Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘A play?’

  ‘A song.’

  ‘What sort of song, Erskine? A pop song?’

  ‘Sure, sure. I’d just like to see how it goes.’

  There was a whole programme of pop songs on. Morris sprawled back in the one armchair with his whisky, watching them all impassively. As each new number came up Bob looked at him and asked ‘This one?’ Morris shook his head without interest. Bob began to get nervous on his behalf.

  ‘You’re very casual about it, Erskine,’ he said.

  ‘What is there to get excited about?’ said Morris easily, the flesh beneath his chin folding over the top of his collar as he leaned back into the cushions. ‘It’s just a song.’

  ‘But to get it on television! Or have you done it before?’

  ‘I’ve had a few numbers on.’

  Bob stared at him.

  ‘What a strange man you are, Erskine!’ he said. The corner of Morris’s mouth twitched up into his cheek and fell back. Bob became embarrassed at his own effusiveness, and turned back to the screen, tapping out the rhythm with his fingers on the side of his glass. ‘What’s this number of yours called?’ he asked.

  Morris blew smoke down his nose.

  ‘ “I Can’t Stop Crying”,’ he said.

  A girl with dark-rimmed eyes and long straight blonde hair appeared on the screen, picking her way through a number of abstract decorative shapes at the back of the studio.

  ‘I can’t stop crying,’ she sang in a plaintive voice. ‘All through the night, I can’t stop crying. Know it’s not right, but can’t stop crying. I can’t stop crying, ’cause I am crying for you.’

  ‘Is this yours?’ asked Bob.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I can’t stop crying,’ sang the girl. ‘Though I’m a fool, I go on sighing. Know I’m a fool, not even trying. It can’t be right to cry through the night. I can’t stop crying for you.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Bob, when she had finished. ‘I liked the tune.’

  ‘I did the words,’ said Morris. ‘Someone else did the music.’

  ‘The words were very good, too.’

  Morris shrugged.

  ‘It’s what the children like,’ he said. ‘They don’t like anything new or strange. Children are very conservative.’

  They left the television on while they had dinner, because Morris wanted to watch a Western. Thinking that he wanted to watch it because he thought it was funny, Bob made a few humorous remarks at the expense of the characters on the screen. But Morris didn’t smile. He watched silently and impassively, chewing his overdone steak, and retrieving his cigarette from the ashtray between courses. Bob took the point; Morris didn’t think the Western was funny.

  When the Western was finished they watched the hospital serial. And when the hospital serial finished they carried their coffee across to the set and watched the courtroom serial. Bob and Tessa sat on the floor, their arms round each other. Morris sprawled in the armchair, dispensing whisky. Mrs Mounce rang the bell, and was invited in. ‘Hello, Glenda,’ said Morris when Bob introduced them. She curled up on the floor and leaned against the arm of Morris’s chair. He poured her a tumblerful of whisky.

  ‘Sweetest!’ she cried, flirtatiously. ‘You’re trying to get me tight!’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Morris absently, his attention on the screen.

  And so they sat. The telephone rang three times; each time it was for Morris. ‘Sure . . .’ they heard him murmuring into the mouthpiece, between the noise of gunshot and the scream of tyres. ‘I could be interested . . . I should want to use him in a completely different context, of course . . . Sure, sure . . .’

  After the third call Morris said to Bob: ‘I asked some people to step round.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Bob. ‘They’re welcome.’

  But when they arrived, Morris didn’t seem particularly interested in them; not, anyway, enough to stop watching the television. ‘Lake, Brian, Andy,’ he explained, scarcely looking up from the screen. ‘Tessa, Glenda, Bob. Pour out the rest of the whisky, Brian.’

  Brian and Andy lounged against the edge of the dining-table at the back of the group, half watching the television, half talking to each other. Lake perched on the arm of Morris’s chair and stared at the screen. She was a girl; she was the girl who had sung ‘I Can’t Stop Crying’. Bob gazed at her, drinking her in. She shone in the half-darkness of the room. Her long bleached hair shone; her polished white raincoat shone; her white boots and her unstockinged knees shone.

