At that time in Hollywood there were two Conrads whose names you could bank with—Conrad Crow and Conrad Cole. Gil’s brother was always arguing with his producers, and breaking contracts, but moviegoers liked his stories, which were stuffed with adventure and detailed portraits of the lives of men working in dangerous businesses—mining, logging, deep-sea fishing. Flora had cut one film for Connie Crow, and had loved working for him. She did not, however, enjoy working for her rescuer, Conrad Cole. Cole was self-financing, a king of the grand splash, and something of a star-maker, but he was difficult and litigious and there were people in the business who fervently hoped he would tire of Hollywood and go glory-seeking elsewhere.
Gil Crow was someone in Hollywood, he had pedigree, was always a good catch. Gil got women and, Flora guessed, did what he had with her. When they were together Gil stayed out late, drank too much and, when Flora laboured over him—with discouraging results—he always blamed the drink.
However, a year ago, Gil gave up the showgirls, and got married. His marriage had come as a great surprise to Flora. And she hadn’t held out much hope for its happiness.
Flora went into the kitchen to get ice. She’d forgotten ice, had been in too much of a hurry to get that first drink down. She pushed a stack of dishes into the sink, wiped the draining board, set an ice block down and went to work with her ice pick.
It was a still, hot night and for hours the skin at the rims of all her scars had been itching. The scars didn’t sweat, and the border of damp skin and dry scar was often irritated. Flora would have to wait until tomorrow for relief. This was the last of her ice. Tomorrow the iceman would bring another block, and the milkman her usual three pints. She would put the ice in a basin and pour milk over it—she would soak a sheet in the icy milk and wrap it around her hips and thighs, then lie in the hallway, the coldest part of the house, her hips on a pile of towels and her head on a cushion. No one would come to her door. The movie she was working on had stalled again. Flora didn’t mind. Everyone whom Conrad Cole thought he might need was still being paid, including his editor. The other day he’d said to her, ‘I take too much time over things.’ He thought his fault was perfectionism, and certainly he did worry at details which Flora often thought didn’t matter, and wouldn’t show in the end. But this time Cole had suspended work on his film because—the papers said—he planned to travel to Europe with his movie-star fiancée, on the airship Lake Werner.
As Flora chipped at the ice and gathered the chips in her vacuum-sided ice bowl, she told Gil that she was off work because Cole had stopped the clock again.
And Gil told her that his wife was having an affair with Cole. ‘He’s—what?—twenty-five? Twenty-five and completely corrupt already,’ Gil said. ‘Myra read in the paper that Cole is sailing off on that airship with Sam Goldwyn’s new it girl, and she came home crying to me. She expects me to welcome her with open arms, and woo her all over again. She expects me to comfort her.’ Gil dropped his head into his hands and his loosened tie drooped between his thighs.
Flora put ice in his glass, poured whisky, and rattled it under his nose. He took it, said, ‘You know what we are, Flora? We’re neutered.’ He raised his glass, inviting her to treat his insult gallantly.
‘Why did you get married?’ Flora asked.
‘I was in love. I thought that would make a difference. But I can’t be married,’ Gil said. ‘Love doesn’t do the trick.’
‘Have you—’ Flora began.
‘Don’t start making suggestions. The only reason I’m talking to you about this is because you can’t either.’
Flora recalled getting drunk and crying on Gil’s shoulder. She didn’t recall what she had said to him. How far she’d gone. Her trouble was that the scars were everywhere that counted.
Gil drained his glass and poured another. ‘What will I do?’ he mourned—he wasn’t really listening to Flora, only wanted someone to drink with, and complain to. He didn’t mean her to answer him. But she hated to hear him grieve. She wanted to stand up and open her robe. She wanted to be able to do that. For one lucid but self-destructive moment it occurred to Flora that because of her scars she might have to be forced a little, and that if Gil forced her maybe he could do it. When they had been together she had often suspected that his liking for her was part of his problem. She could imagine how much trouble he’d have with any woman he really loved. Flora was sure that it was better for him if he was able to treat a woman as if she was immaterial in herself. Then he could be rough and selfish and speechless.
