Mischief (26 page)

Amsterdam is far enough North to still be partly the land of the Nordic Gods, and Christmas is still Yuletide, their mid- winter festival. I have always suspected Schiphol Airport to be Thor’s own place, all that cracking of the skies, the low thunder of aircraft breaking through the clouds, the tremble of the ground as the big jets land. Thor likes it; he hangs around. This year Christmas Day falls on a Thursday, (donderdag in Dutch) Thor’s day: all the more likely for him to put in an appearance. When the God roars out over the flat damp land that it’s time to shut the doors and bring out the drink, people do as he commands, and who cares what the timetables say. They go home, as instructed.

We got early to the airport and checked in the baggage. We’d allowed ourselves twenty minutes to look round the Rijksmuseum annexe situated between Piers E and F before going to the gate. We like to do that. There is something refreshing, like cool clear water on a hot day, about looking at paintings in an airport. It restores you to sanity. There’s currently an exhibition of Rembrandt prints, which Chris particularly wanted to catch before it closed on January 3rd. But my attention was caught by a farmyard painting by Melchior d’Hondecoeter, 1636-1695. Two vain and disdainful peacocks look down their nose at a little pretty silly hen with four fluffy chicks, while a great gobbling turkey, stupid and amazed, looks on. I wondered which of them was most like me. I asked Chris, hoping, I suppose, for some kind of compliment or reassurance, but instead of answering he said ‘We can’t be too long here. We don’t want to miss our flight. Shall we go?’ Now I can’t bear to be hurried, Chris can’t bear to be late. And I was feeling tetchy and tired: we’d been shopping and wrapping all morning. ‘Don’t panic.’ I said, meanly. ‘You are so neurotic about time. They have our luggage, they can’t go without us.’ And for once I didn’t relieve him of his anxiety and turn to go, but lingered, and let him fret. It is the kind of cruelty even the fondest couple sometimes practice on one another. Putting the other in the wrong, creating a double bind, pressing their buttons: it may fall short of an outright row, but it verges on it.

The elegant girl from the Rijksmuseum shop, the only member of staff left on the premises apparently still resistant to the Gods, was beginning to hover and look at her watch. That irritated me too. I am a customer: I have my rights. It was only ten past three: there was a full five minutes before the place was due to close for the six days of the Christmas holiday. I was looking at Art. I shouldn’t be hurried.

It was almost twenty past three by the time we left and the poor thing could hiss the doors shut behind us. She stalked past us as we left, long legged: she carried crimson and gold parcels, prettily tied with Rijkmuseum ribbon. She was one of the peacocks, disdainful.

In the space of fifteen minutes Schiphol had stopped being a busy, noisy, excited place and become a lonely expanse of empty walkways. Shops had closed, passengers gone their ways. Lights were muted. Even the all-pervasive smell of coffee was fading.
Yuletide!
said the notices,
Happy Christmas!
Bon Noel,
but here and there New Year Sale signs had gone up. The passport booth was closed and empty: barriers were up. We had to find another one, and the Information desk was closed. Chris began to run. The moving walkway slowed and stopped while we were on it. The girlish warning voice dropped a tone and was silent. I ran too. We loped down a flight of steps – the escalator had stopped – to gate C4, where our flight was closing. Even as we ran we heard a gate change. Now it was Gate C6. We ran some more. And then we sat, because when we got there, there was no urgency, the flight was delayed. One minute we were racing: the next we were staring into space. Airports are like that. And we sat, and sat and sat.

‘We could have taken our time,’ said Chris. He is very good. He could have said earlier, as we ran ‘told you so.’ But he didn’t. There were six of us. One little old lady who had been drinking, one shabby business man who looked as if he had been up all night, and a young engaged couple. She was plump and blonde and fidgety and reminded me of the busy little hen in the painting. He was the turkey, cross and awkward, with a nose too big and a chin too small. But he loved her. He kept trying to hold her hand but she’d push it away. She was upset. There were tears in her eyes. I don’t know what they had quarrelled about but it seemed quite bad. Two hours passed.

