Towards the End of the Morning

by Michael Frayn

  A group of Yugoslav officials had appeared on the apron, and the Magic Carpet party advanced to meet them from the direction of the plane, parading Starfield in front of them like some sacred relic or regimental mascot. The two parties halted face to face. Silently the Western Press held Starfield up for inspection, so used by now to his authority that they somehow assumed it would be self-evident. Silently, the Yugoslavs inspected him, giving little sign that any impression of authority was registering.

  Dyson and the man from the Telegraph hurriedly conferred together.

  ‘Know any Serbo-Croat?’ asked the man from the Telegraph.

  Dyson shook his head.

  ‘I’ll try them in German then,’ said the man from the Telegraph, and turned to the silently gazing Yugoslavs.

  ‘Dies ist unser Führer,’ he said, pushing Starfield a little farther forward.

  The officials examined him even more curiously.

  ‘Euer Führer?’ they repeated musingly. ‘Ah, so.’

  ‘Be taking off in a few minutes, folks,’ said Starfield, his eyebrows going up, his glasses coming down, and his eyes focusing on a spot some five feet through the other side of the Yugoslavs’ heads. ‘Give you my solemn oath.’

  ‘Er ist wenig, oh, what’s the word?’ said Dyson. ‘Well, malade.’

  ‘Ah, wirklich?’ said the Yugoslavs, inspecting Starfield again.

  ‘Nein, nein,’ said the man from the Telegraph frankly.

  ‘Die Fakt ist, unser Führer ist ein wenig getrunken – no, getrinken . . . getranken . . .’

  ‘Detronken,’ said Dyson.

  ‘Betrunken,’ suggested some of the German journalists helpfully.

  ‘So, so,’ mused the Yugoslav officials.

  ‘Drinks will be served in the bar,’ said Starfield. ‘Compliments of Magic Carpet . . .’

  But for once drinks were not served in the bar. The Yugoslavs insisted on examining all their passports, and then took a representative selection of the party, including Starfield and his supporters, and the captain of the plane, who was Lebanese and spoke neither Serbo-Croat nor German, into the airport offices to discuss the situation. Starfield, the only one with any powers or experience to negotiate on their behalf, sat in the position of honour in the middle with his head dangling very slightly to one side.

  ‘If this is Amsterdam,’ he said indistinctly, ‘I’m a Dutchman.’

  The Yugoslavs displayed a clear sense of priorities.

  ‘Nun,’ they began. ‘Wer zahlt?’

  ‘Who pays?’ translated the Germans.

  ‘Him,’ said everyone at once, pointing to Starfield. ‘Er, lui.’

  ‘Jauohl,’ said the officials. ‘Seine Papiere, bitte. Seine Ermächtigung, seinen Kreditbrief.’

  ‘His authorization and letter of credit,’ translated the Germans.

  Someone went back to the plane and fetched Starfield’s briefcase. The officials opened it and spread the contents out over the desk. Very slowly and patiently, with the assistance of everyone present, they went through them all document by document.

  ‘Per-son-al Assid-ent In-shoor-ance,’ they would read slowly aloud.

  ‘Personalunfallversicherung,’ the Germans would translate, and slowly, regretfully, the officials would lay the document aside and take up another one.

  When a collection of documents had at last been assembled which satisfied the authorities, a number of Yugoslav forms were run to earth in distant offices and laboriously completed by the officials. Dyson and the man from the Telegraph had to wake Starfield up to sign them, because he had fallen uncomfortably asleep with his head on his chest. It was difficult to wake him; it was more difficult still to get him to write. His eyes were bleary, and his hand moved waveringly over the paper. The officials compared the marks he had produced with his signature on the documents from his briefcase, and shook their heads regretfully.

  ‘Nein, nein,’ they said. ‘Nicht gut.’

  They tried again with the man from the Telegraph steering Starfield’s hand, but the result was worse. Dyson asked if they would let him forge a signature. ‘Ja, ja!’ they said, quite eagerly. But when they had seen the result they shook their heads again. ‘Nein, nein,’ they said sadly.

