‘It’s supposed to be hushed up,’ she reminded him. ‘Anything but the real thing is secret. It’s strange, isn’t it. A genuine hijack, they tell the newspapers, an imitation and it’s under wraps.’
‘Mustn’t do anything to frighten away the customers,’ pointed out Bramwell. ‘But they can hardly keep mum about the real thing. Holy Holloway would love to give a few interviews.’
The staff bus was almost vacant. At the front two stewards talked, heads close, then there were ranks of empty seats. With their uniformed shoulders against each other, Bramwell and Barbara said nothing more until they reached the car park.
‘Pity about the Mercedes,’ she tried a smile.
‘Vauxhalls are so reliable,’ he shrugged. She smiled genuinely. ‘You are a fool, Bram,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he replied looking into her white face. ‘I always have been.’
She went towards her car and he climbed into his, waiting until he saw her go by in his mirror and then following. All around the day was beaming. As they drove in a long curve around the perimeter road, past the sewage farm, Concorde howled along its runway and threw itself with a shout into the fresh morning sky. Bramwell ducked and tooted his horn at its disappearing tail. To the east planes were coming in to land like cows coming home, one, two, three in the approach line and more behind them. He kept fifty yards to the rear of Barbara’s car. He could see her orb of fair hair through the rear window.
He followed her from the Bath Road roundabout to the minor road and then bent through a lane where dusty brambles brushed the sides of the car. There was dried mud in the lane but blackberry blossom on the thorns.
Barbara turned into an opening with a fallen iron gate and he followed. She was almost out of the car by the time he had pulled up and she came around to the open window. ‘Where’s this?’ he asked looking around. ‘A time warp?’
‘A junkyard more like it,’ she said. ‘Come and have a look at the barge.’
She beckoned and he followed through the gap leading to the tow-path. Birds sang more loudly than he had heard for a long time. It was like being in some summer idyll. The whine of the motorway came faintly over the hedged fields and the chimneys of an industrial plant, straight and bleak, stood like a warning hand against the sky. He could hear the planes. But here there was a warm, confined peace, a concealed place, thick with the smell of old water and vegetation. ‘It’s like Wind in the Willows,’ he called to Barbara who was already opposite the closed hatchway of the broad barge.
‘We have to get the gangway across,’ she told him. ‘It’s easier with two.’
He put his foot across to the deck and heaved himself over before shifting the neat gangway forward and then swivelling it so that it bridged the short gap to the shore. ‘Just like the old days,’ he laughed to Barbara on the bank. ‘Manhandling the steps for Imperial Airways.’
‘You’re not as old as that,’ she said, laughing at him in return. For the first time they looked firmly into each other’s faces. She looked quickly away then mounted the gangway and, taking the keys from her satchel, unlocked the hatch. ‘Welcome aboard.’
Following her down he found himself in the commodious room. He looked around admiringly.
‘It’s plenty for two.’ She opened the curtains and the window and looked out onto the canal. ‘And Georgina and I are hardly ever here at the same time. She must be on a trip. Her car wasn’t there.’
Two polished wooden doors with brass fittings stood against each other at the end of the room, and now one of them opened and Georgina in a silk robe came tiredly out. ‘I’m here,’ she mumbled leaning against the door frame. ‘What time is it?’
‘Oh God, sorry,’ said Barbara. ‘We didn’t see your car.’
‘I’m buying a new one,’ she said. Her hair straggled over her forehead and her eyes and she threw it back with some irritation. It seemed damp as if she had been perspiring. Bramwell looked at her curiously. ‘I left the Ford with them and they’re bringing the new car around as soon as they get the documents sorted out.’ Her face became alive. ‘Barbara, it’s a Porsche.’
‘A Porsche! Have you met somebody rich?’
‘Sort of. Well, I’ve known him a long time. It’s my father.’
‘Lucky you.’ Barbara turned to Bramwell. ‘Oh, sorry. This is Bramwell Broad. You may have met.’
They did not think so. The airline had several thousand cabin staff.
