Chapter 20
We pressed on onto a well-lit, wide highway which looked quite new, and Genova was right, there was definitely less traffic at that hour, apart from the huge lorries which occasionally thundered past us, honking their horns and causing the three of us in the back seat to cling on for dear life.
The dog, who was about the size of a spaniel and was called Enzo, seemed to find this very entertaining and clambered over us, tail wagging, drool splattering over us. This was because Evelyn had unwisely tried to bribe him with one of her hidden fritole, a kindness which of course encouraged Enzo to hope for more.
Occasionally Genova would reach between the seats and swipe at him.
‘Enzo! Cane cattivo! Bad dog!’
At which point Enzo would retreat to the footwell, sulking for a few minutes, before gradually creeping back up on to our laps, tail wagging again in anticipation.
These episodes invariably were accompanied by Genova swerving across the road and incurring the understandable wrath of the lorry drivers behind us. At one point I squeezed my eyes shut and was grateful that Eddy didn’t know what I was up to. If Joe or Luke had been doing this, I would have been beside myself with fear. Occasionally Diana and I exchanged terrified glances over the top of Evelyn’s head. I could almost see the headlines.
Elderly Brits in motorway dash cause pile up.
Italian police blame absentminded pensioners for E45 carnage.
About ninety minutes later we swung off the road towards a town which clambered up a hill in a series of hairpin bends, where a few lights from houses and apartment blocks were still shining out encouragingly.
‘Potenza is a lovely town,’ Genova said, ‘you must return. They make a wonderful dish if you are hungry, pasta mollicata. Tomatoes, onions wine and stale bread. Simply delicious. But Potenza has not been lucky. There was damage during the war, and earthquakes. But luckier than Craco, where there was a terrible landslide, and the town was abandoned.’
The three of us looked at each other, and in the dim glow of a streetlight, Diana pulled a face worthy of Munch’s The Scream.
‘We certainly pick our spots, don’t we?’ Evelyn said happily. ‘First, Pompeii where Vesuvius might erupt at any moment, and now a town famous for earthquakes.’
Enzo, sitting at her feet gave a muffled woof and Evelyn gave him another fritole from her handbag.
We stopped at last outside a house in a narrow street, perched on the side of the hill which probably in daylight had the most marvellous views over the valley below. Genova stopped her car in the middle of the road, went to get something from the boot of her car and banged on the front door.
The three of us sighed with relief that at least we had stopped. The racket from the car shaking when it went over 100km/h, which it did very frequently, had ceased, and we were all still in one piece.
Rapha?l turned to look at us.
‘Are you alright, ladies?’
We gave him weak smiles of agreement.
We saw a light go on in one of the upstairs rooms, and after a few minutes the door opened and a man stood there in a striped dressing gown, his hair on end. By the look on his face, he was not pleased at all to be woken up at nearly midnight, but Genova handed over the painting and they had a short conversation which included some hand waving towards us by Genova and some fairly brusque language from her customer.
Enzo stood up at the window, his back paws very heavy on my thigh for such a small dog and let loose a volley of barks.
‘I was hoping we might use the facilities,’ Evelyn said quietly, ‘but by the look on that man’s face, maybe that’s not such a good idea.’
In the meantime, a couple of delivery vans had stopped behind us and there were horns honking their disapproval, a woman shouting out of an upstairs window, plus one man who had got out of his lorry and was yelling something that didn’t sound very friendly.
Completely unperturbed, Genova skipped back and got into the car.
‘He was delighted,’ she said.
‘He didn’t look very delighted,’ Diana said. ‘I think you woke him up.’
She laughed. ‘Ah well, he should know me by now. That was my father. I have painted a picture for him of his mother, as a birthday present. I copied an old black-and-white photograph, and I really did try to make her face smile, but it wasn’t easy.’
Then it was back down the winding road towards the highway.
‘There is a petrol station a few miles ahead if you wish to stop,’ Genova said as she rocketed her way up some slip roads and past a petrol tanker.
‘Ideal,’ Evelyn said with feeling as we clung together and Enzo, seizing his opportunity, nosed into my handbag.
