Arrivals & Departures

by Leslie Thomas

  ‘What a job,’ sighed Mrs Durie as she sank into the cushioned chair at the Castle Hotel. It had been a warm afternoon. ‘No wonder the Queen looks weary sometimes.’

  Professionally she scanned the lounge and people sitting at tea. ‘This place could do with a dust,’ she confided. Before them the low table was already set out and she picked up the cups and examined each one minutely at both the rim and the base. Then, like a ceramics expert, she subjected the plates to a similar scrutiny and finally turned her squeezed eyes on the bowls of the teaspoons and the prongs of the forks. ‘Seems to be all right,’ she announced grudgingly. ‘But you can never tell. They don’t wash up like they used to.’

  The waitress came and, after diplomatically consulting with Mrs Durie, Pearl Collingwood ordered tea, sandwiches and cakes.

  ‘It was nice,’ said the Englishwoman genuinely. ‘Thank you ever so much. I’d probably never have gone in the Castle if it wasn’t for you.’ She prepared to whisper as though worried about the consequences of what she was about to say. ‘It was a bit dusty in there too, didn’t you think, Mrs Collingwood? And draughty. I couldn’t feel at home with all those windy corridors.’

  ‘There’s Buckingham Palace as well,’ pointed out the American woman. ‘And that looked quite solid, quite draught proof, Mrs Durie.’

  They had staked out their relationship well, each knowing where she stood and was comfortable. The waitress brought the tea. ‘Do you really like it here?’ Mrs Durie asked seriously. ‘Not in this hotel, I mean, in England?’

  Pearl Collingwood appeared astonished. ‘But of course I do,’ she enthused. The other woman had taken charge of the teapot as if her companion could not be expected to know how to deal with it, and was now busy with the strainer, which, for a moment, she briefly peered through like a magnifying glass. The American went on: ‘I just love it here. It is everything I would have imagined.’ She accepted the cup of tea and placed it carefully in front of her. ‘Otherwise,’ she added firmly, ‘I would never have stayed.’

  Mrs Durie was eyeing the sandwiches. Stealthily she opened one, as though raising a lid. She squinted at the salad contents. ‘Quite well filled,’ she murmured grudgingly, ‘in the circumstances.’

  She returned her attention to Mrs Collingwood, handing the sandwich plate across and saying: ‘There’s ham as well.’ With her free hand she made another snap check of the ham contents. Her head bent forward and her nose twitched. ‘Quite fresh,’ she decided. She looked about her with less suspicion. ‘Quite a good hotel.’

  They went through the commonplace ritual of sugar and milk. ‘Bedmansworth, I mean, not just England,’ pursued Mrs Durie. ‘Staying.’

  ‘I just love it,’ Mrs Collingwood assured her. ‘And so does Rona. If we’d checked in to some London hotel we would have just gone along with the usual treadmill of sightseeing and returning home, not too much the wiser. But now we feel we know so much more.’

  ‘People thought it was very odd,’ divulged Mrs Durie. ‘There was some that reckoned you might be spies.’ She giggled, holding her hand over her sandwich-filled mouth. ‘Spying on the airport.’

  ‘And who might we be spying for?’ Mrs Collingwood inquired, amused. Mrs Durie smirked: ‘It was only silly old Bernard Threadle, him with the motor bike. Spies. He looks under his bed at night.’ She pressed forward as if to get something off her chest. ‘But nobody could understand why Bedmansworth. I mean, it’s not pretty. And it’s not near anything much, except Heathrow, all those noisy old planes and the smell of them, the fumes.’

  ‘We were pleased we came,’ reiterated the American as though to close the subject. She patted the other woman’s hand. ‘And we feel we’ve made a whole lot of friends.’

  ‘Oh, you’re very popular, both of you,’ said Mrs Durie hurriedly. ‘Everybody likes you. You’re novelties. We’re all quite proud of you.’

  They ate another small sandwich each. Mrs Durie had poured hot water into the teapot and now she lifted the lid tentatively like someone monitoring an experiment. ‘Which cakes would you like?’ she inquired. ‘You choose. I’ve got a weakness for cakes.’

  Mrs Collingwood selected one. ‘There are two of these,’ she said. ‘We can have one each.’

