by Rosie Thomas
When we reached Paris, or London once again, I knew I couldn't just thank him for his contribution and ask for the keys.
I would have to give it to him: I wanted him to have it.
Anyway, I couldn't even drive the bloody thing.
We reached the café and I lingered for a minute outside, flirting with the Bentley and taking a picture to remember it by. The boys went inside, laughing at something, and when I followed them they were sitting at a table with a mirror behind it.
The sight of our reflections in the sooty glass stopped me short.
We had been driving and living and eating and drinking as a little group for so long and there had been scant opportunity for examining my appearance. I had forgotten I wasn't thirty, like them.
For a moment I was shocked, and embarrassed in case I had been guilty of some lapse of taste related to this oversight, and also envious. Why should I be – and look – so much older and tireder than they were, when there seemed so little difference between us?
But then.
I knew what I was going home to, and what it had taken to achieve it. Phil was a loner, Jon was single. Adam was married with a baby, but he was still at the beginning of everything. And because I had been away, and thought about home from an uncomfortable vantage point, I also knew how much I valued it – that old cliché of travel. The almost twenty years that I had ahead of Phil and the others hadn't been stolen from me, nor were they empty. They were prizes that we had won, and their past tense made them invulnerable to any of the fears that even I could conjure up.
The barman put a thimble cup of viscous Greek coffee in front of me. I looked at fantasy Phil blondly posing in his leather flying jacket, and saw the sexy nose of the Bentley beyond the door, and the yellow leaves dropping from a pergola, and it was a moment of serene happiness and perfect contentment.
Such moments are, by very definition, short-lived.
On the way out of the time control Phil leaned over and busily but mistakenly zeroed the upper trip for me. Which inconveniently left me without a running total of the distance travelled against which to check our position and the intermediate instructions.
'Why did you do that? It makes my job much harder.'
'I'm sorry.'
'The navigating is my job. Don't try to take that over as well as everything else.'
'I'm sorry, okay? I made a mistake.'
The onward journey was less than cordial. We were passing the flying monasteries at Meteora. They looked like illustrations in a book of fairy stories, casdes set on a magic pinnacle, but yet again there was barely time to glance, let alone to consider.
The lunch-time control was at a place called Kalabáka. There was a hotel and a restaurant, but Phil had already spotted a garage across the road and pulled in there. He jacked the car to examine the rear axle once again, and Dave Bull came over to confer. Dave's Rover was suffering problems with the bearings too. The two of them agreed that they could only continue for the rest of the day, with constant checking for possible deterioration.
Most uncharacteristically, Phil hadn't eaten the midmorning snack of a cold fried-egg sandwich that I made him every day from the hotel breakfast provisions. Usually he demanded it within half an hour of leaving the start.
'I feel sick,' he announced now.
Immediately I went to stock up on bottled water and tissues and wet-wipes from the garage shop, secretly pleased with the idea that he might, for a change, need me to look after him.
'Tell me if you're going to be ill,' I said as he drove on.
He regarded me hollowly. 'Nah. I'll just open the door and puke.'
He didn't even do that. An hour later he was asking me what there was for him to eat.
It was a stirring afternoon, driving through the foothills of Mount Olympus and negotiating a special gravelly off-road stage that took us over tight bends through thick conifer forests. At one point we rounded a sharp corner and saw RO at the roadside watching us fly past.
'Fuck, missed him,' Phil said drolly. 'Shall we go back and try again?'
It was fun but the time allowances were still generous, and if they were easy for us they were also easy for everyone ahead of us. We weren't going to climb any higher up the order on today's showing, although we heard later that the Dutchmen Harm and Tonnie had managed to crash their Amazon by skidding sideways into a bridge. They were still running but they lost 76 minutes as a result, slipping below Dan and JD in the list.
Team Amazon now represented the top two Volvos.
There was another time control in a gilded valley near the site of the battle of Thermopylae. Wandering up the dusty road, tired and dreamy with the extravagant scenery, I found Thomas and Maria sitting at a table under a tree with a fruiting vine scrambling through the branches. Thomas beckoned me over.
'Have a drink, Rosie.'
There was a silver-gilt flask on the table, and four silver-gilt nesting cups. I took the cup he gave me and tasted. It was a large shot of vodka, in which a peeled quarter of a luscious ripe fig was marinating.
I told the Noors, with a smile hooked to my ears, 'I think that's the best drink I have ever had in my entire life.'
Thomas and Maria were so cool and Continental, just as Howard and Chris were cool in a rather different, ironic-Brit style. Real Phil and I, by contrast, were a deep-litter, oily, egg-sandwich shambles of suppurating uncool. I was reflecting mildly on this as I pottered onwards to the marshals.
The neat vodka hit the bottom of my empty stomach like a bite out of a hot chilli pepper. Motherly Betty and her partner were leaning against the bonnet of the Frontera with the chequered flag hanging loose beside them. Hmm, hanging loose, like me, I thought and beamed vaguely. I handed over my book with a cheery flourish.
'Car 82, due 15.24.'
