In-Flight Entertainment Page 6

‘My day?’ she said. ‘Are you sure? Nothing very much happened. I took the twins to Tumbletots, then we went round Asda …’

  ‘Keep talking,’ he said, fiddling with his hearing aid. ‘I want to test this gadget out.’

  ‘… then I had to queue at the post office, and I wasn’t very popular with the double buggy,’ she droned on.

  He flicked the switch to the T-setting.

  ‘… never good enough for you, you old beast, you never had any time for me, you never listened to anything I said,’ came the low growling voice he remembered from before. ‘You cold old beast, Ruth says you’re emotionally autistic, definitely somewhere on the autistic spectrum anyway, that’s why she went to the other side of the world, but she says she still can’t get away from it there, your lack of interest, you blanked us, you blotted us out, you don’t even know the names of your grandchildren let alone their birthdays …’

  He flicked the switch back.

  ‘… after their nap, then I put the washing on and peeled some potatoes for tonight’s dinner while they watched CBeebies …’ she continued in her toneless everyday voice.

  ‘That’s enough for now, thanks,’ he said crisply. He took a big gulp of his drink, and then another. ‘Scarlett and, er, Mia. You’d better see what they’re up to.’

  ‘Are you OK, Dad?’

  ‘Fine,’ he snapped. ‘You go off and do whatever it is you want to do.’ He closed his eyes. He needed Elizabeth now. She’d taken no nonsense from the girls. He had left them to her, which was the way she’d wanted it. All this hysteria! Elizabeth had known how to deal with them.

  He sensed he was in for another bad night, and he was right. He lay rigid as a stone knight on a tomb, claustrophobic in his partially closed-down head and its frantic brain noise. The deafer he got the louder it became; that was how it was, that was the deal. He grimaced at the future, his other ear gone, reduced to the company of Matthew Herring and his like, a shoal of old boys mouthing at each other.

  The thing was, he had been the breadwinner. Children needed their mothers. It was true he hadn’t been very interested in them, but then, frankly, they hadn’t been very interesting. Was he supposed to pretend? Neither of them had amounted to much. And, he had had his own life to get on with.

  He’d seen the way they were with their children these days – ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, darling! You are clever’ and ‘Love you!’ at the end of every exchange, with the young fathers behaving like old women, cooing and planting big sloppy kisses on their babies as if they were in a Disney film. The whole culture had gone soft, it gave him the creeps; opening up to your feminine side! He shuddered in his pyjamas.

  Elizabeth was dead. That was what he really couldn’t bear.

  The noise inside his head was going wild, colossal hooting and zooming and pressure-cooker hiss; he needed to distract his brain with – what had the doctor called it? – ‘sound enrichment’. Give it some competition, fight fire with fire: that was the idea. Fiddling with the radio’s tuning wheel in the dark, he swore viciously and wondered why it was you could never find the World Service when you needed it. He wanted talk but there was only music, which would have to do. Nothing but a meaningless racket to him, though at least it was a different sort of racket; that was the theory.

  No, that was no better. If anything, it was worse.

  Wasn’t the hearing aid supposed to help cancel tinnitus? So the doctor had suggested. Maybe the T-setting would come into its own in this sort of situation. He turned on the tiny gadget, made the necessary adjustments, and poked it into his ear.

  It was like blood returning to a dead leg, but in his head and chest. What an extraordinary sensation! It was completely new to him. Music was stealing hotly, pleasurably through his veins for the first time in his life, unspeakably delicious. He heard himself moan aloud. The waves of sound were announcing bliss and at the same time they brought cruel pain. He’d done his best, hadn’t he? He didn’t know what the girls expected from him. He’d given them full financial support until they were eighteen, which was more than many fathers could say. What was it exactly that he was supposed not to have done?

  Lifting him on a dark upsurge into the night, the music also felled him with inklings of what he did not know and had not known, intimations of things lovely beyond imagination which would never now be his as death was next. A tear crept down his face.

  He hadn’t cried since he was a baby. Appalling! At this rate he’d be wetting himself. When his mother had died, he and his sisters had been called into the front room and given a handkerchief each and told to go to their bedrooms until teatime. Under the carpet. Into thin air.

