‘This,’ said László, ‘had better be very good indeed.’
‘But that depends on you, monsieur,’ said the woman, sharply. Emil waved her to silence.
‘On me?’ László repeated. He took the chair opposite her, and as he did so he entered again, quite suddenly, that other room in that other house where men and women had come to have their parts explained to them, street maps spread over the table top, gunfire echoing across the wintry city. And now he knew he would be asked again, told what would depend on him, not by Feri or Joska, but by a young woman whose name he did not know, and who, however well informed, could not possibly understand the character of his need. He locked eyes with her and smiled – a little fiercely, a little sadly – and because she was unable to see the origin of the smile, its long roots, she was momentarily disconcerted.
‘Go on,’ said László.
And so they began.
3
There was a rumour, perhaps true, perhaps no more than a high-altitude urban myth, that passengers in economy received less of the piped oxygen than those in superior classes. Larry could not remember who had suggested this to him – it might even have been Ranch – but coming round from the slough of another mid-flight doze he was inclined to think the rumour had substance, for in happier days he had travelled on the other side of the mysterious curtain and thought he had indeed inhaled a richer mix and been the better for it. Pinker and more optimistic.
He knuckled his eyes and looked round for Ella, but her place beside him was empty; nor—turning and twisting in his seat – could he see her in the aisles. They had been allotted the middle two seats of four in the central section just to the rear of the wings. At one end of the row was an American college student on his way to summer school in Oxford, a young man with troubled skin who addressed Larry as ‘sir’. On the other side was a nun, an ethnic oriental, who had crossed herself and prayed audibly during the take-off from San Francisco, for which Larry had been grateful. Like most people he had only the haziest idea of how this communal defiance of gravity actually worked and believed that at least one person on the plane needed to offer up a prayer if they were to arrive in safety. He waited five minutes, then leaned over to ask her if she had seen his daughter.
‘Daughter?’ She spoke the word as though it were new to her, but she had evidently understood because she looked at the empty seat with real alarm, as if the child might somehow have tumbled out of the plane and fallen through miles of air into the unlit Atlantic.
‘I guess she wandered off while I was napping.’
‘We look for her,’ said the nun, decisively.
‘No, no,’ said Larry, ‘I’ll go.’ But the nun was already out of her seat. ‘My name Sister Kim,’ she said.
‘Larry Valentine,’ said Larry. He noticed that along with the more usual accoutrements – habit, beads, cross – she was wearing a brand-new pair of green-and-white sneakers blazoned with the Greek for victory.
They set off together, looking left and right along the gently vibrating body of the plane. Sister Kim stopped a passing stewardess, explaining to her, in an idiom all her own, that the gentleman had lost his little girl.
‘She’s an asthmatic,’ added Larry, hoping this would justify the presence of a nun.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the stewardess, in a voice sharply English, ‘she can’t get very far on a plane, can she?’
They went on as a party of three, just as the screens came down for the next film and the lights in the cabin dimmed. After a discreet check of the toilets, the stewardess consulted with the chief steward.
‘Does she have her inhaler?’ asked the steward.
‘Yes,’ said Larry, recalling that he had put it in the bib pocket of her dungarees as they waited in the departure lounge after a tense farewell to Kirsty, who had driven them to the airport and come as far as the check-in, crouching to hug Ella for several teary minutes. Larry had been somewhat offended, as if flying with him implied some imminence of danger for the girl. This, however, was not a good beginning.
On the screens, young women in Regency dresses were receiving a gentleman caller. Long-haul somnolence had seized most of the passengers. They gazed up, shoeless and weary. Some already wore the complimentary black eye mask and slept, or attempted to. There was little sense of any progress.
The search continued for another fifteen minutes; a man, a nun and two aircrew, processing in the aisles until at last they discovered the child on the top deck, wide awake in one of the unoccupied multi-adjustable seats in club class, apparently thinking. The steward and stewardess expressed amazement. How could she have got there without being noticed? But Larry knew that his daughter had several mysterious talents, and that not being seen by the coarse-grained gaze of adults was merely one of them.
‘You always stay with Papa,’ said Sister Kim, wagging a finger at the girl, though at the same time winking at her and then telling her how pretty she was.
Larry took Ella’s hand and walked her back.
‘You want to watch the movie, El?’ A horseman was riding through the rain, a shining black figure atop a shining black horse. But Ella preferred the colouring book she had been given in the child’s pack at the beginning of the flight, and she began filling in the patterns, her brow furrowed with concentration, as though colouring were a chore some authority required her to complete in a responsible manner for a purpose Larry was not privy to. The flora of her inward life was increasingly foreign to him. He could no longer be sure even of the fundamentals, such as whether or not she was happy, or at least content. Hoffmann’s view was that the trip would be good for her. A therapeutic encounter with a fundamental human experience. He liked, he said, his ‘little people’ to meet Mr Death and shake his paw. Kirsty had been in favour too, so Larry was overruled. But was it good for a child to be exposed to the events waiting for them in England? What’s wrong with Granny? Where’s Granny gone? No. He could not share Hoffmann’s faith in a child’s capacity for truth in the raw. Why should a child’s capacity be so much greater than a man’s?
Sister Kim was studying a book with photographs of other nuns in it. Her hands were small and careworn, working hands, and Larry wondered whether her heart were in the same condition, chapped and chaffed from the difficulty of having to love indiscriminately. He asked her if she would keep an eye on Ella while he went to freshen up. She said she would, and he took his blue leather wash bag from under the seat and made his way to the toilets, shutting the folding door of the cubicle and confronting himself in the mirror. The light in there was peculiarly unforgiving. He seemed to have acquired a grey tan, and even his hair, the brown-blond thatch to which the California sun gave threads of gold, looked ordinary and glamourless. From the shallows of his skin, an older, feebler man peered back at him.
He took a pee. Someone rattled the door. He badly wanted to smoke, but if the man who had lost his daughter were discovered endangering the flight and setting off the smoke alarm he would be met at Heathrow – another of his fantasies of imminent arrest – by social workers and transport police. He grinned at the thought of how Alec might deal with such a situation and, thinking of his brother, realized how badly he wanted to see him, and that in some way he was counting on him. What kind of shape was Alec in these days? Five, six years now since he had had his ‘wobble’ (Alice’s term), and had left full-time teaching at the comp in London. How serious had that been? Were doctors involved? He had never asked, because five, six years ago he was in San Diego doing promotion for Reebok and talking to Ray Lumumba about a part in Sun Valley. Ella had just been born, and Alec’s trouble had been like a reminder of everything he – Larry – thought he had escaped in escaping England, those Fates who naturally crowded into old used-up countries, and who had already sent his father into the dark. He had no clear idea how he and Alec were going to get through these coming weeks, what dread pressures would come upon them, but the fact was that soon now they would be orphans, a thought terrible and curious that pricked all manner of childhood anxieties.