The Complete Short Stories (47 page)

So many friends had
invited her to spend Christmas Day with them that she couldn’t remember how
many. Kind faces, smiling, ‘You’ll be lonely without Moira … What are your
plans for Christmas?’ Georgie (her so-called boyfriend): ‘Look, you must come
to us. We’d love you to come to us for Christmas. My kid brother and sister…’

Cynthia felt terribly
empty, ‘Actually, I’m going back to England.’

‘So soon? Before
Christmas?’

She packed her things,
gave away all the stuff she didn’t want. She had a one-way air ticket,
Sydney—London, precisely on Christmas Day. She would spend Christmas Day on the
plane. She thought all the time of all the beauty and blossoming lifestyle she
was leaving behind her, the sea, the beaches, the shops, the mountains, but now
it was like leaning over an old wall, dreaming. England was her destination,
and really her destiny. She had never had a full adult life in England. Georgie
saw her off on the plane. He was going for a new life, too, to the blue hills
and wonderful colours of Brisbane, where his only uncle needed him on his
Queensland sheep farm. For someone else, Cynthia thought, he won’t be empty.
Far from it. But he is empty for me.

She would not be alone
in England. Her parents, divorced, were in their early fifties. Her brother,
still unmarried, was a City accountant. An aunt had died recently; Cynthia was
the executor of her will. She would not be alone in England, or in any way
wondering what to do.

The plane was practically empty.

‘Nobody flies on
Christmas Day,’ said the hostess who served the preliminary drinks. ‘At least,
very few. The rush is always before Christmas, and then there’s always a full
flight after Boxing Day till New Year when things begin to normalize.’ She was
talking to a young man who had remarked on the number of empty seats. ‘I’m
spending Christmas on the plane because I’d nowhere else to go. I thought it
might be amusing.’

‘It will be amusing,’
said the pretty hostess. ‘We’ll make it fun.’

The young man looked
pleased. He was a few seats in front of Cynthia. He looked around, saw Cynthia
and smiled. In the course of the next hour he made it known to this small world
in the air that he was a teacher returning from an exchange programme.

The plane had left
Sydney at after three in the afternoon of Christmas Day. There remained over
nine hours to Bangkok, their refuelling stop.

Luxuriously occupying
two vacant front seats of the compartment was a middle-aged couple fully intent
on their reading: he, a copy of
Time;
she, a tattered paperback of Agatha
Christie’s:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

A thin, tall man with
glasses passed the couple on the way to the lavatories. On his emergence he
stopped, pointed at the paperback and said, ‘Agatha Christie! You’re reading
Agatha Christie. She’s a serial killer. On your dark side you yourself are a
serial killer.’ The man beamed triumphantly and made his way to a seat behind
the couple.

A steward appeared and
was called by the couple, both together. ‘Who’s that man?’ — ‘Did you hear what
he said? He said I am a serial killer.’

‘Excuse me, sir, is
there something wrong?’ the steward demanded of the man with glasses.

‘Just making an
observation,’ the man replied.

The steward disappeared
into the front of the plane, and reappeared with a uniformed officer, a
co-pilot, who had in his hand a sheet of paper, evidently a list of passengers.
He glanced at the seat number of the bespectacled offender, then at him: ‘Professor
Sygmund Schatt?’

‘Sygmund spelt with a
y,’ precised the professor. ‘Nothing wrong. I was merely making a professional
observation.’

‘Keep them to yourself
in future.’

‘I will not be silenced,’
said Sygmund Schatt. ‘Plot and scheme against me as you may.

The co-pilot went to the
couple, bent towards them, and whispered something reassuring.

‘You see!’ said Schatt.

The pilot walked up the
aisle towards Cynthia. He sat down beside her.

‘A complete nut. They do
cause anxiety on planes. But maybe he’s harmless. He’d better be. Are you
feeling lonely?’

Cynthia looked at the
officer. He was good-looking, fairly young, young enough. ‘Just a bit,’ she
said.

‘First class is empty,’
said the officer. ‘Like to come there?’

‘I don’t want to —’Come
with me,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Cynthia. What’s yours?’

‘Tom. I’m one of the
pilots. There are three of us today so far. Another’s coming on at Bangkok.’

‘That makes me feel
safe.’

