The drinks trolley jangled and clattered its slow, tantalizing, way towards them. Esther had settled on a vodka martini and a small white wine, and was about to place her order with the stewardess when her neighbour ungallantly, forcefully, intercepted her request and demanded a couple of whiskies. The stewardess obliged, instantly: for he was a very handsome man. Esther waited, and received in turn, or rather out of turn, her dinky little paper disc, her mini-packet of nuts, her beaker of crushed ice, her little bottles: she arranged them in front of her as though for a doll’s tea-party. She herself had relaxed, completely, having diagnosed the complaint of her unchosen companion. He was a drinking man, and he needed his Scotch. He poured out one of his little bottles and knocked it back in one, undiluted (he had, in an almost unnoticeably foreign accent, expressed great displeasure at the thought of ice): then he poured out the second and sat back, as Esther assumed, a happier man. But she had got it slightly, though only slightly, wrong: for after a few minutes, he suddenly leaped to his feet, waving his arms, and shouting in an unknown tongue. He hit his head again on the luggage rack, but managed to stay on his feet, flailing, crying out.
Passengers and crew reacted with instant panic and consternation. Some ducked and covered their heads: the stewardess fell on the gangway behind her trolley, screaming: a woman shouted that she had been shot. As it slowly became clear that no one had been shot, and that the man was not armed, people began to collect themselves, ashamed of their display of instant terror: a steward began to approach, as the man, hooked onto the luggage rack by one long arm, orated. Esther had by now worked it all out. Her new friend was not mad, or crazed, or violent, he was simply very very drunk. His quiescent behaviour at the beginning of the flight had been the careful calm of a man who knows he has already had too much: the irresistible miniature whisky had taken him over the top, into another realm.
As it happened, Esther was thoroughly familiar with this realm, and well used to conversing with its inhabitants, though not, perhaps, in the language which he was currently employing: she tugged at his sleeve, as he swayed above her, as the gold-braided, nervous-camp steward descended upon them, and whispered, ‘Hey, sit down, come on, sit down, you’re going to knock my drink over if you go on like that, and I’ve been looking forward to it for hours.’
He gazed down, took in her presence, took in her little tea-party, switched currents, smiled, bent at the knees, sat. The steward was at his elbow. ‘Now then, sir,’ he said, ingratiatingly, ‘now then.’
The man was tugging at the top of his second bottle. Esther thought it would be much better to let him have it: experience hinted to her that the next phase might be maudlin, conversational, quiet, rather than noisy. Calmly, she poured out her own little drink. The steward, crouching on his haunches in the aisle, watched her small ceremony. ‘You with this gentleman, madam?’ he asked. Esther hesitated, prevaricated, sipped from her beaker.
‘Well, no, not really,’ she said, ‘but we’ve been getting to know one another. Haven’t we?’
She laid what she hoped was a soothing hand upon the man’s arm, as he managed to unscrew his second bottle, and to pour its contents, with an impressively steady hand, into his beaker. The man nodded, mumbled. ‘We’re quite all right, thank you,’ she said, firmly, and followed this statement up with various nods, winks and facial contortions by which she intended to indicate to the steward that she thought everything was under control, and more likely to stay so if the steward absented himself. The steward responded by a similar barrage of nods and winks, and by pointing discreetly at the service button. He rose to his feet, said, ‘We’ll be back for your dinner order soon, madam – that is, sir and madam,’ and backed away.
Interesting, thought Esther, as she took another sip. Not really much one can do to calm people down inconspicuously at this height above sea level, in this cramped space. Did they have strait-jackets on aeroplanes, she wondered. The man was drinking his whisky, slowly, meditatively, as though nothing had happened. Carefully, gingerly, she reached under her tray for the Numismatic Review. The sight of this innocent publication aroused him, however, as she had half feared it might, and he put down his glass and turned his attention full upon her.
