Page 27 of Where Do We Go From Here?
Once they leave the autoroute and start to drive through the various villages along the way, Jill begins to ooh and aah. She also reads almost every sign they pass in an exaggerated French accent.‘Travaux !’she says.‘Rappel ! Boulangerie !’
As they snake through the centre of Roquefort-les-Pins she comments, ‘And therearebars here, you liar! I’ve seen three just along this stretch.Andthere are men in them.’
‘But we’re nowhere near home. Not by a long stretch. You’ll see.’
Once they’ve passed through Châteauneuf-de-Grasse theroad starts to rise into the mountains, twisting and turning. Below them, fluffy low clouds swirl in the ravines. Jill clings onto the panic handle until her knuckles start to turn white.
‘You OK?’ Wendy asks, glancing briefly across. She’s used to these roads now, and she’s only just remembering that Jill isn’t.
‘Sure. I just get a little carsick on roads like this. Vertigo, too. But carry on, I’ll be fine. I just need to remember to look at the road. Must not take my eyes off the road!’
Wendy slows down a little, and they drive in silence for a few minutes with only the noise of the engine and the rhythmic swish-swashing of the windscreen wipers.
‘Do you want some mus—’ Wendy starts, but Jill has started speaking at the same time.
‘So how have you been?’ she asks.
‘Oh,’ Wendy says. ‘Um, fine, I suppose.’
‘You’ve been pretty quiet lately,’ Jill says. ‘You OK?’
Wendy struggles momentarily to formulate an answer. Since she invited Jill two weeks ago – or rather since Jill invitedherself– it’s true, they have barely spoken. This is partly because Wendy has had little to say that she considered newsworthy, but it’s also because she’s been saving the nuggets of chatter she does have for Jill’s arrival. She’s been feeling uncharacteristically nervous about having nothing to talk about. Her life these past weeks has been so peaceful, so repetitive – soempty, some would say. After all, there are only so many times you can tell someone you ate breakfast, walked up a hill and drank a few glasses of wine.
Wendy swallows and licks her lips. ‘You know, I have no idea. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. I’m kind of all over the place, so it’s hard to say. I actually might be going a bit bonkers.’
‘Oh?’ Jill says, briefly dragging her eyes from the road to glance concernedly at her friend. She knows she’d go loopy in a day if she had to live alone on a mountain top.
‘I can be… like… ecstatically happy, you know, totally in love with life, and all this clean air and the trees and what-have-you. It’s very beautiful up there. You’ll see, well… if it stops raining, you will. And then a minute later – not even a minute, actually, more like ten seconds later – I feel utterly, utterly depressed, as though everything’s so hopeless – the world, the climate, my life, my marriage – that I might as well kill myself and get it over with.’
‘Right,’ Jill says. ‘Wow.’
‘Yes, wow indeed.’
‘But you wouldn’t actually…’
‘No! Of course not!’ Wendy says, even as she wonders if that’s true.
‘But then— Ooh, careful!’
‘Seen it,’ Wendy tells her as she swerves around the rock on the road. ‘Don’t worry. You get quite a few of those. It’s like a video game dodging them all.’
‘But you are happier than back home?’
Wendy shakes her head and sighs. ‘I’m still not sure about that either. It’s different, I suppose? More intense, if that makes any sense. The ups are more up and the downs are more down. I kind of feel like I had everything buttoned up before. I smoothed things out all the time, well… because I had to. But now it’s just me… it’s as if I’ve got licence to be more… I don’t know…’
‘Emotional?’
‘Maybe,’ Wendy laughs. ‘I was thinking more along the lines ofhysterical, actually. Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad you came. I could do with someone to talk to, I think.’
‘Yes,’ Jill says. ‘It sounds like it.’
They get drunk. Well, of course they do.
While Wendy makes her famed mushroom carbonara, Jill pours bowls of snacks and mixes gin and tonics.
By the time the spaghetti is on the boil, they’re halfway through their second glass, because when the first drink tastes that good, how could anyone ever resist another?
‘You won’t get it to work,’ Wendy tells Jill, who is trying to connect her phone to the Bluetooth speaker. ‘I tried for almost an hour the other day. It just beeps like that and nothing happens.’
