“Look, Daddy,” shouted Bertie, pointing to the tail of a plane that could just be made out peeking over a covered walkway. “Look, that must be my plane.”
“Perhaps,” said Stuart, looking down at his son. This was Bertie’s first flight; could he remember his own first time in the air? It was a remarkable moment for most people, a moment when the laws of gravity are for the first time ostensibly flouted, and for him this had been in Fife, he thought, during a brief time as an air cadet. He had been fifteen and had been taken, along with several other boys, on a flight from Leuchars. He had not thought about that for a long time, but now it came back to him. How young the world was in those days, how fresh.
They had been told that the members of the orchestra would all congregate just inside the terminal so that they might check in together. And there they were, all milling about near the foot of the escalator. Bertie spotted them first and tugged at his father’s sleeve. Everybody was so tall, so grown-up, and this made his heart sink. Nobody was in dungarees, of course, except him.
Stuart would have wished to have remained with the group until they had gone through security, but he sensed that it would be important for Bertie that he should not.
“Well, that’s it, Bertie,” he said, passing the suitcase over. “That’s you all set up. I’ll let you get on with it now.”
Bertie looked up at his father. “You’re not staying, Daddy?”
“Well, I think you can look after yourself,” said Stuart. “So I’ll just say goodbye.”
He wanted to pick this little boy up and hug him. But he could not do that, not with all these teenagers around, and so he put out his hand and Bertie took it in his.
“Good-bye, Bertie,” he said. “Good luck in Paris, son!”
Bertie shook hands solemnly with his father and then Stuart turned round and walked off. He did not look back.
Left with the others, Bertie stood in silence. He imagined that people would be staring at him, but he soon realised that nobody was paying him any attention and he relaxed. One of the flautists, a girl of about sixteen, glanced at him at one point and smiled. Bertie smiled back. Then she said something to her friend, which Bertie did not hear, and the friend looked over in his direction and gave him a wave. Bertie waved back.
Bertie was fascinated by the whole process of checking in for the flight and going through the security search. The conductor seemed to be in charge of the party and Bertie decided to follow him closely, keeping a pace or two behind him. And then, on the other side of the barrier, he waited while the rest of the orchestra came through and they could go off to wait at the departure gate. Bertie looked about him; he felt very important.
“All right, Bertie?” asked the conductor. “You looking forward to Paris?”
“Yes, I am,” said Bertie. “Thank you very much, sir.”
The conductor laughed. “You don’t have to call me sir,” he said. “My name’s Richard. Richard Neville Towle. But you can just call me Richard.” He paused. “You checked your saxophone in, did you? I hope that you had a strong enough carrying case.”
For a few moments, Bertie said nothing. Then, his voice barely audible, he said: “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry about what?” asked Richard. “Do you think the case will break?”
“I didn’t bring it,” said Bertie, his voice small and broken. “Mummy just gave me my suitcase. That was all. I forgot my saxophone at home.”
Richard sighed. Taking an orchestra anywhere was always a difficult business; taking a youth orchestra was even worse. This was not the first time that he had been obliged to deal with an instrument being left at home, and at least it would be easy to borrow a saxophone at the other end. It was not as if Bertie played the cor anglais or anything like that; that might have been a bit more problematic.
He reached down and patted Bertie on the shoulder. “Not to worry, old chap,” he said. “Paris is full of tenor saxophones. We can very easily borrow one for the three days that we’re there. In fact, I’ll call ahead to a friend I have over there and get him to have it sorted out by the time we arrive at the hotel. No need to be upset.”
Bertie had begun to cry, and so Richard knelt down and put an arm around his shoulder. “Come on, Bertie,” he said gently. “Worse things have happened.”
Bertie made an effort to control his tears. This was a terrible start, he thought; to go off with a group of teenagers and then to start crying. It was just terrible. He looked about him furtively, half-covering his face with his hands so that the others might not see his tears. Fortunately, they all seemed to be busy talking to one another. They were smiling and laughing. As well they might, thought Bertie: they had their instruments with them.
74. The Principles of Flight
By the time they boarded the aircraft, Bertie’s spirits had picked up again. He tried to give an impression of knowing what to do–an impression which would have been weakened if anybody had seen him turn left on the entrance to the plane, rather than right, and head purposefully towards the flight deck. But nobody saw this solecism, apart from a cabin attendant, who gently pointed him in the direction of the window seat that had been allocated him and into which he was shortly strapped, ready to depart.
Bertie had already seen, but not met, the boy who came and sat next to him. Now, turning to Bertie, this boy, who in Bertie’s reckoning was at least fifteen, introduced himself. “I’m Max,” he said. “And you’re called Bertie, aren’t you?”
Bertie nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I play the saxophone, only…” He was about to explain that he did not actually have his saxophone with him, but he decided not to mention this. Max would think him rather stupid to have left his instrument behind, and Bertie wished to impress Max.
