Thomas - Arrivals and departures

Leslie Thomas was born in Newport, Monmouthshire in 1931, the son of a sailor who was lost at sea. His boyhood in a Barnados orphanage is described in his hugely successful autobiography This Time Next Week, and he is the author of numerous other bestsellers including The Virgin Soldiers, Tropic of Ruislip, and Revolving Jones. He lives in Salisbury with his wife Diana.

Fresh from Los Angeles, Mrs Pearl Collingwood and her daughter Rona arrive in the frenzied no-mans-land of Heathrow airport: from the nearby village of Bedmansworth, Edward Richardson jets in and out of it faster than his marriage can tolerate. Yet precisely where village and airport overlap, there exists a world bubbling with intrigues and assignations, with wit, pathos and excitement, that all readers of Leslie Thomas will recognise as his alone/

One

On that June evening, at ten oclock, the airport appeared from the incoming plane curiously like the eastern city it had left not many hours before; low buildings, flat roofs, white walls, light languid in the late day. The London sun had gone down ahead of the aircraft in a dusty orange cloud, the level land below was darkening and the vast reservoirs on the western side of the runways dimly reflected the sky.

Edward Richardson was going home again. Every week, sometimes more often, he flew home from some far place, the change in times and climates, lands and people, all part of his life. He was a tall but solid man with a tired face. At forty-three he had done so much travelling, so much flying. He was becoming unclear where he was going.

As commercial manager of the airline he was well known on the plane and at Heathrow. Landing formalities were quick and the terminal was quiet, almost idle. He went briefly into his office, two hundred yards distant, then boarded the bus for the staff car park, collected his car and with the window down drove towards home. There was a touch of pungency from the airport sludge farm.

Adele was already in bed. She often had early-morning meetings. She stirred sleepily. How was it?

Bahrain? Oh, it was all right in the end. The usual insurmountable problems. But we shuffled them around until they didnt look so bad.

There was a call from Gohm, Brent and Byas Travel Management. They really want you, Edward. Theyre very keen. Theyre ringing back tomorrow.

Richardson sighed. I dont want Gohm, Brent and Byas. In any case I have to go to Istanbul tomorrow. There was a message when I arrived at Heathrow.

She half sat up in her bed. She had left the side light burning and it shone on the curve of her cheek. Adele had always had a strong face and the illumination was unflattering. Istanbul? she said frowning. But surely thats on the way back from Bahrain.

It is, more or less. He sat on the end of his bed and took off his jacket. They had not kissed. But for a start the flight didnt call there and even for me they wont divert. You should know that. And additionally, I didnt get the Istanbul message until I was back at Heathrow.

Jesus, thats typical. So you have to go most of the way back again.

Its the job.

I dont know how you stand it. Or me. She corrected the double meaning. How I stand it.

He took off his shoes and put on a pair of light suede slippers. Nor do I, he confessed. Im going up to take a look at the stars.

I thought you might.

The nights clear. I know, Ive just been up there. He pulled on a sweater. Ray Francis, the manager in Istanbul, has gone off with a local woman.

Some bimbo? I suppose they have bimbos in Turkey like everywhere else.

This bimbo is a university professor. Francis was always original. Ive got to find him or sort it out somehow. I may be back in the evening.

Oh good, she said flatly.

She extinguished the bed light as he was going out of the door. He thought how poor their marriage had become. It was strangely as though it were someone elses marriage, viewed from a safe distance. Each of them watched its disintegration as if fascinated, the slight crumbling here, the insidious rot and the powdering there, but with neither making any move to stop or save themselves. Sometimes he felt that if she would only hold out her hands to prevent another piece falling away, then he would help her. Between them they might save it. But then they might regret the attempt; they might be left standing, holding up only a ruin.

Softly he walked along the corridor. The house was old and close. It held the warmth of the summer night. One of the lattice windows had been left open at the end and a climbing rose tapped like a reminder against the frame. He passed his son Tobys room and heard him mildly snoring.

There was a brief flight of stairs up to another room, once a half-landing, which he used as a study. He switched on the lamp at the desk and its glow circled the walls. There were two cases of books, the titles gleaming from their spines and a series of prints of celestial charts, copies of the ancient maps of the universe, and a burnished astrolabe. Even now, in the low luminescence, the colours glowed finely, and his hand went out and touched one of the frames. He began to smile. He mounted a second short flight of oak steps and opened a silent door. It swung to reveal a telescope on its mounting, a tipped chair beneath it, and a glass dome eighteen feet wide, above, ribbed into sections but displaying the sky, the stars and the beginnings of a moon.

He settled into the tubular steel chair and, with a touch of the controls, swung the telescope towards the southern sky. As he did so he activated another switch and music, eerie, spacious music, filled the dome. He turned the volume down so that it seeped gently and mysteriously into the room; Vaughan Williams theme from the Antarctic of chill and winds and lonely emptiness.

Now he traversed the telescope across the deepness of the southern sky. There was the summer triangle, Vega in Lyra the Harp, Deneb in Cygnus the Swan, Altair at the centre of Aquila with the Wild Duck far out on the fringe and Arcturus, the brightest star in the Northern hemisphere. He watched them playing tag across infinity. The music surrounded him, the stars held his gaze. He felt himself relax into happiness.

A burned-out earth satellite swooped across his view. Richardson let it go past with a sniff of annoyance. He concentrated on the southern firmament, as he always did, for to the north the lights of Heathrow glowed, itself like some planet landed upon the world.

He was there for more than an hour. His eyes became tired. The music had changed several times. He turned the switch off and rubbed his eyes. Just below him the village of Bedmansworth was silent as the stars. There was one light in the short street and another in the church (a precaution since a burglary during which the money from the Footballs for Africa Fund had been stolen) but the night itself was fine enough for him to distinguish the shapes of the houses, the two inns, the tower and arrow of the church and the end of the row of shops.

Bedmansworth had been a village for centuries and was noted on the Actual Survey of the County of Midlesex, a copy of which hung in the drawing-room downstairs, drawn by John Ogilby, cartographer to Charles the Second, in 1675, who noted also with a single thatched cottage, the hamlet of Hetherow in the Hundred of Elthorne.

In the pale night he could see, beyond the roofs, fields, indistinct as cobwebs, real meadows once, that had stretched from the fringes of London to Uxbridge, to Windsor, to Hounslow Heath, then the territory of the highwayman but now covered by the tarmac flat-tops of the Heathrow runways and the metropolis of its buildings.

The road through the village was as dim as a secret passage. He picked out the sleeping outlines of the houses, knowing each family who lived there: the Swan Inn, where Jim Turner held the licence, and the other smaller pub, the Straw Man, once a drovers inn on the sheep and cattle trails from Wales to the markets of London. There was a squat row of roadside cottages, their backs to him, that had been there since farm labourers were paid threepence a day. Old village families still lived in them, most of the men employed at the airport.