Walking on Air
Page 5
Lobbing his cap out of sight in the cockpit, Jonah shrugged out of his jacket and sat down. The pre-flight check routine was as automatic as breathing: getting out the charts, setting both the normal and back-up radio frequencies, followed by the altimeter. He was just completing the flight controls check for free movement when Vinny plonked himself into the copilot’s chair.
‘All OK out there.’ Vinny, like Jonah, clapped on his headset. ‘Might as well get ’em loaded. Anything for the hold, or is it hand luggage only?’
‘Just cabin bags.’ Jonah spoke into the radio, informing the terminal that the passengers could start boarding. ‘Apparently part of their initiative. Dress up in combat gear all day and have one set of civvies only. Minimal comfort – and a hell of a way to be spending the week, poor sods. Who’d be desk bound, eh?’
Vinny joined him in looking back across the tarmac, as their fifteen middle managers filed out through the pale blue morning, heading for the boarding steps, and gave a wry chuckle. ‘Put like that, maybe this old crate has her appeal.’
‘Please!’ Jonah raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ll hurt her feelings! What?’ He spoke into his mouthpiece to the ground handler on the tarmac. ‘Oh, yeah – sorry, Kev. No, I was talking to Vinny . . . Yeah, I’ve got ATC clearance to start the engines. OK with you?’
Kev, twelve feet below them, gave the thumbs up and unplugged the auxiliary power unit just as Pam popped her head into the cockpit. ‘All on board, seated and strapped. Miserable-looking bunch.’
Jonah laughed and started both engines, the propellers whirring rhythmically as he checked the fuel gauge, oil pressure and temperature on the console in front of him, while Vinny confirmed with Kev that the chocks were removed.
It was all as routine to Jonah as brushing his teeth, he thought as he radioed again to air-traffic control that everything was AOK and he was ready to taxi.
‘Received Golf Hotel Charlie Foxtrot,’ the air-traffic controller said merrily. ‘Cleared to left taxi way. Taxi out to holding point Bravo Two.’
‘Charlie Foxtrot received and understood.’
Once at the holding point Jonah turned the Shorts into the wind, running the engine up to full power and then letting it fade down again. Sweet music. He flicked the radio switch.
‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Jonah Sullivan and I am your captain.’ He always loved that bit. ‘My copilot today is Vinny Taylor, and your stewardess is Pam. The weather is calm and clear all the way to East Anglia and we will be climbing to a cruising height of eight thousand feet on our short journey to Norwich. We expect to arrive in approximately forty-five minutes. I hope you’ll enjoy your trip and thank you for travelling with Sullivanair.’
Vinny chuckled as they gained speed and taxied towards the runway. ‘You always make it sound like you’ve got a stand-by crew of thousands.’
‘One day, Vin. One day.’
Jonah could hear Pam doing the safety and emergency drill behind him and was pretty sure that none of the passengers would be listening. They never did.
‘Charlie Foxtrot,’ the air-traffic controller crackled in his headset, ‘cleared for takeoff.’
With a quick word to Pam to strap herself in, Jonah noted the traffic controller’s air pressure setting – the wind direction and speed – as he set the flaps and taxied to the end of the runway. Again turning into the wind, he put the brakes on, ran the engine up to ninety per cent power, released the brakes and immediately increased the engine thrust to full.
This moment of supreme roaring power, of speed, never failed to exhilarate him, and as the Shorts belted down the runway Jonah felt the thrill prickle his spine. Vinny, counting the airspeed to 130 knots, was grinning too. God, they were like kids!
‘Rotate!’ Vinny said sharply.
Jonah, exultant as always, pulled back on the stick and felt the Shorts slide smoothly away from the ground and glide upwards. Climbing quickly away from Whiteacres, Jonah passed the controls to Vinny while he turned on to his heading and put the flaps back.
‘Brilliant, though I say so myself,’ Jonah grinned.
‘I’ve seen better takeoffs in the babies’ class at the aeroclub.’ Vinny relaxed back in his seat as they reached their allotted altitude and reduced the engine power. ‘Now switch on to auto so we can have a cup of tea – I didn’t have time before I left home . . . Heavy weekend. I met her on Friday night. We didn’t get out of bed until this morning.
