Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  The tedium of other people’s dreams is an important fact, Scrannel once argued, and one not to be explained away by our selfish indifference to the inner life of others. For the truth is that dreams like all inconsequential narratives are intrinsically without interest, as is shown by the fact that we frequently dream about minor characters in our lives whom we would not dream of – now there’s a real Freudian slip – discussing in our waking lives. Nor is it likely that our dreams can be dredged to reveal some significant secret about ourselves. If our dream-life is some intimate psychic sanctum, then surely we would express ourselves there with directness and freedom: a phallus would be a phallus, one’s desire for one’s mother would be openly and violently expressed. Yet if we are to believe the head-doctors, the dreaming brain is as prim as a Victorian lady covering up the legs of her piano. No, my dear boy, I am well aware that Victorian ladies were not in fact so silly. It is our twentieth-century fantasies about the Victorian age that cooked up this particular legend, and it is in just the same way that the psychoanalysts and the surrealists have imposed their sinister designs on to the harmless and meaningless kaleidoscope of our dreams.

  I woke with a start to the chattering of birds and a sense of great anxiety that I had forgotten something of importance. Which in a couple of minutes turned out to be true as it came to me that today was the day of my flight home.

  ‘Helen will drive you back to Edge and get your stuff. I’ll finish up here and get the police to run me back. See you back at the ranch.’

  Dodo looked large and competent in the bright light of the mission courtyard. In his bush shirt and beige trousers with complicated flaps and pockets, he might have been some US cavalryman come to save the mission from the Indians. For a moment the morning seemed to have washed away the terrible events of the day before. Then Father Ambrose, shades reinstalled, scarcely coming up to Wilmot’s shoulder, said he was sure we would like to see the coffins, Brother George would be so gratified.

  So we filed back down the passage and there they were, four gleaming gumwood boxes just where the four blankets had been, as though a conjuror had whisked the blankets away and made the coffins grow out of the floor.

  Brother George either operated to a standard measurement or had had no opportunity to measure up, for Jack Greenbaum and Fonso Leonard were bulging out of the boxes with scarcely room for their arms to fit in along their sides. As in life, their faces were swollen with discontent. Next to them, John Stilwell looked poised and not at ease exactly but not out of place, rather as if he was standing, neat and uncomplaining, in an elevator designed for one. I didn’t have time to look at the pilot before I had to go outside.

  ‘Empty stomach, that’s always the problem. We should have given you breakfast first.’ Father Ambrose patted me on the back, almost as though to congratulate me. Then he gave me a white cloth to clean myself up with. The cloth had a faint tickle of incense clinging to it. I wondered whether it had some liturgical use. As I was wiping my face, Dodo came up to Father Ambrose.

  ‘You’ve done a terrific job, Father, I don’t know how to thank you. I hope this will cover the cost and leave an itty little bit over.’

  He handed Father Ambrose a bundle of notes. On his face there was that same rueful innocence I remembered from when he was describing how he had paid off the owner of the Café Boudin. Here was another little caper that had gone off course and the damage had to be paid for.

  Back in the courtyard, we found one of the lorries from the mine and Dodo began ordering a couple of his men to transfer the samples from the Land-Rover.

  ‘Don’t want to slow you down, honey, and the boys can take the stuff straight down to the strip. I’ll fly down to Jo’burg myself with the bodies tomorrow or the next day. Life goes on.’

  He bent down and kissed Helen in a fatherly way which she endured rather than responded to. I could see she was as impatient to get moving as I was, but Father Ambrose was reluctant to let us go – ‘You’ll have to promise you’ll come back and see us on a less tragic occasion’ – though in the nicest possible way even behind his dark glasses he seemed less than overwhelmed by the tragic aspect of this occasion.

  As we drove away, he waved us goodbye from his low white roughcast kingdom. His enthusiasm was touching.

