‘Where have you visited so far?’ Father Davide asks Emma.
As I listen to her describing what presumably have been her travels around southern Italy and her plans to go on to Florence and the Cinque Terre and the Alps, I’m struck by how well-thought-out and concrete those onward plans seem, and how much sightseeing they involve. I think I need to ask Emma about that when we’re alone. Hopefully they’re just the product of the same fertile imagination that came up with the wedding ring story.
‘And here we are.’ Father Davide opens a low, narrow door with a flourish and indicates that we should go ahead of him into the room. It’s whitewashed and contains two narrow, single beds on opposite walls and one small chest with two neatly folded white towels on it. ‘Perhaps you would like to leave your suitcases here and I can show you where the bathroom is.’
The bathroom is a long way along the corridor and up a flight of stairs and along another corridor.
‘It’s almost en-suite,’ he tells us, grinning broadly at his own joke.
‘It’s perfect; thank you so much.’ Emma sounds so sincere that I’m wondering whether she genuinely means it.
Father Davide escorts us back to the bedroom and then leaves us, asking us to let them know soon whether we’re planning to join them for dinner.
Emma and I stand staring at each other for a long moment.
‘I can’t see how we can do the communal area sleep thing,’ she says eventually.
I nod.
We stare at each other some more.
Then Emma says, ‘It’s lovely here. We could be sleeping in the van tonight. Could be a lot worse.’
It could be. We do have a roof over our heads and – since realistically we’re both going to have to stay inside this room overnight – we do have two beds.
It could be better, though.
We could, for example, be a good couple of hundred miles further north towards England by now and be staying in a nice hotel with separate en-suite bedrooms.
‘I might just go and have a shower,’ I say.
Emma nods vigorously. ‘Good plan.’
As I get dry clothes out of my case, I realise that, now that we’re going to be on the road for an extra day, I’ll have to buy some more underwear and socks. The hotel did all my laundry for me, but I only came with four days’ worth of clothes and I’m going to have to change completely right now.
Which reminds me…
‘You mentioned spending the night in Florence,’ I say. I saw on Google Maps earlier that Florence is only about three hours from Rome in good traffic. ‘And also you referred to the Cinque Terre and the south of France earlier.’ That’s a bit of a detourfrom the fastest route to London. ‘I’d expected that we might have got further north today had it not rained? Beyond Milan, maybe into Switzerland?’ If we don’t do eight hours a day (or a lot more than that at Emma’s driving speed) this journey is going to take a very long time.
Emma shakes her head. ‘That’s a really long way.’
‘Only eight hours’ driving?’
‘I can’t drive for eight hours in one day. And I’ve never been to Florence before. So I was planning to arrive there mid-afternoon today and do some sightseeing for the rest of the day, before leaving in the morning. Obviously that will be delayed by a day now.’
‘Oh.’ Oh fuck. It’s sounding like the plans she told Father Davide about are actual ones. ‘And what’s your plan after that?’
‘I was thinking the Cinque Terre next.’
‘Okay. Great.’ I’m not an Italian geography expert but I’m pretty sure that the Cinque Terre are tourist-magnet pretty villages in the north-west corner of Italy and not on a direct line from here to London. ‘And then…?’
‘I was thinking the Alps and a night in Chamonix, and then two or three nights travelling up France to Paris, some sightseeing there, and then home on the ferry.’
‘Oh. That sounds…’ That sounds like a very, very long time on the road in the company of someone I do not want to be with, but to whom I can only be grateful. ‘It sounds great.’ I look at her looking at me with her eyebrows raised, waiting for me to say more and… God. What a farce. ‘So I’ll go and have my shower, then.’
There is no shower. It’s a bath, with no shower attachment of any kind. Unless Emma’s changed alot, she will not appreciate that.
I take my time because I could do with some space from Emma to sort through my thoughts. Unbelievably, because itfeels like a lot has happened today, it’s still only twelve thirty, as in there’s the whole of the rest of today to get through.
