The Road to Zarauz E-Book

Sam Adams

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

It is the summer of 1954. Four young men on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war, Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember. A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams that we hold. Sam Adams has created a rare novel in The Road to Zarauz, both timeless and very much of a time and a place, a past of hope and expectation erased in a moment, and what remains when hope is gone.

Leseprobe

Contents

About The Road to Zarauz

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

THE ROAD TO ZARAUZ

Parthian Fiction

Copyright

THE ROAD TO ZARAUZ

It is the summer of 1954. Four young men on a summer vacation buy an old car from a farmer and drive it from the hills of Wales all the way to the mountains of Spain. It is only a few years since the war, Europe is still in ruins. They are innocent and war-scarred, dreamers and realists, men but not much more than boys. They have their whole lives ahead of them. This will be their summer to remember.

A beautiful, elegiac rumination on youth, friendship and the dreams that we hold.

“A haunting meditation on memory and loss that takes the reader on a summer road trip to a vanished Spain. In this well-crafted, wistful novella, Sam Adams weaves his tapestry from fragments of a remembered friendship in a coming of age tale written with sixty years’ bitter hindsight.” Richard Gwyn

Sam Adams is poet and novelist. He has written extensively on literature as an editor and critic. He lives in a house on a hill above the Usk.

THE

ROAD TO

ZARAUZ

Sam Adams

To Muriel

‘If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I could only shrug – because it was him; because it was me.’

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The Perseids brought it all out of the past, with the force of a blow that leaves you winded. The night lurched and swooped suddenly down. The boy lay still, stretched out on his back, but when I sat up, gasping, I glimpsed the pale disc of his face as he turned to see what had startled me.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, though it wasn’t. ‘Anything yet?’

Just then a brief, bright streak fell across the inky sky, followed by three more.

‘There, there,’ he said, pointing. ‘Did you see them?’

Was it the brilliance and brevity of that streak across the sky that brought Richie at once and with such clarity to my mind? No, that would have been a spontaneous imaginative leap I am incapable of, though I have thought of it since – a symbol of a short life – a cliché. It was the sky alone, the black starry sky, that jolted the memory.

Earlier that August day, with the weather forecast to be warm and cloudless after dark, the newspaper had promised the Perseid shower would be a rare spectacle. We talked about it over breakfast. The boy said he had never seen a falling star and this seemed an opportunity too good to miss. His parents didn’t think much of the idea, but to have a ten-year-old interested in a natural phenomenon rather than a computer game I thought worth encouraging. ‘I’ll keep him company,’ I said. My grandson and I had done little enough together, for he was growing up three hundred miles away, and my daughter and her husband had busy lives; their visits were infrequent and brief.

Only a few minutes had passed since we closed the back door behind us, found our way by torchlight down the garden steps and across the sloping grass, already damp with dew, beyond the two apple trees. It was ten o’clock, his bedtime as his mother pointed out, when we spread the old tartan travelling rug and settled ourselves down. Once the torch was switched off, despite the chain of street lamps along the road the other side of the house, there were stars enough to be seen, though the moon was down.

Fully sixty years had passed since I had lain in the open looking up into the night. That was the trigger. Then it had been an unsullied, perfect black filled with stars of astonishing brilliancy. In all my life before I had never seen such scintillation, so many pulsing, glittering specks, and as I turned my head slowly left then right, a long, bright cloud, a shimmering river of light, running across the western sky. I remember thinking that is what’s meant by unearthly beauty, colourless, silent, alien, and the shock of hearing Richie sobbing. I was then not quite twice the age of my grandson and in some respects less sophisticated than he already was. On that holiday, through hot weeks at the height of summer, we lay in the open on other nights full of stars, but none held quite the fascination and existential unease of that first one. Where were we that night, all those years ago? Was it the far south of France? Or over the border in Spain?

It had been so long, so many years, since the time when thoughts of that holiday tormented me like a fever day and night. You cannot will yourself to forget a painful memory, nor can you easily conceal it from yourself beneath layers of mundane affairs and events, but like the murdered corpse, it will rise bloated to the surface of the lake, or in bony fragments jut from the shallow grave. Silting over took a long time. I might have thought I was somehow ‘cured’ of it, or inured to it, when I could shake my head and turn my attention to other things. At last, mercifully, I didn’t think of it at all, until that night, when it returned with a rush and left me distracted and stammering, so that the boy and his father looked at me curiously.

‘Are you all right, Dad?’

‘Yes, of course.’ I was irritated by my daughter’s concern.

As the boy was hurried to bed (‘It’s an early start tomorrow!’), I took my usual chair to watchNewsnight. But I couldn’t settle, couldn’t get into the programme at all.

‘I think that’s enough for me,’ I said. ‘I remember when you used to get pleasant news occasionally. I’ll say goodnight.’ I bent to kiss my daughter’s cheek, sorry for my shortness earlier.

I wouldn’t say I am a good sleeper – average I suppose for someone my age, but that night I lay awake for hours, thinking over the journey, long ago, through France and Spain, trying to piece it all together. If I slept at all I am sure in my dreams, too, I was there on the road, the road to Zarauz. When the alarm went I was glad to get up, fearful that what had long been unthought of had returned, and some of the images, the voices, the words even, as sharp as a goad.

As soon as my daughter and her family had left after breakfast, I couldn’t rest until I had started looking for the few sad souvenirs of August 1954. I knew what I was seeking, and where it probably was. I have always had difficulty in throwing stuff away. It’s a common enough failing. Unwanted things worm to the back of drawers, or the far dark corners of cupboards, and perchance disturbed in those resting places are put into cardboard boxes and lugged up to the loft, where they can linger a lifetime and more, for one’s children, or strangers even, to come upon, ponder over briefly and throw out or burn. I lowered the loft ladder took the torch and clambered up to look.

Though still morning, it was already oppressively hot in the low, upturned V of the space under the roof. There was no electricity and no skylight. The torch played on rafters and felting above as I rose to the lip of the opening and, when I had hoisted myself in, lit the yellow, hairy insulation thick between the beams where I trod carefully. The boxes, six or seven of varying sizes, lay inconveniently close to the eaves, so that I had to balance on a beam bent double, my throat full of clogging dust, to reach them. Black dust coated everything, shimmering faintly as I swung the torchlight over the boxes. I was lucky, for the third I opened with gritty fingers contained a collection of vintage rugby match programmes and the object I was looking for – an empty Player’s Medium Cut cigarette pack of fifty. A few moments more and I was taking deep breaths of fresher air on the landing, the ladder back in place and loft door closed.

Richie, Alan and Gwyn had shared the cost of the cigarettes at the duty-free shop on the cross-channel ferry. As a non-smoker I had been glad to be spared the expense. A dark blue cardboard box of fifty Player’s, about nine inches by six, with the familiar trademark in the top right-hand corner, the bust of a bearded sailor encircled by a whitish, rope-wrapped lifebelt. It had survived the journey well, and the years that followed. The silver-foil lining was intact too, and when I pulled open the overlapping sheet, there were those few souvenirs of our holiday, which, despite everything that happened, I had preserved by putting them away from me: the postcards I sent home from France and Spain, one smudged with a dribble of wine, and the photographs, ten of them, black and white, and small, about two inches square. They were taken with the Brownie box camera my older sister had pressed on me. She must have had them printed when she wanted to put a fresh reel of film in the camera. At the time I couldn’t bear to look at them, but neither could I destroy them. Yes, I put them away with the postcards my mother had kept, the entire record of those weeks, apart from what long suppressed memory had refused to erase.