An Inch of Time

by Peter Helton

  There were few people about. Having driven non-stop to get there by lunchtime, I made straight for the brasserie which was named Le Brasserie, in case you were harbouring any doubts. The place had a confused ambience, perhaps resulting from the mixture of white tablecloths and polypropylene chairs, and was half empty, which guaranteed me a table near the window from where I watched England recede into greying mists. I happily bade the waiter ‘bonjour’, which more or less depleted my non-culinary French. He took his revenge by handing me a French menu. I stared at it in alarm.

  Nuggets de Poulet accompagnés de purée ou frites . . .?

  Glace ou Mousse au Chocolat . . .?

  Coca-Cola . . .?

  I blinked, then the penny dropped. La Table des Enfants – I had the children’s menu. I turned it over and my stomach stopped rebelling, despite a slight rolling as we left the harbour for choppier water.

  As a farewell gesture to both Blighty and the east wind blowing from the Urals, I started with smoked salmon and blinis, but for the main course I steered straight for the Mediterranean with red mullet and marinated vegetable kebab accompagné by surely the smallest bottle of beer ever to sail the seas.

  Because of the time of year and since it was the middle of the week, there was a marked absence of nuggets de poulet-munching children in the restaurant. My closest neighbours were a middle-aged couple who argued in flat, resigned voices about something they had probably argued over for years. It didn’t seem to impair their appetite, however, nor their impeccable politeness as they passed the salt and poured more wine for each other. There were several men eating alone like me; some looked like lorry drivers, some middle-income businessmen. A man with a square face and severe haircut contemplated his mobile phone with intense concentration while eating chips in a distracted fashion, and a woman with bleached hair at a table by the window dissected a steak while reading a book she had propped against her bread basket.

  My red mullet turned out to be a scrawny creature who had probably travelled far, and I consoled myself with the thought that every hour brought me closer to a big pond full of his fatter cousins.

  The same stiff easterly breeze that had so quickly driven me inside slowed our journey, so that it was over two hours before I finally rolled off the Berlioz and on to French tarmac at Calais. Having completed the formalities, I couldn’t wait to put a few miles between me and the dispiriting roundabouts and hoardings of the harbour. I had twelve hundred miles ahead of me, nearly exactly two thousand kilometres. The temperatures here were no improvement on what I had hoped to leave behind, but at least it wasn’t raining. The only thing to do now was drive south until the sun came out. A hundred yards in front of me, a loud blaring of French (car) horns reminded a dreamy British driver which side of the road they preferred to drive on in France. It took me a while to get on to the motorway, but once on the A26 I simply slotted into the slow lane, pointed Matilda’s nose towards the Alps and drove for hours.

  French lorry drivers are much the same as anywhere else; if they think their rig can go one mile per hour faster than whatever is in front of them, then they will overtake it even if it takes them all day. Which meant that for much of this leg of the journey I had articulated lorries in front, behind and to my left, all of us munching miles as best we could. The turbulence some of those massive rigs produced while surging past meant I had to keep a tight grip on the steering wheel. It was late afternoon and at just such a moment that I heard a small sound behind me which ought not to have been there, only I couldn’t possibly turn around right then. The van produced so many noises I wasn’t used to yet and the old Ford engine in front made such a racket that I forgot about it for another mile until I heard the sound again, this time close up. ‘Tell me I’m imagining this. Please tell me that’s not you, Derringer.’

  This was answered by an unequivocal meow of the ‘feed-me-now’ variety that I had long come to recognize as a prelude to Derringer’s much worse ‘no-one-around-here-ever-feeds-me’ yowl.

  ‘Do you have any idea of the price of cat food in France?’ Silence. ‘Or the fine for taking a cat across European borders without a pet passport?’ No comment. Derringer jumped on the backrest of the passenger seat. I cleared the maps off the seat and he sat next to me, completely ignoring the traffic, just staring at me. ‘Yeah, very clever. There isn’t a crumb of cat food in this wreck, so you’ll have to wait until I get off the motorway and to a supermarket.’ He was not impressed by the arrangements. Fifty miles later I stopped at a motorway service station. Derringer wanted out, but there was no way I was going to go cat-herding on the motorway, so I slammed the door in the rogue’s face and went in search of food. The only vaguely suitable thing I could find was a rubberized ham sandwich for which I handed over an astonishing number of euros. While Derringer polished off the ham, I dispatched the oddly bouncy bread and decided to leave the motorway soon, find some shops and stock up with provisions.

