Comments are always very welcome.
*****
I should have known it when the taxi was late. I did catch my plane to London, and circling over London for half an hour wasn’t a sure sign of anything bad. It’s more the rule than the exception. But I should definitely have known it would be one of those weeks when my suitcase caught the plane to Paris instead of London. Anyway, it was too late to cancel everything. I was already there and my suitcase did show up after all on Tuesday morning. I lost a day since some of the stuff I needed to do the job was in the case, but it was no problem to get a seat on the six o’clock plane on Thursday instead of Wednesday. Nobody flies from London to Copenhagen on a Thursday evening.
Exactly! Nobody flies to Copenhagen Thursday evening. I’ll bet you there were no technical problems—just too few passengers. It’s always due to technical problems, they say, when they cancel a plane. The reality is that they often do it because it’s cheaper to pay one night at a hotel for a few people than to fuel up a plane.
There was no reason to argue with the guy at the airline check-in desk. I mean, it wasn’t his fault, he just worked there. I was pretty much used to people taking it out on me when something wasn’t functioning the way they wanted it to, so I didn’t cause him any grief. He looked like he appreciated it. At the next desk was a woman in her mid or late twenties yelling at the poor guy there. I just left and went to the ticket counter where I could get the hotel voucher. The woman joined me shortly after, still furious about the cancellation. She waited impatiently behind me, complaining she had to queue to get a hotel room. She was apparently living too far from the airport to go home.
“How can you take it so calmly?” she asked me while the ticket clerk prepared my voucher.
“Well, these people working here are not the ones responsible for the cancellation. As long as they treat me well, I see no need to batter them.”
“Yes, but it’s just so… argh.”
“We’ll just have to make the best of it,” I said and turned to look at the woman behind the desk. “Now, I’m sure we’ll get money for a cab to the hotel, so we don’t have to carry our heavy suitcases and then we can have a nice dinner at the hotel restaurant.”
The ticket clerk looked up at me, smiling. She had clearly heard what I said and there was really no way she could avoid giving us the cab fare. Normally, they didn’t give a damn about how you got to the hotel, since it was next to the airport, but I knew the small tricks of the trade. It was a really hot evening and there was thunder in the air. You know the feeling: hot, heavy humid air all around you, like a blanket.
We shared a cab to the hotel, which was a few minutes from the airport. Now, you might think you know what this was leading to, but there were no such thoughts in my mind. I love my wife, really, and just the thought of a little adultery could make me scared. I mean, either you suddenly have a jealous woman threatening to tell your wife if you don’t break up the marriage immediately and marry her or you get the clap or something worse. So no, I wasn’t even considering it.
We checked in and everything was okay, until the receptionist asked us whether we needed two keys.
“I’m sorry, you seem to have misunderstood. We are not together. We need separate rooms,” I answered politely.
“Ehh… I think we have a problem then. You see, there is a conference at the hotel and we are fully booked. If you’re not going to share a room, one of you will have to go back and get a voucher for another hotel.”
My female companion immediately blew a fuse.
“What? First our flight is cancelled and now you haven’t got a room…” I put a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
“My good man,” I said quietly. “Our flight has been cancelled and we need to be in the airport to catch the first flight tomorrow morning. If I have to go back, get another voucher, go into town and check in, it will hardly be worth the effort. I’ll have to get up before I go to bed. Now, we need two rooms and it can’t be impossible in a hotel this size.”
I was still calm, but my patience was beginning to run out too.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” I continued. “Now, we’ll put our luggage in the room you have found and then we’ll eat a nice dinner. When we’ve finished eating, you’ll have found an extra room for us, okay?”
“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t think I can.”
“Sure you can.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise you anything.”
He didn’t look too pleased with the situation, but I had tried something like this before and usually they would come up with something. I was soon to realise that my troubles weren’t over yet. You know, it really was one of those weeks where I should have stayed in bed on Monday.
When I opened the door to the room, I was almost knocked over by a heat wave.
My God, they have booked us in the hotel sauna, I said to myself. It was 27 degrees C outside, but this room was facing south and had been heated to well over 30 C by the sun. I went inside, found the switch to the air conditioning, and turned the dial to full power. We dropped the suitcases and got out of there as fast as possible.
It was now a couple of hours since we’d stood at the check-in desk at the airport. The time was a little past seven and the restaurant was reasonably empty. We got a nice table. We didn’t even discuss it, it was just natural to eat together.
“Now, what should we have,” I said out loud, mostly to myself.
“I don’t know what you are having,” she said, “but I’m fairly hungry, so I’ll have a complete three-course menu, starting with the smoked salmon on toast and steak for the main course. I’ll decide on dessert later. By the way, I’m Sofie. What’s your name?”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Henry. Pleased to meet you.”
I quickly glanced through the menu.
“I think I’ll take the same. Since it’s the airline paying, how about a glass of champagne to accompany the salmon and a bottle of red for the steak. I think the 1982 St. Emillion looks like it’s worth drinking.”
“I better leave that to you. You sound like you know a lot more about it than I do. I guess you go to fancy restaurants often. Do you travel a lot?”
“No, not really. And I usually travel alone. I rarely bother to go to a restaurant when I’m by myself. It’s so boring to eat alone, so I just grab a sandwich or something.”
“What do you do?”
“Well, I install and maintain a computer system specially designed for advertising companies. Sometimes I visit the customer to update their system. It’s not really necessary to do it on the spot. Most of it can be done remotely, but my boss seems to think we need to be visible to the customer. If we just update their system remotely they don’t think they are getting anything.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“It isn’t really. Computers are boring in the long run and hotels and airports begin to look alike after a while.”
“Beats working in a bank, I can tell you. I never get to go anywhere unless I pay myself. And then they cancel my flight. Just think if I had booked a hotel in Copenhagen. I would’ve had to pay for that anyway.”
“When you get back, you should write a letter to the airline company and complain. Ask your travel agent to send it for you. And be sure to list any expenses you’ve had. They probably won’t give you a cash refund, but maybe a gift voucher for later use,” I said, enjoying giving away some of my hard earned traveling experience.
“I might try and do that.”
“Where were you going to stay? Do you have family in Copenhagen?”
“No, one of my friends is studying there for six month. I’m going to stay with her until Sunday.”
We carried on with light dinner conversation. I learned that she was 26, she had a boyfriend, they didn’t live together but they were engaged to be married. He couldn’t get Thursday and Friday off, so he was going to join her on Saturday. I told her she was having dinner with a 40 years old father of two, happily married for fifteen years. Just for the record, it is fifteen years with the same woman, which is a bit of an exception nowadays—at least judging from friends and colleagues.
I also had time to get a better look at her. She looked fairly average. I mean, she was pretty, but not anything like a model. Something like 5’5” or maybe 5’6”. She was wearing a long, loose T-shirt, which made it hard to tell what her figure was like. She didn’t look fat, but she was definitely not extremely thin. Her hair was brownish, cut short, and only just covered her ears. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, as far as I could see, and in my opinion she didn’t need to. Her eyes were big and brown, her eyelashes very long, and her lips pale red.
I felt flirtatious like I hadn’t felt in years, maybe even a little in love. I was thinking about a story I could put her into, to sort of keep her for more than this dinner, when she interrupted my thoughts.
