The Travellers and Other Stories (12 page)

Yesterday I had another small altercation with Arthur. He said Alice had to go home early yesterday she was so upset.

‘Why must you keep coming, Howard?' he said. He spoke in a harsh whisper, nothing like his ordinary gentle voice, and he looked so angry. Arthur who has been my friend and colleague for so long.

I tried to speak quietly too.

‘My life is very empty without Alice, Arthur,' I said. ‘Without my job. My research gives me a feeling of usefulness, of being still alive. I need to come to the library.'

Arthur folded his arms and looked me in the eye.

‘So you don't come here to see Alice and Philip then.'

I have never known Arthur to be sarcastic before. I couldn't lie.

‘Yes I do come to see Alice. And Meakin. I do. I can't help it, Arthur. But I also come for the birds.'

Arthur stood with his arms folded across his Fair Isle slipover. His little face had a cold, sceptical look which I found suddenly very irritating.

‘I can't do nothing, Arthur.' Now I was shouting and the people over at the newspaper and periodicals table were looking at us. Gail's head appeared from behind one of her hessian screens. ‘I can't just carry on as if nothing has happened to me,' I went on, and then I said, and I suppose I shouldn't have, ‘We're different, Arthur, you and I. I'm not like you, Arthur.'

Arthur blinked and drew in his neck like a tortoise.

Arthur has his own love story.

It happened a few years ago: a girl who came to the library for a while, looking for information about the local hatting industry in the nineteenth century. She was not pretty and she always came in alone and perhaps those two things together were what made Arthur think he would succeed. Or perhaps he simply believed after a time—after helping her every day over all those weeks—that he had become important, even indispensable, to her. Anyway she stopped coming one day. She had finished her study I suppose and no longer needed to use the library, or Arthur, anymore.

Arthur never mentioned her afterwards. For a long time whenever the big oak and glass doors at the front of the building opened he would look up from whatever he was doing to see if it was her coming back. But he never tried to find her, he never went looking for her, he refused ever to talk about her and he made no attempt to fill the hole she had left in his life. He remained quiet and self-contained. He carried out all his duties with the same brisk efficiency as before. He still came out with me at lunch-time to buy a sandwich from the shop across the road. He had the same sandwich he'd always had, egg mayonnaise with chopped onion. He wore the same pair of brown trousers, the same green jumper with the short zip at the neck which he alternated with his two slipovers, the plain navy one, and the one with a Fair Isle design on a chestnut background.

‘Talk to me, Arthur,' I'd say from time to time and he knew exactly what I meant but he always ignored me and would straightaway start up a conversation about something else entirely.

He disapproves of my behaviour now, I can see that, I can understand it. But I have always believed that he would feel better if he could find some outlet for his misery.

‘I do come for the birds, Arthur,' I said now, as gently as I could, trying to patch things up. ‘Not just for them, it's true, but I do come for them too.'

Arthur said nothing. He pursed his lips and date-stamped my books. He charged me 30p for the microfilm copies I'd made that day of various aeroplane accidents reported in the newspapers, and renewed
The Flight of Eagles.

A big-ish eagle beats its wings twenty-four times a minute.

I practise mostly in the evenings, using the kitchen clock.

I have had only one reply to my letters, from Manchester. It was very short; the tone was lofty and sarcastic and full of scorn and I have thrown it away. No one else has replied.

No one else has replied so today I am going to go anyway and make the attempt.

For a big part of the journey from Euston, I don't think about Alice once. I think only about what I'm going to be doing when I arrive. I practise my breathing, the slow counting. I feel light, optimistic, excited. I don't think of Alice at all except once when we stop at Acton Town. Outside on the platform, through the scratched window glass of the train I see a strong, stocky man in a dark suit holding a child in a blue duffel coat by the hand.

Meakin.

My breathing buckles, my counting stops. No, not Meakin. Of course not Meakin. Meakin is miles and miles away in the library with Alice and Arthur and Gail. I take several long breaths and begin counting again, and continue for the remainder of the journey.

I have mentioned the accidents.

I first came across them about three weeks ago. Two of them, only a few days apart, one reported in
The Times
, the other in
The Telegraph.
The first involved a Lockheed Electra which took off from Boston airport and collided with a flock of starlings. All sixty-two people on board died in the crash. In the second, a Vickers Viscount struck a flock of whistling swans over Glasgow airport. The plane went into an uncontrolled dive, all seventeen people on board perished.

I found more cases on the library's microfilm, going back over the last five years, involving woodpigeons and oyster-catchers, rooks, Canada geese, gulls. Take-off and landing are the most dangerous times.

The accidents trouble me, I can't stop thinking about them. I dream about them. The torn metal and broken beaks and drifting feathers and human corpses falling out of the sky.

I have never flown.

I have never set foot, even, in an airport terminal, let alone on the glittering tarmac of the runway.

There is a section of the outer fence made of wire, a temporary barrier adjacent to some building work. Pretty soon I have made a man-hole sized opening and climb through.

The airport is vast. Unbelievably noisy. I hadn't counted on it being so noisy and busy and big. As far as my eye can see the flat ground is dotted all over with aircraft, either about to take off, or just having landed. I position myself about a hundred yards from the end of the nearest runway. After a while, the starlings come, moving in quick, skittery patches across the sky: a murmuration of starlings. If they are making any sound, I can't hear it. The only noises are the screams of the planes overhead, the rumble of the nearest plane waiting to move—a huge, barrelchested Lufthansa monster.

I close my eyes to shut out the noise of the planes; to concentrate fully on what I am doing. Very slowly, rhythmically, I begin flapping my arms and counting. One potato, two potato. Very slow: po-ta-to. I have practised this at home a thousand times, with and without the video. When I count, and flap my arms, it gives exactly the right number of wing beats per minute. Twenty-four. The same as an eagle. Twenty-four mean menacing wingbeats. Eighteen potato. Nineteen. Inside the sleeves of my parka my arms feel heavy and there's a slow burn starting at the top where they are pinioned to the rest of my body. The whole thing is both exhausting and soothing, calming and at the same time extremely exciting. High up the starlings swoop and dive, very nervy, more like a shoal of fish or a swarm of bees, a dark panicky mass. And now they see me, these birds, or one of them does and the rest follow. Or they have somehow sensed the danger I present, and by whatever strange communal intelligence it is that governs their behaviour, they all make one last dive, change shape again, rise up and are gone. The plane lifts itself safely into the clear, open sky.

I shake my head and chuckle, and experience—for the first time in months—a profound sense of calm; of thorough and complete satisfaction, of something close to contentment. All around me, now that the plane and the birds have gone, the busy airport seems suddenly silent—lulled—and I stand there, grinning; wrapped in the quiet celebration of the moment. If there are loud noises I don't hear them. The only sound is behind me somewhere, a dull, remote kind of thrumming I cannot immediately identify.

Only when I turn do I see the long line of men in luminous yellow jackets, fanning out across the runway, jogging towards me, the thunderous tattoo of their heavy boots on the tarmac becoming steadily louder and more furious.

There are perhaps a dozen of them and they all look very stern; a few of them start swearing at me when they are still some distance away, one of them refers to me loudly as
the prick in the parka.
They have no interest at all in what I try to tell them about the success of my experiment. I am seized, roughly handled, frog-marched, half-dragged back to the terminal. Arrested.

And the strange thing is, that amid the clamour and the shouting and the gruff commands and the painful snapping-on of the handcuffs, all I can think of is Arthur. Arthur with his pale blinking eyes and his broken heart; Arthur with his delicate brand of silent restraint, his decorum, his sweet quiet dignity. Arthur who has been my friend for twenty years, who over the past few months has come to think the worst of me. And as the police van begins to speed away from the airport, I find myself wondering what Arthur will say when I tell him about this afternoon—if he will purse his lips and click his tongue with irritation and disbelief and carry on stamping his books as if he wants nothing more to do with me. Or if, in fact, he will look up at me with a weary sigh, and give his head a small indulgent shake, and suggest a sandwich.

IN SKOKIE

GOOD
, I
THOUGHT
, when the horrible old thing disappeared.

