Staring at the Sun (14 page)

In Nanjing, where it was hot and damp, Jean had experienced her own attack of deafness: she developed a snuffling cold, and one ear refused service. They were staying at a hotel built by an Australian company: a eucalyptus-leaf pattern raged across the bedspread, and koala bears swarmed up the curtains, making her feel even hotter. Half asleep in the dark, Jean thought she heard a mosquito’s thin whine of interest. She wondered why mosquitoes didn’t give up on victims who had reached a certain age, and hunt for younger flesh instead; as men did. She pulled the bedclothes up over her head. After a while this made her too hot; but the moment she gave herself air, the mosquito started up again. Irritated, Jean played this drowsy hide-and-seek a few times, then realized what was happening: the snuffle in her nose when filtered through her bad ear was coming out as a mosquito’s whine. She woke up completely, checked the genuine silence of the room and laughed at this little echo from the past. It was just like Sun-Up Prosser: setting off his own guns and wheeling about the sky as it attacked. She too was producing her own source of fear, and she too was really quite alone.

Aeroplanes—in homage to Prosser she went on calling them aeroplanes long after they had been shortened to planes—never frightened Jean. She didn’t need to cram music into her ears through a
plastic tube, order stout little bottles of spirits, or probe a heel beneath her seat for the life jacket. Once she had dropped several thousand feet over the Mediterranean; once her aeroplane had turned back to Madrid and circlingly burnt up fuel for two hours; once, landing from the sea at Hong Kong, they had bounced along the runway like a skimming stone—as if they really had put down on water. But on each occasion Jean had merely withdrawn into thought.

Gregory—studious, melancholy, methodical Gregory—did the worrying for her. When he took Jean to the airport he would smell the kerosene and imagine charred flesh; he would listen to the engines at takeoff and hear only the pure voice of hysteria. In the old days, it had been hell, not death, that was feared, and artists had elaborated such fears in panoramas of pain. Now there was no hell, fear was known to be finite, and the engineers had taken over. There had been no deliberate plan, but in elaborating the aeroplane, and in doing all they could to calm those who flew in it, they had created, it seemed to Gregory, the most infernal conditions in which to die.

Ignorance, that was the first aspect of the engineers’ modern form of death. It was well known that if anything went wrong with an aeroplane, the passengers were told no more than they needed to know. If a wing fell off, the calm-voiced Scottish captain would tell you that the soft-drinks dispenser was malfunctioning, and this was why he had decided to lose height in a spin without first warning his cargo to put on their seat belts. You would be lied to even as you died.

Ignorance, but also certainty. As you fell thirty thousand feet, whether towards land or water (though water, from that height, would be the same as concrete), you knew that when you hit the ground, you would die: you would die, in fact, several hundred times over. Even before the nuclear bomb, the aeroplane had introduced the concept of overkill: as you struck the ground, the jolt from your seat belt would induce a fatal heart attack; then fire would burn you to death all over again; then an explosion would scatter
you over some forlorn hillside; and then, as rescue teams searched ploddingly for you beneath a mocking sky, the million burnt, exploded, cardiac-arrested bits of you would die once more from exposure. This was normal; this was certain. Certainty ought to cancel out ignorance, but it didn’t; indeed, the aeroplane had reversed the established relation between these two concepts. In a traditional death the doctor at your bedside could tell you what was wrong, but would rarely predict the final outcome: even the most sceptical sawbones had seen a few miracle recoveries. So you were certain of the cause but ignorant of the outcome. Now you were ignorant of the cause but certain of the outcome. This didn’t strike Gregory as progress.

Next, enclosure. Do we not all fear the claustrophobia of the coffin? The aeroplane recognized and magnified this image. Gregory thought of pilots in the First World War, the wind playing tunes as it whistled through their struts; of pilots in the Second World War, doing a victory roll and embracing as they did both the skies and the earth. Those fliers touched nature as they moved; and when the plywood biplane peeled apart under sudden air pressure, when the Hurricane, excreting the black smoke of its own obituary, wailed down into some damp cornfield there was a chance—just a chance—that these endings were in some degree appropriate: the flier had left the earth, and was now being called back. But in a passenger plane with mean windows? How could you feel the dulcet consolation of nature’s cycle as you sat there with your shoes off, unable to see out, with your frightened eye everywhere assailed by garish seat covers? The surroundings were simply not up to it.

