Out of This World (23 page)

Another woman might have said: Jesus! Either they go or I do. Jenny said, ‘Show me.’

Sometimes I’ve thought there must be some institution, some worthy cause somewhere that would be glad of them, that would know what to do with them. But then I’ve thought: These are bits of Dad.

They are like a miniature museum of prosthetic technology.
(The words we might never have had to learn!) But they are more than that. The earlier ones are shapely, useless bits of sculpture that gradually lose their anthropomorphic wishfulness and their aesthetic pretensions; the later ones look like nothing human, but actually simulate the function of an arm.

They are like an index of the twentieth century.

Sophie
 

You think it’s a long time to be on a plane? Another six hours. You think they should get you from New York to London in – well, you tell me, how long? One hour? Half an hour? A couple of minutes?

But look at it another way.
Only
seven hours to fly from New York to London. It takes days to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship. It used to take weeks. And once they didn’t even know that America was
there
, on the other side. You’re not impressed? You don’t think it’s so great to be thousands of feet up in the sky in a jumbo jet? You’ve done it before when we flew that time to Miami with Daddy. With Daddy. So what’s new?

Or look at it another way. Seven hours. And yet we’re flying so fast that we’ll actually
shorten
time. You’ll see. In a little while it’ll be dark, but it won’t stay dark for very long. Not like a normal night. When we land in London it’ll be breakfast-time there, when for us it should still be the middle of the night. And it will all seem strange.

It’s because we’re travelling in one direction but the sun is travelling in another. And the sun is moving slower than we are. Don’t you think that’s wonderful? To be moving faster
than the sun? Of course, it’s not that the sun is
really
moving. The sun isn’t really going anywhere. It’s that the earth – It’s–

When do they show us the movie? Oh, in a little while yet, I guess. When everyone’s settled. First they give us a drink and some food on a tray. But you don’t really want to watch the movie, do you? On planes it’s always a bad movie. And don’t you think it’s
weird
– to be thousands of feet up in the air and to want to pretend you’re in a movie-house? The real movie is out
there
, isn’t it? Those clouds – look, we’re
above
them! A whole ocean sliding underneath us.

You know, a long time ago, they’d have thought what we’re doing now was magic. Impossible! Out of this world! They’d have thought only gods could fly up into the sky. And now we get into these things and stow our luggage and fasten our seat-belts – and say: How about something to keep us amused?!

Let’s not watch the movie, my angels. Let’s not even listen to the music on the head-sets. Don’t neglect your mother. You know, I’m getting the feeling she’s not such a good flier as you are. It’s true, she’s always been a little nervous. Ever since – Let’s just be together, here, above the world. There are more important things than movies. And it’ll be tomorrow sooner than you think. It’ll be tomorrow before it’s even stopped being today. And your mother has only six hours.

Harry
 

But once everything was black and white. No, I don’t mean simpler, clearer – when were they ever that? I mean, literally: monochrome.

Picture your father, Sophie, walking down Fleet Street on a grey, wet day in the grey post-war year of 1948. He wears the non-colours that are everywhere around him (like a true news photographer, he blends in with his surroundings): grey raincoat, dark suit, dark-grey trilby. The cars that pass him are black and grey. The city buildings are charcoal studies: soot and stone. The wet road and the clock-face over the
Daily Telegraph
building and the smoke from a train on the Blackfriars line and the grey dome of St Paul’s against a grey sky are all the tones of newsprint and photographs.

And yet his heart is full of colour, his heart is aglow with colour, in that year of your birth. More colour than it will ever have in the days of Kodachrome and technicolour and colour TVs and that mainstay of his future career, the Sunday colour supplement.

If you are happy, why go looking for trouble?

Colour appeared, in shy, unstable tints, in the Forties and Fifties, then blossomed – yellow cars! Pink shirts! Shop-fronts
that fluoresced! – in that bright new age in which you grew up. Was all that to do with the perfecting of the three-colour emulsion process – as if the world had glimpsed itself in some new and flattering mirror – or was it to do, like rising hemlines and marijuana and rockets into space, with sheer high spirits? And was it only coincidence that the years that had preceded, the years of world wars and depressions and newsreels and family albums, should be clad, or so it seems in my memory, in sullen shades of grey?

Before there was colour there was black and white. But before there was black and white there was sepia, ochre, tawny, bronze. I was born – just about – in the age of sepia. And it has always seemed to me that before this black-and-white then technicolour century came of age, the world was brown. My father’s world was brown. The brown of leather and horseflesh and mahogany sideboards. The brown of old brown shires and rutted lanes before the spread of tar. Even the first cameras were little brown boxes, glossy and venerable as violins.

My father’s desk was polished oak. And the study was oak panelled, and the spines of Uncle Edward’s books were mostly brown, and even the plaster busts on the mantelpiece – Homer? Cicero? I forget – turning on me their blind eyes that brown afternoon, had acquired a faint, tobaccoey sheen.

The desk was unlocked – for once, negligently unlocked – and when I took from the top left-hand drawer that single sepia photograph, that colour brown, most familiar and companionable of colours, became all at once foreign and strange, the colour of things lost.

