‘No!’ breathed Cassie. ‘And is it all right now?’
‘Intensive care,’ says Judith. ‘Touch and go. As Derek said when I told him, it makes you wonder what Sally’s legal position would be.’
‘The number of children I know with a fatal nut allergy,’ groans Cassie. ‘I live in terror.’
She draws her sunglasses out of her bag and puts them on, but this does not prevent Judith from noticing the tears in her eyes.
‘I’m a bit fed up,’ explains Cassie. ‘The doctor says he can’t do anything about this trouble with my ears.’
‘It’s the colour of your downstairs,’ says Judith without missing a beat. ‘You should get my Feng Shui friend in. Anyone who has ear trouble, sinusitis, catarrh, that sort of thing, they should never have walls that colour.’
‘What, magnolia?’ says Cassie.
‘Cream,’ Judith corrects her. ‘Dairy products. Milk. Cheese. Terribly mucilaginous. You should ring my Feng Shui friend. What have you got to lose?’
‘This ringing noise, for a start,’ says Cassie, smacking the side of her head, exasperated.
She spends the next couple of hours in the park pleasantly enough, watching the children and chatting to her friend, but not for one minute does she lose awareness of the minatory knife-sharpening noise inside her skull.
The official transition from afternoon to evening in Kew is marked at this time of year by the lighting of a thousand barbecues. This Saturday it is Cassie’s neighbour’s turn to host the road’s annual summer party. The seasonal stench of paraffin and hickory-impregnated briquettes hangs low in the muggy air.
The women stand in clumps on the patio, sipping white wine and keeping an eye on the children, who surge around the forest their solid legs provide. The men have gravitated to the end of the garden under the trees where they help themselves to icy cans of lager from the turquoise cool-box standing on the picnic table.
Above them roars a steady stream of package flights and others. It is now at that point in the year when there are always three planes in the visible arch of the sky, lined up like formation gymnasts. Every forty seconds the barbecue guests fall silent without thinking at the peak of the central plane’s trajectory, and then carry on as normal. Cassie remembers her first summer here and the way, inaudible through the din, people had mouthed at her like earnest goldfish: ‘You don’t even notice it after a while.’
She pours herself a third glass of wine and joins a group of women who are talking about what they are going to do on New Year’s Eve. Carol has booked a family package to Paris, where it is rumoured the Eiffel Tower will lay a giant egg. Donna, recently divorced, hopes to fly to Tonga for a seafood feast on the night, if she can sort out the trouble with the Air Miles people; then on to Samoa. Christine is hoping to dodge across the dateline on Concorde so that she can see the new century dawn twice.
‘I was just saying to Nigel the other day,’ says Amanda from number twelve, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to see the sun rise from Mount Kilimanjaro. But I don’t know what we’d do with the children, nobody’ll be wanting to babysit that night, will they?’
‘I really don’t see why air travel has to be so convenient and cheap,’ says Cassie. ‘People should think twice before crossing the world.’
It is exactly as though she has not spoken. Nobody ever listens to me, she thinks.
‘Frivolous and greedy,’ she throws in for good measure.
‘Amanda went down to Cornwall for the eclipse last week, didn’t you Amanda,’ says Donna. ‘On that overnight train from Paddington, what was it called; champagne breakfast, the works.’
‘The Fin de Siècle something or other,’ says Amanda. ‘Yes, it was a bit gloomy, the actual eclipse, but the rest of it was a really good laugh.’
‘My God! Look at those ants!’ cries Carol with a faint scream, having caught sight of the swarming insect mass pouring out from an airbrick. ‘They’ve all grown wings!’
She runs off indoors for a kettle of boiling water while the rest of them crouch down to examine the glistening insect mass.
‘They look a lot bigger than normal ants,’ says Amanda.
‘Probably from France,’ says Donna. ‘You know, like the Eurowasps. Double the size.’
‘Oh, not Europe again,’ says Amanda, tutting.
Cassie fills her glass and walks unsteadily off across the lawn towards the men. She has that sense of being able to see everything with perfect clarity, but nobody will listen to her.
