A Man Over Forty (4 page)

‘Not as many as that.'

‘I have a very large audience. A very large audience indeed! And when seven million people – at least seven million – heard me say I was afraid of being found out – well, what do you suppose they thought?'

‘Most of them, I imagine, were deeply sympathetic. They felt the same as you did.'

‘But I didn't! I have nothing to conceal—'

‘Oh, come!'

‘I have no fear of that kind. None at all. I haven't always lived according to the rules – you know that – but when my time comes I'll face judgement without fear. A judge who's qualified to judge all mankind won't be much perturbed by anything I've done.'

He sat upright in his bed, looking frail and fevered in yellow silk pyjamas, and his voice trembled with the intensity of his conviction.

‘Very well, then,' said Palladis. ‘What you said was only a meaningless aberration—'

‘The consequence of a slight coronary thrombosis.'

‘Which fortunately has left no ill effects – except, perhaps a false impression in the minds of a lot of people who were watching you.'

‘It has left me weak and exhausted,' said Balintore indignantly. ‘I'm a sick man, and I'll need care and attention for a considerable time to come.'

‘I've been thinking about that,' said Palladis, ‘and a long rest will do you good in more ways than one. No one has any memory nowadays, and by the time you come back—'

‘Come back from where?'

‘Have you ever been to Jamaica?'

‘No, by God, and I've no intention of going! I don't want to look at American tourists in tartan shorts, and international tax-dodgers, and twittering perverts cooing over their cocktails in Montego Bay. They're the sort of people who go to Jamaica, and they're welcome to it.'

‘You have been reading novels written by discontented
young men,' said Palladis, ‘and you ought to know enough to disbelieve them. You must get out of England – away from an English February – and Jamaica, as well as being very beautiful, has a perfect winter climate: everyone admits that. The tourists spend all their time on the beaches, and if you don't want to see them, you can stay away from the beaches.'

‘Where?'

‘I have a remote cousin who lives there, and his house is about fifteen hundred feet up in the hills. He's a very remote cousin – his great-great-very-great grandfather was a Regicide, and went to Jamaica after the Restoration of Charles II, when England wasn't healthy for him. He changed his name – my cousin's called Scroope: Weatherby Scroope – and that branch of the family has lived there ever since. But we've kept in touch, and the other day I sent him a long and expensive cable, to which he replied at once, to say we could come as soon as we liked and stay as long as we wanted. And from what I know of my cousin I'm pretty sure that he doesn't associate with tourists in tartan shorts or rich tax-dodgers, but I hope he won't exclude people with curious voices. I'm sensitive to criticism of voices, because my own is rather unusual.'

‘What does he do?'

‘His father owns a lot of land, and they make rum.'

‘How old is he?'

‘Weatherby, I think, is in his early fifties. He was the youngest of the family, so his father – well, his father's quite a lot older. I don't know his father, but Weatherby has been over here.'

For a thoughtful half-minute Balintore lay down on his pillow and looked silently at the ceiling. Then, with a profound sigh, he said, ‘It may be the sensible thing to do. The truth of the matter is that I made a bloody fool of myself the other night, and the only cure for that is to go away and forget it: to go away, and hope that other people have bad memories too. And since your cousin has been so kind as to invite us to – what's the name of the place?'

‘Fort Appin. But it's more accurate to say that I invited us, and Weatherby, who's a kindly soul, offered no objection.'

About Three weeks later Balintore stood looking through a tall glass wall at an artificial landscape of winter-bleached grass and pallid concrete. It was a Sunday morning, they had arrived too early, and London Airport had a yawning, half-awakened air. There was a distant noise of engines warming up, and a murmuration in the large and scantly tenanted hall of official voices asking small, stereotyped questions. At a long counter Palladis was paying a surcharge on their luggage.

Balintore, though now in good health – his complexion clear and rather pale after a month in a nursing home – was in a mood of nervous gloom, and in the loneliness he felt, the loneliness that seemed to enclose him, he spoke his thoughts aloud.