  ‘How did it look?’ she asked Morris, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  ‘Great,’ said Morris, not taking his eyes off the screen either. He slipped a non-committal hand round her waist, so that the smoke from his cigarette rose past her left ear.

  Bob couldn’t stop staring at her, even though he had his arm round Tessa. He rubbed his chin absently on the top of Tessa’s head, so that he could look over it at the girl. Tessa and Mrs Mounce, he knew, were watching her out of the corner of their eyes too, as silent and overawed as he was himself. He knew without even thinking about it consciously that she had no bottom worth worrying about. God Almighty! A girl in show business, with white boots and no bottom – in his flat!

  ‘It looked all right, did it?’ she asked Morris again, perhaps forgetting that she had asked him once already.

  ‘Great, great. Have you eaten?’

  ‘We’re going to get something at Nick’s. You coming?’

  ‘OK,’ said Morris. He stood up and put his cigarettes in his pocket. ‘Thanks, Tessa. Thanks, Bob. I enjoyed that. Bye, Glenda. Bye!’

  They had gone, all four of them, almost before Bob realized they were going.

  ‘Darling!’ said Mrs Mounce admiringly. ‘I never knew you had such smart friends!’

  Bob drew the curtain to one side and looked out of the window. The four of them were just climbing into a long red two-seater sports car standing double-parked almost in the middle of the roadway. Its headlights came on full beam, and it accelerated away with a rising roar which brought heads to windows all along the street.

  Silently, Tessa switched the television off and began to clear the table.

  Eleven

  Dyson wandered about the Final Departure Lounge at London Airport in a curious state of elation. The Magic Carpet Travel plane was late leaving; Dyson and the rest of the press party should have taken off for the Trucial Riviera ten minutes before. But he didn’t mind at all. He loved airports. He would have liked to feel blasé about them, but he didn’t have the opportunity to use them often enough. As soon as he got inside one he became elated. He seemed to have a heightened sense of reality. Moving staircases, rubber plants, low black leather armchairs; ‘Flight BE 4029 for Copenhagen and Stockholm is departing now . . . This is the last call for passengers travelling on Flight LH 291 for Düsseldorf and Berlin . . .’ He bought Oggi and Neue Illustrierte at the bookstall, even though he could scarcely read a word of either Italian or German, because being inside an airport made him feel that he could. The Final Departure Lounge, sealed off from gross particular Britain by passport and customs barriers, was a bright nowhere land, sterilized of nationality and all the other ties and limitations of everyday life. Here Dyson felt like International Airport Man – neat, sophisticated, compact; a wearer of lightweight suits and silky blue showercoats; moving over the surface of the earth like some free-floating spirit – from Karachi to Athens to Hong Kong, from Honolulu to Tangier to New York – unimpeded by the traffic problems of Karachi or the housing situation in Honolulu, not deflected from New York by any emotional attachment in Athens, or kept from Hong Kong by business entanglement in New York. Airports and television studios – this was the way of life Dyson felt he was intended for.

  He could pick out some of the other journalists in the Magic Carpet group sitting about the lounge; they were all, like himself, carrying the folder of publicity material Magic Carpet had issued them with. There was a photographer w
ho had checked in just ahead of him. He seemed to have brought a couple of models with him – badly-dressed girls with pained expressions and tragically thin legs. And the tall, cavernous man with the dark blazer and the ex-officer’s moustache – wasn’t he from the Telegraph? The red-faced young man with the thin hair falling all over the place was a humorous writer for somebody – Dyson had seen him on television. There was a man in a blue pinstripe suit, with elegantly grey curls, who freelanced food and wine, and an anxious young woman with dark eyes and three strings of beads to chew who did travel for one of the glossies; Dyson had seen them both on facilities trips before. Oh God, he thought, facilities trips! How awful they were! He could picture the holiday development at Sharjah already – new concrete hotels built too quickly, no amenities, the squalor of the local population beyond the new concrete reserves. It was only the travelling there and back which made them worthwhile at all. They could be hours late leaving for all he cared; he was quite happy to sit at London Airport all day and watch the aircraft coming and going.

