A Start in Life (38 page)

There was no one around the doors, so I opened one and told her to get inside. Then I followed in, and snapped the catch behind us. ‘What an idea!' she said, ‘I'd never have thought of it. I suppose you've done this often with your casual pick-ups?'

We closed in a bout of hugger-kiss: ‘I just thought of it. There's no other place except the baggage compartment and I don't know how to get to that – unless I ask the pilot for a key. But I'm so much in love with you that I can't bear not to be able to touch you in the right places. Anyway I've got a question, and it's the sort I can't ask unless I'm able to kiss you while I'm doing it.'

She leaned against the sink. ‘What is it?'

‘Will you marry me? I know it's absolutely potty to ask, but I'm doing it without too much thought, because that would spoil it. Don't answer me. I don't want to know yet. I just want to say how I can't bear for us to come back to earth after these few days. If you've no wish to see me again, I'll understand. But I don't feel like that, and don't want you to think I do, even if you decide you want to feel that way. I'm not spoiling it, either, by asking you to marry me. You don't know me yet. Maybe you never will, but you will with every minute you stay with me. I just want you to know when you walk off this plane how intensely I feel, and I can't think of any other way to tell you than this. Even asking you to marry me isn't the end of it. It's only as serious as a passionate kiss, but that is very serious with me.'

Her full and pretty face was turned to me, and I could see my own face in the mirror behind her, full of pain and confusion, greed and lies and love.

The plane dropped a few feet, and she clung to me. ‘So don't answer,' I went on. ‘That's not what I want, not urgently. I'm saying this so that you'll know I'm honest and am telling no lies. It's something I suddenly wanted to say. I've never said it before, and I'll never say it again, not to anyone else. Just remember it, sweet Polly, and tell me anything you like for an answer, but don't talk about what I've just said, unless you absolutely must because it's burning its way out of you. Then I'll hear it and wallow in it, because I feel about you as I never have for anyone else before.'

We went beyond speech, touched and teased each other, sometimes her eye's closed, sometimes mine, as we kissed and struggled to get our way in that impossibly furnished room. Fortunately the engines made enough noise, due to those superlative modern designs that put them near the tail, and our cries weren't heard. The door handle rattled when we were too far gone to take much notice, and presumably whoever wanted to use the place for its proper purpose had found the opposite one vacant or had waited till it was. Polly got her full coming, because she finally sat on me and worked herself up and down, and I got it too, a fountain of thick elixir shooting into the flesh-filled sky of her.

When we crept back to our places the stewardesses gave us funny looks as they handed our trays of food. One of them smiled at me on every trip up and down the gangway, and she was so much Polly's opposite that I was quite attracted by her, and wanted to take her up to the back as well in my beastly and incorrigible fashion. But we tucked into our second breakfast as if we hadn't eaten for a week, and this time I ordered a full bottle of champagne, which the stewardess presented to us with exaggerated ceremony as if we had just been married and were going to England for our honeymoon. I began to wonder whether the captain himself wouldn't be down to congratulate us and wish us long life together as part of the airline's service, because certainly the engineer gave us a knowing gaze as he went to the back of the plane, as if the girls had been talking about us up front and spilling what they'd thought we'd been doing.

Polly ate with her head down, all modesty, and I thought that maybe she was reflecting on our adventure and, caught in the public gaze because of it, was holding it against me and wouldn't want to know me any more when we'd landed. But she said: ‘I remember that when we first met you said you never told anyone that you were in love with them, that it wasn't the sort of thing you did, that you just let the relationship develop, and never used the word love.'

‘I've been waiting for you to bring this up. It's true. I don't know what's come over me since then. This is so new, I haven't felt such a thing about anybody before, and that's why I say it. Obviously.'

‘Obviously,' she said.

‘I talk too much.'

