In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  ‘Yes,’ said Phyllis, blinking. ‘Sarah. She went into the book business. In fact, she’s the one who dreamt up the idea behind this festival, and now she runs it. Artistic Director of the Festival of Immortals, that’s her title.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Viv. ‘The opportunities there are for girls these days!’

  ‘It’s a full-time year-round job as you can imagine,’ said Phyllis, gaining confidence. ‘She spent months this year trying to persuade Shakespeare to run a workshop but the most she could get him to do was half-promise to give a masterclass in the sonnet. He’s supposed to be arriving by helicopter at four this afternoon but it’s always touch and go with him, she says, it’s impossible to pin him down.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Viv again, and listened enthralled as Phyllis told her anecdotes from previous years, the time Rabbie Burns had kept an adoring female audience waiting forty minutes and had eventually been tracked down to the stationery cupboard deep in congress or whatever he called it with Sarah’s young assistant Sophie. Then there was the awful day Sarah had introduced a reading as being from The Floss on the Mill and George Eliot had looked so reproachful, even more so than usual, but Sarah did tend to reverse her words when flustered, it wasn’t intentional. Every year Alexander Pope roared up in a fantastic high-powered low-slung sportscar, always a new one, always the latest model. Everybody looked forward to that. Jane Austen could be very sarcastic in interviews if you asked her a question she didn’t like, she’d said something very rude to Sarah last year, very cutting, when Sarah had questioned her on what effect she thought being fostered by a wet-nurse had had on her. Because of course that was what people were interested in now, that sort of detail, there was no getting away from it.

  Last year had been really fascinating, if a bit morbid; they’d taken illness as their theme – Fanny Burney on the mastectomy she’d undergone without anaesthetic, Emily Brontë giving a riveting description of the time she was bitten by a rabid dog and how she’d gone straight back home and heated up a fire-iron and used it herself to cauterise her arm. Emily had been very good in the big round-table discussion, too, the one called ‘TB and Me’, very frank. People had got the wrong idea about her, Sarah said, she wasn’t unfriendly, just rather shy; she was lovely when you got to know her.

  ‘They’ve done well, our children, when you think of it,’ commented Viv. ‘But then, there was no reason for them not to. First generation university.’

  Phyllis had tried to describe in her memoir how angry and sad she had been at having to leave school at fourteen; how she’d just missed the 1944 Education Act with its free secondary schooling for everyone. Books had been beyond her parents’ budget, but with the advent of paperbacks as she reached her teens she had become a reader. Why couldn’t she find a way to make this sound interesting?

  ‘Penny for your thoughts, Fuzzy,’ said Viv.

  ‘Viv,’ said Phyllis, ‘would you mind not calling me that? I never did like that name and it’s one of the things I’m pleased to have left in the past.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Viv. ‘Right you are.’

  ‘Because names do label you,’ said Phyllis. ‘I mean, Phyllis certainly dates me.’

  ‘I was called Violet until I left home,’ confessed Viv. ‘Then I changed to Viv and started a new life.’

  ‘I always assumed Viv was short for Vivien,’ said Phyllis. ‘Like Vivien Leigh. I saw Gone with the Wind five times. Such a shame about her and Laurence Olivier.’

  ‘Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff!’ exclaimed Viv. ‘Mr Darcy. Henry V. Henry V! That was my first proper Shakespeare, that film.’

  ‘Mine too,’ confessed Phyllis. ‘Then later I was reading “The Whitsun Weddings” – I’d been married myself for a while – and I came to the last verse and there it was, that shower of arrows fired by the English bowmen, just like in the film. The arrows were the new lives of the young married couples on the train and it made me cry, it made me really depressed, that poem.’

  ‘Not what you’d call a family man, Philip Larkin,’ said Viv.

  ‘Not really,’ said Phyllis. ‘You know, thinking about it, the only time I stopped reading altogether was when they were babies. Three under five. I couldn’t do that again.’

  ‘I did keep reading,’ said Viv. ‘But there were quite a few accidents. And I was always a Smash potato sort of housewife, if I’m honest.’

