‘Our clients aren’t in that league. I suppose we wouldn’t have to tell anyone that. Just turn up and have a ball.’
‘We aren’t going to have the time, unless I change the plane tickets. We have to tell these United people right now.’
‘For an extra thousand?’ she said. ‘And it might be interesting. If all the other people they wrote to are travel agents, we could learn a lot.’
‘That’s a point‚’ he said. ‘Okay.’
*
They stayed up all night, writing memos and leaving messages, taking things out of their suitcases and putting them back again. When, the next evening, they were finally on the plane, they both felt slugged. He wanted to order some drinks, to relax.
‘You can’t be serious,’ she told him. ‘That dehydrates you. It’ll make you feel terrible. And they say jet-lag hits you a lot worse if you drink. That’s what I read in that body book.’
‘Well, my body book says a little drink never hurt anyone.’ He ordered a double for himself. She stuck to water. They came out nearly equal, because she’d been tired to begin with and she always fretted more than he did.
They landed in the morning, had an hour’s sleep, made themselves get up and go sightseeing, and ate their evening meal early. Already they were glad they had come. Beth kept saying, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t everything beautiful?’ He said yes; he was more interested in seeing what was happening to her than in looking at the sights. He’d been worried about her for a long time. Her friend, Faye, was all right but the other one, Ella, was certifiable: she had a bad influence on Beth. Ella had turned into some sort of religious or ESP fanatic. She’d tried to make Beth believe totally crazy things, such as that it was possible to go through walls by concentrating on an imaginary black dot in front of your eyes. She’d told Beth to meditate and to sing certain notes and melodic phrases and to go on diets. Luckily Beth couldn’t prevent herself from nibbling potato chips, wasn’t able to carry a tune for long and fell asleep as soon as she relaxed; she hadn’t needed all that. One look at her now would have convinced anyone: what she’d needed was a break. She’d even become flirtatious.
‘It’s like our honeymoon‚’ she said.
‘Without the mosquitoes‚’ he reminded her.
‘But, darling, that was the best part.’ She made a face at him. The phrase was from a family joke – something to do with the part of a lobster you weren’t supposed to eat because it could kill you.
‘The second-best‚’ he said, leaning over from the other side of the table to catch hold of her hand.
They spent the weekend in London, then they visited the two Devon hotels on their list, looked in at the Stratford guesthouse and did the Stonehenge trip. On the fifth day they felt tired, but that was simply the reaction they called ‘traveler’s dip’: everyone had at least one day of it. After that, you straightened out.
*
The temperature dropped as they boarded the plane. Beth wondered if she should have brought an extra sweater with her; she’d had her shopping-spree clothes sent back home.
‘Cold,’ Alan said, lifting his head. ‘Scandinavia, here we come.’ He settled down to read, while Beth shut her eyes and tried to doze. She didn’t like flying. What she used to tell her clients was that it was exactly like a bus ride, only safer; but, naturally, that wasn’t quite true: even if you could adjust the air-conditioning nozzles so that they didn’t shoot jets of air straight on to your head, the pressure made a difference. It did something to the fluid in all the sinus passages. It gave you a headache. That was funny, she thought: the travel agent who didn’t like to travel.
She went right under for a few minutes. Alan had to touch her shoulder to wake her up. They were beginning the descent.
She got her handbag from under the seat in front of her, redid her lipstick and combed her hair. She pulled her seat belt tighter. At the same instant the plane braked suddenly, unnaturally; everyone was tossed forward. A steward’s voice, omitting the usual, ‘Ladies and gentlemen’, spoke loudly over the address system, saying, ‘Fasten your safety belts, please. We’re experiencing some turbulence.’ Although there was no indication of what it could be, everyone knew: something had gone seriously wrong. This wasn’t a small or incidental disturbance. There were murmurs of distress among the passengers. Several people had been thrown against the seats and had hurt their heads or broken the glasses they were wearing. And they were frightened.
