Prague Spring

10

It’s raining. Scudding clouds like damp rags hung out in the wind. A boy and a girl, laden beneath rucksacks, climbing out of a Land Rover and taking up position on the roadside. The Land Rover drives off in a plume of spray and laughter.

‘Daddy doesn’t believe we’ll get anywhere,’ Eleanor mutters angrily, and it’s only defiance that stops her fulfilling her parent’s belief. Her anorak hood is letting in water around the neck, it’s too damp to roll a ciggie and she’s having second thoughts about this venture.

Lorries, cars, buses, splash past. They seem indifferent, not even inhabited by human beings, just steel boxes of varying size and design and colour careering past as though on a conveyor belt. ‘What do we do now?’ she asks. She feels hopeless and angry, above all angry at James for bringing her here.

‘We walk on a bit.’

‘Walk on? I thought the idea was to bum a lift off someone.’

James is wearing a smug expression that says this is what he knows and she doesn’t. He’s the expert here. ‘First rule,’ he says. ‘Only hitch where there’s a place the driver can pull in. No one’s going to stop in the middle of a main road.’

‘What’s the second rule? Give up and take a taxi?’

They shuffle through the drizzle as far as a lay-by. ‘You may as well start,’ he says, plonking his rucksack on the grass verge. ‘Shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll stand back a bit. They’ll stop for a girl.’

‘For a girl?’

‘Come on, stick your thumb out.’

‘I don’t want that kind of lift.’

‘It won’t be that kind of lift. It’ll be a lift.’

‘It’s like hustling.’

‘It’s only hustling if the customer thinks you’re a tart. But they’ll just assume you’re hitching. Now stick your bloody thumb out.’

She does so, like someone trying in vain to plug a leak. Cars splash by.

‘You want to look the driver in the eye as well. Make it personal. That’s rule number two. You’re a girl, so take advantage of it.’

‘I told you, I don’t want that kind of lift.’

‘Come on, Ellie. All he’ll want is a grope.’

She turns on him, but at the very moment that she’s about to loose a stream of invective, a van slithers to a halt in the lay-by. ‘Hop in,’ the driver yells through the window, and James is opening the door and shoving Ellie and the rucksacks across the seat before she can utter a word. ‘Dover,’ James says across the sodden, furious figure sitting in the middle of the bench seat. The driver, a callow youth with prominent Adam’s apple and rodent teeth, slams the vehicle into gear and accelerates back into the stream of traffic. He’s chewing gum and smoking and scratching his groin, all these things at the same time as driving. It takes concentration, a degree of slick skill. ‘You going abroad then?’

‘France, Germany, Italy. Maybe Greece.’

He grins at them. ‘And you’ve had a row already?’

11

‘About last night,’ she says. They’ve bought tickets, had something to eat in a greasy-spoon café and then boarded the ferry and waited for it to depart, all without broaching that most delicate of subjects. Now they are on deck looking back over the ship’s wash to where low-lying cloud throws a wartime smokescreen across what might be the white cliffs of Dover fading into the night. The lounge they have abandoned is like a refugee encampment, littered with squalling babies and arguing adults, dominated by a large, loud American extolling the virtues of the latest film to anyone who will listen and many who are trying not to. ‘You’ve gotta see it,’ he is insisting. ‘It’s just ace. This little guy Hoffman. He’s a real star.’

Out on deck it is quiet and cool. The rain has stopped.

‘What about last night?’

He senses rather than sees her indifference. ‘I’m sorry, that’s all. Just… I don’t want to rush into anything.’

‘Bloody Kevin again.’

‘Perhaps.’

There is silence between them but not around them. Around them, beneath them, is the sound of the ship and its way through the water. It pitches and shudders like an old lady confronted with something not altogether pleasant. Deep in its bowels is the rumble of machinery. He wonders what she thinks of him, while she wonders what he thinks of her. Neither offers the other much in the way of clues. Should he take her hand? It seems mad. They’ve kissed a bit, and now he doesn’t know whether to take her hand or not.

‘Strange, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Tomorrow morning we’ll be in France—’

‘Belgium, actually. Zeebrugge, remember?’

‘Only because you insisted, because it was cheaper.’

‘My mother brought me up to be careful with money.’ He waits. ‘You were different with your parents, you know that? From what you’re like at Oxford.’

‘Different how?’