Betty gave a little gasp, but it was too late. I raised my eyebrows at the rally clock on the Frontera bonnet. It showed 15.23 and fifty seconds and she was already writing 15.23 in my book, which gave me a one-minute penalty. And, since early arrival carried a double charge, my little interlude with the vodka had cost us two minutes. I went back to the car and owned up to Phil, reckoning that this cancelled out the fiddling with my Terratrip. He took the news rather frostily. It wasn't our best day together.
The road led onwards around the beaches of the western Aegean, and over hillsides policed with cypresses, through Lamía to Kamena Vourla and the night's stopping place. It was a pretty little town, with harbour restaurants already opening to catch the end-of-season business, and an empty hotel overlooking the rippled sea. The local rally club was out in force to greet us, with their classic and vintage cars all polished up. Inside in the deserted bar, RO stepped out in front of Phil and me.
'You were going well today.'
'We always are,' Phil answered as we passed by. It was the only remark RO addressed to us over the whole trip.
Phil and I took our glasses of ouzo outside and sat by the pool in the slanting light. There was a fringe of leaves floating on the chilly water, an overturned chair in the uncut grass, and lights reflected from the branched lamp standards on the terrace. Birds were coming to roost in the spruce and maple trees, and I could hear the throaty putter of a vintage car arriving to a polite round of clapping. In the bar, someone was picking out a tune on the piano. All these falling cadences were melancholically appropriate. We were almost there, it was almost over.
'I'm going to look at the bearings.'
'Of course.'
I finished off my drink on my own.
It was bad news. The day's special stages and slightly increased speed had wreaked more damage. After an inspection, Jingers' verdict was that one bearing was in bad shape, the other dreadful. They would both have to be replaced; the first problem was to find appropriate parts. Fortunately, I learned from the mechanically literate, bearings were universal rather than specific to Volvo. We consulted Theo Voukidis, who had the necessary local expertise. His suggestion was that we get up very ea
rly in the morning and take a taxi back to Lamia; tonight, being a Sunday, was no good.
It was getting dark now. We sat in the dust, the picture of disheartenment. If the bearings went altogether, before Phil could replace them, we'd be on a truck to Paris. To have come so far, and to lose our gold medal . . . To have come so far and not to make it at all . . .
Dan and JD had been working under their own car, but Dan came over to talk. He told us that both their rear shock mountings had started to crack again, but he couldn't face going out to have more welding done. Their speedometer cable had broken too, so they had no Terratrip or mileometer to navigate by.
'We'll have to follow you the rest of the way,' he said.
'Doesn't look like we'll be going much further,' I sighed.
Phil stood up, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.
'I'm going to see if I can bodge it up with what we've got.'
He started stripping down the back axle. Brake fluid spurted out of a tube. The clamp light he was working under slipped and I tried to wedge it more securely.
'Will you see if you can find someone with some bearings grease?' he asked.
I trudged around the emptying car park. Carolyn and Chris and Howard and Melissa were all going out to dinner at a nice place on the harbour. I wanted to go with them, very badly. I wanted to go with Phil even more, but it was just dawning on me that the little place with the white cloths was never going to materialise. Most of all, I was profoundly tired of hovering in the dirt around jacked-up cars, fetching beers and finding spanners and feeling helpless and yet obliged to help.
Andrew Snelling gave me a murky tin of bearings grease. Werner Esch was just locking up his Mercedes for the night. I knew that Werner had a garage business at home in Luxembourg; he was knowledgeable about all kinds of cars.
I tried my luck. 'Werner, could you spare five minutes to look at the Amazon? I think Phil's out of his depth.'
Werner liked Phil, as everyone did. He came at once. Two minutes later he was in his shirtsleeves, underneath the rear axle.
I sat and watched. It was plainly a hideous job but it was a pleasure to see Werner working because he did it so deftly and surely. Dan and Phil were adept enough, but they still quite often did things on a trial and error basis.
The pitted bearing was lifted up for us to examine, and then filled with grease. I wrote down the Timkins numbers of the spares we would need to buy tomorrow, and our ally smoothly and unhesitatingly slotted the pieces of the axle together again. It was fascinating, in a slightly appalling way. Not only had I learned that you could fall in love with a car, I could also see that there was poetry in motor mechanics.
It was too late to go out to eat. The hotel dining room was our only option, where the food was bad and the service slow and grudging. None of this was Phil's fault, my ill-humour least of all, but I took it out on him. I went to bed angry, and got up in the morning in the same frame of mind.
'It was really good, the little place where we ate last night,' Carolyn told me as we waited for the morning start.
I brooded on the blurred, tempting glimpses of so many places, and the sights I had missed altogether because Phil had been obsessed with the car and because out of some sense of loyalty – misplaced – I had stayed to support him.
When I talked about this to Dan he said bluntly, 'I don't know why you didn't go out to smart dinners and sightseeing with Chris and Howard and Carolyn, instead of hanging around in all those car parks. Phil didn't want you there.'
That hurt.
We had to drive to the car ferry at Patras. It was another beautiful day, on a route that led us westwards through blue and sepia hills past Mount Parnassós. There were a couple of short stages, up and down hairpin bends, but nothing that caused any of us to lose time. It seemed that RO was right, the real competition had ended at Istanbul, but the challenge for us was now the heart-in-mouth business of whether the car would hold out. At every control, Phil jumped out to listen to the noise the rotating wheels made, and to check the amount of play. We communicated in terse half-sentences.
