May I take this opportunity to wish you, on behalf of Daphne and myself, a pleasant vacation and a safe return to the Kingdom after Haj. Sincerely –
ERIC PARSONS
‘Would you like champagne?’
This was the beginning; an hour or so out from Heathrow. Already it felt further; watches moved on, a day in a life condensed to a scramble at a check-in desk, a walk to a departure gate; a day cut short and eclipsed, hurtling on into advancing night. And now the steward leaned over her, putting this question.
‘I don’t think so.’ They had already eaten; dinner, she supposed. So much smoked salmon is consumed on aircraft that it is a wonder there is any left to eat at ground level. The steward had just now whisked her tray from under her nose. ‘You could give me some brandy,’ she said.
‘Two to get you started?’ Hand hovering over the trolley, he seemed to approve her choice; as if what lay ahead were something to brace yourself for, not to celebrate.
‘And one of those nice plastic glasses,’ Frances Shore said. ‘Please.’
Across the aisle grown men were getting drunk on Cointreau. One of them cocked an eyebrow at the steward. He leaned over them; his face, pale and seamy under the late-night lights, showed a kind of patient disgust. Drinks were free of course, but on the Saudi run this standard airline ploy had the status of charity work. His fingers, dispensing the miniature bottles, were as clean and careful as a bishop’s.
The businessmen had done their talking earlier; passed sales charts to each other. ‘I wonder how Fairfax is doing in Kowloon?’ one of them asked.
His companion dug his plastic fork into a millefeuille, and made no reply. ‘How long now?’ he asked after a while.
‘Three hours.’
‘Keep the drinks going then.’
‘Enjoy it, gentlemen,’ the steward said. The woman held up her coffee cup. He swayed towards her with the pot. ‘Non-dairy creamer, Madam?’
I always wonder about this stuff,’ she said, accepting the foil packet. ‘It says what it isn’t, but not what it is.’
‘That’s life,’ the steward said. He moved away again. Dull clunk of ice cubes against plastic. Flimsy cushions flatten under head and back. Onwards. The man with the tough millefeuille stares at the dial of his watch, as if he could make the time go faster. Or hold it back.
Left alone, she closed her eyes. She was apprehensive, yes. She turned over the steward’s comment in her mind, because she was not one to let flippancies go unexamined; it paid to examine them, as there was so little, she always thought, in what people said when they were trying to be serious. You could only describe the future by exclusion; say what will not occur. Say what you will not be: an ice dancer, a cosmonaut, a mother of twelve. Much less easy to make a single positive prediction even for the coming week; much less easy to say what, in a month’s time, you will have become.
Andrew’s letters had been short, practical. They told her to bring flat sandals, British postage stamps, a bottle of Bovril. His voice on the phone had been hesitant. There had been the odd, expensive silence. He didn’t know how to describe Jeddah. She must, he said, see for herself.
She picked up the half-cup of coffee: black, and almost cold now. When she moved her legs, newsprint rustled, a paperback slid from her lap on to the seat. She felt stiff, uncomfortable. She began to think of lurching along to the lavatory, braving the bleary stares.
When the steward came back she said to him, ‘There aren’t many women on this flight.’
‘It’s not the time of year. Christmas and Easter, the wives fly out.’
‘Why don’t they stay?’
‘They can’t stick it. More coffee?’ She shook her head. ‘It must be your first trip. Got a husband out there?’
She nodded.
‘Visa all in order?’
‘I hope so. But I don’t read Arabic.’
‘Be waiting for you, will he?’
Again: ‘I hope so.’
‘Been out there long?’
‘Six weeks.’
‘Quick work,’ the steward said. ‘To get you out so soon.’
‘It’s the company who organized it. He says it’s not that easy, but they’ve been in Saudi for a while and they know how things are done.’
‘We all know how things are done,’ the steward said; he rubbed finger and thumb together, rustling an imaginary wad of notes. ‘What’s his line of country?’
‘He’s a civil engineer. They’re putting up a big new building for one of the Ministries.’
‘Likes it all right, does he?’
‘I don’t really know.’ During those phone calls (direct dial, good clear line) she’d not inquired of Andrew, are you happy? It would have meant another expensive silence, because he did not deal in that sort of question. He’d have found it strange from three paces, never mind three thousand miles. Could the man be right, she wondered, had someone been bribed on her behalf? It seemed such a small thing, obtaining a visa for one unimportant woman to join her unimportant husband, but she had once been assured, by a man called Jeff Pollard, who understood these things, that when corruption took root in a country it spread in no time at all from monarchs to tea boys, from ministers to filing clerks. She believed him; but did not feel herself a better person for the belief. She had been round and about southern Africa for five years, in regions where, by and large, the possibilities of corruption had not been fully explored. Andrew thought that, once, someone might have offered him a bribe; but through the other party’s ineptitude and poor English, and Andrew’s naïvety, the occasion had passed without profit.
As this occasion will pass, she thought; and in time, this flight. ‘More brandy?’ the steward inquired.
‘No thanks.’
‘Lived abroad before?’
‘Yes.’ He had a boring job, she supposed, and a right to people’s life-stories. ‘Zambia for a bit, then Botswana.’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ said the steward, animated now, but not impressed. ‘I’ve been to Botswana, the Holiday Inn, Gaborone. It’s a hole, Botswana. I went in the coffee shop and asked them for a toasted cheese sandwich, and do you know what they said?’
‘Cheese it is finished?’
‘Right on. You must have been there.’
‘Of course I’ve been there.’
‘But no cheese in the whole place? I ask you. They could have sent out for some.’
‘Look,’ Frances said, ‘there are two kinds of cheese in Botswana, Cheddar and Sweetmilk. They are imported from South Africa, which makes any number of kinds of cheese, but they only import two; they realize that people must have cheese, but to have too much of it might seem to condone apartheid. You’re with me?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Never mind. So what kind of sandwich did you have?’
‘I had ham.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘Where would the ham be from?’
‘Zimbabwe,’ she said. ‘Was it called