‘I need to get some fuel anyway, and there is a pizzeria there if you are hungry.’
‘We would insist on paying for your fuel,’ Evelyn said, loosening her seat belt a little, ‘but I don’t think we need any food.’
‘Okay, va bene,’ she said.
We had a brief stop where we found the loos, Genova filled up with fuel, Enzo cheerfully watered one of the petrol pumps, and then we were off again.
‘Is it much further?’ Diana asked, voicing a question we all wanted to ask, but hadn’t dared for fear of sounding like some ungrateful kids in the back.
‘Oh no, no distance,’ Genova said, ‘perhaps a couple of hours, it all depends, I’m not sure. But this is such a pretty road, it’s such a shame you can’t see it. You must come back one day soon.’
‘I think I will try and sleep,’ Evelyn murmured, ‘otherwise I might be car sick.’
‘I know the feeling,’ Diana said.
I leaned away from both of them as far as I could and took a deep breath.
We got back onto our old friend the E45 road, the signs pointing encouragingly towards Messina and the traffic became heavier as the minutes passed.
By then Enzo had settled down on my feet for a well-earned nap and Evelyn’s head was heavy on my shoulder. We passed through tunnels and gorges, on and on, pressing ever south. It was going to be alright, it had to be. This adventure was just that. An adventure. Something we would laugh about in years to come. Perhaps not yet, nor next week, but one day. And then Genova added another casual, throwaway comment.
‘And then you will have to get the ferry. I will leave you in Villa San Giovanni. I’m not sure how often they run, but I’m sure it will be fine.’
A ferry. I took a deep steadying breath. It hadn’t been a couple of hours as Genova had suggested, it was three thirty in the morning. Yes, of course there would have to be a ferry, seeing as we would be leaving mainland Italy and heading off to meet our ship in Sicily.
I looked over Evelyn’s sleeping head at Diana. I was glad to see she seemed to be asleep too, her head up against the car window, pillowed on a dog blanket. I tried to think of positive things; the intrepid Victorian and Edwardian ladies doing the Grand Tour in their cumbersome skirts and corsets. Seeing the wonders of the world and reaching for the smelling salts as a result. Surely we could do this just as well, if not better.
‘Does it take long?’ I asked, trying to sound unconcerned.
As is often the case I’d started to feel more secure in the car than was reasonable, despite the weight and the dampness of the dog on my feet and the fast, often erratic nature of Genova’s driving. Some muddled logic on my part was that a lot of other vehicles seemed to be driving like maniacs too, so perhaps in the grand scheme of things everything evened out.
The prospect of getting out and finding a ferry and then getting to the right place to re-join our ship was another matter. Particularly as my grasp of Italian was so feeble. I would have to grab Genova before she drove off with a jaunty wave and make sure she had asked all the right questions and deposited us in the right place.
‘Oh no. At least I’m not sure. Perhaps five minutes? Ten minutes?’ Genova said.
I took this information in and mentally added an hour, knowing by then her vague grasp on timings.
‘Excellent,’ I said firmly, ‘we are all very grateful for you, helping us out like this.’
She laughed. ‘I love driving. I often think it is the closest I will get to a teleporter on Star Trek. You know what I mean? I get in at one place and sometime later I get out at another. It’s miraculous.’
I supposed it was if I thought about it.
‘I hope you are not too tired?’
‘Oh no, not at all. I sleep when I am tired and get up when I am not.’
Fair enough, that sounded reasonable.
‘And when I get to my cousin’s house, she will find me a bed, I am sure. She works for the circus, as a trapeze artist and she juggles knives, and knows what it is to keep strange hours.’
If I hadn’t been feeling my age by that point, I did then.
I tried to imagine what it must be like, to be Genova. With her pretty curls, her cheerful, optimistic outlook on life. How amazing; to live so freely, unbounded by timetables and other people’s requirements. It made my past life in the passport office seem very tame by comparison. All those years of fretting about Eddy and the boys. School exams and sports days. My weight and my wardrobe. Perhaps I should have run off and joined the circus when I was younger too?
