Airs Above the Ground (3 page)

The
Guardian
gave it eight lines just above the Bridge game on page thirteen.

Two men were churned to death on Sunday night when
a wagon belonging to a travelling circus caught fire. The circus was performing in the village of Oberhausen, in the Styrian province of Austria, near Graz
.

Next morning, Friday, I did hear from Lewis. It was a note in his own handwriting, dated on Monday, and postmarked Stockholm, and it read: ‘
Have almost finished the job here, and hope to be home in a few days’ time. I’ll cable when you can expect me. Love, Lewis
.’

That same morning I rang up Carmel Lacy.

‘If you still want a courier for your baby boy,’ I told her, ‘you’ve got one. You were quite right about Lewis . . . I’ve had a letter, and he’s in Austria, and he wants me to join him there. I’ll go any time, and the sooner the better . . .’

Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple: ’tis with him e’en standing water, between boy and man. He is very well-favoured, and he speaks very shrewishly: one would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him.

Shakespeare:
Twelfth Night

Timothy Lacy had changed, in that startling way children have that one ought to expect but never does.

He had grown into a tall boy, resembling as far as I could see neither parent, but with a strong look of his grandfather, and a quick-moving, almost nervous manner which would weather with time into the same wiry, energetic toughness. He had grey-green eyes, a fair skin tending to freckles, and a lot of brown hair cut fashionably long in a style which his mother had deplored loudly, but which I secretly rather liked. The expression he had worn ever since his mother had officially handed him over in the main lounge at London Airport – much as she had handed over her
spoilt spaniel in my father’s surgery – had been, if one put it kindly, reserved. If one put it truthfully, he had looked like a small boy in a fit of the sulks.

He was fumbling now with his seat belt, and it was obvious from his unaccustomed movements that he had never flown before; but I dared not offer to help. After Carmel’s tearful – and very public – handing over of her baby, it would have seemed like tucking his feeder round his neck.

I said instead: ‘It was clever of you to get these seats in front of the wing. If only there’s no cloud we’ll have a marvellous view.’

He gave me a glance where I could see nothing but dislike. The thick, silky hair made a wonderful ambush to glower through, and increased the resemblance to a spoilt but wary dog. He did mutter something, but at that moment the Austrian Airlines Caravelle began to edge her silky, screaming way forward over the concrete, and he turned eagerly to the window.

We took off exactly on time. The Caravelle paused, gathered herself, then surged forward and rushed up into the air in that exciting lift that never fails to give me the genuine old-fashioned thrill up the marrow of the spine. London fell away, the coast came up, receded, the hazy silver-blue of the channel spread out like wrinkled silk, then the parcelled fields of Belgium reeled out below us, fainter and fainter with distance as the Caravelle climbed to her cruising height and levelled off for the two hours’ stride to Vienna. Clouds flecked the view below, thickened, lapped over it like fish-scales, drew a blanket across it . . . We hung
seemingly motionless in the sunlight in front of our whispering engines, with the marvellous pageant of clouds spread, at no more than the speed of drifting surf, below.

‘Angels’ eye view,’ I said. ‘We get a lot of privileges now that only the gods got before. Including destroying whole cities at a blow, if it comes to that.’

He said nothing. I sighed to myself, gave up my attempts to take my own mind off the situation ahead of me, and opened a magazine. Lunch came, and went, temptingly foreign, with
Apfelsaft
or red wine or champagne, the boy beside me so pointedly refraining from comment on what was obviously a burstingly exciting experience for him that I felt a flicker of irritation pierce my own preoccupations. The Caravelle tilted slightly to starboard; Nürnberg must be somewhere now below that cloud, and we were turning south-east for Passau and the Austrian border. The trays were cleared, people stood, stretched, moved about, and the trolley of scent and cigarettes was wheeled up the aisle in nice time to block the passengers’ access to the lavatories.

The pretty stewardess in her navy uniform bent over me. ‘Would you care for cigarettes, madam? Perfume? Liquor?’

‘No, thank you.’

Her eyes went doubtfully to Timothy, who had turned back from his window. ‘Cigarettes, sir?’

‘Of course.’ He said it promptly, and rather too loudly, and I caught the edge of a glance at me. ‘What kind have you?’

