TransAtlantic (3 page)

—My mother wrote it.

—Is that so?

—Can you put it in the mail bag?

—No imposition at all, he says, turning on the stairs once more, slipping the envelope inside his tunic pocket.

IN THE MORNING
they watch as Lottie emerges from the hotel kitchen, her red hair askew, her dressing gown fixed to the neck, tightened high. She carries a tray of sandwiches wrapped in waxed butcher paper.

—Ham sandwiches, she says triumphantly, placing them down in front of Brown. I made them especially for you.

—Thank you, young lady.

She crosses the restaurant floor, waving over her shoulder as she goes.

—That’s the reporter’s daughter?

—Indeed.

—They’re a little cuckoo, eh? says Alcock, pulling on his flight jacket, looking out the window at the fog.

A STRONG WIND
arrives from the west in uneven gusts. They are twelve hours late already, but now is the time—the fog has lifted and the long-range weather reports are good. No clouds. The sky above seems painted in. The initial wind velocity is strong, but will probably calm to about twenty knots. There will, later, be a good moon. They climb aboard to scattered cheers, secure their safety belts, check the instruments yet again. A quick salute from the starter. Contact! Alcock opens the throttle and brings both engines to full power. He signals for the wooden chocks to be pulled clear from the wheels. The mechanic leans down, ducks under the wings, armpits the chocks, steps back, throws them away. He raises both arms in the air. A cough of smoke from the engines. The propellers whirl. The Vimy is pointed into the gale. A slight angle to the wind. Uphill. Go now, go. The waft
of warming oil. Speed and lift. The incredible roar. The trees loom in the distance. A drainage ditch challenges on the far side. They say nothing. No
Great Scott
. No
Chin up, old sport
. They inch forward, lumbering into the wind. Go, go. The weight of the plane rolls underneath them. Worrisome, that. Slower now than ever. Up the incline. She’s heavy today. So much petrol to carry. One hundred yards, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and seventy. They are moving too slowly. As if through aspic. The tightness of the cockpit. Sweat accumulating behind their knees. The motors strike hard. The wingtips flex. The grass beneath them bends and tears. Bumping along on the ground. Two hundred and fifty. The plane rises a little and then sighs again, jarring the soil. Good God, Jackie, lift her. The line of dark pine trees stands at the end of the airfield, looming closer, closer, closer still. How many men have died this way? Pull her back, Jackie boy. Skid her sideways. Abort. Now. Three hundred yards. Good Jesus above. A gust of wind lifts the left wing and they tilt slightly right. And then they feel it. A cold swell of air in their stomachs. We are rising, Teddy, we are rising, look! A slow grade of upwards, an ever so faint lift of the soul, and the plane is a few feet in the air, nosing up, the wind whistling through the struts. How tall are those trees? How many men died? How many of us fell? Brown converts the pines to possible noise in his mind. The slap of bark. The tangle of stems. The
ack-ack
of twigs. The smashup. Hang on, hang on. The throat still tight with terror. They rise a little in their seats. As if that might unloosen the weight of the plane beneath them. Higher now, go. The sky beyond the trees is an oceanic thing. Lift it, Jackie, lift it for godsake, lift her. Here, the trees. Here they come. Their scarves take first flight and then they hear the applause of branches below.

—THAT WAS A
little ticklish! roars Alcock across the noise.

THEY HEAD STRAIGHT
into the wind. The nose goes up. The plane slows. An agonizing climb over treetops and low roofs. Careful now not to stall. Keep her rising. Higher up, they begin a slight bank. Take her easy, old chum. Bring her around. A stately turn, all beauty, all balance, its own sort of confidence. They hold the altitude. Banking tighter now. Until the wind is behind them and the nose dips and they are truly leaving.

They wave down to the starter, the mechanics, the meteorological officers, the other few stragglers below. No Emily Ehrlich from the
Evening Telegram
, no Lottie: mother and daughter have already gone home, early, for the day. They have missed takeoff. Pity that, thinks Brown. He taps the inside of his jacket where the letter still sits.

Alcock wipes the sweat off his brow, then waves to the shadow of themselves on the last of the ground and steers the plane at half-throttle out to sea. A line of golden strand. Boats bobbing in St. John’s Harbour. Toys in a boy’s bath.

Alcock picks up the rudimentary telephone, half-shouts into it: Hey, old man.

—Yes?

—Sorry about this.

—Sorry, what?

—Never told you.

—Never told me what?

Alcock grins and glances down at the water. They are eight minutes out, at one thousand feet, with a wind strength behind of thirty-five knots. They lurch over Conception Bay. The water, a moving mat of gray. Patches of sunlight and glare.

—Never learned to swim, me.

Brown is momentarily taken aback—the thought of ditching at
sea, of flailing at the water, floating for a moment on a wooden strut, or clinging to the rolling tanks. But surely Alcock swam to safety after he was shot down over Suvla Bay? All those years ago. No, not years. Just months. It is odd to Brown, very odd, that not so long ago a bullet pierced his thigh and now, today, he is carrying that fragment over the Atlantic towards a marriage, a second chance. Odd that he should be here at all, this height, this endless gray, the Rolls-Royce engines roaring in his ears, holding him aloft. Alcock can’t swim? Surely that’s not true. Perhaps, thinks Brown, I should tell him the truth. Never too late.

He leans into the mouthpiece of the phone, decides against it.

THEY RISE EVENLY
. Side by side in the open cockpit. The air rushing frigid around their ears. Brown taps out a message on the transmitter key to the shore:
All well and started
.

The telephone is a series of wires wrapped around their necks to pick up speech vibration. To listen, they have earpieces tucked beneath their soft helmets.

Twenty minutes into the flight, Alcock reaches under his hat and rips the cumbersome earpieces out, throws them down into the blueness. Too bloody sore, he mimics.

Brown gives a simple thumbs-up. A shame that. They will have no other means of communication now—just scribbled notes and gestures, but they have long ago mapped their minds onto each other’s movements: every twitch a way of speaking, the absence of voice a presence of body.

Their helmets, gloves, jackets, and knee boots are lined with fur. Underneath, they wear Burberry overalls. At any height, even behind the sloping windscreen, it is going to be freezing.

In preparation, Alcock has spent three evenings in a walk-in fridge
in St. John’s. One night he lay down on a pile of wrapped meat and failed to sleep. A few days later Emily Ehrlich wrote in the
Evening Telegram
that he still smelled like a freshly cut side of beef.

SHE STANDS WITH
her daughter at the third-floor window, hands on the wooden frame. They are sure at first that it is an illusion, a bird in the foreground. But then she hears the faint report of the engines, and they both know they have missed the moment—no photograph either—yet there is also a strange exaltation about seeing it from a distance, the plane disappearing into the east, silver, not gray, framed by the lens of a hotel window.
This is a human victory over war, the triumph of endurance over memory
.

Out there, the blue sky lies cloudless and uninterrupted. Emily likes the sound of the ink rising into her fountain pen, the noise of its body being screwed shut.
Two men are flying nonstop across the Atlantic to arrive with a sack of mail, a small white linen bag with 197 letters, specially stamped, and if they make it, it will be the first aerial mail to cross from the New World to the Old
. A brand-new thought:
Transatlantic airmail
. She tests the phrase, scratching it out on the paper, over and over,
transatlantic, trans atlas, trans antic
. The distance finally broken.

FLOATING ICEBERGS BELOW
. The roughly furrowed sea. They know there will be no turning back. It is all mathematics now. To convert the fuel into time and distance. To set the throttle for the optimum burn. To know the angles and the edges, and the spaces in between.

Brown wipes the moisture from his goggles, reaches into the wooden compartment behind his head, grabs the sandwiches, unwraps the waxed paper. He passes one to Alcock who keeps one gloved hand on the yoke. It is one of the many things that brings a
smile to Alcock’s lips: how extraordinary it is to be munching on a ham-and-butter sandwich put together by a young woman in a St. John’s hotel more than a thousand feet below. The sandwich is made more delicious by how far they have already come. Wheat bread, fresh ham, a light mustard mixed in with the butter.

He reaches back for the hot flask of tea, unscrews the cap, allows a wisp of steam to emerge.

The noise rolls through their bodies. At times they make a music of it—a rhythm that conducts itself from head to chest to toes—but then they are lifted from the rhythm, and it becomes pure noise again. They are well aware that they could go deaf on the flight and that the roar could lodge itself inside them forever, their bodies carrying it like human gramophones, so that if they ever make it to the other side they will still, always, somehow hear it.

KEEPING TO THE
prescribed course is a matter of genius and magic. Brown must navigate by any means possible. The Baker navigation machine sits on the floor of the cockpit. The course and distance calculator is clasped to the side of the fuselage. The drift indicator is fitted in under the seat, along with a spirit level to measure bank. The sextant is clipped to the dashboard. There are three compasses, each of which will illuminate in the dark. Sun, moon, cloud, stars. If all else fails, he will have dead reckoning.

Brown kneels on his seat and looks over the edge. He twists and turns, makes calculations using the horizon, the seascape, and the position of the sun. On a notepad he scribbles:
Keep her nearer 120 than 140
, and as soon as he shoves the note across the tiny cockpit, Alcock adjusts the controls ever so slightly, trims the plane, keeps it at three-quarter throttle, keen not to push the engines too hard.

It is so much like handling a horse, the way the plane changes over
a long journey, the shift in her weight from the burn-off of petrol, the gallop of her engines, her rein-touch at the controls.

Every half hour or so Brown notices that the Vimy is a little heavier in the nose, and he watches Alcock exert backwards pressure on the yoke to level the plane out.

At all times Alcock’s body is in contact with the Vimy: he cannot lift his hands from the controls, not even for a second. He can already feel the pain in his shoulders and the tips of his fingers: not even a third of the way there and it has lodged itself hard in every fiber.

AS A CHILD
, Brown went to the racecourse in Manchester to watch the horses. On weekdays, when the jockeys were training, Brown ran on the inside of the Salford track, around and around, widening his circle the older he got, pushing the circumference outwards.

The summer he was seven the Pony Express riders came from America and set up their Wild West show along the Irwell River. His people. From his mother and father’s country. Americans. Brown wanted to know who exactly he was.

Cowboys stood in the fields, swirling their lassoes. There were broncos, buffaloes, mules, donkeys, trick ponies, a number of wild elk. He wandered around the huge painted backdrops of prairie fires, dust storms, tumbleweeds, tornadoes. But most amazing of all were the Indians who paraded around the tea shops of Salford in ornate headdresses. Brown trailed behind, looking for their autographs. Charging Thunder was a member of the Blackfoot tribe. His wife, Josephine, was a sharp-shooting cowgirl who wore elaborate leather coats and six-shooter holsters. Towards the end of summer their daughter, Bessie, came down with diphtheria, and when she got out of hospital they moved to Thomas Street in Gorton, right beside Brown’s aunt and uncle.

On Sunday afternoons, Brown cycled out to Gorton and tried to stare into the window of the house, hoping to see the shine of the headdress coins. But Charging Thunder had cut his hair short and his wife stood in an apron making Yorkshire pudding on the stove.

A COUPLE OF
hours into the flight Brown hears a light snap. He puts on his goggles, leans over the fuselage, watches the small propeller on the wireless generator spin uselessly for a second, shear, then break away. No radio now. No contact with anyone. Soon there will be no heating in their electric suits. But not just this. One snap might lead to another. One piece of metal fatigue and the whole plane might come apart.

Brown can close his eyes and see the chessboard of the plane. He knows the gambits inside out. A thousand little moves that can be made. He likes the idea of himself as a center pawn, slow, methodical, moving forward. There is a form of attack in the calm he maintains.

An hour later there is the chatter of what sounds to Alcock like a Hotchkiss machine gun. He glances at Brown, but he has figured it out already. Brown points out towards the starboard engine where a chunk of exhaust pipe has begun to split and tear. It glows red, then white, then almost translucent. A flock of sparks flare from the engine as a piece of protective metal breaks away. It flies upwards a moment, almost faster than the plane itself, and shoots away into their slipstream.

It is not fatal, but they glance at the severed pipe together and, as if in response, the noise of the engine doubles. They will have to live with it for the rest of the trip now, but Alcock knows how the engine roar can make a pilot fall asleep, that the rhythm can lull a man into nodding off before he hits the waves. It is fierce work—he can feel the machine in his muscles. The sheer tug through his body. The exhaustion
of the mind. Always avoiding cloud. Always looking for a line of sight. Creating any horizon possible. The brain inventing phantom turns. The inner ear balancing the angles until the only thing that can truly be trusted is the dream of getting there.