Old Filth - Jane Gardam [105]
He prayed—what, will the line ne’er be done?—for the nice girl and her grandmother, and for the aunts’ little maid Alice, and for Garbutt and Kate. He prayed for the souls of his father and mother. And then he prayed for Ada, the shadow who leaned to him over water which he now was not sure was a memory or the memory of a memory. He prayed for podgy Cumberledge who had come out strong as a lion. How unaccountable it all is. How various and wonderful. He kept on and on praying through the rest of the service. For Veneering, for that unattractive Barrister girl who’d had a baby she’d called after him, for . . . He struggled hard against praying for Chloe and the souls of his aunts—but in the end, he managed it. He didn’t pray for Betty. He knew she didn’t need it.
He had his usual Christmas dinner at the White Hart in Salisbury and over the next few days put his desk in order, adding a codicil to his Will that left Mrs.-er—Kate (her name was Toms, Katherine Toms) the amethysts. He left Garbutt a cheque, then tore it up and left him a much larger one. He topped up his bequests to the National Trust and the Barristers’ Benevolent. And so the last dead days of December passed.
On the thirty-first, he was waiting for the car in the hall, seated upon Betty’s rose-and-gold throne, alone, since Kate had her family to think about at New Year, and the car drove him without incident in pouring rain the hundred miles to Heathrow.
The airport was almost empty. There had been “an alert.” How ridiculous, he thought. We are letting these people win. Security was meticulous. He was made to step three times under the scaffold before anyone realised that the alarm signal he gave off came from his old-world eyeglass. The suitcase with its emblazoned studs and Muslim appearance was passed through without a glance. Islam. There was a little hesitation about the X-ray picture of Pat Ingoldby’s clothes-brush which looked like a gun.
And, then, the plane.
How stewardesses do smile these days, thought Filth. How cold their eyes.
He wondered what it would be like to be hi-jacked? He wondered once again, an hour or so later, when the plane plunged like a stone for a thousand feet over the Alps.
“Just a bit of turbulence.” The pilot came strolling through, presumably to give confidence, and Filth was pleased with himself for continuing to drink his soup.
“Are you comfortable, sir?”
He was pleased that the fellow was English. Pilots nowadays tended not to be.
“What route are we taking, Captain? Round the edges?”
“Oh, sure. Well to the South. Not a missile in sight. It’ll be dark over Afghanistan. Singapore for a cup of tea and then up to Dacca.”
Filth said, “When I first used to come out here, it was Vietnam we had to avoid. Had to refuel twice then. The Gulf. Then Bombay. Bombay’s called something else now, I gather. There used to be half a marble staircase on Bombay airport. Gold and cream. Lovely thing. It stopped in mid-air. Symbolic.”
“Time marches on.”
“Not so sure it marches anywhere in particular though.”
He slept. Once, jerking awake from a dream, he yelled out, thinking he was being put into a body-bag. An air stewardess with tendril arms was tucking a blanket around him.
The black night shuddered all around the plane. When he next woke there was a pencilled line of gold drawn round each oval blind.
Dawn already.
“We are in tomorrow,” said the girl.