Page 21 of Road Trip to the Riviera
‘How are you feeling?’ he adds.
I grimace. If I’m honest, sitting in Betty’s passenger seat and enduring all the jolts that come from a fifty-year-old – albeit restored – suspension, I’m not feeling too great. The painkillers take the edge off, but there’s a constant, dull ache. I’m tired, too, probably from last night and the fact this has been our longest drive yet – five hours, and we even took an autoroute at one point.
‘That bad, huh?’ he says, seeming concerned.
‘I’ll live.’
‘Still, how about once we’re settled, I go and get us some proper food. There’s a takeaway, I think. You need to eat something hearty.’
‘Hearty?’
‘I know. It sounds like something my mum would say.’
A flicker of sadness passes his face for an instant. Hal’s mother was diagnosed with dementia earlier this year and I know he’s struggling with it. He told me he’s asked her to move in with him so he can look after her, but she’s having none of it.
‘It sounds perfect,’ I tell him, touching his arm briefly, and he nods.
I’m not sure whether this site, so different from the others, was on Hal’s original itinerary or whether he’s surreptitiously changed things to make up for last night. But either way, as we pass the clean, modern shower block, I can already imagine the warm water cascading down my back. I’m allowed to take the boot off to shower, but I’ve been a bit too nervous. Here, if they have a stool I can sit on, I’m going to free my leg just for five minutes, and maybe even rinse over the poor, half-ruined boot.
The campsite is surrounded by woodland and nestles close to the river Loire. Hal tells me it’s in easy reach of several chateaux and asks if I want to visit one. Maybe, I tell him, but in all honesty, I’m aching and desperate just to relax.
I’m also still inwardly fuming from my conversation this morning with Mum. The thing is, with my mother, I could write down everything we said in our phone call and it wouldn’t look too bad. But she peppers her conversation with meaningful silences and small, significant coughs so that I’m left in no doubt about what she really means.
Mum knows I’m not 100per cent on board with the wedding. Don’t get me wrong, Summer is great and I’m so glad that Louis has found someone to love. Only he’s so very young. But everytime I mention it, Mum sort of closes off. ‘Not quite as young as you were when you had him,’ she’ll sniff.
She’s never said it outright, but something shifted between me and Mum when I got pregnant all those years ago. She’s not religious or particularly moral, but I think she took my ‘lapse of judgement’, as she calls it, very personally.
Mum was there for me throughout the pregnancy; it wasn’t as if she kicked me out. She helped out enormously with Louis, too. Both my parents did. But there was a frostiness, a formality about her that hadn’t been there before. The way she glared at me sometimes in those days made me feel completely wretched.
‘She’s just worried about you,’ Dad would say at times, noticing how down I seemed. ‘She doesn’t want you to have ruined your life.’
‘Doyouthink I’ve ruined my life?’ I’d ask, and he’d chuckle. ‘Of course not,’ he’d tell me. ‘I tell your mother all the time, “Sarah is a force to be reckoned with! She’ll take on this challenge just like all the others!”’ I’m still not sure whether he completely believed his own words, but the fact that he’d say them, reassure me, bolster me up when I felt down about it, all meant the world.
When I was a kid, it was Dad who’d scare the monsters from the room at bedtime. He’d check under the bed, in the wardrobe and confirm that the coast was clear. I heard him doing the same with Louis once, years ago when he was five and we stayed over for a couple of nights.
The man always knew how to make me feel safe.
‘What’s up?’ Hal asks, and I realise that I’ve let a tear escape and run down my cheek.
‘Oh nothing,’ I say, then, ‘just thinking about Dad.’
And he reaches over and gives my hand a squeeze. There’s something tender about the action that almost makes me tear up.
To stop myself giving in to the feeling of melancholy, I begin to count the plots, trying to relate them to the tiny map we were given by the entrance. ‘Left,’ I say, and Hal turns, narrowly missing a teen on an electric scooter who shoots out of nowhere and glides in front of the van. Hal swears but the kid carries on, oblivious.
‘Those things are a menace!’ he tells me.
‘What, teenage boys? Or scooters?’ I ask innocently.
He laughs. ‘Can I say both?’
‘I’m kind of glad they weren’t really around when Louis was that age. Can you imagine?’
‘Only too well.’
We park up and sit for a moment before Hal jumps out of the driver’s seat. He’s in the back almost immediately and gets out the little put-up chairs and table. Then he opens my door and offers me his hand, guiding me down to sit on one of the chairs. ‘Coffee?’
‘You don’t have to,’ I say, but he shushes me.
