‘The Thames River is still there,’ pointed out Mrs Collingwood.
Jim examined the map uncertainly but then followed the meander of the river with his finger. ‘That’s something they couldn’t alter,’ he said. ‘They would have if they could, I expect.’ With some searching he found their own location. ‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘Bedmansworth. London Airport wasn’t like it is now. It was just prefabs, Nissen huts, tents in those days. Tents! Can you credit it.’ His hand took in the central area of the map. ‘All Indian country now, this is, Southall, Hayes … all around.’
‘Boondocks, you mean?’ queried the old lady. ‘Backwoods?’ Her daughter thought she knew what he meant. ‘Indians?’ she asked.
‘Indians from India,’ responded Jim sombrely. ‘Not like the Indians you’ve got in America, feathers and that. This is Tandoori Junction. They’re getting everywhere.’
‘We saw them sweeping the airport,’ nodded Mrs Collingwood.
Two people came through the open door. Bramwell Broad blinked in the dimness of the bar. Lettie followed him swaying her hips and smiling. Jim introduced them to the Americans. ‘Lettie’s from the East,’ he said, nodding his head in the right direction.
‘I am from the Philippines,’ supplemented Lettie.
‘It’s all the East to me,’ replied Jim as he pulled a beer for Bramwell. ‘The vicar says the church points east to west.’ He nodded again. ‘The Philippines is somewhere beyond Bedfont.’
‘Would you mind if I asked what you’re drinking?’ asked Rona.
‘We want to try the local drinks,’ her mother agreed vigorously.
Indicating Broad’s tankard, Jim said: ‘We call this bitter.’
Bramwell lifted the beer to the light and said: ‘Cooking bitter.’ He nodded towards his wife. ‘Lettie drinks Ribena.’
‘It looks like wine,’ suggested Pearl. ‘Is it?’
‘Sort of,’ said the landlord. ‘She gets through gallons of it over the course of a year.’ A telephone rang and he turned and went through the curtain at the back of the bar.
‘And what brought you to England?’ Mrs Collingwood asked Lettie kindly.
‘My husband,’ said Lettie seriously. She indicated Bramwell. ‘He paid and I came.’
Dilys reappeared from behind the curtain holding a square of cardboard. ‘Menu for tonight,’ she announced.
She handed the card, embellished with childishly large handwriting, to Rona. ‘Or there’s a nice steak,’ Jim ventured coming through the curtain. ‘Although you probably get fed up with steaks over there.’
Two women came in followed closely by three small men. ‘Oh God,’ muttered Jim. His tone changed: ‘Good evening, Mrs Kitchen.’
‘We’d like our corner,’ announced Mrs Kitchen briskly rubbing her hands. She was bell shaped with a narrowing head like the handle. Almost challengingly she regarded the people in the bar. Her companions stood nodding like dogs.
‘Right you are,’ agreed Jim. ‘It’s reserved especially. Usual drinks? One half of bitter and four lemonades.’
Firmly checking the faces of her party, she answered: ‘Correct.’ Full of purpose she swung her ungainly form around the tables and chairs towards a niche at the distant end of the room. Her plaid-skirted hip pushed one table aside and she moved a solid chair with one sweep of her moccasined foot. Her companions sat themselves obediently around the wooden table, their eyes on Mrs Kitchen. ‘We’d like some light,’ she called towards the bar. Grimacing, Jim put down a switch and a cowled light glimmered over the niche. Mrs Kitchen placed a cardboard file before her. Jim took a tray of drinks to them. ‘Here we are then,’ he said carefully placing the glasses. ‘Half a pint and four lemonades. Hope none of you are driving.’
Two of the men obediently shook their heads but Mrs Kitchen paid no attention. Muttering Jim went away and Mrs Kitchen opened the file with slow importance. ‘I’ve called this emergency action committee meeting,’ she growled, fiercely looking at each anxious face around the table, ‘to report on an unauthorised erection.’