  ‘Er kann in die Morgen unterschreiben,’ said the man from the Telegraph hopefully. ‘Er wird in die Morgen ganz OK sein.’

  ‘Nein, nein,’ said the Yugoslavs dogmatically.

  Dyson and the man from the Telegraph took Starfield outside and poured cold water over his head. The British party took turns at walking him up and down the carpark, trying to exercise the alcohol through his system faster.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Mounce, as he and Dyson sat resting in some grass at the edge of the car-park, ‘it’s a bit stinking much when the stinking organizer of the expedition gets stinking himself.’

  ‘Bang goes my television programme,’ said Dyson bitterly. ‘Bang goes most of my life, in fact.’

  ‘It’s stealing the booze out of our mouths, for a start,’ said Mounce. ‘It’s just downright selfishness.’

  From time to time Starfield was taken back to the office to try another signature. Most of the officials had gone home for the evening by this time, but the ones that remained shook their heads politely. Dyson and the young British humorist with the hair all over the place held Starfield up while he was sick next to the taxi-rank. ‘Now he’ll be all right,’ said the humorist. But he wasn’t; he was worse. He groaned and rolled his eyes and was sick again in the middle of a flower-bed. After that he refused to be walked any more. He lay down in a quiet corner behind some oil-drums and went to sleep. They covered him with his own silky blue showercoat, and he slept for several hours. When he woke up it was dark. Dyson, who was keeping watch at a discreet distance, heard him sit up, and groan, and blow despairingly through his teeth several times. He got up, and a moment later there was the noise of a thin but powerful jet booming against the side of an empty oil-drum and trickling away across the tarmacadam. Starfield emerged into the moonlight and washed himself under a tap sticking out of a wall. Then he lifted his head and gazed thoughtfully upwards for a long time. Dyson supposed for a moment that he was staring at the moon, then followed the direction of his gaze more carefully and realized that he was studying the sign on the side of the control-tower which said LJUBLJANA.

  Starfield hurried into the departure lounge, where the rest of the Magic Carpet party was scattered, lying on benches and propped up in armchairs, trying to snatch a few hours of cramped and fitful sleep.

  ‘Boys and girls!’ he cried, pressing his palms together as anxiously and operatically as ever, and waiting till everyone had woken up. ‘We regret this delay, folks, which is due to unavoidable causes beyond our control. I do assure you that we are doing everything in our power to facilitate our speedy departure, just as soon as it can be arranged. Meanwhile, drinks will be served at the bar, compliments of Magic Carpet. Thank you.’

  They heard him in silence, perhaps because they were half asleep, or perhaps because, like Dyson, they were all lost in astonishment and admiration. The bar, of course, was closed, and remained closed. There was no possibility of starting work on the plane that night, and there was no one left in the Putnik office to arrange accommodation. So eventually everyone settled back to spend the night on the seats in the departure lounge – too beaten down by fate now even to curse, too weary in mind and body even to mutter to themselves.

  Just before dawn Dyson got up to stretch his aching legs. He walked outside into the road in front of the airport. It was cold, and he shivered violently. Slowly his eyes got used to the grey pre-dawn light; he made out the shapes of cars parked by the roadside, covered by a thick white dew, and soft banks of mist lying motionless in the fields all round. Beyond the mist the dark grey of the surrounding hills was just detaching itself from the lighter grey of the sky. Everything was quiet, and completely still.

  He turned up his lapels, and cringed along the road with his hands in his pock
ets, feeling cold and miserable. The banks of mist in the fields showed whiter as he looked at them, and odd little hills loomed between them. A whiff of manure lingered on the air – human manure, taken brown and liquid and disconcertingly acrid from farmyard tanks. Gradually he began to warm up and feel more alive. He stopped and pissed into the ditch with a great sense of satisfaction, shivering pleasingly as he did up his trousers. Then he ran along the road as fast as he could, until his heart was pounding, and getting his breath was like dragging rocks into his lungs, and his eyes were streaming from the effort in the cold air.