  It was dark by the time I finally drew up in front of a shabby-looking supermarché in a tiny town called Bar-le-Duc. On the inside, the supermarket was drab but well stocked with most of what I needed, including all the Camembert you could carry, but, mysteriously, not a single can of cat food. I bought cans of tuna instead. Derringer might have to share. Apart from the supermarket, Bar-le-Duc didn’t look like a bad little town to spend an evening in. I found a place to park near a bridge over the fast-flowing waters of the Ornain river. Derringer laid wordlessly into some tuna while I cooked myself a cheese omelette on the Leisure Princess, fully intending to find a bar, preferably one with an open fire, and test the local wine. I woke up at one in the morning, shivering and with a crick in my neck. It took me ten minutes to rig up the bed and fall asleep again.

  A persistent knocking sound woke me from heavy-goods-vehicle dreams. It was a policeman clicking a beringed finger against the side window. I opened the driver window to find out what he wanted, but still had a crick in my neck so gave him a sideways look. The gendarme informed me in fluent French that I couldn’t park my van here and should move off sharpish. The only word I understood was le camping which he pronounced with all the disgust it deserves. I said bon, oui, merci and started the engine. It was then that I noticed the blue Toyota with the British plates for the first time, or rather noticed that I had seen it before, at the motorway service station. It was parked on the opposite side of the road and I could see the number plate because the car in front had just been driven away. As soon as I pulled off into the thin early morning traffic along the river I forgot all about it. I stopped at the first boulangerie for a couple of still-warm baguettes and left Bar-le-Duc, which looked picturesque despite the greyness of the hour, by a southern route. From here on I travelled on minor roads, away from the rush and crush of lorry traffic. A few miles out of town, when it felt as rural as France can suddenly get, I stopped by the side of the road, brewed coffee and tore into baguettes, slathered with oozing Camembert. By the time I’d finished my breakfast Derringer was nosing an empty can of tuna along the floor and my maps were richly globuled with cheese.

  I drove all day. While the slowly changing landscape of France rolled by and became ever more mountainous, I sought to remedy my woeful ignorance of Greek language and custom. I shoved the first cassette into the tape player.

  Welcome to your Greek-Made-Easy language course. Introduction . . .

  The voice on the tape spoke in measured, soothing tones of how easy I would find the language, how much more enjoyable my holiday or business trip was going to be and how I was going to gain confidence by repeating expressions and whole phrases in the exercises. So far I was coping admirably.

  Modern Greece is a country of eight million inhabitants and roughly the size of England. One sixth of the area consists of some two thousand islands . . .

  Wait a second: two thousand? It couldn’t be. I wondered how many islands the British Isles consisted of, yet two thousand seemed a preposterous number. All I could hope was that Kyla Biggs had sta
yed put in Corfu and not decided to go island hopping. I could never hope to find her if she had left the island of Corfu to explore the other one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.

  No part of Greece is more than eighty miles from the sea and eighty per cent of the land is mountainous.

  I shifted down as the road rose steeply through pine-forested hills that began to look more and more like mountains and Matilda slowed as the labouring Ford engine hauled us towards Switzerland. I hoped that Kyla was the sea-and-sand type and had stayed on the flat.

  It was late evening and dark by the time I approached the Swiss border at Goumois. I pulled over and stopped within sight of the sodium-lit border post.

  ‘Derringer? Time to do that disappearing trick you do so . . . well?’ I turned on the feeble light in the back and saw no sign of him. For a moment I panicked. We had both enjoyed several al fresco toilet breaks on the way . . . no, I remembered closing the door with the cat inside. He was here somewhere, in the woodwork, and hopefully had the sense not to make a sudden appearance during the border formalities.