Civilly, gallantly, courteously, in his near-perfect English, his too attentively articulated English, he enquired her destination. As she was flying to Bologna, and had taken some trouble to find the only airline with a direct flight to Bologna that week, she felt she should answer truthfully: ‘Bologna,’ she said, with a lightly censorious intonation, which might have implied, ‘of course, you fool.’ He picked up the subtext at once, with all the free-playing instinct and subtlety of a person liberated by alcohol from time-wasting niceties: ‘You needn’t have been going to Bologna at all,’ he said. ‘I, for instance, am not going to Bologna. I am going to Ferrara. But as there is no airport in Ferrara, I was obliged to catch this flight to Bologna. I could, of course, have travelled from Venice, as there are direct flights to Venice, in fact there are more regular direct flights to Venice than to Bologna, so it took me some time to work out that it was wiser to travel via Bologna, so I think it was not at all necessary for you to imply that I ought to have known you were travelling to Bologna.’
‘I could have been going to Ferrara, you mean,’ said Esther, curiously delighted by this turn of conversation: and she continued delighted, through another quarter of an hour’s discussion of airports, flight schedules, duty-free allowances, and such matters. He was, he said, a Dutchman. He showed her his passport: she inspected it, as he seemed eager for her to do so, and noted that he appeared to be something to do with antiques, and lived in Amsterdam. She showed him hers. They conversed a little of art, unwisely perhaps, for when she enquired whether or not he was familiar with Jacopo della Quercia’s Madonna in the Museo del Duomo in Ferrara (as his previous observations on the Sienese school had led her to believe he might well have been) he suddenly turned violently against poor della Quercia, whose very name seemed to inspire him with a barely controllable rage, for he repeated it some twenty or thirty times, in varying experimental pronunciations, in a diatribe interrupted only by the arrival of a meal – (tea? supper? dinner? at that time of day, who could say?) – and by the solicitous enquiries of the steward as to whether sir and madam were enjoying their flight. Yes, said Esther, firmly, but her friend (whose name, she had learned, was Leo Steen) disastrously struggled to his feet again, folding up his plastic dinner in its folding table, and waving his arms. ‘Oh, do sit down,’ said Esther, sharply, ‘that’s quite enough of that, you’ll send us all plummeting down into the Alps if you go on like this.’
The word ‘Alps’ worked like a charm. He sat down at once, muttering to himself some rubbish about the Zillertaler Alpe and the Julijske Alpe, and about a journey he’d once made through them many years ago with a woman in spring, and about trains and boats and cars, about a wonderful instant passion on a night ferry, and about the inferiority of air travel. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Esther, hungrily gobbling up her unidentifiable stew, her portion of salad, her roll, her biscuits and Bel Paese (but drawing the line at the trifle); yes, she agreed, trains and boats are much pleasanter; but there were fewer and fewer of them; one was obliged to travel by air, air travel was boring, unromantic, frightening, tedious, all at once; yes, they agreed, yes: the steward brought him a replacement, pacifying meal but, like a true drinker, he wouldn’t touch it, so Esther unobtrusively stole his cheese. She was ravenously hungry: she hadn’t got round to earing at all earlier in the day. The North Sea, he was saying, The Hague, Felixstowe, Harwich, the Hook. Yes, yes, said Esther. It was music to her ears, for some reason, this conversation, of which (she knew the signs) he would, the next day, remember not one word. The next day, it would be as though this conversation had never been. He was telling her about his mistress, who was married to an art dealer. Yes, yes, said Esther.
