Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  'Ah. And how is the way I am?' I was thinking hard. We had been travelling for a long, difficult time, but I couldn't recall that any of those people had seen anything but my public face. Unlike Phil, who had seen some faces – up the hairpins and at the roadside on the icy plateau and across the desert – that I hadn't even known I possessed.

  'You seem very controlled and confident and dismissive. People – men – find you frightening.'

  I digested this information. It is disconcerting to find that the external image is completely at odds with the view from inside. I knew it was a wrong assessment; I was often meaninglessly angry, much more with my awkward self than with the more amenable world, and I understood that my anger might give me an intimidating aspect. But it was rooted in weakness and bereavement and defensiveness, and it did not give rise to confidence or self-control, only the crack-glazed superficial veneer of them. I also knew that my lack of self esteem was innate. It was too late to eradicate it but I figured that acknowledging the problem went part of the way to compensating for it – something like the way that accepting that you have curly hair for better or for worse finally helps you to stop fiddling about with straightening lotions and hair dryers.

  'I'm only just finding out that you aren't confident at all, even though you seem to have achieved everything anyone could want. It isn't just your driving you aren't sure of.'

  I smiled with my face against his shoulder. It was very comfortable there after so many weeks of being fended off.

  'You're right.'

  'I thought we were different. But you are the same as me.'

  'How is that?'

  Very carefully at first, unpractised, Phil began to talk about himself.

  The things he told me belong to him, but in his confiding he gave me the piece of himself that I had sought ever since we met. And I hadn't been able to reach for it before because I had made the blind-eyed mistake – a very big mistake, much bigger than the one his friends in the bar had made about me, because I was closer to him – of accepting the version of himself that he projected on the world.

  Phil wasn't invulnerable or even impervious. He was just almost impregnably defended. Once or twice on the journey I had suspected it, but it had taken until now for us to read each other properly.

  We had more or less unthinkingly embarked on an adventure together that meant we had to be capable, and to appear so to one another. Phil had tried to be infallible and I had overplayed my weaknesses so as, in a way, to diminish them. Without those responses, and the partial subterfuges that they involved, we would probably have understood each other quicker and much better.

  But it didn't really matter, I thought. We had achieved a friendship now.

  We lay for a long time and talked, while the sea churned blue-grey past the porthole. It was one of the best, for me, one of the happiest and the most valuable moments of the whole adventure. Real connections with another human being are the most elusive and the most satisfying achievements of life. That was another discovery I had had confirmed for me on this motorised odyssey.

  In the end, naturally, Phil started to think about food. He turned my wrist to look at my watch – his was amongst the trail of possessions he had mislaid along the way.

  'Time for lunch.'

  He rolled off the bunk and fidgeted around the cabin.

  'Or we could stay here, and I'll shag the arse off you . . .'

  He was being ironic, of course.

  To indicate as much he had chosen the most quintessentially Philistine of the wide variety of philistine expressions available to him. (I reviewed the other possibilities. A good seeing-to was probably near the top of the list.) He was also acknowledging what might be expected of him in the cosy situation in which we now found ourselves, and politely making a humorous nod towards it, as well as reinforcing his projected image as a man ready and able to deal with whatever bizarre emergency might crop up between the Great Wall and the Place de la Concorde.

  He wasn't nearly as obtuse as he pretended to be, and he certainly wasn't insensitive.

  For me, just briefly, fantasy Phil and real Phil slid together and almost coalesced. He had a blurred outline, rather like an imperfectly registered colour print, but it was near enough a complete picture to be tempting. He wasn't even wearing the sheikh's turban, and in that minute I still fancied him.

  I said, 'Lunch, I think.'

  For a full nanosecond afterwards I regretted the decision.

  'Oh-kay,' he agreed, with apparent relief.

  We went to lunch, laughing merrily.

  Phil spent the afternoon playing backgammon with the Iranians, and I stared out of the saloon windows at the flat blue Adriatic.