  I had my passport checked twice and was wished bon voyage by both the French and the Swiss border guard when I stated my destination – Brindisi, Italy.

  A sign told me that I was now in the district of Franches-Montagnes, which to my un-French ears sounded a bit like ‘French mountains’, and that the elevation was 1,617 feet. I drove on into the night which closed in on me in the rattling Matilda once the lights of Goumois disappeared behind us. The headlights on the van were feeble by modern standards and the night seemed vast and cold. As soon as I could I pulled off the road into what looked like a forester’s track under the dark loom of tall pines.

  With the engine turned off and the lights killed, I sat in the ticking, creaking darkness, feeling as though I was still driving along an after-image of rolling tarmac into nowhere. The headlights of a following car swept by, choreographing the fringe of the forest into a jumping band of shadow men. When darkness returned, I made the bed and crawled under the clammy duvet.

  The next morning Derringer woke me by pummelling my chest, complaining about the cold and wafting stale tuna smells into my face. It was so cold up here his breath waved little white flags of surrender. The windows were steamed up; boiling the kettle made it worse. Outside, a mist obscured all but the immediate surroundings. I’d been driving south for two days, yet the weather was colder than ever. After some scrambled eggs that were homesick for their coriander leaf and brinjal pickle, I backed into the road and set off.

  Yes – ne. No – ochi. Hello – yiá soo. How are you? – ti kánete? I like it – moo arési. I don’t like it – then moo arési.

  My memories of Switzerland are steeped in clichés: it was clean and multilingual, expensive, and looked disapprovingly upon scruffy long-haired private eyes, while they in turn stared unbelievingly at the price of a litre of milk in roadside shops. Then moo arési. It also left me with the impression that there wasn’t an acre of flat ground in the country. Matilda made hard work of the endless climbs, but I drove on relentlessly, having convinced myself – and frequently promised Derringer – that we would emerge from the St Gotthard tunnel into the warm, sun-drenched south. I warmed myself with thoughts of Greek tavernas by the sea.

  Eating out will surely be one of the great pleasures of your stay in Greece. You will enjoy it even more once you have memorized a few simple phrases. In this chapter you will learn all you need to know to order meals and drinks and ask for the bill.

  Waiter! – garçon! A bottle of wine – ena boukáli krassí. One beer, please – mia bíra, parakaló. Two beers, please – dio bíres, parakaló. One Coke – mia Coca-cola . . .

  Only the drenched part of my sun-drenched prediction came true. It was midnight by the time I had managed the endless climb to the pass, and on the other side was southern rain, indistinguishable from its northern cousin. I stayed on the motorway and drove through the night, chasing a similar delusion about the weather in Italy.

  In this chapter you will learn to find your way around by asking questions. Where is . . .? – Poo íne . . .? Where is the baker’s? – Poo íne o foornos? Where is the post office? – Poo íne to tachidroméeo? I finally crossed the border at Chiasso in the early hours, yet not too early for the lorries which were much in evidence once more. ‘You can come out now,’ I called to Derringer who, perhaps picking up on my nervousness as I approached the border, had disappeared into his hidey-hole again in a rare display of cooperation. He remained wherever he had curled up. ‘I know; so much for Italian spring sunshine. It’s all a swindle.’ A few minutes later I left the main route and moved gladly on to a B road.

  One thing improved immediately. In Switzerland I had been moved on by traffic police almost as soon as I stopped anywhere – it appeared the Swiss did not approve of parking – but I knew that Italians parked anywhere they liked any time they liked.

  I pulled into a muddy lay-by, toasted country number three with a very large bottle of folksily labelled Swiss wheat beer and fell asleep as soon as I closed my eyes.

  FOUR

  I awoke to piercing rays of sunlight. Derringer lay asleep at the bottom of the bunk in a patch of bona fide Italian sunshine, exposing his golden belly fur to the warmth steaming through the window. For a long moment I just lay there, enjoying the unusual sensation of sunlight that I could feel as well as see, something I hadn’t experienced since last autumn. Yet soon my stomach let me know what it thought of a supper of wheat beer on a load of nothing, and Derringer took a break from sunbathing to wind up his feed-me whine.

