Beauty Chorus, The (9 page)

The tailor winced, flung the tape measure out, and decorously turned his head away as he lassoed Megan.

By the time the girls clambered back into the car, they were helpless with laughter. ‘Do you think the uniforms will fit?’ Megan caught her breath. ‘Poor man,
the look on his face!’

‘We can always get them taken in,’ Evie said. ‘I heard a couple of the girls went to the men’s tailor in Maidenhead and their trousers came up two sizes too
big.’

‘I can see why, the inside leg was the funniest – he should have just asked me to hold the tape for him,’ Stella said. Her nerves had settled now, their laughter had taken the
edge off her anxiety.

‘You’d think they’d never seen a woman before!’ Megan agreed.

‘I can’t wait to get our uniforms.’ Evie glanced over her shoulder and pulled out into the traffic. ‘Even
Tatler
said uniform is the look of the season, and ours
is gorgeous – the dark blue with gold braid is so smart.’

Evie had always loved driving. It was a passion she shared with Leo – that and horses. As soon as her legs were long enough to reach the pedals, he had let her drive any of his cars,
propped up on cushions so that she could see over the steering wheel. She had spent hours at racetracks with him over the years, caught up in the adrenalin of watching horses or cars whizz round.
From him, she learnt to love speed.
And what did I learn from Ingrid? Sometimes I wonder if she wouldn’t walk straight past me in the street.
Evie pushed the uncomfortable thoughts of
her mother away, imagined closing a door in her mind. Up ahead she saw a queue of people snaking around a street corner. ‘I say, are you hungry?’

‘Famished,’ Megan said. She had heard Evie say the word last night and was trying out a new vocabulary.

‘I’ve always wanted to try one of those British Restaurants. Meat, dessert and tea all for a shilling. What do you say? We’ve got time for a quick bite, then we’ll stop
off to loot the flat in Chelsea on the way home.’ She pulled over and the girls jumped out. The queue was long but moved surprisingly quickly. The restaurant was bright and clean inside, its
noisy tables filled with servicemen and office workers.

‘I’ll say one thing for the British,’ Stella remarked as they sat down with plates of piping hot food. ‘They’re efficient, and they certainly know how to queue
properly.’ She raised her cup of tea. ‘Well, here’s to the ATA and here’s to us.’

‘The Always Terrified Airwomen?’ Evie said drolly. ‘I think I prefer “the beauty chorus”.’

‘Rather that than “Ancient and Tattered”.’ Stella held Evie’s gaze as Megan enthusiastically tucked into her roast beef. ‘Do you think we’ll
cope?’

‘Of course we will.’ Evie raised her chin. ‘We’ll be running the bally show by spring.’

The girls raced back from London with the roof down. Beside Megan on the back seat there was a table lamp with an oyster silk shade, and a tangled assortment of cushions,
drapes and crockery.

‘I could get used to this,’ Megan called through the wind.

‘Make the most of it,’ Evie said as she turned onto the White Waltham road. ‘We’ll have to watch our petrol rations from now on. I’m thinking of getting something
smaller for the time being.’

‘I can’t picture you on a bicycle,’ Stella said.

‘Why not? Jolly good exercise too when you think we’ll be sitting on our bottoms ferrying planes all day. I saw some of the girls doing exercises in the mess yesterday too. Perhaps
we could get a little class going.’

Evie pulled up outside the offices, letting the car tick over for a minute before turning off the engine. A Spitfire was just landing, and she looked longingly at it. ‘I’m going to
fly those one day,’ she said firmly.

As the ground crew took over, Wing Commander Beaufort jumped out of the cockpit and strode towards the buildings. He paused when he saw the girls. ‘Miss Chase. I thought
we might have seen the last of you.’

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ Evie said. ‘No, you won’t get rid of me that easily. I wanted to thank you for passing me.’

‘Why? You completed the test successfully, that’s all there is to it. As long as you fly straight and keep your wings level you’ll be fine.’ He eyed the loaded-down car
as Megan and Stella clambered out. ‘Been shopping, girls?’

‘No, just liberated a few things from my father’s place in town. Make do and mend,’ Evie said breezily. ‘You should see the place we’re billeted …’

‘It’s not that bad.’ Megan smiled apologetically at Beau.

Evie laughed. ‘Well it’s not what I’m used to.’

