In the Time of Greenbloom (38 page)

Here, above the ocean, the clouds began to thin out and separate a little as though even they themselves moved like dissolving icebergs through a cold sea of air which was nevertheless warmer than that which flowed over the great land mass of England. Looking back he saw that England was itself shaped in the clouds, that they lay above the land in a tumbled outline of her coasts and bays casting their gloom over her landscape narrowly and exactly. Ahead, quite low on the horizon, was a less distinct mass which he guessed must be coincident with the French coast; but between this and the Moth lay the sparsely clouded space of the grey-blue Channel.

He had never realised how wide the Channel was; they seemed to have been flying above it for something over half an hour before the opposing coast became sufficiently clear for him to try and identify particular features. Then, when finally they were about to cross the deep fringe of frozen waves, cloud again intervened and Greenbloom who had come down a little for the sea crossing pulled on the stick
and forced the Moth to ascend once more into the endless variations of the cloudscape.

John turned and shouted to Rachel:

“Was that the French coast?”

She nodded.

“What part?” She shook her head gaily and yawned.

“Britanny,” said Greenbloom. “Off course a little—stratocumulus!”

Rachel handed him a note.

“HAVE WE PLENTY OF PETROL?”

Greenbloom glanced at the fuel gauge. “Half an hour—land somewhere—fill up.”

“On an aerodrome?” asked John.

“Give me the map!”

Rachel passed it and John leaned over and spread it across Greenbloom's knees. It was scored in red with little flags marked:

Good, Bad, Indifferent, Impossible

“What are those?” he asked as Greenbloom's long fingers slid over the green patterns.

“Forced landings—old ones.”

“Forced landings?”

Rachel nudged him and shook her head quickly; in a few moments she gave him another note:

“DON'T KEEP ASKING HIM QUESTIONS” it said. “HE LIKES TO BE TRUSTED. IF HE THINKS YOU HAVE LOST FAITH IN HIM—MAY DO SOMETHING RECKLESS.”

John nodded vigorously. The inside of his mouth had become glutinous and slightly bitter; he remembered something he had read somewhere about the ‘thick saliva of fear'. Forced landings were a last resort, or at least so he had always
supposed; nobody ever attempted one unless they were desperate, and yet Greenbloom seemed to have made at least a dozen of them if his map were trustworthy. Forced landings, successful ones, depended on all sorts of factors such as wind-speed and direction, suitable approach, length of run, and landing speeds. He found himself trying desperately to work out how long it had taken them to get off the ground at Port Meadow so that he might assess the size of field they would need in order to land in France. He decided that it would have to be quite a large field, a very large one, say twice the length of the upper playing field at Beowulf's; there would have to be no cars, buildings, telegraph poles, nor pylons.

His heart suddenly very apparent to him, each wild beat thumping up into his ears, he started searching the dashboard for the fuel gauge: the white needle was now very near the round O and he could imagine the petrol sinking perceptibly in the tank, washing backwards and forwards over the metal bottom like water in an emptying bath.

“
This cumulus
!” said Greenbloom angrily. “Have to get below it.”

He pushed the short aluminium stick forward, cut down on the revolutions, and they began to sink towards the cloud floor. Nearer and nearer rose the delicate sculpture until it seemed that any moment some perceptible change must become apparent in their progress; but nothing happened. They continued to sink as easily as they had done in the untrammelled sunlight, and the fact that the great solidity of the clouds could do nothing to slow them up or hold them above the invisible ground made John for the first time fully aware of their peril. Around him the clean panes of glass had vanished; instead they were fogged over and breathed upon as though by an icy dragon: drops of water blown by the wind of the propeller jerked wildly across them and through the cleared spaces there was nothing to be seen but the enormous vacancy of the cloud in whose vapour they were wrapped and blinded as they floated ever nearer to the deadly ground.

They might be descending at a hundred miles an hour into the peak of a mountain, a church spire, a factory, or an electric pylon; but they could not possibly know. They would never know. Vividly, reliving again the weeks of his own publicity, he imagined the headlines in the newspaper, the short-lived tears and talk; and then tried to banish the insistent thought of the nothingness which might await him, the nothingness he had discussed with Greenbloom only half a day ago.

His panic held him numb in his seat. He could not move or swallow, even his eyes seemed to be glazing between their unblinking lids; and then suddenly the Moth fell clear: once again there was light and colour and beneath them a flat green landscape scattered over with villages roads and woodland.

The variety of it astonished him; even after so short a time in the filtered emptiness of the air and clouds the sudden sight of so many new colours, of such a giant activity as the land implied, shocked his senses, reminding him at once of the book of Genesis: of the land separating itself from the water after the coming of the light, and of the Spirit brooding over them on the first day of creation.

Even without people, even if all this had been a grey-green desert, it would have been prodigious; and he realised that although he had never flown before he had responded more easily to the great void of Heaven than to the material fact of the World. To meet it like this after so much whiteness and emptiness was to see it as though for the first time, to understand the first meaning of Geography which as old Rudmose had often explained derived from
γη
meaning land and
γρα
ϕ
ειν
meaning to draw. Here beneath him was the land drawn together out of vacuity, shaped and moulded in an enormous ball of rock and ocean and put to circling the sun as though by a cunning long-departed hand.

He was glad that on this first encounter with the reality of Creation he should have had Greenbloom with him. Identifying him as he increasingly did with the Old Testament, it was only fitting that he should have been beside him at the
moment of this personal revelation; and confident now as never before, he relaxed in his seat as they continued to sink slowly down towards the fields of France.

Greenbloom was perfectly calm; his small predatory head swung quickly from side to side as he searched the landscape for a suitable run-in and swung the Moth over the tapestry of woods and fields. For a few minutes they continued this restive questing like a fish hovering over the bed of a running river, drifting in the flow of the wind and light lying between fields and clouds; then Greenbloom evidently saw what he wanted. He muttered something, banked the Moth into a steep right turn which threw them over on their sides, and headed across a low hill to a distant expanse of grass.

