I had slept like a child, and when I woke, the life of the plane was in full swing.
‘Where are we?’
‘Somewhere over the Balkans,’ said Angela.
‘The Balkans? Is there still fighting there?’
‘Well, there was … quite recently. If a decade ago is “recently”. People thought there would never be fighting in Europe again, after your war, you know what I mean.’
‘They said that about the Great War, too. The war to end war. The Great Lie. Fortunately Leonard was too blind to fight. So there’s no fighting in Europe now?’
‘There is trouble in Iraq,’ said Angela, ‘and Afghanistan. And Syria. And Palestine. We are up to our necks in it.’
Where were these countries? I was slightly vague. Leonard would have known, of course. Somewhere in the Middle East, I was sure, somewhere near the cradle of all mankind, the Tigris and Euphrates. How beautiful our language is.
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold …
Why were men always fighting each other?
The cabin girl – no, what did they call them? In my day, of course, they had cabin boys – came down the corridor with difficulty, ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ ‘Excuse me, Miss,’ using her trolley like a slow, polite chariot, and lurched to one side as she bent over me, trying to proffer a plastic tray that held some kind of packaged fodder, with a sidelong glance at the stubborn man who, evicted from the gangway by her mission, was making her roll like a ship at sea as he strained to stay standing and praying in his seat.
The rosy-cheeked young woman beside me was suckling again, I could hear the baby’s happy lip-smacks under the modest cloth that veiled her breast, but her Bible was tucked in the crook of her empty arm, her eyes followed the characters, her lips moved softly. The cabin girl’s eyes fell on nothing directly, but you could see she deprecated any religion that stopped her doing her morning duties, you could see that she only wanted to help, she was not ambitious, she wanted us happy, the flock of passengers in her care, she avoided the scorn and anger of the world, the furious intensity of this faith or that which made them fight wars, and obstruct her passage; she had only benefactions to distribute. With a smile that pulled hard at the lines in her lipstick, she hauled herself upright again and said, in automatic answer to my ‘Thank you’, ‘Not problem, Miss. Please first erect the seat.’
Was the cabin girl’s job one long sorrow and trouble? In some corner of some cubicle, wherever they could hide, she might steal an hour or two’s sleep or gossip, but was it worth it when in a few minutes she’d be getting up again and struggling on? What did she feel about her work, which we always made her do again?
She fed us, we ate, we pushed it away, she had barely finished distributing the trays before she had to take it all back where it came from. Always conjuring things up, then accepting their destruction, whereas a writer’s work was aimed at survival. (And I had survived. A small surge of joy.)
It wasn’t easy, the world she knew, the eternal world of the servant class which Vanessa and I had hoped was ending. We had both vowed to do without servants! What a liberation from their suffering! Who wanted them, sullen in some basement room not far enough away from one’s own? Yet we had no running water till the 1930s, and at Asheham, endless chamber-pots, earth-closets, buckets. Our arms couldn’t carry them. Without servants, Vanessa’s and my work would never have got done.
Bowed down, they always were, with weariness, and how wearying for us to see their pain and hear their awful protestations of duty, the way they vowed they would never leave us, when all we longed for them to do was leave.
What should we have done? There was no answer; and the modern world seemed hardly any better. Our hotel had servants – the Wordsmiths Hotel, with its literature-themed rooms and bookish clients. Yet back up in the bedrooms were the same maids, somehow enduring the same duties, groaning faintly, on creaking knees because how else, pray, could you clean under beds? Was there any difference but the colour of their skin and the strange electric music mine sang to? She had to clean the bathroom, bleach the lavatories, take up mats, put down new towels …
And who was to say if this African woman might have been a great poet, had she but had the chance? Might have given form to that hard, harsh life? Might have made each one of her peers a hero, and at last enlightened us about their story – a story as epic as any of ours? Who knew if one of them burned to do it, without the words, without the schooling?
That’s where it came from, our shame, our awkwardness. Because, I think, one has always known it. We had the luck, and they did not.
Yet she sang along to that fizz of music, which must have been some kind of consolation. Perhaps this new century had given them hope, they had freedoms our servants never dreamed of, and though I didn’t care for how they used their freedom – that crowd at the Statue, so loud, so venal! – they had hopes that their children, perhaps, would be masters, and one had to accept that was no bad thing.
‘What am I,’ she might ask, or ‘What is my life? What brought me from Africa to this strange place?’ They had the luxury of questioning, of not just trudging down the path like dumb brutes. The difference between us was no longer so obvious, I told myself, sipping my morning cup of tea and imagining my next consolation, the coffee.
But the cabin girl continued her rounds as before.