We decided to let her rest and go in search of a coffee. The word search wasn’t necessary because there seemed to be coffee available at every corner. It didn’t take long before we were comfortably seated with cups and saucers in our hands.
Charles understandably seemed miles away. I thought it best to stay silent until he was ready to say something. My mind went back to Belinda’s time in hospital before she insisted on coming home to die. She too had been in a private hospital, but one more local to us in Oakham. The medical staff were brilliant, understanding not only the needs of their patients but also their visitors. The nurses seemed able to switch from their chosen profession to being hosts, depending on whom they were dealing with. I found it a comfort and I am sure many of their patients found comfort in it also. Belinda used to sing their praises all the time and ask why you had to pay private medical insurance for such an excellent service.
We discussed her naivety at length!
“It was Belinda,” Charles muttered beside me. “Never came to terms with Belinda leaving us. Changed her.” He looked down at the cup and saucer in his hands. “Then with David and Isabelle away at school, she wondered what it had all been about.”
“We all wonder that, Charles, but the kids wanted to stay at St Edward’s after Belinda died. Primarily, it’s what they wanted that mattered and they believed it’s what their mother would have wanted.”
Charles simply nodded and went back to staring into space.
Understandably, I wasn’t too happy but not surprised that Belinda and the twins were to be blamed for Elizabeth’s current state … but blame was the wrong word. They weren’t being blamed, it was a matter of circumstances. I would have changed everything if I thought it would have brought Belinda back. I had witnessed and overheard any number of heated discussions between her and her mother concerning the children’s schooling. Elizabeth was in favour of keeping them within easy reach even though she and Charles had sent Belinda away to school. Her logic was that both she and Charles travelled the world with his job and therefore there was nothing else they could have done if they had wanted Belinda to have the best, but with Belinda staying in England when I was travelling, she didn’t have to do the same. The argument that it was what the twins wanted held no water whatsoever.
“How can children of that age know what they want?” I could hear Elizabeth saying now, but she did have sufficient sensitivity to let up once Belinda’s fell ill
“Don’t have to tell me, old boy.” Charles suddenly said. He was looking towards a couple of nurses who were talking quietly by a water dispenser, but I doubted if he could see them. “To see your only child being consumed slowly by a killer disease and finally being taken from you would be too much for anybody. Elizabeth is strong, I agree, but even she –” He broke off, unable to finish the sentence.
I put my hand on his arm. “I know it’s hard now but she’ll …”
“Doesn’t hold you responsible either,” he said, not hearing me. “Gives that impression sometimes, I know, but there’s no malice towards you.”
There was a suitable comment to make but then wasn’t the time and I hated myself for even thinking it. Regardless of recent exchanges, I still felt Elizabeth tolerated me.
I don’t think she ever really came to terms with Belinda and me getting married in the first place. Whether it was my chosen career or me that put her off, I never really knew. I hoped it was the former. Belinda always told me that I was imagining it all and that I could be a very good martyr to the cause, because deep down her mother loved me like the son they always wished for but never had – but I continued to have my doubts.
When we moved to Medbourne to be nearer to Elizabeth and Charles, I thought it might improve my perception, but nothing seemed to change – I got the feeling that I was being tolerated more often, that’s all. Belinda had a facial expression that said, “You’re being a martyr again,” and she used it whenever she saw me react to something her mother said that I thought was personal.
Now I was reacting in exactly the same way to something Charles had said.
In many ways, I suppose Belinda was right; I was overly sensitive at times. I held Elizabeth in high regard and I looked upon her and Charles as more than only Belinda’s parents – in many ways they were mine too. My mother and father had divorced when I was twelve and my sister ten. My father came home one Tuesday in the summer of 1973 and Fran, my sister, and I were sent upstairs to our rooms to do our homework but we actually sat at the top of the stairs and listened, cuddling next to each other for security, each knowing what was happening, neither wanting to admit it.
There was one almighty row.
For a long time I had sensed something wasn’t right between my parents. Being still young, I put it down to adult behaviour. Adults had strange ways a twelve-year-old didn’t understand. Fran would never discuss it. She loved her mummy and daddy and they loved each other, a simple but effective means of escape from the truth.
There was a lot of swearing and screaming downstairs but neither of them, thank God, resorted to violence. For some inexplicable reason, I respected them both for that. I still do today. From what Fran and I could hear, I gathered that Dad had been having an affair for some time with a woman where he worked and they had decided they wanted to be together.
Later mum told us he went off with the ubiquitous secretary. He wanted, and got, access to us, but the weekends when we were with him were never a success. Fran and Melissa, his secretary and soon to be his new wife, never got on together to the extent that after only six months, Fran refused to go and stay with them. I only lasted another three months. I was old enough and wise enough, even at thirteen, to realise that they were trying to buy my loyalty and prise me away from my mother.
It didn’t work.
Melissa was a good few years younger than dad and, from some of the looks she gave him when his back was turned, I wondered what her real motives were for taking him away from my mother.
In 1981, while I was at university, my mother got a letter from a solicitor in Edinburgh explaining my father was dead. He was one of two victims in a fatal car crash and that she was a beneficiary in his will.