After the plane had landed, she was somewhat dismayed when the usual announcement telling
everybody to stay in their seats until the seat belts sign had been switched off was followed by the arrival of the steward and another, larger, fiercer, heavier man in uniform, who indicated to her new friend that he should arise and follow them. The cowards, the bullies, they wouldn’t take him on in mid-air, she said to herself, as Leo stumbled away up the aisle to the exit, having muttered a farewell, and pledged undying devotion and a fervent desire to meet her again on the return flight. Should she protest? What could she do? She would at least enquire after him, she resolved, as she made her way through the aircraft door, but the steward was already waiting for her, with explanations, with official thanks from the airline. ‘Averted an unpleasant incident’, ‘most grateful for her intervention’, ‘very tactfully handled’, the steward and a new, unexplained, sidekick from the ground staff said, as Esther stood in a draughty caterpillar-corridor ten feet above ground, clutching her canvas bag. When Esther, feeling herself getting truculent, feeling her calm fray at the edges, asked what they had done with her companion, they assured her that he would be dealt with by the authorities. Whatever for? said Esther, he didn’t hurt anybody, did he? And they, sensing they had given the wrong answer, immediately began to assure her that they meant he would not be dealt with by the authorities, that there would be no further proceedings, that they had merely allowed him off the plane first for the convenience of other passengers and his own safety, and that he would already be on his way to his desired destination. Esther stared at them with displeasure. ‘You’re a two-faced lot, aren’t you?’ she said, as nastily as she dared, and picked up her canvas bag and marched away, firmly, before they arrested her too for connivance and collaboration and abetting disorder in the skies.
Christmas Day in St John’s Wood. A fearsome scene. Wrapping paper strewed the carpet, waste-paper baskets overflowed, black bags bulged, dirty glasses and plates stood on bookshelves and desks and mantelpieces and stairs, and the washing-up machine ground its way through load after load to no visible effect. The domestic infrastructure could not support its extra burden and Liz, accustomed moreover to three days a week of well-paid skilled domestic help from an energetic young Polish woman, was overwhelmed by the mess, by the indifference of others to that mess. All the younger Headleands were assembled: Jonathan from Bury St Edmunds, with his girlfriend: Aaron from Highbury: Alan from Manchester: Sally and Stella, both of whom still officially lived at home with Liz. They sprawled on settees and bickered in corridors. And there was Charles, traitor Charles, sitting snoring in an armchair, full of turkey and brandy butter and Christmas pudding. Enjoy the peace while it lasts, Liz told herself, as she took cover in a corner behind The Times, as the dark evening thickened. She stroked her cat, also full of turkey, for comfort. The cat sneezed and coughed. Soon, at six, she would ring Alix, up in Leeds: poor Alix, her Christmas ruined by Brian’s father’s funeral, or rather with Brian’s inability to organize a funeral. It hung over them, and Brian’s father lay in the hospital morgue. For years, now, she and Alix had spoken to one another, on Christmas Day at six: it was a tradition. They had not missed in how many years – fifteen, sixteen? They had reassured one another, that there was a world elsewhere, away from the hearth, away from the conflicts of family life.
Esther, the deserter, was eating pasta and prosciutto in Bologna. Wise Esther.
Conflict had sprung up this year where least expected: not between Sally and Charles, who seemed to have buried the hatchet over an amber necklace and a g. and t. (Sally’s new designation, initially adopted to annoy Charles, perhaps, but signally failing to do so, and by now a conspiratorial mutual joke), but between Jonathan and Alan, between Jonathan and Charles, a three-cornered conflict, an Oedipal/fraternal triangle. Jonathan and Charles had always got on well before: now they provoked one another deliberately, and Alan, usually aloof, had involved himself in the fray. It was to do with television: and Liz, glancing at her watch, felt her spirits sink as the door opened, as Charles woke with a start, as Jonathan burst in with a fresh pile of video cassettes.
