In the Time of Greenbloom (37 page)

“Once,” she went on, “the first time, I was unprepared and he took me to Le Touquet. Well, I had to buy everything out of my allowance, every single little thing, and there were scarcely any francs left over and yet Horab would not give me any more. He was getting mean you know; oh sso
mean
! Really, you wouldn't believe how close he can be when he chooses—a regular old Shylock! I call him
Mosselltoff
when he's like that, I tell him he's an old Shemite, the meanest of the twelve Tribes, and he gets
sso
angry.”

“Does it do any good?”

“No,
that
doesn't.”

“Well what does?”

“Ahh, that's a s-secret.” She prolonged the word so that it sounded like a tiny snake hissing. “Rachel's s-secret; every Rachel that ever was born.”

They walked on together increasing their pace a little as they saw that Greenbloom was gesticulating at them through the window of the small cabin.

“I don't see how on earth we're all going to get in,” said John uneasily. “Is it meant to hold three?”

“Indeed it is! Father, Mother and one child.
I
am the child. I weight only forty kilos and you are nearly as thin as Horab though you are very tall for your age.”

“And does he know the way? Can he navigate or whatever it's called?”

“I don't expect so; but it doesn't really matter. Horab always finds his way in the end, and there are plenty of little
airfields in France and as long as he's satisfied with the weather report he won't change his mind even if it should mean that he'll have to come down somewhere a little short of Paris and go on by taxi.”

“Is he a good pilot?”

John was beginning to feel very nervous. Although they had nearly reached the De Havilland Moth it still looked dreadfully insubstantial; the very fact that it was constructed of paint and glass doors and windscreens, had rubber tyres and aluminium struts, made it only more difficult to accept.

He had never seen an aeroplane closely before and on the ground; its resemblance to a motor-car would have been reassuring had he not known that it was supposed to fulfil a quite different function: the seemingly impossible act of rising into the air and carrying with it not only its own engine but also their three heavy bodies higher than the lightest of clouds. The factualness of it as it stood before him immediately terrified him. Until this moment the whole sequence of events had seemed quite unreal; a dream delightful and strange in whose gentle current he had drifted utterly away from the awful world of Beowulf's, ‘The Moors', and his own self-preoccupation; but now, at this moment, when his dream was found to contain the unrelated solidity of an aeroplane which was to fly him into a reality of air and cloud more tenuous than any dream he found himself numbed by reluctance.

Reveries and facts did not mix; aeroplanes should never be seen on the ground. To force people to accept them out of their element like this was to confront them with the ultimate dilemma; and he felt that rather than step into the Moth he would be dumbly prepared to forgo the whole of his enchanted escape and go back to Michael and to the School; but it was too late; Greenbloom, he realised, would never allow him to turn back now; he was a jealous god, a prophet who would not be denied, and therefore somehow he would have to make himself believe in the aeroplane and say nothing to either of them of the cold dismay which froze him as he
followed Rachel's example and clambered in under the wing to take his seat beside her in the back of the cabin.

Rachel leaned forward:

“Poor John is terrified Horab! He wants to know if you are a good pilot.”

Greenbloom who was now wearing a white helmet like a woman's bathing-cap gave a signal to one of the men and pulled dexterously at some levers on the dashboard.

“Of course I am. Why should I not be?”

“Well you're not an awfully good driver, are you?” said John.

“Certainly not! No accomplished pilot is ever a good driver. It is a difference of conception, ‘
Die Frage nach der Existenz eines formalen begriffes ist unsinnig. Denn kein Satz kann eine solche Frage beantworten
.'” He frowned angrily.

“Oh I see,” said John.

Rachel gave a little titter of laughter. “Of course you don't see, you charlatan! Shall I translate it for you?”

“Yes please.”

“It means, ‘
The question about the existence of a formal concept is senseless. For no proposition can answer such a question
!' It is from the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
and Horab always quotes it when he is stuck for an answer.”

“I suppose it's from this Wittgenstein man?”

“You are quite right.”

