by Nesta Tuomey
As he changed gear, Dave’s thoughts returned to Kay’s idiotic stance over phoning and a muscle tightened stubbornly in his jaw. He could never understand this insistence on formal dates. Not when they knew each other so long. Twelve years, he mused. It was a heck of a long time.
His expression softened when he remembered his first encounter with Kay when they were both still children. Ten year old Kay had been balancing on top of the Corporation sewage pipes (as yet unsunk) in Carrick Road, defending herself with a bunch of lethal-looking thorn branches against a crown of gurriers from a nearby housing estate. She had kept them at bay too, Dave recalled admiringly. And they all big lads his own age, thirteen and older. What a tomboy! He grinned at the memory.
When he had gone to her defence she had told him off haughtily in no uncertain terms. ‘I have no time for boys!’ Well, that’s another thing that had changed over the year. Dave’s glance grew thoughtful. He was going to have his work cut out beating the wolves from her door now that she was going into Celtic Airways.
He pulled his ear thoughtfully as he waited for the car in front to move. The trouble was he and Kay were such opposites. She loved dancing and having a good time while he was happiest in casual clothes, going for long hikes or just lounging at home reading or watching television.
When he had the time that was. Lately, he had precious little of it, spending every spare second studying when not working overtime. By the time, In another few months, all going well, Dave hoped to have passed the first of his three-part final accountancy exams. How long it would take him to achieve his second goal and become financial controller at the clothing manufacturing company where he worked depended on circumstances but hopefully it wouldn’t be more than two years at the outset. By the time he was thirty, Dave aimed to have ascended one more rung on the corporate ladder. That is if he didn’t decide to leave his present job and branch out on his own. Anyhow, it was all before him.
And Kay? How did she figure in his plans? Oh, she was in there too, his gaze softened... but first he had a lot of ambitions to realise.
With a sigh of relief, he turned into Carrick Road and parked in front of his house. His muscles ached as though he had been carrying a heavy weight for hours. Thank God to be home! And in one piece. Whistling cheerily, he got out of the car.
‘Nice job!’ his sister cried mannishly, running from the house and sliding into the passenger seat.
‘Does Kay know you have it?’ She pulled down the flap to grimace at herself in the mirror. ‘I suppose you only got it to impress her.’
‘Of course not,’ Dave snapped, annoyed with her for correctly divining his motives.
‘I suppose now she’s becoming an air hostess she’ll be too full of herself to notice any of us,’ Breda sniffed.
Dave waited pointedly for her to remove herself, irritated at hearing his mother’s already expressed opinion on his sister’s lips. Mrs. Mason had never liked Kay and made no secret of the fact that she would have preferred her only son to court a girl with money and, preferably, both parents living.
He slammed and locked the door. Breda was just riled over losing her hat, he decided, tired of hearing what a favour she had done Kay by lending it to her.
Dave sighed, his earlier good humour clouded by his homecoming. It would have been nice to have had one member of his family pleased about Kay’s success. He didn’t count his father who was in an alcoholic haze most of the time. Sometimes he actively disliked his family.
Sulkily, Breda ran up the path hallooing, ‘Dave’s got a new car.’
Now the whole road knew. A frown in his grey eyes, Dave followed her into the house. ‘How nice,’ Mrs. Mason came to peer out the door. Of course, he only got it to dazzle that Begley woman’s niece.
‘I’ll be looking forward to a ride in it,’ she told her son. Before that girl parks herself in it.
‘Sure.’ Dave could see by his mother’s expression that this was something she envisaged very soon, perhaps that very evening.
‘Sorry, Ma,’ he firmly wrote her off. ‘Another time.’ This evening he was calling on Kay.
SEVEN
Kay was relieved when Molly took the news she was changing jobs so calmly. She had been dreading the ordeal of telling her aunt and had made a point of confessing only after Molly had finished her tea and was relaxing before the fire.
‘If it’s what you want to do, dear,’ Molly replied with uncharacteristic detachment, ‘that’s the main thing. Just so long as you’re sure.’
Kay nodded, surprised there wasn’t a word about the folly of throwing up a good pensionable job for one that wasn’t even permanent, or even some well-meaning advice about keeping her options open and maintaining her shorthand and typing speeds. She was almost disappointed.
What Kay didn’t realize was that Molly had already been alerted that change was in the wind by Ginny Halpin’s description of her appearance on the day of the interview and the discover of Kay’s application photographs in her dressing-table drawer. By the time Kay revealed the true state of affairs, Molly was convinced she was planning a modelling career, but she wasn’t displeased to learn it was for the airways and not the cat-walk her niece was destined.
She had always considered that the Insurance Corporation was a dead-end for so beautiful a girl and wished her well out of it. Now she was greatly looking forward to spreading the exciting news to her friends though not too happy about her own daughter’s reaction. Molly was well aware how jealous Winifred had always been of Kay.
Of late, she reflected, her daughter’s nature was becoming even more crabbed than before. Molly attributed it to living for the past fourteen years with that dried-up stick of a husband Cahal Hynes. It would sour even the sweetest nature.
Not that anyone could describe Winifred’s nature as ever being even remotely mellow, she admitted. There was far too much in her of the begrudging Begley side of the family for that. Molly had loved her late husband but she had not been blind to his faults.
She looked at her niece’s beautiful animated face, as she described her hopes and triumphs of the past weeks and fondly thought how like her mother the girl was becoming. It had given Molly great joy when Kay came to live with her in Carrick Road. Her presence had greatly helped to ease the pain she had felt at losing her beloved sister Evelyn. She had soon discovered that besides inheriting her mother’s striking looks, Kay possessed her courage and indomitable spirit too. These attributes came from the Casey side of the family and were already possessed in abundance by Molly herself.
It was her only regret that poor Evvie wasn’t alive to rejoice in how beautifully her daughter had blossomed. She discounted all her own efforts on her niece’s behalf and considered it ample compensation to have had some small hand in the shaping of so lovely a creature.
She reached to turn on the television, murmuring again, ‘Just so long as you’re sure.’
Kay left her watching the evening’s episode of Tolka Row and went down the garden to where Bill, one of her aunt’s longest enduring tenants, stood tossing up clods of earth and smashing them to powder on the back side of the spade. He received her news with customary aplomb.
‘Off to the moon, are you?’ he said, resting his arms on the knotted wood of the handle, his stomach bulging slightly in a lightweight combat suit passed on to him by a nephew serving in the Palestine police.
‘You’ll have some tales to tell. Take my advice and write it all down while it’s still fresh. It’s all grist to the mill.’
Kay nodded. She knew Bill had a huge rambling unfinished novel in his trunk upstairs which he had based on his adventures at sea as a purser with the Cunard Line. Astutely, she suspected gardening was his excuse for getting away from it.
Bill winked at her. ‘One in the eye for that Nora Cassidy.’ Kay grinned back, thinking Bill always got names wrong.
‘Travel is a great thing. See the world when you’re young,’ he jovially advised her, though he hadn’t been all that y
oung himself by the time he took to the ocean wave, having tried a few other jobs in between. ‘It’s what you want... quite sure?’
Kay nodded a trifle grimly and went back to the house. She was tired of being asked that question. Of course it was what she wanted. Wasn’t it every girl’s dream to become an air hostess? Anyone would think she was being lured off to join the French Foreign Legion.
She repeated like an incantation, ‘Pilots, overnights, holidays in the sun,’ willing it to do its usual magic. But now that the need for secrecy was no longer necessary, it had suddenly gone flat on her.
When Dave arrived in his new Volkswagen to take her for a drive, Kay found it irritating to hear him voice much the same sentiments as Molly and Bill. She had portrayed Noeleen Carmody gasping in jealous rage and the girls in the typing pool sour with envy. When he stopped laughing he remarked seriously, ‘This air hostess thing really means a lot to you, Kay. You’re really set on joining Celtic Airways?’