  We docked at Ancona in the early evening. On my way down to be reunited with the Amazon I passed the driver of the Bentley Continental having a huge altercation with a pair of stewards and the ship's purser outside an empty cabin.

  'All gone, all my luggage, stolen,' the man was shouting. He waved at the bare interior. 'I want the thief caught. Maybe it's an Albanian stowaway.'

  The Bentley boys had struck again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a short dash up the motorway from the port of Ancona to Rimini. The car just about held out, although the grumbling of the bearings turned to an outright clamour.

  There was a huge storm as we drove, with slabs of water driven up by truck tyres sluicing the windscreen, and pale tongues of lightning licking the dark sky. Summer was over. Rimini itself was huddled behind the rainwashed seafront, the network of deserted streets shiny under the deluge and patched with soaking fallen leaves.

  It was a joy to be in Italy. The hotel was old, and plain, and dinner was waiting for us as soon as we arrived. It was as if I had requested my fantasy meal in advance. There was antipasti including rucola salad – how I had wished for rocket, back in Iran – and pasta with tuna and asparagus, and grilled swordfish, and tiny fruit tarts, and good red wine from the Veneto, and the best coffee I had ever tasted. We ate with JD and Dan and Colin, and the Doreys, and Pim Bentinck from the Railton Straight 8 and his two co-drivers. There was a lot of laughing and refilling of plates and waving for more wine. Phil and I gave the meal our full attention, in anticipation of the night to come.

  It was 11 p.m. when we finally went out to address ourselves to the bearings.

  Phil had persuaded the receptionist to find us a place in the underground car park, so at least he wouldn't have to work outside in the downpour. There was a steep ramp leading up to the street and a navy-blue square of rainy night sky at the top of it, and down in the hotel's bowels the car waiting for attention in the close beam of clamp lights, like a patient on the operating table.

  At first Phil had plenty of company and the benefit of more advice than he could assimilate. Dan and JD joined in and Dave Bull came to watch; he had decided that he would leave his Rover's bearings as they were and trust to luck. Jonathan Lux's co-driver David Drew had rejoined the rally at Istanbul, and he came to offer his opinion as a mechanic. Jingers was eager to help too, but RO had warned all the official mechanics that they were not allowed to help out competitors except in roadside breakdowns or emergencies. It was funny to see Jingers sliding forwards to look at the axle as it was dismantled, and then skipping backwards with a furtive glance over his shoulder in case anyone should suspect he was involved in the work.

  Time passed. Midnight came and went, and the crowd of advisers thinned considerably. The half-shafts were removed from the axle casing and the new bearings fitted on to the ends. Reassembly should have been a tedious but straightforward process, but it was not going smoothly. By 1 a.m. only Dan and JD were left of our original supporters, and then JD yawningly announced that he must go to bed or fall asleep where he stood.

  Phil and Dan worked on and I sat on a spare tyre, remembering what Dan had said but still wanting at least to be there.

  Michael Kunz, the navigator from the Triumph Vitesse that was two places and 20 minutes a
head of us, came unsteadily down the ramp to see what we were doing. He was beamingly, owlishly drunk.

  'C'n I get you guys a drink?'

  He fetched beers for Phil and Dan and a cup of chocolate for me that was more like a bowl of hot melted mousse.

  'S'what's happnin?'

  Phil and Dan weren't very communicative, but Mike didn't seem to mind. At length he drifted away again.

  I put some sad cello music in the cassette player. The clamp lights threw highlights on Phil and Dan's frowning faces as they moved around the car, and cast elongated shadows over the concrete floor. The darkness seemed to thicken in the recesses of the car park. Sitting on my tyre in the chiaroscuro I thought it was like being in a picture by Rembrandt: Portrait of Mechanics At Work maybe. I didn't share this artistic insight with them.

  They kept reassembling the axle and finding that it locked tight. The rear wheels would not turn, and so they would have to strip it down all over again and slide little plates of metal called shims in between the hub and the axle casing, to change the pressure of the half-shafts against the differential.

