He crossed the final no man’s land of the check-in gate. At Logan airport in Boston you could buy live lobsters at this stage, their claws held together with a rubber band for safer transit. Just the thing you might need. As he set foot on the plane and met the unblinking smile of the stewardess, he noticed the simple construction of the doorway. These plates and rivets would shortly be under unimaginable pressure in a freezing empty world high above this one, he thought, as he trailed his finger over the metal. He folded, then shoved his overcoat into the locker above the seats, squeezing the two parts of the catch together to spring the door open. His was the aisle seat, as far as possible from the sights of the window. He leaned over the empty seat and pulled down the hard floral blind. Then he reached for the plastic switch in the armrest.
Take-off was not frightening. The increased engine noise was reassuring. It was only after ten minutes or so, when all trace of earth was gone and there was no doubt that the aircraft was unsupported in the air that his palms began to slip on the metal ends of the armrests where he had unconsciously clamped them. There were a number of different kinds of crash. The nose might shear off as the plane ran into a mountain. He imagined the sight of the rock, quite clear for a fraction of a second, that would appear to him from the other side of the cinema screen, behind the curtains of the business class section. It would be the last thing he would ever see: perpendicular granite. Or the wings could drop off. This was unlikely, but his fear was not a reasonable thing. The engines raged and died as the plane banked. It had once been explained to him that one engine had to turn faster than the other during this manoeuvre, but it surprised him that no one else seemed to notice. They continued with their crosswords, they talked calmly, they even slept. The most likely way to crash, it always seemed to him, was as a result of turbulence. No man-made structure could survive the buffeting an aircraft took when it unaccountably dropped in the sky. It would disintegrate eventually and it would spiral down into the sea, though he would be dead from decompression before it completed its fall. The calm of his fellow passengers when the plane plummeted was the most miraculous thing of all. Reason and experience might eventually persuade anyone that such turbulence was seldom dangerous, but surely any sentient being, any creature with the meanest instinct of survival, should be alarmed when the machine in which he was travelling at hundreds of miles an hour lurched into sudden freefall. But apparently it was his own reflexive grasp of the armrests that was morbid or misplaced; the normal human response was to fill in another crossword clue.
‘Among those who died in the crash, the largest civilian disaster of its kind, was Pietro Russell, the famous . . .’ There was always some problem at this point in the obituary. What he really hoped was that people would feel sorry for the dreadful way he had died and that their sympathy might in some way save him or bring him back to life.
He looked down the aisle where the drinks trolley was making irksomely slow progress towards him. The stewardesses wore royal-blue uniforms and tan tights of a peculiarly dense weave. He ordered a whisky and ginger ale, something he never normally drank, which came with a thin plastic stick and a small packet of dry-roasted peanuts which emitted a sharp little stench when he pulled the packet apart. He took the headset from the pocket of the seat in front, then from its plastic bag, and stuck the ends into his ears. He found himself listening to a rasping, singsong comic with storms of interference, possibly from audience laughter, which the flight guide identified as ‘Nutter on the Bus by Jasper Carrott’. It conjured distant worlds. The television in the front room, London, a theatre, a Birmingham bus queue, terra firma. What a way to go down to your death, with so many references, with this thing playing in your ears.
After five weeks in Los Angeles he had forgotten the flight, the fear, pretty much everything. The man came round to shampoo the dog in a white truck with the words ‘Critter Cleaner’ on the side, but he had no shame about this. It was a good job, it beat pumping gas, and he liked the weather though one day he’d go back to New York, he reckoned, he figured.
Inside, the movie on Channel 13 was Big with Tom Hanks. He played a child in a man’s body, going wild in a toy store, which seemed like a good enough metaphor for the city and even the country. The kitchen had M & M chocolate beans in a glass jar and a can of spray-on butter, guaranteed dairy-free, and a giant pack of Twiglets and some herbal tea, but no bread. So breakfast was tea and peanuts and a drink from some Mexican bottle in the cupboard that said ‘Mezcal con gusano Monte Alban Regional de Oaxaca’ and that last word seemed to spell trouble. The label also said, ‘with agave worm’ – and there it was, a dead worm at the bottom of the bottle. Out in the garden, with the orange tree hanging over the wall from next door, the critter cleaner gave a squeeze to the avocados in the sunshine to see if they were ripe. By the french doors were tall plants that wilted only for a day before reblooming in the permanent spring.
