Travels With My Aunt Page 7

  I was puzzled too at her insistence that we must go to the Kensington air terminal and take the airport bus. ‘It’s so easy for me,’ I said, ‘to pick you up by car and drive you to Heathrow. You would find it much less tiring, Aunt Augusta.’

  ‘You would have to pay an exorbitant garage fee,’ she replied, and I found her sudden sense of economy unconvincing.

  I arranged next day for the dahlias to be watered by my next-door neighbour, a brusque man called Major Charge. He had seen Detective-Sergeant Sparrow come to the door with the policeman, and he was bitten by curiosity. I told him it was about a motoring offence and he became sympathetic immediately. ‘A child murdered every week,’ he said, ‘and all they can do is prosecute motorists.’ I don’t like lies and I felt in my conscience that I ought to defend Sergeant Sparrow who had been as good as his word and posted back the urn, registered and express.

  ‘Sergeant Sparrow is not in homicide,’ I replied, ‘and motorists kill more people in a year than murderers.’

  ‘Only a lot of jaywalkers,’ Major Charge said. ‘Cannon fodder.’ However, he agreed to water the dahlias.

  I picked my aunt up in the bar of the Crown and Anchor where she was having a stirrup-cup and we drove by taxi to the Kensington terminal. I noticed that she had brought two suitcases, one very large, although, when I asked her how long we were to stay in Istanbul, she had replied, ‘Twenty-four hours.’

  ‘It seems a short stay after such a long journey.’

  ‘The point is the journey,’ my aunt had replied. ‘I enjoy the travelling not the sitting still.’

  Even Uncle Jo, I argued, had put up with each room in his house for a whole week.

  ‘Jo was a sick man,’ she said, ‘while I am in the best of health.’

  Since we were travelling first-class (which seemed again an unnecessary luxury between London and Paris) we had no overweight, although the larger of her suitcases was unusually heavy. While we were sitting in the bus I suggested to my aunt that the garage fee for my car would probably have been cheaper than the difference between first and tourist fares. ‘The difference,’ she said, ‘is nearly wiped out by the caviar and the smoked salmon, and surely between us we can probably put away half a bottle of vodka. Not to speak of the champagne and cognac. In any case I have more important reasons for travelling by bus.’

  As we approached Heathrow she put her mouth close to my ear. ‘The luggage,’ she said, ‘is in a trailer behind.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I have a green suitcase and a red suitcase. Here are the tickets.’

  I took them, not understanding.

  ‘When the bus stops please get out quickly and see whether the trailer is still attached. If it is still there let me know at once and I’ll give you further instructions.’

  Something in my aunt’s manner made me nervous. I said, ‘Of course it will be there.’

  ‘I sincerely hope not,’ she said. ‘Otherwise we shall not leave today.’

  I jumped out as soon as we arrived and sure enough the trailer wasn’t there. ‘What do I do now?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing at all. Everything is quite in order. You may give me back the tickets and relax.’

  As we sat over two gins and tonics in the departure lounge a loud-speaker announced, ‘Passengers on Flight 378 to Nice will proceed to customs for customs inspection.’

  We were alone at our table and my aunt did not bother to lower her voice amid the din of passengers, glasses and loudspeakers. ‘That is what I wished to avoid,’ she said. ‘They have now taken to spot-checks on passengers leaving the country. They whittle away our liberties one by one. When I was a girl you could travel anywhere on the continent except Russia without a passport and you took what you liked in the way of money. Until recently they only asked what money you had, or at the very worst they wanted to see your wallet. If there’s one thing I hate in any human being it is mistrust.’

  ‘The way you speak,’ I said jokingly, ‘I suspect we are lucky that it is not your bags which are being searched.’

  I could well imagine my aunt stuffing a dozen five-pound notes into the toe of her bedroom slippers. Having been a bank manager, I am perhaps over-scrupulous, though I must confess that I had an extra five-pound note folded up in my ticket pocket, but that was something I might genuinely have over-looked.

