The Complete Short Stories Part 32

The plane was practically empty.

'n.o.body flies on Christmas Day,' said the hostess who served the preliminary drinks. 'At least, very few. The rush is always before Christmas, and then there's always a full flight after Boxing Day till New Year when things begin to normalize.' She was talking to a young man who had remarked on the number of empty seats. 'I'm spending Christmas on the plane because I'd nowhere else to go. I thought it might be amusing.'

'It will be amusing,' said the pretty hostess. 'We'll make it fun.'

The young man looked pleased. He was a few seats in front of Cynthia. He looked around, saw Cynthia and smiled. In the course of the next hour he made it known to this small world in the air that he was a teacher returning from an exchange programme.

The plane had left Sydney at after three in the afternoon of Christmas Day. There remained over nine hours to Bangkok, their refuelling stop.

Luxuriously occupying two vacant front seats of the compartment was a middle-aged couple fully intent on their reading: he, a copy of Time; she, a tattered paperback of Agatha Christie's: The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

A thin, tall man with gla.s.ses pa.s.sed the couple on the way to the lavatories. On his emergence he stopped, pointed at the paperback and said, 'Agatha Christie! You're reading Agatha Christie. She's a serial killer. On your dark side you yourself are a serial killer.' The man beamed triumphantly and made his way to a seat behind the couple.

A steward appeared and was called by the couple, both together. 'Who's that man?' - 'Did you hear what he said? He said I am a serial killer.'

'Excuse me, sir, is there something wrong?' the steward demanded of the man with gla.s.ses.

'Just making an observation,' the man replied.

The steward disappeared into the front of the plane, and reappeared with a uniformed officer, a co-pilot, who had in his hand a sheet of paper, evidently a list of pa.s.sengers. He glanced at the seat number of the bespectacled offender, then at him: 'Professor Sygmund Schatt?'

'Sygmund spelt with a y,' precised the professor. 'Nothing wrong. I was merely making a professional observation.'

'Keep them to yourself in future.'

'I will not be silenced,' said Sygmund Schatt. 'Plot and scheme against me as you may.

The co-pilot went to the couple, bent towards them, and whispered something rea.s.suring.

'You see!' said Schatt.

The pilot walked up the aisle towards Cynthia. He sat down beside her.

'A complete nut. They do cause anxiety on planes. But maybe he's harmless. He'd better be. Are you feeling lonely?'

Cynthia looked at the officer. He was good-looking, fairly young, young enough. 'Just a bit,' she said.

'First cla.s.s is empty,' said the officer. 'Like to come there?'

'I don't want to -'Come with me,' he said. 'What's your name?'

'Cynthia. What's yours?'

'Tom. I'm one of the pilots. There are three of us today so far. Another's coming on at Bangkok.'

'That makes me feel safe.'

It fell about that at Bangkok, when everyone else had got off the plane to stretch their legs for an hour and a half, the pa.s.sengers had gone to walk around the departments of the Duty Free shop, buy presents 'from Bangkok' of a useless nature such as dolls and silk ties, to drink coffee and other beverages with biscuits and pastries; Tom and Cynthia stayed on. They made love in a beautifully appointed cabin with real curtains in the windows - unrealistic yellow flowers on a white background. Then they talked about each other, and made love again.

'Christmas Day,' he said. 'I'll never forget this one.'

'Nor me,' she said.

They had half an hour before the crew and pa.s.sengers would rejoin them. One of the tankers which had refuelled the plane could be seen moving off.

Cynthia luxuriated in the washroom with its toilet waters and toothbrushes. She made herself fresh and pretty, combed her well-cut casque of dark hair. When she got back to the cabin he was returning from somewhere, looking young, smiling. He gave her a box. 'Christmas present.

It contained a set of plaster Christmas crib figures, 'made in China'. A kneeling Virgin and St Joseph, the baby Jesus and a shoemaker with his bench, a woodcutter, an unidentifiable monk, two shepherds and two angels.

Cynthia arranged them on the table in front of her.

'Do you believe in it?' she said.

'Well, I believe in Christmas.'

'Yes, I, too. It means a new life. I don't see any mother and father really kneeling beside the baby's cot wors.h.i.+pping it, do you?'

'No, that part's symbolic.'

'These are simply lovely,' she said touching her presents. 'Made of real stuff, not plastic.'

'Let's celebrate,' he said. He disappeared and returned with a bottle of champagne.

'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.

'G.o.d, 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-cla.s.s 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. n.o.body 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 executors.h.i.+p 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-cla.s.s 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 Cla.s.s.

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 Harvard 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, n.o.body 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 ...