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I did.
And it was different. And I enjoyed it. Our chosen trip was a
special interest tour sponsored by the US Library of Congress: 17
participants, plus the French tour guide and an archaeologist; 2 weeks
of caves and castles and the prettiest villages in the Perigord and the
Pyrenees regions.
The most heart-warming realisation was the instant rapport with Alice.
We could again say anything to each other without worry, laugh at the
same things - as though 40 years had not gone by. We had kept in touch
with Christmas cards and Alice had flown from Phoenix to visit us in
Washington DC when we lived there. But there had not been an extended
period of day-to-day friendship.
Alice had always been the athletic one of us. I was grateful now
for her steadying hand as we slipped and slid thorough the mile-long
narrow passageways of the Caves de Niaux to reach its newly-discovered
innermost chamber, revealing the painted walls of herds of mountain
goats, drawn some 14,000 years ago. I doubt David and I would have
crawled through this subterranean passage. We would have been happy with
something slightly more accessible.
When we parted, me to fly back to London, Alice to Phoenix, we
agreed that a trip the next year was a must. Again, Alice researched and
planned it. “China and the Yangtze: Sacred Mountains, Rivers and
Cities”, a travel/study programme sponsored by the University of
California at Berkeley. Alice may have remembered the intense, long
hours I spent at university studying Chinese history. I had yearned to
travel to the real place.
On our first night in a downtown Beijing hotel, as Alice and I
celebrated our joint June birthdays courageously drinking appalling red
wine, I glanced at the group in the lobby nearby. These were young
Chinese professionals having an after-work drink. The women impeccably
groomed, trim in chic designer suits, hair sleekly blow-dried, subtle
make-up. The confident young men wore their well-cut business suits with
ease. The scene could easily have been in New York.
Yet my lasting memory of that trip is of the tortuous 3-hour hike
up the sacred Huang Mountain. There, when I reached the top, was a
painting come to life: one of those familiar Chinese landscape scrolls
of towering peaks, rising above a sea of clouds, with grotesque pine
trees twisting from the rock pinnacles.
“South Africa!” Alice’s voice resonated with horror when I
suggested the next trip.
“It’s dangerous.” Violent crime in the cities: Cape Town and
Johannesburg, the murder capitals of the world, slaughter on the farms.
Those were Alice’s images from U.S. television reports. It will be all
right Alice, I assured her. I’ll plan it. I have relatives who live in
Cape Town, and my son and his wife have just bought a holiday cottage in
the Winelands. They’ll take care of us.”
We dined with Zetta and Estelle, my brother-in-law’s sisters, at the
seaside restaurants in Cape Town and toured the city by day, quite safe.
We spent a week in the winelands, with Cil, my daughter-in-law. She took
us on wine tastings in the verdant vineyards of the Franschhoek Valley.
We helped her furnish their new cottage and made good friends with the
vineyard owners and their families.
It was the next year that I first found myself holding back in
conversations with Alice. That year I had said to Alice, “Let me come to
you in Phoenix. I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon.” It was May, 2003, 2
months into the Iraq invasion. I was worried. Did I tell Alice I thought
the war was indefensible?
Though Alice had been brought up in liberal New York, as had her
husband, and they had gone west in their early married days. Don, a
lawyer, became president of the Young Republicans. Their friends
included the conservative Supreme Court justices William Rehnquist and
Sandra Day O’Connor. Could we discuss the subject of the war? All
America seemed gung ho and anyone who disagreed was viewed as
unpatriotic.
I think we must have tactically agreed to disagree and I sunk
happily into the eye-opening wonders of the Canyonlands of the American
west, Alice driving and mapping out the where to stay for the best
experience. She had driven these routes and hiked these canyons and
rafted these rivers many times with Don and the children, but seeing
these spectacular geological wonders through my eyes brought new
perspectives to her.
This spring Alice is coming to me. I’d like to see Scotland she
has said. What do you want to see, I asked. I’ve planned that we’ll take
the train from London to Edinburgh. Spend a few days there, train to
Inverness to go aboard a yacht cruising through the heart of the
Highlands on inland waterways. We’ll sail to the Western Isles, too.
My family adore Alice, so we’ll spend a weekend with my sister
and brother-in-law in Surrey and my son and his wife and twin boys in
Somerset. In Phoenix I got to know Alice’s grown-up children. Now when
we write or talk we have so many more reference points, to enjoy hearing
about each other’s lives and families.
And we talk about what Don would have thought and David would have
said with ease and understanding. They are both always with us.
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