Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  ‘We can’t do that, I’m afraid, Erskine, because . . .’

  ‘I think it’ll look quite good, Bob. We’ll put a heavy rule round it, set the head in 42-point Old English, and put a single flower from the print-books next to it.’

  ‘I think it would look very pretty, Erskine, but it’s not for us to . . .’

  ‘It’ll look rather Giles Gilbert Scott – rather Guildford Cathedral. The G. G. Scott mood. It’s the next one out from platform one, Bob.’

  ‘Look, Erskine, this is Dyson’s department. We can’t make any decisions as major as this while he’s away.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ said Morris, putting the copy in one of the special envelopes with COMPOSING ROOM printed on them. ‘Don’t worry, Bob. I’ll take responsibility if Dyson questions it. I see Morley’s copy’s not in yet, incidentally. Get on to him, will you, Bob, and find out where it is . . . ?’

  The Magic Carpet party got airborne eventually.

  ‘Two hours late,’ said Mounce bitterly, several times, as their secondhand turbo-prop climbed through ragged cloud into the world of shining snowfields above.

  ‘For God’s sake shut up, Reg,’ said Dyson, gazing out of the window at the stark absolutes of white and blue.

  ‘Yes, but two hours late! I could have mended the stinking puncture myself in that time.’

  They were not flying to Sharjah direct. Dyson realized he must have misread the invitation slightly. They were going to Paris first to pick up another party of journalists which had assembled there from the rest of Europe. The Continental contingent was waiting in the departure lounge at Le Bourget when the London party arrived, and had of course been waiting there for over two hours, consuming drinks supplied with the compliments of Magic Carpet. There were about thirty of them, some carrying complicated camera kits; some, as Dyson noted with approval, wearing silky blue overcoats; all of them carrying folders of Magic Carpet handout material. There were two models among the group, even worse dressed and more pained than the English pair; they looked as if they were already preparing themselves spiritually for posing in the middle of some Arab village or Bedouin encampment wearing nothing but see-through bathing costumes and gauze yashmaks. The Paris party stared coldly at the London party, associating them with the plane’s puncture and its lateness. The London party stared back no less coldly, feeling that they would be halfway to Sharjah by now but for the selfish insistence of the Paris party on being fetched along too.

  Mounce, however, began to cheer up slightly. He looked round the departure lounge with some interest, and sniffed the air.

  ‘Ah, the smell of France,’ he said. ‘Smell it the moment you arrive. Have you ever noticed that, John?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dyson. But the sight and smell of the departure lounge at Le Bourget had the opposite effect on him to Mounce. The pleasure he got from airports, it occurred to him sadly, was subject to the law of diminishing returns.

  ‘Do you think the bar’ll take sterling?’ said Mounce. ‘Let’s have a quick one before they shove us back on that snotty little plane.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s time. We’ll be leaving again directly.’

  But, it turned out, they were not leaving again directly. No announcement was made about rejoining the aircraft, and Starfield seemed to have disappeared. Gradually the London party subsided into seats. A certain amount of muttering commenced within the various linguistic groups. Someone over­heard, deduced, or invented the information that the Scandinavian party, which was flying down from Copenhagen to join the expedition, had landed at Orly instead of Le Bourget. Slowly the word crossed the various linguistic barriers, until even Dyson and Mounce had heard.

  ‘Trust the Swedes,’ said Mounce bitterly. ‘Trust the Swedes to get the whole stinking thing screwed up.’

  ‘But are they still at Orly?’ cried Dyson to the wine-and-food man.

  ‘I expect so,’ said the wine-and-food man, sipping a lightly chilled Chambéry vermouth. ‘I expect they’re waiting for us.’

  ‘Où sont-ils?’ shouted Dyson boldly at one of the men in silky blue showercoats. The man shrugged his shoulders in a typically French way.

  ‘Who knows?’ he said, with a German accent.

  ‘Trust the stinking Swedes,’ said Mounce.

  Starfield came hurrying anxiously into the lounge.