She is standing in front of some porch or verandah, in a long dress with a tight waist. And though the photographer was plainly no professional (but I knew that), you must give him his due. She is clutching in one hand a wide-brimmed summer hat which would have cast her face into deep shade were it on her head. The photographer has told her to take off the hat,
and she has only just removed it. Her hair is slightly disarranged. She is trying to hold a pose, but it is clear that – because the photographer has not given her time or because of something he has said – it has slipped. Her eyes are wide in happy surprise, her lips are just parted.

Fact or phantom? Truth or mirage? I used to believe – to profess, in my professional days – that a photo is truth positive, fact incarnate and incontrovertible. And yet: explain to me that glimpse into unreality.

How can it be? How can it be that an instant which occurs once and once only, remains permanently visible? How could it be that a woman whom I had never known or seen before – though I had no doubt who she was – could be staring up at me from the brown surface of a piece of paper?

From a time before I existed. From a time before, perhaps, she had even thought of me and when she was undoubtedly ignorant of what I would mean to her.

I was nine years old. It was half-term. November 1927. Through the window – when I dared risk being seen myself – I could see him standing in a corner of the orchard, talking to the gardener (Davis?) who was prodding with a rake a sullenly burning heap of leaves. He is not yet thirty, but he has the bearing of a gruff, grizzled dignitary. He would surely have thrashed me – a fierce, left-handed thrashing – if he had known I had seen that photograph. Just as he would have chastised himself if he had known he had forgotten to lock his desk. As he had never forgotten, not for a single day in nine years, to lock up himself.

I put the photograph carefully back in the drawer, not daring to pry further. There was no way I could ask to look at it again without disclosing I had looked already. No way of knowing if that drawer would ever be left unlocked again.

Why locked away? Till I was fifteen years old and summoned the nerve to ask him, he never told me where she was buried.

The leaves on the trees in the orchard, like the leaves on the bonfire, were brown, and even the thick, reluctant smoke, trailing across a background of brown woodland, had an amber tinge to it. So that that scene, framed in the study window, was almost, itself, like an old, lost photograph. My father, caught unawares, as if I had him squarely in my sights. Talking to the gardener. Stepping back to avoid coils of autumnal smoke.

That Christmas I asked for a camera. Four years later he bought me one.

When I was ten years old, the following autumn, he took me on an aeroplane for a weekend in France. We could have gone by the traditional method, train and boat, but I know now that trains, which always evoke for me mournful journeys to and from boarding school, must have evoked for him even more mournful journeys – out of Waterloo to Southampton, and then again on the French side. Entrainings. Detrainings. Pass and warrant. So, in 1928, apart from reasons of ostentation and novelty, we flew. From Croydon to a military airfield somewhere north of Paris, in a specially chartered Armstrong-Whitworth Argosy, a monstrous, vibrant biplane, with an open cockpit, three engines, fifteen or so other passengers and a cabin interior which would now seem both absurdly plush and prehistoric.

Perhaps that aeroplane trip was only a bribe for my good behaviour in the days that immediately followed. We were there to mark the ten-year-old Armistice, and somehow a public truce had to descend on our own ten-year enmity. I had to play the dutiful and admiring son of my good soldier father. The bribe must have been effective. The Armistice meant nothing to me. And being in a foreign country for the first time was nothing to being several thousand feet up in the air, from where, in fact, one country looked much like another and the demarcations of maps and atlases seemed suddenly a sham.

I wish I could remember more of those three days in France:
a turreted, mansarded French hotel; an old French matron, with a distinct moustache, who must have been employed to look after the children of wealthier guests; many men, like my father, wearing dark coats and medals; an occasion in a big square before a cathedral, with bugles and rain; drives to some inexplicable places in the middle of muddy fields (there was much talk about mud – ‘the mud’). And a sense, yes, in spite of myself, that he was pleased with me, and I, in return, was perversely proud of him, that in that strange, ceremonial and rigid atmosphere he was actually unfreezing and making some sort of bid to be like a man I might know. Had I been older I might have thought: Is it possible, is it possible, then? That he means to come out of mourning?

In the evenings a little hotel band would strike up its medley of what must have been mildly jazzed up versions of old trench songs. He watched the dancing like some old buffer tolerating the ways of a frivolous young world.

I don’t even remember the name of the hotel. Or the names of those places we drove to in the rain. My thoughts were on that astonishing aerial journey and the equally astonishing one we would have to make back. And he must have somehow appreciated this. As we waited to board for the return trip, he slipped away momentarily and reappeared with the hint of a gleam in his eye which was not, for once, a piece of public play-acting but a genuine, faltering attempt at fatherliness. I don’t know where this fondness came from, but it seems, as I recall it, that there was something valedictory about it, as if he knew, even then, how the gap between us would only widen further.

A moment later a steward, with a knowing look, ushered us through a doorway, and we followed him across the tarmac to the waiting plane. Standing by its ponderous, uptilted fuselage and dressed in the outlandish costume, goggles and all, which was then
de rigueur
for airline crew, was no less a person than
the pilot. And in no time, while Dad waited below, this same fancy-dress pilot had somehow whisked me up behind the huge, bristling, forward engine and sat me down amidst an array of instruments which would now seem impossibly archaic but which seemed to me then like the very stuff of the future.