  The music was so astonishingly beautiful, that was the trouble. Waves of entrancing sound were threatening to breach the sea wall. Now he was coughing dry sobs.

  This was not on. Frankly he preferred any combination of troublesome symptoms to getting in this state. He fumbled with the hearing aid and at last managed to turn the damned thing off. Half-unhinged, he tottered to the bathroom and ran a basin of water over it, submerged the beastly little gadget, drowned it. Then he fished it out and flushed it down the lavatory. Best place for it.

  No more funny business, he vowed. That was that. From now on he would put up and shut up, he swore it on Elizabeth’s grave. Back in bed, he once again lowered his head onto the pillow.

  Straight away the infernal noise factory started up; he was staggering along beat by beat in a heavy shower of noise and howling.

  ‘It’s not real,’ he whispered to himself in the dark. ‘Compensatory brain activity, that’s what this is.’

  Inside his skull all hell had broken loose. He had never heard anything like it.

  In the Driver’s Seat

  I WAS CROUCHED in the back of Deborah’s car. Her bluff new boyfriend was driving it, rather brutally, down the A4 in the dark through the rain. We were on our way to Maidenhead, where the party was. He knew the road well so he was driving with a sort of braggartly contempt.

  ‘I had no idea your car could get up this sort of speed, Deborah,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a new car,’ said Deborah with a nervous laugh.

  ‘She can tell that,’ scoffed Andy. ‘It’s shaking so much it feels like it’ll fall to bits.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not used to …’ said Deborah, and I saw her hand grip the dashboard, which goaded Andy into putting his foot down even further.

  He belted us along with breezy boyishness, although he is now thirty-six. He looks like what he is, a former rugby player. Injuries stopped him a couple of years ago and he’s concerned about running to fat.

  ‘You should try rowing now you’re living in Isleworth,’ I had said over dinner. ‘You really should, you’re the right build; you’d love it.’

  I noticed how he bristled, how a sullen flash of resentment flew at me from his forcefield.

  ‘Andy doesn’t like being told what he’d like,’ laughed Deborah watchfully across the table.

  Back on the A4 Andy was intent on forcing the car, a decent elderly Polo, up into the nineties if he possibly could. Deborah was at the limit of her tact and patience.

  ‘I’m not sure my poor old car will be able to take this,’ she murmured.

  ‘You’ll never know till you try!’ carolled Andy above the roaring of the engine.

  ‘Actually I’m feeling a bit sick,’ she said, uncertain, but it made no difference.

  He obviously couldn’t bear to be in the passenger seat unless it was absolutely necessary – that is, unless he’d had what he would call a skinful. The way a man drives gives a surprisingly accurate idea of what he’s like in other areas. Does he crash his way through the gears? Does he speed, or stall? Does he get nasty at the lights? I gazed at the back of Andy’s head. You certainly wouldn’t want him sitting on your tail, I thought, with a coarse mental chuckle.

  I was trying to disregard the awareness that I was bumping along on a mad, dangerous, out-of-control toboggan ride. It seemed a good ti
me to describe my next-door neighbour’s teenage daughter’s horror when I’d told her how the new speed cameras work. Her eyes had stretched in shock. She’d obviously been speeding all over London in her father’s Ford Mondeo, I said. They photograph the face at the wheel as well as the car’s number plates, I’d told her. Deborah skipped the laugh in the story and went straight for the element that worried her.

  ‘The thing is, Andy,’ she said, would-be brave, trying to sound mock-truculent, ‘this is my car and if it’s photographed by the speed cameras, I’ll be the one who’s held responsible.’

  ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ said Andy, spitefully I thought.

  ‘I’m not joking any more, Andy,’ she said, still timid in the shade of his massive macho aura. ‘I could lose my licence.’

  ‘Oh dear me!’ crowed Andy, and the car bowled creakingly along at ninety.

  Was he wanting her to beg him?

  ‘But then I’d find it very difficult to keep my job,’ she protested. ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘No, it’s not funny,’ he mocked, not slackening the pace at all.

