Travels with my aunt / Путешествие с тетушкой. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Грэм Грин
hope you don’t plan anything illegal.”
“I have never planned anything illegal in my life,” Aunt Augusta said. “How could I plan anything of the kind when I have never read any of the laws and have no idea what they are?”
Chapter 8
It was my aunt herself who suggested that we should fly as far as Paris. I was a little surprised after what she had just said, for there was certainly in this case an alternative means of travel; I pointed out the inconsistency.
“There are reasons,” Aunt Augusta said. “Cogent reasons. I know the ropes[80] at Heathrow”.
I was puzzled too at her insistence that we must go to the Kensington air terminal and take the airport bus.
“It’s so easy for me,” I said, “to pick you up by car and drive you to Heathrow. You would find it much less tiring, Aunt Augusta.”
“You would have to pay an exorbitant garage fee,” she replied, and I found her sudden sense of economy unconvincing.
I arranged next day for the dahlias to be watered by my next-door neighbour, a brusque man called Major Charge. He had seen Detective-Sergeant Sparrow come to the door with the policeman, and he was bitten by curiosity. I told him it was about a motoring offence and he became sympathetic immediately. “A child murdered every week,” he said, “and all they can do is to pursue motorists.” I don’t like lies and I felt in my conscience that I ought to defend Sergeant Sparrow, who had been as good as his word and posted back the urn, registered and express.
“Sergeant Sparrow is not in homicide,” I replied, “and motorists kill more people in a year than murderers.”
“Only a lot of jaywalkers,” Major Charge said. “Cannon fodder.” However, he agreed to water the dahlias.
I picked my aunt up in the bar of the Crown and Anchor, where she was having a stirrup-cup[81], and we drove by taxi to the Kensington terminal. I noticed that she had brought two suitcases, one very large, although, when I had asked her how long we were to stay in Istanbul, she had replied, “Twenty-four hours.”
“It seems a short stay after such a long journey.”
“The point is the journey,” my aunt had replied. “I enjoy the travelling not the sitting still.”
Even Uncle Jo, I argued, had put up with each room in his house for a whole week.
“Jo was a sick man,” she said, “while I am in the best of health.” Since we were travelling first-class (which seemed again an unnecessary luxury between London and Paris) we had no overweight, although the larger of her suitcases was unusually heavy. While we were sitting in the bus I suggested to my aunt that the garage fee for my car would probably have been cheaper than the difference between first and tourist fares. “The difference,” she said, “is nearly wiped out by the caviar and the smoked salmon, and surely between us we can probably put away half a bottle of vodka. Not to speak of the champagne and cognac. In any case, I have more important reasons for travelling by bus.”
As we approached Heathrow she put her mouth close to my ear. “The luggage,” she said, “is in a trailer behind.”
“I know.”
“I have a green suitcase and a red suitcase. Here are the tickets.”
I took them, not understanding.
“When the bus stops, please get out quickly and see whether the trailer is still attached. If it is still there let me know at once and I’ll give you further instructions.”
Something in my aunt’s manner made me nervous. I said, “Of course it will be there.”
“I sincerely hope not,” she said. “Otherwise we shall not leave today.”
I jumped out as soon as we arrived, and sure enough the trailer wasn’t there. “What do I do now?” I asked her.
“Nothing at all. Everything is quite in order. You may give me back the tickets and relax.”
As we sat over two gins and tonics in the departure lounge a loudspeaker announced, “Passengers on Flight three-seven-eight to Nice will proceed to customs for customs inspection.”
We were alone at our table and my aunt did not bother to lower her voice amid the din of passengers, glasses and loud-speakers. “That is what I wished to avoid,” she said. “They have now taken to spot-checks on passengers leaving the country. They whittle away our liberties one by one. When I was a girl you could travel anywhere on the continent except Russia without a passport and you took what you liked in the way of money. Until recently they only asked what money you had, or at the very worst[82] they wanted to see your wallet. If there’s one thing I hate in any human being it is mistrust.”
“The way you speak,” I said jokingly, “I suspect we are lucky that it is not your bags which are being searched.”
I could well imagine my aunt stuffing a dozen five-pound notes into the toe of her bedroom slippers. Having been a bank manager, I am perhaps overscrupulous, though I must confess that I had brought an extra five-pound note folded up in my ticket pocket, but that was something I might genuinely have overlooked.
“Luck doesn’t enter into my calculations,” my aunt said. “Only a fool would trust to luck[83], and there is probably a fool now on the Nice flight who is regretting his folly. Whenever new restrictions are made, I make a very careful study of the arrangements for carrying them out.” She gave a little sigh. “In the case of Heathrow I owe a great deal to Wordsworth. For a time he acted as a loader here. He left when there was some trouble about a gold consignment. Nothing was ever proved against him, but the whole affair had been too impromptu and disgusted him. He told me the story. A very large ingot was abstracted by a loader, and the loss was discovered too soon, before the men went off duty. They knew as a result that they would be searched by the police on leaving, all taxis too, and they had no idea what to do with the thing until Wordsworth suggested rolling it in tar and using it as a doorstop in the customs shed. So there it stayed for months. Every time they brought crates along to the shed, they could see their ingot propping open the door. Wordsworth said he got so maddened by the sight of it that he threw up the job. That was when he became a doorman at the Grenada Palace.”
“What happened to the ingot?”
“I suppose the authorities lost interest when the diamond robberies started. Diamonds are money for jam, Henry. You see, they have special sealed sacks for valuable freight and these sacks are put into ordinary sacks, the idea being that the loaders can’t spot them. The official mind is remarkably innocent. By the time you’ve been loading sacks a week or two, you can feel which sack contains another inside it. Then all you’ve got to do is to slit both coverings open and take pot luck[84]. Like a children’s bran tub at Christmas. Nobody is going to discover the slit until the plane arrives at the other end. Wordsworth knew a man who struck lucky the first time and pulled out a box with fifty gem stones.”
“Surely somebody’s watching?”
“Only the other loaders and they take a share. Of course, occasionally a man has bad luck. Once a friend of Wordsworth’s fished out a fat packet of notes, but they proved to be Pakistani. Worth about a thousand pounds if you happened to live in Karachi, but who was going to change them for him here? The poor fellow used to haunt the tarmac whenever a plane was taking off to Karachi, but he never found a safe customer. Wordsworth said he got quite embittered.”
“I had no idea such things went on at Heathrow.”
“My dear Henry,” Aunt Augusta said, “if you had been a young man I would have advised you to become a loader. A loader’s life is one of adventure with far more chance of a fortune than you ever have in a branch bank. I can imagine nothing better for a young man with ambition except perhaps
know the ropes – (
was having a stirrup-cup – (
at the very worst – (
Only a fool would trust to luck – (
take pot luck – (