Pretty soon I had tears in my eyes too. The flight had been cancelled. There had been a technical fault. Thor was punishing me. I had been mean to Chris: I had been mean to the girl in the shop. I had not heeded the clarion call to the midwinter ritual. The last flights to Heathrow had gone. There was no way we could leave Schiphol that night. They were running a skeleton service. They would put us up in the airport hotel. They apologised for the inconvenience caused. We would be compensated. No, baggage could not be returned. There had been an industrial dispute, and the baggage handlers had gone home. There was a strange underwater feeling to everything. I could hear Schiphol breathing, or was it the air conditioning in the great echoey empty halls. In and out, very slowly. Thor’s breathe. Airline staff were polite, but looked at their watches. Everyone wanted to be off. Christmas. Yuletide. Donderdag coming.

We were all silent. ‘A Fokker 70,’ said the business man, looking out the window, as it taxied away, cute and ansty, as if the brand made a difference. There was a crack of thunder from outside and lightning – only one second between the two – but no rain. ‘Nice little aircraft,’ he observed. I think he was stunned. So was I. ‘Cityhopper. Doesn’t usually go wrong.’

But that was no comfort to us. The blonde girl, whose name was Penny, threw the engagement ring across the floor. It skittered and bounced. The boy, whose name was Darrell, set his jaw and didn’t go after it. ‘That’s it,’ Penny said. ‘That’s it,’ ‘Yes it is,’ he said. ‘Goodbye you and goodbye Christmas.’

It seemed a great pity to me, the way the whole world had to suffer from the weight of my sin. The ring glittered under a plastic chair. I thought it was diamond. The old lady said it was all right by her, she didn’t like Christmas anyway. I longed to be at home in bed.

They bussed us to the airport hotel. The rain broke as we stood outside waiting for it to arrive. We were soaked. Thor was letting me know who ran things round here. I had no face cream: Chris had no sleeping pills. The young couple still weren’t talking. I was distressed for them. It seemed such a waste of life. They’d never find anyone better than the other. I told Chris so. He said it was projection, personally he was distressed for us. The hotel was crowded. Industrial dispute, fog and storm had wreaked havoc with flights. They gave us tickets so we could be called in order to the reception desk. A girl from the airline came over and said they would try to get us out first thing the next morning. Christmas Day. She was the other peacock from the painting, disdainful. They go round in pairs.

‘Now I must be off,’ she said. ‘In Holland we take Christmas Eve seriously.’

We made phone calls. We said don’t expect us tonight, we’d been delayed, we’d be in touch when we knew more. There were plates of free food in the bar, but I wasn’t hungry, not even for little marzipan cakes with windmills imprinted on the chocolate. Chris gnawed a chicken leg. Our numbers came up. There was one room left, a double: they gave it to Chris and me. Everyone else would have to sleep in armchairs and sofas in the lobby. I said to Chris, ‘Please can we give the room to them,’ meaning the young couple, and he looked at them and he looked at me and said ‘Okay.’ He is not a man of many words. They went upstairs, not touching. We slept and partly slept and outside the storm died down.

In the morning everyone said ‘Happy Christmas,’ to each other, and there was big notice up with an arrow saying ‘Yuletide breakfast this way,’ and there was, too. Fresh bread and good coffee and fine eggs. The young couple came down from their bedroom. They had made it up. They leant into each other and smiled soppily at everyone. Chris looked in his pocket and handed them the ring. He had actually stopped to pick it up. ‘I kept it safely,’ he said. ‘I’d have given it to Oxfam.’

The young couple leant into each other in the Cityhopper, the Fokker 70, all the way home. An oil seal had been mended. We had missed Christmas Eve goose and the hire car depot was closed, but my son-in-law would pick us up and we’d be in time for Christmas lunch. We even had the presents with us.

‘Look at you!’ said Chris, as we disembarked into brilliant morning sun. Thor doesn’t have much pull down here in the old West Country. ‘You’re even smarter than a peacock, nicer than a mother hen, and not one bit like the turkey,’ and the world seemed pretty ideal to me.

2003

Sooner or later all roads lead to Schiphol Airport, if only for an hour or so, on the way from here to there, in transit. It is a vast place. Today we perched on our high stools at the oyster bar where Zones C and D meet. My husband had a new-season herring and a glass of beer, and I had a brown shrimp sandwich and a modest glass of white wine. After that we planned to do our usual thing and go to the art exhibition in the new Schiphol extension of the Rijksmuseum, situated where Zone E meets Zone F. The exhibits change every month or so, and there is always some new skating scene, some famous soldier on a horse, some soothing Dutch interior to be seen, some long dead artist’s glimpse of the love and trust that exists within families, or between mankind and nature. Thus fortified, we would fly on to Oslo, or Copenhagen, or on occasion further afield, along those curving, separating lines on the KLM map – Bombay, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Perth, wherever. And if you are lucky, on the return journey the Rijksmuseum exhibits will have been changed, and there will be yet more to see. That is, of course, if delays and security checks allow you the time you expect to have to spare in that strange no-man’s land called Transit.

