Fuel for the Flame

by Alec Waugh

  What would her life be like there? How would she strike her new acquaintances? How would she get on with Barbara who was only four years older than herself? They could have been at school together. Fancy Daddy marrying somebody like that. She remembered her father as a large, bulky figure, coming in to kiss her in the morning before he went to work. His cheek would be smooth, and he would smell of eau-de-Cologne, In the evening, after tea, he would take her to the swimming pool or to the tennis court, and ask about her day. When he kissed her good-night his cheek would be rough and he would smell of—she could not define the smell: it was masculine and expensive and she would nuzzle her face into his shoulder, breathing it in. Would he look very different now? Four years was a long time. And how would she strike him? At fifteen she had been a gawky, awkward girl, all knees and elbows, with a shock of untidy hair. He had nicknamed her ‘Carrots’. She’d be a surprise to him.

  She felt nervous, but excited; Karak would be a challenge.

  4

  Dawn had broken, breakfast had been served and cleared away; the handsome Englishman crossed the aisle again. ‘Had a good sleep?’ he said.

  ‘A broken one.’

  ‘That’s what everybody says about sleeping in an aeroplane, but every time I looked round at you, you were sleeping soundly. I envied you.’

  He might be envying her, but he himself looked as spruce as an advertisement for an electric razor.

  ‘Are you going to be long in Singapore?’ Annetta asked.

  ‘I don’t expect to be.’

  ‘But you’ve been there before, of course.’

  He smiled at that.

  ‘I’m forty now,’ he said. ‘I came out first when I was twenty, before the Second War, at the end of the Maugham era that’s to say. Aeroplanes have altered everything. In the days when a man came out by ship he was not saying good-bye to his country for five years, he was saying good-bye to it for life. He returned to his home as a stranger, and when he married, he brought his wife out to a way of life altogether different from his own. In one way it was a very pleasant life. She was a woman of prominence and prestige. She was a mem-sahib. In England she had lived in a small villa in the suburbs, with a single resident maid if she was lucky. Here she had a staff of five. She lay back on a long chair and clapped her hands. She had nothing to do. That was her trouble. At first it was a kind of heaven, but after a while, when the honeymoon was over, she became peevish and dissatisfied. It was all too easy. Besides, it was a man’s world. Men went to their offices and clubs and played their golf and polo and talked shop half the time. They drank too much. That was inevitable. They also took quinine as an antidote to malaria; it diminished their virility. The six years’ wife is a problem anywhere. She was a particular problem in the tropics, then another problem came. As soon as her children were seven years old, they had to be sent back to England. I don’t know why they should have been, but it was the agreed thing they should be. It was held that the tropics retarded them mentally, overdeveloped them physically, and the wife had to decide whether she should go back with them or stay with her husband. Whichever she decided, she felt resentful. Aeroplanes have altered that; aeroplanes and air-conditioning: and incidentally the cost of living. Women can’t have as many servants as they did and because there is air-conditioning they can do work in the house; also because there is air-conditioning children do not need to be sent home so soon. They can get a proper sleep. Because of refrigeration they can get special foods: because of aeroplanes, parents are not separated from their children; children can be flown home every year from school, mothers can be flown back to their children. You can get an answer to a letter within six days. It used to be three months.’

  They were now high above the desert: between Egypt and Pakistan. Grey and ochre brown it stretched to the horizon. There was no sign of life. The foot of man had never trodden here. It was difficult for Annetta to remember that twenty-four hours ago she had been in a bus, driving through the western suburbs, and that forty hours away a new and unfamiliar world was waiting her. She had lost the sense of personal existence. This monologue beside her was typical of her non-existence. She was attracted to this man beside her: but there was nothing that he could do about it. What was he planning? Was he planning anything? Was he accepting their non-existence in this vacuum? For his monologue was a form of courtship, she realized that. He was trying to interest her; to tell her things that would be of help to her. He was a man who could afford to wait; who could accept the necessity of waiting. She was curious about him.

  ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said. ‘Are you going out for long?’

  ‘Three months, six months, I’m not sure.’

  ‘Are you in business or are you working for the Government?’

  ‘Both. With income tax at its present height everyone is working for the Government indirectly, and with so many things state-controlled, even private business has to form a kind of partnership with the Government.’

  ‘But you must be employed by someone.’

  ‘I’d call myself self-employed.’

  ‘You must employ yourself very profitably if you can afford to travel about like this.’

  He laughed. ‘There are two kinds of money nowadays, the kind on which one pays taxes and the kind one doesn’t. The professional classes have been pauperized, so have the rentiers, who are quickly liquidating themselves by cutting into capital. There is a new privileged society, the aristocracy of the expense account. I’ve had the good sense to ally myself with it.’

  ‘Are you someone I should have heard of?’

  He shook his head. ‘Expense account operators, if they are wise, remain anonymous. They don’t want to call attention to themselves. I’ve even got the kind of name that nobody remembers, Francis Reynolds; it sounds like the hero in a serial.’