‘At least I can get out now,’ Gil said. ‘Out of my marriage, with my honour intact. And then—never again.’ His eyes, even filmed with tears, looked mean.
‘Don’t challenge the future,’ Flora said. She always felt provoked when men talked about honour. Gil and his brother Connie were both very big on honour.
‘You’re right,’ Gil said. ‘I shouldn’t say that. I do want to be in love. Doesn’t everyone?’
Flora said, ‘I don’t know.’
They inclined over the stained oak table top, mirroring each other’s movements, tilting their glasses so that the light caught on the surface of the whisky and its glossy scabs of melting ice. Flora asked, ‘Did you ever think to promise yourself? To say: “I can’t, so I won’t”?’
‘You really can’t,’ he said. ‘So it’s easy for you to promise. Besides, Flora, you know it’s more acceptable for a woman to give it up.’
Flora was angry with him for saying this, but only said, ‘I have pain to remind me of any promises I’ve made.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. And God how I wish I’d been there, Flora. I wish I’d been there to help.’
Flora shrugged. ‘Cole was there. If he hadn’t pulled down a curtain and caught me I’d be dead.’
‘Which is why you work for him.’
‘I work for him because he pays well. And Flights of Angels was the feature I was offered. I’d prefer to work for Connie, but he didn’t seem to want me again. Do you know why?’
Gil shook his head. Then he said, ‘Actually, I do. But it’s unworthy.’
Flora waited.
‘It was because we were filming in the Yukon. And we were hunting. It was a boy’s outing and you aren’t a boy.’
‘Of course,’ Flora said, and peered into her glass. She sighed. ‘Anyway, I’ll tell you, I’m glad to see the back of Cole for a while. I don’t want to keep sorting through the best shots of Monty Mantery’s hands.’
Gil said, with grim, delighted spite, ‘So the rumours are true?’
Flora thought that any man who had been nearly in tears a moment ago about his trouble in bed shouldn’t start passing judgment on any other man’s masculinity. But that was men, and that was half Gil’s trouble. He was ashamed of his trouble because it disturbed his sense of his own masculinity, and because other men might find out. It was easier for Flora to give up sex because, for her, there wasn’t any great shame in it. For any woman there was perhaps chagrined enlightenment in learning at forty or so that she couldn’t really expect any more to command male attention. But Flora, maimed, was to feel none of that—her injuries were an honourable withdrawal from the game.
Gil asked if Flora could get by with Cole gone to Europe.
‘I am editing short subjects. Because Cole’s dithering I’ve been moonlighting for months.’
‘Come to us when you’re done.’
‘I will.’
Gil was working on his brother’s latest film. Flora asked, ‘How’s Spirit going?’
‘The studio have moved some of the budget to the new sound scenes. But we’re shooting the battle schedule tomorrow at Clover Field. Dogfights mostly. Connie’s having your friend Millie Cotton crash her Spad. I’m in one of the chase planes.’
‘Then you should be at home, asleep,’ Flora said, ‘not up drinking.’ She couldn’t stretch far enough, so got up and came around the table to take the glass from his hand.
‘All right, mother,’ Gil said.
She caught him under the elbow and he got up, towering over her. Then he took his glass again and upended it to catch the last drops on his tongue. ‘Flora,’ he said, ‘you’re a good friend.’
‘That’s me: Flora McLeod, friend to man.’
Flora wanted to help him. To give him some advice on parting. ‘Divorce your wife and go back to the showgirls, to temporary, uncritical women.’ But she wouldn’t say it. Solutions were fantastical; his problem was his life. There wasn’t anything honest she could offer but herself, and she had done that already, in naive self-confidence, in her beauty, almost in love. She had wasted on Gil her, as it turned out, rather limited licence to love. Besides, Gil wasn’t offering her advice on what she could do—she, whose corset of scars prevented her even spreading her legs. Her case was hopeless. How was he to know that, though? How much had she confided when drunk? Or was it so plain, that when she went about, walked and sat, her body, once flexible and comfortable, now warned anyone who looked: Noli me tangere—touch me not.
