Cannibals and Missionaries (22 page)

Six

H
UMAN NATURE, THEY DECIDED
, was contrary. One would have supposed that they would have been grateful for practically any change, anything to break the monotony—more than a day in the jumbo at that point without even a cribbage-board. Yet the first-class hostages had not welcomed the arrival of a slew of hostages from Economy in their midst. Utterly unannounced: up to the minute the curtain had parted and that procession had filed in, one had thought one was alone in one’s glory; it had stood to reason that when the separation of the sheep from the goats had taken place, eons ago, the whole Economy contingent would have been released. So that it had been a shock to see these people appear and to learn that one was going to have them for company on the next leg of the journey, for no sooner had they made their appearance than the loud-speaker had blared: everyone was to collect his belongings and stand ready to board another aircraft.

But then a long wait had followed, and in the interval one had had time to sort out who was who, more or less, among one’s future companions. The gangling, bow-tied minister (Lily knew him from ages back) had got himself quite a name for being the worst type of bleeding heart—sad for his sweet wife and family and for his church, which was paying the price; nobody had a pew there any more. The stout tweedy old party with him, who looked quite a dear really with his apple cheeks and his “brolly,” had been a bishop somewhere out west, but he was tarred with the same brush: he had been close to Eleanor, it seemed, though Franklin could never abide him. And dear silly Charles, turning up like a bad penny after his “slumming” tour; one forgave him because one was used to his prattle. He was a nice old thing at heart, wouldn’t hurt a fly. He knew what it was to live with beautiful things. But clinging to him was a little rouged woman with dangling earrings and a screechy voice who could not stop talking—some sort of menopausal cause-person probably that he had picked up for his sins on one of his pinko boards. And there was a red-eyed unshaven creature draped in a filthy scarf and with a basket of cat food and “kitty-litter” who was evidently one of the flock; he had helped himself to several miniatures of vodka from the serving-pantry as he went by, and the steward had just shrugged. What the lot of them had been doing on a flight to Teheran was rather hard to imagine; there was nothing in that part of the world but oil and archaeology, and neither, one would think, was their dish of tea.

But it fitted that that Senator Carey was with them, a maverick even in his own party. He was a well-groomed man at any rate, rather actorish like so many of his trade but handsome in a theatrical way. He probably used a rinse on that silver hair and dyed his eyebrows. And of course he would be odoriferous of toilet lotion—the Irish in him coming out. He was exchanging witticisms with a younger man, quite handsome too, with a trench coat slung over his shoulders and got up in a flaring whipcord suit coat that must have been “bespoke”; he wore a folded-over scarf for a tie and did not seem like an American. With them was a tall, frowning girl with a long Jewish nose that Beryl said she knew—another lefty, needless to say. Bringing up the rear had been a short bristly man, who looked like a professor, with a pipe. Most of them could have done with a freshening-up in the lavatory.

Luckily, though, there was room in the helicopter for the two parties to keep their distance. Beryl, right away, had wanted to fraternize, but Lily, exercising a mother’s rights, had made her stay put. Until they had actually laid eyes on the “whirlybird” they were going to have to board—quite a feat for a woman of Margaret’s girth—they had been fearing a tight squeeze. Some of the ladies had armed themselves with atomizers from their toilet cases to ward off odors, and clever Mrs. Chadwick had improvised quite a pretty fan from the Air France menu. But there was space, and to spare, for everybody, including two of the cabin crew. The steward told them that the giant helicopter had been flown in from Germany (West), which was the reason for the long delay, but Harold Chadwick was sure it was an American jobbie—they did not make them that size over here. And one certainly need not have worried about lack of air. In fact, it was awfully drafty. Noisy as well; you could hardly hear yourself think. Johnnie Ramsbotham, who was up front, had kept shouting at the pilot to ask where they were bound for, but any answers he might have got were lost in the din of the propeller-blades. The stewardess—the nice one, with the smelling-salts—had no idea where they might be going. Lapland, it felt like, from the interior temperature. The high-colored, strong-jawed fellow in the whipcord seemed to know; he was standing up, rather dangerously, and pointing out landmarks to the Senator.

