There were drops of sweat running down Mounce’s temples. He looked tired; the strain of fetching drinks and keeping an eye on his publicity folder seemed to be telling on him. Whenever he asked Dyson yet again if he thought things would have simmered down or blown over by the time he got back, Dyson realized how much he preferred it when Mounce explained to him about intending to have it away with one of the model girls as soon as they got to Sharjah; though as soon as he started to explain about having it away with the model, Dyson immediately realized that it had been the topic of simmering down and blowing over which he had really preferred all the time.
‘I mean,’ said Mounce, ‘what do you think personally?’
Dyson rested his head against the back of the chair, gazing up at the ceiling.
‘Even if we take off for Sharjah immediately,’ he said, ‘I don’t see how I’m going to be back in London in time for my television programme on Friday night. I just don’t see it.’
He fanned himself meditatively with his publicity folder.
‘I mean,’ said Mounce, ‘have you taken a look at the one they call Daisy-Claude? Haughty and naughty – that’s how I like them. You wait till we get to Sharjah. First night in a proper hotel and I’ll be away.’
Dyson watched the shadow of Mounce’s chair creep millimetre by millimetre nearer the toe-cap of his right shoe.
‘If I miss that television programme,’ he said, ‘I swear to God I will take Starfield and his crapulous company to court and sue them for every penny they’ve got.’
Mounce swirled the bits of ice round at the bottom of his empty glass, until they shot out over the side and fell on the floor.
‘I wish you’d stop crapping on about your spotty television programme,’ he said. ‘You’re getting a real bore about it.’
Starfield did not reappear until teatime. Apparently Overland en Overzee knew nothing about any bill for landing dues at Beirut. At the time of the alleged tort they had been chartering the plane to Lineas Aereas Pan-Balearicas of Palma, a company whose affairs now seemed to be in the hands of the receiver. The French were very firm with Starfield when he had explained all this. Magic Carpet, they insisted, would simply have to settle the debt itself, and sort everything out later. The Belgians agreed. So did the Germans and the Dutch, and indeed everyone who was not too drunk to express an opinion, except Starfield. Magic Carpet couldn’t settle the debt, he explained, until it had received the subsidy it was getting towards the cost of the press trip from the Joint Tourism Committee of the Trucial Sheikhdoms. And when would that be? demanded the French, with the full support of the Dutch, the British, and everyone else. When it had delivered its cargo of journalists into the Committee’s hands in Sharjah.
Slowly the sun settled towards the west, and the airfield was covered once again in red, blue, and green jewels. Starfield hurried desperately in and out telephoning his directors in London and trying to placate the French. ‘Listen, boys . . . !’ Dyson could hear him pleading haggardly. ‘Gentlemen, I beseech you . . . ! We shall be taking off any moment . . . ! Friends, I beg of you to facilitate proceedings by remaining calm . . . ! I implore you . . . ! I give you my solemn oath . . . ! For God’s sake talk English – I can’t understand a word you’re saying . . . ! Oh, go and jump in the sea, you stupid ignorant Frogs, I’m sick of the sight of you . . . !’
Another night in a Beirut hotel, with windows open once again on the soft Levantine air, and the noise of Beirut’s traffic. Dyson liked the noise of the traffic. It soothed him as he lay on top of his bed, unable to sleep, because it was tangible evidence of the real and romantic world which existed outside the confines of international airports. He hoped he would never see another airport in his life again after this trip. Every time he closed his eyes the blank waiting faces of the passengers came back to him, and the roaring and whining of jets and turbojets, and the characterless international voice of the loudspeaker system announcing the departure of Flight ME 731 to Baghdad and Tehran, the further delay in the arrival of Flight ME 491 from Istanbul and Ankara . . . Oh God, how he hated airports!
