The Infinite Air (2 page)

And now, instead of breaking records, here she was in Rome, alone to all intents and purposes, with Molly Reason needling her about her plight.

‘My husband says that Signor Savelli, who owns the Gipsy Moth, is not keen on parting with the wings of his plane.’

Jean looked across the rooftops, rose coloured in the deepening day. For an instant she thought the woman sitting at the window inclined her head ever so slightly towards her. ‘I assure you,’ she said, tilting her chin, ‘that before today is done, I’ll have wings.’

CHAPTER 2

1909. WHEN JEAN WAS BORN HER MOTHER,
Ellen Batten, who was known as Nellie, pinned a newspaper picture of Louis Blériot and his monoplane above her cot. Just eight months before, the Frenchman had flown across the English Channel, the first person to achieve this feat, in the time of thirty-six minutes and thirty seconds in a
two-seater
monoplane. A year to remember, the family said — Blériot’s triumph, and the birth of Jean.

The story of the aviator was often told in the Batten household, when they all lived together in Rotorua. It would come up in conversation each time there was some new and amazing exploit by an aviator. ‘It struck me very forcibly,’ Nellie would say. ‘Perhaps because of my condition, I was very impressionable at the time. But you know, when I read about that man, launching himself across the sea, right on the moment of sunrise, and what he had to say about the loneliness of it all, it struck my heart. As he told it, he was alone, isolated, lost in the midst of the immense ocean, not able to see anything on the horizon or a single ship. Such courage. Just imagine, his wife was on a following ship, and she couldn’t see him either. What must she have thought?’ She would pause then, and marvel. ‘Yet he did it,’ she always said, completing the story. ‘He made it across the water and survived.’ When her daughter was older, she would add: ‘How I wish I could do that.’

During that time in Rotorua, they believed they were happy: Fred the dentist, with a flourishing practice, and his exuberant wife, Nellie, two little boys, and Jean, the baby. True, there had been a loss along the way, a boy who had died, and, sometimes, later on, Jean wondered
if that might have been when the family’s problems began, the first hint that sorrow might besiege them. But when she was born, tiny and frail, her parents rejoiced in a girl, swaddling her with care and constant attention, lest this one be lost. Jean imagined, later, that she must have been born prematurely, for just two nights before the birth her mother had danced at a ball. Nobody knew my secret, she boasted. They couldn’t tell that I was having a baby. On the night of her birth her father played the flute in the room next door to where her mother laboured. They called their daughter Jane Gardner Batten, in honour of Fred’s mother, but somewhere along the way her name eased itself into Jean, and it stuck. It was the name she called herself when she began to talk.

Rotorua resembled a frontier town, with long unpaved streets, hitching posts for horses, small houses made of wood and roofed with iron. What made it different from other central North Island settlements were the thermal pools, volcanic steam rising in unexpected places from the turbulent earth. Geysers erupted, spewing hot water into the air, and mud bubbled on the corners of the streets. The air was suffused with the pungent smell of hydrogen sulphate. Although visitors to the town spoke of the stench of rotten eggs, those who came to live there soon stopped noticing it. Because of the curative properties of the water, a spa resort had been built at the eastern end of the town, a sprawling mock-Tudor bath house with its back to a lake, and also a number of large hotels to accommodate those seeking cures. Beneath the charming entrance to the bath house, with its grand sweeping staircase, and an orchestra playing soothingly on a balcony, lay a complex subterranean basement where patients underwent therapies intended to remedy all manner of ailments. The lights were dim, and the powerful reek of sulphuric gases caught one in the back of the throat.

Amohia Street, where the Battens lived, ran close to the large public gardens where the bath house stood and was just around the corner from the Prince’s Gate Hotel where prime ministers and royalty had stayed. Fred and fellow musicians sometimes entertained
guests in the reception hall, just for the hell of it, not for money. The Prince of Wales and his wife, Mary, who were soon to be king and queen, had stayed there and, in their honour, large steel archways were placed at the entrance to the gardens. In spring these arches foamed with purple wisteria, the vines turning into green canopies in the summer. Just think, Nellie murmured to Jean, we are walking in the same footsteps as their majesties.

