7 Not far from the incautiously hopeful man, a pair of lovers were parting. She must have been twenty-three, he a few years older. There was a copy of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood in her bag. They both wore oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afar was revealed at closer range to be an unusual degree of devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief as he cradled her in his arms and stroked her wavy black hair, in which a clip shaped like a tulip had been fastened. Again and again, they looked into each other’s eyes and every time, as though made newly aware of the catastrophe about to befall them, they would begin weeping once more.
Passers-by evinced sympathy. It helped that the woman was extraordinarily beautiful. I missed her already. Her beauty would have been an important part of her identity from at least the age of twelve and, in its honour, she would occasionally pause and briefly consider the effect of her condition on her audience before returning to her lover’s chest, damp with her tears.
We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let alone in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.
There seemed no end to the ritual. The pair would come close to the security zone, then break down again and retreat for another walk around the terminal. At one point, they went down to the arrivals hall and for a moment it looked as if they might go outside and join the queue at the taxi rank, but they were only buying a packet of dried mango slices from Marks and Spencer, which they fed to each other with pastoral innocence. Then quite suddenly, in the middle of an embrace by the Travelex desk, the beauty glanced down at her watch and, with all the self-control of Odysseus denying the Sirens, ran away from her tormentor down a corridor and into the security zone.
My photographer and I divided forces. I followed her airside and watched her remain stoic until she reached the concourse, only to founder again at the window of Kurt Geiger. I finally lost her in a crowd of French exchange students near Sunglass Hut. For his part, Richard pursued the man down to the train station, where the object of adoration boarded the express service for central London, claimed a seat and sat impassively staring out the window, betraying no sign of emotion save for an unusual juddering movement of his left leg.
8 For many passengers, the terminal was the starting point of short-haul business trips around Europe. They might have announced to their colleagues a few weeks before that they would be missing a few days in the office to fly to Rome, studiously feigning weariness at the prospect of making a journey to the wellspring of European culture – albeit to its frayed edges in a business park near Fiumicino airport.
They would think of these colleagues as they crossed over the Matterhorn, its peak snow-capped even in summer. Just as breakfast was being served in the cabin, their co-workers would be coming into the office – Megan with her carefully prepared lunch, Geoff with his varied ring tones, Simi with her permanent frown – and all the while the travellers would be witnessing below them the byproducts of the titanic energies released by the collision of the Eurasian and African continental plates during the late Mesozoic era.
What a relief it would be for the travellers not to have time to see anything at all of Rome’s history or art. And yet how much they would notice nevertheless: the fascinating roadside advertisements for fruit juice on the way from the airport, the unusually delicate shoes worn by Italian men, the odd inflections in their hosts’ broken English. What interesting new thoughts would occur to them in the Novotel, what inappropriate films they would watch late into the night and how heartily they would agree, upon their return, with the truism that the best way to see a foreign country is to go and work there.
9 A full 70 per cent of the airport’s departing passengers were off on trips for pleasure. It was easy to spot them at this time of year, in their shorts and hats. David was a thirty-eight-year-old shipping broker, and his wife, Louise, a thirty-five-year-old full-time mother and ex-television producer. They lived in Barnes with their two children, Ben, aged three, and Millie, aged five. I found them towards the back of a check-in line for a four-hour flight to Athens. Their final destination was a villa with a pool at the Katafigi Bay resort, a fifty-minute drive away from the Greek capital in a Europcar Category C vehicle.
It would be difficult to overestimate how much time David had spent thinking about his holiday since he had first booked it, the previous January. He had checked the weather reports online every day. He had placed the link to the Dimitra Residence in his Favourites folder and regularly navigated to it, bringing up images of the limestone master bathroom and of the house at dusk, lit up against the rocky Mediterranean slopes. He had pictured himself playing with the children in the palm-lined garden and eating grilled fish and olives with Louise on the terrace.
But although David had reflected at length on his stay in the Peloponnese, there were still many things that managed to surprise him at Terminal 5. He had omitted to recall the existence of the check-in line or to think of just how many people can be fitted into an Airbus A320. He had not focused on how long four hours can seem nor had he considered the improbability of all the members of a family achieving physical and psychological satisfaction at approximately the same time. He had not remembered how hurtful he always found it when Ben made it clear that he disproportionately favoured his mother or how he himself invariably responded to such rejections by becoming unproductively strict, which in turn upset his wife, who liked to voice her opinion that Ben’s reticence was due primarily to the lack of paternal contact he had had since his father’s promotion. David’s work was a continuous flash-point in the couple’s relationship and had in fact precipitated an argument only the night before, during which David had described Louise as ungrateful for failing to appreciate and honour the necessary connection between his absences and their affluence.
Had the plane on which they were to fly to Athens burst into flames shortly after take-off and begun plunging towards the Staines reservoir, David would have clasped the members of his family tightly to him and told them with wholehearted sincerity that he loved them unreservedly – but right now, he could not look a single one of them in the eye.
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us to recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
As David lifted a suitcase on to the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well. He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire.