Things Work Out

When anyone proudly asserts that 'there will always be an England,' they are probably not talking about Tottenham Court Road. London is London, and then there's all the rest. The English countryside exerts such a powerful pull and in many ways represents the true wealth of the nation -- that our departure could not have been delayed any other way. Partridge death.

There we were saying our goodbyes, Marlou and me, Alistair and Caroline, as the news gradually drifted in. The trains weren't running. This confirmed everything my cousin Caroline tends to believe about the British railways. But I take the opposite view. The railways are in a transitional state. They were not always as we see them now, and in the future they will be much improved. For now, we have to take the good with the bad. This was what one of Caroline's Moreton-in-Marsh neighbors tried to explain in the railway station car park. It's the partridges. A locomotive had plowed into a flock of partridges, sucked masses of feathers into its air intake and expired. Don't blame First Great Western Railway. There's a reason why they are first and great.

Thus our delayed arrival in London. On the way, Caroline gave us a quick tour of Oxford. I have barely seen the place, and it's on my list. Next time. We cruised past the Ashmolean Museum, glimpsed bits of the center. We will be back. Meanwhile, we were soon back in London. In fact, we were back at the Bloomsbury Holiday Inn. And then we were wandering down Southampton Row in search of a curry.

We each have a place in which we are always strangers and always at home, and for me that place is London. I don't recognize the place. The streets are full of accents that I cannot place, the shops have changed, and I would not want to be the elderly man walking on his cane and looking bewildered amidst the waves of young people washing in and out of the Russell Square tube station. Or would I? He looked all alone, utterly lost in this ever-changing city. But this might be a fleeting impression. He might have family, friends, social service people to keep an eye on him, and all the essentials of a perfectly decent urban life. Besides, I am much like that man myself. I am older, move slowly and now rely heavily on others for many essentials of my life. His existence is much like my own.

I fear sleep. On some nights, I'm afraid to let go and give myself over to it. Perhaps I fear I will never wake up. Perhaps I fear the loss of control. In any case, at some point around one in the morning, I found myself awake. Yes, our alarm was set to go off at 4 a.m. Yes, the hotel's automated wake-up call was scheduled for that hour. No, I would count on neither, and so I stared at the ceiling for almost three hours until, at four in the morning, I was up and about. And shortly after 5 a.m. I found myself at Waterloo Station staring at a 22-pound cab fare. How could it cost so much to go a couple of miles? An itemized receipt explained it all. At that hour, for a man who needed reliable transport for his wheelchair, the only solution was a radio cab. Six pounds for the reservation. Three pounds for the booking fee. A few more pounds for the fact of being a radio cab, and there we were, in front of the Eurostar terminal, looking for a porter.

It's all very modern, Eurostar, which explains why there are no porters and, also, why it took Marlou several minutes and the assistance of our cab driver to work through the intricacies of a coin-operated baggage cart. We set off, wheelchair whirring and baggage cart grinding, in search of our train. Marlou was looking worried. We had a minor tiff at the French immigration kiosk. I proceeded down one queue, Marlou took another, and by the time we were on the other side staring at the Eurostar waiting room, a sober and contentious tone had settled over the travel day. It was barely 6 a.m., and our train was still an hour away. We were not happy with each other. We were not happy with the day's trip, and the latter had not even begun.

What got us right? The short answer is years of hard work. It has taken me this long to understand that when Marlou is bossy and anxious she is still Marlou. I don't have to mount an all-out nuclear attack. I can ensure my survival as a male with, let us say, a conventional strike. And sometimes, I can even suspend hostilities. As I say, it's taken a while. On this occasion, with Marlou seated by the entrance to gate #23, bags at her side, bags under her eyes, I even managed that most chivalrous move. I went in search of a latte.

There's no doubt: life is much better caffeinated. As for me, I could wait for breakfast aboard Eurostar. Nothing to do but find an accessible toilet. This wasn't difficult. There was one with a wheelchair symbol close at hand. Unfortunately, everything inside was close at hand. The sink, the door, the toilet, the walls. I had to remove the footrests to turn my wheelchair around and get the door open.

Eurostar is, of course, one of the modern world's great wonders. Flashing across Kent, dashing under the English Channel, and hurtling toward Lille, there was barely time to enjoy coffee, decompress from the morning's anxieties and enjoy some eggs. Marlou and I had a chat. She feels that nothing must go wrong while we travel, that she must be on top of all challenges, never taken by surprise, never baffled by the procedures and devices of modern transport. In short, she was raised to be perfect. So was I. Thus, our marriage. Perfection, I told her, was asking a bit much of a quadriplegic and a cancer survivor. We were facing great challenges. Together. What more could one say?

Lille is an anonymous place in terms of train travel, a modern station and as far as one can go in northern France without being in Belgium. Which is why we spent a pleasant half hour in the company of a Belgian tour organizer and, for want of better words, missionary. King Leopold may have not done much good for the Congo, but this man has. He ran safaris and plowed his profits into a sort of a rescue mission for abandoned African girls. He showed us a photo of his African family. Marlou recognized the tribe. She also recognized me, I recognized her, and by now, fueled by coffee and inspired by this Belgian ex-army-officer-turned-one-man-NGO, we recognized our mission: getting to Aix-en-Provence in good spirits.

It's almost 700 miles from Lille to our TGV station in Provence. Just look at the map. Do the math. Do whatever you like, but the whole experience still will not add up. I caught a vague intimation of the tres grande vitesse thing on the platform as another train pulled in from somewhere. The electric motors roared. One expects a diesel engine to make noise, but not the mere motor, the sum of copper windings that actually drive the wheels. As I say, this motor roared. And soon we roared with it, or with its TGV cousin.

I always feel I'm going fast at 80 mph on the Amtrak straightaway west of Sacramento, but moments out of Lille we were going twice that. Which meant that 45 minutes later we were pulling out of the train station at Charles De Gaulle Airport, Paris. And 15 minutes after that, already in Burgundy, our train flipped into hyper drive and we hurtled south at something much closer to 200 miles an hour. So, do the math, and don't be surprised when Aix-en-Provence rolls into view after only four hours.

We were met at the station by two attendants who took this to the curb where we awaited Monsieur Bertrand. Who is he? Marlou's own answer to the Aix-en-Provence TGV station wheelchair problem. There is no accessible transport from the station to the town -- I had spent hours researching this problem on the Internet. So we had found this man, Bertrand, who runs a sort of medi-van service for local people in wheelchairs. Marlou had called him weeks ago on and discussed a pick up at the train station.

We waited and waited in front of the TGV station, but Monsieur Bertrand didn't turn up, so Marlou phoned him. He was in Nice and not expecting us. Marlou, he insisted, was supposed to call and confirm. Marlou had been talking about calling for days, but she kept putting the phone call off. Making oneself understood by phone in a foreign language is a daunting experience. She kept avoiding the call, and now here we were, stuck without a ride.

Except, that we weren't stuck. I knew we weren't. Perhaps, for the first time in my life, I knew things were going to work out, because they were going to work out. I wasn't going to berate Marlou, because that is how both of us have been raised, and more criticism is coals to Newcastle. Besides, something was going to happen. And it wasn't going to be bad. I couldn't help but remember my quadriplegic friend Jeanette who, stuck at Prague Airport, had hailed a bakery van and ridden into town with a load of fragrant loaves. It was going to work out, because these two train attendants were still with us and, above all, Marlou and I were still with each other. And now there was a third, just as Marlou is one, I am another, and our relationship adds up to three. And the third here and now took the form of the chief of station operations for Aix-en-Provence. He had on a blue cap, wore a blue jacket and was all business. This is how the French held on to Morocco. He wasn't going to let us go.

Which explains why, less than half an hour later, my electric wheelchair had been loaded into the back of a rented Renault van, and Marlou and I were driving toward our hotel. Marlou was worried about getting lost, and I kept telling her that she was a miraculous person. As was I. Before me was one map, 30 roads, and 50 choices. I chose the right one because it didn't matter. The signs kept coming at me, confusing and inconsistent. I am not used to driving on the Continent. It didn't matter. All the signs were pointing the right way.