  He spoke lightly, casually, as though he did not take himself seriously, yet she was sure that under his banter he was calculating and could be ruthless. If I had met him six months ago, she thought, I’d have been wondering if he was married, wondering how I could discover without putting a direct question, dreading to hear him say, ‘Oh, yes, I’m married. My wife and I understand each other,’ hoping for the transatlantic answer ‘I’m between wives’. Because he wasn’t the kind of man to reach forty without marrying; the only men who did were queers or failures or who had a mother complex.

  ‘Ah, but here come the cocktails,’ he was saying. ‘I must get back to my own seat.’

  There was a choice between Martinis or Manhattans. There was champagne too. Annetta asked for a Martini. It was dry and very cold. It seemed incredible that one should be sipping dry Martinis and munching caviar seventeen thousand feet above the desert.

  The air hostess handed her a modishly decorated menu that informed her that her lunch had been specially prepared by Maxim’s of Paris. She was offered a choice of entrées—curried prawns, a steak or Cornish hen. Until this trip she had never ordered herself a meal from this kind of menu. It was a novel experience and a pleasant one. It was novel and pleasant, too, to eat a meal alone, in public. She had once read an article saying that dining alone was one of the pleasures that women were denied, that a woman could not without feeling embarrassed go into a restaurant by herself, order herself a good dinner, and look about her with detached curiosity. She would be afraid that some man would create a situation, and if she had drunk a little more than was altogether prudent, she might create a situation for herself: but here she was secure, protected, and the stewardess was filling her champagne glass and she was eating the kind of lunch that she would never have dreamed of ordering for herself. She sipped her wine and looked slowly round her, taking stock of her fellow passengers, in a way that she had always wanted to.

  Francis Reynolds was in profile. She liked being able to watch him without his knowing he was being watched. She liked the way he ate, not greedily but with enjoyment, tidily without being pernickety. There was an air of assurance about everything he di
d.

  Yes, she thought, six months ago I’d have been seriously wondering whether he was ‘between wives’ or not.

  5

  Karachi is the main junction in air travel to the Far East. Every line stops there; on many trips the traveller changes planes. Each airline has built a comfortable rest house for its passengers, but the accommodation provided by the Pakistani authorities is among the drabbest in the world: a bleak circular central hall with curio shops, a post office, a money changer and the offices of the various lines. The sitting-room opening on to the airport, is furnished with hard long settees. Annetta sat beside Francis Reynolds waiting for the flight to be announced. The sitting-room was crowded. Three or four flights were waiting to emplane.

  ‘It’s squalid, yet it’s dramatic too,’ he said. ‘People are sitting here who’ve come from the four corners of the globe, who are bound for different places, hailing from different places, people of every age and race and every level of prosperity. There’s a Pan American flight starting for New York; there’s a B.O.A.C. plane with connexions for Rhodesia, there’s a French plane bound for Tokio. We’re here for a brief moment, under orders from the same loudspeaker; if a bomb were to drop upon this building, we’d be all buried in the same tomb; yet in all our lifetime we’ve never been in the same room before, we’ll never be in the same room again. Did you read The Bridge of San Lu is Rey? This makes me think of that. The diverse chances that have brought us all under this same roof this evening.’

  He paused. The tone of his voice changed, grew deeper. ‘I’ve travelled so much in planes during these last few years. I’ve so often thought of the curious meetings that must take place, of the sudden affinities between strangers, who are together for six, eight, eleven hours. She going West, he going East; in all human probability they will never meet again. How often one is prevented from yielding to the moment’s caprice by the knowledge that one is creating an awkward situation for oneself, that one will not know how to behave when one meets that person in one’s own familiar setting. Haven’t we all thought how wonderful to meet for three or four days in some beach hotel somebody who attracts us and whom we’ll never see again. How often in a lifetime does one get that chance? How foolish one would be to miss it if that chance came. I should think one is as likely to find it in an airport like Karachi as anywhere in the world.’

  ‘Pan American Flight No. 10 for Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokio. All passengers aboard, please.’

  He rose to his feet, looking round him, then he laughed. ‘Judging from the appearance of everybody in this room, I should doubt if anything like that had happened here during the last twenty hours. By the way,’ he added, ‘are you being met in Singapore?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Then why don’t you let me show you round in the late afternoon? We could have dinner afterwards.’

  ‘That sounds very pleasant, thank you.’

  He gave his invitation casually, then changed the subject. ‘Singapore is a free port; if you want to buy anything, you should buy it there.’

  6

  The clock was going forward all the time. When it was midnight in Delhi it was only dinner-time in England. Meals followed each other with dizzy speed. The breakfast that Shelagh had declined in Damascus was followed three hours later by another breakfast on the plane: the breakfast had barely been cleared away before cocktails were being served. She had lost all sense of time. She slept at unlikely periods. Her waking and her sleeping bore no relation to the clock. When she emplaned in Delhi, she thought, Two a.m., two days ago that was ten p.m. for me. It still is ten p.m. for all my friends. Far too early for bed, but I suppose I must make the effort.