He can’t quite say. A hint, a feeling. ‘Obedient,’ he suggests. ‘Wanting to please.’

‘That’s why I try to get away from them. Isn’t it the same with you?’

‘You’ll have to come oop North and find out.’

‘That depends on whether we survive this trip.’

We, he thinks. What exactly is this collective? Does it even exist outside the limits of this journey? And in the spirit of scientific exploration he decides to attempt to find out, turning towards her and taking that hand and ducking down to kiss her on the mouth. There is a moment’s hesitation, just the fragile touch of her lips, and then she moves towards him and her mouth opens and for a moment there is the vibrant dance of her tongue against his.

She pulls back and moves away, turning back to the sea, her face in profile.

‘What does that mean?’ he asks.

‘It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.’

‘Isn’t it a signifier?’ The word seems to startle her. Maybe he isn’t meant to know things like that.

‘What on earth have you been reading? Derrida?’

‘Some crap about semiotics.’

‘Well, if anything it’s a floating signifier. It means everything and nothing. What you want it to mean.’

‘I want it to mean you really fancy me.’

‘But maybe that’s not what it does mean.’ She laughs and gives him a little consoling nudge in the chest. ‘Come on, we’d better go inside and find somewhere to sleep.’

12

A Flemish dawn insinuates itself into the early morning. Ellie peers, bug-eyed from lack of sleep, through the salted window of the lounge. There’s a smear of sea and vague shapes of coastline and harbour. ‘Where in God’s name are we?’ she wonders out loud.

‘Zeebugger,’ says James. They take turns to guard their rucksacks while the other goes to wash in the overcrowded bathrooms. The ferry docks with a clanging of steel and a blast of ship’s siren.

Outside on deck the air is cold. It has a different quality from the air they left behind at Dover, a strange hint of foreign, a sense that they are on the edge of a continent that stretches to the Mediterranean, to the Urals, to Finisterre. No longer marooned on an island, encompassed by an island’s limitations. Here, anything is possible. But is that sensation just an illusion? After all, there’s nothing much to see, just the industrial desert of Zeebrugge that lies all around the docks like children’s toys abandoned across a concrete playground. Could be anywhere. Thames estuary. Merseyside. Tyneside.

Ellie huddles against him for warmth, which is good. He puts his arm around her and smells her hair. A warm, maternal scent that doesn’t quite match the girl herself, who is brittle and filial. Below deck engines are being started. On the quayside men are waving instructions. Foot passengers begin to file off the ferry like the infantry of an invading army, each trooper bowed beneath the burden of his or her backpack. All that is missing is the weaponry.

‘Foreign soil,’ James says portentously as he steps down off the gangway. Not really true. Foreign concrete, more like. ‘The first time,’ he adds.

‘The first—?’

‘— time abroad. That’s right.’

‘I don’t believe it—’

‘We ’aven’t all got t’brass you ’ave,’ he says, putting on his phoney Yorkshire accent to amuse her. They stump along a quay, past vehicles are already queuing to drive on once the ferry had been emptied.

‘Look,’ Ellie says pointing. ‘Ringo.’

‘Ringo?’

‘There.’ In the queue of cars is a VW Beetle bearing the name on the bonnet. A face watches them from the driver’s seat as they walk past. A pretty little girly face. Blonde and blue-eyed and rosebud-mouthed. ‘Ringo. For a Beetle. Now is that funny, or just naff?’

‘What’s naff?’

Ellie affects surprise. ‘Don’t you know anything? You are, my dear, you are. So where do we go now?’

‘South,’ he says, not caring if he is naff, feeling, for the moment, like Ernest Shackleton but without the icebergs – an explorer making his first, tentative steps in unexplored territory, although a slow plod through the purlieus of Zeebrugge, passed by overloaded cars bearing GB stickers on their rear ends, doesn’t quite match Antarctica.

‘Why’s no one stopping?’ Ellie demands petulantly.

‘Because they’re bloody full. Can’t you see? And they’re English, which means they’re on holiday, which means they’re not going to pick up hitchers in a foreign country.’

They pause to examine the map that they bought in Dover. ‘We’re here,’ he says, pointing. ‘And that’s where we want to be, at the Ostend to Brussels road.’

Ellie launches into a silly game, ratcheting up her accent to sound like an army officer in a 1950s war film, stabbing the map with a spiky finger. ‘We are he-are and Jerry is they-are.’