  ‘I wish I had been,’ said Phyllis enviously.

  She cast her mind back to all that: the hours standing over the twin tub, the hundred ways with mince, nagging the children to clean out the guinea-pig cage, collecting her repeat prescription for Valium. That time too she had tried to record in her memoir, but it had been even more impossible to describe than the days of her girlhood.

  ‘It’s not in the books we’ve read, is it, how things have been for us,’ said Viv. ‘There’s only Mrs Ramsay, really, and she’s hardly typical.’

  ‘I’ve been bound by domestic ties,’ said Phyllis, ‘but I’m still a feminist.’

  ‘Are you?’ said Viv, impressed.

  ‘Well, I do think women should have the vote so yes, I suppose I am. Because a lot of people don’t really, underneath, think women should have the vote, you know.’

  ‘I had noticed,’ said Viv.

  ‘It’s taken me so long to see how the world works that I think I should be allowed extra time,’ said Phyllis.

  At this point she decided to confide in Viv about her struggles in Life writing. For instance, all she could remember about her grandmother was that she was famous for having once thrown a snowball into a fried-fish shop; but was that the sort of thing that was worth remembering? Another problem was, just as you didn’t talk about yourself in the same way you talked about others, so you couldn’t write about yourself from the outside either. Not really. Which reminded her, there had been such a fascinating event here last year, Sarah had been interviewing Thomas Hardy and it had come out that he’d written his own biography, in the third person, and got his wife Florence to pretend that she’d written it! He’d made her promise to bring it out as her own work after he’d died. The audience had been quite indignant, but, as he told Sarah, he didn’t want to be summed up by anybody else, he didn’t want to be cut and dried and skewered on a spit. How would you like it, he’d asked Sarah and she’d had to agree she wouldn’t. This year she, Sarah, had taken care to give him a less contentious subject altogether – he was appearing tomorrow with Coleridge and Katherine Mansfield at an event called ‘The Notebook Habit’.

  ‘Yes,’ said Viv, ‘I’ve got a ticket for that.’

  This whole business of misrepresentation was one of Sarah’s main bugbears at the Festival, Phyllis continued. She found it very difficult knowing how to handle the hecklers. Ottoline Morrell, for example, turned up at any event where D.H. Lawrence was appearing, carrying on about Women in Love, how she wasn’t Hermione Roddice, how she’d never have thrown a paperweight at anyone, how dare he and all the rest of it. Sarah had had to organise discreet security guards because of incidents like that. The thing was, people minded about posterity. They minded about how they would be remembered.

  ‘Not me,’ said Viv.

  ‘Really?’ said Phyllis.

  ‘I’m more than what’s happened to me or where I’ve been,’ said Viv. ‘I know that and I don’t care what other people think. I can’t be read like a book. And I’m not dead yet, so I can’t be summed up or sum myself up. Things might change.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Phyllis, amazed.

  ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ shrugged Viv, glancing at her watch. ‘And now it’s time for Charlotte Brontë. I had planned to question her about those missing letters to Constantin Heger, but I don’t want Sarah’s security guards after me.’

  The two women started to get up, brushing cake crumbs from their skirts and assembling bags and brochures.

  ‘Look, there’s Sarah now,’ said Phyllis, pointing towards the marquee.

  Linking arms,
they began to make their way across the meadow to where the next queue was forming.

  ‘And look, that must be Charlotte Brontë with her, in the bonnet,’ Viv indicated. ‘See, I was right! She is short.’

  Diary of an Interesting Year

  12th February 2040

  MY THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY. G gave me this little spiral-backed notebook and a biro. It’s a good present, hardly any rust on the spiral and no water damage to the paper. I’m going to start a diary. I’ll keep my handwriting tiny to make the paper go further.

  15th February 2040

  G is really getting me down. He’s in his element. They should carve it on his tombstone – ‘I Was Right.’

