was for an aire, which she’d worked out was a lay-by or camping site. She indicated and pulled into it, parking in one of the spaces beneath the trees. The rustling green leaves provided shelter from the direct sunlight as she sat at the only unoccupied picnic table. Families were eating at the others, while further away, a group of children were playing, chasing each other around a couple of camper vans and an SUV with a large roof box.
Deira remembered her own days of chasing with her best friend, Cecily, who lived two doors down from their home in Galway. Deira had tried to spend as much time as she could in Cecily’s house, which always smelled of home baking, and where Mrs Donnelly was ever present. She would sometimes create scenarios in her head that resulted in Mrs Donnelly having to adopt her. She felt that living with her best friend and visiting her dad at weekends would be a much better way to manage things than being constantly ordered around by Gillian, or ignored by Peter. She knew her Dad did his best, but he worked long hours as a sales rep and often left the house early in the mornings, not returning until after seven in the evening. And although Deira was sure Dom O’Brien loved his children, he hadn’t been a hands-on father before her mum had passed away, and that didn’t change afterwards. His relationship with them had always been remote, and even now, retired and living in a small bungalow in Spiddal, he didn’t engage with them very much. He didn’t know about her and Gavin. She hadn’t told him. He wouldn’t have had anything useful to offer on the situation anyhow.
She made a determined effort to push the complications of her life to the back of her mind and opened Google Maps on her phone. Her search for hotels nearby showed there was nothing within a thirty-minute drive, but that wasn’t all that surprising. Even though she could hear the sound of cars speeding along the motorway, she was in rural France. So she tapped on the first hotel on the list, which was on the outskirts of Nantes, saw that it had availability and booked a room there and then. It didn’t much matter to her what it was like, given that all she wanted was to lie on a bed for a few hours. Hopefully the worst of her pain would be over by the morning and she could resume her journey to Bordeaux.
If, of course, she wasn’t arrested for stealing her own car before then.
Grace had abandoned the password-protected documents in favour of finishing The Sun Also Rises, although the only reason she was reading it was because it seemed appropriate to bring one of Ken’s favourite books on the journey. She’d started it on one of their camping trips years earlier, but had abandoned it saying that she couldn’t warm to any of the characters.
‘You’re obsessed with wanting to like the characters in the books you read,’ Ken told her.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ demanded Grace.
‘Great literature isn’t always about likeability,’ Ken said. ‘And Hemingway won a Nobel Prize.’
‘Maybe because his was the best book around back then,’ retorted Grace. ‘But there’s a lot more to choose from now. Besides,’ she added, ‘I’ve read all about him and he doesn’t seem to have been a particularly nice character himself.’
‘You have to make allowances for his genius,’ said Ken.
‘Why is it only male geniuses we make allowances for?’ she demanded. ‘Why can men behave appallingly and we give them a free pass but a woman has to be calm and composed in order not to be dismissed as hysterical no matter how brilliant she might be?’
‘I never make those judgements.’
‘Not knowingly,’ she muttered.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Grace said nothing. She didn’t want to start an argument with Ken because she never won arguments with him. He always managed to tie her into linguistic knots so that by the end she was agreeing with him even though she didn’t really. It was hard work, she often thought, being married to a college professor who could turn everything she said into the opposite of what she meant.
But now, even though she was still finding the book more hard work than pleasure, one line had struck home and made her think that maybe Ken had had a point, and old Ernest wasn’t quite as bad as she’d first thought.
You can’t get away from