  I watched this routine two or three times, and each time they put the wheels back on there was the same problem, or else there was too much play in the propshaft which was the opposite symptom.

  It was now three in the morning. The rear end of the car was entirely dismantled, there was brake fluid and bearings grease everywhere. I resisted the impulse to whine to Phil, 'But what if you can't fix it in time for the start?'

  I did ask him some trivial question, and he snapped back, unsurprisingly enough. They were both deeply weary. It was generous of Dan to have stayed up all this time.

  I judged that it was the right moment to leave, and quietly slipped away to bed. There was some commotion and shouting and crashing going on downstairs in the lobby, but in the end everything went quiet.

  I was still awake when Phil eventually came in.

  'Fixed?' I asked when he lay down beside me.

  'Fixed.'

  It was 5.30, and there was a grey smudge of light over the sea. With a 7.45 alarm call to come, it seemed hardly worth going to sleep.

  In the morning I heard the story. The problem was that they had taken the axle apart and begun reassembling it from the wrong side, so it had been a process of trial and error to put it back again with the shims as spacers against the differential gears. At last there had been a breakthrough of understanding, and we now had impeccable new wheel bearings.

  'Well done.'

  'Thank you.'

  Beep.

  Rimini to Maranello, 229 km.

  Maranello was always referred to in conversation as 'legendary Maranello' although it was hardly a legend in my book, since I had never heard of it. It turned out to be – as it was also invariably described – 'the birthplace of Ferrari'.

  The route to our lunch-time rendezvous with some red cars involved a morning of steep hill climbs through San Marino. Our Amazon went like a dream. The aftermath of the storm was a clear day with the sun drawing the mist off the vineyards and warming the stone campaniles on the hilltops. We negotiated precipitous hills, and twisting lanes between red and russet woodlands that occasionally opened up to give a view of the blue sea in the distance.

  The distances were short and the navigating more demanding, particularly because the marshals had introduced an extra test – some secret passage controls that had to be carefully watched out for. Road book stamps had to be collected at these passage points as well as at the time controls.

  It was a good day. Phil and I were cheerful, and happy to be together.

  'We can't quarrel any more,' we insisted to each other. 'There isn't enough time left to make up again.'

  After crossing the Rubicon river, like Caesar, we drove on towards Modena and Maranello. At a fuel stop we went into a bar for espressos, and I heard the story of last night's noisy outburst in the hotel lobby from the mouth of the protagonist himself.

  He had been out to a bar, and had picked up a woman – a big, strapping one. They had returned to the hotel together to do some more drinking and the driver had happened to murmur to the night porter that he had met his prize in the such-and-such bar.

  'Which bar did you say?' the porter asked.

  A famous transvestite hangout, as it turned out.

  Realising that his catch was a man, the driver tried to dismiss her but she wouldn't go without full payment, and fell on him. Somehow or other, either arriving late or departing early, RO was passing and was drawn into the thick of the fight. The police had to be called to break up the fray.

  The time control was in the foyer of the Galleria Ferrari, a sharp new glass-and-steel museum and Ferrari-badged shopping opportunity. Most of the men were wandering between the cars in the exhibition in a state of glassy-eyed arousal. Most of the cars were either scarlet or custard-yellow (which made me glance around warningly for David Brister) and looked as if someone had sat on them. It was quite good fun to buy Ferrari T-shirts and Ferrari work overalls and Ferrari dressing-gowns and hats and pencils and postcards at the gallery shop, but the lunch afterwards was much better. It was a picnic in the little amphitheatre outside the gallery, and there was even a tiramisu to follow the prosciutto and salami and bread and cheese.

  In the afternoon we travelled northwards, through flatter countryside towards Lake Garda. Every corner we turned brought a different and more perfect little scene of fading yellow walls and sun-blistered green shutters, grey old church and plane tree-shaded square, hollowed stone steps and balcony with scroll of ironwork. Italy was where all tired and jaded rally drivers should end up, I thought, to have their glazed eyes reopened and their senses refreshed.

