The Gran Tour

by Ben Aitken

  A mile or so down the road, with Jill’s knockers bouncing around like there’s no tomorrow, I ask if she’s got a bit of a thing for George then. She says not really. She says if she’s got a thing for anyone then it’s David Dimbleby. She even went to the filming of Question Time when it was in Telford, and again when it was in Shrewsbury. She was tempted to ask David a question. I ask what she would have asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Maybe if he fancied nine holes sometime.’ David, if you’re reading – you’d have been a fool to say no.

  I was alone at first. I got through a bowl of soup and half a bowl of pasta before Jill spotted me. She was sat with three others but said she couldn’t let me eat alone, not in Italy. I ask if she can recite the poem she wrote about eating alone, the one that was published in the church magazine, but she can’t. She can only remember the odd line. ‘The stale dread / of the end of the bread.’ That’s one she can remember.

  ‘Are you going to that bar up the road tonight?’ I say.

  ‘Hm?

  ‘For the singer you mentioned?’

  ‘Oh yes. Six of us are going. Are you coming?’

  ‘Nah – I’m still knackered.’

  ‘You big baby. Have you ever been to Birmingham?’

  She has a habit of doing this. Or rather: she’s done this three times: asked a question I didn’t see coming. ‘I have,’ I say. ‘But not for years and years.’

  ‘I love to go to Birmingham.’

  ‘I’ve never heard anyone say that.’

  ‘It’s got the biggest Primark in Europe. It’s so cheap.’

  ‘Is that why you can afford to toss your underwear over garden walls?’

  ‘And the Rag Market. That’s very good. You can get six avocados for a pound there.’

  ‘Jill, that’s nonsense.’

  ‘Why is it?’

  ‘You can’t get six avocados for a pound anywhere.’

  ‘And the theatre in Birmingham’s excellent.’

  ‘How many times have you been to Birmingham, Jill?’

  ‘I go once a month.’

  ‘Have you friends there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Family?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just go because—’

  ‘Because I like it.’

  ‘Once a month?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’ve heard of London, right?’

  ‘OMG don’t look behind you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘About a hundred Italian fifteen year olds.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The average age just plummeted.’

  ‘And so did the peace and quiet.’

  ‘Oh, to be that young again!’

  ‘What would you do?

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you were that young again, what would you do?’

  ‘Him, probably.’

  ‘Jill. I’m pretty sure you can’t—’

  ‘I’m joking. Him and him.’

  ‘Jill.’

  ‘That would equal 30. I just hope they’re not on my corridor. Are you in a book club?’

  See? ‘No.’

  ‘I’m in three. And I’m in a walking club, but I think I told you that. Did I tell you that?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘We’re reading a book set in Italy at the moment. There’s a young man in it who rides a motorbike. He’s always greasy.’

  ‘Do you like reading then?’

  ‘I do, but mainly I go to the book club to get out of the house. It’s not that I don’t like my house. I do. It’s nice. It’s just … a bit big now.’

  ‘You say you had to care for—’

  ‘Alzheimer’s. And the less you know about that the better. People say I haven’t grieved properly. They say I should stay at home and grieve properly. But I don’t want to do that. I’m going to Austria in a couple of months. If I get that chocolate thing will you eat half?’

  33 After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 465, this part of the world enjoyed a range of visitors, chief among them the Germanic Lombards, whose whole nation – yes, whole nation – migrated here from the Carpathian basin, which is somewhere near Hungary. Then, in the late 700s, a bloke called Charlemagne came to town, on a mission to get something called a Holy Roman Empire up and running, which, from what I can tell, was just a massive Catholic Germany whose leaders were modelled on Caesar and Augustus and all that mob. Then, the Spanish somehow stuck their nose in locally around the 17th century, and then the Austrians really stuck their nose in locally around the 18th century, which is where they left it (give or take a dash of Napoleon) until 1859, when Lombardy was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy as a result of the Second Italian War of Independence, which involved little Sardinia teaming up with France to boot out the unwanted Austrians. The biscuit guy – Garibaldi – was crucial in all this.