  She is five years older than him, gets back from work in time to help her two children with their homework, reviews the rate she pays on her mortgage every half-year. She is beautiful in the sepulchral Victorian manner, her expression veering between anxiety and seriousness; whereas he plays the fool, the tease, the cosseted grasshopper to her credit-worthy ant.

  ‘Yes, he’s living in my house now but he doesn’t contribute to the bills or food,’ she confided in me over coffee. ‘Whenever we go out together, I have to drive us home because he likes to drink. He never buys a present when we visit my friends or family, that’s always up to me.’

  ‘Tell him how you feel,’ I said. Presumably she didn’t want me to come over breathless with indignation on her behalf. She didn’t need me to state the bleeding obvious, she could see that for herself.

  ‘Well, I do; I have to say what I think,’ she continued. ‘But it makes me feel I’m mercenary, these uncomfortable feelings. Because he’s lovely really. And I like being with someone. I’ve been on my own for a while now and everything’s fine, my job’s secure, the children are fine; but I want to be married again, that’s the trouble, I like the married state. And Andy wants to belong. He wants to get married. He said to me, “What if anything were to happen to you? I wouldn’t feel secure unless I knew I could stay on in the house.” And of course there’s always the fear that he might leave me. He would feel happier if I transferred the house title into joint names. Men like to be trusted, don’t they?’

  ‘I imagine we all do,’ I’d said. ‘Like to be trusted.’

  ‘I’ll be forty-one next year. Andy’s saying he wants my child!’ She laughed, hand swiping her brow, and looked down at the table in confusion.

  That had been some weeks ago. The rain was very heavy now, the windscreen wipers were going at a double lick. Why on earth had I agreed to a lift to this party? I thought of my own car, my little green Fiat, with longing. I love my car. It makes me feel light and free. It means nobody can bully me about not drinking and I can leave whenever I want to. All those sulky end-of-party dramas of coercion and constraint, the driver wanting to go and the drinker wanting to stay, I don’t have to do them; although I would tonight. Why had I said yes?

  I looked at the two antagonistic heads in front of me, his and hers, parental, and I felt like a child crouching in the back on my own. Their child.

  ‘Andy, I really am feeling a bit sick,’ said Deborah faintly. ‘I do wish you’d slow down.’

  That brought back Deborah’s troubled laughter over coffee that time, her hand swiping her brow in confusion as she told me what he wanted. And I thought – I wonder.

  The Tipping Point

  LOOK AT THAT sky. It’s almost sitting on the windscreen. Whose idea was it to hold the Summer School up in the wilds this year? I know my sweet Americans would follow me to the ends of the Earth for my thoughts on the Bard; and I know Stratford venues are stratospheric these days. But all this way to study the Scottish play in situ smacks of desperation. If ever a sky looked daggers, this is it.

  I was quite looking forward to the drive, actually. Impossible to get lost, my esteemed colleague Malkie MacNeil told me, just follow the A82 all the way and enjoy the scenery, the mountains, best in the world, blah blah. So I left Glasgow reasonably bright and hopeful this morning after a dish of porridge, up along Loch Lomond, and the light has drained steadily away through Tarbet, Ardlui, Tyndrum, until I realise that it’s eleven in the morning on the fifth of August and I’ve got to turn on the headlights. Storm clouds over Glen Coe. ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces.’ Not really. More like a celestial housing estate.

  All right, let’s have something suitably gloomy in the way of music. Here we are. Winterreise with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and his manly baritone. No finer example of the pathetic fallacy than Schubert’s Winterreise. ‘What’s that when it’s at home, Dr Beauman?’ That is the reading of one’s own emotion into external nature, child. I still cannot believe that I, confirmed commitment-phobe, have been cast as the rejected lover, ignominiously dumped like some soppy First-Year.

  Nun ist die Welt so trübe, der Weg gehült in Schnee. My German may not be fluent, but it’s become more than passable in the last year. You’d allow that, Angelika? Now the world is so bleak, the path shrouded in snow. Schnee.