‘Really? What a surprise.’ Jonah flicked on the autopilot. ‘Anyone I know?’
‘Out of your league, mate.’
Jonah radioed Whiteacres control tower to confirm the Sullivanair’s destination, then set the second radio to Norwich ATC for their estimated time of arrival. He wasn’t sure he wanted to spend the forty-five minutes of the flight discussing Vinny’s love life, fascinating though it was. It always reminded him of the might-have-beens with Claire . . .
‘Two teas, well sugared for the nerves.’ Pam pushed her way into the cabin. ‘I didn’t bother with the peanuts.’
Four hours later, Jonah sealed his fate. Having safely dispatched his middle managers in Norwich and flown the return trip with no hitches, he’d driven home to his Whiteacres flat and kept his date with Barnaby Molton-Kusak.
‘The transportation’s a gift,’ Barnaby, sleek-haired, elegant and looking every inch the country squire, said as they shook hands in Jonah’s functional living room. ‘I’ll stand you the cost of the container age and shipping and temporary storage, as long as I can have a go with the old paintbrush – oh, and be up there on the inaugural flight.’
‘Anything,’ Jonah said fervently, staring at the array of photographs of the Boeing Stearman fanned out amongst the junk on his coffee table. ‘I just can’t believe it. It’s in amazingly good nick – although I’d have said yes even if I needed to reshape every rivet by hand. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.’
‘Crap.’ Barnaby’s cut-glass accent failed to hide the emotion. ‘I owe you one, Jo. I owe you a hell of a big one.’
Jonah shook his head. Reference to the way they’d met always embarrassed him. He’d only been doing his job. It could have been any pilot in charge of the Hercules carrier that flew the first released prisoners of war away from the Gulf. The Stearman, scruffy but in excellent condition, was Barnaby’s way of saying thank you.
‘If there’s ever anything you want,’ he’d said all those years ago, ‘anything I can do for you, Jonah, you only have to name it. . .
Jonah had shrugged. He and Claire had been happy then. There had been only one thing that he’d really wanted. ‘Find me a Boeing Stearman to buy and I’ll be your friend for life.’
It had been a joke. True, of course, but a joke nevertheless. He hadn’t expected to ever hear from Barnaby again. They’d kept in touch occasionally, but the phone call last month had been out of the blue. Barnaby, now in his forties and out of the RAF, had inherited the Molton-Kusak family fortune plus a minor stately home. He’d ploughed most of his money into breeding racehorses and had been on a bloodstock visit to the Kentucky Bluegrass country when he’d just happened to come across a retired Boeing Stearman which had been used as a crop-duster. He remembered the promise. Was Jonah still interested . . . ?
And the rest, Jonah thought with only a fleeting moment of panic about the size of the cheque he’d just given Barnaby, would be aviation history.
‘I wish I could stand the whole cost,’ Barnaby said. ‘Purchase price and all that. Sadly, being a racehorse owner and trying to maintain a house the size of Wembley Stadium that has galloping rot and no mod cons has rather eaten away the finances. Still, she was a good price, considering she’s still airworthy, wasn’t she?’
‘It was a brilliant price. And I still feel guilty about you paying for dismantling and crating it in the States, and shipping it over here.’
‘The least I could do. I’ll ring my boys in the States and get things moving. As soon as you’ve found a home for her she
could be docking at Southampton as soon as you like . . . and then you’ll have all the hard work of rebuilding and painting, won’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ Jonah’s eyes gleamed pleasurably at the prospect. ‘And the absolute bliss of flying her. So, have you got to belt off back to Derbyshire and the stately pile – or can I persuade you to stay overnight with me in squalor, and celebrate properly?’
‘Oh, I’m easily persuaded – and after all, there’s no one waiting for me at home, is there?’ Barnaby gave a fruity laugh. ‘And all this has given me a hell of an appetite. Is there anywhere in this neck of the woods that does a good lunch?’
Jonah flinched a bit, thinking of Whiteacres restricted culinary delights. Then he brightened. ‘The Dil Raj in Amberley Hill does food to die for – but if you’re looking for pub grub we could try Mulligan’s. It gets crowded, but it has a good menu and it’s pretty reasonable.’