Kay nodded enthusiastically, ‘I can’t wait.’
With slightly heightened colour Dave drove the last hundred yards. He drew up outside the house with a clash of gears and leaned across her to unfasten the door latch. ‘Out you get,’ he said curtly, ‘Time I was getting back to my books.’
Startled, Kay jumped out. What’s got into him she wondered, as he roared off without a backward look.
She forgot him as she ran into the house. There she met another of Molly’s lodgers and on hearing Miss Curran’s eager, ‘So thrilled to hear of your good fortune, dear Kay,’ her spirits lifted again.
On her way upstairs, she heard her aunt telephoning the good news to her daughter Winifred. On first meeting her, Kay had nicknamed her tall angular cousin ‘Winnie the Witch.’ Now she grinned happily to herself. That should make her day, she thought, and went cheerily into her room to write her letter of acceptance to Celtic Airways.
Thirty miles away in Kilshaughlin, Winifred Hynes listened in silence as her mother rhapsodized about Kay. She had disliked her cousin ever since Molly had adopted the orphaned girl twelve years earlier and showered on her all the love and affection which Winifred, as her mother’s only child, considered rightfully hers.
So Kay was going to become an air hostess, she thought jealously, flying off to exotic countries, having the most marvellous time. Gloomily, she returned to the kitchen where she discovered her youngest daughter with her fingers in the jam and vented her frustration by giving the child a resounding slap.
EIGHT
At Celtic Airways ten days later, Maura Kane sat in her office, wondering who she would appoint as training officer over the new group of hostesses due to begin training on October 22nd. This was the second last group in the training programme out of the hundred girls recruited that autumn by the airline. Already the September groups were flying and due their check flights any day.
Sadie McIntyre had been their training officer and, as usual, had done a very good job. Pity she couldn’t use her again, Maura thought regretfully. Sadie really was the best she had. If only there were a few more like her.
Well, if not Sadie, who? Maura sighed, conscious that in another four days the new group would be arriving out to the airport, all set and rearing to go. These days the Chief Hostess was busier than she had ever been but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She loved her job and was determined to succeed in it.
Maura had already put in nine years with Celtic Airways. After two brief years flying she had raised her sights higher than the cabin and wasted no more time until she got to where she was today.
And that wasn’t the end of the line, she told herself. By no means. She was thirty now and head of European hostess operations. By the time she was forty with hard work and some lucky breaks who knew how high she might rise?
Maura didn’t rule out marriage in her working life but she didn’t see why she couldn’t have both wedded bliss and a career. Surely one did not preclude the other, she thought. At the moment in CA there was the asinine rule that hostesses had to resign from the airline on marriage but all that would ... must ... soon change. After all this was the mid-sixties; even stiffer traditions were being broken, boundaries stretched. When this happened she would be ready - despite Oliver McGrattan.
Maura frowned at the thought of the Chief Executive. Anyone would imagine there would be a fellow feeling between them, each taking up key managerial positions almost at the same time. But there wasn’t. From the beginning McGrattan had never bothered to hide his hostility towards Maura.
‘Take no step without consulting me. Don’t do anything on your own initiative and remember everything has to be okayed by me before you put it into operation,’ he had informed her on her first day in the new job.
For heaven’s sake, she was the newly appointed head of the European hostess branch which was a well run, long established wing of the whole outfit. Who the hell did he think he was!
Maura remembered a remark made by one of the check hostesses, Sylvie Duval, when her appointment as Chief Hostess was announced.
‘Did you have to fuck with Oliver McGrattan to get it?’ she had asked deadpan.
Sleep with Oliver McGrattan! That little dried up workaholic. At the time, Maura had had to smile despite her annoyance. Obviously Sylvie couldn’t imagine any other way of getting ahead. According to rumour, she had already bedded quite a few top management herself, though without any material advancement that anyone could see.
