Four hours later we crept down to the dining-room for refuelling, both of us bruised and wacked-out, and quiet as we sat looking at each other, waiting for the food to come, which we then went into with the same gusto as had been previously used in attacks on each other, not talking much during the whole meal, as if our first prolonged time together had accounted for fifty million words that we need not now ever say.
Even so, it wasn’t exactly like a church between us, and I had to keep my end up by telling her stories out of my rich past and varied family. She enjoyed those most about my drunken Irish grandparents, so once on to this line I could go on for a long time without running short of material, and I found myself making up stories, recounting them as if they were true, because she could never know the difference as long as my voice didn’t hesitate or change tone. Music was playing in the background from The Merry Widow, or some such Viennese slop, and I said: ‘Do you remember, darling, how we climbed the Matterhorn in 1905? What a lovely time we had — though it was a pity when our ten guides fell two thousand feet and were never seen again. What a beautiful view from the top! I shall never forget it, because this music reminds me of it. Fortunately, the guide carrying our portable gramophone wasn’t one of those who slipped, and we put on this record and listened to it while we drank our champagne.’
I made up fantasies of what we’d done during the life we’d been together, trekking across deserts that had killed all but one of our hundred camels by the time we walked into the last oasis (where our Rolls-Royce was waiting), sweating through jungles where two of our children had been eaten by tigers (she laughed aloud at that one) and I had been brought to the edge of death by a savage dose of Blackhead Fever. We sat over our wine till the waiter brought the bill as a gentle hint that the place was about to close down, and then we went up to my room again, and made use of the night for as long as we could keep awake.
We travelled back to London on the same plane. I thought this was a bright idea in case any of the customs men remembered my face. If they did, and wondered why I was going out, they would know the reason if they saw me coming back with a beautiful young woman. And if I left through the airport next week they might think I was only off on the same dirty errand again. I felt that William Hay would approve of this bit of bluff. The long bus of a plane was only half-full, and after the light went out about removing our safety belts, and the long climb towards heaven began, I told Polly to come with me to the back of the plane. ‘I want to go to the toilet,’ I said, giving a wink, ‘so keep me company on the way.’
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.’