The Night Stages (13 page)

“Might there not still be some men in the mountains talking?” Annie asked Davey, after a respectful silence.

The tailor bent to place a piece of turf on the fire. He poked at it for a moment with an iron rod, then sat on the wooden chair he had turned toward the settle. “If two men meet in the mountains, they will of course be talking, Annie.” He gazed at the clothing hanging on the wall opposite him. “But there are fewer and fewer men in our mountains nowadays. Donal is up there of course, and Tim the Sky, and Brendan Shea on occasion. But not many young ones that I know about.” Motioning toward four sets of trousers hanging in a corner, he announced, “Many have not come back to collect these.”

Kieran could hear his mother in the room behind the fireplace.
Have not come back
, she whispered like an echo.

“Oh, but they will, of course.” Annie twisted on the settle to regard the pants. “They will wear out their trousers and then they’ll be back.”

“Someday. Perhaps. Which is why I keep them. When they come back, they will need one good set of trousers.”

“Where have they gone?” Kieran asked. The sound of his own voice startled him.

The tailor looked surprised. “To London, of course, for work; London or America. There is none here. And no
money either.” He stood, opened a drawer beneath the table top, and pulled out a long brown tape. Then he turned back to his visitors. “This time we are living in, this time of scarcity, has broken the farming people of Kerry,” he said with sudden vehemence. “It has pauperized them, and scattered them.” A silence slipped in through the door and inhabited the indoor space. Then it slipped out again. “Let’s measure you up then, lad,” Davey said.

“How do they get there, to London?” Kieran stood, willing now to entertain at least the abstract notion of the coat.

Davey wrapped the tape around the boy’s chest and pencilled a number on a scrap of paper. The cows drifted again by the window, moving now toward the east. Kieran felt the tailor’s fingers at his shoulder and then on the side of his leg. He heard the squeak of the pencil writing another number on the scrap.

Applied arithmetic
, his mother whispered in the adjoining room.

“It would be brown for you,” Davey said, reaching up to a shelf to remove a bolt of worsted wool. “They’d take the train in Cahersiveen, for Dublin, then the boat, I’d say. Some come a fair distance in from the mountains to catch that train. I’ve seen them on their bicycles heading into town. It’s the one pack on their back that lets me know that will be the last of them, going over the hill.”

Kieran looked quickly across the room at Annie, a thought taking him. “But what do they do with the bicycles? Do they take them with them to London?”

“Well now,” said Davey, “I’d not thought of that. They’d not be able to take the bicycles to London. What would you say they’d do with those bicycles, Annie?”

She said nothing for a moment. Then she shifted her weight on the settle and replied, “They’d lean them against a wall, I’d say, somewhere in the countryside outside of the town. It would be too heartbreaking, like, to leave them at the station.”

“And do you think you have some of those bicycles, Annie?”

Annie’s face was stern with thinking. “I have, Davey,” she eventually said.

“Well, there’s a mystery solved,” the tailor said. He rolled up the measuring tape and, after shaking open a reluctant drawer under the table, placed it among a jumble of mysterious objects inside, then kicked the drawer closed with his boot.

A small bird swung through the air of the open door and flew in the direction of the tailor, settled down near his chair, and bounced along the floor, turning its head quizzically from side to side. Soon it was joined by another. “Greedy little beggars,” Davey said to the birds, “it’s your second visit and not yet noon.”

Kieran was amazed, but Annie barely gave the birds a second glance.

As he opened a biscuit tin, the tailor said to Annie, “This boy is longing for a bicycle. Surely he could ride just one of them.” He tossed some crumbs to the floor. “Think how wonderful the new coat will look gliding down the hill to the church in Mastergeehy.”

“Will you wear the coat then?” Annie asked the boy.

“I will,” he said. “But I’m not going to the church.”

“And the bicycle, it won’t be stealing?” she asked the tailor.

The tailor handed a biscuit to Kieran so that he could eat some of it and share the rest with the birds. “It will be like giving life to the machine,” he said. He looked at the boy’s face. “You’ve chosen one of those bicycles already, I’d say.”

“Yes, I have.”

“And have you a name for it?”

“The Purple Hornet.”

“It’s as I thought, Kieran,” said the tailor. “I knew you would have a name. And I knew it would be a good one.”

T
he afternoon has darkened now, as has the fog beyond the glass. This murkiness appears to be made of vapour, or even liquid, and the absence of light. It is as if there is no air outside the passenger lounge, as if she would suffocate or drown were she to step outside. She thinks about the man Niall so much admired; about McWilliams, and how he had at one point given a talk, Niall told her, about references to night vapours in Victorian literature and the science that was once used to support the theory that one should close one’s windows against such evils. She can’t remember the theory, or the science, but recalls the word
miasma
. This fog looks the way miasma sounds: clotted, sticky, as if it might cling to the skin. If she as a girl had flown into this miasma, she would have trusted nothing and might have wandered right into the path of the war. She had heard of pilots so disoriented by fog they believed their instrument panels were intentionally lying to them. They had flown far out to sea, some of them never
returning. When she told Niall this, he said that fog was the most stealthy and silent of weather phenomena. Often difficult to predict, it crept up on meteorologists while they were paying attention to an oncoming low pressure system or an approaching gale. Looking the other way, he had said.

Tam had never thought that meteorologists might be distracted, might look the other way. It was difficult to believe that they, alert to the most fractional change of wind or pressure, dogged in their attempts to be accurate, would ever step away from full engagement with their subject. They had always been the strict guardians of flight. Even during the war, one dared not even glance at an airplane without clearance from the weather office. How absurd, really, that she, a retired pilot, had found herself in love with a meteorologist more than a decade and a half after the war. And what had she wanted from him? Full engagement? Clearance? Some kind of permission?

