George's Grand Tour by Caroline Vermalle Page B

asleep straight away. Apart from the obligatory 4 a.m. loo trip, it was a long and peaceful night’s sleep. Which was lucky, because in the days to come he would not sleep anything like as soundly …

Tuesday 30 September
    Guémené-sur-Scorff–Plumelec (Morbihan)
    The second part of this first stage of the Tour was just as pleasant, interesting and exhausting. They stopped for a picnic of andouille and cider by the cemetery in Guern, next to the village fountain, where the music of the falling water inspired another text to Adèle, which also went unanswered, but George understood that his granddaughter was very busy.
    They reached Plumelec, where a charming bed and breakfast awaited them. This time Charles and George would have to share a bedroom, which was furnished with twin beds with white crochet bedcovers and a cushion with a yellow knitted cover embroidered with flowers.
    For dinner they opted, like teenagers, for a takeaway pizza from a pizza van that came to the town’s church square every Tuesday. Charles, who had been put in charge of ordering,chose one pizza for them to share, as they were not very hungry – perhaps because of their excessive sausage consumption earlier that afternoon. When Charles came to choosing toppings, the pizza man began to miss his teenage customers. Charles didn’t garnish his pizza so much as pile it high with every possible ingredient. Most of the available toppings were heaped onto the poor thing, which inevitably crumbled under the great weight. They needed an extra box just to catch the excess spilling over the sides. The pizza man would not forget these two granddads; as for George and Charles, they were delighted with the result.
    Before going to bed, George sent a last text to Adèle:
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    We r in Plumelec, in Chouan country. Pizza 4 dinr, Charles snds his luv, me 2. Gd nite Adl.
    (We are in Plumelec, in Chouan country. Pizza for dinner, Charles sends his love and me too. Goodnight Adèle.)
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    Charles was leaning on the sunflower-yellow cushion and concentrating hard on his Sudoku – Holiday Special , his knife-sharpened pencil in hand. George was impressed; he was so tired he hadn’t even had the energy to pick up his book. They started chatting, and continued their conversation after they had turned the lights out like the boys in boarding-house dormitories they had once been.
    And neither he nor Charles woke up when the phone played the little jingle signalling the arrival of a text message, just before eleven. A text that was not from Adèle.
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    Meanwhile, around nine o’clock, Adèle was coming to the endof a long day that had begun at six in the morning. She hadn’t had time to respond to the last text from her grandfather as there had just been some bad news that had cast a dark cloud over the whole crew, and turned the shooting schedule on its head. His agent had called the producer late that afternoon: Irving Ferns was dead. The actor who had played Aristide Leonides, the murdered grandfather, had passed away in the night at the age of eighty-one. The producers were now tearing their hair out because even though they had already shot the opening scene with him, he had been supposed to reappear in a flashback that was scheduled to be shot next week. So they not only had to find a replacement for the scenes still to be shot, but also for the ones in which he had already appeared. For the production manager, this was catastrophic: there was no budget for this, blah blah blah, they would have to recreate the scene and décor exactly, blah blah blah, costumes made to measure, blah blah blah, moustache continuity, blah blah blah … For Adèle, and for most of the crew, this meant a few extra days of shooting. And she had thought she would have a day off on her birthday … Not any more! But above all, the actor’s death had deeply upset her.
    She was the last person to collect her things in the