  ‘Maids of Honour, they’re called,’ said the Englishwoman. ‘Historical. I think it’s something to do with Henry the Eighth.’ She looked at the pastry closely and flicked away a non-existent speck of dust. ‘My information on royalty doesn’t go back that far,’ she said. ‘Queen Victoria and onwards, that’s my field. I like the name Victoria. I wish they’d have another one.’

  ‘You seem to know so much,’ said Mrs Collingwood admiringly.

  ‘I read it up,’ said Mrs Durie stoutly. ‘My daughter and Jim, they have a laugh at me, but I like it. That Randy, with his pigtail, he’s so ignorant. He thinks I’m mad. One day he’ll grow up.’

  ‘What’s his real name?’ asked the American.

  ‘Randolph. I said to them if they’d given him a proper name, even Jim like his father, he wouldn’t still be trying to be something he’s not. He’s feckless. Not an ounce of feck.’ She drank her tea fiercely.

  ‘Does he work or is he still at college? I’ve never worked it out.’

  ‘College? He couldn’t go to college, not as brainless as he is. And he works when he feels like it, which is not often. On the dole otherwise. I’d make sure he worked or I’d show him the door.’

  They continued their tea in silence, Mrs Durie merely re-muttering ‘feckless’. Eventually Mrs Collingwood said: ‘Every small place in England has a remnant of history. Not just Windsor with a big castle.’ She glanced momentarily at the guide book she had brought. ‘But villages like Bedmansworth. That was on the map more than three centuries ago.’

  Mrs Durie garnered the crumbs on her plate into a tiny pile and then genteelly pushed them to the rim. ‘You don’t have many old things in America, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘A few. But in this country you have so many, a cottage, and people still living there, and it goes back into the mists.’ She finished her tea and waited until Mrs Durie had poured them both a second cup. ‘Tell me about the War,’ she suggested. ‘When the Americans came.’

  A modest flush seemed to come to the other woman’s face. Mrs Durie looked up and said: ‘Oh yes, you said you had an interest in that. Well, let me see.

  ‘It was quite a time for us, of course, just growing up, girls never been anywhere. We’d only seen Americans on the pictures. We never even knew they called them Yanks until they came over here.’ She became suddenly sad as if recalling the best time of her life. ‘They just swept us off our feet, like they used to say. Their voices like cowboys and laughing like they used to and those lovely smooth greeny uniforms. And it wasn’t just us young girls. The local blokes didn’t like them much naturally, but most of that lot was away in the forces anyway, but the older people, especially our mums, thought they was marvellous. I told you they used to bring us that jam and luncheon meat. Stuff you couldn’t get.’

  ‘You had a special … Yank?’

  ‘All us girls did.’ She paused as though trying to picture him. ‘We was all engaged. At seventeen and eighteen! Funny to think of it now. Mine was called Zachary, Zac. He wanted to take me home with him to America. I could have been over there living next door to you. And then, one day, overnight, they was all gone … vanished. Everywhere seemed empty. Up at the camp gate there was just a couple of military police, snowdrops they were called, chaps with white helmets on. We all went up there to find out. In a bunch standing outside. But they’d gone. “Gone with the wind,” I remember one of the girls, Gracie Dorkings, saying. She went to see that film eighteen times. She’s dead now.’

  Mrs Collingwood said: ‘So the camp was nearby?’

  ‘It was a bit of a distance. Over towards Slough. It’s part of the airport now, where they repair them. We had to get on the bus and sometimes, being wartime, the bus didn’t turn up and we’d walk or get a lift
with some other Yanks.’

  ‘They helped to rebuild the wall of the churchyard after it was bombed,’ said Pearl. ‘The vicar told me about that.’

  Mrs Durie looked surprised. ‘You’re right,’ she affirmed. ‘Absolutely right, Mrs Collingwood. I’d forgotten all about that. I think some of those Poles helped too, but they were devils, the Poles. And some of the Yanks from what’s now St Sepulchre’s helped.’

  ‘The old folks’ residence.’

  ‘That’s it. As it is now. Then it was some sort of office they had, or an officers’ mess or whatever. We never went there because they were officers.’ She smiled a little coyly. ‘Being young we just went after the soldiers.’

