‘What do people tend to come to you to ask?’ I enquired of the Reverend Sturdy as we passed by an outlet belonging to that perplexingly indefinable clothing brand Reiss. There was a long pause, during which a disembodied voice reminded us once more never to leave our luggage unattended.
‘They come to me when they are lost,’ the Reverend replied at last, emphasising the final word so that it seemed to reflect the spiritual confusion of mankind, a hapless race of beings described by St Augustine as ‘pilgrims in the City of Earth until they can join the City of God’.
‘Yes, but what might they be feeling lost about?’
‘Oh,’ said the Reverend with a sigh, ‘they are almost always looking for the toilets.’
Because it seemed a pity to end our discussion of metaphysical matters on such a note, I asked the two men to tell me how a traveller might most productively spend his or her last minutes before boarding and take-off. The Reverend was adamant: the task, he said, was to turn one’s thoughts intently to God.
‘But what if one can’t believe in him?’ I pursued.
The Reverend fell silent and looked away, as though this were not a polite question to ask of a priest. Happily, his colleague, weaned on a more liberal theology, delivered an equally succinct but more inclusive reply, to which my thoughts often returned in the days to come as I watched planes taxiing out to the runways: ‘The thought of death should usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us; it should lend us the courage to pursue the way of life we value in our hearts.’
5 Just beyond the security area was a suite, named after an ill-fated supersonic jet and reserved for the use of first-class passengers. The advantages of wealth can sometimes be hard to see: expensive cars and wines, clothes and meals are nowadays rarely proportionately superior to their cheaper counterparts, due to the sophistication of modern processes of design and mass production. But in this sense, British Airways’ Concorde Room was an anomaly. It was humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.
There were leather armchairs, fireplaces, marble bathrooms, a spa, a restaurant, a concierge, a manicurist and a hairdresser. One waiter toured the lounge with plates of complimentary caviar, foie gras and smoked salmon, while a second made circuits with éclairs and strawberry tartlets.
‘For what purpose is all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the end of the pursuit of wealth, power and pre-eminence?’ asked Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), going on to answer, ‘To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation’ – a set of ambitions to which the creators of the Concorde Room had responded with stirring precision.
As I took a seat in the restaurant, I felt certain that whatever it had taken for humanity to arrive at this point had ultimately been worth it. The development of the combustion engine, the invention of the telephone, the Second World War, the introduction of real-time financial information on Reuters screens, the Bay of Pigs, the extinction of the slender-billed curlew – all of these things had, each in its own fashion, helped to pave the way for a disparate group of uniformly attractive individuals to silently mingle in a splendid room with a view of a runway in a cloud-bedecked corner of the Western world.
‘There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,’ the literary critic Walter Benjamin had once famously written, but that sentiment no longer seemed to matter very much.
Still, I recognised the fragility of the achievement behind the lounge. I sensed how relatively few such halcyon days there might be left before members of the small fraternity ensconced in its armchairs came to grief and its gilded ceilings cracked into ruin. Perhaps it had felt a bit like this on the terraces of Hadrian’s villa outside Rome on autumn Sunday evenings in the second century AD, as a blood-red sun set over the marble colonnades. One might have had a similar presentiment of catastrophe, looming in the form of the restless Germanic tribes lying in wait deep in the sombre pine forests of the Rhine Valley.
I started to feel sad about the fact that I might not be returning to the Concorde Room anytime soon. I realised, however, that the best way to attenuate my grief would be to nurture a thoroughgoing hatred of all those more regularly admitted into the premises. Over a plate of porcini mushrooms on a brioche base, I therefore tried out the idea that the lounge was really a hideout for a network of oligarchs who had won undeserved access through varieties of nepotism and skulduggery.
Regrettably, on closer examination, I was forced to concede that the evidence conflicted unhelpfully with this otherwise consoling thesis, for my fellow guests fitted none of the stereotypes of the rich. Indeed, they stood out chiefly on the basis of how ordinary they looked. These were not the chinless heirs to hectares of countryside but rather normal people who had figured out how to make the microchip and spreadsheet work on their behalf. Casually dressed, reading books by Malcolm Gladwell, they were an elite who had come into their wealth by dint of intelligence and stamina. They worked at Accenture fixing irregularities in supply chains or built income-ratio models at MIT; they had started telecommunications companies or did astrophysical research at the Salk Institute. Our society is affluent in large part because its wealthiest citizens do not behave the way rich people are popularly supposed to. Simple plunder could never have built up this sort of lounge (globalised, diverse, rigorous, technologically-minded), but at best a few gilded pleasure palaces standing out in an otherwise feudal and backward landscape.
In the rarefied air that was pumped into the Concorde Room, there nonetheless hovered a hint of something troubling: the implicit suggestion that the three traditional airline classes represented nothing less than a tripartite division of society according to people’s genuine talents and virtues. Having abolished the caste systems of old and fought to ensure universal access to education and opportunity, it seemed that we might have built up a meritocracy that had introduced an element of true justice into the distribution of wealth as well as of poverty. In the modern era, destitution could therefore be regarded as not merely pitiable but deserved. The question of why, if one was in any way talented or adept, one was still unable to earn admittance to an elegant lounge was a conundrum for all economy airline passengers to ponder in the privacy of their own minds as they perched on hard plastic chairs in the overcrowded and chaotic public waiting areas of the world’s airports.
The West once had a powerful and forgiving explanation for exclusion from any sort of lounge: for two thousand years Christianity rejected the notion, inherent in the modern meritocratic system, that virtue must inevitably usher in material success. Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet throughout his earthly life he was poor, thus by his very example ruling out any direct equation between righteousness and wealth. The Christian story emphasised that, however apparently equitable our educational and commercial infrastructures might seem, random factors and accidents would always conspire to wreck any neat alignment between the hierarchies of wealth on the one hand and virtue on the other. According to St Augustine, only God himself knew what each individual was worth, and He would not reveal that assessment before the time of the Last Judgement, to the sound of thunder and the trumpets of angels – a phantasmagorical scenario for non-believers, but helpful nevertheless in reminding us to refrain from judging others on the basis of a casual look at their tax returns.