No more having to watch it come creeping up the street, low-slung and close to the ground, slow and heavy and brown, eighteen foot nose to tail like some gigantic salt-water crocodile; Myron's hat just visible above the steering wheel.

Myron was beside himself, you should have seen him.

For weeks he went round distributing flyers and taping up posters, the way people do when they have lost a cat or a child. Sometimes he'd just stand and stare at the empty driveway. He couldn't believe what the police said, that they had no leads, that all they could do was make out their report and let us know if it turned up.

These days he's much better. He's been going through the automobile classifieds circling anything he likes the sound of. There's a dark blue Buick station wagon he fancies, a cream Oldsmobile saloon. He's stopped going out with his flyers, his posters; when he comes in at five-thirty he eats his dinner and then he goes to the den and turns on the TV and after a half-hour he's asleep. He's like the old Myron again.

Me, I just can't seem to settle. I keep thinking about that old Chevrolet, slouching down the street, past Walgreens, past Dunkin' Donuts. Rolling west across the desert, taking in the sights: Mesa Verde, the Hoover Dam, Vegas. Nosing north maybe, across the border, into the cool air of the Rockies.

Myron's car, making a break for it.

THE VISITORS

THEY WERE BOTH
smaller than I'd expected, especially Mr. Dickens, though I suppose all men are puny compared with Dr. de Vitre. He towered above them, pumping their hands, smiling and sweating and already babbling away in a stream of excited chatter. He waved them into his study and they went in, Reverend Danby following. Through the partly open door, I saw the Gillow cabinet in the corner where the doctor keeps the instruments of coercion. Also, on the mantlepiece, the hateful little clock, brown and humpbacked, that chimes the hour with a clear, ringing sweetness, like the notes struck on a glass by a silver fork.

Afterwards, I cut out the report of the visit from the newspaper, and pasted it into the visitors' book:

‘Mr. Charles Dickens with his friend the artist Mr. Wilkie Collins after a tour of the Lake District arrived from Carlisle last Saturday at the King's Arms Hotel. On Sunday, the two gentlemen, accompanied by the Reverend F.B. Danby, visited the Asylum and were shown its principal departments and made many enquiries as to its management. On the following day the two gentlemen left for Doncaster.'

It is of course rather incomplete. It does not mention, for instance, that the cook at the King's Arms was blubbing half of Sunday night because Mr. Dickens sent his entire dinner back to the kitchen untouched—tongue, chops, lemon pudding, everything. It seems his visit here took away his appetite.

I'd thought perhaps some of us might have been introduced when they arrived, that the doctor might have organised some sort of welcoming party in the hall before beginning his tour of the facilities. Myself and some of the other nurses and female attendants perhaps, but we were not asked, and after I'd watched the men withdraw, I took myself off upstairs, it being early and the women being still locked in their dormitories. The quiet up in the galleries and bedrooms is remarkable here, and that morning when I went up everything was as peaceful as ever. Only the soft, intermittent hooting from Ruby punctuated the quiet, and the whisper of Edith's nails on the floorboards.

I went in as usual to check on Violet Bowl, who had at that time been with us for a little less than a month. She had arrived one dreary Monday morning, without her wits, without a name, and, it seemed then, without a voice. It was I who first called her Violet, on account of the fine, branching veins that come creeping out from her spine, just beneath the white skin at the back of her neck. They are dark and purplish and I looked at them while I washed her for the first time in the bath, and again when I buttoned her into a clean gown. The rest of her is so pale and clear, the veins are very striking. I said to her, ‘I will call you Violet.' She has never objected and that is what she has become.

Her other name, that of Bowl, derives from a strange incident in the dining hall a few days afterwards.

I have always liked the dining hall best of all our rooms here, with its tall palms and all the tables laid out so neat and everything in such perfect order. It is quite a sight in the evening to see all the women here in their chairs, sipping their coffee and eating their bread and butter, everything so tranquil and cheerful. There is of course the occasional scene, outbursts of noise and excitement, and sometimes worse, usually from Charlotte Gittings, who is a creature of persistently filthy habits. But for the most part, I can think of no more restful place on earth.