The men are talking about whether the new century really only starts on the first of January 2001, as the spoilsport Swiss claim, and are speculating about how many work days will be lost, how long the celebrations and their hangovers will last.
‘The good thing about the beginning of the year 2000,’ says Christine’s husband Greg, ‘is that January the first is a Saturday so everyone will have the Sunday and the Monday to recover, because of course the Monday will be a bank holiday.’
‘By then there’ll have been a tidal wave of computer crashes,’ says Amanda’s husband Nigel, with relish. ‘It’ll be the El Nino of I.T. I tell you, it’s unbelievable, half these guys I see haven’t even started to address the Y2K problem.’
‘Heads in the sand,’ nods Carol’s husband Terry. ‘We’re talking global economic meltdown.’
‘Worse than that,’ says Cassie. ‘A thousand times worse.’
‘Steven not back from the Philippines yet?’ asks Terry, acknowledging her presence.
‘He’s up there right at this moment,’ sighs Cassie, pointing at the sky.
‘Let’s hope air traffic control has sorted itself out before next year,’ Greg chuckles knowingly. ‘Because it’s set to be the busiest year in aviation history.’ He rubs his hands together and grins. ‘Just make sure you’re not partying under the flight path on New Year’s Eve. Take it from me.’
‘They’re saying there’ll be record levels of suicide attempts on the thirty-first of December,’ muses Greg. ‘Seems a funny time to do it.’
‘I reckon they’re including the doom and gloom merchants in those statistics,’ says Terry. ‘Like the ones camping out in the Himalayas. I mean, you’re going to look a right plonker when the end of the world doesn’t come, aren’t you, so the only logical thing then is to top yourself.’
‘You can’t afford to worry about these things,’ says Greg. ‘Listen, we’re due a sunstorm next year, which is when the US tracking system goes down. Completely useless. Perfect opportunity for a nuclear attack. Germ warfare. Let’s hope the bad boys haven’t figured that one out.’
He takes a big gulp of lager and shrugs.
‘Too late,’ says Cassie obscurely, mournfully. She knows anything she says now is mere babbling into the wind.
‘Cheer up, Cassandra,’ Terry chides. ‘It may never happen.’
Cassie looks over to where her boys are laughing and playing.
‘That’s the trouble,’ she insists. ‘It will. Any minute now.’
On board British Airways flight 666 from Manila the air is exhausted after thirteen hours of being recycled. It has been in and out of every lung on board and is now damply laden with droplet infection.
Steven is grey-faced and crumbling with jet-lag. He rubs his eyes, his whole face, and the tired flesh moves back and forth in folds. Bloody wild goose chase, he says to himself, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes till they creak. Now he is nearly home, and glad that it’s a Saturday. He’ll be able to catch up on sleep. There has been a child nearby who has been crying for much of the journey, troubled by a recurrence of the sinusitis contracted earlier in summer while on a transatlantic flight to Disneyland with his father, who is from Boston, then back to his mother, who is English but works in Hong Kong where she met and married his father. Although now they are divorced.
The weary pretty air hostess smiles at Steven with just that quality of sympathetic tenderness he wishes Cassie would show him more often.
‘Would you like a dr
ink, sir?’
As she searches her trolley for a miniature Glenfiddich, she thinks ahead to this evening when she and her husband must have sex. Her next set of IVF injections is due next week; she only hopes the airline won’t mess her flights around again or that’s another month wasted. She’ll be forty-one in October, and she’s been doing this job for twenty years.
The pilot meanwhile rubs his eyes and takes a message from air traffic control. This descent to Heathrow has become a regular white-knuckle ride since they reduced the distance between incoming aircraft to a mere mile. A little bit of a holding delay here to fit into the landing sequence, he says suavely into the microphone. The planes are stacked up now, and with all that confusion between West Drayton and Swanwick recently too, he can’t remember feeling as jittery as this on a routine flight in his entire career.
The sky darkens like a tyrant’s face, from ordinary pallor into deep fierce violet-grey. There is yellow lightning, the forked flicker of a monstrous snake’s tongue, then a grandiloquent roll of thunder like the tattoo before an execution. Above the general steam and vapour scowls a rainbow arch of refracted brilliance.
