Eventually I put the book away. “Give me your ticket.”
“Why?”
“I want to check something.”
To my surprise she didn’t argue but handed it over. I wandered out to the concierge, who was very helpful and did a lot of telephoning on my behalf.
Julia contained herself until we were aboard and tightening our seat belts. I made sure she had the window seat this time. “Okay. I give in. What were you checking?”
“The flight path. That we were seated on the left-hand side of the plane. That we could get our luggage sent on to the hotel at the other end so we don’t have to wait.”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“They don’t offer, but if you ask, and pay, they can be persuaded.” Another of those clubs that you have to know exists before you find out how to join.
The plane taxied for takeoff. The pulse in Julia’s neck beat faster. “And what about the flight plan, and seats?” The plane jerked a little as the pilot braked. The huge Rolls-Royce engines turned now in earnest and one of the overhead bins began to rattle. It was an old plane. The rattling got louder and faster. Julia’s nostrils were pinched and white.
“Just after takeoff, there’s something I think you might like to see.”
The engines suddenly roared in release and we lumbered down the runway. A bump, a lift, and we were airborne, the pilot hauling back on the stick so hard I thought he was trying for a loop-the-loop. Julia’s fingers dug into her armrest.
“Look down now. It’s Windsor Castle.”
We flew just a few hundred yards above the now-gracious showpiece of robber barons turned monarchs: the cathedral-sized chapel; the huge hall built by Edward III to bolster his new order, the Knights of the Garter; the vast outer ward.
The plane groaned. Julia breathed very fast. “Edward rebuilt everything in stone, starting about 1350,” I said. “Trouble is, that was just after the great plague. There weren’t really enough stonemasons, carpenters and other artisans to go around, so Edward scoured the whole country and brought them all to Windsor. They demanded bigger wages because now demand outweighed supply. Edward outwardly railed against it, but privately paid them what they asked. Medieval inflation.”
We were leaving the castle behind. Julia’s breathing had evened out a little. “I’ve never seen a castle before.”
“We’ll have a couple of days in London on the way back. While I see my mother, you might like to visit Windsor, and there are numerous cathedrals, ruined abbeys, manor houses….” We were up among the clouds now. She still had not let go of the armrest. I sighed. This could be a long journey.
“When I first started living in the U.S., I would drive along interstates and country lanes, along highway and freeway, and I would constantly scan the countryside. Every time there was a ridge or a hilltop or a bluff, I found myself looking up, expecting to see…something. It was years before I realized what I was searching for: evidence of the hand of humankind. In England, every hill is topped with the weathered remains of some Iron Age fort, of ruined manor houses, or abbeys staring naked and roofless at the sky. Sometimes it’s just the faint outline of ancient earthworks, but there’s almost always something, some indication that people once lived there. You can look out of the window of a plane and see fields and hedgerows that were first laid out in the ninth century. The hills have been smoothed, the rivers banked, the woods coppiced for thousands of years. And then I moved to Georgia. To Marietta, where a railway that’s barely a hundred years old is trumpeted with huge signs demanding that the poor motorist visit the Historic Railroad. To Duluth, where I lived in an apartment complex called Northwoods Lake Court, surrounded by old-growth pine forest, but where an eleven-year-old child now might go and look around and ask her mother: ‘Why did they call this place Northwoods, because there aren’t any trees?’ To Atlanta, Atlanta which they say Sherman burnt to the ground, but which is really destroyed every ten years by greedy developers who rip down beautiful buildings that have stood for decades and replace them with tissue-walled condominium boxes not even built to code. In Georgia, you drive ten miles outside the city and all you see is bare red clay and huge signposts declaring ‘Land For Sale’ to the highest bidder. It feels cold, sometimes, inimical and empty.”
“So why do you stay?”
“Because despite everything developers are trying to do, there is still a lot of natural beauty. For instance, there’s a park near Duluth. It has a lake with geese and ducks and fish, and it’s fringed with duckweed and cattails. The woods are full to bursting with birds. Cardinals and three different kinds of woodpecker, nuthatches, warblers, bluebirds…Have you ever seen a bluebird? They’re extremely sensitive to pollution. They’re always the first to go. But this park has bluebirds—they’re the colour of blue powder paints in the sunshine. In the woods are salamanders, lizards, mice, voles. There are yellow iris and tiger lilies, trumpet honeysuckle, swamp oak and white pine. And no one is ever there. It’s always empty.”
“You sound angry.”
“I’ve lived most of my life in London and Leeds, in Bergen and Oslo, and most of the time in those cities the only birds are sparrows that cough themselves awake on phone wires in the morning, and if you see a squirrel it’s a big nature day. Americans have no idea how lucky they are.”
She was quiet for a while. “I was brought up in Massachusetts,” she said, “with winding country lanes, blackberries that have grown along the mossy walls for three hundred years, the occasional Cape Cod that has weathered storms off the Atlantic for a hundred and fifty. I had no idea I missed them until now.”
And so for the next two hours, I told her about Yorkshire—the towns there with Roman walls; the pubs in the Dales that were built as farms in the fourteenth century—and she talked about the private school she attended in Boston.
As the western coast of Norway drew near, I glanced out at the sea every few minutes. The captain announced we were beginning our preliminary descent. Then I saw it.
“Look down there,” I said.
We were about two miles out from the coast but the North Sea below us, usually a steely grey, looked like an estuary: huge currents and swathes of what looked like mud.
“Oh, the assholes! What caused that?”
“It’s not pollution.”
“Then what is it?” She was quite belligerent.
“Herring, on their way north, lay so many eggs and release so much milt that it clogs the water.” I imagined their cold, muscular bodies glinting silver in the freezing water, thrashing and ecstatic with the urge to procreate, releasing their vast, living milk tide. “There are so many eggs that they wash up on the rocky northern shores like snowdrift. Then massive flocks of birds dive in to feed. It used to be that massive flocks of people would appear to bring down the birds. Puffins are very tasty. But that doesn’t happen much anymore.”
“Much?”
I just smiled.
The plane turned southeast, the captain struggled bravely with the intercom but remained incomprehensible, and we made our final approach. Beneath us, at the head of the swan-shaped neck of water that is Oslofjorden, Oslo glittered in the spring sunlight like a broken-open geode.
International airports usually smell of jet fuel and stale clothes but at Fornebu, on the peninsula that pokes into Lysakerfjorden just six miles west of Oslo, those scents are swept aside by sharp sea air and the fragrance of pine trees. The scents of home.