The Principles of Flight 231
“Quite good,” said Max. “But not as good as somebody called Peter Gregson. He used to be at the Academy and now he’s gone to study the cello in London. I’ll never be as good as he is.”
“But you do your best, don’t you?” said Bertie seriously. He was enjoying this conversation and he wondered whether Max would be his friend. It would be grand to have a friend in Paris. Some people went to Paris without a friend, and that couldn’t be much fun, thought Bertie. He looked at Max. He had a kind face, he thought, and he decided that it might be best to ask him directly.
“Will you be my friend?” Bertie asked. And then added: “Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris.”
Max looked at Bertie in surprise. Then he smiled, and Bertie noticed that his entire face lit up when this happened. “Of course I will,” he said. “That’s fine by me. I don’t know many of the people in this orchestra and so it would be nice to have a friend.”
Bertie sat back in his seat feeling quite elated. The forgetting of the saxophone was not really a problem, according to the conductor, and now here he was about to take off on his first flight and he was doing it in the company of a nice boy called Max. Really, he had everything he could possibly wish for.
The last preparations for the departure were completed and the plane began to taxi towards the end of the runway. Bertie stared out of the window, fascinated. And then, with a sudden, throaty roar the plane began to roll down the runway, slowly at first and then picking up speed. Bertie felt himself being pressed back into his seat by the force of the acceleration, and then, almost imperceptibly, they were airborne and he saw the ground drop away beneath him.
He watched as the plane banked round and began to head off towards Paris. He saw the motorway to Glasgow, with the cars moving on it like tiny models. By craning his neck, he saw the Pentland Hills and the Firth of Forth, a steel-grey band snaking up into the bosom of Scotland. And then, down below them, hills; green and brown folds, stretching off to the south and west.
Soon they were at altitude, and the plane settled down into even flight. The members of the orchestra made up the majority of the passengers and the cabin was filled with an excited buzz of 232 The Principles of Flight
conversation between them, restrained among the strings and woodwind, rowdy among the brass and percussion. Bertie looked over his shoulder and down the rows behind him. One of the girls who had waved to him earlier caught his eye and smiled.
Bertie smiled back. He felt quite grown-up now, here with this group of which he was now a member, even if they were so much older. Somebody has to be the youngest, he thought, and they were all being very nice to him about it. Nobody had laughed at him, so far; nobody had suggested that he was too small.
After a while, Bertie slipped past Max and whispered something to one of the attendants. She smiled and told him to follow her to a small door near the galley. Bertie entered the cramped washroom and emerged shortly afterwards to find that the Captain of the aircraft was standing in the galley area, in conversation with one of the attendants. Bertie gazed in admiration at the Captain, who looked down at him and smiled.
“Hello, young man,” said the Captain, winking at Bertie. “Is this your first flight?”
“Yes,” said Bertie. “But I know how it works.”
The Captain smiled. “Oh do you?” he said. “Well, you tell me then.”
“Bernoulli’s principle,” said Bertie.
The Captain glanced at the attendant and then back at Bertie.
“What did you say, young man?”
“You need lift to fly,” explained Bertie. “Mr Bernoulli discovered that pressure goes down when the speed of flow of a fluid increases.
That’s what pushes the wing up. The air flows more quickly over the top than the bottom.” He paused, and then added: “I think.”
The Captain reached out and shook Bertie’s hand. “Well, that’s pretty much how it works. Well done! You carry on like that, son, and . . .”
Bertie waited for the Captain to say something else, but he did not, and so he went back to his seat.
“I saw you talking to the Captain there,” said Max. “What did you say?”
“I was telling him about Bernoulli’s principle,” said Bertie.
“But I think he knew already.”
Scotland’s Woes 233
The flight was over far too quickly for Bertie. It seemed to him only a matter of a few minutes before the plane started to dip down through the clouds to Charles de Gaulle Airport.
“Charles de Gaulle was President of France,” observed Bertie to Max, as they taxied up to the terminal.
“Ooh la la!” replied Max. “Paris! Boy, are we going to have fun, Bertie! Have you heard of a place called the Moulin Rouge, Bertie? You heard of it?”
75. Scotland’s Woes
Antonia Collie, Domenica’s tenant during her absence in the Malacca Straits, was uncertain what to do about Angus Lordie.
The artist had invited her to dinner a few weeks previously and 234 Scotland’s Woes
then, with very little notice, had cancelled the invitation. He had explained that his dog, Cyril, had been stolen, and he had said that he was, frankly, too upset to entertain. She had been surprised, and had wondered whether the excuse was a genuine one. She had been cancelled once or twice before, by others, and had herself occasionally had to call something off. But she had never encountered, nor used, a pretext relating to a dog. It had the air of the excuse which children use for their failure to produce homework: The dog ate it. Presumably there were dogs who really did eat homework, but they must be rare.
She thought that it had been kind of Angus to let her into the flat and make her welcome on the day of her arrival in Edinburgh, and it had been kinder still of him to invite her to dinner. But her conversation with him had been a curious one, full of tension just below the surface. It seemed to her as if he was keen to assert himself in her presence; that he was for some reason defensive.
Of course there were men like that, she realised – men who felt inadequate in the presence of a woman who was intellectually confident, who could do something which perhaps the man himself wanted to do but could not. Some men only felt comfortable if they could condescend to women, or if they felt that women looked up to them. Her own husband had been a bit like that, she thought. He had found it necessary to take up with that empty-headed woman from Perth, a woman who could hardly sustain an intelligent conversation for more than five minutes, if that.
Or could it be envy? Antonia was very conscious of the corro-sive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was. It was everywhere – in all sorts of relationships, insidiously poisoning the way in which people felt about one another. Antonia had been its victim. As a girl, she had been envied for her academic prowess, and she had been envied for her looks, too. She had no difficulty in attracting boys; girls who could not do this envied her and wished that something would happen to her hair, or that her skin would become oily.
Children, of course, knew no better. But she saw envy persisting into adult life. She saw it at work in her marriage,
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and now she noticed it in public life too, now that she knew what to look for. Scotland was riddled with it, and it showed itself in numerous ways which everyone knew about but did not want to discuss. That was the problem, really: new ideas were not welcome – only the old orthodoxies; that, and the current of anti-intellectualism that made intelligent men (and she was thinking of men now) want to appear to be one of the lads.