It fell about that at Bangkok, when
everyone else had got off the plane to stretch their legs for an hour and a
half, the passengers had gone to walk around the departments of the Duty Free
shop, buy presents ‘from Bangkok’ of a useless nature such as dolls and silk
ties, to drink coffee and other beverages with biscuits and pastries; Tom and
Cynthia stayed on. They made love in a beautifully appointed cabin with real
curtains in the windows — unrealistic yellow flowers on a white background.
Then they talked about each other, and made love again.

‘Christmas Day,’ he
said. ‘I’ll never forget this one.’

‘Nor me,’ she said.

They had half an hour
before the crew and passengers would rejoin them. One of the tankers which had
refuelled the plane could be seen moving off.

Cynthia luxuriated in
the washroom with its toilet waters and toothbrushes. She made herself fresh
and pretty, combed her well-cut casque of dark hair. When she got back to the
cabin he was returning from somewhere, looking young, smiling. He gave her a
box. ‘Christmas present.

It contained a set of
plaster Christmas crib figures, ‘made in China’. A kneeling Virgin and St
Joseph, the baby Jesus and a shoemaker with his bench, a woodcutter, an
unidentifiable monk, two shepherds and two angels.

Cynthia arranged them on
the table in front of her.

‘Do you believe in it?’
she said.

‘Well, I believe in
Christmas.’

‘Yes, I, too. It means a
new life. I don’t see any mother and father really kneeling beside the baby’s
cot worshipping it, do you?’

‘No, that part’s
symbolic.’

‘These are simply
lovely,’ she said touching her presents. ‘Made of real stuff, not plastic.’

‘Let’s celebrate,’ he
said. He disappeared and returned with a bottle of champagne.

‘How expensive …’

‘Don’t worry. It flows
on First.’

‘Will you be going on
duty?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I clock
in tomorrow.

They made love again,
high up in the air.

After that, Cynthia
walked back to her former compartment. Professor Sygmund Schatt was having an
argument with a hostess about his food which had apparently been pre-ordered,
and now, in some way, did not come up to scratch. Cynthia sat in her old seat
and, taking a postcard from the pocket in front of her, wrote to her cousin Moira.
‘Having a lovely time at 35,000 feet. I have started a new life. Love XX
Cynthia.’ She then felt this former seat was part of the old life, and went
back again to first.

In the night Tom came
and sat beside her.

‘You didn’t eat much,’
he said.

‘How did you know?’

‘I noticed.’

‘I didn’t feel up to the
Christmas dinner,’ she said.

‘Would you like
something now?’

‘A turkey sandwich. Let
me go and ask the hostess.’

‘Leave it to me.

Tom told her he was now in the final stages
of a divorce. His wife had no doubt had a hard time of it, his job taking him
away so much. But she could have studied something. She wouldn’t learn, hated
to learn.

And he was lonely. He
asked her to marry him, and she wasn’t in the least surprised. But she said, ‘Oh,
Tom, you don’t know me.

‘I think I do.’

‘We don’t know each
other.’

‘Well, I think we should
do.’

She said she would think
about it. She said she would cancel her plans and come to spend some time in
his flat in London at Camden Town.

‘I’ll have my time off
within three days — by the end of the week,’ he said.

‘God, is he all right,
is he reliable?’ she said to herself. ‘Am I safe with him? Who is he?’ But she
was really carried away.

Around four in the
morning she woke and found him beside her. He said, ‘It’s Boxing Day now. You’re
a lovely girl.’

She had always imagined
she was, but had always, so far, fallen timid when with men. She had
experienced two brief love affairs in Australia, neither memorable. All alone
in the first-class compartment with Tom, high in the air — this was reality,
something to be remembered, the start of a new life.

‘I’ll give you the key of the flat,’ he
said. ‘Go straight there. Nobody will disturb you. I’ve been sharing it with my
young brother. But he’s away for about six weeks I should say. In fact he’s
doing time. He got mixed up in a football row and he’s in for grievous bodily
harm and affray. Only, the bodily harm wasn’t so grievous. He was just in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Anyway, the flat’s free for at least six weeks.’

At the airport, despite the early hour of
ten past five in the morning, there was quite a crowd to meet the plane. Having
retrieved her luggage, Cynthia pushed her trolley towards the exit. She had no
expectation whatsoever that anyone would be there to meet her.