  ‘Boys and girls!’ he cried, pressing his palms together. ‘I regret to have to inform you of the fact that we have a slight snag on our hands, owing to the fact that our Scandinavian friends are unfortunately not yet with us, the fact being that they were booked in error on to a flight arriving at Orly. As soon as they arrive we shall be departing as planned, though of course a little later than scheduled. In the meantime, there are drinks and a sandwich lunch available at the bar, compliments of Magic Carpet Travel. Thank you.’

  But not much more than three-quarters of an hour later, just as everyone was moving on from the free apéritifs to the free champagne with the free sandwiches, Starfield came hurry­ing back.

  ‘Sorry, folks!’ he said, pressing his palms together once again. ‘Sorry, boys and girls! There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding over the plane. It seems that our Scandinavian friends are still at Orly, waiting for us, as a result of which I feel it would facilitate things best if we went on without them, leaving them to proceed independently by separate means of transportation and join us at the other end. Will you therefore proceed at once to the departure gate for immediate embarkation? Thank you.’

  Grumbling, the party picked up its folders of publicity material and shuffled towards the gate, hastily draining glasses and gnawing at ham sandwiches as it went. The language barriers began to break down slightly under the common bond of mutual discontent. ‘It is bad,’ said a Dutch photographer to Dyson, shaking his head and pursing his lips, ‘Ja,’ agreed Dyson emphatically, ‘Ja, ja, ja.’

  As the plane rushed past the airport buildings on its take-off run, Dyson thought he could see a number of people jumping about and waving their arms in front of the departure gate. They looked to Dyson remarkably like Scandinavian journalists. Still, they had perhaps not missed very much, because as soon as the plane was airborne Starfield came hurrying up to the front of the cabin, pressing his palms together for yet another­ aria.

  ‘Our next port of call, boys and girls,’ he announced, ‘is Amster­dam.’

  A noise of multilingual outrage and complaint arose from the body of the plane.

  ‘Amsterdam!’ cried Dyson, unable to believe his ears. ‘But that’s in the opposite direction to the Middle East!’

  ‘What do you expect, John,’ said Mounce comfortably, from the middle of a benevolent haze of alcohol, ‘with a load of crap like this?’

  Starfield seemed astonished at the feelings his announcement had aroused. His eyebrows climbed out from behind the shelter of his glasses and attempted the ascent of his great forehead. Dislodged by the upward progress of the eyebrows, his glasses came landsliding down his nose. He pushed them back.

  ‘Boys and girls!’ he protested. ‘If we want to get to Sharjah we have to go to Amsterdam first, owing to the simple fact that the plane which is taking us to Sharjah is waiting for us at Amster­dam!’

  The noise of complaint continued.

  ‘There’ll be drinks at Amsterdam,’ appealed Starfield. ‘I’m radioing Schiphol Airport now to lay on full bar facilities, compliments of Magic Carpet Travel. Thank you.’

  He disappeared hurriedly in the direction of the flight-deck.

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Dyson.

  ‘Try and be philosophical about it, John,’ said Mounce. ‘Think of the drinks. The booze is always the only good part of these spotty jaunts. The rest’s always just a lot of crap, one way or another.’

  He was still looking on the bright side when they all filed into the transit lounge at Schiphol.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Amsterdam,’ he said, looking round with interest. ‘Do you know, John, the girls sit in shop-windo
ws here, just waiting for you to go along and take your pick. How about that? They sit in stinking shop-windows, John – doing their stinking knitting!’

  Schiphol, coming after Heathrow and Le Bourget, did not make Dyson feel like International Airport Man, free-floating in a medium entirely isolated from the world’s troubles. It made him feel like a traveller on the District Line, forced by the tiresome vicissitudes of the Underground to change at Earl’s Court as well as South Kensington.

  The terrible claustrophobia of travel began to descend on him. He was trapped in the channels of communication, suffocating in the nothingness of neither-here-nor-there.

