On this first night I find myself watching down at the street from three storeys up, in a room recently decorated. The length of the road below is full of men in cars making their presence known, honking and yells. I watch and try to get the names of these vehicles in my head. For the last month Harry has had me repeat words hoping they will stick, but most often they fade instantly, like a cheap sherry spilt in the sun – an aroma briefly hazes and then vanishes and who knows what it ever tasted like or cost. The woman whose hotel room this is watches me by the curtains, the way I lean, or perhaps the way my head keeps looking from side to side out the window and down the street, I’m not sure, but she calls out and says for me to stop doing what I am doing.
‘I’m watching for rain,’ I say.
‘Not going to come yet,’ she says. ‘Due in the morning.’
‘So I understand. I’m watching for it. I’m not looking forward to it, so I watch for it.’
‘Wait for it tomorrow,’ she says. She speaks a fine English, though the accent leaves its trace like a snail’s trail over glass. Some province in this country making a blur in her voice.
‘What colour is it?’ I ask. ‘The car, what colour is the car?’
‘Blue. Come back here.’
I go to her on the bed and sit and she touches the hem of my trousers as I tuck a leg under the other. She reaches into her bag. She doesn’t have a name yet, not one she wishes to offer and that is fine as long as she doesn’t expect me to remember if I see her tomorrow at the start and she leans out and shouts.
‘More of this?’ she says. I look at the bottle in her hand, then back at her face. She is at least ten years my senior, though she retains a distinctly youthful aspect. She smiles and hides a small scar at the edge of her mouth.
I call her Miss Mademoiselle. She says: ‘How do you know?’
‘How do I know what?’
‘To call me that. Here.’ She leans close to me and puts the topette in my hand, a small ornate bottle. ‘Put a little on your handkerchief and wear it like, erm. Wear it like this.’ She takes her own handkerchief and places it over her nose so a triangle of white falls over her mouth. She looks like a bandit, though one used to finery and the feel of lace.
‘You look ready for a robbery. Ready for a hold-up.’
‘Yes, I am a thief. Now –’ And she looks at me for a moment and then gets up and goes to the window. She’s waiting for a car. Earlier in the evening I had come across her outside the Abbey of Saint-Étienne as I walked looking for architecture of interest. My neck ached and caused a limp somehow. She said my name and looked shy, as if she had made a mistake and I wasn’t the rider she thought she recognised from my profile in L’Auto. But I was that rider, I still am in fact, despite the effect of the ether she gave me when I came to her hotel room. I am slightly awash.
‘Do you have family?’
‘Me?’
‘Do you have family? Children?’ She speaks quietly, as if hushed by the presence of other sounds she would prefer to hear.
‘No children. Though I am likely to work on that. One day I will work on it. How about yourself?’
‘At home?’ she asks. ‘At home in New Zealand?’ I can’t tell if she is biding time here or interested. She keeps looking toward the window. A car is due. She says she needs to get in it. That’s all I’ve been told.
‘At home,’ I say. ‘A brother.’
‘A sister?’
‘Once. She’s –’ I put my hand up, I wave goodbye to the thought.
‘Mmm. I’m sorry. So, and – what about here? Out here: these old countries? Extended family. If I see a man or woman from the colonies I can’t help but wonder, where are they from? Their family, I mean. What stock, if I may?’
‘Yes,’ I say, and laugh lightly. ‘Family in England. Margate. My mother emigrated back in the 90s with her sister and brother. She has family back in England, another sister. My father, I’m not sure. But yes. Family. Family are everywhere.’
‘Aren’t they?’ she says. ‘Aren’t they always somewhere? So uncles and aunts. Then cousins. I have cousins in South America. Lord knows.’
‘Quite so.’
She lies down on the bed and says nothing for a moment, as if concentrating on something, a pure sensation of the sort I don’t expect to be privy to, but then she says, ‘God. My feet. My feet feel so perfect. Do you ever have that sensation – they are. It’s like I have never noticed them before.’ She looks at me.