  34 Turns out I asked for the bill in Spanish.

  20

  They took him to hospital in a gondola

  Rita’s sitting alone, and she doesn’t mind if I join her. She says Vinny isn’t coming down just yet. He’s doing his physio. He’s got no right knee, you see, because of the football.

  ‘No knee at all?’

  ‘There’s a cap, but it’s not really connected to much, so it just slides around.’

  ‘And what does physio involve?’

  ‘Sitting on the balcony reading the paper most of the time.’

  ‘Was he good at football then?’

  ‘Oh yes. He was captain. If you got tackled by Vinny, you stayed tackled by Vinny.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘That’s what he used to say. But he was soft with it. I remember he was really sad one Saturday night because he’d broken someone’s ankle in six places.’

  Rita went up to the church yesterday. She walked up there on her own. She’s not religious, she just felt like it. She used to be religious but just sort of forgot, or kept forgetting rather – to go to church, to pray, to trace things back to God. And if you keep forgetting something – well, it might mean it’s not ever so important to you. Rita considers herself an intelligent tomato, that’s her way of looking at things, and so long as she goes back into the soil somehow, back into the system – so long as she’s recycled – then she’ll be happy – well, not happy because she’ll be soil, she’ll be dead, but I know what she means. Rita used to be a hairdresser and still does the odd bit now and again – the odd cut, the odd colour – but mostly she goes into a local school to listen to some of the kids read, the ones who don’t have ideal domestic situations. She also goes in an hour before school starts to make toast three times a week, which sounds a bit questionable to me. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘here comes Vinny. He must have smelt the bacon. Watch he doesn’t tackle you.’

  Jill ended up on the dance floor last night. That’s what she tells me, on our way to Tirano, from where we’ll take a train to St Moritz in Switzerland. But it wasn’t her fault. It was her mum’s fault. Her mum loved a boogie, and now Jill’s got it in her genes.

  ‘Did you say your mum was Welsh, Jill?’

  ‘Oh, very Welsh!’

  ‘And what did that involve then?

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Being very Welsh.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Just not being English, really.’

  We head north and then east towards the Swiss border. Again, the sky is clear; again, the motion picture is glossy and stark.

  ‘My dad worked on the trains,’ says Jill. ‘He was a guard.’

  ‘I hope he was a lenient one.’

  ‘I doubt that very much. Not unless he had a character transplant on the way to work each morning. The most lenient thing he ever did to me was letting me tie my own laces. He was in Italy during the war, caught Yellow Fever in Venice. Not a bad spot to get it. They took him to hospital in a gondola. When you cook risotto do you use that special rice or just normal stuff?’

  Jill knows a lot of words. That’s what I’m hearing, wh
at I’m noticing. Not just words like risotto and laces. She knows a lot of proper nouns. She knows the name of things. For example, she often points to passing flowers and nominates them: bougainvillea, giant daisies, jasmine, periwinkles, oleanders. She says she didn’t used to know the names. Says it’s only since her husband died, really, since she started getting out more. And golf helps. She’s always in the bushes. She doesn’t always find her ball, but she almost always finds some flowers she hasn’t seen before. She’ll get someone to come over and say what they are, and if they don’t know, then she’ll take a picture and find out later. Jill’s explanation of how she knows the names now but didn’t before makes me think of a poem by Clive James that I read in a newspaper when he died not long ago. The poem says something about flowers, about learning their names, about noticing things, about losing your ball but finding something else.35