And in five weeks things began to slide. He had lunch in Santa Monica. A Greek or perhaps Armenian café with tabouleh and hummus but also chicken sandwiches and Coke. The girl had even teeth and her legs were tan, though he couldn’t see that much because the pants were mid-calf. She was going to play tennis with Gail because her boyfriend was out of town, then maybe she’d go to a movie. But she’d definitely call if she was free. She looked so healthy, her hair was shiny and her eyes were bright. She was drinking diet coke, eating diet burger.
Later he drove up Mulholland and wondered if he needed to buy a hummingbird feeder he had seen advertised. The creatures had been hovering that morning, minute things more like insects than birds, hanging between the orange tree and the oleander. In the end he was heading for the new cinema complex in Century City. He had all night ahead of him and all the next day and all of the day after that, and there was no impediment in view and no end to the even sunshine. He discovered there was an art to pleasure, that gratification requires hard work; and in that art and hard work, the absence of guilt became at first negligible, then imperceptible.
They sat over dinner one day at some new French place in Hollywood, West Hollywood, whatever. The valet parking had taken the car and parked it in back. ‘What did you get for dinner?’ she asked him. No longer confused by this question, he said, ‘The endive salad and the grilled lamb.’ The waiter had curly hair cut short up the sides and back, glistening with gel. He dealt deftly with questions about the regional Alsace cuisine, the choucroute garnie, the Strasbourg sausage and the Gewürztraminer by Hügel or Hartmann. Afterwards they drove down freeways, boulevards, underpasses, strips and highways, out towards Malibu, the hot wind in the palm trees by the road. The music for some reason was wrong, a Beethoven sonata on the cassette and rap on the radio, but she whistled the right song anyway through her teeth: ‘Then she looks in my eyes / It makes me come alive / When she says / “Don’t worry, baby, / Everything will turn out all right . . .”’ Nothing would happen between them.
Idling one morning in the kitchen, where the sunlight flagged the floor, he read an article about the Ligurian coast of Italy. The sights and only barely evoked atmosphere in the rudimentary travelogue, all olive oil and gnarled enchantment, seemed overpowering. Through the picture window the Pacific Ocean lay like a boundary that marked how far he was from England; yet being so absent made him also want to be elsewhere.
At other times his body quickened with a sense of loss and possibility. It was still feasible for him to change his life. He was being shown an existence that might have been his if he had made other choices. It was too late, but not quite too late. Without practice or testing, however, what could either choice mean? Where was the value in a blind decision with no appeal permitted?
Sitting in Los Angeles airport, Pietro ordered a gin and tonic at the cocktail bar.
It was over. LAX to LHR, the baggage label changed.
He thought of Hannah, and so powerful was his desire to see her that he could sense the cool touch of her skin, he could almost taste the peculiar fragrance of
her neck and hair. He pictured her waiting at the barrier in London and how her body would feel when he wrapped his arms about it: the firm, flat waist, the soft tissue of the upper arm; the long slender legs said by Harry to be the most beautiful in the world. She would be holding James, their third child, now five months old, and he would take him from her. His arms could feel the boy’s compact bulk, the weight of the buttocks resting on his own right forearm; he envisaged the toothless, twisted smile; he could smell the sweetness of the baby’s hair over the unclosed fontanelle.
Tears stung his eyes as he raised his glass. His body was raging with a sense of mortal urgency. He could not be sure if this was caused by expectation of seeing those he loved, or by the abandonment of America and of the lives he had not led.