“Where did
you
hear about him?”

“In Vienna, they are very excited about him there and I try to keep up with him because if I did not Horab would be cross.”

“Wittgenstein is essential,” said Greenbloom. “Even Bertrand Russell has discovered that, although he is
not
an intelligent man.” He turned round. “You had better fasten your belts. Rachel! Show him how to fasten his belt. What is the time?”

“Six o'clock.”

“We are a little late; but it is nobody's fault. The ground mist was in any case a little too thick for the start I'd scheduled.
Even so, we should be at
Les Deux Magots
in good time for a
Mandarin
.”

He raised his hand and the man at the propeller started to twitch it viciously. The engine sneezed out some pale-blue smoke Greenbloom depressed another switch and at the fourth swing they were enclosed in a flux of sound. The metal glass and fabric of the tiny machine thundered over them like a wave as they sat there in a wind that was filled with the rude smell of exhaust gas and benzole. Everything came to life: the seats shook, the glass vibrated, and outside John's window appeared the wind-torn head of the other mechanic. He signalled to John to open the door and then bellowed out through his hand into his ear. He looked alarmed and urgent, and thinking that the plane was on fire or about to explode, John had a desperate impulse to leap straight out on to the newly remote and glorious grass. It was quite impossible to hear what the man was saying.

“
What
?” he shouted. “I can't hear. Say it again.”

“The cëows Sir—” The man made two horns out of his hands and holding them on either side of his head wobbled it slowly from side to side. “Tell 'em. Tell Mr Greenbloom, to watch ëout for the cëows on his take-off!”

“Oh the cows.” He was relieved; now that they were safely in the aeroplane no cow could ever harm them. It was Greenbloom country again and the bad moment was over. A wild thick excitement was filling him from his toes to his ears; and though someone had told him now that this was to be his last morning alive he would have made no further effort ever to get out of the Moth.

This was the moment for which he had been born. This was the bright beginning which was to end the whole of the insane past: to fly with Rachel and Greenbloom to Paris in the early morning.

There was no need to pass on the message; Greenbloom had seen and understood the gesture. He signalled curtly to the man, put the engine through its paces, waggled a bent aluminium rod between his knees, and signalled once again.
The chocks were pulled away and they began to taxi out into the thinning mist; red sunlight gushed into the cabin as they turned in strange graceful figures over the rippling grass; Greenbloom glanced at the windsock floating free in the morning wind, tested the controls again, and then pulled the throttle in the dashboard out to its farthest limit.

The Moth leapt as though it had been given an unexpected and potent injection and then began to rush forward towards the rosy streaming face of the sun which hung full ahead of them. In a moment the horizon became visible as the tail lifted and the windscreen tilted lower to reveal the spires and tree-tops of Oxford; the vibrations diminished hesitated and then ceased, as the grass, the whole flat expanse, withdrew its claim upon them. The last edge of their shadow flew back behind them and they were sustained higher and higher above the pale mist which floated over the meadow from which they had risen.

Looking out above and below John saw flocks of birds flying to their feeding grounds, the buildings of the hangar performing a slow horizontal cartwheel, and the golden stones and dewy lawns of Oxford turning smaller and smaller into neatness and order as they rose ever higher into the smokeless air. He looked desperately for Beowulf's, for one last convincing glimpse of the School; but he could not see it; the whole city seemed to be hiding its particulars from the clarity of his vantage point and he could recognise no single point or feature as, far beneath them, the streets churches and squares receded into the swell of the shadowed landscape.

Beside him, Greenbloom pointed at one of the black dials in the dashboard. It was overprinted in white:

ALTITUDE IN FEET
(X 100)

and the needle was wavering round the 50 mark which meant that they were five thousand feet up in the air. At this height Greenbloom pushed in the throttle a little and pulled a small
lever marked TRIM in the roof of the cabin; the Moth flattened out and the engine noise became quieter. John turned round and Rachel handed him a thick map-case which he passed on to Greenbloom who ignored it.