And in the morning – back to the airport. But there was a surprise awaiting them. Starfield – unshaven, exhausted, and triumphant after sitting up all night telephoning and negotiating – had found them a fresh and unencumbered plane. It was older and even more visibly secondhand than the one they had arrived on; it had piston engines, which caused Mounce to start predicting a stinking sticky end for it even before they were aboard. Prudently, Starfield waited until they were airborne before he pressed his palms together and announced where they were going. The stewardesses would be coming round immediately with drinks, he said, compliments of Magic Carpet, and they were on their way back home to Amsterdam. Having said which he at once helped himself to a bottle of whisky from the galley and locked himself in one of the lavatories with it, while the French beat on the door in vain. For Starfield the war was at last over.
Mounce made a few indignant noises about Starfield’s stinking cheek. But they sounded mechanical; Dyson had the impression that even Mounce was privately relieved. Everyone was relieved, except the French, who had a great sense of responsibility. The trip had been one long series of disasters. God clearly did not want them in Trucial Oman, and there was nothing for it but to retire to Amsterdam in good order, drinking to keep their spirits up as they went.
Dyson felt a deep content. He would be back in Amsterdam by evening, and on his way to London first thing Friday morning, in plenty of time for his programme. He felt the sort of happiness he had always expected to feel when he had been a homesick Boy Scout at interminable summer camps in waterlogged meadows, if only he could have found an excuse for getting himself sent home early.
The feeling persisted until teatime, when in front of his incredulous eyes the starboard outer propeller came spinning to a halt, and they landed in some haste, with fire-engines and ambulances standing by, at Ljubljana.
Twelve
Everyone thought that Bob ought to do the programme if Dyson wasn’t back in time. They kept ringing him at the office all through Friday morning to urge him.
‘It’s not just my idea, Bob,’ said Jannie. ‘John wants you to do it, too, if he’s not back. He made a great point of it when he rang from Ljubljana this morning.’
‘How did he sound?’ asked Bob. ‘Was he in a great state?’
‘No, he was surprisingly calm.’
‘Poor old John.’
‘He’ll almost certainly be back in time, Bob. You’d just be standing by in case. It’s really simply that this Samantha Lightbody woman at the BBC has got in a great tizzy about it. She keeps ringing up to ask if I’ve got any more news.’
‘She keeps ringing me up, too.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I said I didn’t know anything about race relations.’
‘Oh, Bob! Don’t be so feeble. You know as much about them as John does.’
‘I can’t think why you’re so keen for me to do it, Jannie.’
‘I’d just like to see you on television, Bob. I just think you’d be terribly good.’
Bob sighed.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some work here that Erskine’s waiting for.’
Ten minutes later Samantha Lightbody rang again to say that she gathered Bob did know something about race relations – she understood he’d shared rooms in college with a Siamese. Bob gazed longingly at some layouts for the new pre-teen page which Erskine had asked him to look through. There was nothing he wanted more in life, he realized now, than the chance to get on with a little quiet work.
‘Who told you about the Siamese?’ he asked.
‘Mrs Dyson,’ said Samantha Lightbody. ‘She’s just very kindly phoned about it. Honestly, we’re absolutely scraping the barrel. Every expert on race relations in London seems to be sick, or away at some conference.’
‘I’m very sorry . . .’
‘We’d only use you in the very last pos
sible resort.’
‘All the same . . .’
‘Can we leave it that you’ll think about it?’
‘Well . . . all right, I’ll think about it.’
As soon as Samantha Lightbody rang off, Tessa was on the line.
‘Your friend Mrs Dyson’s been ringing me,’ she said. ‘She told me to try and persuade you to appear on this television programme.’
Bob slipped a peppermint into his mouth, and rubbed a galley between finger and thumb. He liked the coarse, soft texture of newsprint.
‘Go on, then,’ he said.
‘How do you mean, go on?’
‘Go on and persuade me.’
‘Well, do you want to do it, Bob?’
‘I don’t know. Do you think I ought to do it?’
‘Bob, I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. You know that.’
‘Yes.’
‘I only want you to do what you want to do. I only think you ought to do it if you think you ought to do it.’
Bob felt suddenly exasperated.
‘Tess, you never have any opinions of your own! There’s never anything you actually want yourself!’
‘Bob, that’s not true! I want you to be happy and do what you want. I don’t want to stand in your way. Bob, you’re the man! You’ve got to run your life and decide things for yourself.’