Maura’s expression clouded. How people loved a bit of smut. Even her cousin Christy Kane who was a senior captain on the line, had sceptically voiced much the same opinion.
‘Come clean, Maura. What did you have to do to get it?’
None of them, Maura reflected a trifle bitterly, could imagine a person, especially a female getting anything on her own merits. Still what did she care. She was determined to succeed.
Her gaze grew thoughtful. The Hostess Superintendent was due to retire in another few years and the Chief Hostess Atlantic was tipped as her successor. When this happened, Maura did not see why she shouldn’t step right into Judy Mathews’ heels.
No reason at all. Maura grinned. Unless in the meantime, Judy, like her predecessor, upped and ran off with an oil sheik.
Unlikely. Petite, glamorous Judy in her tailored silk suits and spike heels, had her eyes too firmly fixed on the top to do anything so foolish. She excelled at her job and nothing fazed her. Even Oliver McGrattan backed down when she insisted things be done her way.
Maura envied Judy her composure, her complete disregard for what anyone thought. Some day soon, she promised herself fervently, she would have all that Judy had.
She shook herself briskly. What about the October group? So was no nearer solving this particular headache.
She decided she would ask Sadie to do it as a special favour. There was no one better and perhaps she wouldn’t mind too much, seeing as she was taking Winter leave straight after Christmas. By then the group would have got their wings and begun flying. She scribbled a reminder on her memo pad glad to have reached a decision. First thing tomorrow she would contact Sadie.
Now, Maura decided, early though it was she would take a coffee break. She realised she was starving. With breakfast the usual rushed affair and lunch non-existent, was it any wonder?
Lately she had dropped a few pounds on her naturally slim figure. She leaned over and pressed the bell on her desk, buzzing for Bernie, the junior typist, and at the same time took a mirror from her drawer and looked in it. She frowned at her reflection, aware that the slight weight-loss made her look a little drawn. She smoothed a finger under her eyes, easing away strain and traced the line of her high cheekbones before patting her hair into place. Maura possessed cool Grace Kelly type good looks and (many people thought) a temperament to match. But few guessed at the fires of passion and ambition burning so fiercely beneath that calm exterior.
Better get a few pounds back on quickly, Maura decided. It didn’t do for the Chief Hostess to l
ook peaky. Not with every critical eye trained on her and all those glamorous new hostesses flooding the airline.
And Simon loose amongst them!
Maura frowned and for the first time felt unsure. Captain Simon Cooney, her loving boyfriend. Three gold bars on his sleeve. Charming and fickle-hearted.
‘A pot of coffee, Bernie,’ she said when the girl appeared plump and breathless in the doorway.
No harm for that young lady to step up on the scales, Maura found herself thinking. ‘A pot?’ Bernie was surprised.
‘Yes, and some biscuits...chocolate,’ Maura said firmly. The telephone rang.
‘I’d love to tear your panties off,’ a masculine voice groaned breathily in her ear.
Oh, damn! Maura replaced the receiver promptly. Dirty phone calls. That made the third since yesterday. The hostess section was never free of them but this had to be a record! She decided it must be the sight of all those nubile new hostesses working them up.
NINE
On Kay’s first day to the airport she was amazed when confronted by row upon row of shabby prefabricated huts, to find that these drab wooden buildings housed the hostess section. She was about to retrace her steps convinced she had taken a wrong turning (nothing could have been further from her glamorous imaginings) then, seeing the sign on the grass, she overcame her astonishment and entered the one marked ‘Hostess Training’.
Her first few days in Celtic Airways were exciting, bewildering too, a jumble of new faces and impressions.
Sally! How marvellous to see her again. Alas, no sign of Florrie.
Meeting Sally, however, was like meeting an old friend. They greeted each other rapturously and quite naturally fell into step for the rest of training.
But Sally’s friend whom she had met at her first interview, lisping Bunny Fagan, was something else again with her kiss curls and arty draped scarves. Kay couldn’t bear the way she monopolized Sally and insisted on keeping a seat for her in class every day.