  23rd February 2040

  Glad we don’t live in London. The Hatchwells have got cousins staying with them, they trekked up from Peckham (three days). Went round this afternoon and they were saying the thing that finally drove them out was the sewage system – when the drains packed up it overflowed everywhere. They said the smell was unbelievable, the pavements were swimming in it, and of course the hospitals are down so there’s nothing to be done about the cholera. Didn’t get too close to them in case they were carrying it. They lost their two sons like that last year.

  ‘You see,’ G said to me on the way home, ‘capitalism cared more about its children as accessories and demonstrations of earning power than for their future.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ I said.

  2nd March 2040

  Can’t sleep. I’m writing this instead of staring at the ceiling. There’s a mosquito in the room, I can hear it whining close to my ear. Very humid, air like filthy soup, plus we’re supposed to wear our face-masks in bed too but I was running with sweat so I ripped mine off just now. Got up and looked at myself in the mirror on the landing – ribs like a fence, hair in greasy rat’s tails. Yesterday the rats in the kitchen were busy gnawing away at the breadbin, they didn’t even look up when I came in.

  6th March 2040

  Another quarrel with G. OK, yes, he was right, but why crow about it? That’s what you get when you marry your tutor from Uni – wall-to-wall pontificating from an older man. ‘I saw it coming, any fool could see it coming especially after the Big Melt,’ he brags. ‘Thresholds crossed, cascade effect, hopelessly optimistic to assume we had till 2060, blahdy blahdy blah, the plutonomy as lemming, democracy’s massive own goal.’ No wonder we haven’t got any friends.

  He cheered when rationing came in. He’s the one that volunteered first as car-share warden for our road; one piddling little Peugeot for the entire road. He gets a real kick out of the camaraderie round the stand-pipe.

  – I’ll swop my big tin of chickpeas for your little tin of sardines.

  – No, no, my sardines are protein.

  – Chickpeas are protein too, plus they fill you up more. Anyway, I thought you still had some tuna.

  – No, I swopped that with Astrid Huggins for a tin of tomato soup.

  Really sick of bartering, but hard to know how to earn money since the Internet went down. ‘Also, money’s no use unless you’ve got shedloads of it,’ as I said to him in bed last night, ‘the top layer hanging on inside their plastic bubbles of filtered air while the rest of us shuffle about with goitres and tumours and bits of old sheet tied over our mouths. Plus, we’re soaking wet the whole time. We’ve given up on umbrellas, we just go round permanently drenched.’ I only stopped ranting when I heard a snore and clocked he was asleep.

  8th April 2040

  Boring morning washing out rags. No wood for hot water, so had to use ashes and lye again. Hands very sore even though I put plastic bags over them. Did the face masks first, then the rags from my period. Took forever. At least I haven’t got to do nappies like Lexi or Esme, that would send me right over the edge.

  27th April 2040

  Just back from Maia’s. Seven months. She’s very frightened. I don’t blame her. She tried to make me promise I’d take care of the baby if anything happens to her. I havered (mostly at the thought of coming between her and that throwback Martin – she’d got a new black eye, I didn’t ask). I suppose there’s no harm in promising if it makes her feel better. After all, it wouldn’t exactly be taking on a responsibility – I give a new baby three months max in these conditions. Diarrhoea, basically.

  14th May 2040

  Can’t sleep. Bites itching, trying not to scratch. Heavy thumps and squeaks just above, in the ceiling. Think of something nice. Soap and hot water. Fresh air. Condoms! Sick of being permanently on knife edge re pregnancy.

  Start again. Wandering round a supermarket – warm, gorgeously lit – corridors of open fridges full of tiger prawns and fillet steak. Gliding off down the fast lane in a sports car, stopping to fill up with thirty litres of petrol. Online, booking tickets for The Mousetrap, click, ordering a crate of wine, click, a holiday home, click, a pair of patent leather boots, click, a gap year, click. I go to iTunes and download The Marriage of Figaro, then I chat face to face in real time with G’s parents in Sydney. No, don’t think about what happened to them. Horrible. Go to sleep.

