In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  Darling, shall we go for a swim? No, my love, for the oceans have warmed up and turned acidic. All plankton is doomed and, by association, all fish and other swimmers. Sweetheart, what can I do to melt your heart? Nothing, for you are indifferent to the ice albedo feedback; you are unconcerned that the planet’s shield of snow, which reflects heat back into space, is defrosting. That our world grows dangerously green and brown, absorbing more heat than ever before, leaves you cold.

  My own dear heart, let’s make a happy future for ourselves, for you and me and Jens. How can that be when the world is melting and you don’t care? How can we be gemütlich together in the knowledge that the twin poles of the world are dissolving, that permafrost is no longer permanent and will unloose vast clouds of methane gas to extinguish us all?

  You did love me. You told me so. Ich liebe dich.

  Then came your ultimatum. We couldn’t go on seeing each other like this. Yes, you loved my flying visits, you loved being with me. But no, you could not bear it that our love was sustained at the expense of the future. By making it dependent on cut-price flights we were doing the single worst possible thing in our power as private individuals to harm the planet.

  ‘Love Miles,’ I countered, morally righteous, fighting fire with fire.

  ‘Selfish miles,’ you retorted: ‘We are destroying other people’s lives when we do this.’ Very truthful and severe you are, Angelika; very hard on yourself as well as others.

  Time for a change of CD. More Schubert lieder, I think, but let’s drop Fischer-Dieskau. He’s a tad heavy-hearted for Scotland, a bit of a dampener where it’s already damp enough. Ah, Gérard Souzay, he’s my man. Rather an eccentric choice, but my father used to listen to him and I cottoned on to what he admired. A great voice, fresh, rich, essentially baritonal but keener on beauty than usual. Let’s skip Der Jüngling und der Tod, though. OK, here comes the Erlking. There’s a boy here, too, riding on horseback through the night with his father, holding close to his father. Oh, it’s a brilliant micro-opera, this song, one voice singing four parts – narrator, father, boy, and the lethal wheedling Erlking. I’d forgotten how boldly elliptical it is, and how infectious the boy’s terror – ‘Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,/ Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?’ My father, my father, and don’t you hear/ The Erlking whispering promises to me? But his father can’t hear anything, can’t see anything, only the wind and the trees.

  I used to start laughing uncontrollably at this point, which annoyed my father, who was trying to listen; but it appealed to my puerile sense of humour – Vater as farter.

  Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt fasst er mich an!

  Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!

  My father, my father, now he is taking hold of me! The Erlking has hurt me! And by the time the father has reached home, the boy lies dead in his arms. Tot.

  Listen, Angelika. You make my blood boil. What possible difference can it make whether I get on a plane or not? The plane will take off regardless. Why don’t you concentrate your energies on all those herds of farting cattle, eh? All those cows and sheep farting and belching. Then after that you could get the rainforests under control! The blazing forests! You don’t want me.

  It’s stopped raining at last. I can see ahead again, the air is clearer now. A truly theatrical spectacle, this sky, with its constant changes of scene. I couldn’t do it in the end. I wanted tenure, sure, but I was being asked to give up too much. The world. The world well lost? No. No, no, not even for you, Angelika.

  In September I’m attending a weekend conference on Performance Art at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I’m not going by coach. There’s a seminar on Sturm und Drang in Tokyo this autumn, as well as my Cardiff-based sister’s wedding party in Seville. After that there’s an invitation to the Sydney Festival to promote my new book, and the usual theatre conference at Berkeley in spring. All paid for, of course, except the return ticket to Seville, which cost me precisely £11 – just about manageable even on an academic’s meagre stipend.

  You used to have to join the Foreign Office if you wanted to travel on anything like this scale. Now everybody’s at it. The budget airlines arrived and life changed overnight. Sorry, but it’s true. The world’s our sweet shop. We’ve got used to it, we want it; there’s no going back.

  The downside is, I lost my love. She followed through. And how. She caused us both enormous pain. Ah, come on! For all I know, she’s got back together with that little dramaturg from Bremen, the one with the tiny hands and feet. So?