The engines of the plane began to roar. Beth wanted to reach for Alan’s hand, but she knew he wouldn’t like it. She was relieved and pleased when, without saying anything, he placed his hand lightly over hers.
The noise stopped, but they seemed to be falling fast. All at once they were plunging, rushing. A man’s voice, abruptly, announced, ‘Attention, all passengers. Prepare for an emergency landing.’ The rest of the message was cut off as the plane screamed. Many of the passengers too were shrieking, crying, moaning. Beth and Alan looked at each other. His hand gripped hers. Her lips moved. She said, into the uproar, that she loved him. He said something back, which she couldn’t lip-read; it might have been Thanks for everything, Happy landings, or We should have drunk our duty-free bottle. The plane crashed.
She was still trying to undo her belt while he was up from his seat and out into the aisle, pushing a space clear for both of them. The air was bitter with smoke. Everyone was yelling and fighting. Fire fanned towards them from the rear of the aircraft. She kicked herself free of the seat in front of her. She scrambled to her feet. Alan had gone. The thrashing crowd had carried him away from her. She could just see him, a long way off. He turned back. He was shouting. She tried to get into the aisle, but it was no use. She held her arms out to him. There was an explosion. High flames shot up from the seats near the front exits. Across a wave of fire she saw him, looking back at her. A fierce heat blasted the left side of her face, her shoulder and hand. She jumped back. She couldn’t protect herself: the flames were everywhere. She knew it was too late.
She woke up. Alan was standing in the aisle. He was getting the coats down from the overhead locker. They had landed. The other passengers were collecting their belongings.
‘Okay?’ he said. She nodded, unbuckling her seat belt. She was too shaken to speak. She never wanted to talk about the dream. She didn’t even want to go over it in her mind. It had made her feel sick in a way that was worse than anything she could remember, even the nightmares of childhood. She kept herself busy with her flight bag and shoulder bag until everyone began to move down the aisle. Alan said, ‘All we have to do now is find that other plane.’
They put their carry-on luggage on a trolley they found in the airport building. Beth stayed with it while Alan went to investigate. Now that she felt calmer, she would have liked to tell him something about the dream – only a hint, to get rid of it herself by sharing it; but she had the feeling that to mention it at all would bring bad luck. It might turn something into a reality that, so far, was only thought.
It would be nice, she thought, to have a long, cool drink; better yet, to wade into a pool of refreshing water. She imagined doing it – stepping in slowly. She could picture the water, pure and effervescent as a drink of bottled mineral water. She thought of the fountain back at the mall, in the center of the meeting place by the arcades, near their office, at home.
Alan was at her side again. He said, ‘I’ve found it. We’ll have to walk a long way, but there’s plenty of time.’
‘Good. I’d love a nice, big drink of spring water.’
‘Oh, Beth. Can’t it wait?’
‘I guess so. I thought we had so much time.’
He started to push the trolley forward. ‘We’ve got time to catch the plane,’ he said. ‘No customs. They’ll look at our passports and cards at the gate.’
She followed him. She wondered if her thirst had been brought on by dreaming of fire; or, it might have been the other way around – that her mind had produced a fire-dream to account for a
thirst she’d already felt in her sleep.
They reached a smooth passageway, slightly ramped. Alan raced along it with the trolley. She trotted to keep up. ‘I had a terrible dream,’ she said.
‘So did I.’
‘About the plane.’
‘Uh-huh. Don’t tell me.’
She didn’t think he’d had any dream. He simply hoped to stop her talking. There were times when he didn’t enjoy keeping up a conversation: when she’d be rattling away on some topic and all at once would notice that he was taking part reluctantly. In the early days of their marriage she’d been hurt by that kind of thing. Now it didn’t bother her. People were different not just in temperament but in their sense of pace. There was no reason why they should be in perfect symmetry every moment of the day and night; it was probably just those incongruities that kept them attached to each other for so long.