It embarrassed Bob to argue on the phone in Morris’s presence. Morris gave no sign of hearing. He typed on behind the wavering blue tape of cigarette smoke, then wrote odd sentences in longhand, clipped bundles of paper together and tossed them on to Bob’s desk.
‘Erskine, do you think I ought to do this damned programme?’ Bob asked him.
‘Sure,’ said Morris soothingly, without breaking off his work.
‘I knew you’d say that,’ said Bob gloomily. ‘You really think I should?’
‘Sure.’
Mrs Mounce rang.
‘Darling, I just had to ring. Tess has told me. Sweetest, you’re not going to turn a chance like this down, are you?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘I mean, it’s nothing to do with me, sweets. But, Bob, do be serious about it, darling. Opportunity doesn’t knock twice, you know, and you are going to have a family to support. I know what it’s like, I can tell you, trying to live on the money that paper pays.’
‘I’m thinking . . .’
‘You’ve got to start making a career for yourself, darling. You’ve got to get on – you’ve got to try and make a teeny weeny bit of progress. Think of Tess, Bob . . .’
‘Well, I am thinking of her . . .’
‘Now, sweetest, will you promise me you’ll ring the television people at once and say yes?’
‘I honestly am thinking about it . . .’
‘Well, will you promise me you’ll think about it very very very very seriously . . . ?’
At one point in the morning he had Samantha Lightbody back on one line, asking if he had made up his mind yet, and Tessa on the other, worrying if she had said the right thing earlier.
‘Perhaps I ought to push you more, Bob,’ she said miserably. ‘I suppose you’re someone who needs rather a lot of pushing. Mrs Mounce thinks I should push you. I’ll certainly push you if you think that’s what you need to get the best out of yourself, Bob. But I don’t want to push you into being pushed. Do you see what I mean, Bob?’
Jannie rang back, too.
‘Bob, you’d be terribly good on television,’ she said. ‘I only want you to go on because I’m sure you’d do it well. You remember how I hated it when John went on – I knew he’d overdo it and just be embarrassing. But you’d be a natural, Bob!’
Bob gazed out of the window at the great whiteness of the sky.
‘I honestly don’t feel I’d be much good, Jannie,’ he said.
‘Bob, you make me so mad sometimes, the way you underestimate yourself! It’s not proper modesty – it’s something really horrible and pathological.’
Bob felt hounded.
‘I am thinking about it,’ he said. ‘I’ve agreed to do that. I wish everybody would let me get on and think about it in peace.’
‘But, Bob, it might be your chance!’
‘My chance? What chance?’
‘Well, for heaven’s sake, Bob – your chance to break out of that office, for a start. You don’t intend to stick there for the rest of your life, do you, just being John’s dogsbody?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I’ll move on eventually . . .’
‘Eventually? It’ll be too late, eventually! You’ll be there when you’re forty, Bob, you really will. You and John – you’re both getting stuck in the rut. But at least John makes an effort to get out. You won’t do anything! You just plod along taking everything for granted, waiting for people to come and bring you your life on a plate.’
Bob doodled on the edge of a galley – a little bald eggheaded man putting his tongue out.
‘You’re in a funny mood today, Jannie.’
‘I’m always in a funny mood when John’s away.’
‘It’s not like you, going on about things like this.’
‘Well, I am going on about this particular thing, Bob.’
‘You’re mothering me, Jannie.’
‘Somebody’s got to mother you, you poor orphan boy.’
She sounded both cross and tender – perhaps cross at her own tenderness, thought Bob, rather like a mother might be.
‘I’m sure your mother would say just the same if she were alive. She’d push you on and make you do something with your life.’
Bob sighed, watching the endless blue smoke rising from Morris’s cigarette.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ll think about it.’
Jannie was in a funny mood, she knew it herself – an even funnier mood than the one she had been in earlier in the week. Her tense anxiety for John to return and her excited longing to help Bob and Tessa had both turned to irritation now that they were frustrated. She was irritated with John for so typically getting himself aboard a plane which had a defective oil-feed system in the starboard outer engine. She was irritated with Bob for being so wet and unhelpable; it was like trying to mould milk-pudding. Above all she was irritated with herself, for allowing herself to be so pointlessly and inappropriately irritated.
