What she knows about motorbikes she’d learnt from Jacques. Jacques la Mer, a Frenchman in Holland. The Frenchman-with-the-motorbike. That Saturday morning of her first weekend in Dordrecht she’d heard a noise in the street, quickly run to the window and seen a man sitting legs astride the monster. He’d looked up at her and made the engine roar. She felt butterflies against her belly.
The private picked up the bag behind her. “It’s about three and a half miles to the hospital,” he said, looking up at her with a wry smile as he bent down. “Let’s enjoy life while we can, don’t you think?”
Then he laughed loudly, rather derisively, and fastened her luggage to the tailboard. He shoved a pair of goggles into her hand and held his elbow out to steady her as she climbed in.
Enjoy life … What does he mean, exactly? But the orderly is already battling to kick-start the engine – at least, that is what she presumes. She’s seen it before, the kicking, but with Jacques’s motorbike you had to push-start and then quickly jump on while running. Prrr, prrr, prrr, he kicks, and she continues with what she has been doing ever since Harwich: trying to concentrate on what is going on around her, trying to get a grip on the landscape, the buildings, trying to comprehend this part of the world.
Is there really a war on the go somewhere? And why is it not evident? There is nevertheless a strange, vague sort of disquiet in her, not exactly relating to this country and its war, but rather to her inability to concentrate fully on anything outside of herself. She is plagued by a persistent feeling that there is something else, just out of view, that actually merits her attention.
Jacobs’s unrelenting kicking does not make it any easier, and before she knows it her gaze is fixed on the blush rising from his jaw across his smooth cheeks – without a trace of beard – and the uniform jacket bouncing up and down above his seat. Oh, dear Lord, even in that she sees Jacques. But the fact is, even when she was driving the bike, in Dordrecht, he first had to warm the engine before they could push-start it, pumping at a lever on the engine. And now, in this strange town in this strange country and with a soldier who is a total stranger under orders to accompany her, this is what rises to the fore: how she sat on the back of Jacques la Mer’s motorbike put-put-putting along little paths through Biesbosch’s reed and grass meadows. Later, she drove herself, but he first had to show her: here are the gears, one, two, three; there you slowly release the petrol; get your fingers properly around the brake.
Back and forth, they charged along the paths of Biesbosch, with her unsteady on the tailboard – through the sea breeze, through shafts of sunlight and shadow, gasping as they descended into bogs filled with cool air to suddenly emerge into languid clarity, her hands under his coat, his jerking ribs below her fingertips, below the pumping lungs, the headlong rush of blood. Reed-cutters pulling themselves upright and gesturing with their sickles; she, laughing loudly, deliberately, scornfully into the back of Jacques’s head, and feeling him flinch. Yes, that she remembers now, how often he shrank from her touch.
Why would she remember that now …? Once, after they’d driven back to the apartment, Jacques remained seated, his hands clamped onto the handlebars. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you coming in?”
He did not look up, it was as if he were talking to the motorbike. “I don’t think we should do it,” he said.
“Do what? What are you talking about?”
He climbed off and pushed past her. “You know only too well,” he muttered.
She stared at his back. His long, duck-like strides, his sunken shoulders. Poor thing, she thought, and recoiled, as if it were he who’d turned and hurled the words at her. Poor, poor thing! But he had simply walked up the stairs and let the front door slam shut behind him.
Jacobs swings his leg over the sputtering motorbike’s saddle, glances at her over his shoulder before slipping into gear and roaring down the street. The momentum pushes her against the seat; alarmed, she glances first to her left and then to her right and grabs hold of the rim of the sidecar. She thought she had already figured it out, that thing with Jacques, but it kept churning in her thoughts as houses, people and trees flashed past, a strange, strange confrontation. After all, there had been nothing between them. He was an occasional companion of sorts. Yes, that’s the word, companion. Perhaps the problem was that the occasions had been determined by her, and by her alone. Anyhow, that’s the conclusion she had come to: that he had found her too presumptuous, too controlling. But now she wonders. Once again, she sees the reed-cutters slowly standing up, their sickles swing, she hears the blades slicing through the grass, she feels his trembling skin under her fingertips. He must have felt it too. But what, exactly?
Out of the corner of her eye she sees a great structure flashing past and she turns her head: in the middle of the street is a clock tower, squat, massive, seemingly the remains of a collapsed church, the ruins half-covered in ivy, but with the clock intact. Now her attention is again fully focused on the surrounds; she is aware of the bumpy, noisy motorbike with the soldier holding on to the handlebars. A commonplace sight, it seems, as a man pushing a bike does not lift his head, and people walk along the street lost in thought. She presses her cloche tighter against her head, and with the other hand holds onto the rim of the sidecar.
Jacobs points out the landmarks along the way, the sights, things she should know if she’ll be living and working in this community for a while.
Once or twice he stops at a crossing, pushes up his goggles and delivers a schoolboy explanation: the house where some cricketer was born, the hospital staff’s favourite bar. Some of the nurses come here, he says with the croaking laugh she’d heard earlier. She laughs with him, totally receptive to his excitement, leaning forward and speaking loudly above the roar of the engine: “I probably won’t be able to come without a companion.”
“I am sure that can be arranged,” he says and winks.
She looks away. Suddenly annoyed. She has allowed him too much; she encouraged him. She hears him speaking, but intentionally diverts her thoughts away from him, away from all boy soldiers on motorbikes. She knows the excitement, the inherent daring in the union of man and machine. Carefully now, carefully … she feels a prickliness crawling up her sides and glances at Jacobs. He has been watching her all along, she realises, but he looks away quickly to something he imagines has attracted her attention. He searches around, and then, nodding his head, he says, “No, I don’t know, they’re just ordinary houses.”
She laughs, relieved, dismissing her question with a wave of the hand, stretching an arm towards him and flicking her fingertips: Drive, just drive.
On the outskirts of the town he stops once more, lifts the goggles over the shield of his cap, rather laboriously takes the motorbike out of gear, rests an elbow on the handlebars and indicates with a long forefinger: “Do you see that house?” he asks, and points to a row of pitched roofs, terraced houses jutting from behind a newly built circular wall. “the one on the far left is where one of our greatest generals was born, Leslie Rundle.” He allows the name to sink in. “Fought mostly in Africa. Against the Zulus, the Boers.” He nods approvingly at the white façade with the single sash window visible above the stone wall.
Her gaze, which moments before was still gliding, flicking freely along walls and roofs from horizon to street level, is suddenly arrested. She turns to look, feels her discomfort become something else, not irritation exactly, although Jacobs’s undisguised admiration makes her think for a moment that she is reacting childishly. Something else however stirs in her consciousness; for some or other reason she does not succeed in giving herself over to this landscape with full attention.
For a good mile or so on the bumpy road out of town she tries to overcome this dead-end, this darkening of her gaze. Later she tried to recall the journey, trying to remember what she had seen. Leaves gathering against low stone walls; a woman leaning out of a window, arms spread wide as if asking for money; trees spreading their branches across the road in an almost exact re-enactment of her gesture. Images following one upon the other.
Jacobs starts to slow down and nods at the building in front of them, but she hardly notices the hospital lying