In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  She marched on ahead of him. He stood and ground his teeth and took a deep breath.

  No, he wanted to say, no we bloody well can’t; you’ve got to listen to me; you don’t get it, do you. He swallowed his exasperation and made an effort to do as she asked.

  ‘That’s the star Wormwood,’ she said when he caught up with her at the next panel.

  ‘I thought wormwood was some sort of bitter plant,’ he said curtly.

  ‘It’s a star that streams blood,’ she read from the guidebook, ‘and pollutes the skies and oceans.’

  ‘Wormwood,’ muttered Brendan, drawn in despite himself. ‘Wow!’

  ‘Moving on past the Eagle of Misfortune, we get to the locusts swarming up from hell. Ha. They’re enormous. They really are quite scary.’

  ‘Locusts! The insects are winning. You won’t be so cocky when we’ve all got malaria.’

  ‘Brendan.’

  ‘It’s all right for the middle-aged ones, the ones in charge now,’ he burst out, unable to contain himself, ‘but they’re deliberately not looking into the time when it’ll be our turn. Because by that time they’ll be dead or past it, so it won’t be their problem.’

  ‘Look,’ she said in a stony voice. ‘Here’s the fall of Babylon and its ramparts tumbling down.’

  ‘The fall of Babylon. It’s still not too late, not quite, but we’ve got to act now. How can you be so defeatist, Adele?’

  ‘Oh, Brendan,’ she groaned. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind.’

  ‘A one-track mind,’ he muttered, drawing her to him, then slid his fingers down inside her shorts and grabbed a spiteful handful.

  She gasped.

  ‘We’re on CCTV,’ she hissed, wriggling out of his grip.

  ‘You look like an angry bushbaby,’ he hissed back.

  She stalked on a few metres ahead, and even her pale legs looked indignant in the gloom.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered when he had caught up with her. He did not feel sorry; he felt angry and cruel.

  ‘A plague of frogs,’ she snapped, staring ahead. ‘You’ll like the next one, I bet. Armageddon.’

  Despite himself he was peering closely at the forces of hell, the scimitars and swords and charging horsemen, the blade-shaped flames in the sky.

  ‘So that’s Armageddon,’ he said. ‘Not exactly convincing, though, is it. A bit tame.’

  ‘You’d prefer the real thing,’ she said, furious. ‘You’d rather be cycling round the battlefields of Normandy.’

  ‘I bet they thought that was Armageddon at the time,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, you liked that Musée des Blindés in Saumur,’ she added nastily. ‘The tank museum.’

  ‘It wasn’t actually that interesting. It was quite disappointing really. Though there was a FT 17 Renault from 1917.’

  She had stayed outside and watched the bikes while he went round the museum in the company of what looked mainly like ex-army types and their tired wives. She had been able to hear the taped military music, brashly jaunty and tear-jerking, male voices swinging along in enthusiastic company, drum rolls and crude trumpet voluntaries.

  ‘It happens, war,’ said Brendan. ‘It’s major. It’s part of life.’

  ‘I do know that, geography boy.’

  ‘Though if we get a proper global treaty on this, it could mean the end of war altogether. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Huh. I don’t think that’s going to happen.’

  ‘What? The global treaty? Or the end of war?’

  ‘Both. Neither. Look, Brendan, I’m sure you’re right about it all, the climate stuff, but the thing is, the world doesn’t want to cut back. In fact the world thinks it’s wrong to cut back. Can’t you see that? What the world wants is economic growth. Increased productivity. The world won’t listen to a word you say. You know that.’

  ‘Even if it means the end of the world?’

  ‘Yup. Even if it means that.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Look. Last one. The New Jerusalem. Happy ending. Time to go.’

  ‘Wait, Adele,’ he cajoled, taking her hand. ‘Look. Look, it’s a lovely white chateau! Circular towers and crenellations and lancet windows. Your favourite sort!’ She stood, head averted, her hand rigid in his. ‘All the flowers and fruit trees are back in action – I bet they’re organic – and it’s floating between land and sky,’ he crooned.