  He slowed down and let his pulse return to normal. On and on he walked through the grey light, thinking about Jannie and the boys, and whether he would be able to get any breakfast at the airport, and about his boyhood, and night exercises in the army, and poor, old Eddy Moulton, and how he had once walked all night, when he had been an undergraduate, from Murat to Salers, over the Peyrol pass. That was fifteen years ago now. Fifteen years! Perhaps a quarter of his life.

  There was a section of drystone walling to the left of the road. He hoisted himself up on to it and sat down. On the other side was a field full of weeds and erratic patches of mist, with a small windowless brick building in the middle of it, surrounded by barbed wire and warning notices, which presumably housed either a transformer or some outlying piece of airport radar equipment.

  What had he done with that last quarter of his life? He had married; had fathered two sons. He had made some progress in an honourable career; had considerable prospects of success in various fields; was happy. He was having a good life, undoubtedly. And yet . . . Half of it had gone – gone like a dream, slipped through his fingers. He couldn’t give any account of it. He had spent his youth as one might spend an inheritance, and he had no idea what he had bought with it.

  Except himself, as he was now. He hunched up, and pursed his lips, and gazed at the little brick building without any windows. He was rather a silly man, he could see that. Vain and splenetic – passionately devoted to futile objectives. He remembered the television programme he was so anxious to get back for, and couldn’t help grinning to himself at the thought. Here he was, at daybreak, sitting on a wall in the grey morning light, looking at a field full of weeds and a meaningless brick structure of unknown function somewhere in the middle of rural Slovenia – and that evening he was supposed to be in a television studio in London, sitting in a pool of unnaturally brilliant light and greasing up to the second Baron Boddy, who was if anything a sillier tit than he was himself. He could not see himself managing such a sudden and total transformation, whatever happened to the plane. They were in two different worlds, and there was some much vaster gap between them than could ever be bridged by a battered old DC6, even with all four engines working. About these weeds, this wall, and this ugly box in the middle of Slovenian nowhere there was something indissolubly solid and smelly and tangible. The second Baron Boddy, and the views which he might or might not exchange with the second Baron Boddy, and the gin-and-tonic and smoked salmon sandwiches which he might or might not share with the second Baron Boddy beforehand, were as factitious and insubstantial as fairyland. He could not help laughing aloud to himself at the optimistic presumption of the universe in thinking that it could contain both Dyson-here and Dyson-there. He remembered with rueful amusement that there had been earlier states of Dyson-here – such as Dyson-yesterday and Dyson-the-day-before – which had worried themselves raw in their anxiety to become Dyson-there. For a few short minutes, at any rate, Dyson-here occupied him completely.

  Somewhere behind the mist and the grey hummocky landscape there was a noise of aircraft engines starting up. It was a long way away, but in the still, quiet air it carried clearly. Dyson sat up rigid. It couldn’t possibly be the Magic Carpet plane, of course. It needed only a moment’s reflection to realize that it couldn’t conceivably have been repaired yet.

  The noise grew faint, then boomed out loud again through the mist, and died away almost to nothing. The plane was taxi-ing. Dyson strained his ears. It couldn’t possibly be . . . The engineers couldn’t possibly be at work yet . . . There was not the slightest need to worry . . . Dyson held his breath, trying to work out what was happening on the airfield. Once again the engines were run up, then died away, then roared out again, and grew steadily louder and louder. A moment later the plane passed almost over Dyson’s head – a twin-engined Dakota climbing into the opalescent sky, its navigation lights winking with reassuring calm.

  But Dyson was still sitting rigid with anxiety, even after it had cleared the hills to the east and disappeared in the direction of Zagreb. Dyson-here was once again no longer enough. He jumped down from the wall and began to walk quickly back towards the airport, and the possibility of smoked salmon sandwiches with the second Baron Boddy.

  None of the usual crowd in the Gates realized that Dyson was overdue. They had scarcely realized he was away in the first place. ‘Where’s John, then, Bob?’ they had asked vaguely earlier in the week. ‘In the Persian Gulf,’ Bob had explained at least a dozen times. Now that he proved not to have been in the Persian Gulf at all, but at Beirut, and was now no longer at Beirut but at Ljubljana, and should not even have been at Ljubljana, but here sinking half-pints of bitter in the Gates, people had at last got used to the idea that he was in the Persian Gulf. ‘John still in the Persian Gulf, then, Bob?’ they asked today. Dyson had disappeared from their lives almost as completely as poor old Eddy Moulton. They were like a self-sealing petrol tank; when sections were shot away they closed up automatically and filled the gap, spilling not a drop of the precious communal spirit. But then no one – not even Bob – had noticed Mounce’s absence at all.