  ‘Luck doesn’t enter into my calculations,’ my aunt said. ‘Only a fool would trust to luck, and there is probably a fool now on the Nice flight who is regretting his folly. Whenever new restrictions are made, I make a very careful study of the arrangements for carrying them out.’ She gave a little sigh. ‘In the case of Heathrow I owe a great deal to Wordsworth. For a time he acted as a loader there. He left when there was some trouble about a gold consignment. Nothing was ever proved against him, but the whole affair had been too impromptu and disgusted him. He told me the story. A very large ingot was abstracted by a loader, and the loss was discovered too soon, before the men went off duty. They knew as a result that they would be searched by the police on leaving, all taxis too, and they had no idea what to do with the thing until Wordsworth suggested rolling it in tar and using it as a doorstop in the customs shed. So there it stayed for months. Every time they brought crates along to the shed, they could see their ingot propping open the door. Wordsworth said he got so maddened by the sight of it that he threw up the job. That was when he became a doorman at the Grenada Palace.’

  ‘What happened to the ingot?’

  ‘I suppose the authorities lost interest when the diamond robberies started. Diamonds are money for jam, Henry. You see, they have special sealed sacks for valuable freight and these sacks are put into ordinary sacks, the idea being that the loaders can’t spot them. The official mind is remarkably innocent. By the time you’ve been loading sacks a week or two, you can feel which sack contains another inside it. Then all you’ve got to do is to slit both coverings open and take pot luck. Like a children’s bran tub at Christmas. Nobody is going to discover the slit until the plane arrives at the other end. Wordsworth knew a man who struck lucky the first time and pulled out a box with fifty gem stones.’

  ‘Surely somebody’s watching?’

  ‘Only the other loaders and they take a share. Of course occasionally a man has bad luck. Once a friend of Wordsworth’s fished out a fat packet of notes, but they proved to be Pakistani. Worth about a thousand pounds if you happened to live in Karachi, but who was going to change them for him here? The poor fellow used to haunt the tarmac whenever a plane was taking off to Karachi, but he never found a safe customer. Wordsworth said he got quite embittered.’

  ‘I had no idea such things went on at Heathrow.’

  ‘My dear Henry,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘if you had been a young man I would have advised you to become a loader. A loader’s life is one of adventure with far more chance of a fortune than you ever have in a branch bank. I can imagine nothing better for a young man with ambition except perhaps illicit diamond digging. That is best practised in Sierra Leone where Wordsworth comes from. The security guards are less sophisticated and less ruthless than in South Africa.’

  ‘Sometimes you shock me, Aunt Augusta,’ I said, but the statement had already almost ceased to be true. ‘I have never had anything stolen from my suitcase and I don’t even lock it.’

  ‘That is probably your safeguard. No one is going to bother about an unlocked suitcase. Wordsworth knew a loader who had keys to every kind of suitcase. There are not many varieties, though he was baffled once by a Russian one.’

  The loud-speaker announced our flight and we were told to proceed at once to Gate 14 for immediate embarkation.

  ‘For someone who doesn’t like airports,’ I said, ‘you seem to know a great deal about Heathrow.’

  ‘I’ve always been interested in human nature,’ Aunt Augusta said. ‘Especially the more imaginative sides of it.’

  She ordered another two gins and tonics immediately we arrived on the plane. ‘There goes
ten shillings towards the first-class fare,’ she said. ‘A friend of mine calculated once that on a long flight to Tahiti – it took in those days more than sixty-four hours – he recuperated nearly twenty pounds, but of course he was a hard drinker.’

  Again I had the impression that I was turning the pages in an American magazine in search of a contribution which I had temporarily lost. ‘I still don’t understand,’ I said, ‘about the luggage-trailer and the suitcase. Why were you so anxious that the trailer should disappear?’

