV screen. Even though I was in the passenger seat my feet pumped on empty air and my fist closed over the missing gear-lever. Without rear seats or any internal padding it felt as if we were sitting in a bare metal box, but this was a real vehicle at last. This glass rectangle would frame all kinds of views for us. I could imagine the thousands of miles that would roll away under the wheels.
Phil was giving his grin. I could see how pleased and excited he was. We exchanged a look, meaning 'We're going to do this. Good or bad, it's going to happen.'
It was a minute of pure elation. I clung eagerly to it.
Then, one afternoon in the middle of May, Tony called me at home. He said that he wanted the car in London now and he had arranged for it to come up on a truck, tomorrow. Noddy, his ace mechanic at Stamford Brook, was going to start in on the electrics, and Phil was going to work alongside him as an apprentice. It was only two months to the shipping date.
It happened that that week I was in the middle of doing roadshows with my publishers, meeting booksellers in Bristol, Birmingham and Nottingham. The paperback was about to be published and the sales push was gathering momentum. Even so, I wanted to see the Amazon again, immediately. I had begun to feel that it belonged to Phil, to Tony, even to Noddy and Geza – and was only connected to me as a source of financial anxiety. So the day after the car arrived I went to a morning meeting at the publishers and then, in my business suit, went on to the arches without warning anyone that I was coming.