Because she was irritated, of course, everything around her conspired to irritate her further. The phone kept ringing. Each time she heard it she literally ran to it, thinking it might be John in Ljubljana, or Bob ringing to say that he would do the programme after all. But each time it was someone banal, with some entirely banal message. It was the BBC wanting to know if she’d heard anything more from her husband (she’d told the stupid woman she’d let her know as soon as anything happened), or John’s brainless sister-in-law chattering about children’s illnesses, or the bank manager pestering on about their overdraft. Most irritating of all, because so entirely meaningless and irrelevant, was some stupid old woman with a condescending voice who kept calling long-distance and asking to speak to a Miss Pennycuick. Nothing Jannie could say seemed to convince her that she didn’t have a Miss Pennycuick concealed about the house. Apparently poor old Miss Pennycuick had gone off to stay with friends in London, and had written back to say that their number was VINcent 4763. Jannie could imagine the poor old soul peering with maddening short-sightedness at VINcent 4673 on her hostess’s telephone, or seeing it correctly and transcribing it with infuriatingly slow, methodical wrongness, never guessing that what she was doing would cause some innocent stranger to be pestered almost out of her mind.
‘For the last time,’ Jannie snapped, when that terrible condescending voice came back on the line yet again, ‘you have the wrong number. The name of the people in this house is Dyson. There is no Miss Pennycuick here. There is no maiden lady of any sort living or staying here, and there never has been. Now will you please stop ringing me?’
Oh, thought Jannie, the chao
s and fragmentation of life! On a day like this nothing fitted. Nothing made any continuous sense or pattern. John should have been home and wasn’t – not for any reason which arose out of his character, or which had any significance outside itself, but because a small part had failed in one engine of a plane he shouldn’t have been on in the first place. Bob should have agreed to take John’s place on the programme if necessary, but wouldn’t – for a reason which undoubtedly arose out of his character, but which was so tangled and obscure and unsatisfactory that even a broken oil-feed would have been better.
And even if you fitted all this lot together to make some sort of sense, what about the wrong numbers, and the garbage collecting in the garden, and the slates falling off the roof? She roamed through the house doing nothing, waiting for the telephone to ring, waiting to collect Damian from school. Life was all thumbs, she thought, a long series of wrong numbers.
‘I suppose perhaps I ought to, oughtn’t I?’ Bob asked Morris, unable to concentrate on the pre-teen page for indecision.
‘Sure,’ said Morris, typing.
‘I mean, I don’t want to do it, Erskine. I’m honestly just not interested in this sort of thing. But I suppose it’s an opportunity I ought to take, isn’t it? What do you think? I suppose one ought to try and make some effort to get ahead in life and so on, oughtn’t one?’
‘Sure.’
‘Of course, I know you think that. But would you do it? Would you appear in this programme?’
‘Surely. Like a shot.’
Bob opened a new tube of chocolate caramels and slipped one into his mouth.
‘I suppose you would,’ he said.
It was not in the first place the condition of the starboard outer engine which detained the Magic Carpet party at Ljubljana; it was the condition of Starfield. Starfield had to be got into normal negotiating condition before work on the engine could even start.
He had not envisaged a stop at Ljubljana, of course, when he had retired to the lavatory with a bottle of whisky after take-off from Beirut, and the first difficulty was to get him out of the lavatory again, since he was sitting on the floor inside with his back against the door, and seemed unresponsive to all entreaties to move himself. When they had extracted him from the lavatory they had difficulty getting him down the steps, and when they had got him down the steps it was the ground that proved too much for him. He was propelled slowly across the tarmac with Dyson holding him up on one side and the man from the Telegraph holding him up on the other; there was a general feeling among the party that as a British citizen he was a British responsibility. ‘Beseech if you, boys and girls . . .’ he said vaguely as they went. ‘Implore you, folks . . .’
Towards the End of the Morning Page 22