The house in Amohia Street was rented, but Nellie had furnished the front room in what was already dubbed the Edwardian style: bamboo and wicker furniture with delicate legs and curved backs, except for one solid, dark green easy chair with a comfortable back so that Fred could rest at the end of a day’s work. The chintz-covered cushions were colourfully patterned, the walls papered a dark gold colour, with deep red floral friezes, not flowers all over like most people had — so very modern, Nellie enthused, and look how large this made the house look. The tall vases that had come from Fred’s mother were always spilling with flowers. In the corner of the front room stood a piano which both she and Fred played. Fred, a swarthy man, with eyes the colour of licorice, had discovered Debussy, whose music he described as sensuous, although Nellie found it discordant. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘that man leads a wicked life in Paris, if the newspapers are anything to go by.’ ‘You’re one to talk,’ Fred had said with a laugh, for Nellie was known as high-spirited. Her musical repertoire was varied, some of it classical, but she liked playing old tunes that people sang around pianos and, for the children, she had picked up tunes like ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, which was all the rage. She held Jean in her lap and helped her finger chords on the piano.

The nearby lake, known to Maori as Rotorua-nui-a-Kahumatamomoe, though Europeans called it Rotorua, was an expanse of water so large that it was difficult to see the far shore from the town, dark blue in summer, purple and chill in the winter, with an island lying at its centre. On Sundays the Battens walked along its shore, dodging eddying bursts of sulphur gases. They never entered the pa, home to local Te Arawa, who wove feather cloaks and
cooked their meals in the hot pools. An Anglican church crouched on the side of the lake, and from it billowed exquisite renditions of familiar hymns, sung in a different language. Jean listened longingly to this distant music, but her mother said that although they meant well in their Christian endeavours, the Maoris still had a long way to go to escape their heathen ways. ‘My father fought them during the wars,’ she said, her voice cool.

Some Saturday nights in wintertime, the family went on expeditions to the bath house and hired a family hot tub. Nellie was a strong believer in natural remedies. ‘Off we go,’ she commanded them, in a loud, cheerful voice. ‘Let’s all get healthy.’

The tub was so deep it was up to Jean’s chin. There were seats around the edge so they could all sit with their feet floating in the middle. Only Jean did not wear a suit that covered her completely, being considered too small for it to matter whether the little flat buttons of her nipples showed or not. When they had soaked, they went off to the changing rooms, and exchanged swimming trunks for their pyjamas and dressing gowns. Afterwards, with much laughter and whispering, they all scampered up the street back to the house, and leapt into their beds.

Fred was in constant demand in his dental practice, a man with presence. He was a captain in the Taranaki Territorial Army, which he had joined some years earlier, and could lift a cannon ball aloft in each hand. Nellie massaged his broad shoulders when he sat in the green chair in the evenings, pipe in his mouth. His chest muscles rippled beneath his shirt; his dark hair, swept back in regular waves, met in a widow’s peak above the high plane of his forehead. ‘You have your father’s cheekbones,’ Nellie would say to Jean, admiring father and daughter as her caresses lingered on her husband. Jean would sit at Fred’s feet on a low stool engraved with poker-work. His hand would fall on her head while he dozed, fingers entwined in her hair, twitching awake with sudden little spasms of his grip on her skull, like an eggshell about to break open. ‘She is so delicate, our little Mit,’ he commented more than once to Nellie. Mit. It was his
name for her then. She used the word when she wanted her mittens on cold winter mornings. There were many of those: it was hard frost country.

‘You’ve had Mrs Hardcastle in again,’ Nellie said one evening.

‘Now why would you say that?’ Fred asked.

‘I’d recognise that freesia perfume anywhere.’

‘Oh that,’ Fred said. ‘I don’t notice things like that. It’s all disinfectant and soap when I have someone in the chair.’

‘She bought it in Grasse, on her grand tour of Europe last year. It’s very distinctive. She wears it to meetings. Her teeth must be in a terrible way, the number of times she visits you. Not that you’d think it to look at her. She’s not a bad-looking woman.’

‘I’ll take a note of it next time, pay her a compliment if I think of it,’ Fred said easily.