But it was useless to call out and ask him; he would not be able to hear. That was the disadvantage of having stayed with one’s own group, leaving a no man’s land of empty seats in between. Johnnie, who was a sailor and knew how to take his bearings, thought they must still be over Holland. But they had not seen any windmills. And not a sign of a landing field. That had made poor Harold anxious, as the sun was already setting. He flew his own plane, so he understood these things. According to him, the pilot would not dare to put down in the dark, just like that, without ground flares to guide him. They could count on half an hour of light after sunset; after that, they would have to find a proper landing field or crash.

It was unnerving to have to hear that, considering all they had been through already; it would be the last straw to die at this point in a common ordinary plane crash. So far, except for the little curator, everybody had been amazingly brave, treating it as a lark and fortifying the inner man with drinks; Helen Potter was quite tiddly. They had agreed to be philosophical about their baggage—Air France could keep it for them in Amsterdam, hopefully under lock and key—you could hardly expect hijackers to be interested in whether you had your nighties or clean shirts. On seeing the new additions to the party, the men, typically, had been concerned about rations: wherever they were headed for, there would be a great many mouths to feed, and the lefties, they feared, would get the lion’s share. Foresighted Johnnie, before quitting the jumbo, had stuffed his pockets with Air France candies from the tray. Still, it would not hurt most of the males to tighten their belts a bit; they could make believe they were at one of their “fat farms.” Yet now, with dusk gathering, all the bravely hidden worries peeked out.

First, the mystifying fact of having been singled out as “hostage material” (Beryl’s funny phrase) when the rest of the first-class passengers had been sent packing. “Do we look so prosperous?” Johnnie had innocently wondered. Well, obviously they did. Johnnie Ramsbotham was one of the two hundred richest men in America. But how could the hijackers know that? Unless Charles had been naughty. The old tease loved to talk about “my millionaires” and “my Republicans.” Of course he would never stop to think that hijackers too had ears. And next there were the collections, which was the point that they all—multi-millionaires or just making ends meet—had in common. Could a little bird have told the hijackers about those? Helen’s Vermeer was famous, and she had been generous—or foolish—enough to share it with the public by letting it hang on loan in a show for one of her charities. And Harold’s Cézannes were in all the books. Johnnie collected only sporting art, but his Stubbses and Degas were worth fortunes, not to mention his Dufy sailing subjects and his great Ward. As for Lily, some authorities thought her English water-colors, though fewer in number, were every bit as fine as Paul Mellon’s.

Then of course there was the “couple” little Mr. Walton, the curator, had included on his own say-so—they were of his ilk, evidently. They had joined the tour at the airport, having driven up from their villa in the south of France: that was in the winter; the rest of the time they lived in Duxbury, outside of Boston. No one knew yet what they collected. Prints, one might guess, since, to judge from their battered attaché cases sporting ancient hotel stickers, they belonged to the category of “more taste than money.” But prints, these days, were “in” and could fetch enormous prices. Eventually one could ask.

Yet even if the hijackers had somehow got wind of this tour of collectors, how could that serve their purposes? All those treasures were back in America, protected by the latest burglar-alarm systems and fully insured. Nobody traveled with their valuables these days. Years ago, Wintie Thorp, before he became a vegetable, used to take his Byzantine ivories with him on the steamer to Europe and set one up in his hotel dressing-room every morning on the shaving-stand, so that he could look at it while shaving, start the day right, but there were no old-fashioned steamers any more and no shaving-stands, unless maybe at Claridge’s, and Margaret had sold the collection—
too
portable. Today someone feeling the pinch and having been stung once too often at Sotheby Parke Bernet might hand-carry a little pair of icons or a Book of Hours to Christie’s in London for appraisal, but if the insurance company knew about it, the premiums would be prohibitive. Of the present group, only Charles, apparently, could not learn to move with the times; he insisted on wearing that intaglio ring—crystal, with
“amor fati”
incised in it—that he said had belonged to some Lord Acton, and if you turned out his pockets you would be bound to find a few of his “trinkets,” a rare Babylonian shekel or a sweet little Twelfth Dynasty Horus. At least his fabulous porcelains were safe with his couple on Mount Vernon Street. So that the collections should be the least of anybody’s worries now; there was no earthly reason to fear on their behalf.

