by Muriel Spark
‘How expensive …’
‘Don’t worry. It flows on First.’
‘Will you be going on duty?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I clock in tomorrow.
They made love again, high up in the air.
After that, Cynthia walked back to her former compartment. Professor Sygmund Schatt was having an argument with a hostess about his food which had apparently been pre-ordered, and now, in some way, did not come up to scratch. Cynthia sat in her old seat and, taking a postcard from the pocket in front of her, wrote to her cousin Moira. ‘Having a lovely time at 35,000 feet. I have started a new life. Love XX Cynthia.’ She then felt this former seat was part of the old life, and went back again to first.
In the night Tom came and sat beside her.
‘You didn’t eat much,’ he said.
‘How did you know?’
‘I noticed.’
‘I didn’t feel up to the Christmas dinner,’ she said.
‘Would you like something now?’
‘A turkey sandwich. Let me go and ask the hostess.’
‘Leave it to me.
Tom told her he was now in the final stages of a divorce. His wife had no doubt had a hard time of it, his job taking him away so much. But she could have studied something. She wouldn’t learn, hated to learn.
And he was lonely. He asked her to marry him, and she wasn’t in the least surprised. But she said, ‘Oh, Tom, you don’t know me.
‘I think I do.’
‘We don’t know each other.’
‘Well, I think we should do.’
She said she would think about it. She said she would cancel her plans and come to spend some time in his flat in London at Camden Town.
‘I’ll have my time off within three days — by the end of the week,’ he said.
‘God, is he all right, is he reliable?’ she said to herself. ‘Am I safe with him? Who is he?’ But she was really carried away.
Around four in the morning she woke and found him beside her. He said, ‘It’s Boxing Day now. You’re a lovely girl.’
She had always imagined she was, but had always, so far, fallen timid when with men. She had experienced two brief love affairs in Australia, neither memorable. All alone in the first-class compartment with Tom, high in the air — this was reality, something to be remembered, the start of a new life.
‘I’ll give you the key of the flat,’ he said. ‘Go straight there. Nobody will disturb you. I’ve been sharing it with my young brother. But he’s away for about six weeks I should say. In fact he’s doing time. He got mixed up in a football row and he’s in for grievous bodily harm and affray. Only, the bodily harm wasn’t so grievous. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, the flat’s free for at least six weeks.’
At the airport, despite the early hour of ten past five in the morning, there was quite a crowd to meet the plane. Having retrieved her luggage, Cynthia pushed her trolley towards the exit. She had no expectation whatsoever that anyone would be there to meet her.
Instead, there was her father and his wife, Elaine; there was her mother with her husband Bill; crowding behind them at the barrier were her brother and his girlfriend, her cousin Moira’s cousin by marriage, and a few other men and women whom she did not identify, accompanied, too, by some children of about ten to fourteen. In fact her whole family, known and unknown, had turned out to meet Cynthia. How had they known the hour of her arrival? She had promised, only, to ring them when she got to England. ‘Your cousin Moira,’ said her father, ‘told us your flight. We wanted you home, you know that.’
She went first to her mother’s house. It was now Boxing Day but they had saved Christmas Day for her arrival. All the Christmas rituals were fully observed. The tree and the presents — dozens of presents for Cynthia. Her brother and his girl with some other cousins came over for Christmas dinner.
When they came to open the presents, Cynthia brought out from her luggage a number of packages she had brought from Australia for the occasion. Among them, labelled for her brother, was a plaster Nativity set, made in China.
‘What a nice one,’ said her brother. ‘One of the best I’ve ever seen, and not plastic.’
‘I got it in Moira’s boutique,’ Cynthia said. ‘She has very special things.
She talked a lot about Australia, its marvels. Then, at tea-time, they got down to her aunt’s will, of which Cynthia was an executor. Cynthia felt happy, in her element, as an executor to a will, for she was normally dreamy, not legally minded at all and now she felt the flattery of her aunt’s confidence in her. The executorship gave her some sort of authority in the family. She was now arranging, too, to spend New Year with her father and his second clan.
Her brother had set out the Nativity figures on a table. ‘I don’t know, she said, ‘why the mother and the father are kneeling beside the child; it seems so unreal.’ She didn’t hear what the others said, if anything, in response to this observation. She only felt a strange stirring of memory. There was to be a flat in Camden Town, but she had no idea of the address.
‘The plane stopped at Bangkok,’ she told them.
‘Did you get off?’
‘Yes, but you know you can’t get out of the airport. There was a coffee bar and a lovely shop.’
It was later that day, when she was alone, unpacking, in her room, that she rang the airline.
‘No,’ said a girl’s voice, ‘I don’t think there are curtains with yellow flowers in the first-class cabins. I’ll have to ask. Was there any particular reason …?’
‘There was a co-pilot called Tom. Can you give me his full name please? I have an urgent message for him.’