It had rained in the night. It sounded heavier, and a touch frightening, when you were living in a tent. Anthony and Annabelle Burridge had lain awake as it rattled fiercely on the canvas. It was prolonged and both knew what that meant. Groaning by torchlight, he had rolled from bed, tugged his macintosh over his pyjamas, and gone out into the soaked night to loosen the guy ropes. Twice, during the three months it had been their home, the tent had fallen down on them like a sail of a ship.
Seven o’clock, however, saw the rain move sulkily away and the sky clear apologetically. Anthony had been for his run, his trainers spraying through the wet grass; he leapt mud flats and scattered clouds reflected in puddles. Cows grazed below the silvery electric pylons; big rooks squawked as they flew; a cockerel sounded from a shabby farm. The country here was made for jogging; it was as flat as any in England, so level it had been used as a basis for the first Ordnance Survey of the Kingdom in 1750. Flights were lifting steadily from Heathrow, each plane like a deliberately shot arrow into the frothy sky. Up they went, one after the other and, from the other horizon, they approached in the same spaced sequence.
Back at the tent, Anthony drank some coffee and, now in his City clothes, striped trousers, dark coat, and bowler hat, he set out for the underground which would take him into central London. Travelling daily on the line from Heathrow he had become used to the awed gazes of recently landed foreigners in robes and strange hats taking in his City mode of dress. He often sat on the tube, among piles of backpacks, regarded with mystified respect by young Australians and Americans straight off the plane. Older Americans took the bowler and stripes to be the usual and universal London uniform although he had heard with amused satisfaction an occasional whisper of ‘Get that’ as he unfolded his Times.
Annabelle would clear up in the tent, wash the cups in a bucket of stream water and fasten the doorflap. She would walk sturdily in her big summer dress, into the village to catch the bus for Slough where she had a secretarial job with an air freight company.
They remained deeply in debt, but their sense of shipwreck was less now, the sudden shock of being penniless: both their jobs gone, hers following his, having to quit their suburban house, the car repossessed. The sound system, video, television and the expensive dining-room suite not to mention the jacuzzi, the mobile telephones, the home fax, the deep freeze, and the tropical fish in their exotic tank, had all been reclaimed by a surly finance company. The rest of their furniture – apart from their bed – and their expendable chattels had been sold for what they could get and they had walked upright out of the house thanking God they had no children, no dog, no cat.
Disaster had, however, provided the opportunity to test a hypothesis, a game they had played in better days – that it would be possible to live in a suburban tent. They now lived in one, a relic of Annabelle’s time as an enthusiastic Brown Owl. It had been in their garage awaiting the next Brownie camp.
They pitched the tent on rough land near Heathrow surrounded by meadows of mud with a few cows, millions of turnips and cabbages, tangled sheep munching below grid wires that sang in the Middlesex wind and advertisement hoardings that rattled with a sound like kettle drums. They shared a field with a disjointed horse they named Freebie that had been abandoned by some gypsies. Anthony and Annabelle had tried to curry-comb Freebie and had wondered why his legs appeared to be attached to the wrong corners of his body.
They were glad of the site which they rented from a smallholder called Mr Best for three pounds a week. It was summer and they heard frogs in the morning and owls at night. Sometimes the horse stood at the back of the tent while they were in their bed, breathing like a furnace or emitting anal wind, depending on which way he was facing. Sun and rain seeped through narrow gaps in the seams of the tent, needles of yellow light, trembling gobbets of water.
Tony had found some wooden pallets outside the airport perimeter fence apparently tipped from a turning lorry, and f
rom these he had inexpertly fashioned a raised floor.
The tent was almost as spacious as their main room had been in Norbiton but now it had to serve as a whole house. Behind a canvas screen at the back was a chemical lavatory stamped ‘A. Coy. 34th RASC Suez’.
It had been difficult to fit their Norbiton bed into the tent but they were determined to continue sleeping together in it. Clothes – and Tony was pedantic about his – were on hangers suspended from a dress-shop frame. They read by lantern light.
A canvas screen separated the bed area from the living space where there were two deck chairs, an orange-box bookcase of paperbacks, and a sofa that twanged like an untuned harp. They had a plastic table on which they played Scrabble and ate their meals which Annabelle prepared on a wood fire.
