The Infinite Air (12 page)

‘I don’t care. I need to go in there.’

So they knelt and crawled their way into the cave, and in a short while they came to a place where they could stand. In the total silence inside the earth, the darkness was lit by the glow worms’ million stabs of light, creating an eerie iridescence, the stalactites shedding a milky glow. They stood beside each other, brother and sister, almost touching, neither of them speaking. Harold’s breath was short in his chest.

‘I could die in a place like this,’ Jean said at last. ‘A field of stars, that’s what it is.’

‘You talk too much,’ was all he said. After a time they left the caves and emerged, back on the surface, blinking in the blinding light of day.

‘Show me how you blow things up,’ Jean said. Her cotton dress was steaming around her knees, drying out under the sun.

This time Harold didn’t seem surprised, as if he expected her to ask this of him. At the quarry he showed her how the ground was dug out, the detonator put in place, the cordite fuse lit to snake its way through the grass until the gelignite was set alight.

‘Let me do it,’ she said.

When the canyon resounded with the blast she’d made, she looked at him with blazing eyes. ‘That was marvellous,’ she said.

‘You’re crazy,’ he said, his tone quiet.

‘But you are, too. Mother says so. Mad as a snake, I heard her tell Dad that.’

‘We’re two of a kind then,’ he said. ‘Only you’re not supposed to be crazy, you’re the concert pianist. Why are you really here?’

They were alone in the quarry, while down the hill the men boiled their billy for a brew of tea.

‘Mother’s selling my piano to raise enough money for us to go to England. Dad’s not so keen on it. He did pay for it. But, you know, I’m going to the Royal Conservatory of Music, so he can’t really complain. That’s what he wanted me to do.’

‘But you’re not going to do that, are you?’

She hesitated a moment too long. ‘I want to fly aeroplanes,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to learn music any more.’

‘Flying, eh? You rotten little cow. You’re telling lies to the poor old sod.’ He seemed half-serious, half-amused. ‘I suppose our mother put you up to this?’

‘Why do you talk about Mother the way you do?’

He shouted with laughter at this. ‘You don’t know? I’m the cause of all her troubles. The old man put her in the family way. She had to marry him.’

Jean turned towards him, horrified. In the family way. Like Freda. Like Alma with him. ‘I don’t believe you. Mother’s not like that.’

‘Please yourself. Ask her. The great dramatic actress strutting the theatre boards and turning people’s heads wherever she went, up the duff. You’ll find out the truth some day. And what did she get out of it? She got me. The mad son.’

‘I was joking. About you being mad.’

‘But she wasn’t.’ His voice was filled with an old, weary sadness.

‘You won’t tell Dad, will you? About the flying.’

‘What’s it worth?’ Her back was against a rock face. He had moved close to her again, putting his hands on either side of her body, creating a barrier she couldn’t pass.

‘Harold, what are you doing?’

His voice was hoarse and thick. ‘I like you, Jean.’

‘Of course.’ She tried to move away. ‘I’m your sister.’

‘You used to play mothers and fathers with little brother. Our brother the Fairy Queen.’

‘No. We dressed up, that was all.’ He held her against the rock with one arm, his other hand fumbling at her skirt. ‘No, Harold, please. Don’t do this to me.’

His breath was hot against her mouth, his saliva acid as if he had inhaled the explosives they had been detonating.

Then, when she had begun to fall beneath his weight, his body convulsed and arced backwards, spittle flying from the corners of his mouth. His eyes rolled upward in his head and he fell.

She picked herself up and stepped away, watching with fascinated horror as his seizure abated. He was sitting on the ground, his face suffused with a plum-coloured glow. ‘That was a cracker,’ he said. ‘Lucky that one didn’t blow us right off the planet. You all right?’ He stretched out his hand for her to haul him to his feet, as if nothing unusual had passed between them. It was impossible to tell whether he believed that an explosion had caused him to fall, or his own failing, the ailment she suddenly understood. Somehow she felt safe from him now, that this wouldn’t happen again.

When they returned to the house, Alma looked both of them up and down. Perhaps she imagined it, but Jean thought her eyes were searching for tell-tale signs of misdoing, as if she had been expecting all along that Harold would try to seduce her. She found herself smoothing her skirt, crumpled and dirty from the excursion into the cave.

