The Light of Amsterdam (15 page)

 

 

She had to force herself up the steps of the plane, lagging behind the others. It made no sense to her at all. She associated flight with lightness, feathers, small things, so as she glanced at the plane she couldn't understand how such a thing encased in a metallic heaviness could ever rise into the air and then stay there. It seemed totally ridiculous, positively suicidal to be mounting these frail metal steps that clanged against her heart with every heavy tread that rattled and strained. She tried to keep her eyes on the heels of the person in front so that she wouldn't let herself take in the side of the plane, its black pouting engines, its heavy slabs of metal. In the doorway the stewardess smiled at her and she felt a moment of relief that she was stepping into an interior that seemed vaguely familiar. Perhaps it was the smell that reminded her of the offices she cleaned each morning, a strange mixture of the synthetic and the human, a sense too of a space that belonged to people who were no longer there.

She got stuck in the aisle behind a small man struggling to stow his bag in the overhead locker and when she eventually sidled past him she found herself separated from the tribe by other passengers. She was held up some more and when she reached her group it was clear that there were no free seats. She looked in panic for Shannon and when she caught her daughter's eye she stood up and looked around her, shrugged her shoulders and then pointed to a single seat a few rows in front. There was no choice about it and so after asking if the seat was free she tried to manoeuvre her bag into the small space that was left. She had to stand on her toes and then, remembering the shortness of her skirt, sank back on her heels.

‘Can I help you with that?' he said and as she nodded her thanks he stood up and edged past her. She hoped it wouldn't take long and was suddenly conscious that all the people in the seats behind were probably staring at her. But he had to jiggle the other bags and as he did so she smiled nervously at the boy in the window seat who was looking at her but who turned his eyes away when she did so and busied himself with his
MP
3 player. His face was pale against the darkness of his hair.

‘That's it,' he said, slamming the lid on the locker and slipping back into his seat.

‘Thanks,' she said, squirming as she tried to free the safety belt she had sat on. ‘There wasn't much room.' She accidentally pushed her elbow into him as she finally released the belt. ‘Sorry.' She felt flustered, claustrophobic, increasingly confined in some bad dream. ‘Not much room.'

‘Hi,' he said. ‘Or should it be Hiawatha?'

‘Hi. Hia . . . ?'

‘Hiawatha – an Indian girl.'

‘It's my daughter's idea. Nothing to do with me and I don't really know why I'm here,' she said, finally clicking the belt shut.

‘Her hen party?'

‘Don't know why we have to go all the way to Amsterdam for it or why I'm going dressed like this.' She tried to stretch her skirt towards her knees but there was little give.

‘You must be close for her to ask you. This is my son Jack,' he said, pressing his son's arm until he turned his head and looked at her again. She raised her hand in greeting and got an almost imperceptible nod in response. ‘I don't think he'll invite me on his stag night. He's listening to the Death Pixels.'

She didn't know what to reply but the stewardess was already asking for their attention and doing the safety drill. She watched intently, only glancing away to study the safety card. It seemed vital to remember how to tie the life jacket and where to locate the whistle. In her imagination she practised the brace position. Shannon should have kept her a seat – she didn't want to die beside a stranger. Even the card seemed an inadequate preparation for disaster, hopelessly imprecise with its arrows and cartoon illustrations. Her palms were beginning to sweat again and her mouth was dry. She thought of the photographs on the office desks and the lives they represented, of all the times she had wanted access to their worlds and how she had sometimes thought that they were barred to her because she wasn't clever enough, didn't have the right certificates. But now it struck her that perhaps her exclusion was a failure of courage. She couldn't step inside because she wasn't brave enough to leave behind what she was prepared to accept were the limits of who she was. People flew in planes every day – the girls at work said it was safer than being in a car – so why should she now be sitting in the tightening grip of fear? Perhaps the flight was her moment of initiation and if only she could endure it then everything would be opened to her. Her hands gripped the armrests as the engines started and the plane began to move along the runway.

She told herself that she was brave enough for this, had already shown how strong she was from the moment when three months pregnant she had read his letter telling her that he was leaving. Written in pencil on a page torn from a spiral notebook, the edges little curls of white that flaked away in her hand. So he wasn't ready to be a father, it had all been a mistake, it was better to put things right before it went any further, he was sorry but it was better to be honest. He had tried, really tried, but it was no use. Of course he hadn't told her that he had met someone else – she would find this out only later. It was a page taken from the book he used in his
PVC
windows business. He had made her a customer and was settling the account. It was a bill she had to pay and she told herself that she had met it in full, bringing up a child on her own, a child that he had never once made any attempt to see and had been happy when she had rejected his offer of a pathetic amount of money. Others had told her she was a fool, that she should have got legal advice and fleeced him for every penny she could squeeze out of him, but she wanted nothing from him, not even his money. To take it would have been to taint how she saw her child. There was no part of him in her daughter and she would not acknowledge any form of claim that the money might bring.

She pushed back into the seat and told herself that her bravery had already been proved, that nothing could be harder than that, that there was nothing to worry about. And the one thing she knew above all others was that no man would ever steal her trust, that she couldn't be fooled again. She tried to turn her head to see Shannon but it wasn't possible and then the plane was rushing down the runway and she had no thoughts for anything else.