In the City of London, where he worked on a commission basis for a troubled broker, Anthony told his colleagues that he and Annabelle had moved to the country for the quality of the life.
His weekday path to the Terminal Four underground station took him along the route of ancient lanes, hedged byways now diminished, as though hiding from the progressive invasion of the airport, and along the side of the concrete-banked Longford River with its enclosed swans. On some mornings he would be greeted by a man who occupied, with a conspicuous defiance, a bench outside a house which had formerly been grand but was now cowering directly below the flight path for Runway Two. Its old windows reflected the rising and descending planes that rattled its doors and frames.
Today the seated figure seemed unusually hunched, as though by a weight of worry, and Anthony Burridge interrupted his own brisk step: ‘Good morning. How’s Sergeant Morris?’
The man scarcely moved, looked up only fractionally, but the reply was uncompromising: ‘Old, sir.’ He nodded backwards towards the house. ‘Like this place, St Sepulchre’s, sir. Old and fucking shaky.’
He appeared prepared to add to the condemnation but an Iberia flight crossing their heads froze conversation. When it had gone, leaving its signature of smoke wriggling low in the sky, the elderly sergeant continued, with a general upward nod. ‘Just like that, see. Shaking the house down. What a place to have a home for old folks, I mean, I ask you. Mind you most of the old fools shake so much anyway a bit more won’t matter. And they’re deaf too, deaf as stones a lot of them.’
An outward flight gathered strength and then came snorting down the runway. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ shouted Anthony. The shadow passed across them like a hand.
‘That’s why it’s cheap,’ admitted Morris in the moment of comparative quiet. ‘Being here. It’s all right if you’re mutt and jeff and you’ve got the shakes, because it’s all the same. But I’m not bloody deaf.’ He pummelled his ear with his fist. ‘I might be before long, mind you.’ It was the turn of his nostrils now. ‘And just smell that muck, that petrol. Clogs your lungs.’ He nodded grimly with the back of his head towards the house again. ‘There’s a few in there that won’t survive till Christmas, believe me, sir.’ His tone changed: ‘Would you like a paper? Save you buying one.’
He reached below his backside. There was a pile of crushed newspapers on the bench. He detached one and attempted to smooth it. ‘Telegraph? Here, have the Telegraph. They’ll never notice.’
‘They come from St Sepulchre’s?’ asked Anthony carefully as he hesitated but then took the proffered newspaper.
‘On the hallstand,’ confirmed the sergeant winking and becoming a touch jovial. ‘Brought them out because I thought the seat might be damp. Poured last night, didn’t it.’
‘But … surely someone will miss it?’
Morris took the point. ‘Better not have the Telegraph,’ he decided taking it back and replacing it on the pile. ‘She’ll miss her rotten crossword and then there’ll be all hell let loose.’ He selected another newspaper. ‘Here, take the Mirror. Barmy as a lark, he is. I’ll give him yesterday’s to read again. He won’t notice.’
‘I’ll get a paper at the station,’ decided Tony.
‘Oh, all right.’ He replaced the Daily Mirror under his buttocks. ‘Off to the City, are you? I like your titfer. The sun shines on it. I can see you coming up the road. I look forward to it.’
He surveyed the grey-green monotonous countryside before him. Another plane ascended over his shoulder. ‘I envy you, I do, son,’ he burst out like a confession. ‘Going off like you do every day, seeing women and buses and everything. When I think of Dunkirk and Alamein, and now this.’ He shrugged.
‘At Dunkirk and Alamein, were you?’ Tony said. He resisted the need to check his watch.
The veined eyelids came up. ‘Not me, but I had a cousin who was. We’re an old army family. My grandad was in India. Belonged to a famous regiment, he did, the Seventeenth Slashers. Me, I was a cook.’
