Authors: Jonathan Coe
Welkom terug
Entering the modest arrivals hall at Melsbroek airport late on Thursday morning, Thomas looked out for a besuited figure who might correspond to his image of David Carter, the British Council representative who had arranged to meet him there. However, no such figure presented himself. Instead, Thomas found himself being approached by a young, attractive woman in uniform.
‘Mr Foley?’ she said, extending her hand. ‘My name is Anneke and I am here to escort you to the British pavilion at the Exposition site. Would you follow me please?’
Without waiting for his reply she turned and began walking towards the exit, two or three paces ahead of Thomas. He hurried to catch up.
‘I was expecting Mr Carter,’ he said, ‘but this is a very pleasant surprise.’
Anneke allowed him a smile which was neither warm nor cold, just highly professional.
‘Mr Carter has been detained,’ she said. ‘He will meet you at the site.’
Anneke’s uniform was smart, discreet and studiedly sexless. The heels were high, but not too high. The navy-blue skirt was cut well below the knee. Beneath the trimly tailored maroon jacket she wore a white shirt with collar and tie. The whole ensemble was crowned by a cheerful – but sober – pill-box hat. It was an unexceptional uniform, but Thomas found himself feeling slightly revolted by it. He felt that Anneke would have been much easier to talk to had she been wearing something else.
‘So you are one of the famous Expo hostesses,’ he said.
‘Are we famous already, even in England?’ she asked. ‘I will tell my colleagues. They will be excited.’
Thomas was entertained by a passing image of a group of these young women, all in their early twenties, all wearing the same uniform, sitting around a table in some Brussels café or works canteen, giggling together over their English celebrity. It made him feel very elderly.
Outside the arrivals hall, the sunshine of early spring was breaking through tentatively. Anneke came to a halt and looked to the left and right, newly indecisive.
‘There should be a car waiting for us,’ she explained. ‘I will go and find it.’
Left to his own devices for a few minutes, Thomas attempted to savour what should have been a significant occasion for him: the first time he had ever stood on the soil of Belgium, his mother’s country. He had been looking forward to this moment all week, and was grateful for the opportunity to enjoy it alone. But soon he began to feel foolish. There was nothing significant about it really. This was just a country like any other: it had been naive to suppose that he would feel anything like an immediate sense of belonging. In any case, perhaps the paradox of Belgium was going to be that it made him feel more British than ever.
The car arrived: it was a pale-green Citroën, the driver’s door emblazoned with the distinctive, irregular star-shaped logo of Expo 58. Anneke jumped out and opened the rear passenger door for him. They set off quickly in the direction of Heysel.
‘Just a short journey,’ Anneke promised him. ‘Twenty minutes or less.’
‘Fine. Will we be passing near Leuven, by any chance?’
‘Leuven?’ Anneke seemed surprised. ‘Leuven is not far away, but it lies in the other direction. You wanted to visit there?’
‘Perhaps not today,’ said Thomas. ‘Another time, I hope. My mother was born there. My grandparents had a farm nearby.’
‘Ah, so your mother was Belgian! Do you speak the language?’
‘No, not at all. Just a few words.’
‘Well then, I suppose I should say,
Welkom terug
, Mr Foley.’
‘
Dankuwel, dat is vriendelijk
,’ said Thomas, carefully.
Anneke gave a delighted laugh: ‘
Goed zo!
But I won’t test you any more. It wouldn’t be fair of me.’
After that, their conversation flowed more easily. Anneke told him that she came from Londerzeel, a village to the north-west of Brussels, where she still lived with her parents. She was one of 280 young women who were lucky enough to have been chosen as hostesses. All of them spoke four languages – French, Dutch, German and English – and most were being sent to seaports, railway stations and airports, where it would be their job to greet the expected thousands of visitors from overseas and ensure that they had an easy onward journey to Expo 58. The hostesses were considered to be among the Expo’s most important ambassadors, and their rules of conduct were strict: during their working hours, they were not allowed to chew gum, to knit or sew, to smoke, drink alcohol, or to read novels, newspapers or magazines.
