Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Leslie Thomas
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Copyright
About the Book
Fresh from Los Angeles, Mrs Pearl Collingwood and her daughter Rona arrive in the frenzied no-man’s-land of Heathrow airport: from the nearby village of Bedmansworth, Edward Richardson jets in and out of it faster than his marriage can tolerate. Yet precisely where village and airport overlap, there exists a world bubbling with intrigues and assignations, with wit, pathos and excitement, that all readers of Leslie Thomas will recognise as his alone/
About the Author
Leslie Thomas was born in Newport, Monmouthshire in 1931, the son of a sailor who was lost at sea. His boyhood in a Barnado’s orphanage is described in his hugely successful autobiography This Time Next Week, and he is the author of numerous other bestsellers including The Virgin Soldiers, Tropic of Ruislip, and Revolving Jones. He lives in Salisbury with his wife Diana.
Also by Leslie Thomas
Fiction
The Virgin Soldiers
Orange Wednesday
The Love Beach
Come to the War
His Lordship
Onward Virgin Soldiers
Arthur McCann and All His Women
The Man with the Power
Tropic of Ruislip
Stand Up Virgin Soldiers
Dangerous Davies
Bare Nell
Ormerod’s Landing
That Old Gang of Mine
The Magic Army
The Dearest and the Best
The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving
Dangerous in Love
Orders for New York
The Loves and Journeys of Revolving Jones
Non-fiction
This Time Next Week
Some Lovely Islands
The Hidden Places in Britain
A World of Islands
In My Wildest Dreams
LESLIE THOMAS
Arrivals & Departures
For my friends Denis and Liz Riley, with thanks
… the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT
One
On that June evening, at ten o’clock, the airport appeared from the incoming plane curiously like the eastern city it had left not many hours before; low buildings, flat roofs, white walls, light languid in the late day. The London sun had gone down ahead of the aircraft in a dusty orange cloud, the level land below was darkening and the vast reservoirs on the western side of the runways dimly reflected the sky.
Edward Richardson was going home again. Every week, sometimes more often, he flew home from some far place, the change in times and climates, lands and people, all part of his life. He was a tall but solid man with a tired face. At forty-three he had done so much travelling, so much flying. He was becoming unclear where he was going.
As commercial manager of the airline he was well known on the plane and at Heathrow. Landing formalities were quick and the terminal was quiet, almost idle. He went briefly into his office, two hundred yards distant, then boarded the bus for the staff car park, collected his car and with the window down drove towards home. There was a touch of pungency from the airport sludge farm.
Adele was already in bed. She often had early-morning meetings. She stirred sleepily. ‘How was it?’
‘Bahrain? Oh, it was all right – in the end. The usual insurmountable problems. But we shuffled them around until they didn’t look so bad.’
‘There was a call from Gohm, Brent and Byas Travel Management. They really want you, Edward. They’re very keen. They’re ringing back tomorrow.’
Richardson sighed. ‘I don’t want Gohm, Brent and Byas. In any case I have to go to Istanbul tomorrow. There was a message when I arrived at Heathrow.’
She half sat up in her bed. She had left the side light burning and it shone on the curve of her cheek. Adele had always had a strong face and the illumination was unflattering. ‘Istanbul?’ she said frowning. ‘But surely that’s on the way back from Bahrain.’
‘It is, more or less.’ He sat on the end of his bed and took off his jacket. They had not kissed. ‘But for a start the flight didn’t call there and even for me they won’t divert. You should know that. And additionally, I didn’t get the Istanbul message until I was back at Heathrow.’
‘Jesus, that’s typical. So you have to go most of the way back again.’
‘It’s the job.’
‘I don’t know how you stand it. Or me.’ She corrected the double meaning. ‘How I stand it.’
He took off his shoes and put on a pair of light suede slippers. ‘Nor do I,’ he confessed. ‘I’m going up to take a look at the stars.’
‘I thought you might.’
‘The night’s clear. I know, I’ve just been up there.’ He pulled on a sweater. ‘Ray Francis, the manager in Istanbul, has gone off with a local woman.’
‘Some bimbo? I suppose they have bimbos in Turkey like everywhere else.’
‘This bimbo is a university professor. Francis was always original. I’ve got to find him or sort it out somehow. I may be back in the evening.’
‘Oh good,’ she said flatly.
She extinguished the bed light as he was going out of the door. He thought how poor their marriage had become. It was strangely as though it were someone else’s marriage, viewed from a safe distance. Each of them watched its disintegration as if fascinated, the slight crumbling here, the insidious rot and the powdering there, but with neither making any move to stop or save themselves. Sometimes he felt that if she would only hold out her hands to prevent another piece falling away, then he would help her. Between them they might save it. But then they might regret the attempt; they might be left standing, holding up only a ruin.
Softly he walked along the corridor. The house was old and close. It held the warmth of the summer night. One of the lattice windows had been left open at the end and a climbing rose tapped like a reminder against the frame. He passed his son Toby’s room and heard him mildly snoring.