‘What flight did you say?’
Cynthia told her not only the flight but her name and original seat number in Business Class.
After a long wait, the voice spoke again, ‘Yes, you are one of the arrivals.’
‘I know that,’ said Cynthia.
‘I can’t give you information about our pilots, I’m afraid. But there was no pilot on the plane called Tom … Thomas, no. The stewards in Business were Bob, Andrew, Sheila and Lilian.’
‘No pilot called Tom? About thirty-five, tall, brown hair. I met him. He lives in Camden Town.’ Cynthia gripped the phone. She looked round at the reality of the room.
‘The pilots are Australian; I can tell you that but no more. I’m sorry. They’re our personnel.’
‘It was a memorable flight. Christmas Day. I’ll never forget that one, said Cynthia.
‘Thank you. We appreciate that,’ said the voice. It seemed thousands of miles away.
The First Year of My Life
I was born on the first day of the second month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday. Testimony abounds that during the first year of my life I never smiled. I was known as the baby whom nothing and no one could make smile. Everyone who knew me then has told me so. They tried very hard, singing and bouncing me up and down, jumping around, pulling faces. Many times I was told this later by my family and their friends; but, anyway, I knew it at the time.
You will shortly be hearing of that new school of psychology, or maybe you have heard of it already, which after long and far-adventuring research and experiment has established that all of the young of the human species are born omniscient. Babies, in their waking hours, know everything that is going on everywhere in the world; they can tune in to any conversation they choose, switch on to any scene. We have all experienced this power. It is only after the first year that it was brainwashed out of us; for it is demanded of us by our immediate environment that we grow to be of use to it in a practical way. Gradually, our know-all brain-cells are blacked out although traces remain in some individuals in the form of ESP, and in the adults of some primitive tribes.
It is not a new theory. Poets and philosophers, as usual, have been there first. But scientific proof is now ready and to hand. Perhaps the final touches are being put to the new manifesto in some cell at Har
vard University. Any day now it will be given to the world, and the world will be convinced.
Let me therefore get my word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my remembrance of things past. My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the time, started in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far. Apart from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise myself on the pillow or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, my bladder and my bowels totally out of control, I was further depressed by the curious behaviour of the two-legged mammals around me. There were those black-dressed people, females of the species to which I appeared to belong, saying they had lost their sons. I slept a great deal. Let them go and find their sons. It was like the special pin for my nappies which my mother or some other hoverer dedicated to my care was always losing. These careless women in black lost their husbands and their brothers. Then they came to visit my mother and clucked and crowed over my cradle. I was not amused.
‘Babies never really smile till they’re three months old,’ said my mother. ‘They’re not supposed to smile till they’re three months old.’
My brother, aged six, marched up and down with a toy rifle over his shoulder:
The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up.
And when they were down, they were down.
And when they were neither down nor up
They were neither up nor down.
‘Just listen to him!’
‘Look at him with his rifle!’
I was about ten days old when Russia stopped fighting. I tuned in to the Czar, a prisoner, with the rest of his family, since evidently the country had put him off his throne and there had been a revolution not long before I was born. Everyone was talking about it. I tuned in to the Czar. ‘Nothing would ever induce me to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk,’ he said to his wife. Anyway, nobody had asked him to.
At this point I was sleeping twenty hours a day to get my strength up. And from what I discerned in the other four hours of the day I knew I was going to need it. The Western Front on my frequency was sheer blood, mud, dismembered bodies, blistered crashes, hectic flashes of light in the night skies, explosions, total terror. Since it was plain I had been born into a bad moment in the history of the world, the future bothered me, unable as I was to raise my head from the pillow and as yet only twenty inches long. ‘I truly wish I were a fox or a bird,’ D. H. Lawrence was writing to somebody. Dreary old creeping Jesus. I fell asleep.
Red sheets of flame shot across the sky. It was 21st March, the fiftieth day of my life, and the German Spring Offensive had started before my morning feed. Infinite slaughter. I scowled at the scene, and made an effort to kick out. But the attempt was feeble. Furious, and impatient for some strength, I wailed for my feed. After which I stopped wailing but continued to scowl.
The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men …
They rocked the cradle. I never heard a sillier song. Over in Berlin and Vienna the people were starving, freezing, striking, rioting and yelling in the streets. In London everyone was bustling to work and muttering that it was time the whole damn business was over.
The big people around me bared their teeth; that meant a smile, it meant they were pleased or amused. They spoke of ration cards for meat and sugar and butter.
‘Where will it all end?’
I went to sleep. I woke and tuned in to Bernard Shaw who was telling someone to shut up. I switched over to Joseph Conrad who, strangely enough, was saying precisely the same thing. I still didn’t think it worth a smile, although it was expected of me any day now. I got on to Turkey. Women draped in black huddled and chattered in their harems; yak-yak-yak. This was boring, so I came back to home base.
