Mrs. God Read Free Page B

ate the terrible airline meal, drank one glass of red wine that tasted of solvent, and nursed another through the movie. He was not accustomed to drinking so much. Jean did not approve of wine with meals, and Standish did not usually appreciate the sluggishness and confusion with which more than a single drink afflicted him. Yet this was not at all the life to which he was accustomed—the safety of home was thousands of miles behind him, and he was suspended in midair with a copy of Crack, Whack, and Wheel , on his way somewhere utterly unknown. Every aspect of this circumstance felt ripe with anxiety. Three weeks seemed a very long time to be immured in a remote country house looking at manuscripts of poems he still was not sure he understood.
    Standish fell asleep during the movie, and woke up in dim morning greasy with sweat, as if covered with a fine film of oil. The stewardess had put a blanket over him, and he thrashed and kicked, imagining that some loathsome thing, some fragment of a nightmare, lay atop him—fully awake, he wiped his greasy face with his hands and looked around. Only a few goggling idiots had observed his moment of panic. Standish pulled the blanket off the floor and only then noticed that he had an erection. Like some huge beast diving into concealment, his dream shifted massively just beneath the surface of his memory.
    The airplane began to descend shortly after he had eaten. Standish pushed up his window cover, and cold gray light streamed into the cabin. They seemed to descend through layer after layer of this silvery undersea light. At last the plane came through a final layer of clouds filled with a pure, unliving whiteness, and an utterly foreign landscape opened beneath them. Tiny fields as distinct as cobblestones surrounded an equally tiny airport. In the distance, two great motorways met and mingled on the outskirts of a little city surrounded by rows of terraced houses. A long way past the toy city lay a forest, a great flash of vibrant green that seemed the only true color in the landscape. England , Standish thought. A thrill of strangeness passed through him.
    The plane landed at some distance from the terminal, and the passengers had to carry their hand baggage across the tarmac. Standish’s arms ached from the weight of the various small bags he had filled at the last minute with books and cassettes. His Walkman bumped his chest as it swung on its strap. He felt a queer, fatalistic exhilaration. The silvery light, a light never seen in America, lay over the tarmac. Two dwarfish men in filthy boilersuits stood in the shadows beneath the airplane watching the passengers trudge toward the terminal. Standish knew that if he could overhear the words the men passed as they squinted through their cigarette smoke, he would not understand a one.
    But he had no trouble understanding or being understood as he passed through the airport. The customs official treated him courteously, and the Immigration Officer seemed genuinely interested in Standish’s response to the question about the purpose of his visit. And when Standish asked him for directions to a village in Lincolnshire, he said, “Don’t worry, sir. This is a small country, compared to yours. You can’t get too lost.” Every word, in fact every syllable of this charming little speech was not only clear but musical: the Immigration Officer’s voice rose and fell as did no American’s, and so did that of the girl behind the rental desk, who had never heard of Esswood or Beaswick but pressed several maps on him before she walked him to the terminal’s glass doors and pointed to the decade-old turquoise Ford Escort, humble and patient as a mule, he had rented. “The boot should hold all your bags,” she said, “but there’s lashings of room in the backseat, if not. You’ll want to begin on the motorway directly ahead and go straight through the interchange, that’ll see you