At some strange time of night they crossed the Pole. He saw the VACANT sign on the cabin ahead and struggled from his seat. The light in the cubicle didn’t come on until he slid the bolt in the door. There was a smell of liquid soap or perhaps the blue disinfectant that swirled in the metal bowl of the lavatory. He splashed water on his face. Since he could never sleep on planes he thought he might as well be as wakeful as possible. Soon they showed a film in which Michael Caine played an American with an English accent unremarked by the other characters. His daughter was sleeping with a man old enough to be her father. There was a thriller subplot with tropical locations, slow wisecracks and a glimpse of nudity.
When he lifted the plastic blind there was a sense of light outside. They had flown from day to premature night, and through the other side. The sky below was bleached and foaming with fatigue. Someone else’s dawn was coming up.
A stewardess presented him with a tray, which was breakfast. His mouth furred by red wine and sleeplessness, he drank the orange juice and held out the thin plastic cup for coffee. His stomach churned with acid tiredness. Under a foil cover was a dense, overdone but still warm omelette, cooked light years ago by some hapless immigrant in San Diego. It would lie in his stomach on the back seat of the taxi on the M4 as it went past Hounslow.
UZES
FRANCE 1987
IT WAS DARK when Pietro heard the theatrical whispering at his door. ‘Wake up.’ Harry’s voice was urgent. ‘It’s half past five.’
This was a terrible way to begin a morning on holiday. Harry was standing fully dressed in the corridor outside. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re supposed to be in this village by six.’
They tumbled down the steps of the old hotel and out into the first signs of dawn. Harry switched on the headlights of the car. The top of the dashboard was crammed with suncream, dark glasses, postcards and other hot-weather holiday clutter that seemed out of place in the chill morning. They shivered in their shorts and sweaters as the engine started. Pietro stowed their picnic in the back. There was a smell of garlic from the terrine, though the soft cheese was as yet unnoticeable. Harry drove out of the square and found the road east towards Mont Ventoux.
They travelled in silence, each doing his best just to survive the unnatural earliness of the hour and the sense of injustice at having to spoil one of the valued few days of vacation.
In the main square at Bédoin there were signs of reluctant life. At the far end of the sandy expanse was an empty bandstand and a couple of locked pizza lorries. At the near end, where the road bent round to the left, were some small cars, Renaults and Fiats, and a short Provençal man emerging from an alleyway with his arms full of baguettes which he began to distribute.
‘Is this where we’re supposed to be meeting them?’ said Harry.
‘I think so. Yes, look, there’s Patrick.’
A man of about forty, bandy-legged, with black curly hair and a red face, came over and shook their hands. He slapped them on the back and said, ‘Fait froid, hein?’ several times, then took them over to a car where he introduced them to half a dozen other men, mostly in their twenties. ‘Philippe, Jean-Pierre, Martin . . .’ Hands were shaken, and one of the men handed Pietro a baguette.
‘Alors, vous me suivez maintenant,’ said Patrick, and got into his car, a white Simca with yellow fog lamps.
A small convoy trailed out of Bédoin, branching off through the second square and out into the foothills of Mont Ventoux. Pietro chatted to the two men he had been assigned to take. Harry, who could not speak French, looked moodily out of the window where the road began to mount through the scrub on a well-made surface with loose white chippings at the side. When they had climbed above the tree-line and were in sight of the summit one of the Frenchmen pointed excitedly to the side of the road and asked Pietro to stop. They went over to a small memorial stone erected to the memory of Tommy Simpson, a British cyclist who had died on his way to the top. Harry muttered about a similar fate awaiting the rest of them, but the two Frenchmen placed bicycle tyres over the memorial in a gesture of respect.
There were about twenty of them at the top. It was light, but there was no heat from the sun. The men stamped and hit themselves with their arms as they looked out over the whole spread of the Vaucluse down to the south and east.
‘Worth coming, just for the view, wasn’t it?’ said Pietro.
‘Listen,’ said Harry. ‘I’m thirty-seven. I haven’t ridden a bicycle since I was twelve. Most of these guys look about twenty, don’t they?’
‘Yes, I should think that’s about what they are. They’re the local football team.’