‘Piss off,’ he tells her. She sulks. He folds the map away and they plod on through the early morning, Ellie stumping on ahead as though she isn’t with him. He watches her, liking her and loathing her at the same time; a strange combination of emotions. Spoilt brat, is what he loathes. What he likes is more difficult to explain – something about the sharp flights of her mind, her knowledge and her self-confidence. On the ferry she told him something about the weeks she spent in Paris last May, sleeping on someone’s floor, going out during the daytime to throw cobblestones at the CRS and spending the evenings at a student bar with music and beer and hash. She was even arrested and spent a night in a police cell with half a dozen other girls. In the morning she was let go because she was British and they didn’t want the bother of dealing with the embassy. That Ellie seems like an emissary from another continent, far from Yorkshire, far from England even.

The countryside south of Zeebrugge is flat and dull, smeared with rain, named with Zs and Ks: Dudzele, Zuienkerke, and the hip Koolkerke. Only ‘Bruges’ is familiar. ‘Let’s go to Bruges,’ Ellie calls over her shoulder. ‘I’ve heard it’s lovely.’

‘I thought we were going to Italy. If we stop off at every place that—’

‘All right, all right.’

Cars pass by full of smiling families off on their continental hols, but the one that does stop isn’t one of them. The driver is on his own, an undistinguished man as grey as the morning. He winds the window down. ‘Autostop?’ he asks.

‘Er… no,’ James answers.

‘Yes!’ shouts Ellie, running back. ‘Yes! We’re doing autostop. Autostop means hitching, you idiot.’

‘I thought it meant our car had broken down.’

Gratefully they clamber into the car.

‘Where you go?’ the driver asks.

‘To Italy. And Greece.’

He laughs, as though Italy and Greece are figments of the imagination, like the land of Cockaigne. ‘I only go to Oostkamp. I drop you on the Brussels road. Maybe there someone take you to Italy.’

In the car they examine the map again, Ellie leaning over the front seat and reaching out to trace a line past Bruges, past Brussels towards Luxembourg and the Rhine. She looks up with a sudden grin, as though a single lift of no more than a few miles has made all the difference. Her face, rubbed plain by lack of sleep, is suddenly immensely desirable. Not a spoilt brat at all. ‘Hey,’ she says, looking at James with that intensity of gaze that she has, ‘we’re on our way. And you’re really not naff.’

Throughout that morning they move through the Flanders landscape, elated by their successes, stunned by tiredness, and, in James’s case, thrilled by the novelty: foreign road signs, foreign place names, foreign cafés and shops. Even the design of houses. How could you make something different out of a row of terrace houses constructed of bricks and mortar? Yet the Flemish had achieved that very thing.

On the outskirts of Brussels they take a tram with a conductor sitting behind a desk just inside the door, dealing out tickets with a mangled stump of a hand and complaining about life to anyone who will listen and many who won’t. Around them people talk in a blizzard of French, and, to James’s surprise, Ellie talks back at them. ‘Skiing holidays,’ she tells him by way of explanation. ‘And summers in Juan-les-Pins.’

‘Sounds posh.’

‘How could I help it?’ she asks, as though it had been some kind of indignity that her parents subjected her to.

They leave the tram at the end of the line and walk through the last, characterless suburbs. On the south side of the city, other hitchhikers stand like anglers on the banks of a river waiting for a bite. Some hold up cards with their intended destinations, as though these might attract their prey. James knows what to do here – walk upstream and take whatever is coming just to get away from the crowd. And soon enough Ellie lands a catch, a Peugeot driven by a young man in a grey suit who might be a travelling salesman. ‘Namur?’ he asks.

‘Namurça va,’ Ellie replies because it is okay; almost anywhere in the general direction of south is okay. They clamber in, triumphant, and set off. Dull, terrace houses, a supermarket and a filling station give way to farmland. A sign announces Waterloo and shortly a great mound rises like a Neolithic tumulus out of the farmland ahead. People are gathered at the summit beneath the statue of a lion. ‘You want to see?’ the driver asks.

He parks the car amongst the tourist coaches. There’s a memorial stone telling anyone who bothers to read that La Butte du Lion was constructed by some king or other to celebrate the fact that his son, Prince someone or other, was wounded during the battle.

‘Typical imperialist crap,’ Ellie decides. ‘No one gives a shit about the slaughter of common soldiers, but they built a bloody great monument like this because Prince William got knocked off his horse.’

