The Infinite Air (17 page)

CHAPTER 16

STAG LANE. THE MUD UNDERFOOT, LARKS RISING ABOVE,
the hedgerows heavy with hawthorn berries. And, inside the clubhouse, cries of pleasure when she arrived, as if she had never been away. Of more importance, as if they had always known her. Amy Johnson walked over and said, ‘Jean, where
have
you been?’

And the Duchess of Bedford came in, stamping her feet to dislodge the mud, shouting, ‘Mud pies.’ Then she caught sight of Jean. ‘Well, hullo, I haven’t seen you for days. I thought you must be sick. Where did you say you were?’

‘New Zealand,’ Jean said.

‘Good heavens, what were you doing there? The place is full of savages, isn’t it?’

‘I grew up there. It’s my homeland.’

‘Really, how extraordinary.’ The Duchess studied her as if she were some interesting new breed of person.

Herbert Travers was pleased to see her again, if taken aback with her new daring in the air. She needed another seventy hours in her logbook before she could gain a commercial pilot’s licence, something Travers now seemed to take for granted, once he had got over the surprise of seeing her looping the plane. The important thing was that she was back in the clear, bright sky over England that summer. As well as the general flying and cross-country tests that counted towards her B licence, at the end of her hundred hours of flying, there would also be a solo night flight between Croydon and Lympne. This was the greatest challenge, but it still lay a long way ahead. Nor was her study for a commercial licence just about flying. There were more
exams to pass in navigation and air legislature, in meteorology and the inspection of aircraft and engines. She began another engineering course. For months she spent each day in a hangar, dressed in overalls, alongside the regular mechanics. She learned how to banter, and how to wipe the grease off the tip of her nose with her elbow.

So everything had changed again, and she was happy, although there were people missing from her life. The absence of Nellie was painful. Every week her letters arrived, full of promises to take a ship to England, just as soon as she could afford it. There was always a pound enclosed. Jean looked carefully for Victor Dorée each time she went to the clubhouse, knowing it would not do to ask after him. She had had more time to study the entrance to his house in Orchard Road, had seen the name on the closed gates: Oakleigh. In the distance she could see a fountain, and formal gardens.

It was Amy who brought his name up in a conversation. Had Jean met him, she wondered aloud.

‘I just know he has his own Gipsy Moth,’ Jean said, avoiding the question.

‘Good Lord,’ Amy said sighing. ‘If only. It’s the money, it’s always the problem, isn’t it?’ Amy was born into a fishing family, poor as muck, was how she described it, but her dad had worked and gone without to help her get her first plane. She was a strange person, Jean thought, intense and febrile, needing everything around her to be perfect. This was something Jean understood; it just seemed that her new friend let her feelings show more easily. She knew that if she smiled she often got her way, but this was beyond Amy, who tensed and snapped if things weren’t going her way.

Jean considered enquiring about Viscount Wakefield’s money, but decided that might be bad form. Instead she asked about Victor’s apparent wealth.

Amy laughed. Victor was one of five sons of a wealthy linen merchant. Jean decided not to confess that she already knew these details. If she had learned one thing from her mother’s flutters — she had never liked to call them gambling — it was not to show
your hand. A good tip was worth its weight in real gold, and you used it for yourself. Victor’s family had a chauffeur, and servants, and a gardener, Amy told her. And, it seemed, the sons got pretty much whatever they liked. She’d heard Victor was flying somewhere overseas. ‘It would be nice to get your foot through that door,’ she remarked. ‘Well, I thought you might have bumped into him.’

Jean decided her new friend was being too curious. ‘I just wondered about a man who could afford his own aircraft,’ she said.

‘He’s fairly attractive,’ Amy said, picking at a cuticle and nipping it off with her teeth. ‘Anyway, he’s not here, so that’s that. I expect he’d want to marry someone rich.’

‘You’re famous,’ Jean said. ‘That might help.’

‘Hmm, you can’t tell with those types, can you?’ Amy said. ‘They usually end up marrying some girl whose family’s in
Tatler
. Anyway, he’s younger than me. Men never marry older girls.’

SIR ALAN COBHAM BROUGHT HIS FLYING CIRCUS
to Stag Lane just as Jean arrived back. Described as swashbuckling, like a man out of a movie, Cobham had deep-set eyes, a narrow moustache and a cleft chin. Using op pilots and a dozen or more planes, his circus toured the country, barnstorming and offering joy rides on specially cleared fields or airstrips. The whole country seemed taken up with the possibilities of flying.

‘I could do that, you know,’ Jean said to Amy. A plan was hatching in her head. Cobham wanted to employ more stunt pilots and was offering to trial those who believed they had the skills, so when a group of airmen lined up for test flights, Jean lined up with them. She was the only woman. Nobody said a word.

When her turn came to perform, she walked over to one of Cobham’s Moths, climbed in, went through her checks and started the engine. The engineer who was conducting the trials, and seemed not to have been taking much notice of the candidates themselves until
they were in the air, started towards the plane, waving his arms. She waved back to him, smiled and rose in the air. She looped and rolled, dived and inverted, all the tricks she had learned above Auckland. When she landed, there was clapping and cheering. As she waved and climbed out, the engineer stormed across the field towards her. ‘We don’t take women,’ he said.