‘Lead on, then.’ Barnaby slapped him chummily on the back. ‘I’d like to find a nice local pub. Somewhere I can flirt with the barmaids and bore people rigid with stories about flying and racehorses. After all, once you’ve got digs for the Boeing, I’ll probably be spending a lot of time round here, won’t I?’
Chapter Five
‘Billie – you’re cheating! That was a foul!’
‘It was not! It was a fair tackle. It was a – Ouch!’
‘It was a bloody foul! Under FIFA rules you’d have been sent off for that. Now what are you doing?’
‘Taking my ball and going home.’ Picking up the football, Billie brushed down the straw clinging to her knees and poked out her tongue. She wrinkled her nose. ‘And I’m telling Mum of you!’
Jon, her oldest brother, sat on the iron-hard rutted ground and shrugged. ‘See if I care. I’d got fed up with playing, anyhow. You’ve lost your edge – I reckon townie life is making you soft. You could tackle harder than Stuart Pearce before you went away.’
Grinning, Billie hauled him to his feet. Like all her brothers, he towered above her, was fair-haired, broad- shouldered, his face permanently tanned. And like all her brothers, he worked on the farm because he had never wanted to do anything else. Billie had never been treated by any of them as anything other than a younger, if slightly more dainty, male sibling.
Jon and Alex, both in their thirties, lived with their wives and assorted children in granite cottages across the yard: Ben and Tom, in their late twenties, still lived in the parental farmhouse. Well, at least Ben had, until he and Maria had whizzed off to the Caribbean to plight their troth. Now they’d be living in the stable flat. Another branch of the Pascoe dynasty well and truly established.
After being back in Devon for twenty-four hours, it was as if the years had been peeled away. Billie’s nails had broken off on the sacks of sheep feed; the carefully constructed wedding party hairdo had been reduced to a tufty knot on top of her head, and her silky smooth waxed legs had been permanently bared in a pair of ancient denim cut-offs.
Only two more days of this bliss and she’d be trekking back to Amberley Hill and a very uncertain future. She tried not to think about it.
‘You two get in here now!’ Faith Pascoe hurled open the kitchen window. ‘I’m not spending all day in this dratted kitchen cooking for half of Devon without any help. If you want to be having a party tonight, don’t you think you should be making some sort of input? And don’t you think you’re both a bit old for football?’
‘Yes, Mum. No, Mum.’
Jon and Billie exchanged guilty looks and then exploded with laughter. Mrs Pascoe shut the window with a crash.
‘Come on, then.’ Jon ruffled Billie’s hair. ‘We’d better pull our weight or we’ll be in the dog house all night. And you’ve been treated like Lady Muck for long enough.’
‘Crap.’ Billie eased off her trainers in the porch. ‘As the Prodigal, I expected nothing less.’
Since her arrival the previous day, and in between eating and drinking, helping out with the animals, and playing wild games of Subbuteo and Scalextrix, Billie had endured hefty bouts of parental cross-questioning. She’d managed to avoid anything too embarrassing, and had made her deciding to leave Reuben’s Cabs and lease a warehouse sound like she was now on a par with Nicola Horlick. It was obviously, she’d told them, the next sensible step to be thinking of setting up on her own. Her family, still not at all sure why she’d wanted to alienate herself from the West Country in the first place, couldn’t quite see the logic in the argument. Her mum had even looked anxious and had tried to ask Billie all about her new setup, and her reasons for leaving the taxi-driving, but Billie had said she didn’t want to think about work this weekend, and had refused to be drawn.
The farmhouse kitchen was in chaos. Every available surface was covered with food in some stage of preparation, and the various dogs and cats were hovering expectantly with wide eyes and lolling tongues. The Pascoes’ parties were legendary; and people were expected to start making their way across Dartmoor by mid-afternoon. Faith always seemed to cater for about a hundred more guests than necessary, and Billie, closely followed by Jon, swooped on a pile of freshly baked and still-steaming crusty rolls.
‘They’re for later.’ Faith slapped at their hands as she straightened up, puffing, from the bottom oven of the Aga, a proper solid-fuel battered cream monster which radiated constant warmth and delicious smells. ‘There are plenty of yesterday’s batch still in the bread crock.’
‘It’s not the same.’ Billie watched a dollop of thick yellow butter melt into the bread. ‘Oh, don’t be cruel, Mum. In forty-eight hours I’ll be back to prepackaged white sliced.’
