Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [8]
“Pain in the neck,” he mutters. “They oughta build these seats farther apart.”
“Yes, that would be nice,” she agrees politely.
“What it is, they’re trying to save dough.” He sits down again heavily. “Packing the customers in like cattle in a damn boxcar.”
“Mm,” Vinnie utters vaguely, picking up her novel.
“I guess they’re all pretty much the same, though, the airlines. I don’t travel all that much myself.”
Vinnie sighs. It is clear to her that unless she takes definite action this Western businessman or rancher or whatever he is will prevent her reading The Singapore Grip and make the rest of the flight very boring.
“No, it’s never awfully comfortable,” she says. “Really I think the best thing to do is bring along something interesting to read, so one doesn’t notice.”
“Yeh. I shoulda thought of that, I guess.” He gives Vinnie a sad, baffled look, arousing the irritation she feels at her more helpless students—students on athletic scholarship, often, who should never have come to Corinth in the first place.
“I have some other books with me, if you’d like to look at them.” Vinnie reaches down and pulls from her tote bag The Oxford Book of Light Verse; a pocket guide to British flowers; and Little Lord Fauntleroy, which she has to reread for a scholarly article. She places the volumes on the middle seat, aware as she does so of their individual and collective inappropriateness.
“Hey. Thanks,” her seatmate exclaims as each one appears. “Wal, if you’re sure you don’t need them now.”
Vinnie assures him that she does not. She is already reading a book, she points out, suppressing a sigh of impatience. Then, with a sigh of relief, she returns to The Singapore Grip. For a few moments she is aware of the flipping of pages on her right, but soon she is absorbed.
While the shadows of war darken over Singapore in Jim Farrell’s last completed novel, the atmosphere outside the cabin windows brightens. The damp grayness becomes suffused with gold; the plane, breaking through the cloudbank, levels off in sunlight over an expanse of whipped cream. Vinnie looks at her watch; they are halfway to London. Not only has the light altered, she senses a change in the sound of the engines: a shift to a lower, steadier hum as the plane passes midpoint on its homeward journey. Within too she feels a more harmonic vibration, a brightening of anticipation.
England, for Vinnie, is and has always been the imagined and desired country. For a quarter of a century she visited it in her mind, where it had been slowly and lovingly shaped and furnished out of her favorite books, from Beatrix Potter to Anthony Powell. When at last she saw it she felt like the children in John Masefield’s The Box of Delights who discover that they can climb into the picture on their sitting-room wall. The landscape of her interior vision had become life-size and three-dimensional; she could literally walk into the country of her mind. From the first hour England seemed dear and familiar to her; London, especially, was almost an experience of déjà vu. She also felt that she was a nicer person there and that her life was more interesting. These sensations increased rather than diminished with time, and have been repeated as often as Vinnie could afford. Over the past decade she has visited England nearly every year—though usually, alas, for only a few weeks. Tonight she will begin her longest stay yet: an entire six months. Her fantasy is that one day she will be able to live in London permanently, even perhaps become an Englishwoman. A host of difficulties—legal, financial, practical—are involved in this fantasy, and Vinnie has no idea how she could ever solve them all; but she wants it so much that perhaps one day it can be managed.
Many teachers of English, like Vinnie, fall in love with England as well as with her literature. With familiarity, however, their infatuation often declines