‘I feel a strange presentiment,' he said, and his deep voice reverberated from the transparent wall in front. ‘I have a dark foreboding!'

A small movement startled him, and turning abruptly he saw, looking at him in manifest surprise, two young Negresses in smart hats and tightly fitting skirts. They exchanged a confidential glance, and with a giggle, politely restrained, walked away from him; their thin legs in transparent stockings precariously balancing plump haunches on stiletto heels.

Fellow passengers, he thought. Immigrants two or three years ago, and England has treated them so well that they can afford to go home again. That's true hospitality!

Palladis came towards him, smiling. He wore no hat, and his smoothly brushed hair above pink cheeks – above grey eyes, straight nose, white teeth and square-cut chin – gave him a look of youthful innocence intent on holiday. He was twenty-nine, but kept without self-consciousness the taut, expectant look of a happily extroverted undergraduate.

‘That wasn't so bad,' he said. ‘They haven't charged nearly as much as I expected.'

‘We came too early,' said Balintore.

‘Just what I told you! But you were suffering from plane fever – skin hot and dry, very irritable—'

‘We've still time to cancel our tickets. I don't think I want to go. I've got a foreboding—'

‘Oh, not again! You can't change your mind now.'

‘I'm not superstitious, and in the ordinary way the thought of flying – even the Atlantic – doesn't make me nervous. But this morning I feel a strange presentiment, I feel we're running into trouble, and it may be very wrong – shallow and stupid and wrong – to ignore a warning of that sort. Look at that girl over there! You can't pretend that she's feeling happy, can you? If I know anything she's as full of foreboding, of dark foreboding, as I am.'

Not far from them stood a girl of nineteen or twenty. Obviously unused to far travelling, she was heavily encumbered by two overcoats – one of which she carried on her arm – and a large, shabby brown leather bag that ponderously depended from her other hand. She was a very pretty girl, and she looked about her, in a simple, naïve bewilderment, through eyes that were blinking to dispel unwanted tears.

‘There's nothing to show she's coming with us,' said Palladis. ‘She may be going anywhere: Amsterdam, Tokyo, Nairobi, Buenos Aires.'

‘I hope she isn't going to Buenos Aires.'

‘Now don't pretend to feel sorry for her. If she wasn't so pretty you wouldn't give her a second thought. Come and have a cup of coffee.'

An hour later Balintore seemed resigned to fate. Nursing but not reading a sheaf of Sunday papers, he sat on a leather-hided bench surrounded now by a fairly large, variously coloured, and polyglot crowd of expectant travellers who looked lethargically into vacancy from a miscellaneous accumulation of handbags, parcels, briefcases and children's toys. From the concrete wilderness beyond the glass walls there sounded occasionally the fierce, high-mounting scream of jet engines gathering strength for their leap into the bright invisibility above a sullen roof of February cloud; and presently there came a summons to travellers bound for New York, Nassau, and Jamaica. In the untidy queue ahead of them, beside two young Negresses in smart hats, Balintore and Palladis saw the pretty girl who had been crying – or trying not to cry – and
who now looked round, with a long, sad glance, to take farewell of home: of this strange forecourt to what had been her home.

‘I told you so,' said Balintore. ‘I knew she was coming with us.'

They climbed a steep ladder into the foreward part of a long aeroplane, and a well-laundered stewardess – trim and attentive, brushed and manicured – said, ‘Good morning, Mr Balintore. We're very pleased to have you with us, and I hope you'll enjoy your flight.'

‘You heard that?' said Balintore, as they settled in their seats. ‘I can't go anywhere without being recognized.'

‘You would be very disappointed if you weren't,' said Palladis.

‘What nonsense! What absolute nonsense. You promised me immunity from that sort of thing. Absolute privacy, you said.'

‘That's what you'll get in Jamaica, if you want it. But we're not there yet.'

‘Not by a long chalk,' said Balintore glumly. ‘Not by the breadth of the Atlantic.'