  After seven hours’ driving, more than four back to the bungalow and nearly three to the airport, we were dog-tired, at least I was, and I wasn’t taking much in, and noticed only that Helen was also carrying a bag.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Just some stuff I said I’d drop off at Ma McGuigan’s. You go on to Departures, I’ll catch you up.’

  And she disappeared into the throng leaving me with her bag as well as mine. For a moment, I had a wild fancy that she had landed me with a huge consignment of drugs or arms, but the bag felt like anyone’s bag.

  ‘That’s great,’ she said, running up to me and thrusting her arm through mine. ‘They had one ticket left.’

  At Sea

  ‘WHY’D YOU SAY you were dropping your bag off at Ma’s?’

  ‘Didn’t want to look silly if they hadn’t got a ticket.’

  ‘Is that really all the stuff you brought with you?’

  ‘Don’t be so bourgeois.’

  Beyond the boundary fence, some kind of deer, antelope were they, pranced off into the bush. The aircraft began to taxi and suddenly seemed full of air and light, the light flooding down on to Helen’s face. It was something to be part of her impulse, startled by it and exhilarated. By now she was rummaging through her bag, but I still felt the warmth of her arm thrust through mine.

  We took off, rising rather effortfully at first, over the scrubby trees, flushing several more antelope out of their torpor and pricking them into a reluctant canter as though they didn’t quite believe in us. And as we lifted and turned, a little of the same uncertainty spread through me and put my elation on hold. What exactly was all this, why had she come? To ask such questions seemed insensitive, but not as insensitive as to bury myself in Moby-Dick. So I stared at the red and grey swirls of the upholstery on the seat in front and studied the grey bristles on the back of the neck of the man sitting in it.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask?’

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘Don’t be dumb, ask why I jumped on the plane like that.’

  ‘I thought you’d tell me.’

  ‘Did you? Well, I won’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s obvious you don’t care. You just think, oh God, I’m stuck with her for the next twelve hours, is there any way I can stop her making a scene.’

  ‘That’s absolutely untrue. I’m delighted you’ve come, I really am, I just don’t quite know what to make of it.’

  ‘Are you really, is that true?’

  ‘Of course it is, there’s no one I would rather fly across the world with. I do love you, you know.’

  It was surprising to find myself saying such things, not that I didn’t mean them. The last half-dozen words seemed to come from some part of the brain not in full-time service and were dragged out in a rusty, croaky voice. Anyway, there they were, strange prehistoric sentiments which had not been filtered through the usual channels. And in the silence that followed, there was a kind of inquest going on in my head as to how they had been allowed to get out. Not that I wished them recalled, in fact I was rather proud of having blurted out something which needed blurting.

  I had no idea how she would react, not much idea how I would like her to react. Perhaps she hadn’t either. The silence was a long one. She brought it to an end by bursting into tears, loud, convulsive sobs which were audible over the engine drone as far as the nearest air hostess whose cherry lips parted in a startled gawp. It was some time before Helen could throttle the sobs enough to be able to speak.

  ‘Oh I am sorry,’ she said, ‘that makes it much worse, but I expect you’re only saying it to be p
olite.’

  ‘No, no I’m not. But what does it make worse? I mean, I can see –’

  ‘You probably can’t see, and why should you? It’s only logical you should think I’m just jumping on this plane because you’re on it and –’

  ‘I didn’t. Anyway, I don’t think you really believed I did.’

  ‘Of course, it’s nice you are on it. There’s no one I’d rather be on a plane with.’

  ‘That makes two of us. But that’s not the reason. You just want to get away from him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s understandable, in fact it’s more than understandable. He’s repellent. But he’s going away, isn’t he? Did you have to leave all this?’ Gesturing at the window, with a wild, distressed wave, I saw far below through the cloudless air small dots moving across a straw-coloured plain, with tawny-crusted mountains beyond.

