Chapter Nineteen #2
Controlling my sobs, I gulped, swallowed, scrubbed at my tears with my sleeve and blew my nose noisily on a paper tissue.
‘You and me both,’ I croaked.
‘What else does Giancarlo’s message say? Can you tell me?’
I squinted at the text. ‘He says they think Carl might have very mild concussion but there’s no evidence of any…
’ I took a deep breath. ‘No evidence of any brain damage and therefore no serious cause for concern.’ Bemused, I looked up at Luc.
‘It sounds like he simply… well, simply knocked himself out.’
With a wry shake of his head, he patted me on the shoulder nearest to him. ‘Oh, Jesus, kids – they do for you, don’t they?’
I nodded vigorous agreement. ‘And how. But—’ I broke off.
‘But what?’
‘I was about to say I’m sorry I made such a fuss earlier – when I got the phone call, I mean.’
Luc slapped the steering wheel. ‘Oh, don’t say that!
You did not make a fuss. It was a dreadful shock, and you reacted completely normally.
He’s your son, for Christ’s sake.’ He paused a second before continuing.
‘Let me tell you something. When Emma was six, she was invited to a fancy dress party. She was going as a fairy in one of those frilly frocks. You might not believe it now, but Emma was a very girly little girl. Anyway, just before I was about to take her to the party, she went out into the garden with her wand and the next thing I knew, I looked through the kitchen window and saw she was lying unconscious on the grass.’
‘Oh, my God, what did you do?’
‘Rushed her like a madman to A&E – it’s a miracle I didn’t kill us both driving so fast – where I had an absolute fit insisting she was seen by a doctor immediately despite the fact that the only thing upsetting her by that stage was her hysterical father.’
I smothered a grin.
‘Quite,’ said Luc, seeing it. ‘It transpired she’d been spinning round and round in her fairy frock and had simply made herself so dizzy she’d fallen over.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Oh dear, indeed. Emma wouldn’t speak to me for the rest of the day because she’d missed the party.’
I forbore to ask where his wife was at the time.
‘So, no problem, okay? I actually thought you behaved very well, considering.’
‘Thank you. But listen.’ I hesitated again. ‘I’m afraid I still want to go. I still want to see Carl.’
‘Of course you do.’ He released the handbrake.
‘No, wait, you don’t understand. I can go on my own. There’s no great urgency now so, please, if you don’t mind kindly dropping me at the nearest train station, I’ll get there on my own. Then you can go back home.’
He considered me a moment, thoughtfully scratching his nose. ‘Railway station,’ he said. ‘It’s called a railway station, not a train station.’
I looked blankly at him. ‘What?’
‘No, forget it,’ he sighed, ‘I’m the one who should apologise.
Just me being Professor Picky – as usual.
Even at a time of crisis.’ He put the car in gear and, as we pulled away, threw me a quick glance.
‘I am driving you to Milan, Alix,’ he said slowly and distinctly.
‘So, sit back, relax and, as the Americans say, enjoy the ride.’
I hesitated a second. ‘Is there any way I can stop you?’
‘Nope. However, if you could get the name and address of the hospital, that would be a help. Milan is, as you yourself have wisely remarked, quite big.’
‘Is it really?’
‘It’s the second largest city in Italy.’
‘Hey, Mum! I was unconscious for, like, forever!’
‘So I gather,’ I said, speaking briskly to ward off the threat of more tears. Carl looked so much younger and smaller in the hospital bed. ‘Please don’t make a habit of it.’
***
We had arrived at the hospital at around five in the afternoon, the main part of the journey on the motorway going fine but the traffic when we hit the outskirts of Milan absolutely diabolical.
We’d also stopped for an hour at a service station just north of the turn-off for Genoa when Luc had said he needed fuel.
‘Fuel for me,’ he explained apologetically. ‘I didn’t have any breakfast, and I don’t want to risk fainting on you.’
The queue in the cafeteria stretching for miles, we bought sandwiches in the shop, a couple of coffees and took them back to the car.
I didn’t really fancy eating anything, the recurring thought of what might have been with Carl making my stomach still churn like a washing machine.
But I knew I had to be sensible and, in fact, after forcing down a few mouthfuls of a surprisingly pleasant ham and cheese panini, my innards started to settle down and I felt revived.
‘Have you ever fainted?’ I asked Luc.
‘Embarrassingly, I have.’ He brushed crumbs from his shirt front.
