“Very probably,” Vanderdecker said—how could he be so calm about it all?—“but it’s worth a go, and I’ve got nothing else planned.”
“You bloody fool,” Jane screamed, “you’ll get killed!”
“Now then,” said the Flying Dutchman, “don’t let Sebastian hear you talking like that. I don’t want to raise the poor lad’s hopes.”
“I don’t believe it,” Jane said, and realised that she was getting over-excited. An over-excited accountant, like the University of Hull, is a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless. “You actually want to get killed, don’t you?” she exclaimed, and then was silent, mainly because she had unexpectedly run out of breath.
Vanderdecker grinned at her. “Yes,” he said, “more than anything else in the whole world. In my position, wouldn’t you?”
His eyes met hers, and she seemed to see four hundred years of pointless, agonising existence staring out at her; four hundred years of weeks without weekends, without Bank Holidays, without two weeks in the summer in Tuscany, without Christmas, without birthdays, without even coming home in the evening and kicking off your shoes and watching a good film, just millions of identical days full of nothing at all. She sat down and said nothing else, until long after the helicopter had roared away into the distance. The she started to cry, messily, until her mascara ran down all over her cheeks.
♦
Vanderdecker was not usually given to counting his blessings—not because he was an unusually gloomy person; it was just that he had tried it once, and it had taken him precisely two seconds.
However, he said to himself as the helicopter whirred through a cloud-cluttered sky towards Scotland, there is undoubtedly one thing I can be grateful for; I haven’t had to spend the last four hundred odd years in one of these horrible things. Compared to this airborne food processor, the
The journey had not been devoid of incident. For example, he had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed Sebastian sneakily opening the door and jumping out as they soared over the Lake District; in fact, had he not yelled out “Geronimo!” as he launched himself into the air, they probably wouldn’t have noticed his departure, and it would have taken even longer to find him than it did. When at last they managed to locate him, after several tedious fly-pasts of Lake Coniston, he was lodged head-first in the trunk of a hollow tree, and they had to use axes to get him loose.
There was also the smell. Although they were high up in the sky, their passing gave rise to a wave of seething discomfort and discontent on the ground below, and they had had to skirt round the edges of large towns and cities to avoid mass panic. Even then, an RAF Hercules with which they had briefly shared a few hundred thousand cubic feet of airspace had nearly flown into the Pennines.
But none of these trivial excitements was sufficient to keep the Flying Dutchman from brooding. He was faced, he realised, with a dilemma, a conflict of interests. On the one hand, there was a possibility that his wearisome and unduly extended lifespan would soon be terminated, and although he prided himself on being, in the circumstances, a reasonably well-balanced and sane individual, that would unquestionably be no bad thing. Life had become one long sherry-party, and it was high time he made his excuses and left. But, the problem was the great problem of tedious sherry parties. Just as you can see a way of getting out without actually having to knot tablecloths together and scramble out of a window, you meet someone you actually wouldn’t mind talking to—and then, just as you’re getting to know them and they’re telling you all about whatever it is, it’s time to leave and the hostess is coming round prising glasses out of people’s hands and switching off the music.
The problem with human life, when it goes on for rather longer than it should do, is boredom. When it’s boring and there’s nothing to do, it’s no fun. Just now, however, Vanderdecker had an uneasy feeling that his life was rather less boring than it had been for quite a number of centuries, and he could fairly certainly attribute the lack of tedium to the influence of that confounded accountant.