‘In fact,’ said Anneke, ‘I’m not even supposed to appear in public in the company of a man, without written permission from the authorities. Which in your case, fortunately, I have.’
She smiled at Thomas again; and the smile, this time, had less of a professional sheen to it, and more of human warmth. Thomas was starting to realize that she was very pretty indeed.
‘Look!’ she said suddenly, leaning towards him and pointing out of the window. ‘Can you see it?’
All Thomas could see, at first, was a line of treetops standing tall and steady in the middle distance; but then, rising above the topmost of them, something distinctly man-made could be glimpsed: the upper half of what appeared to be a gigantic silver globe. And as their car sped forward and the perspective changed, three more such globes emerged, set at different heights, and connected to each other by glistening steel tubes. The whole of the structure could not be glimpsed, yet, but already Thomas had the sense of something immense and majestic, something sublime and unearthly that had been imagined on an epic scale by the creators of some science-fiction comic or film, and then transported, by a miracle of human ingenuity and engineering, into the natural world.
‘The Atomium,’ said Anneke proudly. ‘We will have a better view of it when we enter the Expo park.’
She sat forward and spoke to the driver in French.
‘I was asking him not to take you directly to the British pavilion,’ she explained (although Thomas had been able to understand quite well). ‘I think you should enjoy a little tour first.’
Shortly afterwards the car pulled up outside a wide entrance gate, surrounded by dozens of flagpoles to which no flags had yet been attached. A half-finished sign announced that this was the Porte des Nations. The car was waved through by an enthusiastic security guard who seemed to know the driver well; and before long they were inside the Park itself, driving at a cautious ten kilometres an hour down a wide, tree-lined boulevard called the Avenue des Nations.
The caution was necessary, for the road was clogged, and there was industry and activity everywhere. At first Thomas could not comprehend anything of what he was seeing: it was all a mêlée of trucks, scaffolding, cranes, girders, piles of bricks, slabs of concrete, planks of wood being carried hither and thither by workmen wearing cloth caps or knotted handkerchiefs on their heads. He had never seen such a density of building work being carried out in such a small space. Instructions, reprimands, cries of warning and encouragement were being shouted out in every language imaginable. Only after he had taken a few seconds to adjust to the pace and the bustle could Thomas start distinguishing some details. The first building to attract his full attention was on their left: indeed, it thrust itself at them, being a spectacular diorama in steel, glass and concrete, more than one hundred metres in diameter, approached by a broad, welcoming walkway studded with flagpoles. In scale, ambition and design it called to Thomas’s mind a profoundly modern version of the Roman Colosseum.
‘The American pavilion,’ Anneke explained. ‘And here is the Soviet one, right next door. Which,’ she added, with a gleam in her eye, ‘is a typical example of the Belgian sense of humour.’
The Soviet pavilion presented a powerful contrast. It conceded nothing in terms of scale, but the heroic simplicity of its design offered a kind of reprimand to American pretension and vulgarity. It was a giant cuboid, constructed from steel and glass, swelling towards the sky almost as far as Thomas’s eye could see as the car eased its way past and he craned his neck out of the window, looking upwards in open-mouthed astonishment. The walls of the pavilion were of corrugated glass, giving it a lightness and openness which belied its dimensions: as if in implied rebuke to Westerners who might have assumed that the very concept of transparency was unknown in the USSR.
After this, they took a left turn down a smaller road, and past a building which – though not as imposing as the two they had just seen – struck Thomas as more beautiful than either: less arrogant, for one thing, and smoother in its curves, clearer and more confident in its outline. Anneke agreed.
‘This is my favourite of the pavilions so far,’ she said. ‘It belongs to Czechoslovakia. I am looking forward very much to visiting this one.’