  Look at those schmaltzy sunbeams backlighting the big grey cloud. Perfect scenery for the arrival of a deus ex machina. ‘What’s that when it’s at home, Dr Beauman?’ A far-fetched plot device to make everything all right again, my dear. There’s Ballachulish in the distance. A painted god in a cardboard chariot. An unlikely happy ending, in other words.

  Geography Boy

  THEY WERE UP very early against the heat, paniers packed and off on their bikes towards Angers before anybody else at the youth hostel was awake. It felt like the beginning of the world, with the fresh damp smell of the hedgerows and the faint reveille from a cockerel several fields away, although it was in fact the last day of their holiday. Six weeks ago they had met at a party, in the summer term of their second year. Neither of them had ever felt this strongly before about anyone.

  Adele was reading history and had chosen the End of the World module rather than the History of Human Rights as her special dissertation subject. It was because of this that she had suggested adding Angers to their itinerary, after reading the guidebook’s rapt account of the apocalyptic tapestries there.

  ‘It’s the largest wall-hanging ever to be woven in Europe,’ she had quoted from the guidebook the other night in Chinon. ‘Six huge tapestry panels, each with fourteen scenes displayed on two levels, like a sort of double-decker cartoon full of monsters and catastrophes.’

  ‘Can’t wait,’ Brendan had said, chivalrously. His subject was geography, and he was aware that he had probably dragged her round one too many troglodyte caves that day. Amazing, though, the way those caves had been created by chance from quarrying for the local tufa stone with which to build the white chateaux of the Loire. The damp ones were now used for mushroom cultivation, their guide had informed them, while the rest were being lived in, or snapped up by Parisians as résidences secondaires. ‘I’d like to live in a cave with you,’ he had wanted to say to Adele, but hadn’t been quite brave enough.

  They were bowling along between fields of ripe corn, and he felt like singing or shouting. Sometimes in the last week, when they had been swooping down a hill in the forests near Chinon, he had shouted aloud into the air rushing past him in sheer exhilaration. Then there was the long stiff climb up the next one, moving the piston legs, ignoring the keen sensation in the front thigh muscles of being flooded with boiling water, Adele panting alongside him, and the reward at the top, as their hearts gradually stopped pounding and they gloated once again over the sweet swooping downward stretch ahead.

  On they cycled as the sun climbed higher and the day grew hotter. Sweat was flying from their faces now and inside their clothes it was trickling down their bodies as they pistoned forward. There were few cars – perhaps one every ten minutes or so – although evidence of their existence was displayed at intervals along the way, flattened hedgehogs, little birds and mice. Once, by a low orchard of strictly serried apple trees, there had been a great silver serpent, half a metre long, flattened in mid-zigzag.

  ‘Chateau,’ he called as they rounded a bend in the road. There it was, white against the green, another one, the twentyseventh this holiday, set in an illuminated meadow of grass and flowers with the shining river beyond. These chateaux were like the ones in fairy-tales, she had said earlier in the holiday, the sort where Sleeping Beauty might be found. You’re my sleeping beauty, he had told her, but she had rejected that particular princess as a bad role model – too passive – and had told him it was Little
Red Riding Hood who was now recommended to girls, for her ingenuity and resourcefulness. He had tried to make her promise to join him in his activism next term; it’s no longer a case of crying wolf, he’d told her, the end of the world really is nigh. Too late, she had replied; it’s too late.

  ‘Money’s won,’ she’d shrugged. ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘But the worst thing we can do now is nothing,’ he’d cried.

  At this she had shrugged again and returned to her book.

  ‘Baguette stop?’ he called to her now after an hour or so on the road. The sun was already strong in a bold blue sky sparsely plumed with cirrus clouds.

  ‘D’accord.’

  They set their bikes against a wall at the edge of a field of sunflowers, in the shade of one of a line of whispering silver-green poplars planted three generations ago. There were armies of these sunflowers round here, great thick stalks as tall as a man, dinner-plate faces turning heavily in the direction of the sun. The thing was, Brendan had faith in the world’s adaptive powers whereas Adele didn’t, it seemed.