  He caught a flicker of a smile at the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Sorry,’ he whispered, and this time he really did feel something, a stirring, though it wasn’t exactly remorse.

  She gave his fingers a faint squeeze. Hand in hand, blinking, they emerged into the late-afternoon sunlight.

  For their last night they had put euros aside for a meal in a proper restaurant. The rest of the holiday it had been peaches and tomatoes, a baguette and some cheese, and evening picnics on park benches or under trees until the dark drove them back to whichever hostel they were staying in.

  Now they sat in unaccustomed formality across the table from each other with a candle between them casting a glow. On the wall beside their table was a machine-stitched hanging of a medieval hunting scene.

  ‘A bit feeble, isn’t it, after the real thing,’ said Brendan, as they examined its pastel stags and undifferentiated trees. ‘I can’t believe we’re going home tomorrow. Who will I talk to without you there?’ He grabbed her hand and gave it a hasty kiss.

  What still surprised them both was the ease with which they had spoken to each other from the start, and how they had not run out of things to talk about even though they had been together exclusively now for ten days without a break. In fact it felt as if they had only just started. It was as if all this was only the beginning of a much longer conversation between them.

  ‘I’m going to have to apply for another loan when I get back,’ said Brendan. ‘I really hope I can get a decent amount of work this August. September.’

  ‘Snap,’ said Adele. ‘Eighteen thousand. More than, probably, by the end of Finals.’

  ‘Worth it, though, if you get a decent degree. A 2:1. A First, even.’

  ‘As long as it’s not a 2:2.’

  ‘No, nobody wants a Desmond. Of course, we’re rich compared to most of the world.’

  ‘I do know that,’ she said. You’re not my conscience, she did not need to add. There had been several dangerous semi-submerged rocks, she reminded herself, in the broadly halcyon sea of this holiday. His tendency to lecture made her want to turn on her heel and walk away.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, touching her hand again. ‘Stop me when I do that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she smiled. ‘I will.’

  It delighted her, their fluidity, how open and interested in each other they were, checking and clashing and counterbalancing. By this process they had been leading each other into unanticipated fields of fresh thought and feeling. She still thought him misguided, though, if he imagined he could change anything about the future.

  ‘Onglet à l’échalote. That’s steak, isn’t it?’ said Brendan uncertainly, studying the menu. ‘Civet de marcassin. Wild boar casserole. I might have the steak.’

  ‘I thought meat was as bad as coal. Especially steak,’ said Adele, who called herself a pescatarian. ‘Barbue. What’s barbue? Oh, brill. What’s brill?’

  ‘There aren’t exactly plenty more fish in the sea, either.’

  ‘We could have the vegetable soup.’

  ‘Yes. Cheaper, too,’ he said, brightening. ‘Then the tian de courgettes, whatever a tian is.’

  ‘And they’ve got profiteroles. My favourite. I’m going to have profiteroles if I have room. Funny, that monster in the tapestry this afternoon made me think of profiteroles.’

  ‘What monster?’

  ‘The Beast of the Sea.’ She thought back to the weird tapestry creature and its long thick stalky neck supporting the pyramid-cluster of multiple lions’ heads. Each of these seven round faces had worn a nasty smile of its own.


  ‘Like a croquembouche,’ she added.

  ‘A croquembouche?’

  ‘My aunt had one when she got married, instead of a wedding cake. It’s a pyramid of profiteroles stuck together with caramel.’

  We could have a croquembouche when we get married, Brendan caught himself thinking, and turned red. It wasn’t that he wanted her to agree with him all the time, in fact he positively relished most of the differences between them; but when that afternoon it had come to the one thing he was most passionate about and she had refused to listen, he hadn’t been able to help himself falling into a pit of anger.

  ‘I’ve got something of a monster in me,’ he said now. ‘I can’t believe I was like that with you at the end there, in the gallery. The beer at lunch didn’t help, but that’s no excuse. Anger. That’s my monster.’

  Just then their food arrived, and for some minutes there was no more talk, only chewing and swallowing and appreciative little noises.

  ‘My monster is melancholy,’ she admitted after a while.

  ‘That’s not a monster.’

