The Angel's Cut (3 page)

Gil shook his head. Then he said, ‘Actually, I do. But it's unworthy.'

Flora waited.

‘It was because we were filming in the Yukon. And we were hunting. It was a boy's outing and you aren't a boy.'

‘Of course,' Flora said, and peered into her glass. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I'll tell you, I'm glad to see the back of Cole for a while. I don't want to keep sorting through the best shots of Monty Mantery's hands.'

Gil said, with grim, delighted spite, ‘So the rumours are true?'

Flora thought that any man who had been nearly in tears a moment ago about his trouble in bed shouldn't start passing judgment on any other man's masculinity. But that was men, and that was half Gil's trouble. He was ashamed of his trouble because it disturbed his sense of his own masculinity, and
because other men might find out. It
was
easier for Flora to give up sex because, for her, there wasn't any great shame in it. For any woman there was perhaps chagrined enlightenment in learning at forty or so that she couldn't really expect any more to command male attention. But Flora, maimed, was to feel none of that—her injuries were an honourable withdrawal from the game.

Gil asked if Flora could get by with Cole gone to Europe.

‘I am editing short subjects. Because Cole's dithering I've been moonlighting for months.'

‘Come to us when you're done.'

‘I will.'

Gil was working on his brother's latest film. Flora asked, ‘How's
Spirit
going?'

‘The studio have moved some of the budget to the new sound scenes. But we're shooting the battle schedule tomorrow at Clover Field. Dogfights mostly. Connie's having your friend Millie Cotton crash her Spad. I'm in one of the chase planes.'

‘Then you should be at home, asleep,' Flora said, ‘not up drinking.' She couldn't stretch far enough, so got up and came around the table to take the glass from his hand.

‘All right, mother,' Gil said.

She caught him under the elbow and he got up, towering over her. Then he took his glass again and upended it to catch the last drops on his tongue. ‘Flora,' he said, ‘you're a good friend.'

‘That's me: Flora McLeod, friend to man.'

Flora wanted to help him. To give him some advice on
parting. ‘Divorce your wife and go back to the showgirls, to temporary, uncritical women.' But she wouldn't say it. Solutions were fantastical; his problem was his life. There wasn't anything honest she could offer but herself, and she had done that already, in naive self-confidence, in her beauty, almost in love. She had wasted on Gil her, as it turned out, rather limited licence to love. Besides, Gil wasn't offering her advice on what
she
could do—she, whose corset of scars prevented her even spreading her legs. Her case was hopeless. How was he to know that, though? How much had she confided when drunk? Or was it so plain, that when she went about, walked and sat, her body, once flexible and comfortable, now warned anyone who looked:
Noli me tangere
—touch me not.

Gil kissed Flora's hand and took his leave.

Flora turned back to the room and stood staring at the spot where they'd been sitting, at their glasses, the crystal clouded by grease from their lips and fingertips. The bottle was empty, her vacuum-sided ice bowl overturned, and the oak tabletop white where water had been spilled on it. She carried everything to the kitchen, wiped her table, and drank some water to down the whisky inside her. Then she went outdoors.

Flora's bungalow was at the end of a cul-de-sac and partly concealed from the road by orange trees whose branches were massed with a mix of ripe oranges and green, and aged fruit whose shrivelled skins were speckled with black mildew.

Flora went down the porch steps and into her front yard. She walked off the yellow square of the indoor light and into
the dark. There were as yet no streetlights down this far. Flora stretched out her hands and felt for the spiny branches of an orange tree. She searched for a fat, slick-skinned fruit, twisted it off its stem and peeled it where she stood, dropping its rind around her bare feet. She ate, the crack at the corner of her mouth stinging. The sky was growing light in the east, and grey-grained blue. Flora licked her fingers and waited. The moon bulged on the horizon, its top edge like viscous liquid then, as it cleared the hills, it solidified and settled into a chipped circle. One night off full.

Flora watched the moon fade from gold to white. Then she went back into her house where she lay down to sleep, and to wait for the milkman, and the man with ice.