Walking to the galley kitchen Barbara put the kettle on. Georgina invited Bramwell to sit down. ‘We had a terrible experience,’ Barbara called calmly over her shoulder. ‘We were hijacked.’
Shocked, the other woman half revolved. Quickly she returned to face Bramwell. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘No,’ insisted Barbara. She walked back into the room. ‘We were hijacked, well, joke hijacked. Except it didn’t seem like a joke.’ Her voice trembled and she began to cry softly. Bramwell moved towards her but Georgina put her arm out to her. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry. It must have been awful.’ She offered to take the kettle but Barbara sniffled her away.
‘He had his arm around my neck,’ sniffed Barbara pouring the water. ‘God, it was terrible. I can’t tell you what it was like. A strange man hanging around your neck.’
Georgina thought she knew.
Six
By now it was August and the evenings became a few minutes shorter each day, sunsets were deep and the twilight air warm and gritty. The countryside, that years before had given a breath of sweet rural air to travellers leaving the smell and the fogs of London, was now itself clouded with the haze of machines and oil. At dusk Heathrow often lay below a baleful halo of suspended smoke, the twin motorways, the M4 and the M25, roared at each other like distant lions.
Fifty years before, the Greater London Plan of 1944 had spoken of a region here of isolated, purely rural villages, away from roads and railways, agricultural land and smallholdings that under no circumstances should be urbanised.
Rivers and streams had been ducted during the successive constructions of the airport, and now they were penned in set concrete confines although before dark they sometimes had a little cloth of mist on them, a signal perhaps from Nature that somewhere she was still lurking. The reservoirs just beyond the Heathrow runways, which mirrored the airliners as they took off, often pulled a private fog over themselves like a sheet at bedtime. There, hidden from the roads and runways, lived tribes of waterbirds. Sheep grazed on the banks of the reservoir indifferent to and undisturbed by the noise all about them.
At that time of the day Bedmansworth might easily have been recognised by its inhabitants of generations before who now lay side by side in the churchyard; the quiet street, the two inns, the church, the cottages and ‘Vinards’, the Georgian house which had remained unchanged for over two centuries and where Edward and Adele Richardson now lived in such unease.
‘They’ve got the fire going,’ called Richardson to Adele. At the bottom of the lawn he putted Pluto into place in the outer ring of his solar system of golf balls. She was inside the French windows, arranging flowers she had taken from her cutting area of the garden. She looked out. There was a low glow and smoke lying casually over the rising field where the Burridges lived in their tent.
She called to him: ‘Are those Americans going? The mother and daughter?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
‘They seem to have made themselves at home,’ commented Adele. She was good at arranging flowers and now she looked at what she had done with a solitary satisfaction for Richardson never said he noticed them.
‘What’s Toby doing?’ Richardson called. He felt glad and oddly guilty that he would see Rona again. He surveyed the small white planets against the green, giving Pluto and Uranus a touch with his foot to put them into position. Then he picked them up, dropping them into a canvas bag, and strolled up the garden towards the house.
‘It’s amazing that we’re both at home,’ she said. ‘Both at the s
ame time. Toby wants to come to the barbeque, so he says. I think he and Liz have been trying to make it up.’ She laughed distantly and said: ‘Young love.’
‘That’s what it’s like,’ he said coming through the French windows.
‘I remember,’ she said a little quietly.
He went to the sideboard and poured drinks for both of them. ‘I had yet another letter from Gohm, Brent and Byas,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘They want me to go and have lunch. People always think they can buy you with lunch.’
‘I saw it on your desk.’
‘Did you read it?’
‘Yes,’ she said bluntly. ‘It had their name on the outside of the envelope. What do you think?’
He walked towards her at the door and handed her the drink. ‘I’m not interested,’ he said with finality. ‘I don’t know why they keep trying.’
‘They want you,’ she answered as she walked out and sat on the bench on the terrace. He followed and stood looking over the fields, the drabness softened by the final sun of the day. Smoke, like a signal, rose from the barbeque fire two fields away. ‘We ought to get going,’ he suggested.