He shivered slightly, and looked with manifest distaste at his fellow passengers. From the length of the queue that had formed for the rear entrance, it had been evident that the tourist cabin would be well-filled, but a third of the first-class seats were empty. ‘I've often thought,' he said, ‘that if I could choose the circumstances of my death, I would ask, first of all, for good company. But there's no one here I want to die with.'

Presently he tightened his seat-belt and listened to the shrill, increasing howl of the engines. The walls of the long tunnel in which they sat trembled with impatience – or so it seemed – and then, with a swiftly gathering speed, they were leaping down the runway with a sense of ever lighter contact with the earth; till suddenly a smoothness proclaimed their freedom, the land receded, houses diminished, they were climbing fast and turning with a tilt to find, through murky cloud, their allotted lane.

A few minutes later the sun assailed their windows and
filled the cabin with a daffodil light. A stewardess, smiling, walked slowly down the aisle, offering cigarettes; and returned, before long, with a tray of champagne cocktails.

Balintore grew more cheerful, his expression more animated. His demeanour became confident, there was assurance in his voice when he said, ‘There's a natural distrust of any sudden or violent transition from one element to another. Little boys show it, standing on the edge of a swimming-pool, mustering their courage to dive; and many of our fellow passengers felt much the same before we took off – though they did their best to hide it, of course.'

Palladis, who was reading the correspondence columns of the
Observer
, said, ‘Here is someone writing about the violent feelings created by conscious transition from one generation to another; and he suggests they will become easier in the future, when girls will mature earlier and start having babies at the age of eleven, thus diminishing the difference.'

‘Is he writing seriously?'

‘He appears to be.'

‘Well, infantilism is on the way: I've said that for a long time. Infantilism on the one hand, senility on the other: that's the prospect for our world,' said Balintore, and holding out his glass, let the stewardess refill it. ‘Adolescents will fill the maternity wards, and suburbs will be erased to make room for Old People's Homes. Doctors will either be paediatricians or geriatricians, and a diminishing middle of adult workers will need a corps of hypnotists to persuade them that work's worth while.'

With pleasure and relief Palladis recognized his friend's return to a normal habit; and happily resumed his humane study of Letters to the Editor while Balintore admired the umbrellas of pale-grey cloud over the wet fields of Ireland, and the brilliance of the sky that stood thirty thousand feet above its little hills. But presently both took a closer interest in the trolley from which a steward offered them, as a solace against the fatigues of altitude, caviare and smoked salmon.

The clouds below grew loose and detached. The blue pallor of the Atlantic showed beneath and between them, but their cabin was lighted by the much darker blue of the upper sky.
Luncheon was served, and they ate with relish turtle soup, breast of pheasant, a bombe glacée under burnt almonds, a cut of Brie and a few strawberries flown from Florida. From the other side of the menu-card they took their choice of a Rhine wine of ‘59, a claret of ‘55 and a champagne brut.

‘A tolerable meal,' said Balintore, belching slightly. ‘Very praiseworthy for the Atlantic sky.'

He had just accepted a glass of brandy when there was a small disturbance beside them. From the longer cabin behind came two stewardesses who supported the figure of a girl with sagging knees – chalk-white of face, with tremulous pale lips and fluttering eyelids – and carefully settled her in the vacant window-seat of two unoccupied chairs on the starboard side of the aisle.

One of the stewardesses – she who had spoken to him before– said to Balintore, ‘I hope you don't mind? She fainted, poor girl, and as they're rather crowded in the tourist cabin I thought it better to bring her here.'

‘Of course,' said Balintore. ‘And what she needs now is a glass of brandy. I'll give her mine – and bring two more.'

‘Let me get past,' he said to Palladis, who sat on his outer side. ‘I thought we'd see something more of her.'

He moved across the aisle, and putting an arm round the shoulders of the chalk-faced girl, held his glass to her lips. ‘Now drink this, drink slowly,' he said, ‘and in just two minutes you'll feel as good as new. There's nothing wrong with you that brandy can't put right.'

Ten minutes later her cheeks were pink and healthy, though her eyes were tearstained, and she was sipping her second glass of brandy. ‘Now tell me,' said Balintore, ‘what upset you.'