My mother had remarried in 1979, and when she heard of my father’s death, she and her husband were living in Australia and Fran with them. They lived in Perth and I saw them once every two or three years.
Fran is married now and has quite a brood, five at the latest count - three girls and two boys. I still communicate regularly with my mother, and with Fran, but after my father left her, she and Fran appeared to grow closer and closer together creating a sort of anti-male bond. I wasn’t excluded, far from it, but there was a definite distancing. When my mother realised that not all men were fornicating bastards – a description I heard regularly coming from the bathroom when she was in there crying her eyes out – and remarried, I was coming to the end of my first year at university.
By this time I had already met Belinda and, although we were still discovering each other, we were secretly, but not always knowingly, planning our future together. We both had designs on the other but didn’t speak about our feelings too loudly in case it scared the other one off. When I decided after finishing my degree not to join my mother and Fran in Australia, they took it badly and I never really regained the closeness we once had.
Belinda’s family, small though it was, therefore became my family. Maybe because deep down I wanted Elizabeth to be a surrogate mother, I had become overly sensitive towards her. I knew I shouldn’t take what she said quite so literally, but we never got close enough to break down all the barriers between us, perceived or not.
“Shall we go back to Elizabeth?” I asked Charles, taking his cup and saucer from him.
Nothing previously said or alluded to, none of the looks, the misinterpretations and the rancour were worth thinking about or worth remembering. Conscience can be a devil when we think we are about to lose someone close.
That evenin
g, and after plying Charles with a couple of whiskies, I explained that I would probably have to go abroad for a week but that I was more than willing to postpone my trip if he thought I could help. My words were underhand. I was putting the responsibility on his shoulders to say whether I should go or not.
He looked at me over his whisky glass, his eyes strained from tiredness, worry and probably the alcohol. “Course you must go, old boy,” he chirruped, his voice appearing enthusiastic but very much in contrast to how he must have really felt. “Needs must.”
“What about you, though. You’ve never had to look after yourself before?”
“And you’re going to do that are you? You’re going to come and cook for me, do my washing and ironing, are you?” His tone was still jovial but I detected an underlying sarcasm that was unusual for him.
“That’s not what I meant. It’s that at times like this you need faces you know about you, not strangers.” I reached for the whisky bottle and added a finger to my glass.
When Belinda was ill I had the twins and they were both marvellous, especially Isabelle. I also had Charles, Elizabeth and a few close friends.
Charles was a member of the local golf club and, like me, he’d made some good friends among fellow members. However, Charles was a private person. He didn’t believe in communicating personal grief too widely. When Belinda died, he became even quieter than normal. I had managed to play a few rounds of golf – I suddenly had the time and my playing partners were sympathetic towards my loss but equally enthusiastic that I should look for pastures new because it was what Belinda would have wanted.
How they knew that I don’t know because most of them had never met her.
I wasn’t sure that Charles was capable of looking after Elizabeth at home if she were to be confined to a wheelchair; and if, at the other extreme, she were to go into a nursing home, I doubted if he would last five minutes on his own.
He could learn to care for himself but nobody could replace the companionship Elizabeth provided. Belinda used to watch them together and smile knowingly. Afterwards she would say, as though reminding herself, “They are absolutely devoted to each other. They might not say a lot but each knows where the other is and what they are doing. When I’m in the garden with mother, she’s constantly looking over her shoulder and checking where he is. When he goes off to the golf club she worries; when he goes to the local shops she worries, and he’s exactly the same with her. God knows what will happen to the other when it’s time for one of them to go.”
Now the time had come.
“Where are you going, anyway?” Charles asked, his words sounding slurred.
“The Far East,” I replied casually, as though it was no more than round the corner.
“Like saying Africa,” he said. “Where in the Far East?”
“Brunei.”
“Brunei? Used to have an arrangement with the Sultan there, still do as far as I know. Had a couple of hundred British servicemen on loan. Damn good posting. Never got it myself. Almost went out for the Borneo Confrontation in the early 60s, but never made it. Can’t remember why not. Didn’t you go there a few years back?”
“Yes, Charles, I did.”
“So why are you going? Thought you’d resigned from Aspect?”
“Astek, Charles,” I pointed out, smiling. “I have, but an old chum has asked me to pop over to see him.”
“Pop over? One doesn’t pop over to the Far East. When are you going?”
“Probably Friday or Saturday, but I’ll be back by the end of next week. There are school commitments and now, of course, Elizabeth.”
Charles began to get up from his chair. “Don’t you worry about me. Didn’t spend all those years in the army without learning to look after myself. Can boil an egg and switch the vacuum on, you know. Slept in some most peculiar places in my time.”
“Of course, Charles, but –”
“No buts, old boy. You bugger off to Brunei and hopefully when you get back there’ll be some improvement.”
Chapter Thirteen
The aircraft banked and I could see the Borneo coastline under the wisps of cloud. In most places a thin strip of white and yellow sand separated the grey-blue sea from the jungle’s green canopy, in others the jungle seemed to be growing directly out of the water. There were no obvious hills or cliffs.