Three
Small shop fronts were strung like shabby washing along the main road before the large, and necessarily squat, Heathrow hotels. Few drivers in the unending heavy daytime traffic took note of them, but ‘Exhaust and Tyre’ was one which Edward Richardson had frequently observed with wry fatigue when going home from a distant flight. There was ‘Elaine (Hair) of Hounslow and Rome’ in company with the cheap premises of finance companies, do-it-yourself and tool hire shops, ‘Knox Brothers’, aptly stone masons, and the ominous ‘Impact Driving School’. There were flagged areas of used and suspiciously shiny cars; steamy launderettes and cafés, newsagents and Indian all-night corner shops.
In that part of Airportland, brick streets, crescents with scarred trees, and cul-de-sacs, patterned out behind the shops; backwaters and byways where children were born to shout, where lip-reading came naturally, women wiped kerosene from window panes, and bottles rattled like the playing of xylophones in public houses; the country of low flying aircraft.
As Edward drove he began to think of Adele. He tried to fix the point when they began to go wrong, where the enjoyment of a marriage had descended to indifference, the sharing of a house with a stranger. Women often said that they knew the moment when they began to love someone, first sight, second sight, or whenever. Men could not often remember details like that. And who could tell when a marriage showed the first sign of rot?
They had met twenty-two years before when both were working at Heathrow. It was one of the first bomb-warning alarms and they had found themselves standing next to each other on the pavement outside the airport church, the emergency assembly point for all staff. They were there for more than an hour and when they returned to the terminal, no bomb having exploded or been located, Adele found that most of the expensive perfumes in the shop which she managed had been stolen.
At that time she had been engaged to a rising business executive, Peter Rose, who, over the intervening years, had gone through a succession of successes. His doings often appeared in the financial pages of the newspapers and in the gossip columns; his marriages, his mansion, his money. Adele had grown to regret leaving him – Edward Richardson was aware of that as he continued the hard and slow climb up the difficult ladder of airline promotion – and she had sacrificed her job so that they could have some home life and Toby, born sixteen years before. The house at Bedmansworth called ‘Vinards’ had been owned by her parents and she was the only child. It was natural that they should live there. Adele had taken up social services work as a volunteer and was now a paid regional organiser. It required much of her time at odd hours, in the same way as his own profession.
But, he continued to wonder, as he drove in traffic that gave ample opportunity for thought, who could tell where a relationship began to waver? Rarely the participants. It may have been some habit, some quirk, some everyday disagreement; a word even, or perhaps a long, almost unnoticed erosion of feeling. One day he and Adele, embarking on a long-promised, much-postponed vacation had travelled on the same aircraft as Peter Rose and his second wife who were going on their honeymoon. The second wife was stupid and beautiful. She displayed a great glinting ring. They had met awkwardly at Heathrow. Mr and Mrs
Peter Rose had settled into the First Class section of the plane; Mr and Mrs Edward Richardson had flown Economy, the only seats left available to staff on an almost full flight. He thought perhaps that was the moment it began to go wrong.
The traffic was different on this road. No one ever seemed to leave for the airport in time. Everyone rushed as if speed, the great plus of air travel, had to begin at their doorsteps; drivers raced along the spur roads, cutting through the surrounding routes along the motorway as if some dread voice issued from the steadily whirling dish on the central radar tower, a voice demanding: ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ And the more they rushed and the more they manoeuvred, the slower the progress, traffic blocks and jams, cars and drivers straining to get forward, a grand prix race in slow motion.
The return was different. From the Heathrow car parks, through the exits, the procession was sedate as if the crossing of oceans and continents had removed all the urgency. Taxis which had been waiting in the rank for two hours headed at last for London, their drivers commenting over their shoulders to homecomers on the weather, recent sport, and the descent of everyday decency, with news concerning the Royal Family and exchange rates for arriving strangers.
Soldiers hung with camouflage and guns stood around an armoured car on the grass below the model of Concorde at the entrance to the long northern tunnel. Richardson remembered there had been notification of a security exercise that day. They were posed, astride and so stationary that they appeared like a silhouetted statue group, just as representative of travel in the 1990s as Concorde. The armoured car had the snout of its gun pointing unerringly towards the exit tunnel: ‘Welcome to London.’
Arrivals & Departures Page 4