When she turned to Beau, he was studying her closely. ‘You remind me of someone.’

‘Really? People do say I’m the spitting image of Vivien Leigh.’

‘Indeed, Miss Chase?’ He tapped a cigarette on his battered silver case and lit it. ‘Do you see yourself as the Scarlett O’Hara of Maidenhead?’

‘This is the part where you say you don’t give a damn.’

Beau smiled, plucked a strand of tobacco from his lip. ‘That would be a little predictable. I was talking about my ex-fiancée.’

‘Is that a compliment, sir?’

‘No. Clearly you’ve never met Olivia.’ He swung his parachute onto his shoulder and walked on.

‘Ex?’ Evie said curiously as Stella joined her.

‘Be careful,’ she said as they walked towards the offices. ‘You don’t want to be too familiar. These RAF chaps can be a bit prickly with civilian pilots – I should
know, I was married to one. Show him some respect.’

‘Nonsense. What does he want me to do? Curtsey every time he comes onto the airfield?’ Evie pulled off her gloves as they went in. Instantly they noticed the atmosphere in the place.
They joined the silent group of pilots in the mess, and watched as Miss Gold pinned a notice on the board.

‘What’s going on, Margie?’ Stella whispered to the woman next to her.

‘There’s a bit of a flap. An aircraft’s gone down,’ she replied. ‘Amy is missing.’

There are things I miss of course. I would love to hold, and be held, smell the tomatoes in the greenhouse at home, taste a glass of cold champagne, feel the rain on my
face. But I remember these things with dazzling clarity, and we are everywhere, that’s what you realise as you take your last breath. Time is meaningless here. I can go back whenever I want,
to my childhood, to the desert, to the arms of the men I have loved. All I have to do is think of my last days, and I am there again.

‘The weather’s closing in, Amy,’ Pauline said to me on the telephone when she called me at Prestwick the day before I died. ‘Come back by train.’ The clipped
head-girl tone got my dander up.

‘No, I can do it. I shall stop at Squires Gate tonight on the way down. It will be a better day tomorrow.’

‘Very well, but send Jennie on the train now. I have a Priority 1 and need her back sharpish.’ Lucky for Jennie as it turned out. She was going to catch a lift south with
me.

‘What are you dicing with, Johnnie?’ she asked as we left the Ops Room.

‘Not much.’ I shrugged on my flying jacket. I wish they had let me keep my astrakhan coat, but I was in uniform just like every other girl. It gets so cold when you’re in
the air. ‘Ferry an Oxford to Kidlington, short stop in Blackpool. I’m seeing my sister Molly.’

It’s Molly’s belated Christmas present that they fished out of the drink after I went down. I had to laugh when the sailors on the
Berkeley
solemnly hung my new monogrammed
silk knickers out to dry in the boiler room after my demise.

‘I’ll be glad to get going.’ Jennie shivered.

‘Me too. I was stuck up here over Christmas,’ I said as she waved me off.

Each time I return to my last day, I kick myself now of course, what an unforgivable fool I feel. It is madness to fly this morning – the whole country is blanketed in
freezing fog, but I shall ‘press on regardless’, as they say in the RAF. We pilots are all the same – we know every time we take off that this could be our last trip. Every flight
is a gamble. If we don’t smash into a cloud-bound hillside, we might be picked off like a defenceless lamb by a lone-wolf Messerschmidt with a gaping maw painted on its fuselage. But, after a
while, when you have had a few scrapes and have seen friends not make it back, death loses its fear, its mystique. It becomes part of life.

‘The plane’s ready,’ the rigger says, standing to attention, ‘but the Duty Pilot says not to leave.’ I check my watch. 11.47 a.m. I jump out, and hand him my
lunch in a brown paper bag.

‘I shan’t be needing this where I’m going.’ If I’m getting out of here today, against orders I shall be going over the top. My gut instinct is I can make it.
Planes are needed urgently at the fighter stations. We have the right to say no, but in truth we fly all craft, anywhere. Ours is one of the most dangerous jobs in the war, yet few people know we
exist.

He looks up at the impenetrable sky. ‘Are you really sure, Miss? It’s ten-tenths.’

