They were scattered throughout the plane, a 747 and inappropriately large. Some people had stretched out over a row of seats and were sleeping. Most were too euphoric. They roamed the aisles, chatted, laughed, visited the luggage lockers. Some of the lockers contained boxed and wrapped lap-top computers and instamatic zoom-lens cameras. These items had appeared loaded on to several trolleys, just as they were moving towards the gate which would lead them to the aircraft. The interpreter had come hurrying forward to explain that the Callimbian government wished to make a present to each member of the group. It wished to make a small compensation for the inconvenience caused. Here were very nice lap-top computers, and autofocus superzoom cameras for the ladies. The group had at first been too stunned to respond. Then some people laughed. Others became interested.
The computer salesman said, ‘That’s the LS 386. Lovely job. We can’t get enough of them.’
There were those who hesitated for a moment, and then helped themselves. Paula took a camera, defiantly. ‘I always wanted a decent camera, and those cost an arm and a leg. I may as well get something out of this.’
The interpreter had been perplexed that not everyone followed suit. He said to James Barrow, ‘Take. Please take. This is very exceptional computer.’
James said, ‘Look, just bugger off, would you?’
As Howard and Lucy passed the interpreter stepped quickly forward. ‘You do not want?’
‘No,’ said Howard. ‘We do not want.’
‘Mr Beamish, I ask you then small favour …’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out a slip of paper with a name and address written on it. ‘I ask you if you very kindly take camera to my landlady in Cambridge. She will like this very much.’
Howard stared at him in blank amazement. Then he put his hand under Lucy’s elbow and moved on, towards the plane. When he glanced back, the man was still proffering electronic equipment, with an air of offended benevolence.
And now Howard sat with Lucy at his side. She had fallen asleep. She had started to write in that notebook and then, as he covertly watched, he had seen the pencil slide from her fingers. She was in the window seat, with her head turned towards him, her chin slumped upon her shoulder. When her elbow slid from the armrest he wedged an airline pillow to make her more comfortable. He watched over her, luxuriating. He learned her features: an interesting irregularity about the nostrils, one wider than the other, a small mole high on the left cheek, those freckles.
From time to time he looked beyond her, out of the window. The plane was cruising now, embarked on its tranquil path between the quilt of cloud beneath and the blue heights above. Earlier, he had watched Callimbia drop away below, its features diminishing by the minute. Buildings went out of focus and became areas of geometrical patterning, cars melted into roads and roads became delicate scribblings on a counterpane of green and brown. He saw the coast, an undulating band of yellow frilled with white. The place began to recede into unreality – it became a geographical expression, a lavish illustration, something to gaze down upon with detached interest. Marsopolis fell away, and with it the furnishings of the previous days – the Excelsior Hotel, the convent, that cell, the execution ground. Omar. The interpreter. They mutated. They lost the crucial hard edge of immediacy and became a sequence in the head, almost as though they were fictions, a disturbing exercise of the imagination.
He leapt ahead. He thought of the weeks to come. Should he go yet to Nairobi? Would Lucy go to Nairobi? Might they go together to Nairobi? But Lucy now would be caught up in more pressing concerns, given her trade. He contemplated the immediate future, to which he had not until now given a thought. To which in fact he had not dared to give a thought. The fuss. The newspapers. He did not want any of this. He did not want to hear the reverse account of everything – the explanations, the justifications, the complementary facts which would illuminate their own experience in Marsopolis. Which would show why the Callimbians had done this at that point, why they had behaved thus at another. He preferred to leave it as it was: irrational and inexplicable. He knew that this attitude was perverse, and also that it was inconsistent with his habits of mind, was intellectually offensive, indeed. All he could feel, right now, was that explanations and revelations had nothing to do with what had happened and could not be undone, with the whole contingent sequence. He considered this sequence: he dismantled it and looked at its component parts, at moments which could have flown off in some other direction, at the whole precarious narrative. The narrative which had dealt him Lucy and which, by the same token, might yet remove her, in which perhaps there lurked already some fatal twist, some malevolent disposition of events. He stared for an instant at capricious fate, and then turned away, because that is all that anyone can do. He looked at Lucy. She woke. She smiled.
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First published by Viking 1993
Published in Penguin Books 1993
Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1993
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ISBN: 978-0-241-96026-4
Penelope Lively, Cleopatra's Sister
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