Blackstone's pursuits

In which we plan to score high marks on the high seas but end up cast adrift

‘I wonder where Ricky Ross is waking up,’ Prim said, as she stretched luxuriously, arching her back and squeezing the last of the sleep out of her body. She’s the best str-e-e-e-e-tcher I’ve ever seen. When she does it she looks like a lioness, with her blonde mane and her golden skin.

‘I hope the bastard’s been driving all right,’ I said, ‘and that right about now he drops off to sleep at the wheel and totals himself.’ I really meant it, and it must have sounded that way too, for Prim looked at me in surprise.

‘If only life was that simple,’ she said. She propped herself up on an elbow and grinned across at me. ‘What’s the game plan for today, lover-boy? Want to look around the shops this morning before we head south. Like Boots, maybe?’

‘I could nip out now, if you like,’ I said, experimentally.

She snorted. ‘The Grant Prix circuit’s closed. What time’s breakfast?’ I looked at my watch. It was almost quarter past nine.

‘We’ve got about fifteen minutes to get down there.’

Prim showered while I shaved, and so we were able to make it with about five seconds to spare. We both felt guilty about keeping the chef from his break, so we settled for cereal and coffee.

Peter, it seemed, had taken to us. He was sorry to see us go, but Prim cheered him up when she said we’d look in on the way back. I muttered that when we did, all the facilities had better be in working order. He stared at me for a few seconds, until at last he grasped my meaning. ‘Ah,’ he said, mournfully, ‘that’s the trouble with outside suppliers.’

Rather than head south straight away we drove back into Darlington. It’s a nice town, distinctive, with a market in its centre set out around a high tower. After I’d been to Boots, we found a travel agent and looked up ferry times from the south coast ports. ‘I’ve never seen St Malo,’ I suggested. The travel agent assured us that there would be plenty of space on a night crossing in midweek, so that was it.

We had nine hours to get to Portsmouth, and we used them all, driving at a steady pace, bypassing Leeds and circling south of Birmingham till we found the M40. We chatted as we travelled, when we weren’t singing along to Jan’s Abba tapes. (The woman’s never been the same since she saw Muriel’s Wedding.) We tried to talk about the future, but for both of us the crystal ball was obscured by the dark shadow of Ricky Ross, and our task in Geneva.

‘If you’ve finished with nursing, honey,’ I asked Prim as we crawled through Newbury, ‘what are you going to do? Not, I say again, that you need to do anything.’

She shook her head, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t All I do know is that I have to do something, but it has to be something really different.’

‘How about marrying me and having babies?’ The words jumped unbidden from my mouth. I twisted the mirror and stared in it to make sure that it was me who had said them.

‘Woah, Oz, woah,’ she said. ‘All in good time. It’s only been five days, and we haven’t even had that test drive yet. Your application still has to be approved.’

I must have looked downcast, because she squeezed my thigh. ‘A couple of years down the road, if we can still stand each other, then we can talk about things like that. But is that what you really want?’

I took a hand off the wheel and stroked her soft cheek. ‘Right now, Springtime, what I want is you. Anything else is a bonus.

‘Tell you what, let’s get the next few days over with. If we’re still alive in a week, we’ll have the rest of our lives in front of us!’

We drove on in silence for a while. Talk of test drives, and our developing, if frustrating, relationship made me think about ferry crossings. Jan and I went to London once. There’s something about making love in a British Rail sleeper. I wondered if it might be the same on a cross-channel ferry. My Dad’s house has cupboards that are bigger than railway sleepers but those narrow berths were an experience … especially with both of us crammed into the lower one.

We got to Portsmouth with two hours to spare. The travel agent was right, up to a point. There was plenty of vehicle space, with no buses booked on board. But there were absolutely no spare cabins. I looked at Prim as we stood at the booking window. ‘Am I being punished for something?’ I asked her. ‘Are you? Has your Mum had a word with the Bloke Upstairs?’

In terms of Grand Prix circuits, the Club Class lounge on a Channel Ferry is strictly a pedestrian precinct.

We sat side by side in our reclining aircraft-style seats, the Fetherlites redundant in my wallet, and held hands through the night, all the way to France.