  It was immediate. As soon as we first clapped eyes on each other, et cetera. But, joking apart, it was. I was over in Munich to give my paper on ‘Milton’s Comus; the Masque Form as Debate and Celebration’, mainly because I wanted to check out the painted rococo Cuvilliés-Theater – crimson, ivory and gold – on Residenzstrasse. I needed it for my chapter on European Court Theatre, for the book that now bears your name as dedicatee.

  You were in charge of that conference, Head of Arts Admin for all the participating institutions that week. Once it was over we went back to your flat in Cologne. Jens was staying with his grandmother as luck would have it. Beautiful Angelika, with your fierce pale eagle eyes and beaming smile. I remember capering round your bed like a satyr after you’d given me the first of your ecological curtain lectures. I was quoting Comus at you to shut you up:

  Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth

  With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,

  Covering the earth with odours, fruits and flocks,

  Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,

  But all to please and sate the curious taste?

  I was proud and stout and gleeful in the presence of your angularity. It felt like a challenge. Heaping you with good things became part of that. I filled your austere kitchen with delicacies, though that wasn’t easy as you are of course vegan.

  ‘Enough is enough,’ you said, pushing me away.

  ‘You can never have enough,’ I laughed. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Not so. I have.’

  Ich will den Boden küssen,/ Durchdringen Eis und Schnee/Mit meinen heissen Tränen. Schnee again. I want to kiss the ground, to pierce the ice and snow with my hot tears. Yes, well. Romanticism was your besetting sin, Angelika; your quasi-mystical accusatory ecospeak about the planet. Whereas my line is, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen – I don’t see how anything mankind does can impose change on overwhelming natural phenomena like hurricanes and tsunamis. We resemble those frail figures in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, dwarfed by the immensity of nature. You took me to see his great painting Das Eismeer in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, jagged ice floes in a seascape beyond hope; and you used it as a jumping-off point to harangue me about the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf. My clever intense passionate Angelika, so quick to imagine the worst, and so capable of anguish; you wept like a red-eyed banshee when you gave me the push.

  An ominous cloudscape, this, great weightless barricades of cumulonimbus blocking the light. I can’t see another car or any sign of humanity. Once out of this miserable va
lley, I’ll stop for petrol in Ballachulish. Then it’s on up past Loch Linnhe, Loch Lochy, Loch Oich, Loch Ness, and I’ll be there. Inverness. What’s done is done. Halfway through the week there’s a day trip planned to Cawdor Castle, where Duncan doubtless shakes his gory locks on mugs and mousemats all over the gift shop.

  So then I applied for a peripatetic fellowship at the University of Cologne, and got it. I brushed up my Schiller. I wrote a well-received paper on Gotthold Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm and gave a seminar on Ödön von Horváth, the wandering playwright who all his life was terrified of being struck by lightning and then, during a Parisian thunderstorm, took shelter beneath a tree on the Champs-Elysées and was killed by a falling branch. Let that be a warning to you, Angelika: you can worry too much.

  We were very happy, you and me and Jens. He’s unusually thoughtful and scrupulous, that boy; like his mother. They had their annual day of atonement at his school while I was over, when the children are instructed to consider the guilt of their militaristic forefathers in the last century. That was the night he had an asthma attack and we ended up in Casualty. Cue copious lectures from you on air quality, of course.

  And here’s the rain, driving against the windscreen with a violence fit to crack it. It’s almost comic, this journey, the menace of those massed clouds, the grey-green gloom. Nor do I have a residual belief that rain is in any way cleansing or purgative. No, no. As you so painstakingly taught me, Angelika, our sins of pollution lock into the clouds and come down as acid rain. Hence Waldsterben, or forest death; and from Waldsterben you would effortlessly segue into flash floods, storm surge, wildfire, drought, and on to carbon capture. You were not the only one. You and your friends discussed these things for hours, organising petitions, marching here and there. Your activism made my English students look like solipsistic children, their political concerns stretching with some effort to top-up fees and back down again to the price of hair straighteners.

  You were in a constant state of alarm. I wanted you to talk about me, about you and me, but the apocalyptic zeitgeist intruded.