Three Hundred Hours , livre ebook

Title Page
THREE HUNDRED HOURS

A NOVEL BY
RODERICK CRAIG LOW



Publisher Information
Published in 2013
by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2013 Roderick Craig Low
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The right of Roderick Craig Low to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Dedication
For my darling wife Chantal.
With all my love.



The First Monday
David Grant walks out of the doctor’s surgery at precisely ten o’clock in the morning. The time is hardly relevant, but he was always governed by time and he makes a mental note of it as he shields his eyes from the bright sunlight and opens the buttons of his pale-yellow lightweight summer jacket. It is going to be another hot day, just like yesterday, the sky straight from a Monet canvas, the lightest of breezes stroking his face as he passes the ends of the narrow streets running up from the riverside.
David Grant is exactly sixty-six years, five months, two weeks and six days old. He is unable to determine what time of day he was born so cannot be more precise than that. It is a question he had wanted to ask his mother before she died but she lost her memory long before her life and thus the detail eluded him. His birth certificate is equally and frustratingly inexact. As a consequence, the moment of his birth is the first event in his life about which he has no knowledge.
David Grant is a tall man; about six feet three, slightly stooped and extremely thin, such that his clothes hang around him as from hangers in a wardrobe. His face is craggy - once handsome perhaps but now drawn and sunken, which has the effect of making his eyes seem slightly protruding. His hair, still largely unchanged from its original black, is thick, rather too long and parted high on the temple, the long side dropping over his eyes as it has since he was a young boy. There is something of the Jeremy Irons about him. He has a birthmark on his left cheek, about the size of a large grape. Over the years, it has altered its hue from deep purple to the brown of a liver spot. In a conscious effort to counter the wasted appearance of his body, he is immaculately dressed. I have already mentioned the jacket, which is more designer than High Street, but his trousers and shirt are equally smart in pale blue shades with a cravat of dark sand at his scrawny neck. Clutched in his long, almost feminine, left hand is the doctor’s prescription, neatly printed and signed, contrasting with the incomprehensible, handwritten hieroglyphics he experienced in England, together with a large white envelope, unaddressed and unsealed.
I apologise. I should really begin at the beginning. The place? Tournon in the Ardèche, a département of southern France. That river I mentioned? The Rhône - the right bank of the Rhône to be accurate. To know your right bank from your left bank, simply turn yourself around so that you are standing parallel to the flow of the water. If the river is on your left and you are watching the water receding into the distance, you are on the right bank. If it is on your left and advancing toward you, you are on the left bank. If you know the region, it would be enough to say ‘Tournon in the Ardèche’ because the habitation on the other side of the river has another name and, anyway, it isn’t in the Ardèche at all. Not that all this matters greatly to the story but I am always governed by precision - not in terms of exact time it is true, but in all other particulars. It matters to me just as time and, clearly, personal appearance matter to David Grant.
If you have visited Tournon, you will say, ‘I know Tournon! I remember the expansive car parks under the trees by the river, the massive and forbidding walls of the château squeezing one end of the town like the neck of a bottle, the number and variety of restaurants, the narrow streets of cheek-by-jowl houses, both winding and straight, level with the river or rising gently westwards, the little hotels all vying for business, the singing of the cicadas in the trees practically drowning out the sound of the traffic, the ancient suspension bridge built by Marc Seguin, the Thomas Telford of France’ (the existing bridge was his second attempt, but everyone is allowed to improve on genius). Or, maybe, if you’re into these things, you may say, ‘Isn’t that where we caught the little steam train that wandered up through the hills whistling at every farmhouse and waving bystander; that stopped somewhere for half an hour there and back so we could buy honey sweets and pots of home-made preserves at hurriedly erected stalls and quaff quantities of Pelforth and “33” and red wine at the lineside bar; that sat at the terminus for hours to encourage us to take a four-course lunch in one of the Lamastre restaurants and still have time to sleep it off before the engine’s whistle summoned us back to the station?’ You’d be right about all that, too.
Tournon, as you can tell, has much to commend it.
David Grant pauses at a street corner and looks at the prescription, sighs and then folds it neatly before unzipping his French-style wallet and sliding it between his carte de séjour and his driving licence. It is a Monday, and most of the pharmacies are closed. Oh, there will be one in the area open for cases such as his, but where? This end of the town or the other? Over in Tain perhaps? Tomorrow will do. Or the next day. It will be easier than usual to get the prescription made up with his wife away, he reasons.
He likes his wallet, a thing of many zips and pockets, some he never uses and probably one or two remaining unknown to him, a thing the size of a substantial paperback and therefore too large for any pocket of his. His life is in that wallet - his credit cards and chequebooks, his car papers and money, his receipts and addresses, his family photographs and his spare keys. He knows, if he loses it, there will be parts of his existence that will become irrecoverable. Years later, his wife might say, ‘You’ve got so-and-so. Come on, you keep it in your wallet.’ And that brief but accurate request will open a hitherto sealed door to an aspect of his life long forgotten. If that ever happens, he will fumble impotently with the replacement’s zips, trying one and another as his brain winds back to beyond the loss and the realisation that he has lived for years without something so important that he had felt it necessary to carry it around with him constantly.
He checks the presence of his credit cards as he does every day, several times a day, and closes the wallet before letting it slip though his hands until only the strap prevents it from falling to the uneven pavement. He transfers the envelope to his other hand and turns down one of the roads to the river, crosses the main street, and locates the elderly and battered Opel Corsa with the local ‘07’ plate. The engine fires first time and he pats the steering wheel by way of a ‘thank you’. ‘What does Jeremy Clarkson know?’ he asks himself, ‘Chortling like a lunatic schoolboy over slivers of Italian steel with engines more powerful than five London buses, at the same time as being creatively sarcastic about the products of General Motors? This is what matters: it starts at the first turn of the key, it is utterly reliable and it costs very little to run.’ He does pull a rueful face, however, as the heat builds up in the cabin. ‘No air conditioning, though.’ He has promised himself that the next car will have air conditioning, but the Corsa would have to break down irreparably for there to be a ‘next car’ and that seems highly unlikely. So, he fumbles his way out of his jacket before clipping the seat belt, winds the window down, and starts to perspire. For a slim, spare man, he is a martyr to perspiration.
David Grant noses out of the car park, turns right, pauses as a woman with an oversized buggy containing an undersized infant shambles over the road at a crossing still showing red for pedestrians, and accelerates northwards, the river disappearing behind a row of shops and apartment blocks. The petrol station is open so he glances at the petrol gauge and decides to fill up. It isn’t strictly speaking necessary yet but it brings trade to the local garage. He is a creature of habit and, anyway, he is loyal. Besides, there are other attractions. He serves himself, wipes around the spilled fuel making muddy streaks down the dark-blue paint with a piece of paper torn from the conveniently placed kitchen roll, unnecessarily notes the number of the pump - there are no other customers on the forecourt - squints at the price and takes his wallet from the passenger seat.
The girl, perhaps twenty years old and no more than five feet tall, tanned breasts forming their own gently sloping valley in the V-neck of her T-shirt, bared flat midriff and loose white shorts that reach her knees, turns around, stops loading a biscuit and sweet rack, returns to the counter, and smiles in recognition.
‘Ça va, Monsieur Grant?’
‘Yes, thank you, Cécile. Pump number five, please. Thirty-six euros, eighty cents.’
She nods, takes the proffered bank card, inserts it into the machine and presses some keys on the register. She passes the hand-held device to him.
‘OK, Monsieur, your code please. And Madame Grant?