Chapter 7
SEVEN
JILL
Somehow, she’s aware of Jill’s presence before she sees her. The airport is surprisingly busy for November, and she has been momentarily distracted from the stream of people spewing from the arrivals gate by a particularly attractive man in bottom-hugging combat trousers.
She watches him petting his bulldog for a moment and wonders who he’s waiting for. You see so many lives in airports, she thinks. So many different ways to live.
She briefly imagines a pretty woman arriving who will kiss this sexy man – an image that morphs rapidly into kissing his unusually plump lips herself.
Harry’s lips are thin and rather British and his kisses always leave her feeling a bit cheated, but this guy…
well, he must be an Olympic-level kisser.
Just as she thinks this, the man raises the dog so that it can lick his face – so that it can kiss him. Yuck!
She remembers Harry letting Whitey lick his face when they’d first brought him home for Fiona.
She’d told him there and then that he needed to choose – told him he could kiss the dog or he could kiss her, but that he couldn’t do both, and they’d laughed about that as though it was a joke, even though they’d both understood that she was being entirely serious.
He’d done his best to avoid doing it in front of her after that, but she’d caught him in the act once or twice. ‘You know he licks his arse with that tongue,’ she reminded him every time.
‘Yes, but their tongues are antiseptic,’ Harry always retorted. From such repetitious dialogues are marriages made.
It’s at that moment, as she’s watching the no-longer-sexy dog-kisser, that she becomes aware of Jill’s presence, moving towards her from the right.
She’s almost completely beyond Wendy’s field of vision but there’s something familiar about her aura – or perhaps it’s the clip-cloppy, wobbly kneed way Jill walks.
Whatever it is, without having seen her, Wendy turns, and there she is, her friend, grinning, dragging a little green suitcase behind her.
‘Darling!’ Jill trills, for some reason putting on a silly posh voice. ‘How absolutely spiffing to see you!’
‘Hello, you!’ Wendy says, opening her arms to accept Jill’s theatrical embrace.
‘How jet-set is all of this, eh?’ Jill asks, gesturing at their surroundings. ‘Quite the change after Luton, I can tell you. English airports are always so scummy, aren’t they? All chipped Formica and worn lino. Why is that, do you think?’
‘This way,’ Wendy says, guiding Jill by one elbow towards the exit. ‘Unless you’re hungry or thirsty or need to pee?’
‘No, I had an easy-sandwich and a gin and tonic from the easy-bar so I’m fine,’ she says. ‘Absolutely disgusting. The sandwich, that is. Not the G&T, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ Wendy repeats – a little repetitive joke of theirs. Old friendships are much like marriages in that way.
They cross the arrivals hall and step outside, walking over tramlines towards the various car parks.
‘Drizzle!’ Jill remarks. ‘Did you order that for me? To make me feel at home?’
‘Of course. I know how you like it.’
‘You shouldn’t have. Really.’
‘The forecast is terrible, actually,’ Wendy tells her. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘You should have gone further south,’ Jill says. ‘Alicante or Tenerife or Rwanda or something.’
‘I nearly went to bloody Norway,’ Wendy says. ‘So consider yourself lucky.’
Once they have found the Renault, negotiated the ticket barriers and a couple of manic roundabouts, Wendy asks how the flight was.
‘Fine. On time!’ Jill says. ‘It was even a bit early, which is a miracle these days.’
‘That is a miracle.’
‘But the sandwich – lord, it was epically awful. Why do they do that? I mean, it’s a sandwich… It’s hardly complicated. Two bits of bread and some cheese. But no. Plastic simulated cheese between two slices of rubbery bread. It was virtually inedible. My teeth kept bouncing off.’
‘Yuck,’ Wendy says vaguely, distracted by the heavy traffic.
‘Ooh, ooh!’ Jill says, visibly remembering something exciting. She pulls a bottle of Bombay Sapphire from her handbag. ‘A little something from the easy-kiosk.’
‘You!’ Wendy laughs. ‘And guess what? I bought a bottle, too. Though mine’s the other one. You know, the one everyone used to buy before they started bombarding us with a thousand different brands of gin. They all taste the same to me anyway.’
‘Oh, Gordon’s, then?’
‘Got it.’
‘That’s true, actually,’ Jill says, unscrewing the top of the gin bottle. ‘Gordon’s was all we had in the olden days, but we somehow survived, didn’t we?’
‘Stop that!’ Wendy tells her, glancing over concernedly. ‘You’ll get me pulled over!’
‘I’m only sniffing it, dear,’ Jill says, proceeding to do just that. ‘Umm!’ she says. ‘Better than Chanel No 5.’ She then tips the bottle and takes a swig all the same. ‘God, I love gin,’ she says as she screws the lid back on. ‘Did I ever tell you that?’