‘They’re nice feet; nothing fancy but nice,’ I say, then look up at her. ‘Don’t take me seriously,’ I say in recompense.
‘Nothing fancy. Well, I’ll tell you something,’ she says. She laughs quietly. ‘England. Any intention of travelling there once this is done?’
I shake my head. ‘Not so much. They are coming to me,’ I say, and look at her. I feel the secret parts of me fade: the loose connections I have to this place, things I’ve told few about. Harry tells me I’m too easy to con out of my own ideas, and by the smell of this woman, I fear he’s right. ‘At least it seems so. I have a cousin. She’s nearby apparently.’
‘A cousin?’
‘From Margate. I’m likely to meet her in the next few days if things go to plan. We made plans over the months.’
‘A plan?’
‘If our correspondence matches up.’
She doesn’t reply, but rather stands on her tiptoes and looks down at the road. ‘Mmm –’ she says.
‘They here?’
‘I go now,’ she says and signals for me to stand.
‘Who are they?’
‘Men and the kind of men who aren’t family. Part of this thing.’
‘The Tour.’
‘Mmm. The Tour. In June, in July, everyone’s part of the Tour. Now,’ she says and hurries me up. I wave the topette at her and she looks at it for a few moments as if weighing the contents. ‘No. You carry on with it. There’s pain to come.’
Outside I bid farewell and head in the opposite direction as she walks towards a car parked across the road. I flick my eyes towards her as I walk away. She circles the car in a slow motion ponder before opening a door and disappearing into the leather interior. I want to name the car as a Ford, but then all cars are Fords to me at first glance. My father’s first car was a Model T. He bought it in February 1914. I, my brother, and Marya my sister, we each stood staring as it came up the drive interrupting our tennis match. Thomas the eldest at one end and we younger ones at the other. We walked about it as he came out of the driver’s door. We walked around and around, watching our reflections in the black that wasn’t splattered in the mud from the ride, from the docks where he’d received the vehicle and a lesson in its functions and particulars.
Half an hour had passed in the woman’s room: one day’s pain was reduced to a hum. Now I walk towards the end of the street thinking about how easily she had slipped inside the car. I think this because of how impossible it was for either Marya, Thomas, or me to get into my father’s new machine. We each stood there as he rushed inside to relieve himself. The car, the way it sang and we all stood around.
‘You do it,’ Marya said. ‘You’re the boy.’
‘What’re you afraid of?’ I asked.
‘I’m not afraid. I’m being polite.’ How old was she? Nine, ten. Something like that. She knew nothing of being polite, no one at that age knows anything of manners. She sidled up beside me and put her arm into the crook of my elbow. ‘Yours to drive,’ she said.
‘Thomas?’ I called out to my brother. ‘You drive the thing. We’ll watch.’
‘No, not Thomas,’ Marya said. ‘He’s so much more the handsome of the brothers. If one of you needs to be maimed, well –’ She had a wonderful ability not to qualify jokes with laughter. She stared at my brother, squeezing my arm. Such were her directions for her siblings to act. Thomas put his arm around me and we both went and sat in the front seat. We looked at each other and the levers and the steering wheel, the pedals and the horn. Nothing was as I thought it would be, nothing was quite as simple as the one lever I imagined which would take you forward. Our father came out and told us to get out and get the hose. It needed cleaning, it needed the distance of 25 miles washed off. We sprayed the vehicle. He told us it was the 3,000th Model T sold in New Zealand. We all nodded in a kind of trance. For years, even all the years my father no longer spoke to me, I was in the trance of truth, that this was true, a fact. The 3,000th car. But as I jump to the side of the road and watch the woman and the car come towards me, I know it was a lie, a bluff and puff. But such are the things of lies, their harmlessness and play, it was a fine story to tell my friends. I could tell it to anyone and it made a hush in the mouths of young men.
A rattle and the car coughs on the street. The woman passes a look my way from the window as they go by, and hints at smiling. I nod with the shy eagerness of an uncourted man.