Paradise News Page 6

  Are you equating belief in God with belief in Father Christmas?

  No, of course not. It’s just an analogy. We lose faith in acherished idea long before we admit it to ourselves. Some people never admit it. I often wonder about my fellow-students at the English College, and my colleagues at Ethel’s … Perhaps none of us really believed, and none of us would admit it.

  How could you go on teaching theology to candidates for the priesthood if you no longer believed in God?

  You can teach theology perfectly well without believing in the God of the Penny Catechism. In fact there are very few reputable modern theologians who do.

  So what God do they believe in?

  God as “the ground of our being”, God as “ultimate concern”, God as “the Beyond in the Midst.”

  And how does one pray to that kind of God?

  A good question. There are, of course, answers: for instance, that prayer expresses symbolically our desire to be religious – to be virtuous, disinterested, unselfish, ego-less, free from desire.

  But why should anyone wish to be religious if there is no personal God to reward him for being so?

  For its own sake.

  Are you religious in that sense?

  No. I would like to be. I thought I was, once. I was wrong.

  How did you find out?

  I suppose through meeting Daphne.

  Bernard opened his eyes. While he had been dozing, or musing, or dreaming, his mealtray with all its plastic detritus had been removed, and a kind of artificial evening had fallen on the passenger cabin of the jumbo jet. The blinds were drawn down over the portholes and the lights had been dimmed. On the video screen, mounted on a bulkhead further up the cabin, a pastel-coloured film jerked and twitched. A car chase was in progress. Vehicles slewed round corners, leapt into the air, overturned and exploded in flames, with silent, balletic grace. Mr Walsh had fallen asleep, and was snoring loudly with his head lolling forward on his chest like a limp puppet. Bernard moved his father’s seat into the reclining position, lifted his head and tucked a pillow under it. The old man groaned protestingly, but stopped snoring.

  Bernard had brought with him the monograph on process theology he was reviewing, but felt no inclination to read. He put on his earphones and tuned into the soundtrack of the film. He soon worked out the basis of the plot. The hero was an American policeman on the verge of retirement who, due to a mixup of medical specimens, had been wrongly informed that he was terminally ill, and immediately volunteered for the most dangerous assignments in his last week of service in the hope of getting killed in the course of duty, so that his estranged wife would receive a pension big enough to send their son to college. Not only did the policeman, to his intense exasperation, survive all the dangers to which he exposed himself, but he became a much-decorated public hero, to the astonishment and envy of his colleagues, who had always regarded him as more than usually cautious.

  Bernard found himself chuckling at the film even as he despised its slick exploitation of terminal illness. The audience could enjoy the pathos and nobility of the hero’s response to his fate, comfortable in the knowledge that he wasn’t really ill at all, and confident that the genre ensured his immunity from violent death. Of course, somewhere on the margins of the story there was another character (a black bus driver as it happened – thus doubly marginalized), the donor of the misplaced specimen, who was doomed to die, and didn’t know it, but out of sight was out of mind in fiction. In the last reel the hero appeared to fall off the top of a high building, and when the next scene presented a funeral in progress it seemed that the filmmakers had turned the tables on the audience in a sudden paroxysm of artistic integrity. But in fact it proved to be their most cynical trick of all: the camera pulled back to reveal the hero on crutches, attending the funeral of the black bus driver, and reconciled with his wife.

  As the credits rolled, Bernard got up from his seat and joined a queue for the toilets at the rear of the aircraft, taking his place behind a young man in shirtsleeves and red braces. At the head of the queue, just out of sight, a woman with a loud voice, in which Bernard recognized the tortured vowels of the West Midlands, was telling somebody that she and her husband were on their second honeymoon. The young man made a kind of choked glottal noise in his throat, and turned to face Bernard. “That’s rich,” he said bitterly.

  “I beg your pardon?” Bernard replied.

  “Did you hear that? A second honeymoon. Must be gluttons for punishment, that’s all I can say.”

  His hair was tousled and his eyes had a wild gleam in them. Bernard deduced that his father was not the only passenger to have over-indulged in liquor at lunchtime.

  “You married?” said the young man.

  “No.”

  “Take my advice: stay single.”

  “Well, I don’t think I’ll have any difficulty in doing that.”

  “Nice, eh, a honeymoon when your wife won’t speak to you?”

