‘Anyway, don’t I have a say in the name?’
‘Not if you’re abdicating all responsibility for the child, no.’
‘I’m not abdicating anything. I promise you, Angela, there’s more chance of the Queen abdicating than me. But you can’t call him Basil. The first thing everyone will think of is Fawlty Towers. He’ll be plagued by people shouting, “Don’t mention the war!”’
‘Says the son of Adolf.’
‘Shush,’ he said, looking around to make sure that she hadn’t been overheard. ‘Please, Angela! God, I don’t know why I even told you that.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Forget I said anything, all right? Look, I’m sorry, I have to go. As you probably know, I’m in a spot of bother, and I have a meeting shortly with a bunch of people who want to push me gently off the roof. Can I call you later?’
‘You can,’ agreed Angela, looking momentarily appeased. ‘But if you don’t, George, I won’t be contacting you again, is that understood? Call me today, or that’s the end of it. I’ll take matters into my own hands.’
‘You were always rather good at that, as I recall,’ replied George with a smile and a wink.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, turning around and leaving.
Perhaps not the best time for a bit of cheeky innuendo, he told himself as he made his towards the lift. But honestly, he needed a little levity in his life right now.
ECONOMY CLASS
Beverley’s flight to Odessa involved an early start, departing Heathrow for Vienna at 6 a.m. before making a quick transfer in a crowded airport for the next leg of her journey. She did her best to sleep on the first plane, but images of her daughter locked in bouts of passion with Pylyp kept dragging her back to consciousness, so by the time she boarded the second, which, to her horror, did not offer business class, she was feeling grouchy and tired, emotions that were only exacerbated when she saw that her neighbours were an elderly man and a seven-year-old boy.
The boy remained mostly silent at the start of the flight, content with reading his comics and listening to music through his headphones, but the man seemed starved of adult companionship and tried unsuccessfully a number of times to strike up a conversation.
‘Are you Ukrainian?’ he asked, breathing coffee fumes over her.
‘I most certainly am not,’ she replied. ‘I’m British.’
‘I used to be British,’ he said wistfully. ‘But when I married my wife, I gave up my citizenship and became Ukrainian.’
‘And is this your son?’ she asked, unimpressed by the idea of a man his age procreating with some unfortunate young woman.
‘Oh no,’ he said, laughing a little. ‘My grandson.’
She nodded, relieved.
‘Do you have grandchildren?’ he asked. ‘Or great-grandchildren?’
She gave him her chilliest expression, wondering whether he was being deliberately rude, before shaking her head.
‘My children are aged between seventeen and twenty-two,’ she said. ‘So I hardly think it likely that a new generation would have appeared just yet. Let alone the one to follow that. Now, if you don’t mind, I must get some work done.’
She removed a set of pages from her bag and, pulling the tabletop down from the seat back in front of her, placed her folder on it and began to read the chapters that the ghost had delivered overnight. To her relief, the story was progressing rather well, although the woman had an infuriating habit of doing what Beverley called ‘writing up’. On one page, for example, a character had fallen asleep ‘counting sheep, but, in her dreams, clouds drifted across the arid landscape of her reveries like inscrutable posies of wool’. On another, a gynaecologist’s surgery was ‘steeped in the blood of lost foeti’, which, frankly, was a phrase that turned Beverley’s stomach. And the heroine appeared to be developing a Sapphic element to her character, too, that none of Beverley’s readers would understand, let alone appreciate. Also, there was a new experimental sequence, five pages of words thrown randomly on the page, like paint splattered across a Jackson Pollock canvas, none of which seemed to connect to each other in any way but which were clearly intended to mirror the confused mind of the protagonist.
She made notes beside each of these and more.
No gynaecologists! she scrawled. And stop talking about her angry cervix!
‘So, what brings you to Odessa?’ asked Beverley’s neighbour, refusing to accept her rebuff.
‘Personal business,’ she replied.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘A lot of women do that. I’m told that it’s a lot cheaper over there than at home.’
She frowned and turned to look at him.
‘What are you talking about?’ she asked.
He raised his index finger and tickled it along the flabby skin that hung beneath his chin. ‘You’re getting a little procedure done, I assume? And why not? We all like to make the best of ourselves. Odessa is well known for the skill of its plastic surgeons.’
‘I’m doing nothing of the sort,’ replied Beverley, outraged. She placed the palm of her hand beneath her own chin, concerned that something might have collapsed in the hours since she’d left London, but nothing there seemed untoward. ‘That’s very rude of you, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘I don’t mind in the least,’ he said. ‘No offence.’
‘Well, I am offended.’
‘Touchy,’ said the man under his breath. ‘As it happens, I had a hair transplant there a couple of years ago. You’d never know it, but all of this’ – and here he pointed towards a thin thatch sitting atop his head that made Bobby Charlton look like Bob Marley – ‘is fake. It’s taken years off me, though.’
‘And did you pay a lot for that?’ she asked.
‘About five thousand pounds.’
‘So about two hundred and fifty pounds per strand then. No offence.’
He looked a little wounded by the remark and the boy took his headphones off and glanced at them both, as if he was worried that something interesting might be going on and he was missing out on it.
‘Hello,’ he said, leaning forward.
‘Hello,’ replied Beverley, who was always pleased to see a child reading. ‘Are you enjoying your comic?’
‘No. It’s boring.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘You look like the Queen.’
‘I think you mean Princess Diana.’
The boy frowned. ‘Who’s Princess Diana?’ he asked.
‘Long before your time,’ said his grandfather, and the boy shrugged and put his headphones back on.
‘If you don’t mind my asking,’ said Beverley, ‘why are you travelling with your grandson?’
‘I went to visit him in Vienna,’ explained the man. ‘His mother is my daughter. And his father … well, who knows? Anyway, she’s not a great mother – not my fault, I left all the parenting to my wife, and it turned out that she was no good at it – so I decided to take him back to Odessa with me. I can give him a good home there.’
‘And his mother agreed to this?’