‘You’re judging the past by the standards of the present.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m judging it by the standards of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.’

‘So you’d bring the guillotine back?’

‘Some people deserve the guillotine.’

Arguing, they climb the steps up the side of the mound while people coming down push past. Up on the top, in the shadow of the pedestal, a cool breeze blows. An information board gives the layout of the battle. It is weather-beaten like the battlefield itself, the colours faded, the names – Napoleon, Wellington, Blücher and all the others – partly worn away. They look from the board to the landscape before them, to the shallow slopes of farmland that at the time meant such a lot. A mile deep and a couple of miles wide, that’s all; a few square miles of open fields and scattered woods, with an occasional farm. James tries to picture the chaos of an early nineteenth-century battle: drifting palls of musketry smoke; the scythe of canister shot; comic opera uniforms; horses plunging and whinnying. Europe tearing herself to pieces, as she always seems to do.

They go back down, arguing the merits and demerits of Napoleon. Was he a little Hitler? Or a great civiliser of Europe? Revolutionary or dictator? About Wellington Ellie has no doubt: duke, prime minister, reactionary bastard. He’d have gone to the guillotine, and deserved it.

The driver listens to their argument as they drive back to the main road. ‘Who gives a shit?’ he says.

13

Namur. Bastions, ramparts, the slippery flow of a great river. Beneath the city walls they stop to buy a newspaper and write postcards. James notices that Ellie’s postcard home is addressed solely to her father. A bleak missive: We’re fine. Hope Mother is OK. Love, Ellie. The newspaper runs stories about the war in Vietnam, about disturbances in France, about dictatorial colonels in Greece. A long editorial asks whether Russian forces will invade Czechoslovakia as they did twelve years ago in Hungary.

Beyond Namur the countryside changes. No longer the dull flats of Flanders but now a crumple in the continent’s mantle that gives rolling hills and woods. Their lift drops them in the main square of Marche, an ordinary little town where they find a brasserie with tables outside under the trees. They sit in the afternoon sun and drink dark, slightly sweet beer. The map shows that they have done almost one hundred and fifty miles.

After buying bread and charcuterie they set off in evening sunshine along the road to Bastogne. The countryside has a mellow, timeless quality to it, spacious and open, as though no one could do it any harm. Towards seven o’clock they stop at a farmhouse and Ellie is pushed towards the door to communicate with the natives. ‘Bonsoir, Madame,’ she says to the woman who answers her knock. ‘On fait l’autostop vers l’Italie. S’il vous plaît, avez-vous un endroit où on peut mettre la tente?’

The woman’s face is stolid as a potato. She turns and calls to someone inside.

‘What did you say?’ James asks.

‘Is there somewhere we can pitch a tent?’

The woman turns back. ‘Une canadienne?’

James is indignant. ‘Canadian? No! Je suis English. Anglais!’

This brings laughter. ‘Shut up, James,’ Ellie says. ‘Oui, Madame. Seulement une canadienne.’ There’s a brief discussion, a waving of arms and a pitying smile in James’s direction accompanied by laughter from the woman. At that moment a little girl emerges from the shadows of the house and, with great solemnity, leads them round the back. ‘Voilà la cerisaie,’ she announces in a piping voice, pointing beyond outhouses to where there’s an orchard, placid in the evening sunshine, the trees laden with fruit. Cherries. A cherry orchard.

Ellie dumps her rucksack on the ground. ‘How very literary,’ she says. ‘Or is that lost on you?’

‘Everything’s lost on me. What was all that about being Canadian?’

‘A canadienne is a tent, you berk.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘Camping,’ Ellie admits reluctantly. ‘With the Guides. We went to a jamboree in Vence in the south of France.’

‘You were a Girl Guide? For fuck’s sake! And you told me all that crap about camping on the lawn with your brother.’

‘That was true. The tent on the lawn was true.’

‘But you never mentioned the Guides, or jamborees or anything like that. What were you? Brown Owl?’

‘That’s Brownies.’

‘It’s all the same. Bloody silly games. How does a Girl Guide light her fire?’ He dumps his rucksack beside hers and looks at her questioningly. ‘Well?’

‘I don’t know. How does a Girl Guide light her fire?’

‘She rubs against a Boy Scout.’

‘Ha ha.’