  Bernard inferred that this was the young man’s situation. “But surely she can’t keep it up indefinitely?” he said.

  “You don’t know Cecily,” said the young man gloomily. “I do. I know her. She’s remorseless when she’s angry. Remorseless. I’ve seen her reduce waiters – I mean London waiters, grown men, hardened cynics – I’ve seen her reduce them to tears.” He looked on the verge of tears himself.

  “Why…?”

  “Why did I marry her?”

  “No, I was going to say, why is she not speaking to you?”

  “That slag Brenda, wasn’t it?” said the young man. “Got pissed at the wedding, and spilled the beans to Cecily about us having it off in the storeroom at the office party last Christmas. Cecily called her a liar and threw a glass of champagne in her face. Oh, it was a lovely reception! Really lovely.” The young man twisted his lips into a bitter, reminiscent smile. “They hustled Brenda out of the room, screaming at Cecily: ‘Has he or hasn’t he got a scar on his bum?’ I have, you see, accident when I was a kid, climbing over park railings.” He rubbed his haunch as if the wound were still tender.

  “Excuse me, lads!” A middle-aged woman in a bright yellow frock covered with a pattern of red beach umbrellas pushed by them, trailing a waft of powerful scent.

  “Er, I think there’s a toilet free,” Bernard prompted.

  “Oh, right, thanks.” The young man blundered into one of the narrow cubicles, cursing under his breath as he struggled to close the folding door behind him.

  A few minutes later, on his way back to his seat, Bernard picked him out in the gloom by his striped shirt and red braces, slumped in his seat beside a young woman with straight fair hair held back from her pale brow by a tortoiseshell comb and a pair of headphones. Cecily was evidently listening to music because she was also reading, with expressionless concentration, a paperback novel held at an angle to catch the light from the overhead lamp. The young man said something to her, laying a hand on her arm to attract her attention. She shook it off without taking her eyes from her book, and the young man threw himself back in his seat with a scowl.

  Bernard also picked out the lady in the yellow frock sitting next to the side-whiskered man with the video camera. He was in a window seat and had raised the blind to film something through the porthole, though Bernard couldn’t imagine what it was – they were flying at 30,000 feet, above an unbroken carpet of cloud. He staggered in the aisle as the plane suddenly bucked and lurched. With a warning ping the “FASTEN SEAT BELTS” signs lit up and the muffled voice of the captain requested passengers to return to their seats as they were passing through an area of moderate turbulence. Mr Walsh was sitting bolt upright, gripping the arms of his seat, his eyes wide with terror, when Bernard got back to their row. “What is it, in the name of God? What’s happening? Is the plane going to crash?”

  “Just a bit of turbulence, Daddy. Air currents. Nothing to worry about.”

  “I need a drink.”

  “No,” said Bernard. “There’s another f
ilm starting. Would you like to watch it?”

  “I’m dyin’ of thirst. Is there any chance of a cup of tea?”

  “I doubt it. Not for a while, anyway. I could get you some fruit juice, if you like. Or a glass of water.”

  “I feel terrible,” moaned the old man. “I’m full of wind and my feet are swelled up and my mouth’s as dry as the Gobi desert.”

  “It’s your own fault for drinking too much. I warned you.”

  “I should never have let you talk me into coming on this excursion,” the old man whined. “It’s madness at my age. It’ll be the death of me.”

  “You’d be perfectly all right if you just did as you were told,” said Bernard, stooping with difficulty in the confined space to loosen his father’s shoelaces. He straightened up, flushed and breathless from the effort, under the slightly hostile regard of a dome-headed man in a beige safari suit, holding a book and leaning forward in his seat at the other end of the row as if to ascertain the latest cause of disturbance. Bernard glanced at his watch and was dismayed to discover that less than five hours of the eleven-hour flight had passed.

  “Do they have a lav on this thing?” says Mr Walsh.

  “Yes, of course, d’you want to go?”

  “Perhaps I could get rid of some of this wind. God, they don’t need a jet engine for this contraption, they could just tie me to the tail and let me fart us all the way to Hawaii.”