  A clock chimed deeply in the hall of the hotel. ‘If we want to catch the bus we must be off,’ advised Mrs Durie. ‘It goes at twenty past.’ She pinched up the tiny pile of crumbs and with an absent-minded gesture put them into her mouth. She asked if she could go half with the bill but the American woman shook her head.

  ‘I’ve had a lovely time,’ said Mrs Durie. ‘I’ve really enjoyed myself.’

  ‘It has been nice,’ agreed the American lady. ‘And so enlightening.’

  Richardson heard Adele come home at five o’clock in the afternoon, her arrival lifting him from a day’s sleep loaded with dreams of guilt and unhappiness. She began moving about in the house; he put on his dressing-gown and went downstairs.

  She was in the kitchen making tea. He had not telephoned her from Mombasa. ‘How was it?’ she asked. They kissed incompletely as they always did now. ‘How was Bill Allsop?’ She had known Allsop from their early days.

  ‘He died,’ Richardson said hopelessly. He lightly punched the kitchen table. ‘Died on the plane coming back.’

  ‘Oh, Edward.’ Her voice dropped with a sadness that caused her to reach out to him and, though accidentally, their hands touched. ‘What was it?’

  ‘Aids,’ he said flatly. ‘He got it out there.’

  She was so shocked she had to lean against the refrigerator. ‘Aids? Bill Allsop? But that’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You can get it in a variety of ways,’ he said. ‘In Africa.’

  She sat down on a kitchen chair. ‘Poor Bill,’ she said. ‘What was his wife’s name?’ Then, all at once realising, she stared up and whispered: ‘You brought him back on the plane?’

  Richardson picked up his cup of tea and stirred it aimlessly. ‘He wanted to come home,’ he told her simply. ‘So we got him on the flight. He just didn’t make it, that’s all.’

  ‘They’ll realise of course. Grainger will.’

  ‘There’ll be a hell of a row, I expect. Snow and I, that’s the doctor who came with me, could say we didn’t know what Bill had – but it would come out anyway. Snow wouldn’t tell them he didn’t know anyway. There’s a doctor in Mombasa who had already given Bill a test. He was HIV positive and then he got this local illness that they all contracted out there and when we arrived we found him alone in his bungalow and dying. So we brought him back.’ He shrugged: ‘He wanted to die in England but we were somewhere over Greece when he went.’

  ‘My God, you get yourself in some amazing situations,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t start being bitter about it, Adele.’

  She regarded him starkly. ‘One day you’ll realise that you can’t take the world’s problems on your shoulders all the time.’

  ‘It wasn’t the world, it was Bill Allsop,’ he pointed out.

  ‘For God’s sake, you know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t want a fight about it.’

  ‘Neither do I. I’m amazed you told me. You don’t confide in me often.’

  ‘I have just confided in you and you still don’t like it. I have to go back to Heathrow this evening. Grainger has called me in. Snow as well. Grainger’s upset.’

  Adele grimaced. ‘That unpleasant man frequently is. He’s in the job you should have had – and he knows it. Perhaps he’ll fire you.’ She said it with a touch of hope.

  He put his cup down and walked to the window. ‘I’ve told you I don’t want to go to Gohm, Brent and Byas. I don’t want to go there so much I wrote to them and told them to forget it. Forever. I instructed them to stop bothering me.’

  The telephone rang. Richardson went to answer it. ‘Grainger’s brought forward the meeting,’ he said when he returned. ‘He’s got another appointment.’

  ‘Rush, rush, rush for Mr Grainger,’ recited Adele.

  ‘He’s the boss,’ he said quietly. They both realised that Toby was standing in the hall listening to them. ‘I’d better get a move on.’

  He went upstairs towards the bathroom and, glancing from habit through the half-open door of his study, he saw a single letter on his desk. He had opened his mail as soon as he had returned that morning but he saw this had the large inscription ‘By Hand’. He opened and read it with receding patience and walked back into the kitchen. ‘That damned woman,’ he said to Adele. Toby had gone out into the garden again and was walking, hands in pockets, towards the bottom fence. He saw him kick one of the golf balls. ‘That Mrs Kitchen.’

  Adele was putting the cups in the dishwasher. She looked up sharply. ‘What now?’

  ‘She wants me to go and meet her committee. What she describes as a “last opportunity to discuss the problem of your observatory”.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked in a dull voice.