While her husband was at work, Nellie was busy about the town. She rode a tall white mare from one committee meeting to another, seated side-saddle and dressed in a green jacket, a plaid riding habit and a hat with a brave red feather tucked in its band. The committees were mostly for theatrical societies, but also for the rowing club. She and Fred both rowed on the lake. Then there was the organising committee for the annual military ball, and for the flower show. Her blooms won the sweet pea division every year. She grew vegetables, too, lettuce and spinach in abundance, believing as she did in healthy nutritional diets. But, really, the theatre was Nellie’s first passion, begun when she was a girl in Invercargill. She was a regular feature at the Theatre Royal, the Fairy Queen in
The Sleeping Princess
when she was just fourteen, and then there were musicals at the Opera House in Wanganui where she kicked up her heels, and showed a little ankle, and met her husband in the process. And now here she was in Rotorua, at the Lyric, playing the lead role in
Lady Frederick
, a widow with a past, and she loved the way the part made the audience laugh. People could think what they liked of her, say she was wanton and abandoned, because of the way she threw herself into every activity, but she knew the truth, that nothing would happen if someone didn’t lead with a bit of spirit.

Louis Blériot’s exploits stood for everything she had ever imagined, the power to propel oneself through the air. In her dreams, she would confide to Jean, she sometimes found herself walking around a room, a library perhaps, with very high walls lined with books, and she would be reading the volumes on the top shelves, her feet just walking along the air beneath her. After Blériot’s flight, she told astonished members of the gardening circle committee that she saw herself as he did, alone in space. Only the other side remained unattainable, the far shore.

The horse she rode was lent to her by an American called John Hoffman, a big man with a crest of hair already turning white, although he was of an age with Nellie. He had emigrated at the turn of the century and ‘gone native’, as it was said, marrying a Maori woman, and already there was a child every year. Nellie found it most peculiar, but she needed a horse and liked Hoffman. He kept two or three and raced them from time to time. He needed his horses to be ridden, he said. The white mare had nice shoulders and a good steady eye, nice for a lady to ride, especially as she took her little girl with her more often than not. Sometimes he would wink, and whisper in Nellie’s ear as she dismounted at his stable. ‘A bit of a flutter?’ he would ask, and laughing she would hand over some coins. The next time he saw her, he would press the palm of her hand. ‘You’ve got a good eye for a horse,’ he often said in his soft drawl.

‘And you’re leading me astray,’ she invariably responded. Once she said, ‘Now don’t you dare tell my husband. He thinks I’m cleverer with money than I really am.’

‘Oh, but I think you are. I think you study form more than you’re letting on.’

By the time Jean was four she had grown strong, with wild unruly curls that reached to her shoulders. She and her second brother, John, bore a close resemblance to each other, small-boned and
dark-featured,
with the same alabaster complexion that came more from their mother than Fred. Harold, the older of the two brothers, was taller and, in a way that was hard to define, more awkward in his
skin, as if something were slightly broken in him already. Sometimes Jean noticed displeasure in her mother’s voice when she spoke to Harold that was never apparent when she talked to her and John. It was years and years later, after flights that circled the globe, after fame, and loss, and despair, when Jean came to bury her mother in a foreign country, that the marriage and birth certificates she carried revealed that Harold’s birth had occurred a few short months after her marriage. This had happened in a town down south, before Fred and Nellie’s move to Rotorua. Not that this could have accounted for the way Harold was, except perhaps for an inner core of desolation Jean sensed, which might have stemmed from this beginning, the embarrassment he would have caused his mother.

Still, it was Harold who wanted an atlas, to study maps of the world. He wanted to become an explorer, like Dr Livingstone. His father sent away for a
Times Atlas
and, when it arrived, Harold invited John and Jean to join him in poring over more than a hundred coloured maps of the world. He traced his finger over country after country, noting where there was still not enough information for the cartographers to fill the gaps. Africa, thanks to Livingstone, looked well coloured in. ‘There’s Russia. And Asia. Look, I could go to China, there’s lots to discover there,’ he said, full of longing. His voice had just broken, and his limbs gangled across the floor.