  ‘Yes it is. It really is. I’ve got to fight it.’

  ‘I’ll help you.’

  ‘All right. For example. I can’t see any future.’

  ‘We could live in a cave,’ he grinned. ‘Like those troglodytes in Chinon.’

  ‘Nobody our age will ever be able to afford a cave, even.’

  ‘A tent, then. We’re bound to be allowed to pitch our tent in some old person’s back garden. We don’t need much, we could grow stuff, grow our own food …’

  ‘Not lemons,’ she said, ‘or bananas.’

  ‘No, not them, obviously. But we could grow all the stuff the monks were growing in that garden at Villandry, remember, all those cabbages and lettuces and courgettes? We could make tians every night! You’re so beautiful. When I look at you I know I could do anything.’

  ‘That’s why I haven’t been wanting to listen to your plans, Brendan. The trouble is, I don’t think they’re going to work. I wish I’d chosen Human Rights for my special subject; all that reading I did for the End of the World was just too much.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But think! Those guys who stitched that tapestry back there, it must have looked the same to them – they must have thought the world hadn’t got long, what with the Black Death, and famine, and the clergy threatening them with plagues of monsters. And that was eight hundred years ago.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Also, I feel happier than I ever have in my life.’

  ‘Do you?’ she said, and smiled a watery smile. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m with you,’ he shrugged.

  Outside was warm and darkly velvet. They started the walk back to the hostel at a languorous pace, under a star-packed sky. He stopped to kiss her, and their tongues tasted of the wine they had drunk at dinner, the light strawberry-red Chinon.

  ‘I wish this wasn’t the last night,’ she murmured into his shoulder. She felt a lurch of concern at the thought of him alone, his sudden scowls misunderstood by others, his sanguine sunny breadth ignored or wasted.

  ‘But we’re not over just because the holiday is,’ he said.

  ‘I thought last night when we were, um, you know, that I didn’t want that ever to be over. But I knew it would be. Same with the meal just now, while I was enjoying it I knew that would be over in a little while, too.’

  ‘And one day we’re all going to die!’ he said. ‘But not yet. Just because we’re going to die one day doesn’t spoil being alive, does it?’

  ‘Everything’s always got to be over in the end.’

  ‘You’re like Pandora. You need to look on the bright side. Think outside the box, Pandora!’

  ‘That’s great, coming from you. You’re the one who’s going round setting end-dates.’ She pulled away. ‘Sorry. Not that again. Look, there’s the Plough, and there’s Orion with three stars in his belt.’

  I’m not a gloom-and-doom merchant, Adele, he wanted to say; you know I’m not; in fact, I’m a sight more of an optimist than you are.

  He doesn’t need to convince me, she thought. I know what he’s saying. I just think it’s hopeless and we’re the last generation. The last but one, to be more accurate. Our children will be the last. That’s my considered opinion as an historian, is it? Yes, it is.

  ‘What I think,’ he said carefully, ‘what I think is, if you really want something to happen, to change, then that definitely improves the chances of it actually coming true.’

  ‘Sounds reasonable. I can see the sense in that. Yes.’

  ‘Good. So …’

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ she responded, with equal care. ‘Or rather, I can. I promise I won’t close my ears again. That was stupid of me this afternoon. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me,’ he murmured. He wrapped his arms round her again, and poked the tip of his tongue into first one of her ears and then the other. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  ‘Listen,’ he whispered, his breath rustling in her hair. ‘I know what I want, Adele.’

  Something had shifted in his voice, in the temperature of the microclimate that enveloped them, and it roused her to pull away and hold him at arm’s length.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t say it.’

  She put her hand up to his mouth to stop the words coming out.

  ‘Why not?’ he spluttered, after a struggle.

  ‘It’s too soon,’ she said. ‘It might not be true.’

  ‘Can I say it in French?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I’ll think it instead,’ he said, holding her hard. ‘I’ll dream it at night and I’ll think it in the day.’

  She was twisting and turning, trying to struggle out of his arms. He enjoyed these tussles more than she did, she realised; he liked a challenge. She looked up frowning into his delighted face.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘I can smile, can’t I? There isn’t any law against smiling, is there?’