There was a brief flight of stairs up to another room, once a half-landing, which he used as a study. He switched on the lamp at the desk and its glow circled the walls. There were two cases of books, the titles gleaming from their spines and a series of prints of celestial charts, copies of the ancient maps of the universe, and a burnished astrolabe. Even now, in the low luminescence, the colours glowed finely, and his hand went out and touched one of the frames. He began to smile. He mounted a second short flight of oak steps and opened a silent door. It swung to reveal a telescope on its mounting, a tipped chair beneath it, and a glass dome eighteen feet wide, above, ribbed into sections but displaying the sky, the stars and the beginnings of a moon.
He settled into the tubular steel chair and, with a touch of the controls, swung the telescope towards the southern sky. As he did so he activated another switch and music, eerie, spacious music, filled the dome. He turned the volume down so that it seeped gently and mysteriously into the room; Vaughan Williams’ theme from the Antarctic of chill and winds and lonely emptiness.
Now he t
raversed the telescope across the deepness of the southern sky. There was the summer triangle, Vega in Lyra the Harp, Deneb in Cygnus the Swan, Altair at the centre of Aquila with the Wild Duck far out on the fringe and Arcturus, the brightest star in the Northern hemisphere. He watched them playing tag across infinity. The music surrounded him, the stars held his gaze. He felt himself relax into happiness.
A burned-out earth satellite swooped across his view. Richardson let it go past with a sniff of annoyance. He concentrated on the southern firmament, as he always did, for to the north the lights of Heathrow glowed, itself like some planet landed upon the world.
He was there for more than an hour. His eyes became tired. The music had changed several times. He turned the switch off and rubbed his eyes. Just below him the village of Bedmansworth was silent as the stars. There was one light in the short street and another in the church (a precaution since a burglary during which the money from the Footballs for Africa Fund had been stolen) but the night itself was fine enough for him to distinguish the shapes of the houses, the two inns, the tower and arrow of the church and the end of the row of shops.
Bedmansworth had been a village for centuries and was noted on the ‘Actual Survey of the County of Midlesex’, a copy of which hung in the drawing-room downstairs, drawn by John Ogilby, cartographer to Charles the Second, in 1675, who noted also with a single thatched cottage, the hamlet of Hetherow in the Hundred of Elthorne.
In the pale night he could see, beyond the roofs, fields, indistinct as cobwebs, real meadows once, that had stretched from the fringes of London to Uxbridge, to Windsor, to Hounslow Heath, then the territory of the highwayman but now covered by the tarmac flat-tops of the Heathrow runways and the metropolis of its buildings.
The road through the village was as dim as a secret passage. He picked out the sleeping outlines of the houses, knowing each family who lived there: the Swan Inn, where Jim Turner held the licence, and the other smaller pub, the Straw Man, once a drovers’ inn on the sheep and cattle trails from Wales to the markets of London. There was a squat row of roadside cottages, their backs to him, that had been there since farm labourers were paid threepence a day. Old village families still lived in them, most of the men employed at the airport.
Richardson was about to lower the chair again when he detected a small movement below, then heard the yawning call of a cat and saw it strolling along the middle of the road, deliberate as a drunk, keeping to the white lines. The cat knew it was safe because there would be no traffic at that time; the highway, which a hundred years before had been a cart track to the villages of Sheepcoat and Powdermill and thence to the Bath Road and London, now went nowhere. It looped around a small green with the Straw Man at its head. There was a patch of grass, a public seat and a stump which was said to be all that remained of a gibbet where they hanged highwaymen, three of whom had been called Tom, Dick and Harry, thus giving a phrase to the English language.
The cat had trundled from his view when he caught a remote whine, like that of an insect in the night. A light, isolated and small, was jolting in the dark distance. He knew what it was even as it approached. One vehicle only was likely to come on that route to nowhere at that hour. It spluttered on the corner and then bobbed into his vision, a thin motor cycle with a heavy figure astride it; Bernard Threadle, the self-appointed guardian of the village, the vigilante. Richardson pictured the round, set and devoted face under a heavy helmet on each side of which was emblazoned a winged letter ‘B’. Bernard wore a heavy protective coat and leggings and carried a torch which he hinted could double as a truncheon. His goggles fitted over rimless glasses that were familiar by day as he served behind the counter of Weaver’s, the Bedmansworth chemist’s shop. His earnestness in applying the scarlet flying-B transfers to the sides of his helmet had not prevented him applying one upside down and back to front, one winging forward, the other winging away.
He covered the countryside in the dark hours; once before midnight, once at two o’clock and then the dawn patrol, rising from his bed for each mission. His soft face hardened into an expression of assurance and his eyes shone surely behind his spectacles as he boasted: ‘I never sleep.’ Bernard had never as yet apprehended any nocturnal felons although he himself had twice been stopped and questioned by the police.