“Where do you go to school?” Max asked, as he adjusted his seat belt.
“The Steiner School,” Bertie said.
“That’s nice,” said Max. “I go to the Academy. I play the cello there. And I’m in Mr Backhouse’s chamber choir.”
“I bet you’re good at the cello,” Bertie said generously.
“Quite good,” said Max. “But not as good as somebody called Peter Gregson. He used to be at the Academy and now he’s gone to study the cello in London. I’ll never be as good as he is.”
“But you do your best, don’t you?” said Bertie seriously. He was enjoying this conversation and he wondered whether Max would be his friend. It would be grand to have a friend in Paris. Some people went to Paris without a friend, and that couldn’t be much fun, thought Bertie. He looked at Max. He had a kind face, he thought, and he decided that it might be best to ask him directly.
“Will you be my friend?” Bertie asked. And then added: “Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever–just for Paris.”
Max looked at Bertie in surprise. Then he smiled, and Bertie noticed that his entire face lit up when this happened. “Of course I will,” he said. “That’s fine by me. I don’t know many of the people in this orchestra and so it would be nice to have a friend.”
Bertie sat back in his seat feeling quite elated. The forgetting of the saxophone was not really a problem, according to the conductor, and now here he was about to take off on his first flight and he was doing it in the company of a nice boy called Max. Really, he had everything he could possibly wish for.
The last preparations for the departure were completed and the plane began to taxi towards the end of the runway. Bertie stared out of the window, fascinated. And then, with a sudden, throaty roar the plane began to roll down the runway, slowly at first and then picking up speed. Bertie felt himself being pressed back into his seat by the force of the acceleration, and then, almost imperceptibly, they were airborne and he saw the ground drop away beneath him.
He watched as the plane banked round and began to head off towards Paris. He saw the motorway to Glasgow, with the cars moving on it like tiny models. By craning his neck, he saw the Pentland Hills and the Firth of Forth, a steel-grey band snaki
ng up into the bosom of Scotland. And then, down below them, hills; green and brown folds, stretching off to the south and west.
Soon they were at altitude, and the plane settled down into even flight. The members of the orchestra made up the majority of the passengers and the cabin was filled with an excited buzz of conversation between them, restrained among the strings and woodwind, rowdy among the brass and percussion. Bertie looked over his shoulder and down the rows behind him. One of the girls who had waved to him earlier caught his eye and smiled. Bertie smiled back. He felt quite grown-up now, here with this group of which he was now a member, even if they were so much older. Somebody has to be the youngest, he thought, and they were all being very nice to him about it. Nobody had laughed at him, so far; nobody had suggested that he was too small.
After a while, Bertie slipped past Max and whispered something to one of the attendants. She smiled and told him to follow her to a small door near the galley. Bertie entered the cramped washroom and emerged shortly afterwards to find that the Captain of the aircraft was standing in the galley area, in conversation with one of the attendants. Bertie gazed in admiration at the Captain, who looked down at him and smiled.
“Hello, young man,” said the Captain, winking at Bertie. “Is this your first flight?”
“Yes,” said Bertie. “But I know how it works.”
The Captain smiled. “Oh do you?” he said. “Well, you tell me then.”
“Bernoulli’s principle,” said Bertie.
The Captain glanced at the attendant and then back at Bertie. “What did you say, young man?”
“You need lift to fly,” explained Bertie. “Mr Bernoulli discovered that pressure goes down when the speed of flow of a fluid increases. That’s what pushes the wing up. The air flows more quickly over the top than the bottom.” He paused, and then added: “I think.”
The Captain reached out and shook Bertie’s hand. “Well, that’s pretty much how it works. Well done! You carry on like that, son, and…”
Bertie waited for the Captain to say something else, but he did not, and so he went back to his seat.
“I saw you talking to the Captain there,” said Max. “What did you say?”
“I was telling him about Bernoulli’s principle,” said Bertie. “But I think he knew already.”
The flight was over far too quickly for Bertie. It seemed to him only a matter of a few minutes before the plane started to dip down through the clouds to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
“Charles de Gaulle was President of France,” observed Bertie to Max, as they taxied up to the terminal.
“Ooh la la!” replied Max. “Paris! Boy, are we going to have fun, Bertie! Have you heard of a place called the Moulin Rouge, Bertie? You heard of it?”
75. Scotland’s Woes
Antonia Collie, Domenica’s tenant during her absence in the Malacca Straits, was uncertain what to do about Angus Lordie. The artist had invited her to dinner a few weeks previously and then, with very little notice, had cancelled the invitation. He had explained that his dog, Cyril, had been stolen, and he had said that he was, frankly, too upset to entertain. She had been surprised, and had wondered whether the excuse was a genuine one. She had been cancelled once or twice before, by others, and had herself occasionally had to call something off. But she had never encountered, nor used, a pretext relating to a dog. It had the air of the excuse which children use for their failure to produce homework: The dog ate it. Presumably there were dogs who really did eat homework, but they must be rare.