  I used to think Jill had two settings – talk and snore – but I’m seeing a third more and more – or hearing a third rather: silence, quiet, reflection. I’ve been hearing it more since we swapped seats. She’s by the window now, and I think there’s more for her to reflect on out there, more to be quiet about. She turns away from the window presently and offers me a sweet. I take one and she says that her grandmother had a rotten sweet tooth, if I’ll forgive the pun. She used to make something called lap cake. Jill used to help her make it in the kitchen. Not that she was much help, but at least it kept her out of the way of her grandfather. If Jill made too much noise – folding the currants, greasing the tin – her grandmother would tell her to keep it down because Grandad’s picking his horses. He was always picking his horses, as far as Jill can remember, though she admits that when it comes to memories, kids cling on to certain things – the cake, the horses – at the expense of just about everything else. He always needed a drink when he was picking his horses, says Jill. You knew when he’d picked one or two because he’d be sucking Parma Violets – a type of confectionery. He was at his best when he was fishing. Those were Jill’s favourite times with him. He used to make her wear dark clothes so the trout couldn’t spot them. Then, if they caught something, they’d fry it up when they got back and have it with boiled potatoes and leeks if they were in season.

  ‘How old were you when they died?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Well not the trout, Jill – your grandparents.’

  ‘They both died on my eighteenth birthday.’

  ‘Christ. That’s a bit weird.’

  ‘Not really. It was a car crash.’

  Sometimes, you meet people who make you see that the people you thought talked a lot don’t actually. I meet Lyn outside a café in Tirano, waiting for our corkscrew-train up into the mountains of Switzerland. Over the course of one small cappuccino, Lyn tells me the following: that I should forget Shearings and use a company called Travel Sphere instead because there are young people on those ones; that she has camped throughout Russia and compared to that experience, this is all fluff; that she’s a university librarian; that she always has a deconstructed kettle on her person; that she likes reading – Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys – but to really let off steam, she watches quiz shows on TV; that if it’s an education I’m after, I could do a lot worse than watching Coronation Street from start to finish (that’s over 10,000 episodes), paying special attention to Maureen Lipman’s character; that I should write that down – Maureen Lipman; and that I should teach English abroad, apart from where they already speak it. I might be wrong, but I don’t think I say a word or make a noise during the transmission of all this information. When the call comes to make our way to the platform, and Lyn moves off and I’m left alone, I try to imagine how I might take all that she’s said and compress it and trap it and ferment it and distil it – that is, make use of it – but I can’t, simply can’t, just cannot imagine converting all of the above into a takeaway kernel of anything. Some things can’t be broken down. Some things can’t be harnessed. Some things just disappear without a trace.

  The first thing you notice about the carriages of the Bernina Express are the size of the windows. And the first thing I enjoy looking at through those windows are the horny cows at Brusio, and then the sweeping circular viaduct which winds us upward and onward into the green, springy hills. We pass a lake (ooh), a field of dandelions and buttercups (ah), and then a huge car park (oh). You can imagine the amount of pictures being taken, the amount of videos. One guy’s filming the entire ascent through the back door: the falling valley, the receding towns, the diminishing signs of man. I have to look through his parted legs if I want to cop a look at what’s behind us.

  And I do want to cop a look. I do want an eyeful from all sides. And so, like most of those on board, I flit around to get the best angles, the best frames. Of course there’s a risk of seeing nothing for wanting to see it all. A case in point: backdoor-man throws a wobbly when his battery runs out halfway through our ascent. He isn’t cheered up or calmed down when someone suggests he just watch the footage twice. Graham’s got the right idea. Graham doesn’t stir. He calmly watches one side go by, occasionally sharing a thought – ‘Cor, that’s alright; I wouldn’t mind one of those in my garden.’

  It’s the sheerness of the colour that I’d want in my garden. It’s the severity of the palette that gets me. The light was meant to be good in St Ives, but up here it’s like someone is flooding us with extra voltage from behind the scenes. It’s the yellow of the flowers, and the green of the grass, and the blue of the sky. That’s what it is. That’s what gets me. I see now why so many colours take their name from nature. Orange, lilac, salmon, amber, aqua, lemon, silver, olive, fuchsia. Nature knows what it’s up to. Nature does it best. It’s telling that when a delay is announced, people cheer.