It was two fifteen. Richardson nodded at the stars, extricated himself from the tight tubular chair, and crouched his way to the door. There were duplicate controls on the wall. He touched the switch lightly, as if that would ensure that the instrument itself would slide back smoothly. With another switch he closed the aperture of the covering dome. Then he extinguished the light and clambered back down the steps into the house, into reality.
In those early hours the airport was wet and empty, the planes lying against the buildings like sleeping animals in stalls. Lights shone whitely within the terminals. An Indian youth began his day’s labour as a cleaner, checking toilet rolls and walking into lavatory cubicles to lift the seats from the pans. As he did so he repeated ‘Smile please,’ a joke he had learned from his Irish predecessor.
Music floated in the long void but the woman behind the refreshment counter had heard it many times before, a never-ending melody. It was interrupted by a warning: ‘This is a security announcement. Do not leave baggage unattended. It may be removed and destroyed.’
At that hour there were few travellers: a knot of young people hunched tiredly in one corner, a man asleep, his arms across one of the refreshment-area tables, his snores enough to rustle a paper napkin close to his nose. A wandering security man surveyed him for a moment but moved on. ‘Why don’t you stop him snoring?’ the tea-counter woman called. ‘Ruddy row.’ The paper napkin flew off the table. ‘Look at that,’ she said.
The first of the morning’s incoming flights rumbled across the roof. ‘Ruddy row,’ she repeated.
The security man slouched towards her and, without being asked, she poured him a cup of tea. His eyelids drooped. He had another job in the day. Outside a taxi pulled up. A traffic warden watched it as if it might possibly commit an offence.
‘Here they come,’ grumbled the security man. ‘Now they’ll all start coming.’
‘Yes, they’ll all start now,’ said the woman pointlessly.
‘They’ll all be coming.’
A uniformed woman customs officer came smartly through the sliding doors.
‘She’s early,’ she added with a touch of interest.
‘Keen,’ nodded the security man over his weary teacup. His eyelids dropped further. ‘Wish I was.’
‘I don’t,’ responded the woman. ‘Where does it get you?’
The customs officer went briskly through the inner doors and began to set out her desk. Her glance went to the glass corridor along which processions of fatigued, hapless and herded passengers, worried and relieved at the same time, would soon be shuffling.
The first dayshift of immigration officials arrived and the woman in the flower shop rolled up the blind. The stock had been replenished overnight and a scent as strong as a garden or a funeral greeted her as she eased open the glass door. The shop was strategically placed opposite the Arrivals doors. Men, stirred by kindness, love, or conscience, were the best customers.
Pallid porters in beige uniforms stood leaning unexpectantly on barrows:
‘How’s your missus?’ called one.
‘Still there,’ answered another.
‘Wish mine was,’ said a third.
Thick wedges of newspapers were taken into the bookshop, the half-asleep assistant knocking over the best-selling-paperback stand as she did so. She quickly righted the frame, putting back the titles haphazardly.
It was full daylight outside now. Passengers were beginning to flow into the Departures hall and out of the Arrivals doors. Planes appeared in the sky, their incandescent landing lights blazing even against the early sun, one, two, three, stretched far out, a fourth flickering into view, nearing journey’s end, at the start of another ordina
ry airport day.
On the flight from Los Angeles, travelling Club Class, Mrs Pearl Collingwood squeezed her eyes to focus on the English fields below. ‘Pretty small,’ she muttered. ‘Not much of it at all.’
‘It’s a small country,’ pointed out her daughter. She was a soft-faced woman with dark hair and strong brown eyes. She leaned to look over the older woman’s shoulder. ‘I’ve always wondered why you never came before.’
‘Never any time,’ answered the old lady. Her face was patterned with lace wrinkles, her eyes deep, dark and lively and there was an uplift at the corners of her mouth.
The Boeing 747 tagged onto the course of the Thames, flying straight along the river’s bends on an easterly approach, having made a wide, elliptical, stacking circuit over Sussex and Kent. ‘Small houses,’ sniffed Pearl Collingwood.
‘Mother,’ said Rona reprovingly. ‘We’re still a long way up. At least there’s no fog. You always thought there would be fog.’
‘Now, that I was looking forward to, fog,’ grunted the old lady. ‘It just don’t seem right without the fog.’
‘We’ll have them fix some,’ promised her daughter. ‘Anyway, you’ve seen fog. There’s plenty in San Francisco.’
‘London fog,’ insisted her mother.
‘Why don’t you put your glasses on?’ suggested the younger woman, as if they might make fog appear.
The old lady sniffed. ‘They’re for long distance,’ she observed without turning from the window. ‘But not this long.’
She fumbled ineffectually with her handbag. Rona found the spectacles and, taking them from their tortoiseshell case, handed them to her. Her mother nodded her thanks. ‘You’re a good girl, Rona,’ she said adding, almost to herself: ‘I’m glad you’re around.’
The captain of the aircraft conversationally informed them that they were on their final approach and would be landing in six minutes. The exactness did not impress Pearl. ‘Six minutes,’ she muttered, her wrinkles moving in a pattern. ‘How can he be so sure?’
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