  21st May 2040

  Another row with G. He blew my second candle out, he said one was enough. It wasn’t though, I couldn’t see to read any more. He drives me mad, it’s like living with a policeman. It always was, even before the Collapse. ‘The Earth has enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed’ was his favourite. Nobody likes being labelled greedy. I called him Killjoy and he didn’t like that. ‘Every one of us takes about twenty-five thousand breaths a day,’ he told me. ‘Each breath removes oxygen from the atmosphere and replaces it with carbon dioxide.’ Well, pardon me for breathing! What was I supposed to do – turn into a tree?

  6th June 2040

  Went round to the Lumleys for the news last night. Whole road there squashed into front room, straining to listen to radio – batteries very low (no new ones in the last govt delivery). Big news though – compulsory billeting imminent. The Shorthouses were up in arms, Kai shouting and red in the face, Lexi in tears. ‘You work all your life’, etc, etc. What planet is he on. None of us too keen, but nothing to be done about it. When we got back, G checked our stash of tins under the bedroom floorboards. A big rat shot out and I screamed my head off. G held me till I stopped crying then we had sex. Woke in the night and prayed not to be pregnant, though God knows who I was praying to.

  12th June 2040

  Visited Maia this afternoon. She was in bed, her legs have swollen up like balloons. On at me again to promise about the baby and this time I said yes. She said Astrid Huggins was going to help her when it started – Astrid was a nurse once, apparently, not really the hands-on sort but better than nothing. Nobody else in the road will have a clue what to do now we can’t google it. ‘All I remember from old films is that you’re supposed to boil a kettle,’ I said. We started to laugh, we got a bit hysterical. Knuckledragger Martin put his head round the door and growled at us to shut it.

  1st July 2040

  First billet arrived today by army truck. We’ve got a Spanish group of eight including one old lady, her daughter and twin toddler grandsons (all pretty feral), plus four unsmiling men of fighting age. A bit much since we only have two bedrooms. G and I tried to show them round but they ignored us, the grandmother bagged our bedroom straight off. We’re under the kitchen table tonight. I might try to sleep on top of it because of the rats. We couldn’t think of anything to say – the only Spanish we could remember was Muchas gracias, and as G said, we’re certainly not saying that.

  2nd July 2040

  Fell off the table in my sleep. Bashed my elbow. Covered in bruises.

  3rd July 2040

  G depressed. The four Spaniards are bigger than him, and he’s worried that the biggest one, Miguel, has his eye on me (with reason, I have to say).

  4th July 2040

  G depressed. The grandmother found our tins under the floorboards and all but danced a flamenco. Miguel punched G when he tried to reclaim a tin of sardin
es and since then his nose won’t stop bleeding.

  6th July 2040

  Last night under the table G came up with a plan. He thinks we should head north. Now this lot are in the flat and a new group from Tehran promised next week, we might as well cut and run. Scotland’s heaving, everyone else has already had the same idea, so he thinks we should get on one of the ferries to Stavanger then aim for Russia.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Where would we stay?’

  ‘I’ve got the pop-up tent packed in a rucksack behind the shed,’ he said, ‘plus our sleeping bags and my wind-up radio.’

  ‘Camping in the mud,’ I said.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ he said. ‘We have a huge mortgage and we’re just going to walk away from it.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ I said.

  17th July 2040

  Maia died yesterday. It was horrible. The baby got stuck two weeks ago, it died inside her. Astrid Huggins was useless, she didn’t have a clue. Martin started waving his Swiss Army knife around on the second day and yelling about a Caesarean, he had to be dragged off her. He’s round at ours now drinking the last of our precious brandy with the Spaniards. That’s it. We’ve got to go. Now, says G. Yes.

  1st August 2040

  Somewhere in Shropshire, or possibly Cheshire. We’re staying off the beaten track. Heavy rain. This notebook’s pages have gone all wavy. At least biro doesn’t run. I’m lying inside the tent now, G is out foraging. We got away in the middle of the night. G slung our two rucksacks across the bike. We took turns to wheel it, then on the fourth morning we woke up and looked outside the tent flap and it was gone even though we’d covered it with leaves the night before.

  ‘Could be worse,’ said G, ‘we could have had our throats cut while we slept.’

  ‘Oh shut up,’ I said.

  3rd August 2040