‘Thanks for telling me. So what’s Patrick doing with them?’
‘He’s the coach.’
A long, open lorry was allowed on to the final peak by an official who guarded the road. On it were two rows of mountain bikes, which the men eagerly removed and began bouncing up and down on the road, testing for resilience and snap.
‘Allez, ’arry.’ Patrick took him by the shoulder and presented him with a bike, which Harry rode shakily up and down.
‘It’s like riding a bicycle,’ said Pietro. ‘Once you’ve –’
‘La descente. Ça commence!’ shouted one, then several, of the young men. There were cries and calls as they set off down the little road from the peak. ‘C’est la descente,’ Patrick confided. After a hundred yards the leaders suddenly veered off the road and on to an area of loose white chippings like those that lined the route on the way up.
‘What’s wrong with using the road?’ called out Harry.
‘Search me,’ said Pietro.
The hill funnelled down into a narrow track between the trees. The gradient meant that both brakes had to be applied all the time and neither could be released more than half an inch. Pedalling was unnecessary, but the legs took almost as much strain as the arms as they held themselves rigid on the bike against the steep fall of the ground. The surface was made up of sharp white stones, packed into loose trails through the forest. They jarred the hands and wrists through the juddering of the handlebars. Occasionally a squeezing wheel caused one to fly backwards at eye level. Soon Pietro and Harry found their arms aching with the strain of supporting their weight against the sharply descending bikes. From time to time they lifted themselves from the saddles to ease the soreness, but this only increased the pressure on the wrists. After a particularly steep section they lost sight of the rest of the party and were relieved to find Patrick by the side of the track. He was mending a puncture inflicted by one of the pointed little stones. To their disappointment this took him about a minute and a half.
‘When I was a kid,’ said Harry, as they reluctantly set off again, ‘that used to take me the whole morning.’
‘How much would you pay not to be doing this?’ said Pietro, the words shaken up by the impact of the bucking machine beneath him. The lever on the gear change had rubbed a patch of skin off his right hand. On the rare occasions that they came to a clearing and could see down the mountain, they appeared barely to have begun the descent.
The sun made spectacular paths and patterns on the forest floor, which passed unappreciated by the bikers. Harry and Pietro could sometimes hear virile noises from a
head as members of the football team encouraged or jeered at one another. Eventually, after an hour and a half, when both had said three or four times that they could not go on, they came into a clearing to find that the others had stopped. They were sitting on two long tree trunks. Some were tending cuts on their legs or making adjustments to their bikes. Most were breaking open their picnics.
‘Ah, les anglais!’ called one. ‘C’est le casse-croûte maintenant!’ He made eating gestures by bringing the fingers of his right hand to a point and shoving them towards his mouth.
Pietro and Harry slumped against a fallen tree and opened their plastic carrier bag. The journey down, with the bag stuffed inside Pietro’s sweater, had agitated the cheese into ripeness.
‘Fait chaud, hein?’ said Patrick, grinning. They agreed, as they stripped down to their shirtsleeves.
‘Do you know what time it is?’ said Harry. ‘It’s nine o’clock. It feels like we’ve been up for a week.’
Patrick’s nephew, a lanky boy of about eighteen, brought them some wine and they began to relax. ‘Hannah’s not going to believe this,’ said Pietro. ‘This is the most ridiculous morning I’ve ever spent.’
He offered some of the rich cheese to Patrick, who in return held out some processed packets of La Vache qui Rit. In response to some of their sweating Provençal terrine, the goalkeeper offered a vacuum-packed piece of ham with sliced bread.
There were several photographs taken before the first signs of restlessness appeared among the young men. They started to bounce their bikes up and down impatiently and to make wine-affected challenges and bets.
Pietro looked at Harry and grimaced. ‘La gloire.’
Harry pulled himself stiffly up. The football team rode slowly round the sun-latticed clearing, over the broken twigs, before one of them let out a yell and pointed his bike down an apparently vertical path. Momentarily emboldened, Harry and Pietro hurried after him.