The aircraft continue to follow the trajectory of this arch on their descent to Heathrow, and now they fly one after the other into an ominously gigantic boxer’s ear of a cloud. Lost in this vaporous mass, British Airways flight 666 from Manila follows an instruction from the arrivals controller until it finds itself fifty feet vertically and a hundred feet horizontally from a Virgin Express Boeing 737 acting on a contradictory instruction. Then both pilots become aware of the danger at the same time, and the incident almost becomes another near-miss for investigation by the Department of Transport. But not quite.
There is a noise like the crack of doom. The enormous cloud lights up as though targeted by a celestial flame-thrower. Over in West Drayton a man in air traffic control has a heart attack which leads directly to the mid-air conflagration of a dozen more incoming flights.
Now aircraft like stingray are plunging, yellow eyes aglare, roaring and screaming as they explode into the glass houses at Kew Gardens and decimate the placid domestic streets surrounding. Steven joins his wife and children, but only in a manner of speaking. Piecemeal. Planes plough into the Hogarth roundabout at Chiswick and put an end to the permanent crawl of the South Circular. A row of double-fronted villas in Castelnau is flattened like a pack of cards, then rises in flames, joined by adjacent avenues of blazing red-brick houses. Mortlake is obliterated and Worple Way razed to the ground. East Sheen is utterly laid waste.
Fire consumes the sky and falls to earth in flaming comets and limbs and molten fragments of fuselage, where for two days and nights it will devour flesh and grass and much else besides in a terrible and unnatural firestorm for miles around south-west London.
And of course that – as Cassie would say were she still in one piece – that is only the beginning.
Burns and the Bankers
They were sitting down at last. There were over a thousand of them. All that breath and flesh meant the air beneath the chandeliers had very soon climbed to blood heat despite the dark sparkle of frost outside on Park Lane. An immense prosperous hum filled the hotel ballroom, as if all the worker bees of the British Isles were met to celebrate industriousness.
Nicola Beaumont used her tartan-ribboned menu to fan herself. The invitation had said six-thirty, so she had dashed straight from Ludgate Hill, having changed in literally two minutes in the Ladies, after a meeting with Counsel which had stretched out far too long; at the end of a day which had started with an eight o’clock meeting; with heels, earrings and lipstick going on in the back of the cab here; only to find that they were expected to stand around drinking alcohol for over an hour. And she’d somehow forgotten to prepare herself for the inevitable Caledonian overkill, all these sporrans and dirks and coy talk of the lassies.
Big Dougal was down from Edinburgh for the occasion, she’d noted, encircled by a servile coterie of younger men. She had been standing near enough to hear fragments of the incredibly circumlocutory anecdote with which he was, as he would no doubt have put it, regaling them. ‘. . . And that young gentleman, desirous of purchasing a property not a million miles away from the aforementioned office in Dumfries, then found himself embroiled in negotiations of a not entirely shall we say salubrious nature . . .’
Oh what windbags the Scots are, thought Nicola, she always forgot in between, but what blowhard old windbags they are really. Look at these young men smiling like stiff-necked nutcrackers, the ricti of servile mirth baring their teeth. It was a terrible thing, ambition; or, as Dougie would doubtless have put it, the desire for advancement. She herself had climbed the greasy pole a while back, she had been a full partner for six years now, so that slavish part of it was behind her, thank heavens; although of course the business of winning and pleasing clients was ongoing. That was why she was here now holding a tumbler of whisky – how she hated whisky, the stink of it, the rubbish they talked about it. But this was an important anniversary year for the Federation of Caledonian Bankers and they had decided to mark it by bringing together senior staff, clients and professional advisers for a mega-Burns Night.
She turned towards another group. Here, a lawyer she knew who had recently been made a partner at Clarence Sweets was talking to the head leasing partner at Iddon Featherstone, each with a black-tied husband at her elbow.
‘But is he good with them at weekends?’ the Clarence Sweets woman was eagerly demanding. ‘Hands on, I mean.’
