In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson

Author:Helen Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409090854
Publisher: Random House

Geography Boy

THEY WERE UP very early against the heat, paniers packed and off on their bikes towards Angers before anybody else at the youth hostel was awake. It felt like the beginning of the world, with the fresh damp smell of the hedgerows and the faint reveille from a cockerel several fields away, although it was in fact the last day of their holiday. Six weeks ago they had met at a party, in the summer term of their second year. Neither of them had ever felt this strongly before about anyone.

Adele was reading history and had chosen the End of the World module rather than the History of Human Rights as her special dissertation subject. It was because of this that she had suggested adding Angers to their itinerary, after reading the guidebook’s rapt account of the apocalyptic tapestries there.

‘It’s the largest wall-hanging ever to be woven in Europe,’ she had quoted from the guidebook the other night in Chinon. ‘Six huge tapestry panels, each with fourteen scenes displayed on two levels, like a sort of double-decker cartoon full of monsters and catastrophes.’

‘Can’t wait,’ Brendan had said, chivalrously. His subject was geography, and he was aware that he had probably dragged her round one too many troglodyte caves that day. Amazing, though, the way those caves had been created by chance from quarrying for the local tufa stone with which to build the white chateaux of the Loire. The damp ones were now used for mushroom cultivation, their guide had informed them, while the rest were being lived in, or snapped up by Parisians as résidences secondaires. ‘I’d like to live in a cave with you,’ he had wanted to say to Adele, but hadn’t been quite brave enough.

They were bowling along between fields of ripe corn, and he felt like singing or shouting. Sometimes in the last week, when they had been swooping down a hill in the forests near Chinon, he had shouted aloud into the air rushing past him in sheer exhilaration. Then there was the long stiff climb up the next one, moving the piston legs, ignoring the keen sensation in the front thigh muscles of being flooded with boiling water, Adele panting alongside him, and the reward at the top, as their hearts gradually stopped pounding and they gloated once again over the sweet swooping downward stretch ahead.

On they cycled as the sun climbed higher and the day grew hotter. Sweat was flying from their faces now and inside their clothes it was trickling down their bodies as they pistoned forward. There were few cars – perhaps one every ten minutes or so – although evidence of their existence was displayed at intervals along the way, flattened hedgehogs, little birds and mice. Once, by a low orchard of strictly serried apple trees, there had been a great silver serpent, half a metre long, flattened in mid-zigzag.

‘Chateau,’ he called as they rounded a bend in the road. There it was, white against the green, another

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