Lucky, I say, but thinking about it I am not sure. The paintings in the Rijksmuseum pull you out of the trance which sensible people enter while travelling, checking out from real life the moment they step into the airport, coming back to full consciousness only when once more entering their front door. The technical name for the state is de-realisation, or dissociative disorder: too much of it, they say, and you can actually shrink your hippocampus – that part of the brain from which the emotions fan like airline flight paths on the map – never to recover. It might be wiser just to stare at the departure board like anyone else. But I am with my husband, a rare bird who has never in his life experienced a dissociative state, and is enjoying his herring, and I am emerging from mine in preparation for the Rijksmuseum, and am even vaguely wondering whether I am drinking Chardonnay or Chablis, when there is a sudden commotion amongst the throng of passengers.

The herring stall is by a jeweller’s booth, where today there are diamonds on special offer. ‘
The new multi-faceted computer cut’
– whatever that might be: presumably habitual buyers of diamonds know. But can there be so many of them as the existence of this shop suggests? So many enthusiastic or remorseful husbands or lovers around, who want to buy peace at any price, and stop off to purchase these tokens of respect and adoration? Though I daresay these days travelling women buy diamonds for themselves.

Next to the diamond boutique is a shop selling luggage, and a booth offering amaryllis bulbs at ten euros for two. As a point-of- sale feature I see they’re using a reproduction of that wonderful early Mondrian painting you can see in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
‘Red Amaryllis with blue background.’
I bet that cost them a bit
.
It’s midday by now and comparatively quiet in Schiphol: few customers and lots of staff, like a church when they congregation has left after a big service and the clerics are busy snuffing out candles and changing altar cloths. How do these places ever make a living? It defeats me.

A woman and her husband walk past us in the direction of departure gates C5-C57. They are in their forties, I suppose. I notice her because she walks just a little behind him and I tend to do the same, whenever I am with a man. It is a habit which annoys husbands, suggesting as it does too much dependency, too little togetherness, but in a crowded place it seems to me practical. You don’t have to cut a swathe through potentially hostile crowds, and passage can be effected in single file. Couples who face the world side by side, I am prepared to argue, assert coupledom at the expense of efficiency. And it must be remembered that Jacob sent his womenfolk to walk before him when angry neighbours obliged him to return to the family farm – so that the wrath of his brother Esau would fall first upon the wives, and not upon him. As it happened Esau wasn’t in the least angry about the business of the potage and was simply glad to see his long lost brother again. But lagging behind is always safest, in a world scattered with landmines, real and metaphorical. This woman seemed well aware of their existence.

I was hard put to it to decide their nationality; probably British, certainly Northern European. They had a troubled air, as if worried by too much debt and too little time ever to do quite what they wanted to do, always grasping for something out of reach, disappointed by the world, not as young as they’d like to be, or as rich as they deserved to be. I blame the Calvinists and the work ethic: people from the warmer South have easier ways, less conscience and more generous hearts. Something at any rate was wrong. The flight had been delayed, or it was the wrong flight, or they didn’t really want to go where they were going, or they didn’t want to go together, or she was thinking of her lover or he of his mistress. But I didn’t expect what was to happen next.

She was I suppose in her mid-forties: a respectable, rather pudding-faced, high-complexioned, slightly overweight, stolid blonde with good legs and expensive hair piled up untidily in a bun. She was trying too hard. Her skirt was too tight and her heels too high and slim for comfortable travel. She wore a pastel pink suit with large gold buttons. The jacket stretched a little over a middle-aged bosom: that is to day it was no longer perky but bulged rather at the edges. She carried a large shiny black plastic bag. The husband who walked before looked like a not very successful business man: he wore jeans, a tie and a leather jacket, not High Street, but not Armani either, and you felt he would be happier in a suit. His face was set in an expression of dissatisfaction, his hair was thinning: he had the air of one beset by responsibilities and the follies of others. There was no doubt in my mind but that they were married. How does one always know this? We will leave that as a rhetorical question: it being parried only with another, ‘why else would they be together?’ and the import of that exchange is too sad to contemplate.