‘Was there something wrong with my flying?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘But it
is
the point,’ Jean said. ‘Surely it’s the
whole
point.’

By now, Cobham had joined his engineer. His eyes rested briefly on Jean with a certain admiration. ‘You were good,’ he said. ‘But you can forget it. I wouldn’t put a woman up there. You’ll be married and having babies in next to no time.’

Jean walked away, aware that her hands were shaking.

Her voice was bitter as she recounted the day’s events to John that evening. He was distracted, barely seeming to hear her. He was filming
Men Like These
, a submarine disaster film that required him to be waist deep in water for much of each day. He was cold and hungry in the evenings, waiting for her to cook dinner. Although there was always talk of movie stars around the clubroom, living with one was different. Her existence seemed suddenly to be collapsing into a halflife. She depended on John’s goodwill and income to keep a roof over her head, but on his terms. There were times when she felt that he was irritated by her presence. Of late, he had been spending time with a young novelist called Madeleine Murat. Although she was only nineteen she had written a novel called
Sidestreet
, hailed by the critics as brave and compelling. It featured movie sets and film directors, homosexual men having complicated relationships with women, and a cynical critic to whom the main character becomes pregnant, although she really loves someone else. Jean wondered where she had done her research. She had only met Madeleine once, a restless, pretty girl who exclaimed a lot and made dramatic gestures with her hands. ‘Are you in love with her?’ Jean asked her brother. Love was on her mind a lot these days, both its absence, and too much of it.

John had been evasive. ‘What’s love?’ he’d said. ‘It’s nice to be seen around town with a girl. She’s famous, you know.’

‘She talks a lot,’ Jean said.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘You don’t like it that she’s famous.’

‘That’s ridiculous, John,’ she said, stung. ‘Wait until I break Amy Johnson’s record.’

He gave her look bordering on condescension. ‘It’s been done,’ he said. ‘Why bother doing it again?’

‘So I should be writing books about sex?’ she said.

They were very close to a quarrel.

‘Madeleine’s breaking new ground,’ he said. ‘She’s daring and fearless. The critics think so.’

Jean stormed out of the room, though that was barely out of sight, and threw herself on the bed. If this kept up, she supposed she would have to find somewhere else to live, although so far John hadn’t brought Madeleine to the flat. She wondered if he were waiting for Jean to leave, so that he
could
bring her here.

Frank Norton wrote her a letter care of Stag Lane.

She screwed the letter up in disgust. As if she wanted his money. Early the following morning she got up while John was still asleep, and began
preparing a pot of soup. He was sleeping deeply on the couch, his blanket pulled up to his chin. For a moment, she saw the old childish John, his glee as they dressed up in their parents’ clothes. She wanted to touch him in his sleep, like their mother did when they were children, brushing hair back from his face, settling a kiss on his forehead with the end of her finger. It seemed better not to disturb him.

She began to peel vegetables, but her movement at the little kitchen bench woke him anyway.

‘What are you doing, Jean?’

‘I thought I’d prepare dinner before I went out. I know you like it early.’

‘Oh, do what you like. Don’t you always?’ He crawled out from under the blanket, his face grey.

‘That bed’s too short for you,’ Jean said. ‘Why don’t I sleep there tonight?’

He seemed about to say something but thought better of it. She turned her back while he put on a dressing gown and collected some coins for the bathroom. When he left the room, she scrawled a note, telling him to turn the gas down on the stove when the soup was ready, and left for Stag Lane.

There was a party that night. One of the pilots was turning twenty-one and he ordered champagne for everyone. Nellie’s familiar refrain about the dangers of alcohol stirred in Jean’s brain. She didn’t need much reminding, having seen the way Frank Norton behaved when he’d been drinking, but the idea of champagne was seductive, just this once. The bubbles looked pretty in the wide glasses. The young man, who was called Mostyn, with a double-barrelled surname that Jean never could remember when she thought back to that night, insisted that she try a glass. Hadn’t she drunk champagne when she turned twenty-one, that’s if she were that old, though he could believe she mightn’t be yet? ‘Oh, I’m ancient,’ she quipped, ‘Twenty-two is as old as the grave.’

Someone said, on a sombre note, that they might as well drink up, because who knew when their turn would come. There had been an
air accident up north just the week before and two people had died in the crash.

Mostyn said, ‘Not on my birthday, please.’ He filled Jean’s glass to the brim. She sipped and the champagne seemed as light as lemonade, not harmful at all.

Charles Ulm was in town, reconnoitering for a flight he was planning the following year. He recognised Jean immediately, singling her out with kisses on each cheek.
‘La belle femme
from New Zealand,’ he cried. ‘Well, little Jean Batten, you’ve made it all the way to Stag Lane.’ He held her by the hand, pinning her to his side, while he told the crowd how she had tracked him and Smithy down for her first flight. ‘I knew she was going to make it,’ he said. ‘You could tell from the look in her eye that there’d be no stopping her.’ This attention served to draw her more into the circle. Ulm whispered into her ear, at one stage, ‘Have you got yourself a boyfriend yet?’