They were back on it again: television talk. ‘Now look, Dad,’ thirty-year-old Jonathan was saying, crouching on the floor and twiddling with the video control, ‘look, just look at this sequence,’ and he began to play yet again a piece of his own recent film about life at an expensive, sporty, minor public school. Liz yawned, resentfully: how silly they both were: squabbling jealously, childishly, the pair of them: and all because Jonathan’s programme had been well received, had won an award, had been a succès d’estime. It was a direct challenge to his father: he had first shown Charles the film immediately on Charles’s arrival, three evenings earlier, and Charles had gone straight back to his hotel room and devoted an hour on the telephone to rustling up some old copies of his own classic on education in the sixties, The Radiant Way, and had played them, relentlessly, competitively, mournfully, angrily, nostalgically, on Christmas Eve. Now here they were on Christmas Day, still at it. Alan, slouched on the settee, opened his eyes and shouted at Jonathan, ‘Turn that bloody thing off, Jon, I’m not sitting through that crap again’: ‘Shut up, son,’ said Charles, leaning forward, belching, his attention gripped, despite himself, by Jonathan’s camera technique: and on they went, round and round again, the same old insults, the same old arguments. Alan hated the film because it showed a crowd of upper-middle-class twits making fools of themselves for the entertainment of the nation, egged on, in his view, by Jonathan: Jonathan would then claim his film was social satire, or at least that Alan ought so to perceive it: Alan would retort that Jonathan’s own position was neither objective nor satiric, but simply vacuous, timeserving, frivolous: what’s wrong with frivolity, Aaron would interject, to keep them all at it, to the irritation of both: your film’s got no moral centre, look at the difference from The Radiant Way. That was a committed film, Alan would argue: yes, and look where Charles stands now, Jonathan would respond, look where commitment gets you: what’s wrong with where I stand, Charles would retort: and on they would go, hopping round and round the same old treadmill, each shifted by the others from his natural position, Alan forced to occupy the role of snarling Thersites, Aaron the role of Oscar Wilde, and Charles – most oddly of all – finally forced into the role of peacemaker, as his sons went for one another and for him. It was all Jonathan’s fault, Liz suspected, for making so naked a bid for power, so naïve and theatening a claim to his father’s respect, and yet of them all Jonathan appeared the smoothest, the most controlled, the least engaged in the dispute. She remembered them as small children, rolling, fighting, on the floor. And now Jonathan has a handsome salary, a self-possessed girlfriend called Xanthe (Liz does not like her much, she talks too much about food, but she hopes Jonathan has settled at last) and parked outside stands his smart new car, a competitive red GTI convertible.
Liz was rather impressed by Alan’s dismissal of Jonathan’s successful film, which she would never have been able to formulate herself. So, she could see, was Sally, though Sally was trying not to be involved. Jonathan’s film was, as Alan had said, curiously unfocused in intent if not in image, its mocking, tongue-in-cheek evocations of privilege and prejudice curiously flattering to viewer and subject: For Amusement Only, it seemed to say. And yet, and yet – it was smooth, acute, revealing, and Jonathan was rightly enjoying his success. It was mean of Alan to try to spoil it, petty of him to envy it: did he not thereby invalidate the moral grounds of his own objections? Liz yawned again, as she watched a languid dinner-jacketed young seventeen-year-old speaking about the thrills of gatecrashing parties and stealing kegs of beer; and describing the delights of filling the evening bags of dull young women with Camembert when they weren’t looking: claiming that he had slept with the matron of his previous school when he was only fifteen. ‘As a social document,’ Alan was beginning, once more, to argue, ‘that sequence is completely worthless. I’m sure Dad would agree you can tell the boy is lying, what’s the point of filming that?’ Jonathan said something about the revealing nature of
people’s fantasies, and tried to invoke Liz’s support, but Alan was not to be deterred: ‘Fantasy,’ he reiterated, ‘fantasy, that’s all we get fed these days, we can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, we watch garbage, night after night, we’ve all gone soft in the brain.’ ‘And what are you doing about it, up there in Manchester, teaching political theory? You’re just pandering to another kind of fantasy; the fantasy of social progress, the discredited dream of Utopia, better to show people as they are, than to make them dream they can have what they can’t have.’ ‘I don’t think he was lying,’ said Stella, who had been placidly knitting throughout this, ‘I know lots and lots of people at Cambridge who are just like that.’ ‘Well, that’s your problem,’ said Alan, but not very viciously, because she was, after all, only his half-sister and his baby half-sister at that. ‘No, it’s not,’ said Sally disloyally, ‘there really are lots of people like that, it’s just that you go through life ignoring them – you live in an even more self-selected world than Jonathan.’
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