  He ran several steps ahead of her and skipped around playing air guitar.

  ‘I’m a troubadour!’ he sang. ‘I’m a troubadour!’

  She ran after him, caught between laughter and protest.

  ‘Look at the stars!’ he yelled. ‘Hello, Wormwood! Come in, Wormwood, are you receiving me? OK, the universe is huge, we don’t matter, all that … So what?’

  ‘It’s no use,’ she panted, lunging at him and missing.

  ‘So what,’ he shouted, running ahead of her. ‘So what so what so what! You can’t stop me saying it! I’m going to say it!’

  ‘Don’t!’ she called, running after him. ‘Don’t say it! Kiss me, though.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he said, lifting her in the air and letting her slide slowly down the front of his body. ‘I’ll do more than that.’

  He lifted her again and whirled her in his arms until they were both dizzy. Breathing hard, exhilarated, they leaned into a mutual embrace, this time for balance as much as anything. Then they stood in the fathomless dark and stared saucer-eyed beyond the stratosphere into the night, as troupes of boisterous planets wheeled across the blackness all around them.

  Channel 17

  I

  ‘THAT WAS DEFINITELY her in the Eurostar queue,’ says Paul from the small double where he lies zapping the television atop the wardrobe with a remote control.

  ‘It certainly looked like her,’ says Jackie, rezipping their suitcase and stowing it behind the door. ‘Despite the sunglasses. Oh if the children think they can hold wild parties while the cat’s away, I’ll kill them.’

  ‘Being very friendly with that bloke who definitely wasn’t her husband,’ says Paul. ‘Seventeen channels but they’re all in French.’

  ‘Imagine if they were staying at this hotel,’ says Jackie. ‘Imagine if we bumped into them at breakfast.’

  ‘A nasty shock,’ Paul agrees. ‘That’s what Paris is for, though, isn’t it? That’s what it means to the
English. Somewhere where you won’t get caught.’

  ‘Oh the French think we’re ridiculous,’ says Jackie. ‘Apparently they take all that in their stride over here. They even have a sort of happy hour when it’s allowed, late in the afternoon, they call it the peccadillo or something.’

  ‘Isn’t that Spanish, peccadillo?’ queries Paul. ‘Jalapeno? Siesta? Anyway it’s probably all just talk. Hot air.’

  ‘And instead of screaming and crying and divorce they do that French shrug and say tant pis,’ continues Jackie, joining him on the bed. ‘Have you got to channel 17 yet? It says it’s the adult channel, on this card.’

  ‘Give me that,’ he says. ‘Oh. It’s non-paying. It won’t be any good if it’s free.’

  ‘So,’ she says, fitting herself into his side. ‘You know about these things, do you.’

  On the screen on top of the wardrobe a girl in meagre underwear is slowly drawing a thin white stocking up her leg. When it covers her thigh at last, she starts to roll it down again, very gradually, with stoical deliberation.

  ‘Is that it?’ he says as they watch the girl repeat the process, easing the white stocking, a centimetre at a time, along her outstretched leg. ‘And why’s she wearing sunglasses?’

  ‘She’s probably Albanian, poor girl,’ says Jackie. ‘She doesn’t want her mother to recognise her. Turn it off.’

  ‘But it’s so boring,’ he complains, mesmerised.

  ‘Turn it off then,’ she says, seizing the remote. ‘Our first night away alone together in five years and you’re still watching television. Come here.’

  ‘No, hold on, Jackie, I’m shattered. No, no, really I am. Oof! Let’s have a rest first.’

  After a pause Jackie says, ‘It used to be the men that had the affairs, ten years ago, when the children were little. But now we’re older it’s the women.’

  ‘I’ve never had an affair,’ says Paul.

  ‘No,’ says Jackie. ‘I’d know if you had. I’m more than enough for you. I’m as much as you can manage.’

  ‘You’re my best friend,’ says Paul with a mighty yawn and a smile.

  ‘Snap,’ says Jackie. ‘But do you think that might be because we both work full-time and, what with office life and the children, we’ve got nothing left for anybody else?’