Instead, there was her
father and his wife, Elaine; there was her mother with her husband Bill;
crowding behind them at the barrier were her brother and his girlfriend, her
cousin Moira’s cousin by marriage, and a few other men and women whom she did
not identify, accompanied, too, by some children of about ten to fourteen. In
fact her whole family, known and unknown, had turned out to meet Cynthia. How
had they known the hour of her arrival? She had promised, only, to ring them
when she got to England. ‘Your cousin Moira,’ said her father, ‘told us your
flight. We wanted you home, you know that.’

She went first to her
mother’s house. It was now Boxing Day but they had saved Christmas Day for her
arrival. All the Christmas rituals were fully observed. The tree and the
presents — dozens of presents for Cynthia. Her brother and his girl with some
other cousins came over for Christmas dinner.

When they came to open
the presents, Cynthia brought out from her luggage a number of packages she had
brought from Australia for the occasion. Among them, labelled for her brother,
was a plaster Nativity set, made in China.

‘What a nice one,’ said
her brother. ‘One of the best I’ve ever seen, and not plastic.’

‘I got it in Moira’s
boutique,’ Cynthia said. ‘She has very special things.

She talked a lot about
Australia, its marvels. Then, at tea-time, they got down to her aunt’s will, of
which Cynthia was an executor. Cynthia felt happy, in her element, as an
executor to a will, for she was normally dreamy, not legally minded at all and
now she felt the flattery of her aunt’s confidence in her. The executorship
gave her some sort of authority in the family. She was now arranging, too, to
spend New Year with her father and his second clan.

Her brother had set out
the Nativity figures on a table. ‘I don’t know, she said, ‘why the mother and
the father are kneeling beside the child; it seems so unreal.’ She didn’t hear
what the others said, if anything, in response to this observation. She only
felt a strange stirring of memory. There was to be a flat in Camden Town, but
she had no idea of the address.

‘The plane stopped at
Bangkok,’ she told them.

‘Did you get off?’

‘Yes, but you know you
can’t get out of the airport. There was a coffee bar and a lovely shop.’

It was later that day,
when she was alone, unpacking, in her room, that she rang the airline.

‘No,’ said a girl’s
voice, ‘I don’t think there are curtains with yellow flowers in the first-class
cabins. I’ll have to ask. Was there any particular reason …?’

‘There was a co-pilot
called Tom. Can you give me his full name please? I have an urgent message for
him.’

‘What flight did you
say?’

Cynthia told her not
only the flight but her name and original seat number in Business Class.

After a long wait, the
voice spoke again, ‘Yes, you are one of the arrivals.’

‘I know that,’ said
Cynthia.

‘I can’t give you
information about our pilots, I’m afraid. But there was no pilot on the plane
called Tom … Thomas, no. The stewards in Business were Bob, Andrew, Sheila
and Lilian.’

‘No pilot called Tom?
About thirty-five, tall, brown hair. I met him. He lives in Camden Town.’
Cynthia gripped the phone. She looked round at the reality of the room.

‘The pilots are
Australian; I can tell you that but no more. I’m sorry. They’re our personnel.’

‘It was a memorable flight.
Christmas Day. I’ll never forget that one, said Cynthia.

‘Thank you. We
appreciate that,’ said the voice. It seemed thousands of miles away.

The First Year of
My Life

I was born on the first day of the second
month of the last year of the First World War, a Friday. Testimony abounds that
during the first year of my life I never smiled. I was known as the baby whom
nothing and no one could make smile. Everyone who knew me then has told me so.
They tried very hard, singing and bouncing me up and down, jumping around,
pulling faces. Many times I was told this later by my family and their friends;
but, anyway, I knew it at the time.

You will shortly be
hearing of that new school of psychology, or maybe you have heard of it
already, which after long and far-adventuring research and experiment has
established that all of the young of the human species are born omniscient.
Babies, in their waking hours, know everything that is going on everywhere in
the world; they can tune in to any conversation they choose, switch on to any
scene. We have all experienced this power. It is only after the first year that
it was brainwashed out of us; for it is demanded of us by our immediate
environment that we grow to be of use to it in a practical way. Gradually, our
know-all brain-cells are blacked out although traces remain in some individuals
in the form of ESP, and in the adults of some primitive tribes.