  Bob had been going to take Tessa out that evening for a meal in some small Indian restaurant, so that they could tell each other their latest house-hunting experiences over the biriani and enjoy a quiet laugh together about the situation they’d got themselves into. At least they could still enjoy a joke together sometimes, thought Bob, or at any rate they could provided he avoided any literary allusions, and explained all references to the newspaper industry, well-known personalities, and politics. But Morris insisted that they both came out to dinner with him instead. Tessa wouldn’t be pleased, Bob knew. She didn’t like Morris – she didn’t like any of Bob’s friends very much, except Mrs Mounce and just possibly John Dyson. But there was nothing much she could do about it when Morris arrived with Bob at their rendezvous. ‘Hello, Tessa,’ said Morris, with no more and no less familiarity than he had at their first meeting. He didn’t rest his hand in hers this time, however; but he put it round behind her back and laid it inertly on her farther hip for a moment or two, like a pound of Plasticine, in some notional representation of an embrace. After which he ignored her for the rest of the evening.

  He took them first for a drink at the Ritz. He didn’t much like the Ritz, he explained, as Bob and Tessa gazed covertly about at the furnishings, but they were meeting Lake, who was coming on from making a personal appearance at a convention of canning machinery manufacturers in the Westbury, just up the road. And when Lake arrived, her long silver hair breaking and spraying over her glossy black dress as she walked, like some unbelievable moonlit sea on wet rock, Morris laid his brief tribute of Plasticine on her hip, and took them all on to what appeared to be a private restaurant, in what looked like a private Georgian house just behind Park Lane.

  Bob could not remember ever being inside a more visibly expensive eating-place. It had deep pile carpet and stripped pine panelling everywhere, as he imagined high-class gambling clubs had. And it had a great deal of space left between the tables. At current Mayfair land prices they would be paying about three-halfpence a mouthful for the surplus floor area alone. Looking at the distant tables round about, Bob thought he recognized some of the other diners who were shouldering a share of the rating assessment. He had seen them in films and plays, reading the eccentric will in Act One, or covering up for the hero as chairman of the Stalag Luft escape committee in reel six.

  ‘Isn’t this place rather expensive?’ he whispered.

  Morris looked round without interest.

  ‘About the same as other places,’ he said. ‘It’s handy to have it. I hate trying to think where to eat.’

  The sight of the prices on the menu confirmed Bob’s expectations, and brought on in him the symptoms of mild nervous indigestion. They ordered and ate their way through what might as well have been, from its cost and for all Bob could enjoy of it, portions of grilled, stewed, and marinated banknotes, and drank two bottles of a wine apparently fermented from the juice of sun-kissed golden sovereigns. When the dessert-trolley was brought round, and Lake asked for a helping of out-of-season wild strawberries, Morris commandeered the whole bowlful to share between them. Bob refused his portion queasily, too occupied with praying that he was right in assuming that Morris would insist on paying the bill. He slipped his hand into his back pocket and tried to feel how much money he had on him. It felt like four pounds, unless one of the notes had got folded over and counted twice.

  Lake was the only one who talked much during the meal. ‘Do you have trouble with your feet?’ she asked Tessa. ‘I’ve got rotten feet. They get so tender I can hardly walk on them. Sometimes I get a terrible sort of itch underneath the front part, just behind the toes. Know where I mean? Do you get that at all?’

  ‘No,’ said Tessa.

  ‘Sometimes I get a sort of terrible tickle between the toes. I just want to kick my shoes off – doesn’t matter where I am – and scratch, scratch, scratch. I’ve got really rotten feet.’

  Morris seemed uninterested in conversation. But he was clearly well-known in the restaurant, and several people greeted him on their way in or out. A girl wearing what looked like backless striped pyjamas came over and held out her cheek to be kissed. Morris obliged without getting up. ‘Hi,’ he said, unenthusiastically. A couple of men came over to the table to talk business with Morris. One seemed to be arranging for him to organize an exhibition of somebody’s paintings, the other for him to come in on a complex deal which involved selling share capital in a group of fashion photographers.

  ‘You seem to have fingers in a number of pies,’ said Bob admiringly, as Morris paid the bill.

  ‘You’ve got ten fingers,’ said Morris. ‘Why not stick them in ten pies?’