  ‘I have an impression,’ my aunt said, ‘that you are really a little shocked by trivial illegalities. When you reach my age you will be more tolerant. Years ago Paris was regarded as the vice-centre of the world, as Buenos Aires was before that, but Madame de Gaulle altered things there. Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples survived a decade longer, but then the only two cities left were Macao and Havana. Macao has been cleaned up by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Havana by Fidel Castro. For the moment Heathrow is the Havana of the West. It won’t last very long, of course, but one must admit that at the present time London Airport has a glamour which certainly puts Britain first. Have you got a little vodka for the caviar?’ she asked the hostess who brought our trays. ‘I prefer it to champagne.’

  ‘But, Aunt Augusta, you have still not told me about the trailer.’

  ‘It’s very simple,’ my aunt said. ‘If the luggage is to be loaded direct on to the aircraft, the trailer is detached outside the Queen Elizabeth building – there are always traffic hold-ups at this point and nothing is noticed by the passengers. If when the bus arrives at the BEA or Air France entrance you find the trailer is still attached, this means that the luggage is going to be sent to the customs. Personally I have a rooted objection to unknown hands, which have fiddled about in all kinds of strange luggage, some not over-clean, fiddling about in mine.’

  ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘I reclaim my bags, saying that after all I don’t require them on the voyage and wish to leave them in the cloakroom. Or I cancel my flight and try again another day.’ She finished her smoked salmon and went on to the caviar. ‘There is no such convenient system as that at Dover, or I would prefer to go by boat.’

  ‘Aunt Augusta,’ I said, ‘what are you carrying in your suitcases?’

  ‘Only one is a little dangerous,’ she said, ‘the red. I always use the red for that purpose. Red for danger,’ she added with a smile.

  ‘But what have you got in the red one?’

  ‘A trifle,’ Aunt Augusta said, ‘something to help us in our travels. I can’t really endure any longer these absurd travel allowances. Allowances! For grown people! When I was a child I received a shilling a week pocket money. If you consider the value of the pound today, that is rather more than what we are allowed to travel with annually. You haven’t eaten your portion of foie gras.’

  ‘It doesn’t agree with me,’ I said.

  ‘Then I will take it. Steward, another glass of champagne and another vodka.’

  ‘We are just descending ma’am.’

  ‘The more reason for you to hurry, young man.’ She fastened her seat-belt. ‘I’m glad that Wordsworth left Heathrow before I came to know him. He was in danger of being corrupted. Oh, I don’t mean thieving. A little honest thieving hurts no one, especially when it is a question of gold. Gold needs free circulation. The Spanish Empire would have decayed far more quickly if Sir Francis Drake had not kept a proportion of the Spanish gold in circulation. But there are other things. I have mentioned Havana, and you mustn’t think me strait-laced. I am all for a little professional sex. You have probably read about the activities of Superman. And I am sure that the sight of him cured many a frigidity. Thank you, steward.’ She drained her vodka. ‘We have not done badly. I would say we have almost covered the difference between first-class and tourist, if you take into account a little over-weight with my red suitcase. There was a brothel in Havana where the Emperor’s Crown was admirably performed by three nice girls. These establishments saved many a marriage from boredom. And then there was the Shanghai Theatre in the Chinese Quarter of Havana with three blue films which were shown in the intervals of a nude review, all for the price of one dollar with a pornographic bookshop in the foyer thrown in. I was there once with a Mr Fernandez who had a cattle farm in Camaguey. (I met him in Rome after Mr Visconti had temporarily disappeared and he invited me to Cuba for a month’s holiday.) The place was ruined, though, long before the revolution. I am told that to compete with television they put in a large screen. The films, of course, had all been shot on sixteen millimetre, and when they were enlarged practically to cinerama size, it really needed an act of faith to distinguish any feature of the human body.’

  The plane banked steeply over Le Bourget.

  ‘It was all very harmless,’ my aunt said, ‘and gave employment to a great many people. But the things which go on around Heathrow …’

  The steward brought another vodka and my aunt tossed it down. She had a strong head – I had noticed that already – but her mind under the influence of alcohol ranged to and fro.