During our descent from over thirty thousand feet, the aircraft pitched and yawed and mine wasn’t the only anxious face. The Captain informed us the aftermath of a tropical storm named Cimaron, was the cause of our discomfort.
We were flying in a Royal Brunei Airlines Boeing 757. Although I knew quite a lot about structural stress factors, and had flown all over the world, I had never experienced anything quite like the last twenty minutes.
Taking off from Changi Airport, Singapore, into a clear blue sky, the clouds built up quickly, obliterating the sparkling South China Sea. Fortunately, for most of the flight, the aircraft was above the storm but the strange swirling cloud eruptions below didn’t auger well unless conditions improved dramatically and quickly. Once we started to descend and entered the cauldron, I have no idea how the aircraft stayed in one piece. At one point, we must have hit an air pocket of two or three hundred feet because the aircraft seemed to plummet and the passengers were too scared to scream. I was sitting in business class surrounded by mostly local Bruneian business executives who were openly praying to Allah. They believed that whatever happened was God’s will, but their expressions suggested that His will on this occasion should be that they would see another day. I rather hoped that God would grant their prayers, and my silent ones.
There were three other European passengers in business class – two men and a woman – all sitting individually. One of the men had thick grey hair, the other, on the opposite side of the cabin, was thin on top and his liver-spotted bald patch was glistening with perspiration in spite of the air-conditioning.
The female, who was also on the other side of the cabin but level with me, was probably in her early to mid-thirties, with shoulder-length auburn hair. She had a pretty face that was now set in deep concentration as she tried to read a book, attempting to ignore the sudden jolts and descents. We had exchanged pleasantries when she boarded the aircraft in Singapore. The flight attendants, dressed in their attractive light blue and gold uniforms, were firmly strapped into their seats in front of us and the reassuring smile given to me by Wendy when I had flown into Düsseldorf prior to my fateful trip to Germany wasn’t replicated. The Bruneian flight attendants were as terrified as the rest of us.
The last time I had been in Negara Brunei Darussalam in the mid-1990s, Europeans undertook the maintenance of the Sultan’s National Airline on contract, and many of the pilots and co-pilots were European also. However, and as part of the Bruneianisation programme, Bruneian citizens were now trained in the maintenance of the aircraft and some of the Bruneian co-pilots were captains.
Whoever was at the controls of this particular aircraft was experienced, he had to be. The captain’s voice had sounded European but that meant nothing if the plane hadn’t been checked recently or properly, for airworthiness. In this instance, I hoped the captain was Bruneian, because it would be emblematic for the future of the country. I believed that The Royal Brunei Airlines did have an excellent safety record, unlike some of its South East Asian competitors.
“Cabin crew prepare for landing,” the captain announced. The flight attendants looked at each other as much as to say: “We are prepared for landing. Any fool who’s not strapped in deserves all they get.”
Reluctantly, one member of the cabin crew did undo her seatbelt. She stood up and then carefully, clutching onto the sides of the seats as she moved down the aisle, checked that we were as we should be. I assumed other brave souls were doing the same elsewhere in the aircraft.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain. Sorry about the bumpy ride but we’ll be on the ground soon. The tail end of the tropical storm we have just flown
over and through, dictates the current weather in Bandar Seri Begawan, and it’s awful. It was touch and go whether we landed at Bandar or elsewhere, but fortunately, the wind has dropped sufficiently for us to have a go. Kota Kinabalu is the nearest alternative, however I doubt if conditions are any better there. The temperature on the ground is 32°C and the humidity is at about 90%, the winds are strong and variable, and it’s raining, pouring in fact. Welcome to Negara Brunei Darussalam!”
I looked at the woman sitting across the aisle and she turned her head towards me. She smiled and said over the roar of the aircraft’s engines, “I have every faith in the fact that by ‘have a go’ he meant he had every intention of being successful.”
“I hope so too.” I said, smiling.
The aircraft suddenly lurched heavily to the right and there was a surge of power from the engines drowning any further chance of conversation. The flight attendant had fortunately already returned to her seat.
I looked out of the window and guessed we were about four hundred feet above the ground. We were flying over the coast and I could see heavy breakers doing their damndest to reach the jungle only a few yards from the shoreline. The aircraft lurched again and I stole another look at the woman. She looked terrified and I hoped another smile gave her some reassurance.
There was a sudden thump. Looking out of the window and to my surprise, we were on the ground. The engines went into reverse, and the surge of power was comforting. From the rear of the aircraft there was loud applause and cheering. Those of us in business class joined in a split second later, delighted to be on terra firma.
“Ladies and Gentlemen …” It was the Captain again “… that, to say the least, was interesting but now we are down safely. Welcome again to Negara Brunei Darrusalam, where the local time is fourteen-fifty hours. Please keep your seatbelts fastened until we have docked and the cabin crew have opened the exit door. May I remind you that there is no smoking permitted until you are inside the terminal, although after our recent experiences you might feel like one now. I certainly do, but I must also refrain. Thank you for flying Royal Brunei Airlines and we look forward to you flying with us again.”
Pooh Bridge: conscience stricken Page 14