‘You should be pleased you’re wanted,’ she persisted. ‘There doesn’t seem a lot of future for you otherwise.’ He looked towards her sharply. ‘I think I’m the best judge of that,’ he said. ‘I happen to like what I do.’
She took her gin and tonic almost to her mouth, then held it there and said: ‘Gohm, Brent and Byas don’t fly aeroplanes, do they.’
‘That’s exactly it. They don’t.’
‘What’s so wonderful about flying aeroplanes?’
‘I’ve been in that business all my life,’ he said deliberately. ‘I don’t want to change. Whatever they offer. You really should have married your tycoon.’
‘He wasn’t a tycoon, as you call it, then,’ she reminded him. ‘Just someone with positive ideas, with a bit of courage, someone going places.’
‘Through three marriages at the last count.’
She stood up and went into the shadow of the room. She felt miserable. He did too, and ashamed of his spite. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Let’s go,’ she answered. ‘I’ll get my coat.’
Liz was frowning, something she did well, when Toby got to the lych-gate. ‘It’s like being one of those brides who gets left outside the church,’ she grumbled.
‘I got kept at work.’
‘Dusting off the Egyptian mummies?’ she mocked. They began to walk but without touching.
‘Egyptian mummies are worth thousands,’ he said defensively.
‘Horrible old things. How you can work among all that junk I can’t think. You could get diseases. And that man who owns it. I’ve seen him and he doesn’t look like he’s made a fortune.’
‘Plenty, he’s made,’ argued Toby stubbornly. ‘He just dresses like that to make people think he’s not rotten rich. It’s no good standing in an antique shop looking like a millionaire.’
Liz sniffed lifting both her nose and her blunt breasts. ‘You ought to get into a proper business,’ she advised. ‘Computers or something. That’s where the money is. It’s in the future, computers.’
Toby said: ‘Everybody’s doing it. Computers. I’d be no good at it anyway. I hate that stuff.’
‘You’ll end up wheeling a barrow round the streets, you will.’ She laughed mockingly as they walked and gave a taunting skip. They were passing the Straw Man and Mrs Mangold called ‘Hello, who’s that?’ through the open door from the dimness of the bar.
‘Come and have a drink,’ Toby challenged. ‘Gin or something.’
‘She won’t serve you. Only coke,’ said Liz. ‘She knows how old you are.’
He knew she was right. He said: ‘There’s beer and wine at this barbeque.’
‘That’s something I suppose,’ shrugged Liz. They continued walking separately. ‘And sausages. God, how sophisticated!’ She glanced at him sideways. ‘I had two gins and some wine last week,’ she said cagily. ‘I went out to dinner with a chap in business.’
‘How sophisticated,’ he repeated.
Moodily they continued. ‘I don’t intend to wheel a barrow around the streets, take it from me,’ he told her eventually. ‘And I’m not sitting in any dusty old shop. I’m only in the shop so I can learn. One day, when I’m ready, I’ll go into the top range of the market, fine art and antiques. And that’s money. Big money.’
‘You reckon?’ she said at once impressed.
‘Millions. You only have to know what you’re about, that’s all. Be able to spot things. Ever heard of Hester Bateman?’
‘No, I haven’t. Who is it?’
‘She’s dead. Been dead years, yonks. One of the great English silversmiths. Brilliant she was.’
‘A woman?’
‘Exactly. And I’ll tell you something, Liz, I can recognise her work just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. A thrush flew hurriedly from the hedge.
‘You’ve learned that much then.’ She regarded him studiously.
‘Masses. I can tell a genuine netsuke from a fake.’
‘He’s a painter is he?’
‘Netsuke, pronounced net-ski, like that but spelt N-e-t-s-u-k-e, is the Japanese art of making little figures,’ he said importantly. ‘They used to thread the ropes of their robes through them like a toggle, and they carved them with heads and whatnot. The heads can even revolve. I bought a beautiful Meissen figure the other day. Or you might know it as Dresden.’
Now she was impressed. ‘I’ve heard of Dresden,’ she said. ‘So you say there is money in it?’