She told him, and he made his choice and fumbled
for the money. As she handed him the statutory packet of two hundred, I saw his eyes widen, but he successfully hid dismay, if that was what he was feeling, and paid. The trolley moved on. With some panache, but without another glance at me, Timothy tucked the cigarettes down into his airline holdall, and got out a paperback mystery. Silence hovered again, conscious, ready to strike.

I said: ‘You know, I couldn’t really care less if you want to smoke all day and all night till you die of six sorts of cancer all at once. Go right ahead. And as a matter of fact, the sooner the better. You have the worst manners of any young man I ever met.’

The paperback dropped to his knees, and he looked at me full for the first time, eyes and mouth startled open. I said: ‘I know quite well that you’re perfectly capable of travelling alone, and that you’d prefer it. Well, so would I. I’ve got troubles enough of my own, without bothering about yours, but if I hadn’t said I’d go with you, you’d never have got away. I know you’re sitting there fulminating because you’ve had a kind of nursemaid tagged on to you, but for goodness’ sake aren’t you adult enough to know that there are two sides to everything? You know you’d get on fine on your own, but your mother doesn’t, and there’s no sense in making gestures to reassure oneself, if they’re only distressing other people. Surely all that really matters now is that you have got your own way, so why not make the best of it? We’re stuck with each other till I get you – or you get me – safely into Vienna,
and you meet your father. Then we’re both free to go about our own affairs.’

Timothy swallowed. The action seemed to use the muscles of his whole body. When he spoke, his voice cracked infuriatingly back for a moment into falsetto.

‘I – I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I didn’t want to make you talk if you’d rather read or watch the view,’ I said, ‘but as a matter of fact I always get nervous on take-off, and if one chatters a bit about things it takes one’s mind off it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Timothy again. He was scarlet now, but his voice had got back to the norm required of a young man who could comfort a nervous woman on take-off. ‘I hadn’t realised you were feeling like that. I was so – that is, it’s all been so . . . I couldn’t think how I was going to . . .’ He stopped floundering, bit his lip, then said with devastating simplicity: ‘The cigarettes were for Daddy.’

As an
amende honorable
it was superb. It also had the effect of taking the wind right out of my sails. And he knew it. I could see the glint in the grey-green eyes.

I said: ‘Timothy Lacy, you have all the makings of a dangerous young man. I’m not in the least surprised your mother’s afraid to let you out alone. Now tell me what to call you. I know your mother calls you Timmy, but it sounds a bit babyish to me. Do you prefer Timothy, or Tim?’

‘I’ll settle for Tim.’

‘Well, mine’s Vanessa.’

‘That’s an awfully pretty name. Are you called after Vanessa Redgrave?’

I laughed. ‘Have a heart, I’m twenty-four. I don’t know where they got the name from, probably just something my mother found in a book. As a matter of fact, it’s a butterfly, or rather a family of butterflies, rather pretty ones, peacocks and painted ladies, and so on. Fair and fickle, that’s me, born to flit from flower to flower.’

‘Well,’ said Timothy, ‘that’s a bond between us, anyway. They used to call me Mothy for short at my prep. school. I say, you can see a bit now through the clouds. There’s a river . . . Do you suppose it’s the Danube?’

‘Could be. We more or less follow it the last part of the way.’

‘If you’re going to be frightened when we land,’ he said kindly, ‘I’ll hold your hand if you like.’

‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ asked Timothy.

The clouds we drifted across now, a mile above our own shadow, were Austrian. They looked just the same. Timothy, slightly crumpled looking, and melting minute by minute into relaxation, had got to the stage of showing me photographs. This one was of a girl on a grey pony. It was an oldish print, fading a bit, and in the girl, plump and fair and sitting solidly in the saddle, I was a bit startled to recognise Carmel.

‘Er, yes.’ Nothing that her son had told me up to now – and he had poured out a good deal about the Lacy
ménage
which I was sure Carmel would prefer me not to have heard – nothing had led me to expect the enthusiasm with which Timothy now held out his
mother’s photograph. I asked rather lamely: ‘How old was she then?’