She thought that it had been kind of Angus to let her into the flat and make her welcome on the day of her arrival in Edinburgh, and it had been kinder still of him to invite her to dinner. But her conversation with him had been a curious one, full of tension just below the surface. It seemed to her as if he was keen to assert himself in her presence; that he was for some reason defensive. Of course there were men like that, she realised–men who felt inadequate in the presence of a woman who was intellectually confident, who could do something which perhaps the man himself wanted to do but could not. Some men only felt comfortable if they could condescend to women, or if they felt that women looked up to them. Her own husband had been a bit like that, she thought. He had found it necessary to take up with that empty-headed woman from Perth, a woman who could hardly sustain an intelligent conversation for more than five minutes, if that.
Or could it be envy? Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was. It was everywhere–in all sorts of relationships, insidiously poisoning the way in which people felt about one another. Antonia had been its victim. As a girl, she had been envied for her academic prowess, and she had been envied for her looks, too. She had no difficulty in attracting boys; girls who could not do this envied her and wished that something would happen to her hair, or that her skin would become oily.
Children, of course, knew no better. But she saw envy persisting into adult life. She saw it at work in her marriage, and now she noticed it in public life too, now that she knew what to look for. Scotland was riddled with it, and it showed itself in numerous ways which everyone knew about but did not want to discuss. That was the problem, really: new ideas were not welcome–only the old orthodoxies; that, and the current of anti-intellectualism that made intelligent men (and she was thinking of men now) want to appear to be one of the lads. These men could talk and think about so much else, but were afraid to do so, because Scotsmen did not do that. They talked instead about football, trapped in that sterile macho culture which has so limited the horizons of men. Poor men.
Antonia moved to her window and looked out over Scotland Street. Our country, she thought, is such an extraordinary mixture. There is such beauty, and there is such feeling; but there is also that demeaning brutality of conduct and attitude that has blighted everything. Where did it come from? From oppression and economic exploitation over the centuries. Yes, it had. And that continued, of course, as it did in every society. There were blighted lives. There were people who had very little, who had been brutalised by poverty and who still were. But it was not just the material lack–it was an emptiness of the spirit. If things were to change, then the culture itself must look in the mirror and see what rearrangement was required in its own psyche. It had to become more feminine. It had to look at the national disgrace of alcoholic over-indulgence. It had to stop the self-congratulation and the smugness. It had to realise that we had almost entirely squandered our moral capital, built up by generations of people who had striven to lead good lives; capital so quickly lost to selfishness and discourtesy. It had to admit that we had failed badly in education and that this could only be cured by restoring the respect due to teachers and cajoling parents into doing their part to discipline and educate their ill-mannered children. It had to think sideways, and up and down, and round the corner. It had to open its mind.
This train of thought had started with Angus, who had re-issued his invitation for dinner for that evening. She had accepted, although she would rather have stayed at home and continued to write about her Scottish saints and their difficult lives. She did not think that the acquaintanceship with Angus would go anywhere. It was curious, was it not, that people expected those who were by themselves to be looking for somebody else. There were plenty of people–and she was one–who rather relished being on their own. If she met a man who interested her–and, thinking over the last year, she found it difficult to bring any such man to mind–then she might be prepared to contemplate an affair, or should she call it an involvement? The word “affair” was an odd one. It had suggestions of the illicit about it. And it implied the existence of a terminus: affairs were not meant to last. That, she thought, was why Graham Greene was right in that title of his, The End of the Affair. There was a sad inevitability about that.
Antonia turned away from the window and smiled. Graham Greene! That w
as Angus Lordie’s problem. He was a Graham Greene-ish character, just like that dentist who had run out of gas and went down to the jetty every day to see if the boat would bring him new supplies. Dentists on jetties; whisky priests; seedy colonial officials; and now a failed portrait painter in the unfashionable end of the Edinburgh New Town. C’est ça! Greeneland.
76. Brunello di Montalcino
Had he known that Antonia was mentally comparing him to a character from a Graham Greene novel, Angus Lordie’s existing dislike of his prospective guest would have doubled, or quadrupled perhaps. And had he known that a literary comparison was being made, he would himself have sought comparisons of his own. There she was, writing her novel in Domenica’s flat, not doing anything of importance really. And the novel–if it existed at all–might never be published anyway. Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren’t enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.
Angus Lordie stood in his kitchen, his blue and white striped apron tied about his waist, contemplating the appetising collection of ingredients he had bought from Valvona & Crolla. Even if he was not looking forward to receiving Antonia, he was certainly looking forward to the experience of cooking the meal. He glanced at his watch; it was now five o’clock, which meant that it would be roughly three hours before Antonia arrived (provided, he thought, that she knew that an invitation for seven-thirty meant ten to eight). There were always people who did not understand this, and who arrived on time, but he did not think Antonia would be one of these. So he had his three hours to prepare the meal.