  Ah, the aircraft! He gazed at them through the windows of the lounge. They stood ranked on the apron, shimmering in the morning sunlight. The tangled confusion of ground equipment which surrounded them – the lorries, steps, and generators, the ordinary shoddy private cars in which the aircrew drove themselves out, the temporary sheds and stacks of building materials – only emphasized their remote and fragile perfection. They stood like swans standing – on unlikely legs, in tangled nests. Like swans they would fold their legs and beat up into the uncluttered, abstract sky. One of them moved off the stand as Dyson watched, its engines whining, the blast of air behind it crinkling the standing rainwater on the apron into a million fleeing furrows . . . And there, away across the grass a mile beyond it, one of the big jets was just starting its take-off run. Slowly, very slowly, the great bulk gathered speed, as if the Bank of England or the National Gallery had started to walk, and was trying to run. It drew level with the airport buildings, the colossal baggage of noise it trailed swelling at great speed now, but still heavy on the ground and never in a million years capable of leaving it – a great beast charging head down at central Middlesex. Then, suddenly, it lifted its head above the runway, looked round and sniffed the air for a moment – and went straight up into the sky like spring-heeled Jack; levelled off; and vanished against the shifting clouds. Four lines of brown exhaust, rounded off at the top, hung faintly in the air where it had leapt.

  Dyson turned round, moved by the performance – and there behind him, about three feet away, picking absently at a morsel of food between his front teeth and twitching his nose from time to time to ease some hidden blockage in his nasal passage, was Reg Mounce. The supraterrestrial perfection of the Final Departure Lounge faded a little.

  ‘Well, well, well!’ said Mounce, taking his finger out of his mouth, as surprised as Dyson.

  ‘Hello,’ said Dyson unwelcomingly.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m going out to the Persian Gulf,’ said Dyson coldly. ‘For the paper.’

  ‘The Magic Carpet beano?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, snap! Stinking snap!’

  The Final Departure Lounge seemed to Dyson suddenly no more isolated from the imperfections of life than the saloon bar of the Gates of Jerusalem, and the great silver aircraft no rarer or lovelier than red London buses.

  ‘I’m doing it for a load of crap called Leisure and Pleasure magazine,’ said Mounce. ‘They don’t pay much, but what the hell? It’s a week off from the stinking office, with nothing to do but collect a few pix from the firm, slap some sort of crap together from the handout, and get some serious drinking done.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dyson.

  ‘Charge some exes up, of course. Charge a few more up to the paper. It all adds up.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ said Mounce confidentially, ‘I can do with a few days in the sun just at the moment. All this business about Other Arrangements – it’s been rather getting me down. I thought it might be clever to shove off for a few days and let it all blow over.’

  Dyson said nothing. He was swearing a solemn oath to himself that he would be absolutely ruthless about Mounce on this trip. When they went aboard the plane he would firmly find himself a seat next to the wine-and-food man, or the girl with the beads, and ignore Mounce’s existence until they were back in London.

  ‘I think it’ll all just simmer down, won’t it?’ said Mounce.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this Other Arrangements business. It’ll blow over. In a month’s time we’ll be laughing about it. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘For God’s sake – I don’t know.’

  Mounce fell silent, thoughtfully trying to remove the last traces of breakfast from his teeth with his tongue. Dyson took the opportunity to move away and sit down on the other side of the lounge. He found that Mounce had followed him across the room, and had sat down in the seat beside him.

  ‘We’re twenty-five minutes late,’ said Mounce.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These stinking trips are always late.’

  A small man with an archaic toothbrush moustache and a wild tangle of stand-up hair above a domed forehead came hurrying across the lounge. About half his height seemed to be forehead. He had thick spectacles, behind which his eyes darted keenly about like goldfish searching for a way out from their bowls. He had introduced himself to the party earlier, at the air terminal, as Starfield, Magic Carpet’s Air Transportation Director.