  ‘Go,’ he told her. ‘If this Mrs Kitchen and her bloody committee want a fight, they can have it.’

  She was not very interested. She went out of the room saying: ‘Mind you don’t take it out on poor Mr Grainger.’

  Heathrow, at night, shone like a circus; floodlights, coloured lights, moving, flashing, blinking and rotating lights; the beams of aircraft in the dark sky like the trapeze performers, the luminescent elephant shapes of the planes on the ground.

  Richardson drove below the tunnel and parked in the reserved area outside Snow’s office and surgery. Snow was inside. He could see him through the window conducting an imaginary orchestra. ‘Ah, Barbirolli did have one big advantage over me,’ the doctor smiled quietly when Richardson interrupted him. ‘He had the Halle.’

  They walked through the traffic to Hardy Grainger’s office. ‘He’s a pedantic little dictator,’ said Snow genially. ‘He reminds me of a doctor I once knew who corrected the grammar of patients on the point of death. He’d put them right on their last words.’

  Grainger’s secretary Moira, with her perpetual expression of someone expecting the worst, and still worse to follow, asked them to wait. ‘He should not keep you too long,’ she said as though that might be the best they could hope for. ‘He has a dinner appointment.’ Grainger was suspected of keeping people waiting for the sake of keeping them waiting.

  ‘He’s had a day,’ Moira said. ‘And he didn’t want to stay this evening.’

  They sat in silence. ‘Tchaikovsky,’ said Snow quietly after a few minutes, ‘had a terrible time coming to terms with his homosexuality.’

  Moira glanced up in a sort of maiden fear. Everyone knew she had not married because she was afraid of leaving Grainger. ‘Did he?’ Richardson said glancing at the secretary at her desk. She lowered her face to her work.

  ‘It’s said that he committed suicide because he had made advances to a young man whose father found out. There is certainly serious doubt on the theory that he died of cholera after drinking iffy water.’

  The telephone rang on Moira’s desk. She did not pick it up but smoothing her skirt down she went smartly, head down, through to the inner office. She returned, like someone perpetually grateful to survive.

  ‘Mr Grainger will see you now,’ she half whispered. Pulling the door completely behind her but softly, she said, like a warning: ‘He’s gone very quiet.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s merely calm,’ Snow pointed out pleasantly.

  They went in, Snow first. The room was panelled with photographs of ceremonies, many involving Grainger, which mark
ed milestones in the company’s history. Sitting on a couch against the wall was a fattish man with splayed feet whom Richardson recognised as one of the company’s lawyers. Grainger was at the desk making a performance of signing documents. He waited until he had finished and went over the papers again before looking up. ‘Oh,’ he said as if he were surprised they had mustered their courage.

  He invited both to sit down on two chairs already arranged. ‘You may not know Mr Chandler,’ he said waving towards the other man. They exchanged nods, Chandler’s scarcely a nod at all. He widened the angle between his shoes. It was not a time for handshakes.

  Grainger pretended he did not know how to start, opening and shutting his limp mouth, staring at and fidgeting with his pen. ‘I’ve asked Henry Phillipson from the press office to come in,’ he said eventually. ‘He ought to be in on this. He’s gone home but he’s coming back. I’d prefer him to be here at the outset.’

  He surveyed each of them. ‘If there’s anything else you would like to discuss while we’re waiting, then perhaps we could do so. First, I have to make a phone call.’ He rose from his desk and went to the third room in the suite.

  ‘No, you’d never think he was a homosexual,’ said Snow conversationally to Richardson. Chandler sat abruptly upright on the couch.

  ‘Who? Who is that?’ whispered Chandler urgently. He glanced at the door through which Grainger had gone to make his call. Snow turned carefully towards the couch as though he had forgotten Chandler was there. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said. ‘Who was what?’

  ‘A homosexual,’ hissed Chandler his heavy middle rolling forward. His feet had moved to a quarter past nine. ‘Who … you were just saying.’

  ‘Ah, Tchaikovsky,’ replied Snow sweetly. ‘You’re interested in Tchaikovsky?’

  Chandler coloured and sat back with a grunt. There was a knock and Moira entered with Henry Phillipson wearing a Scout-master’s uniform. ‘Where’s he gone?’ he demanded, striding in. ‘I was just on my way to the lads.’ He had a broken tooth at the front.