Rates of Exchange (5 page)

The flight-handler waving his bats to bring the plane into parking position has, beneath his great headphoned helmet the flat face of a Tartar. The big bird still flies on the skyline; on the
roof of the terminal the people continue to wave, wave, wave. Lev Pric is not visible. On the intercom, the martial music ceases: ‘Resti stuli, noki fitygryfici,’ says a stewardess over
the apparatus. The long rows of passengers, who have been sitting in great quietness, stir very slightly. On the tarmac, the Tartar waves his bats; then he crosses them over his chest in a final
gesture. There is one last movement from the plane, one last roar of the engine; then it halts. Inside there is stillness, but outside movement: the armed men move forward to surround the plane,
and the blue buses begin, very slowly, to move away from the door marked
INVAT
and come toward them; a flight of steps trundles forward. A great red burst fills the front of
the cabin; the stewardess has pushed open the forward door. Unclicking his lap-strap, Dr Petworth, a cultural visitor, begins to rise and reach upward to the laced racks for his hand luggage,
staring down the aisle that will lead him towards his new city.

II

Now this Dr Petworth whom we see peering out through the globed windows of Comflug 155, as it halts on the apron at Slaka airport, is not, it had better be admitted, a person of
any great interest at all. Indeed, as brilliant, batik-clad, magical realist novelist Katya Princip will remark, somewhat later in this narrative, he is just not a character in the world historical
sense. He is a man who is styleless; he wears an old safari suit, its pockets packed with pens and paper, Christmas present socks of a tedious rhomboidal design, and flat earth shoes; there is a
certain baldness to his head where, in a better world, hair would be. He is white and male, forty and married, bourgeois and British – all items to anyone’s contemporary discredit, as
he knows perfectly well. He is a man to whom life has been kind, and he has paid the price for it. No military adventures enter his history, and he has struggled for no causes, taken no part in any
revolutions. When the world went to war in the forties, he lay in a cot and played with soft toys; when the young in the fifties rebelled over Suez and Hungary, he played cricket for his school.
When the students of the sixties saw the dream of a new Utopia, he quietly completed his doctoral thesis on the great vowel-shift; when the pill came and the sexual world was transformed, he
promptly married a small dark girl met on a camping holiday. His service has been all on that most commonplace of battlefields, the domestic front; and he has the baggy eyes and saddened heart to
prove it. He has known the Freudian hungers, received, at the age of twenty, a sound education in complicated misery from a bouncy-breasted Swedish girl friend, which still haunts his middle life,
felt the desire for change and complication, but never satisfied it. He teaches; that is what he does. And his sole interest here is that he has also travelled much, for the British Council, and
has had diarrhoea for that excellent cultural organization in almost all parts of the civilized or part-civilized world.

And it is as a cultural traveller that he now sits here, strapped in an aisle seat of an Ilyushin on the airport at Slaka, waiting to enter the world outside. He has left behind him, two time
zones back, under different birdlife and a different ideology, a habitat of sorts: a small office in a Bradford college, lined with books, where he teaches the vowel-shift and the speech-act to
students of many nationalities, including his own; a small, fairly modern brick house of faintly rising property values on a bus-route convenient both for the college and the city; in the house, a
quantity of contemporary, which is to say already out-of-date, furniture; and a dark wife, contemporary too, a woman of waning affections, bleakly hungry for a revelation, evidently disillusioned,
in these therapeutic times, with . . . well, what? It is a little shaming to say that he does not quite know, for his instincts are decent; but with him, perhaps, or the role of helpmeet-slave, or
the patriarchial enslavement of women in society, or the incapacity of the marital orgasm to make all life endlessly interesting, or her own ageing, or his absences, both symbolic and actual; a
small sad wife in Laura Ashley dresses, who writes many letters to undisclosed friends, and belongs to Weightwatchers, who reads horoscopes in old newspapers, paints paintings of no recognizable,
or at least recognized, merit in the lumber room, drinks solitary glasses of sherry at odd hours of the day or night, and sits for long hours in a sunchair in the garden, as if waiting – or
so it appears to Petworth, as he peers, when he is there and not here, through the curtains of his high upstairs study at the lonely figure in the lounger – to be a widow, who makes him feel
guilty when, as then, he is present, and quite as guilty when, as now, he is not.

He has also left behind, under another sky, in pouring rain, an England in fits of Royal Wedding. For this is the very late summer of 1981, one of the lesser years, a time of recession and
unemployment, decay and deindustrialization. The age of Sado-Monetarism has begun; in the corridors of power, they are naming the money supply after motorways, M1 and M2 and M3, to try to map its
mysteries better. The bombs explode in Ulster, the factories close, but it has been a ceremonial summer; the patriotic bunting has flown, the Royal couple whose images are everywhere have walked
the aisle. The nuptials, it seems, have been celebrated much by foreigners, come for the season to enjoy the splendour and stability of British traditions, and the collapse of the coin. Shards and
fragments, chaos and Babel; so summer London has seemed to Petworth as, up from the provinces the previous night, he taxied through it on the way to his hotel near Victoria. In Oxford Street,
bannered and decorated, where the kerbside touts sell laurelled mugs with Royals on them and small signs that say ‘Oxford Street,’ the shoppers in the busy stores are mostly Arabs,
buying twelve of everything, evidently furnishing the desert. By Buckingham Palace, the hi-tech cameras snapping the Changing of the Guard are mostly held by Japanese – reasonably enough,
since their skills made them in the first place. In the lobby of the Victoria hotel, the clerk speaks only Portuguese, and that not well; burnouses are mingling with stetsons, Hausa with Batak. In
the high third-floor bedroom, no bigger than a wardrobe, where Petworth unpacks, the electric kettle which would once have been a maid offers instructions for use in six languages, none of them
his. In the street, black whores in sunglasses and short tunics laugh in doorways, vibrators prod their plastic rocketry up in the sex-shop windows, and a troubled, chaotic noise of shouting people
and police sirens sounds as he goes to dine on an American-style hamburger.

In the morning, after a breakfast of teabag and Coffeemate, London seems a fancy fiction, a disorderly parade of styles. There are Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Pierre Cardin ties in the Lancias
halted at the traffic lights; meanwhile youths pass on the pavement with pink cropheads and safety-pins stuck through their ears. Green-headed girls with red-patch faces in clown’s pantaloons
and parachute suits walk along; a young black with his hair in a string bag skates by in headphones, with wires going down into his clothes, listening to his own insides. ‘We’ll take
more care of you,’ say the BA posters at Victoria, where Petworth gets on the single-decker Airbus; chadored Iranian women sit there, carrying designer dresses in plastic bags from
Harrod’s, beneath advertisements for home pregnancy testing, computer dating, the joys of being a personal assistant to an assistant person. The bus pulls out into Sunday London streets, past
pizza places, topless sauna parlours, unisex jeans outlets. Vandalism marks the spaces, graffiti the walls, where the council pulls down old substandard housing, to replace it with new substandard
housing. ‘Fly poundstretcher to Australia,’ cry the posters by the flyover, shining with sweatless girls in bikinis, drinking drinks with ice in in other people’s bright sunshine;
rain falls over factories which stand empty with broken windows. Beer advertisements display half-timbered cottages and old grey churches, the England of the heart; rubbish and abandoned cars
litter the hard shoulder of the motorway out to the airport.

And at Heathrow, that city in the desert, the summer’s stylistic pluralism has chaos added. The late summer tourists who have fed the economy are massing to go home; the assistant air
traffic controllers, calling for their annual gold benison, have gone on strike. In the upper air, planes bleep for attention and, finding none, go elsewhere; below, on the wet pavements, a few
strikers sit outside the European terminal, their legs out in front of them, holding a sign saying
OFFICIAL PICKET
, watched by one policeman. In front of Petworth, the
automatic doors open, then close on his foot; inside the great sounding terminal, the summer spectacle is held in a state of suspended animation. Some flights are cancelled, yet more delayed, yet
more uncertain; the crowds are gathered in confusion. Germans and Swedes, French and Dutch, Arabs and Indians, Americans and Japanese, sit on chairs, lie on benches, wheel suitcases round on small
fold-up wheels, push airport carts here and there, laden with bags from Lord John and Harrod’s, Marks & Spencer and Simpson, wear jeans, wear tartan pants, wave tickets, quarrel at
check-in counters, wear yashmaks, wear kimonos, buy
Playboy
, buy
La Stampa
, wear beards, wear Afros, wear uncut hair under turbans, buy
Airport
, buy
Ulysses
, request
The History Man
but cannot get it, buy cassette recorders, model guardsmen, Lady Di pens from W. H. Smith, hold dolls, carry tennis rackets in Adidas bags, struggle with backpacks, hold up
wardrobe bags, chatter into red telephones of modern design devised to make conversation impossible, wear safari suits, wear flowing robes, wear furs, wear headbands, wear tarbooshes, wear
cagoules, sit on stools, eye girls, comb curls, tote small babies, hug old ladies, furiously smoke Gauloises or Players, gather in crowds in hallways or on stairs, depart, led by blue stewardesses
carrying large clipboards, in the direction of aircraft, and then, led by yellow stewardesses carrying small clipboards, back into the lounge again. Meanwhile, amid the post-Bauhaus chairs, the
sounding spaces, the crying children, the meaningless announcements, a few Indian ladies in baggy pants, the only stable residents of the transient place, sweep the floors and empty the flowing
ashtrays with an air of resigned and stoical patience.