  Bernard sniggered, but was a little shocked. Either the alcohol or the high altitude had released a vein of ribald language in his father’s speech that he had never heard before, something that must derive from the rough male world of work and pubs that he had always kept at a distance from his family. For most of his life, Mr Walsh had worked as a despatch clerk for a transport company in the London Docks, retiring as chief shipper. One day in his school holidays, when he was about fourteen, Bernard had invented a pretext to visit his father’s place of work, a shabby wooden shed in the corner of a yard full of lorries, driven by men with arms like tattooed hams, who spat on the ground and kicked the huge grooved tyres of the vehicles before they climbed into their cabs. His father had looked up from a steel desk covered with files and spiked invoices, and said, “What the devil are you doing here?” He had not been pleased. “Don’t ever come here again,” he said, after Bernard delivered his trivial message. Bernard had realized then for the first time that his father was ashamed of his humble job, and of its sordid setting. He had wanted to say something healing and reassuring, but couldn’t find the right words. He had slunk off feeling guilty and ashamed himself. It had been a kind of primal scene, very Irish, exposing a secret of status, not sex.

  Coming out of the toilet, where she has spent some time trying to remove a sauce stain from her pink and blue tracksuit top, Sue Butterworth comes face to face with the old Irishman she chatted to in the terminal, standing disconcertingly close to the folding door as she opens it. He recoils, equally disconcerted, and says angrily to his son, hovering in the background, “Is this the Ladies you’ve brought me to?”

  “It’s all right, Daddy. The toilets are for anybody.”

  “Did you enjoy the film?” Sue asks, to cover the embarrassment. “I was really taken in at the end, by the funeral.”

  The old man is silent.

  “He’s just woken up, he’s not feeling too good,” says the bearded son. “Can you manage on your own, Daddy?”

  “Of course I can.”

  “What are you waiting for, then?”

  By the glare which he directs at herself, Sue infers that he is waiting for her to disappear before he enters the cubicle. She returns to her seat next to Dee, who is reading a courtesy copy of Cosmopolitan.

  “I just met the old Irishman and his son, coming out of the toilet.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought there was room for the two of them.”

  “No, silly, I mean I was coming out of the toilet. They were waiting. He’s rather nice, the son, don’t you think? He would suit you, Dee.”

  “Do you mind? He looks about fifty.”

  “I wouldn’t say that old. Perhaps forty-five. It’s hard to tell with a beard.”

  “I hate beards.” Dee gives a little shudder. “When they kiss you it’s like walking into cobwebs in the dark.”

  “He could shave it off. He’s very kind to his old Dad. I like a kind man.”

  “You have him, then, if you fancy him.”

  “Dee! I’ve got Des.”

  “Hawaii’s a long way from Harlow.”

  “Dee! You are awful,” Sue giggles.

  “Anyway,” says Dee, “I expect he’s married.”

  “No, I don’t think so, somehow,” says Sue. “He might be a widower, though. He has the look of someone who has suffered.”

  “He’s suffering from his old man, all right,” says Dee.

  Slowly, slowly, the hours passed. Another film began. This time it was a family story, set in Wyoming, centring on a young boy’s relationship with his horse. Bernard found it intolerably sentimental, but watched anyway to encourage his father to do the same. Behind the drawn blinds the sun shone brightly. It flooded into the cabin when the blinds were raised and the second meal, a light snack, was served. It was still shining, but dully, through a haze of smog, when they landed in Los Angeles, at four in the afternoon local time, but midnight by the passengers’ body clocks. They walked slowly and stiffly through the long carpeted corridors; they stood dumbly on moving walkways, like objects on a conveyor belt; they lined up patiently in a huge, hushed hall, segmented by moveable barriers and braided ropes, to have their passports examined. What was it that these places reminded one of? It was, Bernard decided, those visions of the next world, or of passage to it, that he had seen in films at the Brickley fleapit in his childhood and adolescence, films in which airmen who had just been killed in combat rose serenely on moving staircases to a kind of heavenly reception area of white synthetic surfaces and curved modular furniture, and reported to some officious angelic clerk. The populist pareschaton.

  “Vacation?” said the official examining Bernard’s landing card.

  He replied in the affirmative, having been advised to do so by the young man in the travel agency, as being less likely to cause difficulty over the waived visa.

  “The old guy with you?”

  “He’s my father.”

  The official looked from one to the other, and then at the landing card. “You’re staying at the Waikiki Surfrider?”

  “Yes.” Bernard had found the name of the hotel in his Travelpak.