  While he unstrapped the water-bottles, she took out some bread and fruit saved from the night before. She started to clean the peaches by rubbing off their down with the hem of her T-shirt, then paused to watch as he drank, his head flung back, his eyes closed.

  ‘Last day,’ he scowled, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I wish it wasn’t.’

  ‘Can you remember all the days in order? Where was it we cycled first, after Tours?’

  She went up and wound her arms round his damp waist, inhaling his heat and the grassy smell of sweat drying.

  ‘It was that Plantagenet place, the abbey with the painted king and queen on top of their tombs,’ he said, tucking her head beneath his chin. ‘Fontevraud. The queen was Eleanor of Aquitaine.’

  ‘Yes. And their son was on his tomb beside them, Richard the Lionheart. Remember? The Crusades. Crushing the infidel.’

  ‘I’ll crush you,’ he said foolishly, twisting her arms behind her back.

  She was pressed close to his chest, her ear against the thump of his heart.

  They were testing each other on this holiday, competitive and protective and teasing. It was neck and neck so far. She didn’t yet know if she had met her match. Sometimes she suspected not, and this made her feel like crying. Anyway, how can we promise to stay together when we don’t know how we’ll change? thought Adele. Look at my parents. Look at anyone. Brendan was thinking, I want her in my bed and at my side now and for good. We belong together, it’s a fact, not a choice.

  She pulled away and started to eat a peach.

  ‘You’ve got juice on your chin,’ he said, watching as she ate.

  ‘No!’ she flared at him, laughing.

  ‘No what?’

  ‘Just no.’

  ‘How did you know what I was going to say?’

  ‘It’s too hot,’ she said, blushing.

  He pulled himself up to sit on the wall where the bicycles rested; with a broad smile he held his arms out to her.

  He had begun to look fierce and brick-brown with sundamage, she thought, like some sort of wild man or wandering minstrel. One evening she had told him what she knew about troubadours and courtly love in the Middle Ages, about their songs and code of courtesy and chivalric belief that desire was in itself ennobling; all that. He had listened intently, before seizing an imaginary lute and capering to and fro and warbling rubbish, until she, cracked into unwilling laughter, had run about trying to swat him as he dodged and skipped around her.

  ‘It’s what the French call bronzer-idiot,’ she said now, rubbing a fingerful of suncream into his forehead, his cheeks, his chin and neck. He took her hand and turned it, kissing inside the wrist, then pulled her round so that she was leaning back, an elbow on each of his knees. He undid the clip holding up her sweat-damp hair, and twisted it slowly, held it away from her head.

  ‘No wonder you’re so hot, with all this hair,’ he murmured. ‘Hothead.’

  She closed her eyes, ensnared by thoughts of the night before.

  ‘We’re making good time,’ said Brendan after a while, glancing at his watch and at the sky. ‘We’ll be there soon after midday at this rate.’

  Once at Angers, they found a shady patch of grass by the Maine, beneath the chateau, where they could lie and eat their supermarché picnic. They had bought cherries, a small soot-coated goat’s cheese and some cold beer.

  ‘It’s not one of the fairy-tale ones, is it?’ said Adele, looking up at the massive black-striped circular towers.

  ‘More of a fortress than a chateau,’ said Brendan, following her gaze and taking a swig of beer. He rolled the bottle over his brow and then along the inside of her arm.

  ‘Angers, city of Cointreau. Chateau built between 1229 and 1240. Famous for Apocalypse tapestries,’ said Adele, frowning over the guidebook. ‘They say famous, but I’ve never heard of them. Not like the Bayeux Tapestry. Do you want to know what it says about them?’

  ‘In a nutshell,’ said Brendan. He was rifling through the bag of cherries.

  ‘Oof, let’s see. In a nutshell. Well, they were commissioned by the Duke of Anjou, not long after the Black Death. He used them to show off, bringing them out for jousts and troubadour events and that sort of thing. Then they were given to Angers Cathedral, which had trouble displaying them because they were so enormous.’

  He smoothed her hair back gently and hung twin cherries over her ears.