  She began sobbing again and muttering, not unkindly, something to the effect that I didn’t understand but it didn’t matter. I put my arm round her, awkwardly in the confined space, just as we hit a patch of turbulence and so we were thrown against each other like orphans sheltering from the elements. A strange certainty came over me that the antique confession I had just made to her would never lead to anything or be repeated. But making it had locked us into a friendship which was indissoluble because it was more than platonic but not the other thing either. I had heard my father once referring to two of his contemporaries having an amitié amoureuse and thought how phoney it sounded – or at any rate reserved for the middle-aged, – but perhaps that was what Helen and I were gearing up for, the last amitié amoureuse of the twentieth century.

  Now inching back into a kind of tranquillity, I could see that her escape was not so odd. If you woke up to the fact that you had been sleeping with a monster, not only a physical monster but a monster who cared for nothing but emeralds, you wouldn’t want to go on working for him, even if he was in a different continent. The mystery was, always had been, why she had ever taken on the job in the first place and why she had then let him crawl all over her. And suddenly, from running on subtle questions of relationships and sensibilities, my brain was full of the vilest images, especially of his great swinging scrotum, and it was a relief when the stewardess asked whether I wanted the chicken or the vegetarian menu. Then we drowned our embarrassment in the Cape Cabernet and she made a fuss when the stewardess wouldn’t let her have another bottle.

  ‘Down with Dodo.’

  ‘Down with Dodo.’

  We clinked our plastic glasses and I reflected that I knew her no better than on the day I first met her, which was somehow a comfort. She went to sleep and so did I, but later we both woke and somewhere in the midnight hum of the aircraft and the shuffling of blankets, I thought I heard her say, ‘This has got to change.’

  A raw, cold, dark dawn, a wet runway in a Heathrow January. Helen had stopped lolling against me and was sitting up straight, looking frostily at the other passengers queuing to wash and scent themselves. We said goodbye at the taxi rank. There was a bus, she said, and she’d only collapse again if she came with me.

  The roads were empty and even when the light straggled through the dirty grey cloudbank they did not fill up much. Half the petrol stations were still closed, though it was past nine a.m.

  ‘Seems very quiet today.’

  ‘Fucking three-day week, mate, where you been, Timbuktu?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And the bloody A-rabs starving us of petrol, had to queue an hour and a half to fill up.’

  The darkened villas seemed lapped in misery, as though they were being punished for being so neat. The taxi-driver, half-laughing, half-snarling, threw me crazy little stories – how a government minister had instructed people to brush their teeth in the dark, how some patriotic old lady had thought it would help the nation if she drove at night without her lights on, how in Lincolnshire a man had suffocated to death trying to run his boiler on chickenshit.

  The taxi took me straight to the office, not because I was eager to do my bit but because I was due back in that very day. My suit had been left hanging in the cupboard, plus shirt and tie, and I was just stripping off my dusty Africa clothes when Hilary Puttock surged in, burly, ebullient cyclist, keen student of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Sienese school, unstoppable, with the spirit of the service running through every nerve and vein in his body.

  ‘Thank God you’re in. The miners are coming out today. I can’t think how you failed to clear your leave with me, or rather I can, because there would have been no question of it at a time like this. We’ve been two men short in the unit throughout the whole business. Riley-Jones is still out with that testicle trouble.’

  ‘I cleared my leave back in August when I got the tickets.’

  ‘In that case, you should have applied for confirmation when you saw how things were going. I’ve never heard of anyone taking a month off in the middle of a national crisis.’

  It is hard writing down Hilary’s words to convey the good humour radiating from him, the total lack of peevishness. My colleague, the swollen-balled Ian Riley-Jones, used to do imitations of Hilary announcing various disasters – the Black Death, the Holocaust, Armageddon – to his superiors. As the pile of corpses, the record of beastliness and blood and filth mounted, the fantasy-Hilary would sound ever more cheerful and positive, at the same time increasingly larded with gravitas: the most urgent priority is to improve interdepartmental liaison, I venture to suggest that a steering group at under-secretary level might be helpful, it would be advisable to consult the Pope and the Welsh Office.