  ‘We were talking of Heathrow,’ I reminded her, for my curiosity had been aroused. In my aunt’s company I found myself oddly ignorant about my own country.

  ‘There are a number of big firms around Heathrow,’ my aunt said. ‘Electronics, engineering, film manufacturers. Glaxo, as one would expect, is quite untouched by the Heathrow influence. After office hours some of the technicians give private parties; air crews are always welcome, so long as stewardesses are included in the party. Even loaders. Wordsworth was always invited, but only on condition he brought a girl and was willing to exchange her at the party for another. Pornographic films are shown first as an encouragement. Wordsworth was genuinely attached to his girl, but he had to surrender her in exchange for a technician’s wife who was a homely woman of fifty called Ada. It seems to me that the old professional brothel system was far healthier than those exaggerated amateur distractions. But then an amateur always goes too far. An amateur is never in proper control of his art. There was a discipline in the old-time brothels. The madame in many ways played a role similar to that of the headmistress of Roedean. A brothel after all is a kind of school, and not least a school of manners. I have known several madames of real distinction who would have been just as at home in Roedean and have lent distinction to any school.’

  ‘How on earth did you get to know them?’ I asked, but the plane was bumping on the Le Bourget field, and my aunt began to fuss about her luggage. ‘I think it better,’ she said, ‘if we pass through customs and immigration separately. My red case is rather a heavy one and I would be glad if you would take that with you. Employ a porter. It is always easier to obtain a taxi with a porter’s help. And show in your manner that the tip will be a good one before you arrive at the customs. There is often an understanding between a porter and a douanier. I will meet you outside. Here is the ticket for the red case.’

  9

  I HAD no clear idea what my aunt intended by her elaborate precautions. There was obviously little danger from the douanier who waved me through with the careless courtesy which I find so lacking in the supercilious young men in England. My aunt had booked rooms in the St James and Albany, an old-fashioned double hotel, of which one half, the Albany, faces the Rue de Rivoli and the other, the St James, the Rue Saint-Honoré. Between the two hotels lies the shared territory of a small garden, and on the garden front of the St James I noticed a plaque which tells a visitor that here La Fayette signed some treaty or celebrated his return from the American revolution, I forget which.

  Our rooms in the Albany looked out on the Tuileries gardens and my aunt had taken a whole suite, which seemed rather unnecessary as we were only spending one night before we caught the Orient Express. When I mentioned this, however, she rebuked me quite sharply. ‘This is the second time today,’ she said, ‘that you have mentioned the subject of economy. You retain the spirit of a bank manager, even in retiremen
t. Understand once and for all that I am not interested in economy. I am over seventy-five, so that it is unlikely I will live longer than another twenty-five years. My money is my own and I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made many economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particularly care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love satisfactorily on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age. They have little idea of real pleasure: even their love-making is apt to be hurried and incomplete. Luckily in middle age pleasure begins, pleasure in love, in wine, in food. Only the taste for poetry flags a little, but I would have always gladly lost my taste for the sonnets of Wordsworth (the other Wordsworth I mean of course) if I could have bettered my palate for wine. Love-making too provides as a rule a more prolonged and varied pleasure after forty-five. Aretino is not a writer for the young.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s not too late for me to begin,’ I said facetiously in an effort to close that page of her conversation, which I found a little embarrassing.

  ‘You must surrender yourself first to extravagance,’ my aunt replied. ‘Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times. In any case this suite is not wasted. I have to receive some visitors in private, and I don’t suppose you would want me to receive them in my bedroom. One of them, by the way, is a bank manager. Did you visit lady clients in their bedrooms?’

  ‘Of course not. Nor in their drawing-rooms either. I did all business at the bank.’

  ‘Perhaps in Southwood you didn’t have any very distinguished clients.’

  ‘You are quite wrong,’ I said and I told her about the unbearable rear-admiral and my friend, Sir Alfred Keene.

  ‘Or any really confidential business.’

  ‘Nothing certainly which could not be discussed in my office at the bank.’