‘I don't mind at all,' she answered. ‘I like it in fact. All the boys I've known don't talk. Not the way you do. They say things, but they don't talk. Your sort of talk makes me feel human, but theirs just makes me feel more and more apart from them. Not that I believe everything you say. Belief doesn't come into it. But people aren't together unless they talk.'

‘Or do the other thing.'

‘You're mostly silent then.'

‘My mouth is otherwise occupied,' I said, feeling slightly disturbed by her new mood of seriousness.

‘I don't believe anything,' she said, ‘when it comes to talk. I've been let down so often, except by my own father, and he isn't a man who talks very much, not to me, anyway. I only believe things when they've happened, and then I know whether I've been let down or not. I'm so mixed up, Michael, I don't know what to say.'

I felt sorry for her, and in some strange way for myself as well. Just after making love was a bad time to strip oneself down to the fibres like this, though God knows there didn't seem any other time when it might be possible to do it properly. She was right, I suppose, in choosing to do it now, though I might have been the one to start it if she hadn't. I'd noticed before that the worst quarrels, or the most intense talk, only come after a wonderful bout of love.

‘I've had more of a sheltered life than you imagine,' she said. ‘The people I should have been staying with in Geneva have already phoned my father to say I haven't been seen these last two nights. In any case he'll be waiting for me at the airport when we land, so maybe you'd better not come out with me, especially since he knows you.'

I was only too willing to accept her advice, not wanting to tangle with Moggerhanger a second time. I wasn't afraid of him, but I had been strenuously advised by William Hay not to get into trouble during my run of smuggling trips. It was a pity though that I couldn't go through the customs with Polly on my arm, which had been the reason for my arranging to travel back with her. I gave my telephone number, and took hers, neither of us knowing when we'd be able to contact each other again, never mind see each other. The light went on to douse fags and fasten seat belts, and we suddenly broke through the clouds to see Battersea Power Station below, without having had any time at all even to get properly stuck in to the unresolved questions that were starting in earnest to eat us away.

I went down the steps behind Polly, feeling like one of the walking wounded as I let her get far in front. But I ran and caught her up, and we kissed wildly before turning into the arrival lounge.

‘I love you,' she said. ‘I held back from saying it, but I do.' She went to the ladies, and I walked up and down. Half in fun I glanced at the messages rack, and saw an envelope with my name on it. I took it down and tore it open, thinking it was for someone of the same name but curious to see what it said. ‘Number nine is good today. Hope you had a successful trip to Leningrad.' So I let Polly get her luggage first, and she went through the customs with only a brief question from them and a half-smile. And I went through Gate Nine as instructed, though I saw no reason to do so because I only said I had nothing to declare, which was the truth for once, and then I was through and out of the place in time to see Moggerhanger's head going down the steps to the floor below.

I hung around a while, then went below and got the bus back to town.

William was waiting at the flat, himself just back from a quick trip to the Lebanon. He sat on the living-room couch in his dressing-gown, and Hazel came in with a tray of coffee. She was a whore from Soho, with a hard face and voluptuous body, who visited him now and again, and he gave her the wink to clear out while we were talking. His cigarette smoked from a ridiculously long holder, and he sat back to hear my story, which I supposed he might deliver later to the Jack Leningrad Organization. Either that, or I had too big an idea of their thoroughness, and if this was the case then I must already be getting too outsized for such an outfit.

‘You've got something else for next week,' he said when I'd finished. As he swallowed his coffee the skinbone and ligaments of his throat shook and convulsed, as if he'd been hit there with an invisible rubber sledgehammer while it was on its way through. ‘They'll tell you where to in the morning.' He poured another cup, while Hazel sang to herself in the bedroom.

‘What are you going to do with the money you earn?' I asked.

‘Haven't thought about it yet, my old lad. Mother's coming down from Worksop next week to spend a couple of days. I'm fixing her up in a hotel. I'll shunt her round the usual tea-caddy places, like Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace.'

‘Sounds lovely. In fact it's touching.'

