I checked my wristwatch, making the conversion to the French twenty-four hour system. I had fully fifteen minutes to buy my ticket and catch the autocar – plenty of time. ‘Thank you, Monsieur,’ I said, lifting my single suitcase from the pavement. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘You are welcome.’ He inclined his head gallantly, then leaned back against the sleek grey Safrane and looked away, lifting the cigarette. When I came out of the station the second time, he was deep in conversation with an older red-faced man sweating beneath the burden of a rich-looking set of luggage.
I passed by swiftly, without looking up, and scurried on towards the waiting autocar, where I settled myself in the vacant front seat behind the driver. I had every intention of enjoying my clear view of the passing scenery, but the rolling motion of the bus defeated me, and before we’d even driven the few miles to the centre of the city of Tours I was asleep. It was wholly understandable – I’d been up before the birds that morning, caught the plane to Paris and endured a bumpy bus ride, high-speed trains, and two full cups of railway station coffee the consistency of river mud.
I might have kept on sleeping straight to Chinon, but for the sudden blare of a car horn directly beneath my window. The second blast of sound brought my head round with a jolt that rattled my teeth, and my eyes flew open in time to see the Safrane cut smoothly in front of us, travelling at twice the necessary speed. So, I thought smiling, my dashing taxi driver had found himself a fare after all. Good for him. He had long disappeared down the road ahead by the time the bus reached the next town.
‘Azay-le-Rideau,’ the driver announced over his microphone. Fully awake now, I held my breath as the bus folded itself around the narrow, sharply twisting streets, pressing pedestrians back against stone walls or into the shelter of doorways. Down we went at a dizzying angle, disgorged a handful of passengers in front of a row of shops, and swept on over a bridge that offered an intriguing glimpse of a jewel-like château that seemed to have been built on water, a perfect island perfectly reflected in a pale quiescent lake.
Here at last, I thought happily, was the Loire Valley of the brochures and guide books – and the France that I remembered from my childhood. The town gave way to forest, and the forest fell in turn to field and vineyard. I sat forward in my seat, reading the passing signposts with interest, and then with eager recognition. La Devinière … surely that great block of a building was the birthplace of the writer Rabelais. I remembered reading about it in one of my brochures, somewhere. Which meant that Chinon itself must be just around that …
‘Oh,’ I said suddenly, and with rather more force than I’d intended.
The bus driver smiled at my reaction, understanding. He slowed his speed a little. ‘It is your first visit to Chinon?’ he guessed, in French.
I somehow managed a nod in reply, and the bus slowed still further.
‘It should be savoured, then, this first approach,’ he told me.
Savoured indeed. The yellow-white ruins of Chinon Castle rose majestically above us like the crumbling scene of some great Shakespearean tragedy, an unbroken sweep of blind wall and decaying towers bleached with age, jaggedly spearing the grey and ever-shifting sky.
Despite the bus driver’s best efforts, I barely had time to register the image before the road tipped sharply downwards, hugging ancient walls hung thick with ivy as we dropped towards the level of the town. The castle hung high on the cliffs above us now, all but forgotten in my first view of the river Vienne and the wide avenue of towering plane trees that ran along the riverbank, marking the approach to the town centre. Nothing – neither Harry’s descriptions nor my own faded memories of the French countryside – had prepared me for such a sudden, breathtaking explosion of sheer beauty.
‘Oh,’ I said again.
It was, I realised, an inadequate sort of comment to make, but the bus driver seemed quite pleased by it.
‘It grabs, does it not? It grabs you here,’ he said, making a fist with one hand over his heart, to illustrate.
I found my voice at last. ‘Yes, it does.’
And it did. It grabbed me so completely, in fact, that when the driver announced: ‘Place Jeanne d’Arc’ and another handful of passengers filed off the bus, I scrambled off after them without thinking, bumping my suitcase down the steps. It was only after everyone had scattered purposefully that I realised I hadn’t the faintest idea how to get to the Hotel de France.
I stood for a moment with the river to my back and the plane trees stretching off to either side, and looked for someone to direct me. The square across the street was, I presumed, the Place Jeanne d’Arc, a great broad crossroads filled with a confusing swirl of bodies and faces and the half-familiar sounds of speech and laughter. I’d just prepared myself to grab the nearest person when, quite by accident, I saw a face I recognised.
He had parked the Safrane in a no-parking zone beside the curb, and was leaning up against the bonnet as before, frowning slightly as he watched the milling crowd. I don’t know what impulse it was that made me cross the street towards him – simple weariness, perhaps, or maybe just his handsome face. I caught him this time unawares.
‘Is it also an expensive taxi ride,’ I asked him, in English, ‘to the Hotel de France?’
His head came round, startled, and the frown dissolved into a genuine smile. ‘No,’ he conceded. ‘That is not expensive. I will take you.’ He pitched the stub of his cigarette into the street and levered himself away from the car, coming round to open the passenger side door for me. ‘You have only the one suitcase?’ he asked, taking it from my hand.