He unrolls the tent in the long grass beneath the trees: a strip of bright nylon with rings and cords and zips attached.

‘Orange,’ Ellie observes disparagingly, as though orange is a colour that has long been out of fashion in the tentage world. Naff, maybe.

James tosses a small bundle of aluminium poles onto it. ‘Go on then – show us how you do it.’

‘You think I can’t?’

‘Show me.’

In a few minutes, beneath the grave eyes of the little girl and with disconcerting skill, Ellie has the tent pitched. Cautiously she unzips the entrance and peers in. ‘Am I meant to get in there with you?’

‘Wasn’t it like that with the Boy Scouts? You get inside the tent and they get inside you.’

‘Don’t be so crude. I didn’t sleep a wink on the bloody ferry, and now this.’

‘This is all right. You can sleep like a baby, in my arms.’ He pulls out his sleeping bag and unrolls it inside the tent. Called by the woman, the little girl has disappeared. They are left alone with their paltry meal and their tent. Fando and Lis. On the road to Tar.

‘We haven’t got anything to drink,’ Ellie complains.

James pulls two bottles of beer out of the side pocket of his rucksack. They have foil round the neck, like miniature champagne bottles. ‘Here you are. I got them on the ferry.’ He glances at the label. ‘Stella Artois. Never heard of it. Not the kind of thing a red-blooded Englishman would be happy with, but beggars can’t be boozers.’

‘If I want a pee?’

‘I thought you were a Girl Guide. Just wander off into the cherry orchard and commune with nature.’

‘Sounds like Chekhov.’

‘Easier in those days.’

‘Easier?’

‘Long skirts and no knickers.’

‘They wore knickers!’

While they are arguing about that the little girl returns, silently bearing a large paper bag full of cherries like an offering to the gods who have blessed her with their presence. ‘Merci beaucoup,’ is all that James can manage, which seems paltry under the circumstances. ‘Merci, merci. Très bon,’ he adds despairingly.

The little girl laughs and runs off to tell her mother about the strange man who can’t really talk properly. Ellie is delighted with the gift. Perhaps it fits in with her idea of the generosity of the peasant class. ‘How kind. And it saves us having to steal them.’

So they sit together at the opening of the tent and eat their supper of bread and rillettes with cherries to follow. It is almost idyllic. Mainly Ellie talks, that quick, energetic talk, of what she thinks and what she intends, of how the day has gone and how she doesn’t really care about sleeping in a tent. ‘Actually,’ she concedes, ‘it’s quite fun.’

They take it in turns to wash at a tap on a nearby outhouse. Teeth are cleaned, armpits self-consciously splashed.

‘Now what?’ James asks. He blows up the airbeds, light-headed with the effort, then pushes them into the tent and stands up. The sun is setting, brushing peach and apricot into the cherry orchard. It is beautiful in the way that the ordinary can be beautiful. Just somewhere nondescript in Europe, in a cherry orchard amidst farmland where armies once tramped. And the tent is there between them, something between a double bed and a single coffin lying beneath the trees. Ellie dives inside. ‘I’ll tell you when,’ she calls from within.

He waits. Noises come from inside the tent, of movement, of things being taken off and stowed away. ‘Come,’ Ellie says, peremptorily. He unzips the entrance and peers in. She’s sitting cross-legged at the far end of the space, bathed in light strained through the fabric of the tent, shades of ochre and amber. She’s wearing a T-shirt and underpants and a smile; before her is what’s left of the bag of cherries and a tin of Gold Leaf tobacco.

‘Welcome to the tent of ungodliness,’ she says.

He crawls in to face her. What, he wonders, is expected of him? He struggles to take off his jeans in the confined space, and when he has finished and has sat himself opposite her she opens the tobacco tin. Rizla paper and mossy shreds of tobacco. The scent of something other than tobacco seeps into the close air, mingling not unpleasantly with the smell of socks and sweat. A pungent, earthy amalgam. He watches as she rolls the mixture into an expert cylinder. Her tongue emerges from its lair to moisten the margin of the paper.

‘What’s that?’

‘A smoke.’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘You’ll try this, though.’

Understanding dawns. ‘You brought that with you? Through customs?’

‘Relax.’ Her smile is part amusement, part contempt, wholly challenging. A match flares and she takes a drag. Her inhalation isn’t perfunctory as with a cigarette. Instead she pulls the smoke in and holds it, breath suspended, eyes closed. The smell spreads through the narrow space, dark and fierce.