‘I know the cloud’s on the deck, but I shall smell my way there.’ I load my pigskin bag into the back, and look up as a dark car parks beside the runway. The passenger door
opens and a man in a black fedora steps out. That is one of the theories, you see, that I was flying a top-secret mission. The missing hours. Apparently I was ferrying a spy into Europe, or helping
a lover escape. Was I? It was expressly forbidden for us to fly to the Continent but we bent rules, steadily broke new ground all the time.

Others think I was shot down by friend or foe, maybe even faked my own death. Perhaps I am still holed up in South America somewhere, laughing into my dotage. Or perhaps it was an elaborate
suicide – after my disappearance someone came forward and said I had always predicted I would end up in the drink. They conjured the same stories about Amelia when she went down. Funny,
isn’t it, the truths and lies people weave around your life once you are not there to contradict them.

As I settle into the cockpit for the last time, I am in my element – senses heightened, adrenalin pumping through my veins. At last the door slams closed, the Oxford’s propellers
are swung and the twin engines sputter into life. I bump over the rough grass, everything rattling and creaking. Once I ease back, the wheels leave the earth for the last time, and I glide over the
hedge. Soon I am in the air. Rising through the cloud is as unnerving as ever but then I break through and I am speeding over a dazzling white sea in glorious sunshine. This is more like it. Here
you lose all sense of speed and time, of yourself even. Below the world is at war, but here I have a taste of the eternal as I tool along. It’s bliss to be alone, the shadow of the plane
skimming along the clouds, a luminous halo refracted around it. This is why we fly. This is the pilot’s private ecstasy.

Up here, I am still ‘Amy, wonderful Amy’, who has soared over shark-infested waters, and flown eleven thousand miles in little more than a wooden crate with wings. I earned my
money, but they had the cheek to call me the ‘gimme gimme girl’ for a while. Still, if you ride the bucking peaks and troughs of celebrity long enough you become a national treasure. If
you have the sense to die in mysterious circumstances you become a legend.

After soaring beyond the clouds for a couple of hours, I realise I must have passed Kidlington. Still no break in the cloud. Now my heaven has begun to feel like a prison. I
don’t panic immediately. There was enough fuel to fly for four and a half hours in all. There is still time. A strange calm settles as the minutes tick away. I check my fuel for the last
time, and realise I must risk going down. I hold my breath as I descend slowly through the cloud. My ruddy cockpit ices up. Now I really can’t see a thing. I have to go back, and as I ease
the nose of the plane up, panic clutches at my stomach. I am trapped between heaven and earth. This is the first time I have ever really been afraid flying. But wait, what’s that? Ahead I see
a barrage balloon. Land! By this hour I calculate I am near the Kent coast. There’s fuel left for another quarter of an hour. If I trim the plane to fly straight on out to sea, there will be
no casualties and I can bail out safely.

Now, as I descend silently through the sea of clouds towards eternity, I am nearly out of gas and completely out of luck. I know this is it. The descent lasts a lifetime, and my heart
tightens on itself as I wait. I would rather die than be burnt or disfigured, so would most of the girls – our greatest fear is hitting the deck in a flamer. I am frozen on the stick, cold
sweat trickling down my spine. That my life has come down to this – luck – is galling, when I have always directed my own fate. Land or water? Heads or tails? Life or death? We’ll
see.

7

The ferry pool at White Waltham was subdued. The pilots carried on their urgent work regardless, but the girls thought constantly of Amy.

‘Is there still no news?’ Megan rubbed her freezing hands together as she waited for the ground-school class to begin. ‘We all know how dangerous this is, but I never thought
… of all of us, for Amy to go.’

Evie paled. ‘I’m all for a bit of an adventure, but if a world-class pilot like Johnnie loses her life doing this ferrying lark, well, I’m not sure it’s for me.’
She frowned as Beau strode past. ‘And it’s not as if the natives are friendly either.’

‘Morning, girls, come on in. We’re waiting for you.’ CFI MacMillan beckoned them into the training room.

‘Come on.’ Megan took Evie’s arm. ‘There’s no way you’re backing out now.’ Reluctantly, Evie followed the other girls into class. As they took seats at
the desks, the male pilots watched them with interest.

‘What else are you going to do? Go home to your stepmother?’ Stella whispered. She glanced over at a dark-haired pilot who was eyeing Evie up. ‘Taken in the right spirit this
will be fun. It’s just like being back at school,’ Stella said drily as Pauline strode in.

‘Though there’s less chance of being bumped off at school,’ Evie whispered.