‘Not as such, but I somehow knew,’ Wendy laughs, fumbling for the windscreen wipers.
‘Somehow. You’re quite the psychic, really, aren’t you?’
‘Now, shush a minute,’ Wendy tells her. ‘There are wa-a-ay too many roundabouts along here.’
‘I wonder why they drive on the wrong side,’ Jill says. ‘I mean, I wonder who made that decision and when. “I don’t like this side anymore. I think I’d prefer it over there.” Must have been mayhem.’
‘I believe…’ Wendy says hesitantly as she indicates, changes lanes and then exits the roundabout, then checks her mirror and GPS, ‘that… um… that we’re the ones who swapped sides.
On our horses, way back when. So we could stab people going the other way more efficiently with our swords.
Without, you know, all that impractical having to reach across. ’
‘Nice,’ Jill says. ‘A friendly nation, the English. Welcoming.’
‘We are!’
Once they leave the autoroute and start to drive through the various villages along the way, Jill begins to ooh and aah. She also reads almost every sign they pass in an exaggerated French accent. ‘Travaux !’ she says. ‘Rappel ! Boulangerie !’
As they snake through the centre of Roquefort-les-Pins she comments, ‘And there are bars here, you liar! I’ve seen three just along this stretch. And there are men in them.’
‘But we’re nowhere near home. Not by a long stretch. You’ll see.’
Once they’ve passed through Chateauneuf-de-Grasse the road starts to rise into the mountains, twisting and turning. Below them, fluffy low clouds swirl in the ravines. Jill clings onto the panic handle until her knuckles start to turn white.
‘You OK?’ Wendy asks, glancing briefly across. She’s used to these roads now, and she’s only just remembering that Jill isn’t.
‘Sure. I just get a little carsick on roads like this. Vertigo, too. But carry on, I’ll be fine. I just need to remember to look at the road. Must not take my eyes off the road!’
Wendy slows down a little, and they drive in silence for a few minutes with only the noise of the engine and the rhythmic swish-swashing of the windscreen wipers.
‘Do you want some mus—’ Wendy starts, but Jill has started speaking at the same time.
‘So how have you been?’ she asks.
‘Oh,’ Wendy says. ‘Um, fine, I suppose.’
‘You’ve been pretty quiet lately,’ Jill says. ‘You OK?’
Wendy struggles momentarily to formulate an answer.
Since she invited Jill two weeks ago – or rather since Jill invited herself – it’s true, they have barely spoken.
This is partly because Wendy has had little to say that she considered newsworthy, but it’s also because she’s been saving the nuggets of chatter she does have for Jill’s arrival.
She’s been feeling uncharacteristically nervous about having nothing to talk about.
Her life these past weeks has been so peaceful, so repetitive – so empty, some would say.
After all, there are only so many times you can tell someone you ate breakfast, walked up a hill and drank a few glasses of wine.
Wendy swallows and licks her lips. ‘You know, I have no idea. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. I’m kind of all over the place, so it’s hard to say. I actually might be going a bit bonkers.’
‘Oh?’ Jill says, briefly dragging her eyes from the road to glance concernedly at her friend. She knows she’d go loopy in a day if she had to live alone on a mountain top.
‘I can be… like… ecstatically happy, you know, totally in love with life, and all this clean air and the trees and what-have-you. It’s very beautiful up there.
You’ll see, well… if it stops raining, you will.
And then a minute later – not even a minute, actually, more like ten seconds later – I feel utterly, utterly depressed, as though everything’s so hopeless – the world, the climate, my life, my marriage – that I might as well kill myself and get it over with. ’
‘Right,’ Jill says. ‘Wow.’
‘Yes, wow indeed.’
‘But you wouldn’t actually…’
‘No! Of course not!’ Wendy says, even as she wonders if that’s true.
‘But then— Ooh, careful!’
‘Seen it,’ Wendy tells her as she swerves around the rock on the road. ‘Don’t worry. You get quite a few of those. It’s like a video game dodging them all.’
‘But you are happier than back home?’
Wendy shakes her head and sighs. ‘I’m still not sure about that either.
It’s different, I suppose? More intense, if that makes any sense.
The ups are more up and the downs are more down.
I kind of feel like I had everything buttoned up before.
I smoothed things out all the time, well…
because I had to. But now it’s just me… it’s as if I’ve got licence to be more… I don’t know…’
‘Emotional?’
‘Maybe,’ Wendy laughs. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of hysterical, actually. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you came. I could do with someone to talk to, I think.’
‘Yes,’ Jill says. ‘It sounds like it.’
They get drunk. Well, of course they do.
While Wendy makes her famed mushroom carbonara, Jill pours bowls of snacks and mixes gin and tonics.