Winter Garden Read Free

heroically.
    ‘Feeling better?’ he said.
    ‘A little,’ she conceded, and turned her back on him almost immediately.
    Ashburner was alarmed by her indifference. He feared there was worse to come. ‘I do feel’, he said, anxious to show his authority, ‘that we ought to sit in the front of the plane.’
    ‘I want to smoke,’ snapped Bernard.
    ‘I was thinking of Nina,’ explained Ashburner. ‘Besides, should anything go wrong, the back end is always the first bit to fall off.’
    ‘In that case,’ Bernard said, ‘she’ll need a fag in her hand.’
    No one bothered to ask Enid where she wanted to sit.
    Hampered by his assortment of carrier bags, Ashburner had difficulty handing over his boarding pass. When eventually he entered the aircraft and struggled up the centre aisle to the rear of the plane, Nina was already seated, positioned between Bernard and a man in horn-rimmed spectacles with a briefcase on his knee.
    ‘Ah,’ breathed Ashburner and stood there, undecided.
    ‘Do get settled,’ pleaded Nina. ‘You’re causing a blockage.’
    It took Ashburner some time to stow Bernard’s belongings satisfactorily in the overhead lockers. Pieces of charcoal and several tubes of oil paint spilled on to the lap of the man with the briefcase. Bernard stared impassively out of the starboard porthole as though it was no concern of his.
    ‘You’re in my seat,’ protested Ashburner, at last. Now that he was actually aboard, his rightful place was beside Nina.
    ‘Sorry, mate,’ said Bernard. ‘Once down, I stay down.’ And he slapped his leg obscurely.
    Face mottled with annoyance, Ashburner joined Enid on the other side of the aisle. He had been warned about the man’s rudeness. Bernard’s first appearance on television, in a programme featuring his work, had been noteworthy. Standing in the back garden of his dark little house in Wandsworth, he had pointed graphically at an upstairs window and referred to his unseen wife as the first Mrs Rochester. He had called the interviewer a prick for confusing an etching with an engraving. He had answered every question with such evident overtones of commercial insanity, giving vent to a burst of insensitive laughter when describing the death of his cat, lost under the wheels of a corporation dust cart, that he had become an overnight celebrity. He was never off the box.
    I can’t compete, thought Ashburner. A man in my position has to mind his ps and qs . He muttered audibly enough for Enid to hear: ‘What a nerve the man has!’
    ‘He can’t help it,’ said Enid. ‘He’s had a hip replacement. He’s got a steel ball-and-socket thing.’
    Ashburner’s cheeks glowed redder than ever. He felt as though he’d been caught throwing stones at a cripple. He leaned forward in his seat to attract Nina’s attention.
    The man with the briefcase nodded at him and smiled.
    ‘Don’t look now,’ muttered Ashburner, turning to Enid, ‘but that fellow seems to know us.’
    ‘He’s probably a member of the KGB,’ Enid said, and she studied the emergency exit procedures.
    She was dismayed by the size of the aeroplane, having expected something larger. She wondered if perhaps they were being flown out on the cheap. She had travelled three times by air, twice to New York and once to Los Angeles. On each occasion she had enjoyed watching a film. Her head-phones had blocked out the noise of the engines and she had scarcely known she was flying.
    ‘I don’t like small planes,’ she told Ashburner. ‘I don’t think they’re as safe as big ones.’
    ‘On the contrary,’ Ashburner reassured her, ‘they’re safer. Think of all those fellows during the war, limping home on a wing and a prayer.’
    He had just begun to tell her of the miraculous return of a Wellington bomber whose tail hung by a wire from the fuselage, a story he’d come across in Reader’s Digest while waiting for a dental examination, when the aircraft began to roll along the tarmac.
    Enid bent