As they drew nearer, a tiny grandstand appeared and John was able to see the white posts and railings of an oval racecourse set neatly out ahead of them. They came up to it quickly; Greenbloom looked for chimney-smoke from a near-by cottage, circled into the wind, and having adjusted the Trim cut down on the engine revolutions as they began to stream forwards towards the last straight section of the racecourse.

Once again their shadow flew to meet them; they flashed over a hedge, over a section of the rails stretching far over to the right towards a group of trees, and then as the flickering propeller responded smoothly to the accelerator, as even the molehills became distinct as small mountains, they met the racing grass and fled over it in a perfect three-point landing.

Greenbloom applied the brakes; they were thrown forward on their seats, the posts on either side of them slowed up, the propeller spun idly and quite swiftly they drew up in front of an empty enclosure to the left of the grandstand. Greenbloom switched off the engine and there was a full silence: it drew round them like the sucking aftermath of a wave, thick and turgid, filled with bright pebbles of sound: wind noises, the creak of plovers, and somewhere far away the braying of a donkey.

Greenbloom pulled up his trouser leg and adjusted a small
lever beside the metal knee-cap, he flicked it from
Driving
printed in blue letters to
Walking
printed in green and then leaned back in his seat.

“France!” he said loudly. “Pass over the flask. We will drink to a successful flight and a quite superlative landing.”

They all drank and then Rachel said:

“I really must find a little place—that coffee!”

“
Coffee
!” said Greenbloom scornfully. “
This
is the coffee country; from now on we shall drink coffee as black as an Arabian's eye, sweeter than love. Go to the grandstand Rachel, you will find a
Dames
there somewhere.”

“Never!” said Rachel. “I
detesst
them.”

They opened the doors and stepped down on to the racetrack. The shadows were still quite long and the air was delicately scented with the morning. John looked round him; he had never seen a French racecourse before and at first he was a little disappointed by the lack of any obvious ‘foreignness' in the architecture: only a solitary flag fluttering above the centre of the grandstand gave any clue to their situation. He looked at the broad vertical stripes and thought of the French Revolution. Visions of the Scarlet Pimpernel,
Le Tricoleur
, of lazy
châteaux
, even memories of Monsieur Camambert and
les oiseaux
filled his head so that he could have danced with excitement on the resilient turf.

“It is ten o'clock.” In Rachel's absence Greenbloom was limping impatiently about in front of the Moth. “We must find out exactly where we are. All things considered I should imagine we must have come down somewhere between Rouen and Paris, say between
Chaumont-en-vexin
and
Chantilly
.” The words slid like liquid off his tongue and he started a snatch of song:

“
Auprés de ma blonde
Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon
—”

he croaked, taking off his helmet and giving it to John.

“Put this in the plane and find me my beret,” he said. “It
is under the seat somewhere. I am going to get hold of a
paysan
and find out about supplies of
essence
and
les taxis
. We are late.”

John found the beret and then ran after him as he made his way up the road running from the grandstand towards the group of trees they had seen. He dropped into step beside him as he put on the beret and hobbled rapidly in the direction of the smoke eddying from a hidden chimney-stack.

Behind them someone shouted and they turned round; a small man had emerged from a door at the back of the grandstand. He was carrying a besom and he looked sleepy.

“
Aie
!” he shouted. “
Aie
!”

They turned and hurried over to him as he waited there looking obsequious but a little dazed.

“
Pardon
!” said Greenbloom rapidly. “
J'espère que nous ne vous avons pas dérangé. Vous etiez en train de faire un petit somme, paraît-il
!”

The man touched his forehead and smiled; he smelt strongly of alcohol but even if his breath had been innocent they would have known by his air of broad complacency, by the sweep of his frequent gestures with the broom, that he had been drinking heavily; and then in confirmation of their suspicions he bowed and beckoned them to follow him into the room from which he had emerged. At the door he paused, bowed again, and ushered them in ahead of him.

The little room was furnished with two or three broken chairs on which sacks were spread, a large first-aid cupboard with Red Crosses on its doors, a jockey's weighing scale and a trestle table with a pair of binoculars on it.

Greenbloom at once sat down on one of the chairs and spread a
carte routière
across the table. He pointed at it.

“
Combien de kilometres y a t-il d'ici a la Capitale
?” he asked.

The little man leaned over it unsteadily. “
Francais
,” he said, and then rolled with laughter; his thin face assuming a festoon of creases as he rocked about in front of them.

“
Mais certainement
,” said Greenbloom. “
Vive La France
!”

At this the
concierge
stood to attention his laughter ceased
instantly and his face assumed an expression of great cunning. He fumbled in his trouser pocket brought out a bunch of keys and moving over to the first-aid cabinet unlocked it. He did it with such familiarity that they knew at once the reason for his delay in making his appearance. Quite obviously he had been afraid that the police or his employers had found him out at last, their sudden descent into his bored and bottled morning must have filled him with terror as he sat there drinking the stimulants reserved for injured jockeys.

Watching them a little uncertainly he drew out from the cupboard three dirty glasses and a half-empty bottle of brandy.

“‘
Sfine
,” he muttered. “
Cognac! Triste arles. Biste
.”

“
Mon Dieu
!” said Greenbloom. “He's drunk.”

“What's he saying?” asked John.

“Oh—‘
Fine
', the French for a shot of brandy. The man is so far gone that it's a little difficult to follow him.”

He accepted a tot of the brandy touched glasses with him and drained it at a gulp. “Try and get hold of the bottle,” he went on. “Once they're retired these
maquignons
drink like fish.”