  Absorbed in all of this I let the route notes sag on my lap. I missed a left turn and we motored straight on, with the Dangerfields and one of the white Ford coupés following unthinkingly in our wake.

  As we did a U-turn a half-kilometre up the road, I waved apologetically.

  'Sharpen up!' Richard Dangerfield called. 'If we're going to follow you blindly you had better get it right.'

  We wound through the chain of little towns and resorts along the shores of the Lake.

  'Big windsurfing place, this. The wind funnels straight down from the Alps and rips across the water.'

  Windsurfing was yet another of Phil's outdoor-boy enthusiasms. The water looked innocuous enough to me, a wide blue sheet swimming with the reflections of piled-up clouds.

  We reached Gardone Riviera, our stopping place for the night. I handed in the road book yet one more time, another day without penalties. It was too easy now. The rally was ending as it had begun, in a procession.

  We hauled our kitbags out of the back of the car and wandered into yet another hotel. We seemed to have been performing these rituals for an aeon of time, and the end of it was suddenly close enough to touch. We had a room with a window framed in bougainvillea, and a little wrought-iron balcony looking directly over the lake. Beyond a terrace with flowers in tubs there was a jetty, with a view to an island, and the mountains beyond. Inevitably a pair of swans slid across the water.

  It was too picturesque – too easy, like being on a holiday, and I missed the dirt and the threat and the desert.

  I sat on the balcony floor with my back against the wall and rested my chin on my knees. Phil had disappeared and I was glad of the solitude although I didn't use it to work out anything as significant as what all these people and places had meant to me. I just sat, and the sun went down on my left, and I let the impressions sift down through my head towards a settling place, like dry sand running through my fingers. The moon rose to the right of me and as the colours drained out of the view Dan appeared on the terrace below. He dropped off the end of the jetty and swam away, his narrow head drawing a vee of silver ripples in the navy-blue water. I listened to the wavelets slapping and gurgling under the planks of the jetty. I was tired, from the lack of sleep last night and the much deeper tiredness of a long time on the roa
d. It was like having every sense sharpened to pin-bright, hallucinatory intensity.

  From the open window of one of the rooms overhead there was a loud burst of laughter. It went off in my head like fireworks.

  I collected it all up, testing the strength of recall. I was already afraid with the finish line in my mind's eye that I would forget too much of what had happened, that I hadn't properly contained it or fixed it in memory's glass.

  In the bar before dinner, I went and sat next to Trev.

  'Trev, do you think I'm frightening?'

  His jaw dropped. 'You what?'

  'I thought not.'

  Phil and I took Dan and JD out to a celebratory dinner, to thank them for helping us to replace the wheel bearings and for being Team Amazon. It was a rather grand restaurant, in the lakeside villa that Mussolini had built for his mistress. At last, there was starched napery for me and phalanxes of impeccable waiters and sommeliers. No one blinked at real Phil's Ferrari T-shirt or JD's ripped jeans. The concierge at our hotel had telephoned ahead to advise them that we were long-distance drivers and couldn't be expected to summon up ties and jackets and a little black dress with a pearl choker. In fact most of the other diners were rally crews too, although all of them were better turned out than we were. Anton Aan de Stegge waved at me from across the room, the men from the pink Rolls-Royce continued their aloof dialogue. We moved everywhere, had moved for so long, in this perpetual continuum of people. How would it be when we were all dispersed again?

  Dan and I discussed marriage, although not to each other.

  'Can you recommend it?' he asked at last.

  'Oh, unreservedly,' I told him.

  I drank a lot. We all did. It seemed the best way to deal with the melancholia of endings, and the anticipation of imminent reunions. I had no idea how I was going to pick up the patterns of routine again. Nor, I suppose, did any of us who had made the journey.

  The four of us walked back through the cypress groves and ruined villas beside the black lake. There was a thin mist rising off the water and a mysterious waft of piano music. It was like being in an Italian art movie. I kept expecting Monica Vitti to appear in a drift of white linen.