And yet she did, roared Margaret, and doubtless they all did in their hearts. The penalty of owning great works of art, or even itsy-bitsy ones, was that the minute anything out-of-the-way happened, your thoughts flew to them like a mother bird to the nest. Most of the time, unless you were showing the collection to visitors, you hardly
saw
the master works hanging on your walls or mounted in cases, the way you ceased to hear a clock ticking after awhile—it was something about the attention-span. That was why experts advised one to keep changing their positions. If Helen looked at her Vermeer more than once a week, it would be unusual; her maid, dusting the frame with a special soft brush, spent more time, probably, “communing” with it than she did. It was a privilege to be a domestic in a house like that, where practically every stick of furniture was signed by a great cabinet-maker; they said beauty was contagious if you were exposed to it long enough, but sometimes one wondered—look at Harold. In any case, rub off on you or not, beautiful things were a heavy responsibility. Worse than children, who eventually grew up and found their own way. Whenever you went off for a weekend, or even downtown to the hairdresser, a part of you stayed home with your treasures, and your first thought, on opening the door after an absence, was to make sure they were still there. They said you could store them in a vault, like your jewelry, when you went away, but what was the point of having beautiful things if you had to keep coming home to blank spaces on the walls and a constant traffic of bonded moving-men on the carpets? Then there was the burden of caring for them, seeing that they had the right temperature and humidity, protecting them from the sun, making certain that they were dusted, or not dusted, as the case might be. At least, unlike an animal, they did not have to be exercised.

Lily, by the bye, had a funny story about this bolshie minister when he was a curate. She had had him to one of her musical teas—that was when she still had the house on Fifth Avenue—and in those days there was a little Augustus John in the morning-room that had come down to her from an aunt. People always asked to see it, because of the subject—Churchill’s beautiful American mother—though it was a flashy thing and she finally put it up for auction. Anyway, that day there was a new butler, and when this Reverend Mr. Barber turned up, just out of Divinity School, he asked him “Where is the John?” In an undertone, because the music had already started. So the butler said “Here, sir,” and showed him to the toilet. The curate was so mortified that he went in and did his business and turned tail and left. Lily only heard later, from the butler, what had happened. “He asked me for the john, madam, and I directed him.”

“I don’t know why Mother insists on telling that story,” loudly complained Beryl, an overweight child in her late thirties who was always picking quarrels with Lily. For weeks, they gathered, she had been refusing to come on this tour and then, characteristically, changed her mind at the last minute—such a bother for Lily, who had to pull strings with the Iranian ambassador in Washington, so that the girl could have her visa in time. He could not have been more charming, and yet Beryl would not even write him a little note of thanks. Now she was tickled that they had been hijacked; it had “made” her winter, she announced. She would say anything of course to be different, but perhaps in a pitiful way it was true. Her life with Lily in that apartment was rather barren; she had so few interests of her own and refused to share in her mother’s: she had hated art from the cradle and had her own queer little collections of inartistic objects, such as antique false teeth and poison labels for medicine bottles—quite amusingly arranged, it had to be admitted; she had the family knack.

If only she had not had that figure problem, which was not glands but plain over-eating—stuffing herself to fill an aching inner void—she could have been rather stunning. She had a real porcelain complexion (proof of perfect elimination, considering what she ate!), which she had to disfigure with big circus patches of rouge. Her hair was thick and naturally blond, and she wore it in a wide Dutch bang that came down to a point in the middle over the family nose—a twenties style called the “Sweetheart” that she had found in some cheap magazine. Her best feature was her eyes, bluer than Lily’s and glittering like sapphires, which too often she hid behind huge dark glasses, as though she thought she was Jacqueline Bouvier or a film star. And she would not let Lily dress her. Instead, she had a passion for “separates”—billowy skirts and assorted bright-colored blouses that recalled whole choruses of buxom villagers in an opera. Johnnie commented that Beryl’s outfits always looked as if she had bought each item in a different Thrift shop and then thrown them all together in a hopper. For the flight she had not wanted to wear her lovely long mink—Lily’s Christmas offering. Instead, there was a cherished junk-fur jacket dyed a brilliant blue that she had planned to put on over slacks. Lily had had to insist, and now, in this freezing cabin, Beryl could be grateful.