“Tell her to pass me a drink,” he shouted.

Rachel rummaged behind her in the back of the fuselage and brought out two large leather-bound flasks with silver caps marked WHISKY and BRANDY. John filled the cap labelled BRANDY and handed it to Greenbloom, who having drained it at a gulp ordered him to refill it and pass it on to Rachel after he had himself had a drink from it. He shook his head. He did not want a drink; so he passed both flasks back to Rachel who put them in a cubby-hole behind her and started to make up her face again.

Greenbloom turned round to John and waved royally at the open sky. “Do you like it?” he shouted.

“It's—” There were no words which could describe the glory of it and so he contented himself in trying to smile all the insufficient adjectives which came to his mind. Greenbloom nodded confidently and John studied his face in the peaked close-fitting helmet. Against the dead whiteness of his strange covering the skin looked more luminous than ever, rosily gilded by the fall of the new sunlight on its pale surface. Only the curling Egyptian asp was needed in order to complete the resemblance to the golden death mask of a Pharaoh which had first struck him at the moment of their meeting. He saw that the black eyes were sleepy and that over them the lids, tinged with mauve, hung heavily like those of a dancer. Leaning surreptitiously a little farther forward he saw that it was only the eye nearest to him which was lighted, the other one was in half shadow, and this caused him to turn round with surprise and search out through his window to find the new direction of the sun. It was no longer in front of them but had apparently moved round to the right and appeared even to be slightly below the wing tip.

He was amazed by this; it seemed impossible that he should be able to look
down
on the sun and he wondered why
no one had ever mentioned this before in the many books he had read about flying. There was no doubt that relatively the sun at this moment appeared to be far below them, there were even one or two flat clouds, lilac on top rose pink below, hanging between the Moth and its blazing spherical face.

Like the rising sun, Paris of course must lie East of England and they were flying towards it; at least they had been when they started, he remembered it distinctly; but now they must be moving North-East, otherwise the sun would not be shining a little to the right of them. He searched the instrument panel for a compass but could not find one amongst the many busy black circles.

“Where are we?” he shouted to Greenbloom.

“North London any moment now: Ruislip, Eastcote, Harrow.” He waved vaguely towards the propeller. “Clouding over—see all you can.”

“Aren't we flying North then?”

“No no—
South
!”

Astonishing, he thought; but of course, despite appearances, they couldn't possibly be above the sun, so presumably their relationships were all changed and none of the ordinary rules could be relied upon.

“Deviation,” roared Greenbloom. “
Drift
!”

John nodded affirmatively and assumed a contented expression; but secretly he gazed out of his window greedily as he attempted to reconcile the surprising facts. At first he could see nothing but moss-like woods and an apparently entirely flat landscape of hedged fields traversed by a thin network of road-threads; but then, quite far ahead of them, he at last discerned a recurrent series of glints and flashes, several white cocoons of condensing steam from railway lines, and the thunderous opacity of a great area of buildings and smoke heavily overshadowed by a cloud-mass. He drew in a deep breath delightedly and favoured Greenbloom with an open smile; he was right, they would soon be over France.

As the cloudbank drew nearer they began to climb again
into the whiter sunlight of the new day. There was now very little of the land to be seen through the window, they hung heavily over a blinding static ocean of cloud from which smooth snowy mountains rolled and wreathed with almost imperceptible secrecy. Sometimes these accumulated masses rose high above them on either side so that they flew in a cold unseen shadow between the walls of white and blazing valleys; at others, they out-topped the highest clouds and traversed almost interminable plains and deserts of reflected light. Very occasionally there would be a lake of slate-blue depth below them, a cobalt glimpse of what might have been either land or sea far beneath the strata of the clouds; but in contrast to the radiance in which they were suspended these breaks were so dark and shadowed that it was difficult to discern any single feature contained within them. Only once in the first hour did John catch sight of the serpentine Thames beneath them; and then for a long time there was no further sufficiently large gap to help him until they were well out over the middle of what he was sure must be the English Channel.