Gill Alderman - The Memory Palace

The car ferry Spirit of Adventure passed easily through the crowded waters of English Channel. Her wide decks were dazzling in the sunlight, her red, white and blue logo and liveries placed and labelled her; she came to Calais, if not precisely in peace, at least in the certainty of commerce.

Most of the vehicles that clanged off her car decks were family conveyances, big, new, shiny – but crammed with luggage, children and their toys. Henrietta Travis drove a small Peugot and was alone. She glimpsed Guy’s flash red car behind her and smiled. He would be taking the autoroute , eating up kilometres and fuel while she, on routes nationales and by-ways, headed for Alsace – or the Franche-Comté. She would take the road for Reims, make no firm decision yet. The sun still shone, hours before dark – but now, there was a delay, one of those inexplicable stoppages common to all traffic queues. After ten or fifteen minutes, they began to move again and soon were rolling past the barriers. No one stopped Etta.

At the ferryport gate the usual cluster of hitch-hikers waited. Etta stopped her car beside a pale-faced girl whose choker of black velvet only emphasised her pallor. She looked sick and bewildered.

‘Are you all right?’

‘It’s just the sea: I travel better by air.’

‘Want a lift?’

‘Paris? The AI?’

‘I’m going to Reims, but I can drop you near Cambrai. There’s an intersection: you ought to get a lift south there.’

‘OK.’

The girl got into the car. She was very slim and very young, Etta noticed; but clearly an experienced traveller. Etta had started travelling in such a way herself, made no judgements and asked no questions. They talked about holidays and clothes.

Guy was relieved to be back in the Audi. While he waited in the queue, he re-read Dominic’s letter to verify his destination: ‘Coeurville, Burgundy’, that was all. When he reached the town – or village – he would have to ask. He hoped it was a small place.

The official at the passport control barrier, who had been busily waving cars on, signalled him to stop. He took a cursory glance at both versions of Guy’s face, grinned and said,

‘My wife reads your books, Monsieur Parados, the translations. There is money in books? I shall tell her you come to France in your beautiful Audi – “Vorsprung durch Technik” , Monsieur! Good holidays!’

Guy smiled vaguely, and drove on. Even the grey bypasses of Calais looked welcoming in the sun, which shone as fiercely as it had on the English side of the Channel; but he did not linger. Calais must always be a place to leave.

The car went faster in kilometres, 180; reading this speed and its mph equivalent on the dial, he had to remind himself that both were illegal. At three o’clock he pulled into a service station and bought coffee and pain au chocolat – a childish pleasure this. Though you could buy the stuff at home these days it was a quintessentially French delight. Who else would think of enfolding dark chocolate in flaky yeast pastry and serving it as a snack?

He walked back to the parking area. He was clear-headed now and relaxed, the pain had left his hands: it had been a result of tension, nothing more – and damn Sandy’s theories and her odd Chinese therapy. After a bad start, the holiday had begun. Before he started the car, he made sure of his route, AI, Périphérique, A6, and chose a CD to begin with. Phaedra was suggestive of continuous speed and a longed-for destination.

He turned the key, signalled, glanced in the right-hand mirror, began to drive away and glanced again: a girl, the girl, was there, a little way behind him, walking on the grassed reservation in the centre of the car park. Ghosts did not behave like that. He stopped the car and touched a button: the window beside him glided down and he looked out.

She was exquisite, striding out; untouched like a painted icon or a very young child. An orange backpack hung from her right shoulder. He, to her, was old; but he would presume, confident now that he was sure of his priorities and certain that the holiday had begun.

‘Do you need a lift?’ he called.

That was all he was offering, for God’s sake.

She looked up, located him. Her voice came clearly to him.

‘Please!’

She was running, her breasts lifting her shirt as she moved, her backpack bumping against her shoulder; she was beside him. Her face, as she looked at him, was innocent and he was relieved to see that it differed from that other in his memory, the sly and shy face of the dead witch, Alice Naylor; and disturbed again to see that she wore a black velvet choker fastened tight around her long, white neck.

‘Get in, then,’ he said, committed. ‘Here, let me take that.’

She was there, in his car; seated beside him. Her leggings were marked with dust and her shirt had a coffee stain on it, but she had recently combed out her hair and smelled of the soap in the restaurant toilets.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hello. Which way do you want to go?’

‘Oh, quickly, quickly: what a lovely car. Are you famous or something? It’s called “GUY 5”’

‘I am Guy. It’s my fifth Audi. I am going past Paris and down the A6 toward Auxerre. Is that any good?’

‘Who cares? – yes. I have to be in Lyon by Friday: Dad’s picking me up.’

‘He’s already on holiday?’

‘He lives in France. He and Mum are divorced – she’s in Eilat with her toy boy.’

‘I see.’ A prematurely old, wise child; and made so by the behaviour of her parents, he thought.

He drove, and she talked. She made this journey several times a year, she said, from her Kent school to her father’s house near Lyon. Of course, she was meant to fly (Dad sent the air fare every time) but she, although hopeless on a ship, preferred to take the ferry and hitch. No one ever checked, neither the school nor her father – and it would be easy to invent a likely story. She spent the money on clothes and CDs.

‘What CDs have you got?’ she asked. ‘Here?’ and rummaged through the stack.

‘You’re an old hippy, like Dad,’ she remarked. ‘Did you know that Phaedra hanged herself?’

‘Yes,’ he said, but he was thinking, the association no doubt triggered by the music and her remark, that she was about the age of his eldest daughter, Phoebe.

‘She fell in love with her stepson, who rejected her. Then she hanged herself,’ he said.

‘Do you have any children?’ the girl asked.

‘Yes.’ He thought, Gregory is twenty-two and married, with a baby daughter; Daniel is seventeen; Phoebe sixteen; Ellen fourteen; Grace eleven; Ben six. ‘They’re on holiday.’

‘They?’

‘’Fraid so.’

Dominic was sixteen too.

‘I’m going to visit one of them,’ he offered.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said and suddenly and lightly touched his knee. ‘I have – um – four half-brothers. One of them is black.’

‘Oh?’ She had removed her hand but left a sweet and subtle disturbance with him, of both body and mind.

‘Who are you, then?’ she enquired. ‘Guy –?’

‘I write,’ he told her. ‘I expect you’ve seen my books – the Malthassa series, the New Mythologies.’

‘Really? You’re Guy Parados . We did Malthassa for GCSE.’

‘Jesus Christ! That’s recommended reading? I’d no idea.’

‘You should be pleased: all those teenagers reading about sex and magic, though they cut most of the sex out of the school version. I bought my own copy and read the whole thing.’

He felt his past experience propelling him, as surely as the car. His right foot, sympathetic, bore down and the car’s acceleration blurred the green fields of France. The girl drew in her breath and, expelling it gustily in the word, exclaimed ‘Wow!’