‘Oh yes, he takes them swimming,’ said the head leasing partner. ‘Out on their bikes.’ She shrugged. ‘Though of course he’s usually working at weekends.’
The husbands under discussion gazed into their tumblers of whisky like wordless children. Each of the four standing there had that day crammed twelve hours’ worth of work into ten in order to attend this banquet, and the whisky was hitting stomachs which had long since forgotten the snatched midday sandwich.
No, I do not want to compare nightmare journey times to the Suzuki session, thought Nicola, whose four-year-old twins went to the same violin teacher as the Clarence Sweets woman’s daughter, somewhere out in Surrey, every Saturday. She scanned the packed room and caught sight of her husband Charlie on the other side, arriving late. He was looking stockier than ever. All that flying he’d had to do in the last year hadn’t helped, she thought; six or seven times a month recently, including Japan and Australia. Not good for the waistline. Not good for the heart.
By the time she’d threaded her way across through the crowd, Torquil Cameron had got his mitts on Charlie. That was sharp of him, to remember him from Goodwood.
‘A-ha,’ smiled Torquil above his frilly jabot, then he bowed from the hips in that way men do in kilts, the better to show off his pleats, the swing of them. ‘Delighted you could be here, Nicola. As you can see I’ve located your other half for you. Now I don’t think you’ve met my own good lady wife, Jean.’ Jean stood by him, the colour of a brick, free of make-up, in her fifties and a girlish white ballgown with a plaid sash athwart her bosom. She smiled at Nicola, who was wearing a black crêpe trousersuit, and her eyes showed disapproval mixed with shyness and fear.
‘So, Nicola!’ boomed Torquil. ‘When was it exactly, the last time we had the pleasure of seeing you up in Auld Reekie?’
‘Oh, not long ago, I think,’ smiled Nicola, wondering why he had to be so ponderous. ‘It was October, wasn’t it? There was that day of meetings about the Yellow Target business. You took us all out for a good lunch at the Witchery, I seem to remember.’
‘That’s right, that’s right!’ crowed Torquil as though delighted and relieved. He turned to Charlie. ‘You’ll be looking forward to your haggis then?’ he enquired. Charlie smiled wanly.
Following this welcome there had been an interminable stretch of time during which the thousand guests drifted slow as plankton past the seating plan and from there down the huge staircase into the ballroom.
&nb
sp; ‘The things I do for you,’ Charlie had muttered as they shuffled down the stairs.
‘I sat through Die mostincrediblyboringold Meistersinger only last week for your lot,’ she had reminded him. ‘Four hours.’
‘This’ll be longer.’
‘And Orpheus and Eurydice the week before.’
‘That was short.’
‘You’ll be all right,’ she had said crossly. ‘Lots of whisky.’
‘Did Harry make it into the team, d’you know?’
‘As a reserve.’
Charlie had given a vexed snort.
‘That boy. He’s perfectly capable of it. He just doesn’t try.’
‘He said he missed the shot which would have got him a place. Just bad luck. He’s very disappointed.’
‘So he should be.’
Their lives were both so busy that times of idleness alone together like this, on the staircase in a queue, were few and far between. They had over the years developed a breezy shorthand for talking about their four children, for exchanging vital information and intimate views as economically as possible, rather like a couple of fighter pilots crewing the same Mosquito.
Nicola had an extraordinarily retentive memory, which was invaluable not only in the practice of law but also at this sort of event, as she could memorise the seating plan and prime herself to ask the right questions about the various sporting activities and children of the clients involved. She was excellent on names and faces. So, as she and Charlie had made their slow way down, her mental picture had been as follows:
The table was bristling with slim silver vases of orchids and bottles of wine standing ready uncorked before forests of glasses and napkins pleated into white cockades and even little silver-plated quaichs, one each engraved with a guest’s name, the date and the crest of the Caledonian Banking Federation.
‘Well, Iain,’ said Nicola to the man seated on her left. ‘This is all very impressive.’
‘And it hasn’t even started yet,’ said Iain. ‘Here, let me pour you a glass. White or red? Have you been to a Burns Night before? No, well, there are a lot of speeches I can warn you, so you’ll be glad of a glass in front of you.’
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