‘Don't get bloody sarky, Michael. I'm only human, after all.'

‘That's the trouble with both of us, I suppose.'

‘What's splitting your tripes, though? I've seen plenty of blokes come back, and they're usually cock-a-hoop with having done it in safety, but you're a bit down in the sludge about it.'

‘I'm different. It wears me out, and I can't help but show it.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘You're the genuine bloody article, and that's a fact. It's better you're like that, right in touch with yourself, than some of the over-confident young hotheads we could get our hands on. Just the sort we need, you are. When you decide to put on an act your soul goes into it so that nobody would ever twig. Get some snooze, then we might go out for a quiet feed somewhere. I'll pack Hazel off. She won't mind. Won't bloody-well have to.'

‘Thinking of getting married?' I asked.

‘Not in this game. Later, maybe.' Neither of us had our feet on the ground, but we belonged to the world, for all that. But as I lay down in the spare room and thought about Polly, I got frightened, as if only now the full trembles at passing the customs loaded with gold had come upon me. The sky seemed black and I shook in every limb. The reality of my trip seemed like a dream, and like a dream it made me more afraid than reality. I felt a coward, and thought I might not do it any more. Yet when I woke up I knew I would, because being with an aim, an ambition, or even a plan, robbed me of that final edge of courage that helped me to stand by a negative decision. All this is hindsight perhaps, but hindsight is still only part of what existed at the actual time. My memory is clear enough for me to know this. My only positive act, if it can be so called, and I believe it can, was to let myself drift with events, out of curiosity to see where it would take me, and out of lethargy because I didn't have the wit or strength to do anything else. But I told myself to fight off the black and woolly dog, not to worry, to hold on, to calm myself and let life take its course since I wasn't able to steer the crazy airship of it, comforting myself with the thought that maybe I'd be more and more able to as I got older. But this last was only half hinted at, a grain of dust in the middle of the moon that I might never be able to get out to the light of day. I wondered what was in that grain, whether I would ever catch it between my two thumbnails like a flea and split it from end to end so that blood ran out.

William was waking me up but my head felt as thin as a post. He pushed a cup of tea towards my face and the smell of it went into me like jollop. ‘Get this,' he said, a wide grin behind the steam. ‘It'll help you to stand on your feet instead of your arse. You can't stew in your own self all night.'

‘Why not?'

‘You might well ask, but you can't. Here's your wage packet from the gaffer. There's thirty tenners in it. The easiest putty you'll ever earn.'

I took the long envelope and put it under my pillow. ‘It wasn't that easy.'

He sat in the armchair and watched me with his gimlet grey eyes, that were full of expression when they were trying to read me, as they were now. ‘What's biting you, then?'

‘The rats. They've been at me since last Saturday afternoon. Ever been in love, Bill?'

His left leg jerked back, as if the reflexes under the knee had been hit. ‘It wasn't the air hostess, was it? If it was, forget it. Under their white aprons they're just like anybody else.'

‘You didn't answer my question.'

‘The answer's no,' he said. ‘I was in love with my father, but he was killed down the pit when I was seven. While he was alive I didn't know I was in love with him, but when he died I knew I'd never get over it and love anybody else – except maybe my mother, but she's still alive, so it's still only an infatuation. There's lots of women I like, and some I wanted to marry, but as for love, I can't say I have. I've often wondered about it, when it's going to happen and if it ever will, but I've been waiting so long that I've given up hope. I broke my heart as a kid, before I could understand what was what, not altogether over my father, but over what came after. The general misery of our lives. There was nothing to live for except life itself, nobody even to say we were living like this so that tomorrow would be better. I couldn't stand it. I was made to despair too young. After that I couldn't fall in love – not at all.' He flicked his ash halfway across the room. ‘I'm not moaning about it. I sometimes think that English hearts weren't strong enough to bear that much.'

‘Don't you want revenge, then?' I said, thinking how much better off I'd been than he had.