‘You’re mad.’

She laughs. ‘You’re a virgin. Here.’ She holds the thing out, damp at one end, smouldering threateningly at the other. ‘Let me take your virginity. Have a couple of tokes and then…’

‘Tokes?’

‘Drags.’

‘Then what?’

A faint giggle. ‘Then we’ll see. Go easy. Don’t want you to puke. Not in here.’

He takes the proffered joint, puffs at it and coughs. The smoke bites his throat. He feels his heartbeat rise. ‘This is stupid.’

She shakes her head, taking the joint back. ‘It just is. Trouble is all the adjectives we use. Adjectives kill things. Good and bad, moral and immoral, stupid and clever. It just is, James, it just is.’

The thing, the joint, the spliff – neither good nor bad, neither stupid nor clever, neither moral nor immoral – goes back and forth, briefly to James, rather longer to her because, she repeats, laughing again, he is just a virgin and shouldn’t take too much. His head starts to swim. His throat burns and he feels both sick and happy at the same time, a strange, disjointed sensation. Within the tent the orange light glows more vivid, as though the two of them exist within the compass of something organic, pulsing with blood. ‘Is that good?’ she asks and he agrees that, yes, it is good in its own, unusual way.

‘You see?’ she says, and he does see. He sees things very vividly, the precise shape of her sitting there a few feet away from him, flushed orange. Eyes wide and black. Lips black. A pout that is somewhere between surprise and amusement. Her bony knees up against her chest and the scribble of hair on her shins. The form of her toes that are unlike any toes he knows, which isn’t many, to be frank, but hers do seem unusually long, as though they might be able to grasp at a branch. Prehensile toes. A lemur, with those toes and those wide, black eyes. He laughs and coughs and the joint burns down and she produces a small pair of eyebrow tweezers in order to hold it to the bitter end. ‘There,’ she says as she takes her final puff, as though she has proved something by the whole exercise, something about his naivety and her wisdom and experience. Smiling vaguely – is there a joke that she might share with him? – she puts the tweezers away and closes the tobacco tin. Then she lifts her hips and slips her underpants off. ‘Now,’ she says in a matter-of-fact voice, lying down and parting her legs.

All he knows is things that are entirely physical – a swelling, a pulsing, the sensation of imminent explosion, a cloud of something like ecstasy filling his brain. Is this real? Is he, James Borthwick, really there? Is Eleanor Pike really there, stretched the length of the tent, longer laid out than her height when standing, the shadowy ochre of her legs and belly almost filling the whole crepuscular space? Or is she just a figment of his imagination? He touches her as though to make sure, feeling the dense texture of her skin, exploring the hard edge of her pelvis, stroking the silken plume of hair. His finger slips in. He tries to say something but she hushes him to silence. ‘Just that,’ she whispers, ‘just that.’

So he crouches over her while she pivots slowly on the axis of his finger, turning and twisting, lifting her hips up and down, even, at one point, issuing instructions – ‘Slower, slower, keep it slow’ – but mostly just emitting small exhalations that are almost musical in their pitch and intensity. And after a while – a long while when measured by the indolent clock that ticks inside his head – the music begins a crescendo, tempo and volume rising until she is convulsing and crying out like someone in pain. Then the pain or the pleasure or whatever is over and there is only grief left, grief and tears as he climbs on top of her and she twists her hips away, holding him and moving her hand so that he reaches his own paltry climax on her belly and has to scrabble for a handkerchief to clean up the mess. She turns away from him and his apologies and after a while there is the blessed palliative of sleep.

In the morning they barely speak as they pack up the tent, as though insults have been traded and arguments left unresolved. When he asks if she is upset, she pretends indifference. ‘I’m fine.’

When all is ready and their little camp is no more, they knock at the farm door to thank their hosts. The farmer’s wife invites them into her kitchen and offers them coffee with fresh bread and butter. They laugh and joke with her, or at least Ellie does; while James watches with something close to jealousy, that this unknown woman should be able to talk to Ellie whereas he cannot. That he could share the closest intimacy and yet can barely exchange pleasantries. Then they pat the little girl on the head (had she listened to the noises in the night?), say goodbye, shoulder their packs and set off on the road to Bastogne.

