Chapter 6
The following morning, I woke at about six o’clock and pulled myself up, eager to look out of the window at the countryside flashing past us.
The train slowed as we reached Marseille, and I wondered if the man with the Mickey Mouse socks would be leaving.
I resisted the temptation to go out in the corridor and look.
He’d have to be quick because according to the timetable the train only stopped for three minutes.
I checked my phone.
Ben
It was raining really hard so I didn’t like to chuck the cat out last night. This morning, I came down and it’s brought in three kittens. What should I do?
Me
I don’t know. Put their names down for Eton?
You’d better buy some cat food if you can’t find out where they have come from. Don’t get too attached to them. I know what you’re like! We are in the south of France, heading for Nice!
Ben
Where can I find cat food?
Me
Make an educated guess *smiley face emoji*
Once we left the station and the suburbs, the landscape was green with the first hints of autumn colour. Hedges and fields and houses where more French people would be waking up, having their petit déjeuner and heading off to work.
Anna leaned down from her bunk.
‘We should see the sea in a minute. I’ve been checking the map. First one to see it gets an ice cream.’
‘That’s exactly what my parents used to say.’ I laughed.
We passed a little bay where there were white waves up against the coast, and a big road which followed the railway for a while before we swooped off behind some trees and down into cuttings as we made our way towards Nice, our final destination.
We stopped at marvellous-sounding places that I had never expected to see: Toulon, Saint Raphael, Cannes, where palm trees lined the railway line, and Antibes. These were places I associated with celebrities and glamour, and frankly they had neither.
At last, only one minute late, we arrived at Nice, which to me looked pretty much like any other large railway station, which, again, was slightly disappointing.
I’d expected something a bit more opulent I suppose.
Flowers or bright colours. A few film stars on their way to the Cannes film festival, although they were more likely to go in private jets or limousines weren’t they, not shuffle through the ticket barriers with everyone else. And wasn’t the film festival in May?
‘Now where do we go?’ I asked as we clambered down the steps onto the platform. ‘Any ideas?’
I looked around to see if Mr Grumpy was anywhere to be seen, so I could avoid him, but there was no sign of him.
And he hadn’t actually been grumpy at all.
He had been very kind and solicitous. It was quite possible he had got off already and was striding out purposefully to his office, or university, or whatever it was he did.
Perhaps he had an elegant wife with a complicated blonde hairstyle, waiting for him outside the station with a Maserati, and he would tell her all about his journey and the drunk who had fallen into his cabin last night and she would laugh and call him chèrie.
He would bring out a present for her from London too, a teeny tiny turquoise box from Tiffany, tied with white ribbon…
Did actual men do that sort of thing, or had I watched too many romcoms on television?
Harriet consulted her notebook.
‘Of course, if we were recreating the first time we were here we would just wander around looking for a B when she had an idea in her head she tended to ignore everyone else’s suggestions.
‘That’s it,’ Harriet said firmly after about ten minutes, ‘I’m on strike. What’s wrong with this place?’
She pointed to a delightful café with green canopies outside and several tables in the shade where people were drinking huge bowls of café crème and eating delicious-looking pastries.
‘I was just looking for the place we stopped last time,’ Anna said. ‘I’m sure it was around here. I remember that statue. I had moules.’
‘Not for breakfast?’ I said, pulling a face.
‘I know it’s here. There was a really tall man with a waxed moustache, and we sat on tables with red checked tablecloths and cane chairs,’ she continued.
‘You’ll have to narrow it down a bit,’ I said. ‘There are lots of places like that. And it was decades ago.’
Anna looked around for a few moments while Harriet and I perched on the edge of a stone bench, and then Anna looked annoyed.
‘It was there,’ she said, pointing, ‘I’m sure it was. I can’t believe it; it’s a shoe shop now.’
‘Be reasonable, it was nearly fifty years ago,’ I said, ‘things are bound to have changed.’
‘I have changed too,’ Harriet said, ‘and if I don’t get coffee soon and something to eat I’m going to change again, this time into a very bad-tempered old woman.’
Anna tutted and sighed. ‘Oh, all right then.’
We sat down and a waiter came out, not bringing us a menu but jerking his chin up in the usual way of French waiters to ask what we wanted.
‘Trois café cremes et trois pains aux raisins,’ I said in my best French, ‘s’il vous plait.’
He seemed mollified by this and returned a few minutes later with exactly what I had ordered, which was a relief in itself. This adventure business was all very well, but sometimes it could be stressful. For a moment I almost wished I was back on the train.
‘Yum,’ Harriet said, pulling her pastry apart. ‘You are clever, Lizzie.’
‘Sorry I was cross,’ Anna said as the caffeine and sugar rush hit her system, ‘I just wanted it to be exactly the same as it was – when we came here before.’
‘Really?’ Harriet said, sounding incredulous. ‘Why?’
I hadn’t been there all those years ago and I had no idealised memories of particular places or people.
I wanted to see the sights in my own time in my own way.
For too long I had glamorised that trip, and I was beginning to wonder if I had been right.
And did I want to toe the line with someone else’s experiences when there was absolutely no need to?
‘But this is our adventure,’ I said, ‘a new one. We are making our own memories, aren’t we? The place you remembered has gone and probably the big chap with the moustache is long gone too.’
‘True,’ Anna agreed, ‘but I researched the place we are staying in in the Old Town, and it’s definitely the same one where we stayed before, and I bet it hasn’t changed at all.’
‘Well, I hope it has! I hope they’ve changed the sheets anyway,’ Harriet said, ‘and the towels. And got rid of that massive spider in the shower.’
Anna laughed and the mood lifted again.
I stirred some sugar into my coffee and took a sip.
How was it that coffee tasted so much better here than back home?
Was it the whole experience, sitting at a French pavement café in the morning sunshine, was it made in a different way, or was it that I was just tired and over excited?
Looking around, seeing things I had longed to see, was marvellous.
Perhaps it was better to be doing this now rather than back then when I had been young and silly and probably wouldn’t have appreciated it in the same way.
I had changed; we all had. We couldn’t pretend we were eighteen any longer and it would be daft to think we could.
Even so, being in a strange place where the language and customs were so unfamiliar was slightly unnerving.