‘Pretty old when that was taken. About fifteen. You can tell by the tail.’

‘You can tell by the what?’

‘The tail. Actually that pony’s of the Welsh “Starlight” strain, and they’re pretty long-lived; they don’t start to look old till they’re dying on their feet.’ Then he recollected himself. ‘Gosh, listen to me telling you! As if you didn’t know all that, being practically a vet.’

‘Not so much of the “practically”, please! I qualified just before I was married.’

‘Did you? I hadn’t realised.’

‘If it comes to that,’ I said, ‘I was “practically” a vet. as you call it, before I even started at the Dick Vet. – that’s the Veterinary College in Edinburgh where I went. You can’t be brought up all your life in a veterinary surgeon’s house and not learn a heck of a lot about the job.’

‘I suppose not . . . it’ll be like me, getting sort of brought up with the horses at my grandfather’s place. Did you ever practise?’

‘Officially, only for about six months, but in actual fact you do a lot of practical work as a student, especially in your final year. You travel out to farms, and handle the animals, and you learn to make your own diagnoses, use X-rays, assist operations – the lot. After I got my diploma I started work as Daddy’s assistant, but then I met Lewis and got married.’

‘What exactly does he do, your husband?’

‘He’s employed by Pan-European Chemicals. You’ll
have heard of it; it’s not as vast as ICI, but it’s getting on that way. Lewis is in the Sales Department. He’s planning to change over now to another branch, because his job takes him abroad too much – he used not to mind, but we hardly seem to have seen each other since we were married. To begin with I used to go home while he was abroad, and work with my father, but then I started helping out now and then at the PDSA – that’s the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals – near where we live in London, and that keeps my hand in.’

‘Gosh, yes: I’m sorry about the “practically”, it was a howling insult.’ He sat quiet for a moment, riffling through the remaining photographs in his hands. I saw that they were mostly of horses. He seemed completely relaxed now and at ease, his random remarks and silences coming as easily as among his contemporaries. Which, in fact, I now felt myself to be: oddly enough, this was the effect which my school-mistressy outburst had produced in both of us, as if we had quarrelled and now had made it up on equal terms, with a licence to say what we felt.

He said suddenly: ‘I hate London. It was all right when grandfather was alive, I was allowed to go there a lot in the hols. Mummy didn’t seem to want me around so much then, when the girls were still home. If only she’d kept the place on . . . got somebody in to manage it . . . not just sold it . . .’ He snapped the photographs together into a pack, pushed them into their envelope and tucked them decisively down into the holdall. ‘And now that I’ve left school, it just looked as if it was going
to be London all summer, and I felt I couldn’t stick it. So I had to do something drastic, hadn’t I?’

‘Like harrying your poor mother into parting with you? I shouldn’t worry; she’ll survive it.’

He gave me a quick, bright glance, and seemed about to say something, but thought better of it. When he did speak, I felt sure this was not what he had been going to say. ‘Have you ever been to Vienna before?’

‘No.’

‘I wondered if you were interested in the Spanish Riding School. You know, the team of white Lipizzan stallions that give those performances of
haute école
to music. I’ve wanted to see them all my life.’

I said: ‘I know of them, of course, but I can’t say I know much about them. I’d certainly love to see them. Are they in Vienna now?’

‘They live in Vienna. The performances are put on in a marvellous building like a big eighteenth-century ballroom, in the Hofburg Palace. They perform every Sunday morning; only, I’m afraid, not in August. They’ll begin again in September . . .’ He grinned. ‘If I know anything about it, I’ll still be here. But one can go into the stables any time and see them there, and I believe you can get to the training sessions and see the work actually going on. My father’s been in Vienna now for six months, and I’m hoping he’ll know a few of the right people by now, and get me in behind the scenes.’ He glanced away out of his window. ‘I believe we’re beginning to lose height.’

I looked thoughtfully at his averted profile. Here was yet another change. Now that he was launched on
something that appealed to him, that genuinely mattered, his voice and manner had lost the remaining touches of awkward youth. This was a young man talking about his subject with the air of knowing far more about it than he was bothering to impart. But not quite, yet, with the air of knowing exactly where he was going: there was a lurking trace of defiance still about that.