She sees her younger self now in the mural before her, a girl with outstretched arms and a rapt expression launching out of dense foliage a black-and-white streamlined bird-form with red-and-blue markings, as if she were helping to guide it through a troubled atmosphere and into the clear air. And the girl herself is caught in this gesture of ascension. She will follow that bird. Everything about her is connected to flight. Looking at her, Tam thinks of the enormous, roaring sense of freedom on takeoff, then a sky full of stars and wind, or sun and cushioned vapour. And she recalls her own helplessness in the face of such ridiculous joy.

Each morning at the Cosford Airbase she and her roommate, Elspeth, would place a bet on the weather that would be waiting for them on the far side of the blackout blinds. Sun, rain, snow, and, yes, fog. Most often it would have been grey in Shropshire, damp, with light rain threatening. In winter, however, a moist, penetrating chill would settle in, exacerbating the proliferation of cold germs that seemed to be ever-present in the dormitories. The girls took these colds with them into the cockpits. Nobody wanted to be grounded. Tam often won the dawn weather wager, opting for grey conditions. Elspeth was more optimistic. More innocent actually, Tam thinks now, remembering.

After collecting the half-dozen or so chits that would tell them which planes they would fly on any particular day, and which factories or airfields they would fly them to, the girls would consult with the mechanics, many of whom were women, and they would be told about the flaws and wounds of the planes they were about to climb into. Then they visited Wendy Weather in Meteorology. Wendy would have been up for hours sorting through forecasts, attempting to draw together predictions for at least a dozen itineraries criss-crossing the large island of Britain. An island surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean. An island not known for its elemental stability.

Wendy had a maternal side – she would, in fact, go on to have five children – called the girls “love” or “dearie,” in spite of being only a few years older than most of them. And she worried – about whether they had their flannels on under their uniforms, whether they had had enough sleep, about
their colds, their romantic adventures. She dispensed cough lozenges with her reports, but she never suggested caution. She either gave permission or she didn’t. If permission was granted, the pilots themselves made the final call about takeoff. After that, you either got through the weather or you didn’t. “Take it or leave it,” Elspeth would often say about the weather. You took it or you left it. “Here it is,” Wendy said each flying day, “my latest attempt at defeating surprise.”

Romantic weather was another thing. Young men were plentiful in the vicinity, and in spite of her marriage, Tam had had her heart injured if not broken on more than one occasion and had inflicted a few wounds of her own. (Men were both frightened out of their wits and driven mad with desire by the sight, or sometimes even the notion, of these slim young women leaping in and out of aircraft.) Still, there was no question that tearing off into the ether at the controls of one complicated machine after another was the perfect antidote to these dalliances. The earth fell away beneath the wheels – or beneath the belly of the plane once Tam was flying equipment with a retractable undercarriage – and most earthly things fell away as well. No entanglement, Tam had believed, would ever be able to compete with this intoxicating mixture of risk and joy. All of them had felt this, even innocent Elspeth.

On a typical day, Tam might have been required to taxi five other pilots in an Anson from Cosford to Prestwick, then to ferry a Dakota from Prestwick to Speke, then a Spitfire from Speke to Lynham, then a Mosquito from Lynham to Kemble, and another Spit from Kemble to Lichfield, where an Anson
would be waiting to taxi her and several others back to the base at Cosford. It was during these return flights that the knitting she would later speak to Niall about had taken place.

From the first, Tam and Elspeth had always talked after lights out, replaying their routes or revisiting childhoods that would seem so surprisingly sedate in comparison to the crazy stimulation of what had become their daily lives. They confessed their proclivities and dislikes and, never speaking above a whisper, acknowledged the strangeness of quiet and calm after a day of mechanical noise and speed. Within weeks Tam felt closer to this arbitrarily chosen roommate than any of the girls she had encountered at school. Unlike some of the others in the Ferry Pool, who were more or less of Tam’s “class,” Elspeth had been born in the Midlands, daughter of a free-thinking village butcher who had done what he could to help out when his daughter announced that she wanted to learn how to fly. Tam had adored the sound of Elspeth’s whisper, its hint of a Midlands accent. Sometimes as they were falling asleep they would say the names of the children they intended to have. “Brian,” Elspeth would say, “Sally, Rebecca.”

There had been another kind of meteorological variable to contend with, one that concerned airborne balloons, though not the sort of balloons that Niall’s father had so punctually launched in Kerry.

The Maps and Signals Officer was an older woman whose bouts of bad nature were famous in the Pilots’ Routing Room.
Still, it was she who provided the warnings about anti-aircraft installations and practice ranges of the RAF and the Balloon Barrages that discouraged the enemy from attacking the factories, to and from which planes were delivered. Each day a new corridor was established through these balloons, which were tied to the ground by long, thin wires, so that pilots could take off and land. “Don’t annoy me,” Maps and Signals would say to the girls. “Pay attention to these corridors.”

But sometimes there was fog. And, one piercingly bright and crisp day, Wendy Weather had said there might be fog in Stirling. Elspeth had been given a chit to fly a wounded Fairchild to Stirling for repair at the factory there. She had made the final call, she had taken the weather. Tam never saw her again.

The morning after the accident, Tam had accepted the day’s weather predictions from a subdued, red-eyed Wendy. They had clasped hands for a few moments but not said anything. Maps and Signals, however, was noisy with grief and rage. “So bleeding unfair!” she shouted when she saw Tam approaching. “She was so full of life!”

Looking now into the density of the fog, Tam remembers something else. A few weeks after she had stopped the nightly weeping, she had taken a vow. If she ever had a child, she had decided, she would call it Brian or Rebecca.