Грэм Грин – Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке (страница 14)

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 these 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[88]. 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 to 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[89]. I will meet you outside. Here is the ticket for the red case.”

Chapter 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 Saint James and Albany, an old-fashioned double hottel, of which one half, the Albany, faces the Rue de Rivoli and the other, the Saint James, the Rue Saint-Honoré. Between the two hotels lies the shared territory of a small garden, and on the garden front of the Saint 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 retirement. Understand once and for all[90] 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[91] 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.”

“You were not bugged, I suppose, in the suburbs.”

The man who came to see her was not my idea of a banker at all. He was tall and elegant with black sideburns and he would have fitted very well into a matador’s uniform. My aunt asked me to bring her the red suitcase, and I then left them alone, but looking back from the doorway I saw that the lid was already open and the case seemed to be stacked with ten-pound notes.

I sat down in my bedroom and read a copy of Punch[92] to reassure myself. The sight of all the smuggled money had been a shock, and the suitcase was one of those fibre ones which are as vulnerable as cardboard. It is true that no experienced loader at Heathrow would have expected it to contain a small fortune, but surely it was the height of rashness to trust in a bluff which depended for its success on the experience of a thief. She might easily have tumbled on a novice.

My aunt had obviously spent many years abroad and this had affected her character as well as her morality. I couldn’t really judge her as I would an ordinary Englishwoman, and I comforted myself, as I read Punch, that the English character was unchangeable. True, Punch once passed through a distressing period, when even Winston Churchill was a subject of mockery, but the good sense of the proprietors and of the advertisers drew it safely back into the old paths. Even the admiral had begun to subscribe again, and the editor had, quite correctly in my opinion, been relegated to television, which is at its best a vulgar medium. If the ten-pound notes, I thought, were tied in bundles of twenty, there could easily be as much as three thousand pounds in the suitcase, or even six, for surely bundles of forty would not be too thick… Then I remembered the case was a Revelation. Twelve thousand was not an impossible total. I felt a little comforted by that idea. Smuggling on such a large scale seemed more like a business coup than a crime.

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