Chapters (40)
- Cover
- About the Author
- PENGUIN BOOKS
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- THE BEGINNING
She left the teeming main road and turned randomly onto a smaller one, going back towards the industrial coastline. After about five minutes, she pulled over by the gateway to a small field where dun-coloured cows were grazing peacefully and in the distance cranes hung over the skyline. She wound down her window and let the warm, damp breeze blow into the car, then laid her picnic out on the seat beside her. She drank several gulps of warm, fizzy water, tore a chunk off the baguette and stuffed it into her mouth, then took a large bite of the Camembert that was disappointingly plasticky. She chewed slowly, then took a bite of tomato, sucking the pips from it so they didn’t dribble down her chin.
Looking at the large map on the front page of the atlas, she saw she had to drive almost as far as it was possible to go in France, except for the far south-west of the country where it bordered with Spain. She turned to the page which showed distances and journey times; Montpellier wasn’t marked, but to Marseilles it was 1,066 kilometres and would apparently take nine or ten hours excluding any stops. She ate another bite of bread with a wedge of cheese on top and considered her route. It could hardly be simpler, she thought; only a fool could go wrong. She would take the A26 towards Reims and then via Dijon onto the A6.
It was already nearly seven o’clock when she started off once more, and it was well past eight and in the altered light of a summer evening, when she found her way onto the A26, having taken an inexplicable wrong turn which swept her relentlessly onto the main road to Boulogne-sur-Mer, her small Renault wedged between a lorry and a car pulling a caravan, her eyes flickering nervously towards the map which lay open on the seat beside her and showed her she was going entirely the wrong way.
Finally on the A26, it started to rain again and her car windows misted over so that every so often Irene had to lean forward to rub and clear a space in front of her. Arcs of water were spun out from the huge wheels of pantechnicons or were sprayed up from the road. Everything seemed grey and saturated. For the first few miles, it was slow going but gradually the traffic eased.