Chapter Five — The Flight

He was standing at his own threshold when she stopped on it.

She was — and he noticed, because it was the first thing it was possible to notice — shorter than he had expected. He had expected her tall. He did not know from what. She was in a grey travel coat that was not the coat a woman would have chosen for impressing a man, and a pair of flat practical shoes that had been polished within the last hour, and a small canvas bag at her feet which looked, to his eye, to weigh exactly the three kilos a person was allowed to put in a plane's right-hand baggage compartment.

"Jon," she said.

"Maribel."

"Don Jon," she said.

"Just Jon."

"Jon."

They did not shake hands. She did not step in. He picked up his own bag from inside the doorway. He closed the door behind him. They rode down in the lift in a silence that was not uncomfortable, which he distrusted.

#

The car was waiting at the kerb. Íñigo, who had driven for Jon's father for as long as Jon had been old enough to be driven anywhere, touched the brim of his cap at Jon and held the rear door. Maribel got in on the far side. Jon got in on the near side. The door closed.

"Señor Jon," Íñigo said.

"Íñigo."

"La señorita is known to you."

"La señorita," Jon said, "is known to me."

It was a small joke Íñigo made with everyone, and had made with Jon's mother, once, when Jon had been young enough that he barely remembered her laughing at it; and it was the first thing, in two weeks of being back, that had made Jon laugh aloud.

Maribel, on the far side of the seat, looked at him once, and did not laugh.

"The airstrip, please, Íñigo."

"Sí, señor."

They pulled away.

#

Madrid on a Friday afternoon at a quarter past four was not the Madrid of the morning. The traffic was already moving in the direction of exit. Íñigo took the streets Íñigo took — a route Jon could not have drawn on a map but could have followed with his eyes closed from the back of any one of the cars Íñigo had driven him in over the course of thirty-four years — and within twelve minutes they were on the ring road and within another fifteen they were on the motorway, and then, to Jon's private surprise, they were on a minor road he had not been on in six years, and Íñigo was turning off it onto a track he had been turning on and off for longer than that, and the airstrip was below them — a single strip of gravel-topped asphalt, a hangar the colour of an old envelope, and the four-seater, already pulled out, already checked, already waiting.

Maribel looked at the plane.

She said, That is the plane?

"That is the plane."

"Okay," she said.

#

Íñigo stopped at the edge of the apron. He got out. He opened Maribel's door. He took her bag from her, which she allowed, and set it down beside his own foot. He said, Mucho gusto, señorita. Please have a good flight. He turned to Jon and handed Jon a thermos Jon had not ordered.

"Encarna sent it," Íñigo said.

"Through you."

"Through me."

"What is in it."

"Caldo."

Jon took the thermos. He did not open it. He set it inside his own bag.

He walked Maribel across the apron. He said, The right-hand seat. You do not have to do anything. You do not have to touch anything. If at any point you would like to touch something, I will tell you what is safe to touch.

"Thank you."

"Lucas," he said, as Lucas came out of the hangar. "Lucas, this is—"

"I know who this is," Lucas said, without meeting Maribel's eye. He lifted his hand in the way of a man who had been briefed. "Señorita."

"Señor."

Jon looked at Lucas. Lucas looked back at him. A small grey weather had gone through the older man's face. Jon chose not to ask.

He handed Maribel the preflight checklist.

"If you would like," he said, "you can read down the left-hand column while I look at what you are reading."

"I do not—"

"I have done it a thousand times. It is for you, not for me. It is a ritual in this plane. We do not take off without the person in the right-hand seat reading the left-hand column."

"Oil pressure," Maribel read.

"Good," Jon said.

"Oil pressure indicator—"

"Good."

She worked her way down the column. Her voice was careful. She did not read too quickly. She did not read too slowly. She read as a person reads who has filled in forms in more than one country, and who has learned that there is no such thing as a form that does not matter.

Jon climbed into the left seat. She waited for him to tell her to climb into the right. He told her. She climbed.

He closed the door.

The smell was the smell.

He had forgotten, in the two weeks since Asturias, that the smell did what the smell did; and now, in the closed cabin, with the instruments cold under his palms, his body did what it had been doing every time he had sat in this plane since he was fourteen, which was to give him, silently, the half-second of uncomplicated happiness that had been his since before he had had any thoughts about his father at all.

He looked at Maribel. Her hand was on her own thigh. It had not moved.

#

They took off at two minutes past five.

The four-seater did what the four-seater did, which was to cough and settle and climb. Jon could feel — at the moment when the wheels stopped being in contact with the ground — that particular happiness, a little older than the last time, a little more grateful.

He levelled the plane at eight thousand feet. He set the trim. He told her what he was doing in the order in which he was doing it, not because he thought she needed it, but because telling people what one was doing in a plane was what one did. Lucas had done it to him when he was four.

"What is that," she said, once, pointing at a dial.

"The artificial horizon."

"What does it tell you."

"Whether I am flying straight."

"I thought you could see whether you were flying straight."

"At night, no. In cloud, no. Even now — the eye is not very good at this, and the plane is flying straighter than I think."

She looked at the dial for another moment. She turned her head away.

#

He asked her, because he had decided he would ask her, where she had lived in Madrid.

