Comeback Read Free

“Had a bunch of babies and got too fat. Too old. We sing here just for fun.”
    Her speaking voice was English, without regional accent, her diction trained and precise. Under the mild banter she seemed serene, secure and sensible, and I revised my gloomiest views of the next night’s journey. Flight attendants could be chatted-up another time, I supposed.
    Greg said, “My wife would flirt with a chair leg,” and they both looked at me indulgently and laughed.
    “Don’t trust Peter,” Fred cautioned them ironically. “He’s the best liar I know, and I’ve met a few, believe me.”
    “How unkind,” Vicky said disbelievingly. “He’s a lamb.”
    Fred made a laughing cough and checked that we all were in fact booked on the same flight. No doubt about it. British Airways’ jumbo to Heathrow. Club class, all of us.
    “Great. Great,” Fred said.
    Greg, I thought, was American, though it was hard to tell. A mid-Atlantic man: halfway accent, American clothes, English facial bones. Part of the local scenery in Miami, he had presence but not his wife’s natural stage charisma. He hadn’t been a soloist, I thought.
    He said, “Are you a consul too, Peter?”
    “Not at the moment.”
    He looked perplexed, so I explained. “In the British foreign service you take the title of your present job. You don’t take your rank with you. You can be a second or first secretary or a consul or counselor or a consul-general or a minister or a high commissioner or an ambassador in one place, but you’ll very likely be something different in the next. The rank stays with the job. You take the rank of whatever job you’re sent to.”
    Fred was nodding. “In the States, once an ambassador always an ambassador. ‘Mr. Ambassador’ forever. Even if you’ve only been an ambassador to some tiny country for a couple of years and are back to being a dogsbody, you keep the title. The British don’t.”
    “Too bad,” Greg said.
    “No,” I disagreed, “it’s better. There’s no absolutely clear-cut hierarchy, so there’s less bitching and less despair.”
    They looked at me in astonishment.
    “Mind you,” Fred said to them with mock confidentiality, “Peter’s father’s an ambassador at the moment. Between the two of them they’ve held every rank in the book.”
    “Mine are all lower,” I said, smiling.
    Vicky said comfortingly, “I’m sure you’ll do well in the end.”
    Fred laughed.
    Greg pushed away his half-drunk wine and said they’d better get back to work, a popular move with the clientele, always quick to applaud them. They sang another three songs each, Greg finishing quietly with a crooning version of “The Last Farewell,” the lament of a sailor leaving his South Seas love to go back to storms and war at sea round Britain. Shut your eyes, I thought, listening, and Greg could be the doomed young man. It was a masterly performance; extraordinary. A woman at the next table brought out a handkerchief and wiped away surreptitious tears.
    The diners, sitting transfixed over long-cooled cups of coffee, gave Greg the accolade of a second’s silence before showing their pleasure. Sentimental it might all be, I thought, but one could have too much of stark unsugared realism.
    The singers returned to our table, accepting plaudits on the way, and this time drank their wine without restraint. They were pumped up with the post-performance high-level adrenaline surge of all successful appearances of any sort, and it would take them a while to come down. Meanwhile they talked with animation, scattering information about themselves and further proving, if it were necessary, that they were solidly good, well-intentioned people.
    I’d always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn’t the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.
    He had trained originally for opera, Greg said, but there