They pass occasional tanks on the roadside, old Shermans, painted the colour of shit and mounted on concrete plinths as memorials to what happened here a quarter of a century ago, the Ardennes counter-attack, the Battle of the Bulge, the last ferocious assault by the German army on the advancing Western Allies before the Rhine. Rolling hills and scattered woodland rise ahead of them, a mellow landscape that is difficult to imagine in winter, in the cold and fog of war. Now it’s a lacklustre summer Sunday, with the few cars that pass full of families out for a meander round the countryside. No lift seems likely.

‘Where do we go from here, Ellie?’ James asks.

‘Luxembourg. Isn’t that the idea?’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’

‘It’s what you asked. Where do we go from here? You asked it.’

‘I mean us.’

‘Ooz?’ She says it with a faux Northern accent.

They walk on. He knows the danger of pleading. Instinct warns him. ‘It’s just that after what we’ve done…’

‘What have we done? I was stoned, you touched me up, I gave you a wank. Does that make us married?’

Cars pass by. Frustration rises with the temperature of the day. ‘You know your trouble, James?’ she says. ‘I thought you were honest working-class but actually you’re just bourgeois like everyone else.’

‘I’m not working-class or bourgeois. I’m just a bloke.’

‘A bloke? Being a bloke is as bourgeois as you can get.’

14

Luxembourg. One of those privileged city statelets that European history has allowed to survive amongst the big boys. Monaco, Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, cunning dwarfs who have succeeded in getting by in a world of giants, this one perched on rocks above a gorge. From towers, walls, bastions, bridges it regards two sweating hitchhikers with regal indifference. Lifts are few, shops are closed, businesses suspended, the Luxembourgeois are living up to their name, being both luxe and bourgeois, by going to church en famille and afterwards eating vast lunches that undoubtedly involve pork and potatoes. Ignored by them all, Fando and Lis climb up into the old town and find a pavement café where they dump their rucksacks and sit under a plane tree and drink beer. James unfolds the map. The German–French border, a fault line in the structure of Europe, meanders its way south from where they are. They debate the relative merits of left or right, east or west, Germany or France, Saarbrücken or Metz. It is like playing snooker, trying to think ahead, trying to judge where you should be one shot after the next. For the moment Ellie seems content as she traces the possible routes. When she is happy it is wonderful, like the sun coming out.

‘Let’s toss,’ she suggests. ‘I’ve always liked the idea of running your life by the toss of a coin.’

‘Or a dice. Throwing a dice.’

‘A die. One die, two dice.’

‘Pedant. Anyway, we all die.’

‘It’s a good idea for a novel. Using dice to govern your life. And at the end, you die.’

‘Called what?’

She thinks for a moment, frowning. ‘Alea iacta est. The Die is Cast. No, The Dice Man Cometh.’

‘The Tosser,’ he suggests, and wins her laughter. She is, he decides for the hundredth time, entirely lovely like that. No makeup, her hair in disorder, her features strongly shaped, giving her a look that is a fraction older than her real age. Unusual in a girl. He feels like a younger brother at times, which is not what he wants.

‘Well, go on then. Toss.’

He takes a coin from his pocket, a half-crown that still lies there amongst the Belgian and Luxembourg francs he has already collected. He holds the coin poised on his curled forefinger, his thumb cocked beneath.

She stops him. ‘Wait, there’s another possibility.’

‘What?’

‘It’s Sunday. Crap hitching, you said so yourself.’ She looks round the little square. ‘We could stay the night here.’

‘Where?’

‘Not in your bloody tent. A hostel perhaps, or a pension.’

‘Heads we stay, tails we move on.’ The coin rings out, flickering in the sunshine, and comes up heads.

The auberge de jeunesse is in the ditch below the city ramparts, down by the river, with a railway viaduct looming over the roofs. It’s an ancient, dank building that might once have been a factory of some kind. ‘Looks like one of the Yorkshire mill towns,’ James decides, which pleases Ellie. She seems to derive a certain satisfaction at the idea of living amongst the proletariat. But the only proletarians here are the transient occupants of the hostel, a disparate collection of Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, leavened with German, French and Dutch. Everyone smiles naively across the various language divides, exchanging mispronounced words of greeting but little else. Banality is the order of the day. ‘This town is so old,’ one of the Americans exclaims. ‘And amazing. I mean, who’s heard of Luxembourg? And here it is – walls and towers and stuff, and real cute.’