They took another left, and drove straight up the Avenue de l’Atomium. And this time, when he saw the celebrated structure in all its shimmering, eerie magnificence, getting larger and larger as they approached, Thomas felt his heart swell with awe and excitement, and the full import of the adventure he was embarked upon started to strike home. The previous Sunday he had been pouring sherry for his wife and mother in Tooting, the overture to an endless family lunch in which nothing of note had been said, nothing of interest had happened. Even then, he had begun to feel himself driven almost to distraction by the smug quietude of that deathly suburb, the overwhelming sense of indifference towards the great events that were taking place out in the wider world. But now, only four days later, he had already been drawn by some miracle into the very epicentre of these events. Here, for the next six months, would be thrown together all the nations whose complex relationships, whose conflicts and alliances, whose fraught, tangled histories had shaped and would continue to shape the destiny of mankind. And this brilliant folly was at the heart of it: a gigantic latticework of spheres, interconnected, imperishable, each one emblematic of that tiny mysterious unit which man had so recently learned how to divide, with consequences both alarming and wonderful: the atom. The very sight of it set his heart pounding.
‘Do you like it?’ Anneke was saying, as the car drove around it in a full circle. ‘Do you like it, Mr Foley?’
‘I love it,’ said Thomas, leaning out of the window again. ‘I absolutely, utterly adore it.’
The words sounded strange to him as soon as they were uttered. When had he last spoken so extravagantly? Perhaps it was not this place that was stirring him to such heights of enthusiasm – nor the Atomium, for that matter – but Anneke herself.
Rapidly he suppressed this alarming thought. The car drove past the modernist pavilions of France, Brazil, Finland and Yugoslavia, and then the Italian pavilion, which bucked the trend and sought instead to re-create the atmosphere of a mountain village. They drove through the Scandinavian section, past the Turkish and Israeli pavilions; in another few minutes they had traversed the whole of South America and even the Far East. Thomas was beginning to feel dizzy, travel-sick. The clashing architectures were beginning to blur.
‘And what’s this one?’ he asked, as they drove past yet another modernistic construction, this one a semi-circular affair clad in gleaming metallic bricks, approached by an escalator running upwards through a glass tunnel.
‘Ah! For we Belgians,’ Anneke told him, ‘this is a very important part of the Exposition. It will be the section devoted to the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi. On the other side there is a tropical garden with a native village inside. All very authentic, with little huts and grass roofs! They’re even bringing some of the natives over to live here, for the time of the Expo. I can’t wait to see them. I have never seen a real black before. They look so strange and funny in photographs.’
Thomas said nothing in reply to this, but it gave him an uneasy feeling. There were plenty of black faces on the streets of London these days, and while he knew people who felt unhappy about it (a heated conversation with Mr Tracepurcel in the office canteen sprang to mind), he prided himself on being free of skin prejudice. If what Anneke said was true, he considered that this part of the Exposition struck the wrong note.
Before he had time to think of a reply, in any case, the car turned a corner, and Thomas saw something that he recognized at once: James Gardner’s British pavilion – looking, he had to admit, even more quirky, original and impressive in real life than it had in the photographs. Its three triangular sections seemed every bit as modern and dynamic as the buildings that surrounded it, yet somehow they also called to mind a cathedral, or a succession of church steeples. Dazzled though he had been by all the other buildings, Thomas felt a special glow rise up inside him when the car came to a halt here: it was the glow of homecoming.
Anneke opened the car door for him, but then, instead of leading him towards the main entrance of the pavilion (where workmen were ranged upon tall ladders, lifting panes of glass into place) they ducked around a corner, and made their way through a clump of beech trees towards the interior of the British site. Here more buildings were grouped around a small artificial lake, and, standing in the corner, looking about as incongruous as anything could look in the hectic, heterogeneous miniature universe through which Thomas had just travelled, was a sight at once familiar and alien: the weatherboard exterior of a public house, its name spelled out in bold capitals at the upper level: THE BRITANNIA.
‘Mr Foley?’ said a well-bred English voice, and Thomas found that he was being approached by a young man in a white linen suit, who came trotting down the stairs of the pub and extended a firm, energetic handshake. ‘My name’s Carter. So sorry I couldn’t meet you at the airport.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ve been well looked after.’
Anneke smiled her thanks at him, and said to Mr Carter, ‘Delighted to meet you.’ Then, turning back to Thomas: ‘I have to go now. A car will collect you from the British Council at four o’clock, and take you back to the airport. With a hostess, of course, to assist you with all the arrangements.’