Authors: Elizabeth Bowen
‘Well, what’s the matter with that? It’s a K.L.M.; it’s got as much right to the place as you have.—This is where you wait, though,’ he told Jane.
‘Oh yes, Harris.—For how long?’
‘Till it’s called,’ he said, and went off somewhere.
Maud went off to where one could bid for chocolate and dishevel numbers of magazines.
Jane sat down on the ledge of the vast window. Her back was to space: she knew it was there so did not turn round, preferring for some reason to examine twists of paper dropped into an ashtray by someone gone. Nothing is so simple as you hope; the girl did not know what to do now—oh yes, she thought, I
am
doing something, I am waiting; but reason told her that waiting is not a thing to do. A wait is something being done to you. She thought of her mother in the railway station, but in that case the train had gone: you do not wait for what has already happened. But were there not those who said that everything
has
already happened, and that one’s lookings-forward are really memories? However, the girl could not go into that; she did not know—her blazer being across her knee, she ran a finger slowly along a stripe, for the sake of seeing anything move in this dead standstill. Rubber-muted silence would have surrounded her, but that far-off doors sucking open and shut from time to time fanned through degrees of voices: this part of the airport was to be felt to consist of unechoing corridors, barricades and attrition—she wondered where ‘the control’ was, and, if it were a control, what it could do. A glassed-in bar was in view from here, and at it a couple on the verge of goodbye were sitting drinking in twisted silence; and in fact the conditioned air in here was used up, staled by partings and meetings, heartbreaking last moments and eager first ones not to be lived up to in after life, as by the dust which was never quite to be vacuum-cleaned from the settees and chairs.—The girl made one of her beautiful blind impatient movements, perhaps the last.
For the amplifier coughed and began to talk. It spoke first in Irish; then, having set up enough suspense, in the other tongue repeated a company’s announcement of the arrival of one of its flights. Maud came by, eating, saying: ‘Aren’t you coming out?’ Jane put on her blazer and followed Maud out through a glass door. This must be it; for in the railed enclosure with other onlookers Harris had reappeared.
The scattering of people were looking up. And the sky, as though reminded of something else, began at this moment to let fall far-apart tepid drops; each so surprising, as it splashed on to cuff, forehead or eyelid, as to seem larger than it was; each too individual and momentous to be rain. The drops, one could imagine, could be heard; and they distracted attention from any diluted humming above the cloud-ceiling; or did so till this began to concentrate into a pinpoint and pierce through. The sound went on, like pressure upon a nerve, and the plane came sifting through into visibility: one watched its hesitating descent to such, alas, a remote part of the airport that, landing, it dropped again out of view. It remedied this by coming taxiing endlessly, endlessly inward along the runways, first at one angle, then at another, and so absurd was its progress in this manner, one could have wept. ‘I did not think much of that,’ said Maud, as the thing gave a final tremble and drew up, more or less opposite them.
Steps and an airport official went out to meet it; at the conclusion of the formalities the passengers began to descend—glazed, dazed, indifferent to the earth they were to know for so short a time, they came past the watchers one by one. They were interminable: then came a pause. Maud, having scanned each from top to toe, balancing on her stomach upon the rail, remarked: ‘That seems to be all.’Jane, who throughout had been watching Harris’s face for any flicker of recognition, said: ‘Then he probably hasn’t come.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Harris. ‘They let the transit passengers off first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because this is where he gets off.’
‘Something’s still going on inside that aeroplane,’ said Maud. An individual trailing a carried overcoat and inexpertly holding a gift parcel, forgotten, gone back to his seat for and recovered, which had prolonged farewells to the air hostess, head-stooped under the door and all but pitched himself down the steps. The descent was made with a look of ease at being at large again. Harris immediately turned away to seek for a more advantageous position from which to step forward touching his cap.
Richard Priam’s gait marked him as not being a transit passenger. His glance ran over the thin crowd, as he slowed down past it, not so much expectantly as with a readiness to be expected, an eagerness to smile could he find cause. He spotted Harris in time to see Harris go—next the gap remained a girl in a blazer, collar up as though she expected the skies to fall, gold hair bent outward over the collar. She seemed, too, in the act of turning away, of indeed fleeing, but had not yet done so. She wore the air of someone who cannot help knowing she must be recognized; her not yet willing but lovely gaze rested, accordingly, upon nothing; or rather upon a point in the diminishing nothingness between him and her.
He swerved nearer the rail, crying ‘Hullo!’ as though to somebody behind her. There was, as she knew, no one. Their eyes met.
They no sooner looked but they loved.