Pushing hopelessly through the crowd around the BA check-in desk, Petworth manages to show his Comflug ticket. The girl behind the counter, busy fending off passengers, has no promises at all to
offer; but, strangely, she does tag his blue suitcase with a tag that says SLK, feeds it into a metal maw that tastes and then digests it, and hands him a boarding pass, to go on to Immigration.
Near the channel is the window of a bank; Petworth halts for a moment, wondering whether to get vloskan, but if he does not fly he will not need it, and if he does he will be met. He passes on,
through the bottleneck of Immigration, into the stateless, duty-free hinterland beyond. ‘Say Hello to the Good Buys at Heathrow,’ declare the bright yellow signs on the shining
duty-free shop, packed with glossy goods at their special prices. He looks at the long swatches of tartan and tweed, the Dunhill lighters and Jaeger scarves; he picks up a basket and wanders
beneath the anti-theft mirrors, inspecting the bright bottles of Scotch and London Dry Gin, the long cartons of Players and Dunhills, the cans of Three Nuns and Player’s Navy Cut –
elegant British institutions laid out here, much perhaps like the strike itself, to spare the lazy traveller the need ever to step out beyond the small country of the airport in order to find them.
The loudspeakers do not loudspeak; wandering, with nothing to do except buy, Petworth buys – a bottle of Teacher’s whisky, a long thin carton of Benson and Hedges’ cigarettes,
delivered in a sealed bag he must not open until he gets onto the plane he may never get onto, the goodies of travel, which travel itself, that ultimate neurosis, makes us need.

Later, Petworth leans against a convenient bar, a pimplesized English Scotch at his elbow, watching the flight-boards flutter desperately, the television information screens judder and go blank,
as they rake the codes inside themselves for signs that are more than redundancy, waiting for his plane to take off or not, as the case may be. On the digital clock, flight-time comes and goes;
Petworth orders another Scotch and finds himself caught by an old and nameless fear – the fear of being trapped here, for eternity, in the unassigned, stateless space between all the
countries, condemned to live for ever in a cosmopolitan nowhere, on clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches, duty-free whisky, Tiptree’s jam. It is a fate he knows he deserves; he is a man who has spent
his life circling around and away from domestic interiors, hovering between home, where he sits and thinks, and abroad, where he talks and drinks. Travel is a manic cycle, with abroad the manic
phase, home the depressive; there is some strange adrenalin that draws him into the fascination and the void of foreignness, with its plurality of sensation, its sudden spaces and emptinesses. He
travels, he thinks, for strangeness, disorientation, multiplication and variation of the self; yet he is not a good traveller, abhorring tours and guides and cathedrals, hating cafés and
beaches, resenting brochures and itineraries, preferring food in his room to exposed meals in public restaurants. He is a man given to sitting silently in the one good armchair in dull hotel
bedrooms, smoking, drinking, thinking, improving his lectures, analysing, without conclusion, his relationships, inspecting what in some quarters might pass for his soul, peeping through blinds or
curtains at the street-scene below, and waiting – for a happy interruption, a small invitation to work or entertainment, a step outside beyond the world of depression and anxiety, the world
in which he feels that he, in this case, is not the case.