 

 

He didn't like take-offs and landings. They always made him, even in his disbelief, utter a little prayer that he might be allowed to return safely to his family. Jack's head was fixed on the window taking in every second of their lift-off. He could glimpse enough to see that the world had suddenly angled and then the plane seemed to groan and shudder a little and he heard her say ‘Shit' and then ‘Oh my God' and her hand pushed against his and almost instantaneously their fingers gripped and knotted. He felt the force of her fear in her tightening grasp and as he turned to where she strained against the back of the seat as if trying to push herself through it he said, ‘It's
OK
, it's
OK
, we're almost up. Everything's
OK
.' And then as they climbed he felt her hand slip away and she was apologising, her fluttering hands an embarrassed fan in front of her face.

‘It's my first time,' she said. ‘I'm sorry for being so stupid.'

‘First time can be a bit scary but you'll be all right now. I'm Alan, by the way.' And he offered her his hand again and she shook it quickly but didn't give him her name. ‘And you're . . . ?'

‘Karen,' she said but she was glancing down the aisle and he knew she didn't want him to talk to her so he lifted the flight magazine and flicked the pages. A few seconds later she did the same and seemed to squeeze herself smaller and almost into the pages, plucking at the corners as she turned them. He bent down and in his bag found his copy of Van Gogh's letters to Theo. Perhaps his blurted fabrication to Stan Stenson had not been so foolish after all, perhaps there really was something credible that could be garnered from the idea. He needed of course to identify the paintings done just before Gauguin's arrival in Arles and then compare them with those after and try to make some connections between the two men's work. It wasn't entirely impossible that some symbiotic relationship might be detected, and at the end of the day what did it matter so long as he could find some journal to publish it and he did have an ability to spark the suggestion of profundity from rubbing a few twigs together? He believed the key to success was to assert things confidently and even if it evoked mountains of rebuttal he could claim that his provocative article had sparked a new intellectual debate.

He scanned a few of the letters, drafting grandiose sentences as he did so, and then flicking the pages his eyes caught a painting he hadn't seen in twenty years. It was
Old Man with his Head in his Hands
and, if his memory was right, painted shortly before Vincent's death. There was a shiver of recognition, a regeneration of the intensity of bleakness that he always felt in its presence. The old man's face was hidden behind his hands and he was dressed in blue peasant clothes as he sat slumped forward in a chair. The bare floorboards, the inability of the fire's meagre flames to kindle any consolation pressed home on the viewer – it was a picture that always frightened him in its unrelenting presentation of uncomforted human suffering. And although he tried to shrug it off the painting taunted him with a vision of a future he didn't want to contemplate. He thought of his flat above the florist's shop, of George's funeral cortège, of the single rower sculling through the dusk. Closing the book he slipped it into the pouch of the seat in front.

 

 

He always turned the flight magazine to the back pages where he perused what might be bought if he had the inclination and as always he pointed out particular objects to invite her scorn for their supposed rip-off prices. She was aware of a slight scrupulousness in him that was thankfully restricted only to business and if it was softened by his willing generosity to her, it was probably still the hallmark of every successful businessman. He knew what everything cost and sometimes she didn't want that but what was it she did want? A brief moment of moderate recklessness? A spontaneous gesture that put nothing important at risk? And after all they had worked so hard for what they had. She flicked the pages of the magazine and looked at a feature on trendy holiday spots. Why did they still work so hard, so hard that they felt guilty about taking a weekend off? And who would benefit from it all? Did they spend their lives married to work so that they could simply pass it on to their children, children who if truth be told she suspected of taking their numerous generosities a little for granted?

She shook her head dismissively when he asked if she wanted this or that. Every other thing he did irritated her now and she knew that she had to get control of it or the weekend would turn into a disaster whose consequences might prove destructive of all she still valued. She anticipated that he would order a drink or something to eat and then there would be all that smiling charm as he paid the stewardess. He had already discreetly studied their legs as they went about their business, no doubt had weighed them up and made a hypothetical choice. Perhaps a drink would be a good thing, a glass of red wine to help smooth the sharp edges of the tension she felt seeping through – she wasn't sure whether it was her head or her body or both. For a year she had increasingly felt the recurring presence of anxiety, a real and pressing anxiousness but vague and unpredictable in its comings and goings. If it got worse she would have to visit her doctor. But what if he were to ask her about the reasons for her anxiety? She would have to say she didn't know and in part at least that was true. And no doubt he'd be reluctant to dole out a pill but would probably tell her to get some exercise, to join something or to take up something like yoga, suggested cures that she knew were only likely to increase what she suffered from.

Suddenly a flower shop seemed not a bad idea, a flower shop not for Anka but for themselves. Why not think of downsizing, selling the garden centre that required so much constant year-long work and taking up a small business that wouldn't need half the time or commitment? They'd surely make enough from the sale to see them through and the shop would merely tick over, providing enough to meet their living costs. But then she remembered the house and realised that it would have to be part of any sale and that was something she couldn't contemplate so easily. It wasn't just their home, it was their children's home – where they came back to, where they would visit this Christmas. She felt that so many of the important elements of her life were ingrained in its fabric that to leave it would be to leave part of herself.

A shop where young women came with their mothers to choose their wedding flowers. She wondered when she would do that with Judith. If her daughter were to marry someone in France perhaps it would be his mother who would play that role and perhaps all Judith's life, its foundations and its future, would be established permanently far from home. She glanced at the magazine again which shrank Europe to two pages and where flight lines threaded countries seamlessly together. And of course there was always the computer which could send email and photographs and, although she didn't know how, she believed it was possible to talk and see each other if you had the right pieces of equipment.