And the surroundings included the fourth thing, the company. How would we most like to die? It is not an easy question, but to Gregory there seemed various possibilities: surrounded by your family, with or without a priest—this was the traditional posture, death as a kind of supreme Christmas dinner. Or surrounded by gentle, quiet, attentive medical staff, a surrogate family who knew about relieving pain and could be counted on not to make a fuss. Third, perhaps, if your family failed and you had not merited hospital, you
might prefer to die at home, in a favourite chair, with an animal for company, or a fire, or a collection of photographs, or a strong drink. But who would choose to die in the company of three hundred and fifty strangers, not all of whom might behave well? A soldier might charge to a certain death—across the mud, across the veld—but he would die with those he knew, three hundred and fifty men whose presence would induce stoicism as he was sliced in half by machine-gun fire. But these strangers? There would be screaming, that much you could rely on. To die listening to your own screams was bad enough; to die listening to the screams of others was part of this new engineers’ hell. Gregory imagined himself in a field with a buzzing dot high above. They could all be screaming inside, all three hundred and fifty of them; yet the normal hysteria of the engines would drown everything.

Screaming, enclosed, ignorant and certain. And in addition, it was all so domestic. This was the fifth and final element in the triumph of the engineers. You died with a headrest and an antimacassar. You died with a little plastic fold-down table whose surface bore a circular indentation so that your coffee cup would be held safely. You died with overhead luggage racks and little plastic blinds to pull down over the mean windows. You died with supermarket girls waiting on you. You died with soft furnishings designed to make you feel jolly. You died stubbing out your cigarette in the ashtray on your armrest. You died watching a film from which most of the sexual content had been deleted. You died with the razor towel you had stolen still in your sponge bag. You died after being told that you had made good time thanks to following winds and were now ahead of schedule. You were indeed: way ahead of schedule. You died with your neighbour’s drink spilling over you. You died domestically; yet not in your own home, in someone else’s, someone whom you never met before and who had invited a load of strangers round. How, in such circumstances, could you see your own extinction as something tragic, or even important, or even relevant? It would be a death which mocked you.

Jean visited the Grand Canyon in November. The north rim was closed, and the snow ploughs had been out chivvying the road up from Williams to the south rim. She booked into the lodge at the Canyon’s edge; it was early evening. She did not hurry with her unpacking, and even went to the hotel gift shop before looking at the Canyon itself. Not putting off the pleasure, but the reverse; for Jean expected disappointment. At the last minute, she had even considered rescripting her Seven Wonders and visiting the Golden Gate Bridge instead.

A foot of snow lay on the ground and the sun, now almost level with the horizon, had thrown a firm-wristed sweep of orange across the mountains opposite. The sun’s kingdom began exactly at the snow line: above, the orange mountain crests had orange snow beneath indolent orange clouds; drop below the line and everything changed into dry browns and buffs and umbers, while far, far down, some murky greens enclosed a trickle of silver—like a Lurex thread in a dull tweed suit. Jean gripped the frosty guardrail and was glad to be alone, glad that what she saw didn’t have to be translated into words, to be reported, discussed, annotated. The extravagant fish-eye view was bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful and more frightening than she had thought possible; but even this alignment of excited adjectives failed her. Rachel, Gregory’s most combative girlfriend, had told her before she set off, “Yeah, it’s like coming all the time.” No doubt she’d been trying to shock, and these remembered words were indeed shocking; but only in their inadequacy. Sex—even the resounding sex Jean imagined but had never experienced—could be no more than playing the Shoelace Game, little tickles on the soles of your feet as the laces snaked away, compared to this. Someone else had promised, “It’s like looking at the Creation”—but that too was only words. Jean was fed up with words. If the Canyon shrank the watchers at its rim to midges, it shrank their noises—the prattle, the whoops, the camera clicks—into mere insect hum. This wasn’t a place where you made
self-deprecating jokes, fiddled with your exposure meter, or threw snowballs. This was a place beyond words, beyond human noise, beyond interpretation.