Gil kissed Flora’s hand and took his leave.
Flora turned back to the room and stood staring at the spot where they’d been sitting, at their glasses, the crystal clouded by grease from their lips and fingertips. The bottle was empty, her vacuum-sided ice bowl overturned, and the oak tabletop white where water had been spilled on it. She carried everything to the kitchen, wiped her table, and drank some water to down the whisky inside her. Then she went outdoors.
Flora’s bungalow was at the end of a cul-de-sac and partly concealed from the road by orange trees whose branches were massed with a mix of ripe oranges and green, and aged fruit whose shrivelled skins were speckled with black mildew.
Flora went down the porch steps and into her front yard. She walked off the yellow square of the indoor light and into the dark. There were as yet no streetlights down this far. Flora stretched out her hands and felt for the spiny branches of an orange tree. She searched for a fat, slick-skinned fruit, twisted it off its stem and peeled it where she stood, dropping its rind around her bare feet. She ate, the crack at the corner of her mouth stinging. The sky was growing light in the east, and grey-grained blue. Flora licked her fingers and waited. The moon bulged on the horizon, its top edge like viscous liquid then, as it cleared the hills, it solidified and settled into a chipped circle. One night off full.
Flora watched the moon fade from gold to white. Then she went back into her house where she lay down to sleep, and to wait for the milkman, and the man with ice.
Clover Field, Santa Monica
June 28, 1929
At dawn Xas and Millie got out of her car to stretch their legs. They strolled over to the windbreak, set their backs against the trunk of one of the eucalyptuses, and watched the sun come up over the mountains.
A truck growled past, its tray full of milk cans. The dust it raised met the mist lifting from the field. Dust and mist hung together for a moment above the road like spectral coral then, when the dust settled, the mist was gone.
A moment later a bus arrived, stopped at the gate to the airfield to put down a parcel of newspapers, and four of the airship’s crew. They made their crooked, jostling way toward the Zeppelin.
‘They’ll sleep,’ Xas said, ‘they’ll sober up,’ as if the wellbeing of the airship’s crew was his business, as if he were an officer on the airship.
The sun seemed to switch on the crickets, for they all started up at once, calling to one another. Xas heard them as a call to prayer. He was never alone with his thoughts, but he’d taught himself not to talk to God. Yet he could no more fall wholly silent than the crickets could meet the appearance of the sun with silence. He stood still, but the grass seethed with noise. He felt God dropping over him the net of the new day, of this particular day. He felt the vivid presence, and the personal interest of God.
Then someone opened a door in one of the nearby buildings—an aircraft factory—and let the smell of hardwoods and glue out into the morning air. A man in grey overalls came across to pick up the bundle of newspapers. He waved at the two people standing in the windbreak.
Millie waved back. And then Xas did too, a fly-shooing wave, as if he was clearing the air around his head.
Four more trucks went by them, turned in at the gate and continued on toward the aerodromes.
‘That’s us,’ said Millie. ‘Come on.’
The aerodrome was surrounded by dozens of ex-Army surplus training planes. Millie explained that ex-Army pilots and others had bought these Curtiss Jennies as bargains after the war. Some were only recreational planes, but many had been turned to all sorts of uses. ‘You can see how worn they are—stunt planes, modified racers, battered old barnstormers,’ she said.
There were war planes among the Jennies: several Sopwiths, Spads, and three Fokkers. The covered trucks were parked by these, and were unloading cameras and camera crews. Two new closed-cabin planes, Travel Airs, flew in as Xas and Millie crossed the field. They taxied over and joined the film crew.
Xas and his friend were nearly among them all, when Millie abruptly grabbed his arm and veered away toward the airship.
Three men were standing below Lake Werner, their heads thrown back. They were an almost comic mismatch in size—a small Asian man between two gangly giants. The small man would gesture now and then, composing some picture in the air. The tall men stood with their hands on their hips, looking up at the ship with the appearance of climbers figuring the best way up a cliff face.
The day was warming already and Lake Werner’s sleek silver volume was visibly sinking, settling a little nearer the ground, the gas in her cells slower to take heat too, and now cooler than the air.