A
t dawn Xas and Millie got out of her car to stretch their legs. They strolled over to the windbreak, set their backs against the trunk of one of the eucalyptuses, and watched the sun come up over the mountains.

A truck growled past, its tray full of milk cans. The dust it raised met the mist lifting from the field. Dust and mist hung together for a moment above the road like spectral coral then, when the dust settled, the mist was gone.

A moment later a bus arrived, stopped at the gate to the airfield to put down a parcel of newspapers, and four of the airship's crew. They made their crooked, jostling way toward the Zeppelin.

‘They'll sleep,' Xas said, ‘they'll sober up,' as if the wellbeing of the airship's crew was his business, as if he were an officer on the airship.

The sun seemed to switch on the crickets, for they all started up at once, calling to one another. Xas heard them as a
call to prayer. He was never alone with his thoughts, but he'd taught himself not to talk to God. Yet he could no more fall wholly silent than the crickets could meet the appearance of the sun with silence. He stood still, but the grass seethed with noise. He felt God dropping over him the net of the new day, of this particular day. He felt the vivid presence, and the personal interest of God.

Then someone opened a door in one of the nearby buildings—an aircraft factory—and let the smell of hardwoods and glue out into the morning air. A man in grey overalls came across to pick up the bundle of newspapers. He waved at the two people standing in the windbreak.

Millie waved back. And then Xas did too, a fly-shooing wave, as if he was clearing the air around his head.

Four more trucks went by them, turned in at the gate and continued on toward the aerodromes.

‘That's us,' said Millie. ‘Come on.'

The aerodrome was surrounded by dozens of ex-Army surplus training planes. Millie explained that ex-Army pilots and others had bought these Curtiss Jennies as bargains after the war. Some were only recreational planes, but many had been turned to all sorts of uses. ‘You can see how worn they are—stunt planes, modified racers, battered old barnstormers,' she said.

There were war planes among the Jennies: several Sopwiths, Spads, and three Fokkers. The covered trucks were parked by these, and were unloading cameras and camera crews. Two new closed-cabin planes, Travel Airs,
flew in as Xas and Millie crossed the field. They taxied over and joined the film crew.

Xas and his friend were nearly among them all, when Millie abruptly grabbed his arm and veered away toward the airship.

Three men were standing below
Lake Werner
, their heads thrown back. They were an almost comic mismatch in size—a small Asian man between two gangly giants. The small man would gesture now and then, composing some picture in the air. The tall men stood with their hands on their hips, looking up at the ship with the appearance of climbers figuring the best way up a cliff face.

The day was warming already and
Lake Werner
's sleek silver volume was visibly sinking, settling a little nearer the ground, the gas in her cells slower to take heat too, and now cooler than the air.

Millie hauled Xas over to the trio, and placed herself under the nose of the tallest man. ‘Connie,' she said, ‘this is Xas.' Then, mischievous, ‘I think it's short for Texas.' She cackled, then said with a straight face, ‘Xas is a stunt flyer. He used to be with an air circus in France.'

Conrad Crow was a patrician individual. His face was fresh and young but his hair was an even, luminous grey. He looked down his nose at Xas, then asked, interested rather than challenging, ‘Do you have any use for a surname?'

‘Just call me Xas.'

Millie chipped in again, ‘Xas can fly one of the Fokkers. He used to own one.'

As if on cue a fourth Fokker wobbled to the nearest airstrip and made a clumsy, hopping landing. It slowed a
little then made a slewing turn toward the other planes, taxied to them, stalled and stopped.

‘Excuse me, Millie,' said Crow, and hurried away toward it.

‘Sorry,' said Millie to Xas. ‘He's like that.'

The other tall man, a fair-haired spit of his brother, said, ‘And what is
that
like? Eh, Millie?'

‘You know as well as I do,' said Millie. Then to Xas, ‘This is Gil Crow. He's assistant director. And this is Jimmy Chan.'

Jimmy said, wistfully, ‘I'd really like to get a camera up in the control cabin of that airship. I could get some great take-off shots.' Then he shook Xas's hand and said, sympathetically, ‘
My
name isn't really Jimmy. I changed it when I went to school, because it was too difficult getting people to understand that the name that came first was my family name.'

