by Carol Gould
‘Nonsense,’ said Valerie. ‘He’s as popular as Myra Hess. Twin institutions. His newspapers, and her concerts at the National Gallery. I expect you’d think her fur coats vulgar.’
There was a silence as the men looked at each other in bewilderment.
‘Will you sign?’
‘No. I ’d sooner stay here for the duration of the war.’
Preparing for her ninth day in disgrace, Valerie watched as Sir Francis Shelmerdine, Gerard d’Erlanger, and Tim Haydon MP filed out of the room like soiled old men from a peep show. She was excused, and could go home.
That evening she had a visitor.
Listening to the tap at the door she agonized over who it might be, and after what seemed an eternity she decided the person waiting patiently outside might be Shirley.
‘This is a disgrace,’ Sir Henry announced, standing at the entrance to the living room and not moving forward to his daughter’s perch.
‘Do you mean the room, or the lack of a whisky decanter?’
‘Valerie, with some considerable difficulty I’ve managed to keep this affair from the press. Even Beaverbrook thinks you have disappeared on some heroic mission. Privately, I consider everything you have done this year, where that man is concerned, to be utterly despicable.’
She rose from the small, flowered sofa and stood, not daring to approach his enraged presence. ‘The Committee, minus Lady L, seemed more worried about the horror photographs than about my involvement with Friedrich.’
‘You never told me about the snapshots,’ barked her father. ‘That girl should have turned the film over to you immediately. This whole affair shows even more disorganization within your Pool than I had feared.’ He surveyed the room. ‘I do wish you would not refer to that man Kranz by his Christian name,’ he stressed.
‘Would you rather I had become a missing person – me instead of Annabel?’
‘Valerie, please. I need to get through this present matter as quickly as possible.’
‘What present matter?’ She looked up, her bloodshot eyes unfocused.
Sir Henry was still standing, and his shoulders drooped, giving him the look of a tired junk merchant.
‘Beaverbrook has offered to give you only a good press––’
‘He knows I’m under enforced seclusion!’ she interrupted.
‘––to tell the story of the Jew as it stands but to make you look the victim.’
‘That is absurd, Henry!’
‘He has the pictures, and now he wants everything else.’
‘Pictures of experiments on Jewish-looking inmates, plus the tale of Kranz – that will be marvellous!’ Valerie grinned broadly at her father.
‘Are you being facetious?’
‘It’s the best news I’ve heard all day,’ she said, rising and stretching. ‘What do you have to do next – telephone Max? My phone has been disconnected, you know. The spooks have done that, as if I were a German paratrooper squatting in a country cottage.’
‘That is a preposterous notion!’
‘Is it?’ She moved towards Sir Henry and he backed off as if she might strike him down. ‘Haven’t you been the prime mover behind my ordeal of the past few days?’
‘That is monstrous, Valerie.’
‘Of course it is, and it is also true, so do come in and be seated like a normal person, not like a beast who turns his daughter in because the constituents would want it that way.’
He remained stationary, fingering his hat and letting his uneven breathing accelerate until it could be heard in every corner of the room.
‘A father who has lost one daughter would not turn in another.’
‘I’ve heard of worse, in Euripides and … other places,’ she said, curling up into the sofa. ‘Tell me more.’
He looked at her for the first time and his breathing had come under control. ‘The men on the Committee want you to sign a small statement, Valerie, and I too ask you to do this.’
‘What would Mother have said?’ she asked brightly, staring back at him with a vision that seemed to bore through him despite her bleary, red-rimmed pupils. ‘Do I get burned alive afterwards? Do you suppose that’s what’s happened to Annabel?’
‘Heaven forbid,’ he muttered, moving into the room.
‘It’s likely – fascists make you sign, and then you burn.’
‘You won’t miss ATA, Valerie.’
‘Good God, Father – take my blood!’
‘It isn’t the end of the world – someone else can run the organization.’ She had used his favourite word and he felt uncomfortably close to tears.