  ‘Magic Carpet group!’ he cried to the room, pressing his palms together as if about to sing a tenor aria. ‘This is an announcement concerning the Magic Carpet party travelling to Sharjah. There is a slight delay, boys and girls, caused by the fact that the aircraft which will be taking us has burst a tyre on touchdown from Amsterdam, and there will be a slight delay on account of this cause while this fact is rectified. While we are waiting, I have arranged for drinks to be served at the bar, compliments of Magic Carpet Travel, and I would ask you to rest assured, believe me, that everything humanly possible is being done to facilitate our getting away at the earliest possible moment. Thank you.’

  Mounce let his breath slowly out between his teeth.

  ‘Here we go again,’ he said. ‘Bang on stinking form, as stinking usual.’

  Morris’s electric typewriter drummed steadily on. Bob sat with his chin in his hands, sucking a liquorice and watching him.

  ‘I’m afraid John’s taken against you for some reason,’ he said.

  Morris typed on, saying nothing.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into him,’ said Bob. ‘He’s always been very good to me. You’ve rubbed him up the wrong way somehow.’

  He leaned back in his chair and gazed at the people working in the offices on the other side of Hand and Ball Court. He felt disinclined for work. With Dyson away and the sun shining there was a certain sense of holiday in the air which made leaning forward over the desk somehow physically difficult. He swallowed the remains of his liquorice and took another one.

  ‘It’s not getting you down at all, is it, Erskine?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s that, Bob?’ said Morris, without looking up from his typewriter.

  ‘John’s attitude. It’s not getting you down at all?’

  Morris stopped typing, picked up his cigarette from the ashtray, and masticated smoke for some moments while he read through what he had typed.

  ‘No,’ he said. He started typing again. After a while Bob picked up a piece of ‘Country Day by Day’ copy about stoats and weasels, and tossed it across on to Morris’s desk. Morris glanced at it enquiringly as he worked.

  ‘I thought you might like to have a go at subbing while John’s away,’ said Bob casually. ‘Make a break for you.’

  Expressionlessly, Morris picked the copy up and tossed it back.

  ‘You do it, Bob,’ he said. ‘I’ll look it over when you’ve finished it.’r />
  Bob felt a little hurt. He had had a vague idea that he might try to teach Morris the rudiments of subbing and ordering copy while Dyson was away, so that Dyson would no longer have any excuse for refusing to let Morris do anything.

  ‘Look, Erskine,’ he said, ‘you can take a rest from “Years Gone By” for the next day or two. I’ll take full responsibility if John raises any question.’

  Morris rested his pale, neutral eyes on Bob for an instant.

  ‘This isn’t “Years Gone By”, Bob,’ he said. ‘This is a memo to the Editor about the new pre-teen page.’

  Bob stared.

  ‘What new pre-teen page, Erskine?’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard anything about a pre-teen page.’

  ‘You will, Bob, once the Editor’s read this.’

  Bob went on staring at him.

  ‘There’s a lot of advertising in pre-teen A/Bs,’ said Morris.

  Bob subbed all the copy that had come in by the morning post. Later, when Morris had finished his memo and put it in the out-basket, he came over to Bob’s desk and helped himself to some of the subbed copy to study.

  ‘There’s nothing to it, really,’ said Bob modestly. ‘It’s just a matter of checking the facts and the spelling, crossing out the first sentence, and removing any attempts at jokes.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris. He bent down and wrote something on one of the sheets.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Bob, rather sharply.

  ‘ “Exhilarating” with an “a”, Bob.’

  ‘Oh . . . yes . . .’

  Morris looked through another page, and made another correction.

  ‘Now what?’ demanded Bob.

  ‘The territory of the Canaanites was west of Samaria, not east.’

  ‘Oh, was it?’

  Morris began marking something on a number of pages.

  ‘What’s this, Erskine?’

  ‘I’ve had an idea, Bob. I’m marking all next week’s “Meditations” to be set in italic.’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘I’m marking them for italic.’