I gave it some thought. I was afraid of heights, had no knowledge of animals other than the occasional care of someone else’s cat and replenishing the bird table, and didn’t have the dexterity to carve the Sunday roast half the time, never mind juggle with the knife afterwards.
‘Amazing,’ I said.
‘Carolina used to do fire eating too, but she burned the end of her nose so often she gave up.’
Now that would be a good trick to have done at the boys’ speech days. I imagined myself in the car park at their school, with all the other, rigid parents, suddenly taking a swig of whatever it was fire eaters used, and breathing fire over the rather ugly memorial sundial by the entrance doors. The headmaster would have thought twice about asking me in ‘for another little chat’ after that. And I thought I’d been a reasonably good and involved parent. I received no thanks either from staff or my own boys.
As I drifted in and out of sleep, I suddenly remembered one Friday evening being given an impossibly complicated drawing that one of them had conjured up for a soft toy design. A punk T-Rex dinosaur, and the casual request that I ‘help’ get it done by Monday. Which meant instead of spending the weekend getting the laundry done and relaxing in front of Strictly with a large gin, I had to scrabble about for fabric and various trimmings to get the blasted thing made. And I only got a B+. The unfairness of that still stung. Yes, perhaps the fire breathing would be some sort of revenge.
I jerked awake with a start, realising I had been in the middle of a muddled dream about breathing fire over the boys’ teacher, Mr Ingham, with his irritating moustache and sneering face, while my beautiful toy dinosaur roared its approval.
The car had stopped.
‘Are we there yet?’ I asked.
Beside me Evelyn and Diana were still asleep, both of them snoring, and in the front Rapha?l was looking at a map on his phone.
‘Almost there,’ Genova said, ‘just a slight detour.’
Where to, I thought, Spain?
‘There is a road closure ahead, so we are going to take a shortcut,’ she explained.
Really, I had to admire her courage and optimism. And then I wondered if all her generation were like that? What sort of sixty-year-old would Genova turn out to be? I bet she wouldn’t worry about being ignored or side-lined as she got older. Put up with bad service or rudeness in shops or pick through the rails of dull clothes on offer to the older woman. And from now on nor would I.
I decided in a moment of clarity that she might be one or two generations down from me, but I was going to learn from her example. Not when it came to driving, obviously. I was going to be more – what was the word – positive. I liked the thought of that. After all I had a lot of things that I could still appreciate. My health, a decent home, although it needed a fair bit of decorating if I thought about it.
Perhaps when I got back, I would even dismantle the boys’ bedrooms, which hadn’t really changed since they had left home. After all, they had homes of their own now. I would also riddle through all the rubbish they had left behind. Things that apparently they neither wanted nor needed but which I couldn’t possibly throw away. Old sports stuff, a nearly complete collection of some football magazine, sticker albums and a thick wad of duplicate swaps. And then there was my own collection of predictable clothes, that needed a good rethink too.
I stared out of the car window into the darkness that was just starting to lighten with the arrival of the dawn and tried to imagine it. I had a delightful mental image of me and Eddy trundling our cases into Heathrow, ready to board a flight to Boston where we would pick up our Ford Juggernaut and start our road trip around New England. He would probably be looking rather confused, not used to us doing this sort of thing, but I would reassure him with the thoroughness of my research, and I would have a carefully packed plastic folder containing all our documents and absolutely nothing would go wrong.
We made our way up a steep hillside and then back down again, and suddenly in front of us was the glint of the sea and the lights of a town.
‘We’re here,’ Rapha?l said, and at the sound of his voice, Diana jerked awake, the hair on one side of her head squashed flat by the dog blanket.
‘I think I nodded off for a moment,’ she said.
‘You’ve been driving the pigs to market for two hours,’ I muttered, and Diana reached across Evelyn and slapped me on the head.
‘This is Villa San Giovanni, and just a bit further is Villa San Giovanni Imbarchi, where the ferry leaves. It will take you to Messina. Ah look, there is a ferry in at the moment. Caronte and Tourist, I was right. And see, that’s where the cars are lining up to board. How exciting, I wish I was coming with you,’ Genova said. ‘I will leave you by the ticket office, and then I will find Carolina, and she will make me coffee.’
Coffee. What a brilliant idea.