Of a Sliding Box, and of a Country Found Shut

The Master rose at an hour I shall not commit to writing, dressed in the manner of a man who does not expect to encounter other humans, and took me on the walk the woman with the broken leg had recommended. It was a creditable walk. It began as a narrow path beside a fast road; it opened, in time, into a wider road that, the Master informed me with a satisfaction I could not parse, was a road on which the army practised. The road was banked, like a half-pipe of mild ambition, and I made the most of it by ascending one side, descending it, ascending the other, and descending it again, on a circuit I now consider my own. The Master stood, with patience, in the middle.

There was a small breakfast at the hotel, which the Master accepted on the grounds that there would be no opportunity for a larger one in the next several hours. There was a bap, which is a Northern word for a soft bread to which a Northerner is permitted strong feelings, and there were sausages, and there was a juice that the Mrs described in a single, judicious word.

Thereafter, a tunnel.

The rolling box was driven into a sliding box, in a place where the small glowing tile had no opinions at all, and we were paper-stamped by people who took my own paperwork with greater seriousness than they took the Master's. This is, I believe, customary. The sliding box closed. The rolling box waited. After some time, the sliding box began to move, in a manner so smooth that no one noticed it had begun; somewhere near the middle of the journey there was the faintest sensation of pressure, as of the world having taken a long breath, and then we emerged, and the smells had become French.

I shall summarise the remainder. We stopped, frequently, at the small parking places the French provide between long stretches of nothing. At one of them I attended to my first piece of business in the new country. The Master's pride was disproportionate to the act. He pronounced me a very good boy, twice, and in two languages, with the air of a man who had been waiting a long time for this particular result. I gathered the moment was, by his measure, considerable. At another the Mrs took possession of the rolling box and drove it for what was, I gather, fifty of the longer kind of mile, on what is — for reasons no one has explained to me — the wrong side of the road. The Master spent the duration of this in a state of refined silence.

We attempted a lunch in a town with a river. The town was Sunday, the hour was two, and the town was closed. The river was open. I tried, for ceremonial purposes, a small woollen jacket the Mrs has bought me for the heat, which I bore with the dignity expected of one in my position. We resumed our motion.

The afternoon was wheat. Wheat in great quantities. Wheat being harvested by machines I could not see, in fields I could not enter, under a sky that was, frankly, magnificent. At a services we shared the last sandwich of our possession with a man on a motorbike, who said little but understood what was required.

The Master tried the coffee of the country. The Mrs tried the coffee of the country. The verdict, when delivered, was not generous. It was felt that the country was not, this particular afternoon, putting its best foot forward.

We arrived at a city for the night. The receptionist did not seem to know what to do with a Master, a Mrs, or me. The city, by then, was also Sunday. We found, by means of the small glowing tile, an outdoor courtyard where food was on offer. The Master had a chicken with a mustard sauce, of which he approved; the Mrs had a beef in a red sauce, of which she approved more articulately. The wine was French. So was everything. Soldiers passed, as though under instructions.

There followed a private wager between the Master and the Mrs, the terms of which I shall not relay, save to record that it concerned a particular pudding, the Mrs's pronunciation of it, and a face that was to be pulled. The Mrs declined to pull the face. The Master claimed the win. The wager has, I gather, not yet been settled.

Later, at a bar, a woman declined to sell us a bottle of the wine that was, by her own menu, available by the bottle. Spirits were briefly low. A card game was played. The Master walked me, late, and we returned to a room whose air-conditioning behaved, throughout the night, like a creature with a grudge.

Tomorrow, the Master assures me, more — and warmer.