Valerie rose from the sofa:
‘Just at this bloody moment, there aren’t half enough girls to go around to replace the men being siphoned off for active service. D’Erlanger sat there today vexing me but he knows I have access to hundreds of pilots who are holding back from applying to ATA because they don’t want to see me wronged. There is a war, and yes: there is an enemy, but right now we are behaving in this country like imbeciles, imprisoning brilliant Jews who have escaped to this ruddy so-called island haven with Hitler at their heels, and removing me from a vital operation just when the Battle for Britain has been unfolding. Please listen to me, Father – all of this is happening because of one stupid man wanting to save the remainder of his family, having paid Vera Bukova’s lot a fortune to rescue his closest loved ones, and because this man pinched a precious Fulmar, stole somebody’s wallet and loved me.’
‘People associate you with enemy aliens – that camera film implies you have had dealings with Nazis.’ Sir Henry’s face was expressionless as he spoke. ‘Enough is enough, Valerie.’
‘Gerard is in love with me and wants to see me home-bound – I believe they call it bondage.’
Sir Henry was silent. He looked around the room from his spot in the shadows and smiled.
‘Would you be interested in some gossip?’
‘I love gossip. Do sit down.’
He did not move.
‘Angelique Florian has done the unthinkable,’ he murmured, fingering the rim of his hat yet again.
‘She crashed?’
‘She’s pregnant.’
‘Is that all?’ Valerie slumped into the corner of her sofa with an irritable twitch.
‘To me it is quite something.’ He smiled. ‘Had you information she was planning to do something worse?’
‘Not at all.’ She smirked as the thought of Angelique’s proposed mission made pregnancy pale in comparison. ‘Is it your child, Henry?’
He stopped smiling.
‘There has been speculation about Balfour.’
‘Oh – good! A member of the Committee disgraced! Let Beaverbrook get that one!’
‘I must be going,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Please remember that if you sign those papers, the repercussions may subside, and you may be reinstated. A year from now, Kranz will be shipped back to one of those places we saw in the photographs, and you will be back as Head of ATA. Mark my words.’
‘They are indelibly stamped on my forehead!’
‘A father’s oath has been made to a daughter.’
‘Many a fatality, in classic literature, has followed upon such oaths.’
‘We need to get Kranz out of the way and then things will be fine,’ said her father with a pleading look.
Valerie stood up. ‘Where is he?’
‘I cannot tell you.’
‘Please.’
‘He is being packed up ready for shipment.’
She was standing next to the father and his hat. ‘What if I’m carrying his child?’
‘Valerie – for God’s sake!’
‘What if I am?’
‘It’s not possible!’
‘Am I so plain as not to be able to make dough rise, asked the maiden?’
‘You can’t be having that man’s child, Valerie.’ His breathing was doubling in rapidity. ‘When you have these notions you remind me of your mother. Anyway, there is nothing growing inside
you, Valerie – when there is a seed growing, a man can tell, especially when the vessel is a daughter.’
With that Sir Henry moved to the front door and Valerie looked at her watch:
‘Good heavens! The spooks will be bored stiff waiting for my gentleman caller to leave the premises,’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘They are keeping a twenty-four-hour watch – as you well know, Henry.’ She snatched his hat from his cold, loose hand and placed it atop his balding head. ‘You arranged it.’
‘I did no such thing. I have merely advised you of the Ministry’s demands about your comings and goings.’ His eyes seemed to dart from place to place. ‘It was never my intention to have you watched.’
‘On the contrary – perhaps you should run over and say hello. Or would you like to bring them a cold sausage? I’ve one just here.’
‘Valerie, please think about me, and about your sister, and about Mother.’
‘I spend most of my time thinking about Lysanders and Spitfires.’
He left her, and as he moved down her path in the pitch dark she chuckled.
‘Don’t forget my greetings to your spooks!’ she hissed.
He did not turn back, and in a few moments he had disappeared into the night.