Xas said, ‘I sometimes find it convenient to change my name in order to change my nationality. For instance, I found I could get a pilot's licence with a French name, not a German one.'

‘Is “Xas” a French name?' said Jimmy.

And Gil said, ‘Here real pilots always say “wings”, not “licence”—as in “I got my wings”. In case you find it convenient to blend in.'

Millie rolled her eyes and started after Crow. Jimmy, Gil and Xas followed her, Jimmy looking longingly back at
Lake
Werner
.

They joined the knot of people who had surrounded the pilot and were escorting him from the Fokker to the parked trucks and—between the trucks—a businesslike thicket of
cameras, campstools, people. The pilot was holding a balled-up silk scarf against his right ear. He looked ill. He was dabbing at blood coming from his ear. His friends sat him down on a camp stool. They loosened the fur collar of his canvas flying togs and tucked a towel around his neck as though they were preparing to give him a shave. They gave him water. They appeared to want to coax him into a quick recovery.

Conrad Crow hunkered down in front of the pilot, turned the man's head and looked at the ear. ‘I think you've burst your eardrum, Frank.'

Frank said, ‘I had an earache. I'm only here because I promised to bring the plane. It'll be missed. You have to be quick. Use it, then let me take it back.' The pilot's face was white and his hand, holding the glass, was shaking so hard that the water splashed him.

‘I appreciate it, Frank. Right now someone will drive you to a doctor.' The director looked about, then nodded at someone in the group, who went to get a car.

Gil said, ‘How can Cole miss one plane when he has seventy?'

‘Cole knows what he owns,' said his brother. Conrad Crow was apparently unperturbed by the pilot's pallor and oozing ear. He got up and his eyes found Xas in the crowd. He stared for a long minute—then frowned. For a minute Xas could see Crow wondering what he was looking at—then the man put it out of his mind and got down to business.

Crow pointed to where, out over the sea, there was a towering white cliff of cloud, a solid-seeming mass that
hung in the air, its dark base almost flat against its own black shadow. ‘That cloud may not be going anywhere in a hurry, nevertheless I want everyone in the air before it disappears, or bears down on us. It's the first thing I saw when we got here. It's the kind of cloud that it usually takes a whole hot day to build. So perhaps the day will pack up on us come afternoon. Meanwhile, that cloud is a Godsend. It'll help give some sense of scale to every movement in the battle. Xas—if that's your name—the first thing I'd like you to do is take Frank's Fokker and put it into a spin right up against that cloud. Can you do that?'

‘That's my name,' and, ‘Yes,' Xas said.

The director looked around the gathering. ‘We have to do this today. We have to do
everything
today. I want Millie to crash her Spad—I'm already up to nine hundred and she still hasn't given me a firm yes.'

‘I haven't given you any kind of yes, Connie.'

Crow gave Millie his full attention. He revised his offer. ‘Nine fifty,' he said.

She shook her head. ‘I'll fly stunts and light the smoke pots for you today, Connie. I'll crash the Spad tomorrow.'

Crow was silent a moment, looking out over their heads, serene, like a minister directing his prayer to the decoration over the door of the church. When all the talk had subsided in the group, he returned his eyes to Millie. ‘Barnstormers blow in all the time here, Millie. But I like to hire the best people. People I know. I'm in a fix with this film. You know that. And my best pilot seems to have lost her nerve.'

‘Sorry,' Millie said. ‘But not today.'

‘Even if I hire your friend?'

‘No, Connie.'

‘Early tomorrow, then?' Crow said, with arch sweetness. ‘I'm talking about a crash you'll walk away from without a broken fingernail. I'm not talking about a big spectacle. Just something that will
do
with the right shots around it. I'm not Cole, after all. I'm not going to leave in footage with real deaths.'

The pilot with the bleeding ear spoke up suddenly. He said, ‘I think I'm good to go.' He sounded gloomy, but gallant.

‘No you're not, Frank,' said Crow, and clapped his hands and pointed down at the man, meaning ‘someone get this guy out of here for me'. ‘But thanks,' he said.