In the middle of the day, we were passing through an exquisite little hill town. There was a square lined with cafés and shaded with plane trees, and a view over tiled roofs to the mountains. Phil looked sideways at me.
'Do you want to stop for a coffee?'
'Yes, please,' I smiled at him, at the same time disconcerted to be so easily mollified.
He drove on, past another half-dozen inviting little places, and came to the outskirts of the town. In such a lovely spot it would have been hard to find a drab corner, although this came close. There was a fuel station, and a little hotel next to it with a doorway opening on to the street. Phil pulled into the garage forecourt and, discovering to his disappointment that it didn't have a drinks vending machine, he went into the hotel and brought out two cups of coffee. He put mine into my hand and nodded to a white plastic chair beside the fuel pumps.
'I'm going to see if I can buy the spares,' he said, and went.
After a little while JD and Dan came by and saw me sitting there. I told them the story of real Phil stopping for coffee.
'It's a metaphor for the whole trip. In the heart of classical Greece, taking a break on a filling station forecourt.'
It was hard not to laugh, and after a minute I did so. It was funny, and it was also such a neat illustration of the space between us. I wanted a view and congenial company and a memory to store away, and Phil wanted a hot drink, to fix the car, and no hassle. While I was still laughing I thought I had the answer to all those magazine articles and pieces of pop polemic that ask what women really want. What they want is exactly, completely definable as what men don't want, although they try to pretend that they do. Partly.
We reached the ferry terminal at Patras via the motorway along the coast, switchbacking past a series of little bays and sunlit beaches. Once we were through the time control at the terminal gates we joined a mass of rally cars waiting to board the Ancona boat. Phil disappeared yet again in search of the elusive bearings and caps, and I was in charge of the Amazon. I was sitting on a low wall talking to David Blister when our words were briefly drowned by what we took to be the rumble and vibration of an exceptionally heavy passing truck. A while later we learned, via the satellite news on the television in the booking office, that it had been an earthquake with its epicentre in Greece.
I looked over my shoulder. The ferry port was sunnily busy and unaffected, but Phil had been gone for a long time. I was anxious about him, even now.
The line of cars moved forward and I was left staring at the Volvo. The keys dangled in the ignition. I would probably have to negotiate a steep ramp and a series of manoeuvres directed by impatient Greek seamen in the tight, booming confines of the ship's bowels. I was supposed to be an adventurer, a round-the-world rally competitor, and I knew I couldn't drive this car on board that ship. My hands went sweaty and my mouth dried at the thought. I didn't even have the most basic motoring confidence left. I despised myself for this weakness, but it was a fact.
I ran to find Dan.
'Will you drive our car on board?'
'Of course.'
He raced it forward to a new queue configuration. There was still some more waiting to be done.
It was dark when Phil eventually returned, with the spares.
'Well done,' I said stiffly. I had been relieved to see him back safely, out of the earthquake's imagined rubble, but it didn't last.
'Thank you,' he responded equally stiffly.
He drove the car into the ship's hold, where it was locked up and placed out of bounds. It was going to be a 20-hour journey across the Adriatic to Ancona, Italy, and there was to be no work done on any of the cars whilst the ship was under way. The bearings would have to wait for attention until tomorrow night, in Rimini, if we could make it that far. We had a neat little cabin, one narrow bunk above and one below, no space to move around each other.
'Why did y
ou have to ask Dan to drive the car for you?'
'How do you know about that?'
'He told me. Couldn't wait to tell me.'
'Why do you think I had to ask him?'
Within seconds we were having an argument, a proper, stand-up, door-slamming row, weighty with bitterness and resentment. Like any married couple on the downhill slope. Our parody marriage was breaking up fast, and unfortunately it was doing so in just the same ugly way as a real one.
After I slammed the door and found myself outside in the corridor it occurred to me that like a typical dysfunctional couple, Phil and I had clung together somewhat in the last few days. I couldn't immediately recall when I had last spent time with anyone in the group without him being there – it had probably only been a week ago, but quite short intervals in real time stretched into aeons by the rally clock. I felt awkward, going into the crowded bar, like a newly separated wife.
I had dinner with Carolyn, and David and Willem from the Allard. Later, in the distance at the far end of the saloon, I could see Phil drinking and talking with a group of the men. After dinner I went to bed and slept, and when I woke up in the morning he was still asleep in the bunk overhead. I went to breakfast and he appeared and sat elsewhere, and I plodded back to the cabin and lay on my bunk intending to have a clear think about how to negotiate the way out of this impasse and onwards to Paris.
The door opened and Phil sidled around it. We looked warily at one another.
'Come and lie down,' I said, and he did so. At least the rabbit-in-the-headlamps look had gone. We put our arms around each other and our heads together, and listened to the steady note of the ship's engines.
'Talk to me.'
'What about?'
'Anything you like. Last night.'
'I was talking to the guys in the bar. They were saying it can't be easy for me, being with you, the way you are.'