It was said that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe had the power to convert by their mere presence. It wasn’t just a question of impressing the peasants: sophisticated minds had also said to themselves, If something as beautiful as this exists, how can the idea which produced it not be true? One cathedral is worth a hundred theologians capable of proving the existence of God by logic. The mind longs for certainty, and perhaps it longs most for a certainty which clubs it down. What the mind can understand, what it can ploddingly prove and approve, might be what it most despises. It longs to be attacked from behind, in a dark street, certainty a knife at the throat.

Perhaps the Canyon acted like a cathedral on religiously inclined tourists and startlingly argued without words the power of God and the majesty of his works. Jean’s response was the opposite. The Canyon stunned her into uncertainty. Over dinner she sat thinking, and tried not to use words as she did so; or at least, to use them gingerly.
Therefore
was the word she allowed to set most solid in her mind. The Canyon,
therefore
 … If the Canyon is the question, what is the answer? If the Canyon is the answer, what is the question? The Canyon,
therefore
…? Even the sceptic’s response, the Canyon,
therefore nothing
, seemed a large answer. It was said that one of the worst tragedies of the spirit was to be born with a religious sense into a world where belief was no longer possible. Was it an equal tragedy to be born without a religious sense into a world where belief
was
possible?

The next morning, before departure, Jean rested her body once more against the frosty guardrail and gazed at the Canyon. Now the sun was reaching down into it, groping towards the river. High grassy plateaus lay hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet below her. The mountain crests, their soirée of orange glory gone, had become sombre and distant in their morning dress; the snow blinked whitely across. Following its own buzz, a light aeroplane came into view.
The first tourist flight of the day, an insect hovering over an enormous wound. For a while it flew level with Jean, then dropped to examine the wandering fissure which enclosed the river. How strange, Jean thought, to stand on the ground and yet be higher than an aeroplane; seeing the wings and fuselage from above was like seeing the rare side of a leaf or a moth. It was somehow against nature, the idea of an aeroplane flying beneath the surface of the earth; as it would be if some surfacing submarine continued to rise out of the water and leaped into the air, a monstrous flying fish.

Against nature. Was that right? We said “against nature” when we meant “against reason.” It was nature which provided the miracles, the hallucinations, the beautiful trickery. Forty years ago nature had shown to a Catalina pilot a motorcyclist calmly riding across the surface of the Atlantic four hundred and fifty miles off the Irish coast. Nature had done that. Reason had subsequently denied the apparition. It was against reason, not against nature. Reason, and man’s ingenuity, had erected the first Six Wonders of the World that Jean had visited. Nature had thrown up the seventh, and it was the seventh which had thrown up the questions.

Through the RAF Benevolent Fund she traced Sun-Up Prosser’s widow. Not Prosser anymore, but Redpath, with an address near Whitby. Jean wrote, and a few days later received a postcard of a fishing port under a bright blue sky. “Pop in any time you’re passing. Derek and I like a chat about old times. Fancy Tommy coming up after all this time! P.S. Weather not like on card.”

It was a smart semidetached council house on a small estate which hadn’t yet settled into the side of a hill; the trees were leafless poles protected by cylinders of wire mesh and the concrete bus shelters were still unstained by damp or graffiti. Jean managed to be passing rather sooner than Olive Redpath had anticipated.

“Well, what can it be that’s so urgent after it’s waited all these years I wonder.” It was halfway between a statement and a question. Jean was handed a cup of coffee and seated in the chair opposite the television. Olive and Derek sat on the divan, Derek
behind a vapour trail of cigarette smoke. The divan, Jean noticed, was covered in the sort of bright check material much used for aeroplane seats.

“Oh, it was just that I was, actually, passing. I had to go to Manchester.”

“Manchester. That’s passing!” Mrs. Redpath cackled at the profligate and impenetrable ways of southerners. She was stout, bosomy and aggressively welcoming. “Hear that, Derek? Manchester!”