  The pause gives me a chance to talk to my neighbour, Sharon. She’s a social worker. She likes the job because she’s good at it, and because she’s good at it she gets the trickiest cases – normally children who were forced to grow up too quickly. As if to demonstrate her credentials, Sharon offers me half an orange. It’s lunchtime all round by the sound of it. Or elevenses. It looks like Jill smuggled most of the breakfast buffet out this morning. She’s even brought cutlery. She reckons she’s got a teaspoon in her cleavage. I’m happy to take her word for it.

  A long tunnel keeps us in the dark. It’s a welcome respite from beauty. You can only handle so much before you need to turn your back and rub your eyes. At the end of the tunnel is winter: the landscape is otherworldly and totally covered in snow. Sharon asks if I mind all the old people, and I think: mind is a funny verb, isn’t it? It can so easily be positive or negative. To have in mind, to watch out for, to find bothersome. I say, ‘Yes and no, Sharon,’ and then leave it at that. She doesn’t ask me to elaborate because her attention has been taken – and mine with it – by someone skiing uphill with the help of a bright orange kite. The skier is antlike next to the mountains, amid the snow. They’re going to beat us to the finish line by the look of it – St Moritz is just around the corner.

  You could not describe St Moritz as bustling. Perhaps in the winter it is, when people come to ski and snowboard, but right now it’s got the feel of a film set that has wrapped for the day. Not so much après-ski as après-vie. That’s not to say the town is without virtues. The municipal car parks offer splendid views. The public toilets are beyond reproach. And if you’ve got ten quid and want it off your hands pretty quickly, all you have to do is go into any of the bars around here and order a black coffee. When I thank the waitress for taking the money off my hands in French and she replies, ‘Nein, nein. Hier ist es deutsch,’ it is the first time I’ve been told off in German for speaking French.

  I make my coffee last almost an hour. I’m joined halfway through by Dan, who’s on the Shearings holiday with his grandparents. We’re pretty much contemporaries, and yet struggle to find much to talk about. Perhaps we’ve got too much in common. At any rate, when he tells me that he works in a pub in Harrogate, all I can manage is
to agree. After the coffee, Dan and I go our separate ways, which is a mistake on my part because I’m soon lost and late for the coach. When I finally get back to the coach a cool twenty minutes late, you can be sure there are a few remarks directed my way. Mr Prunes thought I might have checked-in to the public toilets (he’d seen me photographing them), while Sharon wonders what on earth I did with the extra time. If anyone had been worried about my disappearance, they do a good job of keeping the fact to themselves. Though Jill does say that she was saving me her last macaroon, but then gave up and let someone called Sidney have it – ‘Not that he needed the sugar boost. He drinks a litre of lemonade a day.’

  Jill reserved a table for six. You’re not meant to, but she saw some Germans reserving a table for five and was inspired by their example. Or, as she puts it, ‘Anything they can do, I can do better.’ I reckon the sixth person – who hasn’t shown up yet – was simply invented to allow a morale-boosting victory. I’m surprised she hasn’t come down wearing her travel pillow.

  Ossobuco is on the menu and they’re impressed when I’m able to say that osso means bone and buco means hole and it’s to all intents and purposes a veal chop. I opt for pasta and pizza and then fiore de panna ice cream. Graham is quite impressed with the veal, and with the food generally, but reckons they do better stuff at the pub his daughter runs in Sheffield – The Fat Cat. Sharon asks if it’s just the one daughter Graham’s got. He says sometimes he wishes it was, but no, he’s got four. Or had four rather – he’s always doing that, getting the has and the had wrong. She was good, was Andrea. She worked for Virgin, in the head office. She met Richard Branson once. He came in with flip-flops on and told them to keep it up. Graham says that his mother said more than once (because it was true more than once) that when something horrible happens, you have to move on. Even if you don’t think you can. ‘You don’t expect to bury your child,’ he says. ‘But you do it. And then it’s tomorrow.’