Contact! by Jan Morris Page A

spectacles vibrated, stiletto heels tapped the deck; but the expressions on the passengers’ faces struck me as sad, as though the hum of the liner’s mechanisms, the blaring of those anthems as the vessel docked, were holding the voyagers for a moment in a lost American world–a world encapsulated there still between the decks of the great ship, that would dissipate the moment the gangplank doors were opened, and they returned to 46th Street.
    Responses on the road
    Driving through Vienna in a rented car, I slowed down uncertainly to decide upon my route. Instantly the driver in the car behind blasted his horn most rudely. I gave him a vulgar two-fingered sign which I would never have dreamed of using had I not recently learnt that it was a gesture devised by Welsh archers to demonstrate to opponents that their shooting fingers were intact. When the other car overtook me, its occupants both looked eagerly in my direction. The stout tight-buttoned horn-rimmed burgher at the wheel shook his jowls at me in affronted astonishment. His wife blew me a kiss.
    Widowhood
    For the jollier kind of American widow Los Angeles offers a cheerful refuge, and provides a bedrock, so to speak, upon which they can reconstruct their lives. There is a certain sameness to their appearance, in their bright blouses, leather jerkins, rather too tight slacks and rather too rakish sailor caps. They are bowed often with arthritis but resolutely jaunty of step, and to their attitudes there is a sprightly element of freedom. ‘Did you know,’ one such lady asked me, supposing me, I imagine, to be a bit lost for social satisfactions, ‘did you know that the telephone company offers a free tour every day of the week? My, that’s a rewarding way of spending an afternoon!’
    Moon men
    In the last years of Rhodesia, before it mutated into Zimbabwe, I sometimes had the feeling that its Europeans were being mutated by history, becoming some sort of new subspecies as they fruitlessly resisted the rise of black power. In Salisbury I sometimes took my lunch beside the hotel pool, and there was generally a group of young officers, on leave from their battle stations in the bush, having a swim or a beer on the terrace. Stripped to their trunks and sun-bleached hair, they seemed to lose all ethnic identity. Some were probably mercenaries: Portuguese, German, Afrikaner; most were doubtless expatriate Britons, subtly changed in posture and physique; all seemed to me specific not simply to the place, but to the time, to the circumstances, the historical prospect. They might have been moon men.
    Ethel in Egypt
    One evening I went to a salon presided over by one of the younger, richer and more cosmopolitan of the Cairo society ladies. The purpose was to present to the Cairo grand monde a celebrated clairvoyant of indeterminate Levantine origin, named–well, let us say Ethel. Ethel would judge character, tell fortunes, give semi-occult advice and accept confidences. The attendance was soignée: a couple of ambassadors’ wives, an Indian, a German, a few bangled Egyptian patricians. We were served coffee in very fragile cups, by a Berber in a tarboosh, and we sat on squashy sofas at spindly tables in a room above the Nile.
    Ethel was closeted on a balcony, and one by one the guests disappeared for consultations, taking their coffee cups with them. In the meantime the rest of us chatted. Did we know that G was almost certainly going to St Tropez with A? Was it really true that B was getting Omani money for his new hotel? Had we tried the chopped liver at the Hilton? What about F selling that awful house of his for a quarter of a million?
    From time to time another woman left for the confessional, but the returning devotees, I noticed, never seemed dismayed by Ethel’s predictions, and returned instantly, without so much as a mention of their brush with the occult, to our distinctly worldly exchange–‘ Half a million, I