  The top lights had been darkened; the seat lowered, the air stewardess had wrapped a blanket round her. She switched on the single beam of her reading light, and took up a magazine to compose and tranquillize her thoughts: she would read a page or two, then put it down, but to her surprise and irritation the story held her; when she reached the note in italics at the foot of the column, ‘please turn to page 89,’ she did turn to page 89 instead of putting the magazine aside. The print on page 89 was smaller, but it did not discourage her; she read on to the foot of page 90, turned over and found four more columns of close print, and at the foot of page 92 a request to turn to page 94; she turned on to page 94 and found a similar note at the foot of 96. However long was this? She turned back to the table of contents and discovered that she was reading not a short story, but a one-part book-length novel. Surely she couldn’t manage this … but she was held by the story. She was completely awake. She had had two hours sleep that afternoon. She wouldn’t be able to fall asleep if she switched off the light. She went on reading.

  It was four o’clock by Delhi time before her eyes had begun to be tired by the small print. But even so she was not sleepy. She had too much upon her mind. It was so long since she had seen her father. Would she recognize him straightaway? Had he put on weight? Probably not, married to somebody as young as Barbara. If you married a girl as young as that, wouldn’t you do your best to keep in step with her? What would it be like to be married to someone twenty years older than yourself? It would be nice to be taken care of, to be looked after … an old man’s darling rather than a young man’s slave: yes, but you wanted your husband to be a playfellow. With what kind of a man would she herself fall in love; when would she fall in love? It was high time, surely; her flirtations, such as they had been, had been mainly experiments with her new-found powers of attraction. She could not quite believe that men wanted to flirt with Carrots.

  So her thoughts ran as sleep slowly came to her barely ninety minutes before daylight woke her. She blinked and pulled back the curtains. The sea was calm; a long unbroken stretch without a ship in sight. The sky was a pallid blue, lighter than the water. There was not a cloud, not even on the horizon’s rim. She had barely slept but she felt refreshed, just as she would have done in the afternoon, after a nap. She walked down the aisle to fix her face and returned with what was almost an appetite for breakfast.

  7

  In the first-class section Francis Reynolds moved into the seat next to Annetta.

  ‘This is a day that you’ll remember all your life,’ he said. ‘My first sight of the tropics.’

  ‘Yes, and more than that, your last day of freedom.’

  ‘You sound as though I was going into a prison.’

  ‘Marriage is a prison. No, it’s not that, it’s a glass cage; that’s not my simile. It’s E. M. Forster’s. He said that married people look like everybody else behind their glass, but you can’t tell what air they are breathing. For the last few years you’ve enjoyed a complete freedom, answerable to nobody, making your own decisions. From now on, it’ll be different.’

  ‘You don’t make marriage sound attractive.’

  ‘Don’t I? It isn’t what I meant to say. I’ll quote from another author, Michael Arlen. He said that freedom is a very lonely thing. It means that no one wants you for their own. You’ll be happier the way it’s going to be for you but a certain kind of freedom will be over for you, when you land tomorrow morning.’

  She knew what he was saying. This is your last chance. For the last day and a half he had been conducting his own special courtship, pleading his case, casually, with phrases dropped here and there, ideas suggested and then shifted from, like the slow instillation of a drug; letting time do his work for him, leaving her to brood over his suggestions. He was a man who could afford to wait.

  ‘In fifteen minutes we shall be landing in Singapore. Fasten your seat belts, please.’

  Through the window she could see the northern hills of the peninsula, along a stretch of forest. Were they rubber trees? she wondered. The plane circled as it lowered. She could see the beach and the palm trees; the large villas and the broad avenues. There was a golf course and several cricket fields. There was a wide boulevard along the water. This was the tropics. The plane bumped on to the fairway, taxied, came to a ha
lt.

  ‘I’m being met,’ said Francis Reynolds. ‘I’ll call for you at half past four.’

  The glare was the first thing that struck her. She winced as the sun beat up off the asphalt. Why had no one warned her about sun-glasses? She followed the air hostess in a daze. She had been to so many airports in the last two days that she could scarcely detect the difference between one and the other. She looked around her. What was different here? Ah, yes, the Chinese: that was where the difference lay: all these neat picturesque women with their black polished hair and bright tight-fitting jackets and skirts slit above their knees. ‘Transit passengers this way, please.’ The passengers divided into two component parts. A dozen or so were getting off here. A European in a white suit came out to meet Francis Reynolds. There was a warm handshake and he led Reynolds ahead of the others. V.I.P. treatment, she supposed. He would be hurried through customs, and a limousine would be waiting at the entrance. The expense-account aristocracy. But he found time to turn and wave to her. She was glad of that. He knew how to play his cards.

  Shelagh Keable was at her side. She looked even more tired than she had the day before, but at her age all you needed was one night’s sleep. She would look fine tomorrow. ‘How are you making out?’

  ‘In need of sleep.’

  ‘We’ve a day ahead of us.’

  It had been hot outside. It seemed even hotter inside the airport. There was an air-conditioned restaurant upstairs, but the customs and immigration rooms were stifling. An air hostess was at their elbow.

  ‘Miss Keable. Miss Marsh. We’ve booked you at Raffles Hotel. Your car will leave tomorrow at nine a.m. Malayan Airways will contact you if there is any change of plan.’