  The official stamped their passports and tore off portions of their landing cards. “Enjoy your stay,” he said. “Take care in the big surf.”

  Bernard smiled feebly. Mr Walsh was oblivious to the irony, and all else. He was beyond fatigue, his arms hanging slackly from his bowed shoulders, his bloodshot eyes glazed. Bernard could hardly bear to look at him, the spectacle made him feel so guilty. Fortunately they were not detained at Customs, though the sandy-haired family had been, much to the father’s indignation.

  “This is absurd,” he was saying crossly. “Do we look like smugglers?”

  “If smugglers looked like smugglers, pal, our job would be a lot easier,” said the customs official, turning over the contents of a suitcase. “What’s this?” He sniffed a packet suspiciously.

  “Tea.”

  “Why isn’t it in teabags?”

  “We don’t like teabags,” said the mother of the family. “And we don’t like your tea.”

  A harassed-looking black lady, in the Travelwise livery, came up to Bernard and his father and said, “Hi, how are you today?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued: “Your flight to Honolulu leaves from Terminal Seven. Just follow the signs to the exit and look for the shuttle tram. Take care – it’s hot out there today.” Bernard and his father passed out of the limbo of the International Arrivals hall, into the noise and bustle of the terminal’s main concourse. Here it was palpably a different
country, and a different time of day: people dressed in every kind of clothing from business suits to running shorts were moving about, briskly and purposefully, or sitting at tables, drinking and eating, or buying things in shops. Leaning on his luggage trolley, Bernard felt as though he were invisible to them, like a ghost.

  “Is this Hawaii?” said Mr Walsh.

  “No, Daddy, it’s Los Angeles. We have to take another plane to Honolulu.”

  “I’m not going on another aeroplane,” said Mr Walsh. “Not today. Not ever.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Bernard, affecting a light, chaffing tone. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in Los Angeles Airport, do you?”

  As soon as they passed through the automatic doors of the air-conditioned terminal, and stepped out on to the pavement, Bernard broke into sweat all over his body. He could feel the perspiration trickling down his sides underneath his clothing, suddenly intolerably thick and itchy. The air, reeking of aircraft fuel and diesel fumes, was so hot that it seemed in danger of spontaneous combustion. Mr Walsh was opening and closing his mouth like a landed fish. “Mother of God,” he gasped, “I’m melted.”

  As well as heat, there was noise: the swish of tyres on the tarmac, the trombone notes of deep-throated car horns, the thunder of planes taking off overhead. Brightly coloured cars, taxis, vans and buses cruised past in an endless stream, like fish in an aquarium, darting and swerving in and out of each other’s way. There were no trams visible, however. Bernard looked around in bewilderment, squinting in the hazy afternoon sunshine, then spotted the girl in the pink and blue tracksuit, with one foot on the runningboard of a small bus parked a short distance away, beckoning to them.

  “Come on, Daddy.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  The bus (which seemed for some inscrutable reason to be called a tram) had a cavity in its side for luggage. When Bernard had stowed their suitcases in it, the driver sprang open the door of the vehicle, and snapped it shut on them like a steel trap. Inside, the passengers shivered in a cold blast of air-conditioning. Bernard smiled a thankyou to the girl in pink and blue, whose returning smile turned into a yawn. Her companion, sitting beside her, had her eyes closed and wore a look of suffering. As they passed down the aisle, Bernard nodded to the young man sitting gloomily beside Cecily, his red braces covered by a linen jacket with its sleeves rolled up. Cecily was looking out of the offside window as if the passing traffic were the most fascinating spectacle in the world. The sandy-haired family boarded the bus, the two children red-eyed and wan. Of the Travelwise contingent, only the second honeymooners seemed unaffected by fatigue, conversing animatedly at the back of the bus. When the driver prepared to depart they loudly appealed to him to wait for a missing couple belonging to the Travelwise party – who appeared, at last, flushed and perspiring, the wife in electric-blue jumper and trousers, pushing a trolley piled with luggage, and her paunchy husband limping along behind. They clambered aboard the bus, and were greeted with yelps of encouragement by the cheerful Midlanders, who claimed credit for holding up the bus, and assured them that their dash had been recorded on videotape. It seemed that a kind of acquaintance had been struck up between the two women on the flight from London, which was now extended to their spouses. The four of them sat together on the back seat behind Bernard, who could not avoid overhearing their conversation.