I Hired a Sports Car, Briefly

Readers who have been with me since the beginning will remember that, back in early July, before any of this began, I briefly considered a sports car. That lasted one afternoon and one honest look in a mirror.

Today I hired one. For six hours. I feel this still counts as briefly.

The car

It was a Porsche. A convertible, dark grey, with a flat six behind the seats and a roof that folded away at the touch of a button in a way that I found so beautiful I made it do it twice in the rental car park. The young man at the desk asked if I had driven one before. I said, truthfully, that I had not driven anything since July, and had been at sea for four months, and that I would be very careful. He looked at me the way the customs officer had. I have that effect on Americans at the moment.

Priya was waiting by the car when I came out. She was not in uniform. She was in jeans and sunglasses and a white shirt, and I had, I realised, never actually seen her in anything but uniform before, and I stood there with the keys in my hand for a little longer than was natural.

"You are staring," she said.

"I am inspecting the vehicle."

"You are inspecting the wrong vehicle," she said, and got into the passenger seat.

The drive

We went north, through the city and out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, and then up the coast past Santa Monica towards Malibu, with the roof down and the ocean on our left the whole way.

I want to describe what it was like, because I have missed it more than I have been willing to admit in these pages.

The first few minutes were clumsy. My hands remembered the wheel, but my feet had to think about it, and at the first set of lights I was too gentle and at the second too eager. Priya said nothing. She simply looked out of the window with an expression of saintly patience.

Then the road opened up, past the last of the traffic, and the hills came down to the sea, and I put my foot down.

The car did not so much accelerate as rearrange the scenery. The engine note rose from a growl to a howl, the wind came over the windscreen and pulled at my hair, the road curved along the cliffs in long sweeping bends, and every bend was a small decision that the car answered instantly and perfectly. Speed, acceleration, the push in the back, the feel of the road through the wheel. All of it. Four months of walkways, and then this.

I laughed out loud. I could not help it. Priya looked across at me and laughed too, and said something I could not hear over the wind, and I did not ask her to repeat it.

Supervision

We stopped for tacos at a stand above a beach in Malibu. Fish tacos, with lime and something green and fiery, eaten on a low wall in the sun with the surf crashing below. Priya ate three and stole the last bite of my fourth, which I allowed, because I am a changed man, within limits, on dry land.

Then she held out her hand.

"Keys," she said.

"I thought you were supervising."

"I have supervised. Now I would like to drive."

I gave her the keys. And I want to place on record, here, publicly, that the Chief Officer of a four hundred metre container ship drives a sports car exactly the way she plays Scrabble. Calmly. Precisely. Without any visible effort. And very, very much faster than you think she is going to, until you look at the speedometer and decide to look at the ocean instead.

I held on to the door. She was smiling the whole way back.

Errands

We found the British shop in Santa Monica. I bought six boxes of proper tea, two packets of chocolate digestives, a tin of shortbread, and some ginger nuts for emergencies. Priya bought a large bag of American peanut butter biscuits and announced that they were "for the bridge", which we both understood to mean for her.

Back at the rental car park, before returning the keys, I lifted the engine cover, knelt on the tarmac, and took a photograph of the flat six for Tiny. Priya watched me do this with the expression of a woman who has realised something important about a man and is deciding whether to mind.

Back aboard

We were back on board an hour before sailing. Tiny was on the gangway. I showed him the engine photograph. He studied it for a long time, zoomed in on it, nodded slowly, and said, "Good. Six cylinders. Respectable." Big Kev, passing behind him, glanced at it and said, "Small," and kept walking.

Elena took one look at me, sunburnt and windswept and holding a carrier bag full of tea, and said, "You drove." It was not a question.

Container was in the canvas bag when I opened my cabin door. She looked at me. She looked at the carrier bag. She climbed out of her bag and into the carrier bag and lay down on the tea. I think that means welcome home.

We sailed at nine in the evening, the cranes of Long Beach lit up behind us like a city of their own. I stood on the deck and watched them shrink, with the wind in my hair again, which this time was the ship's doing. My arms still remember the wheel. I suspect they will for a while.