They had to wait for two officials to look at their airline tickets and passports, then they were motioned towards another hallway; it led to a waiting room where their bags were taken from them, to be loaded on to the plane.
They studied the other people in the room – four couples, one man on his own and a single woman. The couples seemed to be much like themselves; one of the women was pretty, one had red hair, one was fat. The redhead’s husband had a mustache, slicked-back hair and a sharp-featured face. He looked like a bandleader from the thirties. Another husband, standing up, was tall and beefy and was dressed in a frontiersman’s outfit: fringed deerskin jacket, stetson and western boots. ‘Myron,’ his wife called to him. Myron returned to his seat. He put his hands on his knees. His wife – definitely a city type – had on a dark business suit and black patent-leather shoes with very high heels. She handed him a map, which he accepted without interest.
‘Look at that woman’s shoes,’ Beth said to Alan. ‘I thought we were all supposed to be travel agents. One of the first things I tell a female client is not to wear exaggerated heels on a plane. She must be incredibly uncomfortable.’
‘Maybe they came here by car. It’s a short flight, anyway.’
‘Well, just the same.’
The single man – tidy, bespectacled and wearing tweeds – resembled a math teacher at the school Alan had gone to the year before highschool. The man reminded him all at once of the whole year: of the street corner where he’d waited for the bus; and the drive out to the school through the suburbs and into what looked almost like real country. There were several nice houses they passed; a park, and streets with big trees on either side. There was one particular part of the ride he’d never forget – a stretch of road lined by tall maple trees that arched over and formed a tunnel: in the fall it was like driving through a land of jewelry, the leaves scarlet and gold. Every morning for about two weeks he was made happy by the sight of that gorgeous avenue. He would have liked to see it going in the other direction too, but in the afternoon the busdriver took a different route. He’d thought then: some places made an impression on you that you never recovered from. They were special. Some of them used to be hard to reach, yet now that air travel was so easy, it was possible to get to countries and landscapes that – only as far back as the last century – couldn’t have been visited by anyone but explorers and pilgrims. That was one way in which the world had improved; the convenience of modern travel was wonderful.
At that age, when he was young, he’d wanted to go everywhere, anywhere: after Europe, to Asia, the South Seas, Africa and South America. He’d wanted to get to the Arctic. He’d yearned for places where no one else had ever been. And later, he’d hoped to open up the world to other people; to allow them to be in marvelous places and to see fascinating things. He’d never quite outgrown his adolescent longing, never completely achieved his dream, which was to find himself suddenly, and as if magically, somewhere else. And, as it had turned out, the one place that was the most beautiful for him had been at home: on that ride through the maple trees. They had remained his vision of beauty on earth, of the best from all the world outside the school bus. He hadn’t realized it before. He’d forgotten, for years.
‘That woman looks like your Aunt Nora‚’ Beth said.
He looked. The woman was the one he’d decided was unattached. When he’d first noticed her, she’d had her head down and was reading a booklet. Now that she was talking with the tweedy man, he could see what Beth meant, although he didn’t agree. ‘Sort of‚’ he told her, ‘but not much.’
Two airline officials, a man and a woman, came through the entrance. Their uniforms were immaculate, their smiles toothy. They looked a little like mannikins from a store window – perfectly regular and bland. The woman stood at the microphone and made an announcement: they could board the plane. Everything was ready. The passengers stood. Beth and Alan joined the group.
They had to duck to get into the small plane, and to crouch as they moved to their seats. The aircraft had fourteen seats, seven on each side.
It was a bumpy ride. The engines made so much noise that conversation was out of the question. Beth tried to sleep. She closed her eyes, but couldn’t drift off. She felt as if they’d been traveling for years. It was impossible to imagine going back home. London had vanished from her mind, together with America. The house, work, the office in the mall, were like memories from as long ago as early childhood.