‘I’ve been a bit crook,’ Harold said.

‘Ah.’ Alma turned her attention to him and nodded in a knowing way, as if satisfied all was well. ‘You’d better have a lie down,’ she said to her husband. ‘There’s a letter there for you,’ she told Jean.

The letter was from Nellie: Jean was to hurry back to Auckland. Her mother had tickets on a ship leaving for Sydney in three days. From there they would join the liner
Oriana
and sail for England.

In the evening, Harold took a battered book from a shelf in
the kitchen. It was the old atlas that he and John used to pore over with Jean. He opened it and his finger traced a route from London across the world. Paris. Cyprus. Damascus. He murmured the words, caressing them. Babylon. ‘Do you know how Nebuchadnezzar built Babylon?’ she asked, hoping to impress him.

He answered immediately, explaining how cylinders and tablets had been unearthed that told in the king’s own words how he had constructed the city, and his palace with its hanging gardens. Nebuchadnezzar and the bath house.

‘You remember the bath house when we were kids, Jean?’ he said.

She lied to him, saying that she didn’t, she was too young to remember. She knew he didn’t believe her.

When Harold took her to the bus the next morning, they stood on the side of the road. Summer had slunk behind a cloud, and the day had turned dull. They heard the bus approaching before it turned the corner. He took her by the shoulders. ‘You’re the only sister I’ve got.’ He released her and tapped his forehead with his finger. ‘I’ll get old and you’ll still be up here. You remember that when you go flying off in the sky.’

CHAPTER 12

AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL IN LONDON, JEAN AND NELLIE
researched flying clubs. They decided, or rather Nellie did, that the London Aeroplane Club would be the most suitable to approach for Jean’s flying lessons. It was subsidised by the Air Ministry, which meant it was cheaper than others they looked at. The ministry was keen to train top pilots in case there was another war. Still, it was two pounds and ten shillings an hour for dual control instruction and one pound ten an hour to hire a plane for a solo flight. ‘How many lessons do you think I’ll need?’ Jean asked. ‘Oh, six or eight, I’d say,’ Nellie said, with an airiness that belied her anxiety.

She had calculated many times on small notepads just how far her money would stretch. This was a time when a man was fortunate to earn five pounds a week. Fred was sending her an extra two pounds a week for Jean’s music lessons, over and above the regular three pounds. Jean gritted her teeth and expressed the hope that she would learn to fly very quickly ‘Deep breaths, Jean,’ Nellie said. ‘It doesn’t pay to think about it.’ Whether she was talking about the speed with which Jean could learn or their duplicity in regard to Fred’s allowance wasn’t clear. The Royal College of Music was a forbidden topic of conversation.

The London Aeroplane Club had another thing in its favour: it welcomed women pilots. Some of them had already become famous. The exploits of Lady Sophie Mary Heath particularly dazzled Nellie. This woman had challenged an international requirement that women could not fly commercial flights because menstruation impaired their capabilities, and she’d won. Trust the Irish, Nellie said. The club was
based at Stag Lane aerodrome, which lay among farmland, some ten miles from central London. It was the base for Sir Geoffrey de Havilland’s famous aircraft company: he had been building Gipsy Moths there for the past five years. The skyline was dominated by the company’s hangars and engineering workshops.

As flying fields went, Jean already knew that Stag Lane had a reputation for being difficult. It sloped steeply from the road, forming a depression like a shallow basin. From the clubhouse, you couldn’t see an aeroplane landing because it was completely hidden in the dip. In winter, the whole field became waterlogged.

As she and Nellie approached on foot, dressed in tweed suits and good brogues, luxuries purchased in Oxford Street, Jean looked around and shivered. ‘I suppose if I can fly off this aerodrome I can fly off any,’ she said.

‘You’ll need to if you’re going to fly across the world,’ Nellie said. ‘Come on, we haven’t come all this way for you to get your tail down now.’ For today’s journey, all they’d had to do was catch the underground train in central London and alight at Burnt Oak Station at the end of Edgware Road, the old Roman highway. It seemed almost too simple. A stone church slumbered between red brick houses with paling fences, quiet and suburban. Like Sunday afternoon in Auckland. But it was spring and oak leaves were unfurling. Daffodils shone in small gardens.