  ‘Look, I’ve made you earrings!’

  ‘Thank you. Then came the French Revolution, and religion was out of the window. Bits of the tapestries were chopped off and used for rubbing down horses, or as bed canopies, or to clear up after building work.’

  ‘Would you pass me another beer?’

  ‘Won’t you be too sleepy then to go round the chateau?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Weird to think of the French as revolutionaries. They take their cats for walks on leads! Remember that woman in Saumur?’

  ‘Then in the nineteenth century there was a craze on the Middle Ages,’ she continued. ‘They rescued the tapestries and washed them in the Maine, which did their plant-based pigments no good at all. That’s why the trees and grass are blue. And in the twentieth century they restored them and built a special long gallery in the chateau grounds to house them.’

  ‘Do you know, your ears are perfect. Very rare, perfect ears,’ murmured Brendan. ‘Come here, we need a siesta.’

  Adele lay in the crook of his arm with her head on his shoulder.

  ‘You look like that king on his tomb in Fontevraud,’ she murmured to his profile. ‘Calm and complete.’

  ‘You’re my queen,’ he breathed, before falling asleep. She lay moving gently to the rise and fall of his chest.

  They were in a long dimly lit gallery, and had the place almost to themselves. Dawdling along, every now and then one of them would hold the other back to examine a detail, the grapey clusters of a cloud or the leaf-shaped flames of hell.

  ‘The guidebook was right, see, all the grass and trees and foliage are blue,’ said Brendan. ‘Look at the shapes of the leaves! That’s an oak, that’s a vine leaf. Look at the detail.’

  ‘And these must be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ said Adele. ‘Yes, see, there’s Famine on that black horse there. And look, look at this skeleton grinning as he trots past the blue jaws of hell, that’s Death on his pale horse.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Brendan, peering at the fine-stitched skull.

  ‘Look! Seven angels with seven trumpets, heralding seven different disasters, just like in Revelations.’

  ‘Revelations?’

  ‘It’s the book that got tacked onto the end of the New Testament. It nearly didn’t get in at all. It’s raving. I had to read it for my dissertation last term, remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The End of the World. Of course.’

  ‘Full of stuff about the Whore of Babylon and the Anti-Christ and seven-headed mo
nsters,’ she sniffed. ‘Seven was supposed to be some sort of magic number. Apocalyptic talk always comes from nutters, and they always quote Revelations. It’s like a rule. Basically, they want a purge, a wipe-out, they justify it with the Bible, then they say everything afterwards will be purified and perfect for the survivors. Nee-naw neenaw.’

  ‘I want you on board next term, Adele. You’ve got to join my pressure group. There’s no way you’re going to get out of it.’

  ‘Oh, not that again, Brendan.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, hurt.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said, and gently butted her forehead against his arm.

  There was a pause.

  ‘So,’ he continued, almost reluctantly, ‘so, up till now everyone involved in any of this end-of-the-world stuff has been raving mad and nothing but trouble. That’s what you’re saying. But now, now that it really does look like it’s about to be all over, we can’t seem to get a grip at all. Is that it?’

  ‘If you like,’ she sighed.

  ‘Kiss me.’

  She paused and did as he asked, slowly, thoughtfully, then took a step away from him.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, taking his hand and pulling him along to the next panel. ‘It’s a big tapestry. Look at this shipwreck, it’s amazing. See, the floods have come. Look at the faces on the drowning men, their mouths are open, you can see their little teeth.’

  ‘Floods! I could use this next term. I wonder if they’ve got a postcard of it. It’s brilliant! Sorry. Sorry. But you’re right; look at the expressions on those faces!’

  ‘I suppose I did rather cover the same material,’ she said, relenting for a moment. ‘Floods, drought, storms, all that. “The Environment, Human Activity and the End of the World.” Only two of us chose it; they nearly didn’t run it. The module on human rights was way more popular.’

  ‘That’s what pisses me off about students,’ declared Brendan. ‘So fucking short-sighted. We want to travel, basically.’

  ‘Give it a rest, Brendan!’ she said, losing her temper. ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’