Closing the door firmly Valerie thought of Friedrich and of his heated urgency and of his exploding entry that had made her erupt inside and continue to smoulder every moment ever since their last insane coming together. She leaned against the door and ran her hand along her abdomen, begging some supernatural being to reveal his whereabouts and to relieve her of the unbearable urge that was beginning to obliterate even her worries about the pilots’ pools. She was throbbing and felt ashamed, pressing herself to the door as if the cold wood might absorb the rhythm of her frustration. Her torso rigid against the flat, there was a sudden pounding and she jumped back.
Could it be him?
Might Friedrich have been released?
Would she hold him tonight, on the soft carpet in this room, letting him take her then and there because she could not endure the eternity of labouring up the stairs and entering the good manners of a bedroom?
Valerie turned, aware of the perspiration on her back that had pasted her dress to the door, and she reached behind her to pull the fabric away. There was that terrible pounding again. She turned the handle and opened the door, very slowly – and out of the dark came the face of Amy Johnson.
51
All during the night the country’s youngest female ATA pilot had been thinking about flying Lancasters and wondering how one might commandeer a bomber. Eventually Hamble’s best heaved a giant sigh. There simply was no way, for there surely would be a flight engineer on the Lancaster who knew girls were still prohibited from bombers; and God help anyone if that flight engineer was Slater.
End of story.
Was it possible that ferrying Spitfires had become routine for the men, after all the expectation and build-up? What the women would not have given to fly operational craft … Angelique Florian thrust her head into the musty pillow and tried to sleep.
As sleep eluded her, she rehashed the polite tea with Balfour. He had been alone at a smart London address, and his awkwardness suggested he had borrowed the location for the sake of this meeting. Angelique had left Nora Flint scowling on a day when Hurricanes were leaving the huge Hawkers factory at Langley faster than male pilots were available to transport each of the £100,000 machines. ATA women were needed for taxi jobs and no-one could be spared. Her uniform had looked exceptionally smart that day, although she could sense Nora’s disquiet about her destination, and about her bulging waistline in these times of deprivation.
‘Better she should think me guzzling chocolate from the black market than in a condition she would abhor,’ she remembered thinking to herself as the Commanding Officer had granted permission for four hours’ leave from her duties. That leave would have to be made up for some other day, and Angelique knew that day would have to be soon. Nora had distanced herself from Gordon Selfridge, and like so many women in positions of power, had eliminated what she considered unnecessary elements in her life. If Gordon had to go, Nora would lock him out of her life with as little concern as she had cancelled deliveries of biscuits to the base. The girls were astonished when Gordon disappeared from their midst, while some were even more incensed about the biscuits …
Now her baby was shifting again, and Angelique sat up on the sagging mattress. It was black outside and she hoped the Germans would attack other places tonight.
Where were Zack and Paul? Sarah Truman and Annabel Cobb? Where was Valerie? Imagine being Sir Henry!
She jumped from her cot and walked to the window of her tiny room, stepping lightly so as not to awaken the other girls whose tomorrow would likely include several confrontations with the Birmingham barrage balloons. Skirting death was becoming a constant, reflex-sharpening practice for every man and woman in ATA, but the terrors only heightened their desire for tougher assignments, some pilots now doing three complete round-trips a day; all perilous and often in once-only-tested machines. Tomorrow the Toland brothers would be ferrying a pair of Beauforts from a new shipment. Both men were fully recovered, and she smiled to herself at the thought of the two vicars in sheepskin boots, goggles and bomber jackets. One of them had shed his boots and his vestments and when he had taken her in this very room she had been terrified Mrs Bennell might burst in as he slowly peeled the cream blouse from her young shoulders.
