Staying hard-right and driving at an even more sedate speed 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, but she needn’t have worried.
Brother and sister were still fast asleep in the back, with the overflow of toy-filled bags and other paraphernalia that Darcy hadn’t been able to fit in the rear trunk mounded between them to creating a sort of travelling Great Wall of China; designed to separate the warring factions. Despite their four-year age gap, her little darlings normally got on well together, but long car journeys like this didn’t bring out the best in their quite opposite 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 like an awfully uncomfortable position.
Connor, the elder of the two, was snuggled cosily under his comforter with his head on his favourite feather pillow, encased in an appliquéd space rocket pillowcase that he’d insisted on bringing with him. At the sight of them both still asleep 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 briefly rub at her tired eyes.
No two ways about it: driving in France, in the rain, with no one to help navigate was a bitch, Darcy thought gloomily. She frowned through the rain-spattered front windscreen of the car while she attempted to find where she’d gone wrong.
***
They had left England enjoying a balmily sunny autumn morning and clear blue heavens and arrived into patchily grey skies that had become increasingly gloomier on the journey south. It was one of the disadvantages, Darcy mused crossly, of travelling underneath the English Channel instead of staying on top of the waves; there was no gradual sense of any changes in the weather and no visual warning of what lay ahead.
On the plus-side, she reasoned, there had been nada in the way of sea-sickness from her passengers either, so on balance perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing.
The thickening rainclouds that had been looming overhead ever since they approached Abbeville had finally opened as they had 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 dark blue-black clouds that marched across the Normandy 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.
After years of big-city living, in which the Tube or local buses were her regular daily transport of choice and out of practice behind the wheel she had been concentrating hard on driving an unfamiliar vehicle on foreign roads. It did cross her mind that as an American driving in France, she should, theoretically at least, find this easy but 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 continental roads and 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, in a precise ten to two position, she had been caught out by the oncoming cloudburst. As the first light raindrops had turned into an unanticipated deluge requiring high-speed wipers, Darcy, unprepared for this eventuality and having just driven down the on-ramp onto the busier A13 autoroute, had frantically pulled, prodded and punched anything that resembled a wiper switch until she finally found the one that operated the front windscreen wipers.
Just in time, as it had been rapidly becoming impossible to see through the murky glass. Well, she’d thought happily, as she’d adjusted the wiper’s speed to something more effective than the spasmodic snail’s pace that they’d come on at, at least she now knew which buttons operated the rear wipers, the windscreen wash, the heating and the emergency lights in case they were ever required.
Terribly useful. Not. She planned to return the Hulk (so-christened by the children on first sight of its sickly-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, thought Darcy, 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, and when traffic had at last thinned enough to allow her a moment to glance back both children had been sound 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 London), boring (the painfully slow drive out of the city and down to the Chunnel train station at Folkestone), exciting again (driving onto the double-decker train carriage and the first five minutes of the crossing under the channel) 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. Being honest, she did acknowledge that some of her discomfort might have been partially her own doing. She wasn’t exactly the most relaxed of driver’s, and hours of tight shoulders and clenched hands were taking their toll.
Mindful of this, she rolled her shoulders as much as driving would allow, hoping to relieve some of the pressure but the pain in her neck wasn’t going away that easily. As she clenched and unclenched her buttocks in a vain attempt to get some circulation back into her tender flesh she acknowledged with a small glow of what she thought of as justifiable pride that she’d only gotten (ever so slightly) lost 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 blah, blah…
…however that ended…she was too exhausted to think anymore.
Anyway, she thought tiredly, 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.
Chapter Two
Darcy felt like she had been planning this trip forever instead of the three frantically busy weeks that it had really taken.
She had worked every moment of the day and a hefty portion of several nights to pack up their London lives and move them lock, stock and smoking barrel, to Normandy.
The thought sourly crossed her mind, if she’d had the aforementioned smoking barrel, she’d have probably used it on her rat-bastard of an ex-husband, Patrick, when he’d announced that he was moving out of their marital home to go and live in Rio de Janeiro with his newly pregnant Brazilian girlfriend.
The same girlfriend that he’d apparently first met at an international engineering conference two years previously, been seeing on the sly every time he’d crossed the Atlantic to attend yet another terribly important meeting in New York and not bothered to mention until after he’d invited her and her equally in-the-dark husband to stay at Darcy and Patricks’ Islington home eight week
s ago.
Patrick had swaggeringly made the dual announcement of his falling out of love with Darcy and his impending departure with his new beloved for the South American continent while the four adults were sitting chatting around the family dinner table the night after their guests had arrived.
That dinner menu was now indelibly etched in Darcy’s mind. Patrick’s news had been delivered with a suddenness akin to the dropping of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, right there in the gap between the main course of roast chicken and vegetables and dessert, which was to have been a wickedly-rich chocolate mousse, accompanied by an appallingly expensive sweet wine that Darcy had gone out and bought specially, knowing how much Patrick liked it.
Not, thought Darcy afterwards, quite the pleasant dinner-table conversation she’d imagined having with their guests.
She’d sat for some seconds in shock, dithering between several options ...door number one, she could continue playing the polite hostess and offer dessert and wine to her stunned (him –poor thing) and smirking (her, the Brazilian bitch –she must have been forewarned by Patrick as to what was coming) dinner guests, or alternatively, door number two, upend the mousse she’d placed just moments before in the middle of the table over Patrick’s balding, half-drunk, Irish-trash cheating head or, door number three, flee the room in utter embarrassment.
Years of her own mother’s training at not making scenes meant she’d opted for the latter, not so much fleeing but rather, pushing back her chair and quietly walking out of the room to climb the steep stairs to her and Patrick’ suite and sit on the side their bed staring out at the darkened street until she’d heard the front door close behind their now-departed guests, who had, not surprisingly, opted to stay elsewhere for the remainder of their visit to London.
Still, she had something to be thankful for, she’d thought, while sitting there in the gloom, listening to raised male voices drifting up from downstairs. At least he had waited until after the children had left the table, taking their pudding plates with them into the TV room to watch re-runs of Sponge Bob Square Pants.
Cold, calculating prick that he was, she’d realised later, he’d timed it perfectly to do maximum damage to Darcy’s feelings …it was a wonder, drama-prince that he’d shown himself to be, that he hadn’t invited a few more of their friends to witness the spectacle.
Still, as embarrassing as it had all been, it possibly didn’t rate as the worst he’d done to her in their years of co-habiting and marriage, Darcy mused bitterly.
Since that night, despite kindly meant offers from her friends, Darcy had refused all invitations involving meals or food-consumption of any kind, on the grounds that you never knew quite what was going to happen around a dinner table.
Flowers in the Morning Page 38