‘Thousands if you know what you’re doing. Once I’ve got a good grounding I’m going straight to Sotheby’s or Christie’s and get myself right in there with the top experts. Then – when I’m ready – I’ll break away and start out on my own. I wouldn’t mind specialising in marine artists.’
Briskly Liz hooked her arm in his. ‘How much do you think you’ll make, Toby?’ she asked. They went into the field and began to walk up the slight slope to where figures were already gathering around the Burridges’s fire. They could see the white tent like a pointed ghost in the background.
‘Plenty. Enough to take you out to better places than your business friend did last week,’ he forecast.
‘He’s creepy,’ she confessed. ‘He had glasses and they got all steamed up over the coffee. Like a bloody goldfish.’
Toby felt his cheeks warm. He put his arm about her thin waist. She pulled it closer. ‘God, look,’ she said. ‘They’ve got the bloody wrinklies coming.’ A minibus had stopped on the path leading up to the fire and the tent and four elderly forms were tentatively clambering out. An old lady reached for the ground with her thick-stockinged leg outstretched as if convinced it was a sheer drop.
‘Talk about one foot in the grave,’ said Liz. ‘They give me the creeps.’
‘They’ll probably eat all the sausages,’ he said trying to sound funny.
‘They can have them,’ she returned. ‘As long as there’s plenty of wine.’ She looked beyond the old people and saw Lettie. ‘Ah, I know her. That foreign woman over there. I’ve seen her in the shop. She’s beautiful.’
Lettie was moving with Bramwell towards the glowing fire against which the guests were already outlined like heavy shadows. ‘That’s Bramwell Broad’s wife,’ said Toby. ‘He’s an air steward. They reckon he bought her, with money you know, like you’d buy a car or a house. She’s from the Philippines. He just bought her and brought her back with him.’
‘She’s beautiful,’ repeated Liz. ‘I’d love to grow beautiful like that. Not so dark.’
‘You wouldn’t want to be bought though, would you. Just paid for like something from a shop.’
She screwed up her petty, pretty face. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she shrugged. ‘Depends who it was who bought me.’
‘She’s got her whole wretched family over,’ Bramwell confided dolefully in Richardson. ‘Well, not exactly all of them, thank God.
They’d have needed a plane to themselves. It’s bad enough as it is. Her crone of a mother, her vicious-looking brother and his wife – our Pauline as she’s known – who looks like she’s dying, and may be for all I know.’
They were drinking beer near the edge of the iron range which Anthony had built, stones topped with a farm grating. Sausages, brown and hissing, were laid out. At one end were onions and there were potatoes in silver foil. Toby was operating the tap on the beer barrel and Liz was pouring wine, gulping from her own glass. There were fifty people standing under the fading August sky and before the tent. Candles in painted jamjars were stood in a wide circle.
‘That must have been a shock,’ said Richardson. ‘Finding them when you got home.’
Bramwell blew out his cheeks. ‘Shock? I’ll say it was. A damned nightmare. God knows when, or how, I’m going to get rid of them.’
Adele, a wine glass in her hand, moved across the grass to them. It was becoming damp with dew. Richardson said: ‘Bramwell’s been telling me that his wife’s family have turned up from the Philippines.’ Cautiously he glanced around. So did Bramwell. One man looked left, the other right. Lettie, holding her bottle of Ribena, was laughing with some of the young people from the village. She seemed happily at home with them, even the school children. Someone had a tape recorder and they began to dance.
Adele said to Bramwell: ‘I saw your relatives in the shop. They were buying magazines.’
‘Yes, Film Fun, I expect,’ sighed Bramwell. ‘They’re crazy about the cinema. That’s all they do at home, go to the pictures. They’ve got sunshine, sea, palm trees and they’d still queue up for South Pacific. I keep sending them to Slough, and Uxbridge, even Twickenham, to the pictures, just to get them out of the way. That’s where they are now, Slough. The difficulty is finding epics they haven’t seen. They’re clamouring to go to the Indian films in Southall. It’s costing me a fortune in minicab fares.’
‘Send them on a coach trip to London,’ suggested Adele. ‘See the sights.’
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