  Hilary paused and looked at me more intently, taking in my bare legs and grubby bush shirt.

  ‘Why are you trouserless?’

  ‘Just changing. Came straight from the airport.’

  ‘Good man. What I think we’ll do is slot you in where Riley-Jones would have been: Energy Supplies Liaison No. 3 Area, essentially the West Midlands. I suggest you base yourself in Birmingham, anywhere but the Midland Hotel, that, I’m afraid, is for G-Ones and Twos only.’

  ‘And what precisely do I do when I get there?’

  ‘Keep the home fires burning, Gus.’

  He always signed off by using your name, followed by a grin of quenchless benevolence. But on this occasion he couldn’t resist leaving with a quip: ‘Oh and don’t forget your trousers. They mind about that sort of thing up there.’

  The next day Helen called.

  ‘Is it all right ringing you in the office?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I thought it would be quicker like this, you’d want to get off the phone because there’d be important people breathing down your neck.’

  ‘Only the Foreign Secretary and the head of MI5 at the moment.’

  ‘That’s all right then. Because I just wanted to say to avoid misunderstandings and things that it would be better if we didn’t see each other for a bit. Sorry, can’t think of a less corny way of putting it.’

  ‘A cooling-off period?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, that’s what we call it in this department.’

  ‘Because my life is too fucked up at the moment and I don’t know about yours but I’m too fond of you to want to make it any worse.’

  ‘I’m going away anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Are you? That’s good. Where?’

  ‘Birmingham.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said laughing.

  ‘No it isn’t. Can I ring you when I’m lonely?’

  ‘I wouldn’t. I’d only make you feel lonelier.’

  ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘Yes I would, I can make people feel very lonely even when I don’t mean to.’

  The last words were swallowed by a kind of sob during which she attempted to say sorry again or goodbye or both and rang off.

  She was right about how lonely she could make people feel.

  So I set off for the front in the class war of the cent
ury, or so it was billed, as I discovered when I caught up with the newspapers.

  I established my headquarters in Room 9, second floor back, with a view of the Leofric Laundry, in the Beech Lawn Hotel, Beechlawn Avenue, B&B only £5.25. I ate my other meals round the corner from the Ministry’s regional office at the Edgbaston College of Food and Domestic Arts (Hotel and Catering Dept), which did an excellent four-course meal for the absurd price of 70p: Poussin farci polonaise, Délice de sole Mornay, that sort of thing. I don’t think I have ever eaten so well and been so kindly served as by Brendan and Sue and the other fresh-faced students breathing heavily as they enquired through their noses whether everything was all right. Where have they gone, those eager cooks? Twenty years on, they are probably pulling overcooked farragos out of giant microwaves for customers who estimate the value of a dish by the number of its ingredients.

  Each grimy dawn, looking anonymous in a thick navy anorak or so I hoped, I drove my hired red Escort to see how things were going at some industrial site – a coke depot or a power station or a steel rolling mill (there were no actual coal-mines in my area). They were bleak yet also magical, these excursions. I had the sense of probing to the heart of things, as I steamed darkling along the unlit avenues of Edgbaston, then in stragglier, scruffier streets until the road twisted off into a wasteland of rusted-up railway sidings, scrapyards, tyre depots. Leave the car some way off, in an out-of-the-way spot where it wouldn’t get smashed up, then walk the last half-mile to where the police lines started, and I could see the glow from the brazier of the pickets and the great grey outline of the depot beyond. Sometimes, out to the west around Wolverhampton, I could see the hills beyond too, a fainter grey in the blood-orange dawn, Housman’s blue remembered hills, Shropshire, perhaps even Wales, and something about that austere scholar’s life, its underlying hardness I suppose, seemed in tune with this grim, plain struggle too, although reading Housman you wouldn’t suppose we had advanced beyond the horse-drawn plough.