  Still, they were amused by Bob’s account of Dyson’s slow progress to nowhere, with bits chopping off the plane every time it got into the air. ‘Trust old John,’ chuckled Bill Waddy, ‘to get himself on a plane which falls to bits in the middle of Yugoslavia!’

  ‘Poor old John!’ said Gareth Holmroyd. ‘He’ll never live this down.’

  And everyone, when Bob asked them, assured him that he ought to do Dyson’s programme.

  ‘Oh, definitely,’ said Ted Hurwitz. ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with – incidentally, Bob, what are you drinking? – I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing a spot of television on the side.’

  ‘It might be sensible when you come to think about it, Bob,’ said Mike Sparrow. ‘You’ve got to reckon on getting out of this job – bitter, please, Ted – by the time you’re forty.’

  ‘Hey, steady on, Mike,’ said Bill Waddy. ‘I’m thirty-eight, you know. Thanks, Ted. I’m thirty-eight, Mike.’

  ‘I’m forty-six,’ said Gareth Holmroyd.

  ‘I didn’t mean . . . Well, I mean, you’re both specialists,’ said Mike Sparrow. ‘What I really meant was, you’ve got to either get out or specialize by the time you’re forty. Is this my bitter, Ted?’

  ‘What about Laurence Evenden?’ said Gareth Holmroyd. ‘He doesn’t really specialize, and he’s in his fifties.’

  ‘Well, Laurence is an exception,’ said Mike Sparrow.

  ‘Old Laurence is all right,’ said Bill Waddy.

  ‘Laurence is different,’ said Andy Royle.

  ‘What about old Harry Stearns?’ said Gareth Holmroyd. ‘He’s not really what you’d call a specialist.’

  ‘Old Harry’s rather an unusual case, of course,’ said Ted Hurwitz.

  They all sipped their beer in reflective silence.

  ‘I mean,’ said Mike Sparrow, ‘I’m thirty-two myself, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘I’m thirty-four,’ said Ted Hurwitz. ‘How old are you, Bob?’

  ‘Twenty-nine,’ said Bob. ‘I’ll be thirty next month.’

  They relapsed into silence again, some looking into their beer, some at the floor, and some over everyone’s heads at the advertisements round the walls. The last time they had had this discussion, about a month ago, thought Bob, Bill Waddy had been thirt
y-seven. And Bob could remember a similar occasion in the past when it had been Bill Waddy himself who had talked about the need to get out of journalism by the time one was forty. He had been thirty-five then, Bob seemed to recall. Bob was still thinking about this when he realized that he had definitely decided to do the programme.

  Hammersmith was solid with evening rush-hour traffic. The taxi edged along yard by yard, and Dyson craned haggardly forward in his seat trying to spot some break in the jam ahead.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God!’ he cried. ‘We’ve only got thirty-five minutes before the programme actually starts! Suppose it takes us ten minutes to get through this lot, then say five minutes to get up to Shepherd’s Bush . . . Shepherd’s Bush will be solid, of course . . .’

  ‘You spent the whole stinking morning,’ said Mounce, ‘telling me that you didn’t care about this snotty programme any more.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ snapped Dyson. ‘That was in Ljubljana!’

  The traffic in the lanes on either side of them began to flow forward without obstruction.

  ‘Oh God!’ shouted Dyson. ‘If we don’t start moving within the next minute I swear I’ll smash this taxi to pieces with my bare hands.’

  ‘You went on and on,’ said Mounce, ‘about how you’d seen through the whole spotty business.’

  Dyson wriggled his fingers, tapped his feet, and drummed his clenched fists up and down on his knees.

  ‘If only we’d been twenty minutes later leaving Ljubljana!’ he groaned. ‘We’d have missed the connection from Amsterdam and everything would have settled itself!’