As they neared the flying field, they were startled to see the Prince of Wales striding around the perimeter. He wore a top hat, a high white collar, a bow tie and a jacket with satin lapels; a trailing silk scarf was thrown around his shoulders. His long, fair face was flushed with annoyance. The tremendous roar of several engines on test beds filled the air with a high metallic whine.

He shouted to an engineer dressed in overalls, ‘Why can’t that noise be contained in a soundproof room?’

The man turned, looked the Prince up and down and shouted back at him, ‘How would you like to be cooped up in this noise for two hours in a closed room?’

The Prince looked momentarily stunned. ‘My dear chap, I see what you mean. So sorry.’

A second engineer, who had watched this exchange, now hurried to the first man, and spoke to him in an urgent way. It was clear that, despite the clothes and the top hat, His Highness had not been recognised. The man put his face to his hand and ducked his head.

‘No cause, it’s my fault.’ The Prince turned to make a hasty retreat, nearly bumping into the two women. ‘Ladies,’ he said, sweeping off his hat to reveal an immaculate parting. ‘Forgive me, I’ve had a wretched morning. I stayed out hunting longer than I meant to and now I’m running late for an important event. You understand how it is. I’ve brought my plane in for some work. Can’t find my fellow at Hendon, he’ll be hearing from me. Taken the afternoon off, by the look of things. We know each other, don’t we?’ he said to Nellie. ‘Where was it? You’ll have to remind me.’ He glanced with undisguised curiosity at their feet, their shoes muddy from tramping across the damp field.

‘It must have been in New Zealand,’ Nellie replied, her voice as smooth as whipped cream.

‘Ah, New Zealand, my goodness, that was a long time ago.’ He looked as if he were about to ask more, his eyes intent and admiring as they rested on Nellie, but he was distracted by the appearance of a blue and silver DH 60M Gipsy Moth being wheeled out onto the airstrip.

The Prince inclined his head, replacing his hat as if it were a crown. ‘We must talk more about New Zealand the next time we meet.’ He walked over to his aeroplane, took off his hat again and exchanged it for a flying helmet. Within minutes he had risen into the sky.

‘He liked you,’ Jean said, later that night, when they were going over the events of the day. ‘The Prince is said to like the company of older women.’

‘Jean!’ Nellie’s tone was scandalised but suddenly it seemed like the funniest thing, an auspicious start, that had them bursting into laugher every time they thought about it.

Outside the hangars where Jean and Nellie had met the Prince,
stood a whole row of Gipsy Moths, all painted yellow. These were biplanes, flimsy to the casual observer, with plywood-encased fuselages, and fabric covering the rest of their surfaces. Jean was aware of the plane’s design and the way the wings could be detached and folded away, making space in hangars to store several at a time.

Alongside the Moths, to Jean’s astonishment, a glamorous woman in a striking black and white ensemble, including a huge Eskimo hood made from expensive-looking furs, was posing against a monoplane painted to match her outfit. Her face was very pale and her straight black hair was worn like a helmet on her head. A photographer was taking stills, and a retinue of men in suits scurried around calling out instructions.

‘I know her,’ Jean breathed.

‘Keep walking,’ Nellie instructed.

The clubhouse was a modest hut on the far fringe of the aerodrome. They were expected — Jean had written in advance enquiring about membership — and a secretary came out to greet them. Around a fire blazing at the far end of the room stood a group of people, all casually handsome at first glance, the jackets of their flying suits unbuttoned, goggles sitting on top of their heads. There was laughter and blue smoke from cigarettes and pipes. The pipe smoke reminded Jean suddenly of Fred, far away, and not knowing where they were. Nellie caught her eye, as if she, too, had thought of her husband. ‘Somebody just walked over my grave,’ she said.

The club secretary looked startled, then handed Jean a form to fill in.

‘You’re under twenty-one,’ the secretary said, when he looked through her answers. ‘You have to get your parents’ consent to fly.’

‘Both my parents?’ Jean asked in alarm.

‘One will be enough.’

Nellie stepped forward. ‘I am Miss Batten’s mother,’ she announced. ‘I take it you’ll accept the maternal signature.’

The secretary looked amused. ‘Yes, of course, Mrs Batten. Just put your name here.’

‘You’re not related to the film star of the same name, by any chance?’ he asked. Nellie reddened and agreed that yes, John Batten was indeed her son.