Alan looked across the aisle at her. They were near enough to hold hands without stretching, if they wanted to. He would have liked to reach out to her, but he saw that she was trying to sleep. He had no wish to sleep. He’d had his fill of nightmares. The one he’d had on the plane from London was enough to last him a lifetime; he’d dreamt that they’d crash-landed in flames, that he’d jumped out of his seat to get a place for both of them in the aisle; and as soon as he’d turned around to help pull Beth clear, the other passengers had swept him away. The dream ended as she was holding her hands out after him, the fire roaring towards her, and he was being carried ever farther away.
It was only a cliché, of course – one of the basic dreams; one of the earliest myths: Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Euridice. You turned around and she was gone, or dying, or transformed. Or, maybe, just divorced. It was possible that that was his real fear. Years before, for a long time, he’d wanted to leave her. He’d waited for the right moment to talk about it. But time passed, the moment never came and suddenly everything was all right again. Now he was afraid that perhaps what had happened to him could happen to her. One day she might feel that she’d just had enough, and she’d want to get out.
Their landing this time was easy. All the passengers had to stoop, almost to crawl, out of the cramped cabin. It was like emerging from a cocoon or coming up from a tunnel.
The plane sat in the middle of an enormous clearing surrounded by pinewoods. A road ran across one end. Near the road stood a shed with a corrugated metal roof. Boxes were stacked against two of the walls and piled up next to a neighboring shack. A mound of fuel drums had been set some distance away from the buildings and also from the trees. There were no other planes in sight.
Their transportation was waiting. As Alan and Beth stepped down from the narrow ladder, people were already pointing at two old-fashioned, horse-drawn carriages that were heading towards them from the shelter of the woods.
‘Not bad‚’ Beth said. ‘Right on time.’
‘They probably pulled up back in the trees there‚’ he told her. ‘Otherwise the horses might have been spooked by the plane.’ He knew nothing about horses. He was guessing. In the early days of their marriage she’d been in the habit of asking him all kinds of questions, as though he were an authority on everything; and he’d taken to acting like one: if he thought or suspected a thing, he’d say it was true, certain. It gave him confidence in his abilities. His speculation became fact. The odd thing was that so often he turned out to be right. Sometimes he even felt that he had insights of a kind that could be called psychic; he’d know things almost before they happened – not that he really believed in su
ch powers, but belief was part of the phenomenon: her faith in him had made him capable. It might also be true that his unwillingness to concede an equal capacity in her had kept her in a state where she didn’t feel that her life was important, or that she had anything special to contribute. He’d taught her to assert herself when she was at the office. Outside business hours, she was unchanged. What she needed, he thought, was just one or two friends who weren’t crazy. A woman should have a few women friends, so that they could all get together every week and complain about their husbands and families, not bring everything home to the dinner table.
The robotlike steward and stewardess unloaded suitcases. The carriages stood one beside the other, facing the same way; every so often one of the horses on the inside would swing its head over and try to nip the nearby horse of the other pair.
They joined the rest of their group, who were already getting into the high seats. Alan chose the carriage that had their bags on it. He climbed up and held out a hand to pull Beth after him. They were sitting next to the redhead, Gina, and her bandleader husband, who was called Sonny. Like Beth, Gina worked in her husband’s business. ‘We met‚’ she told Beth, ‘when we were both operating one-man outfits.’
‘She kept cutting my sales down to nothing,’ Sonny said. ‘I got to thinking: Who is this broad? I figured I’d better go straighten her out, make some kind of a deal with her. So, one day I drop in at the address, I open the door, and – wham, it’s just like the songs: there she is sitting there, and Love came and tapped me on the shoulder. That’s how we amalgamated.’
Gina said, ‘We sure did. We amalgamated in under twenty-four hours.’
The single woman, who had taken her seat in front of them, turned around and smiled. She introduced herself. Her name was Myrtle. She’d been talking to the tweedy man, Horace, who was worried about whether the coachman had packed his bag upright and not sideways. ‘I’ve got a lot of bottles in it,’ he explained.
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