  Bob supposed that the evening’s entertainment was over. But without a word Morris hailed a taxi and took them off to a pub in the Isle of Dogs to hear a new kid singing in whom he thought he might just possibly be interested. The taxi ride took over half an hour and cost twenty-five shillings; the extravagance of travelling to the East End by taxi made Bob almost as nervous as he had been in the restaurant. By the time they got to the pub the kid had sung her songs and departed. Bob tried to persuade Morris to stay and watch the female impersonator. ‘Aren’t they rather fashionable now?’ he suggested, partly in order to justify the expense of time and money in getting there, and partly in the hope of making a business suggestion which Morris would find useful. But Morris shook his head without interest. ‘They’re finished,’ he said. They took another taxi back to some sort of older children’s nightclub in the King’s Road, at a similar outlay of time and money all over again. ‘I thought night-clubs were finished?’ said Bob, trying to get ahead of the game. Morris shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  It was far too noisy to talk in the night-club, which Bob found rather agreeable, since they had nothing to say to each other. He and Morris drank a lot of whisky, which made Morris more and more impassive, if that were possible, and himself more and more conscious of the girls’ knees that came dancing by, and of Lake, with her moon-white bleached hair and her night-black artificial eyelashes. He invited her to dance, taking hold of her with the utmost precaution, like some rare and fragile artefact. But even this delicate touch seemed to surprise her. She backed away from him as if he had made an indecent assault upon her.

  ‘What’s all this?’ she demanded suspiciously.

  ‘What’s what, Lake?’

  ‘What you’re up to.’

  ‘It’s the foxtrot, isn’t it?’ replied Bob uncertainly.

  ‘The what?’

  They moved about vaguely at arm’s length, looking at each other with incomprehension.

  ‘The foxtrot.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  He couldn’t understand what point she was trying to make.

  ‘Isn’t it a foxtrot?’ he said. ‘Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow . . . No . . . Slow, slow, quick, slow . . . No, no . . .’

  She stared at him.

  ‘How old are you, anyway?’ she demanded.

  ‘Twenty-nine.’

  ‘Oh. They used to do the foxtrot when you were young, did they?’

  Poor Tessa’s head kept sinking with boredom. Yet later they found themselves in Morris’s flat, gazing impassively into space and sipping more whisky. It was a furnished flat in a pre-war block just off the King’s Road. The furnishings suggested period, without tying themselves down to
any one period rather than any other, and bore no imprint of Morris’s inscrutable personality whatsoever. Lake kicked off her shoes, rolled down her stockings, and rubbed her feet. ‘I had terrible corns, even as a child,’ she said companionably to Tessa. ‘Did you? I had a rotten childhood altogether. Spots and boils, the lot. I had ringworm once. Did you ever have ringworm . . . ?’

  ‘What I can’t for the life of me understand,’ said Bob to Morris suddenly, ‘is what made you become a graduate trainee on a newspaper at fifteen pounds a week, when you’ve obviously got so many other more profitable lines of business.’

  Morris took in a mouthful of smoke and worked it over in his mouth for some time.

  ‘I’m interested in newspapers, Bob. I think they still have a big future in front of them. I want to learn the business.’

  ‘You really see yourself working on a paper for the rest of your life, Erskine?’

  ‘I see myself owning one, Bob.’

  Bob, lying back in his armchair gazing up into the air, turned his head to stare at Morris.

  ‘Sure,’ said Morris. ‘Why not? Someone’s got to own them. Go into it through magazines. Buy up derelict properties like Leisure and Pleasure and tailor them for the right markets. Lot of markets still untapped, Bob. Take the fifties age-group. Maximum earning-power, children off their hands; ten years to go before retirement. Lot of money there, Bob. Sell them sports cars, jock-straps, buckskin boots – young men’s kit. They’ve got the money to be young at that age.’

  Hazed by the whisky, Bob felt himself becoming rather emotional.

  ‘You could do it, too,’ he said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You could do it, Erskine.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  ‘All you’d need is the money.’

  ‘The money’s never any difficulty, Bob. All I need is a look at the industry from inside, and a nucleus of really smart young toreros. Interested?’

  ‘Me, Erskine?’

  ‘Sure, Bob.’

  ‘I’m not a smart young torero, Erskine.’

  ‘I could use you somewhere. One of the anchor-men. You’re good with copy. You’re slow and solid.’