‘But not since school, you’ll be relieved to hear.
However, I went to a boarding school where they thought it good for discipline to make us do a sort of parade ground military assembly every morning before breakfast.’ He grunted. ‘I hit the deck virtually every time.’
‘How horrible for you,’ I said, but adding reprovingly, ‘but you really shouldn’t go without breakfast, you know.’
‘Yes, Miss,’ he said meekly.
I blushed. ‘No, I only meant you’re a big man and big people need more regular sustenance than, well, than less big people. I do myself.’
He looked at me. ‘You’re not big, Alix, not big as in big.’
I laughed. ‘Well, thanks, but let’s say I’m not exactly a fairy in a frilly frock either.’
He laughed too.
‘Besides, didn’t you know that men are actually more prone to fainting than women? It’s a medical fact.’
‘I did find that out eventually but too late in the day for it to be any comfort.’
‘Did you get teased about it?’
He screwed up his panini wrapper and chucked it onto the dashboard.
‘I think you’d call it bullying now.’ He took a swig of coffee.
‘But that’s boys’ public schools for you – that is, it was back then.
I believe it’s all changed for the better now, but when I was a kid, or more likely it was just the school I went to, bullying was almost an accepted part of the system.
’ Luc gave a bark of unamused laughter. ‘Designed to toughen you up, to turn you into a man.’
And then he told me something else.
‘You were mocked at school because you spoke English with a French accent?’ I asked, shocked at what he’d said. ‘That’s appalling.’
‘I suppose so.’ But he shrugged. ‘Though it was a pretty appalling accent. Inspector Clouseau with knobs on.’
‘But you’re half French, you were brought up in France, you just told me French was your first language. Of course you’d have an accent.’
‘Yep.’
‘Didn’t anyone help you?’
‘Like who? You don’t mean my mother, by any chance?’
I hesitated a second. ‘Well – yes, if you like.’
‘I didn’t see my mother until I was eleven years old and then not often.
I hardly knew her, so I couldn’t possibly have enlisted her support.
’ He made a little scoffing sound. ‘She wouldn’t have understood anyway.
Jess did her very best to help me when I came home for the school holidays.
However, eventually someone else did unexpectedly come to my aid. ’
All at once he raised his hands in exasperation and let them fall with a thump back onto the steering wheel.
‘Alix, why the devil am I boring you with all this shit?’
‘It’s not shit. Go on, please. Go on with what you were saying. Who came to your aid?’
Watching me, Luc stroked his chin and sighed.
‘She was the wife of my house master and a speech therapist. She didn’t have anything to do with the school as a rule, but by chance she came across me one day when she was walking her dog in the school grounds, chatted in a friendly way to me and immediately noticed I was talking in an odd fashion – by that I don’t mean my accent.
By then I had constructed a weird way of speaking to disguise my accent and she noticed it straightaway.
End of story.’ He smiled at me. ‘One term of pronunciation exercises with her and I was chattering away like a regular little English gentleman, which, of course,’ he continued with irony, ‘is precisely what my father, for reasons utterly unknown, had intended me to become all along.’
‘What a sad story, though.’
‘It’s all a long time ago.’ Then he chuckled.
‘I’ll tell you something funny, though. When I got to university and met Jules, I teamed up with him not simply because we could speak French together but because the other undergraduates were taking the piss out of him for his accent.
’ He laughed out loud. ‘And do you know, Jules didn’t give a monkey’s.
It was only the boys who did it and Jules said they were just jealous because all the girls found his accent sexy.
He was right, too,’ Luc finished in admiration.
‘He had every blessed woman in our year chasing after him – not to mention a few hopeful gays.’
I looked away. I could well believe it.
‘Oh, sorry!’ he exclaimed. ‘That wasn’t very tactful of me. I forgot you were going out with him.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Aren’t you?’ He did one of his yawns as if suddenly bored with the subject. ‘Come on,’ he said, opening the car door and gathering together the rubbish from our lunch. ‘I’ll dump this stuff, then let’s get back on the road. You need to be with your son. You need to be with Carl.’
***
‘Carl, this is Mr Mandeville, who I am working for and who has extremely kindly driven me all the way from Nice to see you.’
Pushing himself upright in bed, Carl shook hands in a very adult way. ‘Hey, thanks, that’s really nice of you,’ he said, looking interestedly at Luc. ‘But then Mum said you were cool.’
Luc grinned at him. ‘Did she?’