  I had parked on quite a busy country road. While the traffic barrelled past the window, I broke my fast on excellent rye bread, Gruyère cheese and coffee and counted my euros. I had spent a hair-raising amount, most of it on fuel. How could one van drink that much juice? Answer: easily. It was ancient and all I seemed to have done so far was to grind up and down endless hills and mountains. I consulted my map and looked at the long shaft of Italy’s boot and decided there was only one answer: live on sandwiches and stick to the motorway.

  How much is that? – Pósso káni aftó? One kilo tomatoes – ena kiló domátes. Do you have any eggs? – Meepos échete avgá? One melon – éna pepóni. Two melons . . .

  I’ll spare you the tedium of that journey and try not to think of the sights I missed. I lived on oozing slices of sizzling takeaway pizza, bags of bread rolls and impossibly thin wafers of salami, and cursed the time I was wasting simply to avoid three hours of hyperventilation on a charter flight. For all I knew, Kyla Biggs had by now turned up and safely returned to her flat in Bath.

  Unbelievably, it was early morning of the fourth day when I pulled Matilda’s wobbly handbrake near my embarkation point in the harbour of Brindisi, her nose pointing at Greece on the other side of the Ionian Sea. A classic Mediterranean sunrise set the Adriatic ablaze, compensating me for the two-thousand-kilometre slog I had just completed.

  Despite a mug of strong black coffee and the noise of the harbour all around me, I fell asleep, then woke in a panic. A quick check confirmed that it was high time for embarkation. The port was a lot busier now. Several car ferries had docked, their rusting iron jaws wide open. As I joined the queue to drive into the bowels of my ferry, the Ikarus Palace, my eye was drawn by a glint of sunlight on car metal to a blue Toyota some two hundred yards to my left. It was the last car to negotiate its way up the ramp of the Ionian Sky, a rival ferry of the Agoudinos Lines. It was impossible to make out the driver, though I could just guess at very fair or even white hair. Then, just as the big car disappeared, I glimpsed a flash of yellow at the back – the number plate was definitely British.

  I told myself that I had probably spent too many days talking to the cat and that at any one time there had to be more than one blue Toyota with British plates driving around Europe. Yet if it was the same car, as the hair at the back of my neck seemed to think, then it was a rare coincidence, and I’ve never been a great fan of those
. Should the Toyota’s destination turn out to be also Corfu – the ferries continued on to the Greek mainland – then I was going to challenge the driver, but my best chance of doing that was to get there before him. Unfortunately, it was the Ionian Sky that left first. I stood on deck and watched as she cleared the breakwater, gaining a considerable head start. I silently urged on my captain, whoever he was, to pull his finger out, wherever that was. At last, with much vibration and a groan, the Ikarus Palace pulled itself away from the quay. By now the Ionian Sky had shrunk to the size of my thumb, ahead and to the north of us. There was nothing I could do about that, so went in search of lunch.

  Considering the earliness of the season, the Ikarus Palace was carrying a surprising number of foot passengers, many of them encumbered by rucksacks. Most had had the foresight to buy food in Brindisi rather than fall hostage to the phantasmagorical prices charged in the, admittedly snazzy, self-service restaurant. I ended up with a less than imaginative cheese-and-tomato toasted sandwich and a bottle of water in order to save my finances.

  I took both up on deck. The wind had picked up but there was hardly a cloud in the sky now, and I greedily drank in the sight of so much glittering blue sea, so different from the English Channel of four days ago. We appeared to be gaining on the Ionian Sky but were just that moment ourselves overtaken by a foot-passenger-only hydrofoil, sweeping past with an impressive bow-wave as it bounced its way east across the water. The spectacle provided enough distraction for me to have missed the fact that a man had joined me at the guard rail. ‘They’ll get there in half the time. Twice as seasick, naturally,’ he assured me, with more than a hint of a German accent. He was a tall, tanned forty-year-old with no-nonsense grey hair and a two-day salt-and-pepper stubble. His jacket was tightly zipped up against the wind. Around his neck he carried a large pair of Zeiss binoculars as well as a Nikon camera encased in rubber armour.