‘He was tremendous in
Under the Greenwood Tree
. Loved that picture. You must be very proud of him.’ Nellie didn’t tell the secretary that they hadn’t yet seen the film. Instead, she handed over six guineas, three for the entrance fee to the club, and three for a year’s subscription.

But Jean was emboldened to ask if Louise Brooks, whom she believed she had seen on her way over to the clubhouse, was one of the other students.

The secretary laughed. ‘Not everyone who comes here wants to fly. The film stars come along to be seen doing adventurous things. They just have their pictures taken. The people who come to fly are in this room. You should meet some of them. There’s Miss Amy Johnson over there — she’ll take you under her wing.’ He chuckled. ‘She’s a true aviator, a star in the making. She’s planning to fly to Australia next month. If she does she’ll be the first woman to make it.’

Jean froze. A plain woman, she decided, with a large nose, and an overlong upper lip.

Nellie nudged her. ‘She’s just a typist,’ she whispered.

‘
Mother
,’ Jean hissed. ‘I think we should go now.’

The secretary had already handed her an appointment time for her first lesson the following morning. Her instructor would be Herbert Travers, a wartime flying ace. He was the best. He’d trained Miss Johnson, and that was some recommendation.

When they were outside, Jean said, ‘But what if Amy Johnson flies to Australia before I do?’

‘Then you’ll have to fly faster,’ her mother said. ‘She’ll probably crash anyway, she doesn’t look very clever.’

JUST ONE AFTERNOON, AND ALREADY THEIR HEADS
were reeling. The Prince. The film star. The rivals. Nellie was calculating again, working out how much of her savings would have to go on better outfits for Jean. A good flying suit was an obvious necessity. Her hands were itching to get her notebook out.

They had, of course, seen John on their arrival in London even though they hadn’t seen his new movie. Jean had been taken aback by his beauty, as if he were a stranger. It was a graceful, muscular beauty, utterly natural and seemingly without guile, his body light and free, as if it completely belonged to him. He seemed to have grown taller, his eyes intense and glowing, his mouth curved in a deep, expressive line. By now he had appeared in five films and was making his sixth, with another one in the pipeline.
The Greenwood Tree
was putting him back on his feet, he said. He was living in St John’s Wood, a small flat above a fish shop, the thin blue smell of the unsold merchandise wafting up the stairs in late afternoon before it was sluiced down. There was something familiar about the way the flat was furnished, elegant in its simplicity. A chintz-covered chair, light curtains at the window, dashes of colour in unexpected places. A hyacinth in a dark pot on a tall stand in the entranceway. A room Nellie might have furnished long ago, in their Rotorua days.

Hollywood had been great, John said, a tremendous place to have fun. He’d made a lot of money and lost the lot. ‘Dud investments, the Wall Street crash,’ he said. ‘You’d know about the slump back home, wouldn’t you?’

‘Back home,’ Nellie said, marvelling. ‘Oh, you’ve got no idea. Things are bad. Well, John, we hope to make our home here if Jean passes her exams.’

‘Dad wrote and said you’d been doing well with your music. You’ll be my famous kid sister. You always said you’d be famous.’

‘I’m going to have to work hard to catch you up,’ Jean said, not giving anything away.

‘I’m sorry, I haven’t got much space,’ John said. ‘I should offer you a bed, but I’ve only got the one.’ He gestured to a day bed covered
with a deep red spread, in an alcove off the main room.

‘No need,’ Nellie said. ‘We’ve taken rooms just off Oxford Street, in the heart of the city.’

John whistled. ‘Nice address.’

‘It’ll probably be temporary,’ Nellie said quickly. ‘But for now it’s very handy to everything.’ The rooms were up five flights of stairs, and very cold, but she didn’t mention these details. John looked relieved. Jean guessed that they weren’t meant to stay anyway, that if they did his delight in their welcome might soon be exhausted.

They began to take their leave with promises to see each other again soon. John was in rehearsals all day, and shooting was due to begin the following week, but he insisted they must come for dinner at the weekend. A young friend would be coming, a chap called Rex Harrison who’d done some theatre work, but it was his first film, he needed some coaching. They wouldn’t be in the way. Rex was a barrel of laughs. John promised fish, the best money could buy, but he’d get a discount for putting up with the smell. The three of them laughed: dutiful, affectionate, reunited.