"Three places," she said. "Near the river."

"Which river."

"The Manzanares."

"Which side of the Manzanares."

"The one with the cheap flats."

"I know the one."

"Do you."

"I have never lived there," he said. "That is how I know the one."

She smiled. It was the first time she had smiled.

"How long," he said.

"Twenty-two months."

"And before that."

"Before that I was somewhere else."

"Here or—"

"Somewhere else."

He let it pass.

#

She said, after a while, You have a cousin.

"Rafa."

"Rafa. He will be there."

"He will be there."

"And your friend from London."

"Abraham. And Pecas."

"Pecas."

"She is Galician."

"I know she is Galician. Your father told me."

"What else did my father tell you."

"He told me," she said, "that I would not know anyone at this party, and that he would like me to know one person by the end of the first evening, and that he hoped that one person would be you."

Jon did not answer for a minute.

"And if it is not me."

"He said it would not matter. He said he thought it would be you."

"Okay."

"Don Jon," she said.

"Jon."

"Jon. I am not going to marry you this weekend."

"That is," he said, "the best thing anyone has said to me in a year."

She did not smile. He did.

#

They were over the northern plain when he did the thing he had done every other time he had taken another person up in this plane, and had done in the secret and slightly embarrassing knowledge that he was doing it because he wanted to see.

He let the nose drop. It was half a second. It was a two-hundred-foot loss of altitude the plane would recover in the next ten. It was the particular small hollow in the stomach which was the reason people screamed on roller coasters and also the reason they got back on.

He levelled.

He looked at Maribel.

She had turned her head a fraction of an inch toward him. That was all she had done. Her hand was still on her thigh. Her face was still composed. She was looking at him with the particular patience of a person who had understood exactly what had just happened and had understood exactly why.

She said, Was that to see what I would do.

"Yes."

"What did the other women do."

"They screamed. Or laughed. Or grabbed the yoke."

"And."

"And I am now looking, Maribel, at the first woman I have ever taken up in this plane who did none of those three things."

"That is because," she said — and she was smiling now, for the second time in the flight, but smiling in a way Jon could not quite read and was not sure he would be able to read even if she explained it — "that is because the other women thought they were on a date. I am not on a date."

#

Jon flew for a while without saying anything.

After perhaps ten minutes, during which the landscape below began to change from the brown of the meseta to the first green of the north, he said, I am sorry I did that.

"Don't be."

"I am."

"I am not a person who needs to be apologised to for a small moment in a plane," she said. "I have lived larger moments. In any case, you were testing me. I have been tested by men before. You test gently."

Jon turned the yoke a quarter-degree. The wing dipped. He corrected.

"What else," he said, "have you been tested on."

She considered.

"On whether I would work for less," she said. "On whether I would sleep with someone. On whether I would disappear. Small things."

"Those are not small things."

"They are small things in the place I am from."

He looked at her.

"The south," he said. "Near the coast."

"Yes," she said — and she was looking at him now in a way that was neither defensive nor apologetic, and was perhaps the first thing, since she had stepped onto his threshold in the Madrid flat, that he had not been able to read. "Near the coast."

#

They crossed into Galicia ten minutes later. The cloud came up. The cloud was the Galician cloud, the low Atlantic cloud that was always there, that had been there in the Roman times, that would be there when the plane was scrap and Jon was a photograph on a wall in the house they were about to land at. Jon brought them down through it.

They broke out at six hundred feet. Green, green, green; and to the west of the strip, the Atlantic, grey today, a line Jon had drawn for himself more than once on maps as the edge of a life he did not live but his family did.

He set the plane down.

It was not the neatest landing he had ever made. He was aware, as he touched the wheels onto the packed earth of the private strip, that he had been thinking about the woman in the right-hand seat for the last ninety seconds, and that he had not been thinking about the runway, and that this was a very old rule he had broken.

The plane bumped once, twice. Settled. Rolled.

He taxied it in.

And there, at the top of the long slope from the strip up to the terrace of the house, was his father. Jesus was standing at the terrace rail with a glass in his hand. He was not waving. He was only standing. He had been standing there, Jon understood, since the particular moment the sound of the plane had first carried up over the hillside, and he had been standing there with a glass in his hand, watching, waiting to see what his son had brought him.

#

Maribel saw Jesus at the same moment Jon did.

She said, Your father is watching.

"I know."

"He is going to know what we said, up here."

"He is not going to know what we said."

"He is going to know what I decided."

Jon cut the engine. The propeller wound down from a shape he could feel back to a shape he could see.

"And what did you decide," he said.

She did not answer.

She unbuckled her belt. She opened her door. She climbed down, in the careful way one climbed down from a four-seater in a pair of flat practical shoes, and she stood on the packed earth with her hand on the fuselage, steadying herself against an hour of vibration she had not let him see had bothered her.

She looked up the slope. Jesus raised his glass, very slightly, from the terrace.

She looked at Jon.

Her face, in the last light of the afternoon, was the face he had been trying to read for ninety minutes, and he still could not read it, and for the first time he thought that this might be because there was something to be read, and not because she was holding it back.

"I will decide," she said, "by the end of tomorrow night."

She picked up her own bag.

She walked up the slope toward Jesus.