‘You don’t have to be.’ Faith checked a hock of gammon simmering on the top plate, adding to the breathless heat. ‘You could stay here and have freshly baked rolls every day.’ She threw a gimlet glance at her son. ‘And where do you think you’re sloping off to?’
‘Home,’ Jon spluttered through a hastily crammed mouthful of hot roll. ‘Ann will want to be getting ready for the party. She’ll have my guts for garters if I leave the hens to her again.’
‘I thought you were going to stay and help?’
‘Nah. Billie can do that. I reckon she ought to get some practice in the kitchen. She’s no great shakes at football any more, so she really should learn to cook. She might, just might, even capture a man if she can offer him more than takeaway pizza. See you later.’
Typical, Billie thought, as her brother disappeared across the yard. Getting out while the going was good. She wandered to the window, clutching a second bread roll, savouring the smell. The view was as it had always been: two tractors in the corner, the Dutch barn piled with hay for the winter feeding, the stables, the hens and ducks skittering around amongst the remains of pigsties, which were now overgrown with Russian vine. Somewhere, Stan, her father, was yelling at the dogs as the heat haze rolled down from the moors, and the tors towered like benevolent grey ghosts on the skyline. It was all so lovely. So familiar.
She turned and looked hopefully at her mother. ‘Do you think Maria will wear her wedding dress for the party?’
Faith was surveying a mountain of cheese. ‘I think I might do a fondue. They always go down well, don’t you reckon? What? No, I shouldn’t think so. It looked like half a bikini and a net curtain in the video. Probably wonderful for the wedding – not so hot in Newton Abbot.’
Ben and Maria were due to arrive at the farm at any time. They’d been off doing the placating rounds of Maria’s relatives, who apparently hadn’t quite had the Pascoes’ equanimity about not being invited to the nuptials. Billie continued to gaze from the window and sighed happily, contented and secure. Right now, in the middle of all this wonderfully familiar family bustle, she felt she could stay here for ever. But she knew before long the claustrophobia would set in, as it had before, and she’d be missing the lights and noise of Amberley Hill, and her no-holds-barred conversations with Miranda. And, yes, oddly, even the challenge of doing something with the warehouse . . .
‘You could knock up a few salads, green, tomato and herb, mixed, pasta, whatever you fancy. Oh, and open that bottle of Baileys. We might as well have a drink while we work. No, don’t fuss with the little glasses – get the schooners. It’s only like milkshake, after all.’
Three milkshakes later, they were giggling immoderately.
‘Go on then.’ Faith leaned towards her daughter across the cluttered table. ‘Then what happened?’
‘Oh, um, nothing much . . .’ Billie back-pedalled. She’d been regaling her mother with graphic tales of Miranda’s varied love life and had just remembered how this particular encounter had ended. There were still some things far too racy for her mother’s ears. ‘Er – is that enough garlic in this one, do you reckon?’
‘Ample. It’ll keep the vampires away right up to the Tamar. Now, tell me to mind my own business, but while your friend is having all this fun, what about you? You always talk about Miranda’s men when you ring, but you never say anything about your own love life. Still no man on the horizon?’
‘None at all. Which suits me fine. Honest. Come on, Mum. Why do you want me to settle down? You’ve just acquired another daughter-in-law – and you certainly can’t want more grandchildren. Alex and Jon seem to be going for the world record.’
It was true. Ann and Katy, her established sisters-in-law, each had two children and were again both pregnant. Billie had picked her way through the chaos of their cottages, which already seemed awash with Pampers and toddler – meal cartons and discarded toys and surely far more mess than four children could possibly create, and was absolutely delighted to be single.
‘I don’t want you to marry, necessarily, or to have babies. Ann and Katy are joyously maternal – perhaps you’ll never be. I just want you to be happy with your life.’ Faith squinted at the depleted bottle of Baileys in surprise. ‘I’ve never understood why you left that nice job you had on the paper – and after you’d studied so hard. It all seemed a terrible waste to just throw it in and move to London for such a brief time. And then end up miles away driving a taxi. Your dad and I never really understood what went awry . . . I thought maybe it was a man when you left, but I was obviously wrong.’