In and out came and went the women in British black. My mother’s brother, dressed in his uniform, came coughing. He had been poison-gassed in the trenches. ‘Tout le monde à la bataille!’ declaimed Marshal Foch the old swine. He was now Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces. My uncle coughed from deep within his lungs, never to recover but destined to return to the Front. His brass buttons gleamed in the firelight. I weighed twelve pounds by now; I stretched and kicked for exercise, seeing that I had a lifetime before me, coping with this crowd. I took six feeds a day and kept most of them down by the time the Vindictive was sunk in Ostend harbour, on which day I kicked with special vigour in my bath.
In France the conscripted soldiers leapfrogged over the dead on the advance and littered the fields with limbs and hands, or drowned in the mud. The strongest men on all fronts were dead before I was born. Now the sentries used bodies for barricades and the fighting men were unhealthy from the start. I checked my toes and fingers, knowing I was going to need them. The Playboy of the Western World was playing at the Court Theatre in London, but occasionally I beamed over to the House of Commons which made me drop off gently to sleep. Generally, I preferred the Western Front where one got the true state of affairs. It was essential to know the worst, blood and explosions and all, for one had to be prepared, as the boy scouts said. Virginia Woolf yawned and reached for her diary. Really, I preferred the Western Front.
In the fifth month of my life I could raise my head from my pillow and hold it up. I could grasp the objects that were held out to me. Some of these things rattled and squawked. I gnawed on them to get my teeth started. ‘She hasn’t smiled yet?’ said the dreary old aunties. My mother, on the defensive, said I was probably one of those late smilers. On my wavelength Pablo Picasso was getting married and early in that month of July the Silver Wedding of King George V and Queen Mary was celebrated in joyous pomp at St Paul’s Cathedral. They drove through the streets of London with their children. Twenty-five years of domestic happiness. A lot of fuss and ceremonial handing over of swords went on at the Guildhall where the King and Queen received a cheque for £53,000 to dispose of for charity as they thought fit. Tout le monde à la bataille! Income tax in England had reached six shillings in the pound. Everyone was talking about the Silver Wedding; yak-yak-yak, and ten days later the Czar and his family, now in Siberia, were invited to descend to a little room in the basement. Crack, crack, went the guns; screams and blood all over the place, and that was the end of the Romanoffs. I flexed my muscles. ‘A fine healthy baby,’ said the doctor; which gave me much satisfaction.
Tout le monde à la bataille! That included my gassed uncle. My health had improved to the point where I was able to crawl in my playpen. Bertrand Russell was still cheerily in prison for writing something seditious about pacifism. Tuning in as usual to the Front Lines it looked as if the Germans were winning all the battles yet losing the war. And so it was. The upper-income people were upset about the income tax at six shillings to the pound. But all women over thirty got the vote. ‘It seems a long time to wait,’ said one of my drab old aunts, aged twenty-two. The speeches in the House of Commons always sent me to sleep which was why I missed, at the actual time, a certain oration by Mr Asquith following the armistice on 11th November. Mr Asquith was a greatly esteemed former prime minister later to be an Earl, and had been ousted by Mr Lloyd George. I clearly heard Asquith, in private, refer to Lloyd George as ‘that damned Welsh goat’.
The armistice was signed and I was awake for that. I pulled myself on to my feet with the aid of the bars of my cot. My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452. With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the table. One of my mother’s black-draped friends recited:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
&
nbsp; When spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air —
I have a rendezvous with Death.
Most of the poets, they said, had been killed. The poetry made them dab their eyes with clean white handkerchiefs.
Next February on my first birthday, there was a birthday cake with one candle. Lots of children and their elders. The war had been over two months and twenty-one days. ‘Why doesn’t she smile?’ My brother was to blow out the candle. The elders were talking about the war and the political situation. Lloyd George and Asquith, Asquith and Lloyd George. I remembered recently having switched on to Mr Asquith at a private party where he had been drinking a lot. He was playing cards and when he came to cut the cards he tried to cut a large box of matches by mistake. On another occasion I had seen him putting his arm around a lady’s shoulder in a Daimler motor car, and generally behaving towards her in a very friendly fashion. Strangely enough she said, ‘If you don’t stop this nonsense immediately I’ll order the chauffeur to stop and I’ll get out. Mr Asquith replied, ‘And pray, what reason will you give?’ Well anyway it was my feeding time.
The guests arrived for my birthday. It was so sad, said one of the black widows, so sad about Wilfred Owen who was killed so late in the war, and she quoted from a poem of his:
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
The children were squealing and toddling around. One was sick and another wet the floor and stood with his legs apart gaping at the puddle. All was mopped up. I banged my spoon on the table of my high chair.
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town;
When spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.