Frank's appointed minder helped him up and led him over to a car. Its engine was running. Frank paused, looked back over his shoulder and said, to Millie, ‘Will you get that Fokker back to Mines for me?'

‘Sure,' Millie said.

Crow lifted his voice to recall everyone's attention. ‘I'll go over the plans once more with all the flyers, and the crews in the chase planes.' He placed his hand on his brother's shoulder. ‘Gil is in charge once I go. I have to hunt up Paige this afternoon and write dialogue.'

Various people made noises of sympathetic exasperation.

‘We'll re-shoot Marshall's death scene with sound tomorrow, so might as well do it in the wreck. Did you get that, Millie? The
wreck
.'

‘Nine hundred,' said Millie, ‘and I'll supply you with a wreck tomorrow morning.'

‘Okay. But remember I don't need you to flip it, Millie. I need Marshall upside down, but we can flip it with wires. Between the crash and flipped plane we can cut away to the crash team running from the hangar.'

‘You might get lucky. I might flip it anyway,' Millie said.

‘Try not to,' said Crow. Then he said, ‘Have I got everyone's attention?'

Everyone made noises of affirmation and encouragement, the whole group moving closer together as if to protect and warm the director. Xas found himself shuffling in, pressed by bodies, feeling their eagerness and loyalty.

Crow said, ‘Jimmy has it in his head to get some shots from the control cabin of that airborne luxury liner. I know it doesn't sail till eight this evening.'

‘The newspapers say “aloft for the sunset”,' said Gil.

‘So our plan is to go over there now and make friendly overtures to the captain about him watching some of the shoot.'

‘As if he'll see anything when we're out by Redondo Beach,' said Gil.

‘Well, he's not to know that,' said his brother. ‘And ten to one he's sentimental about fighter pilots.'

‘And you're not, of course,' said Gil, teasing.

‘I'm not sentimental about anything.'

Gil said, ‘Jimmy and I will go make overtures. We have some German.'

‘Take Carol.' Crow put his hand on the silky crown of the woman who had been standing beside him. She was very pretty. ‘Carol will butter them up.'

Gil, Jimmy, and the director's secretary walked off. The rest of the team surrounded the plan table. For the next forty minutes Crow talked the pilots through their stunts. For some of it—Crow said—they were just to get up in the sky and dogfight, chase about keeping one another in sight. ‘The fighters will be filmed by both chase planes, from above and below together. Then alone from behind and in front for later back-projection—especially shots of the Fokker on Marshall's tail.'

The chase planes were closed-cabin six-seaters. They were going up with four men in each, and equipment. The stunt flyers sat in to hear what the director had to say to the cameramen. Xas picked up new words. He wondered what it would all look like when it was put together, the dogfight, the cockpit shots of ‘Marshall' before the swinging shape of a hunting enemy plane, black blood blowing from his mouth. He wondered if they meant to film only against the towering cloud and clear sky, for how could straight Californian roads and right angle intersections double for the landscape of France? Xas wondered—but didn't interrupt to ask questions. He watched, all the while feeling his attention dilate. He was enchanted by the accord in the group; how, though Crow was in charge, everyone contributed. He got the feeling that this group wasn't just full of old hands, but was, as a group, itself an old hand.

Someone passed around sandwiches and coffee.

Then, ‘Oh, goody,' said Crow. He put his coffee cup down, drew himself up to his full imposing height, and strode out to meet Gil, Jimmy, Carol, and a group of men in
dark blue uniforms. The last of these was just stepping off the zigzag stair of the mast. A square, bearded figure, his uniform bright with silver braid and buttons—the captain of
Lake Werner
. For a moment the captain stood, rocking from foot to foot, testing the lack of give in the ground. When he did this, Xas recognised him. It was his captain. Hintersee.

At around four the slight breeze that had been blowing all day began to fall. The thunderhead still hung over the bay, its shape now degraded by the hot rising afternoon air. Xas's stunts were done. Millie was up again in her Spad, with smoke pots, playing at being wounded. The big chase planes had joined her.