‘What do you want with him, when you’ve got Balfour?’ Marion Harborne had shouted as they flew over Slough in an Anson on the way to Hawkers, with Amy in the rear. They had giggled at the fact that she always kept her parachute at the ready when another ATA pilot was in the cockpit. Angelique’s complicated personal life had become the focus of their chatter, while Amy had drifted into a sad daydream from which neither girl could hope to rouse her until they had reached the entrance to the Hurricane factory. The two Americans had fascinated the women pilots, not so much for their moonlighting as ministers but because their colleague had become, literally, a guardian angel to both men after their near-fatal ordeal. She had stood by when an enquiry had been held, and had comforted them in their typically backwoods bewilderment when Noel Slater’s behaviour had been excused by a distinctly anti-American Adjudicator.
Oscar Toland would be a friend for life but she knew Martin, with his tall, lanky figure and thick, curly brown hair would be her lover. He had taken her for coffee after the enquiry, and the smell of soap, which seemed to emanate from all the Yank men, excited her in a way she did not understand. She also knew Balfour had been beside himself with infatuation for her ever since their brief encounter in the ladies’ changing room during a VIP tour, and she hoped to play upon his fascination when word got about ATA that she was readily entertaining Toland the Ordinary.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ Martin had said, his gentle personality suddenly coming to life as he drew her to him and kissed the one breast he gently took into his left hand. His right hand somehow relieved her of the bottom half of her uniform and she half wanted him to stop, but now his warm, inviting mouth left not one inch of her flesh dry and still he stood, holding her like a giant ice lolly that melted but never shrank. He had placed her on the bed and as she watched his ridiculously long fingers release his strong body from the ATA uniform, she felt an urge to run down the dark, wooden stairs and go to work, naked, in Mrs Bennell’s scullery.
Now Angelique could sense the approach of the same phenomenon. As scenes of her childhood in opulent surroundings amongst obscure European royalty paraded, crammed within a six-second space of thought, Martin was now lying beside her, strangely quiet and controlled. Her royalty faded, and her childhood link with the approach of death disintegrated. She reached out for the ordained minister from Virginia, who at this moment was erect as the fires of Hell, and kissed his forehead. There was no possibility of retreating to the scullery, the expert
hands making her want to give everything up and perhaps do this for the rest of her life, his first entry into her churning newness like a killing during which she would weep and ask to be slain again …
It had left her with a baby.
Angelique found the entire situation amusing. Martin had come to her many times after that first encounter, which had lasted three hours until the sounds of pilots and beer and tea had begun to waft up to her room. As usual, it was Amy who had helped her smuggle Martin out of the girls’ wing of the boarding house while Mrs Bennell had been distracted by Jim’s drunken ravings. Now, standing at the window, Angelique worried about Amy.
Amy could only be happy when in the air, and Shirley’s new status as a ferry pilot had helped her fight off suicidal urges, brought on by the reality of Valerie’s enslavement to orgasm with someone of the opposite sex. It all seemed so idiotic, Angelique thought, returning to the bed. In the few minutes in which she had left its warmth, the mattress had become unwelcoming and she snuggled back under the covers as if to comfort the bed. She always thought of a bed as a he, not a she. Angelique had Catholic Jesus to comfort her, and Martin had Protestant Jesus to comfort him, but what could they offer, in this time of global hate, to comfort him?
Angelique could not sleep.
Tomorrow, and the days leading into 1941, would be so important for everyone: she would see Balfour again, Martin would ferry his new Beaufort with Oscar alongside in its imported twin, and Jo would travel with her to lobby London about poor Hana’s mother. Since arriving, Hana had thrown herself into ATA work, transporting up to three different aeroplanes a day. Ratusz had been just as tireless, his total lack of humour excused by all when he turned in chit after chit in every kind of weather, and in every kind of peril, be it anti-aircraft fire, balloons or simply a terrain completely alien to his experience.
And soon the Americans and Australians who wanted to help ATA would be arriving in force.
Beaverbrook had come under terrible criticism in the aviation press, but Angelique looked forward to meeting Edith Allam again. Imagine having a coloured boyfriend! It was something for which any English girl would be disowned by her family, her peers and the architects of her livelihood – in this case ATA.