Ellie becomes a focus of attention and James feels angry at the loss of her, annoyed that she has enthusiastically embraced this kind of communal living, even laughing and agreeing with the American about the age and cuteness of the town. She flirts with an Australian youth who wants to know all about Paris, argues with another American – or is he Canadian? – who is insisting that de Gaulle is once again the saviour of France. And he understands, with a sudden shock, that she might just as well decide to go off with someone else to somewhere else; that there is little keeping the two of them together. At least Lis had been bound to Fando by bonds of dependence.

That evening they eat an impoverished meal with a dozen others in the gloomy refectory. The talk is all the Vietnam War and the approaching American election and what a shit LBJ is but thank God he’s going and how two of the Americans are evading the draft. Afterwards someone produces a guitar. That was the curse of those days – someone always had a guitar and the ability to strum a few chords and all of a sudden it ain’t me babe and we’re no longer thinking twice about whether there’s any real talent because it’s all right. At eleven o’clock an argument breaks out with the warden over whether too much noise is being made, and the group breaks up. Ellie goes outside with the Australian. James follows.

‘A smoke,’ she says, seeing accusation in his face. ‘That’s all.’

The Australian grins. His name is Declan. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to get in anybody’s way.’ He has blond hair and scorched skin. James can imagine him at a Pacific beach, surfing or wrestling sharks or something else requiring much muscle and little brain.

‘It’s just James,’ Ellie tells him. She has her Gold Flake tin open and is rolling a cigarette with great concentration. ‘You’re not in his way.’

‘Aren’t you two together?’

‘That’s right, we aren’t together. Just friends.’ She strikes a match, lights the cigarette and blows smoke away as though dismissing the very idea of friendship.

‘For fuck’s sake.’

‘Hey, don’t get riled, mate.’

There is a moment when James considers staying and arguing, with Ellie, not with the Australian. But he knows it would be pointless. Ellie is best left alone when she is in this kind of mood, so he just turns away and goes off to the men’s dormitory to sleep on a top bunk and wonder what she is doing apart from flirting with the Australian and smoking her home-rolled ciggies.

He drifts off into a disturbed sleep. Trains rattle overhead throughout the night. In the men’s dormitory, lying in racks like overgrown fruit, they groan and complain in their sleep. A couple – is the female voice Ellie’s? The sound is too indistinct to identify – argue for hours in the street outside the hostel. Morning leaks light through veils of grey cloud and James feels he hasn’t slept more than an hour or two.

‘You look like death warmed up,’ she remarks. She herself is bright with energy, her eyes glistening, her mouth, that could be so sullen, drawn into that summer morning of a smile. Is it the presence of the Australian in her life?

‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’

‘Declan.’

‘Oh, him.’ She grimaces. ‘As thick as a plank. He can’t understand why they don’t speak English here in Luxembourg.’

‘Why should they?’

‘Because they do on the radio.’ She pauses. ‘He was, my dear, thinking of Radio Luxembourg.’ She laughs and James laughs with her. That was the trick. Laughter. Whatever she finds in other men, she’ll find laughter with James. And laughter is a powerful weapon to wield in the tortured world of male–female relations.

After breakfast they pack their rucksacks under the critical eyes of Declan and a couple of others. ‘Where are you off to?’ Declan asks.

Ellie looks up at the Australian with complete indifference. ‘Don’t know yet. Toss of a coin.’

‘Toss of a coin? You serious?’

‘How we make all our decisions.’

‘Cool.’

They sling their rucksacks and straighten up, feeling like two warriors setting off into battle.

‘Well, go on, then.’ Declan’s tone is challenging. ‘Let’s see you toss your fucking coin.’

‘That,’ Ellie says, ‘has to be done in private. At the moment of choice.’ Her tone is prim, as though tossing a coin involves physical intimacy. With James following, she leads the way out of the hallway of the hostel into the grey morning. He’s feeling absurdly happy, warmed by her unexpected inclusion of him into her world. Coin-tossing has been elevated to a shared personal philosophy. Thus connected by tenuous bonds of familiarity and companionship, and the promised toss of a coin, Fando and Lis are still together.

The coin is finally spun at the roadside in the southern outskirts of the city, where signs point left to Remich and Saarbrücken and right to Thionville and Metz. It falls heads down, which means Germany and the Saarland. They walk to the left-hand fork, Ellie sticks out an arrogant little thumb and a car stops almost immediately. Spirits lift.