Millie hauled Xas over to the trio, and placed herself under the nose of the tallest man. ‘Connie,’ she said, ‘this is Xas.’ Then, mischievous, ‘I think it’s short for Texas.’ She cackled, then said with a straight face, ‘Xas is a stunt flyer. He used to be with an air circus in France.’
Conrad Crow was a patrician individual. His face was fresh and young but his hair was an even, luminous grey. He looked down his nose at Xas, then asked, interested rather than challenging, ‘Do you have any use for a surname?’
‘Just call me Xas.’
Millie chipped in again, ‘Xas can fly one of the Fokkers. He used to own one.’
As if on cue a fourth Fokker wobbled to the nearest airstrip and made a clumsy, hopping landing. It slowed a little then made a slewing turn toward the other planes, taxied to them, stalled and stopped.
‘Excuse me, Millie,’ said Crow, and hurried away toward it.
‘Sorry,’ said Millie to Xas. ‘He’s like that.’
The other tall man, a fair-haired spit of his brother, said, ‘And what is that like? Eh, Millie?’
‘You know as well as I do,’ said Millie. Then to Xas, ‘This is Gil Crow. He’s assistant director. And this is Jimmy Chan.’
Jimmy said, wistfully, ‘I’d really like to get a camera up in the control cabin of that airship. I could get some great take-off shots.’ Then he shook Xas’s hand and said, sympathetically, ‘My name isn’t really Jimmy. I changed it when I went to school, because it was too difficult getting people to understand that the name that came first was my family name.’
Xas said, ‘I sometimes find it convenient to change my name in order to change my nationality. For instance, I found I could get a pilot’s licence with a French name, not a German one.’
‘Is “Xas” a French name?’ said Jimmy.
And Gil said, ‘Here real pilots always say “wings”, not “licence”—as in “I got my wings”. In case you find it convenient to blend in.’
Millie rolled her eyes and started after Crow. Jimmy, Gil and Xas followed her, Jimmy looking longingly back at Lake Werner.
They joined the knot of people who had surrounded the pilot and were escorting him from the Fokker to the parked trucks and—between the trucks—a businesslike thicket of cameras, campstools, people. The pilot was holding a b
alled-up silk scarf against his right ear. He looked ill. He was dabbing at blood coming from his ear. His friends sat him down on a camp stool. They loosened the fur collar of his canvas flying togs and tucked a towel around his neck as though they were preparing to give him a shave. They gave him water. They appeared to want to coax him into a quick recovery.
Conrad Crow hunkered down in front of the pilot, turned the man’s head and looked at the ear. ‘I think you’ve burst your eardrum, Frank.’
Frank said, ‘I had an earache. I’m only here because I promised to bring the plane. It’ll be missed. You have to be quick. Use it, then let me take it back.’ The pilot’s face was white and his hand, holding the glass, was shaking so hard that the water splashed him.
‘I appreciate it, Frank. Right now someone will drive you to a doctor.’ The director looked about, then nodded at someone in the group, who went to get a car.
Gil said, ‘How can Cole miss one plane when he has seventy?’
‘Cole knows what he owns,’ said his brother. Conrad Crow was apparently unperturbed by the pilot’s pallor and oozing ear. He got up and his eyes found Xas in the crowd. He stared for a long minute—then frowned. For a minute Xas could see Crow wondering what he was looking at—then the man put it out of his mind and got down to business.
Crow pointed to where, out over the sea, there was a towering white cliff of cloud, a solid-seeming mass that hung in the air, its dark base almost flat against its own black shadow. ‘That cloud may not be going anywhere in a hurry, nevertheless I want everyone in the air before it disappears, or bears down on us. It’s the first thing I saw when we got here. It’s the kind of cloud that it usually takes a whole hot day to build. So perhaps the day will pack up on us come afternoon. Meanwhile, that cloud is a Godsend. It’ll help give some sense of scale to every movement in the battle. Xas—if that’s your name—the first thing I’d like you to do is take Frank’s Fokker and put it into a spin right up against that cloud. Can you do that?’
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