‘Maria said you worked in Belgium for two years.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it . . .?’
‘As bad as they say? Yes.’
‘But they don’t say,’ said Mrs Henderson softly. ‘They come back, those men, those women, and they think they are protecting us by saying nothing. But we can see it in their faces and hear it in their screaming nightmares and we must say nothing, pretend we do not see.’
‘Keep a stiff upper lip,’ said Sophie. ‘Take it on the chin. Get on with life, man. All those things that men say. War is their great secret, even from themselves. If it wasn’t, they could not do it again and again.’
‘Like childbirth,’ said Mrs Henderson, and Sophie wondered if she smiled in the darkness. ‘That is a women’s secret. Impossible pain, and yet we do it again and again.’
‘I never have.’
‘I hope you will, one day.’
Sophie lay still, watching the blinking stars. She had never thought of contraception. She who had proudly ordered cartons of Mrs Stopes’s book for distribution at her factories. What if she had conceived . . . Was it only the night before? Surely not in just one night . . .
She would know in two or three weeks. Until then she would not think of it. Might not need to think of it. And there were jungles and storms and cyclones long before it might even be a possibility.
‘I thought I’d left the war behind,’ she said. ‘I think suddenly it has caught up with me again. I feel as if I have to do, but don’t know what.’
Mrs Henderson laughed. ‘I’d say flying towards England is doing something.’
‘I suppose it is. Almost as melodramatic as a war.’
Another laugh. ‘Wait till you see lightning rip the sky open, or feel your wings sag under snow. The sky can beat any man’s war for drama.’ She added quietly, ‘Every time the thunder batters I can feel that I’m with them, hear the shellfire they must have heard, pull up courage enough to keep my hands on the controls . . .’
You need another life, thought Sophie. I need one too.
At last she slept.
Dawn woke her; she was stiff and cold despite the coat. Mrs Henderson was already pouring the last of the petrol into the plane.
Another camp where the men obviously knew Mrs Henderson and her story, for they treated her with rough kindness, accepting her money, refuelling the plane and filling the jerry cans, brewing them tea so strong it almost dissolved the enamel mugs, sweetened with sugar that was almost an equal measure of sugar and bitter ants. They had been lugging great rolls of wire for the Overland Telegraph. ‘The natives cut it for fish hooks, or belts to carry their knives. It’s a job replacing it.’ The man who spoke had the far-off look of yet another who still lived in the land of war; he had taken this job, perhaps, for the silence.
‘Can’t blame them,’ he added. ‘It’s a bit like paying them rent, I reckon. But can’t say that to the money-wallahs down in Adelaide.’ He tipped his hat to Sophie politely, then fetched a large grey item that might have been a stone or a johnnycake cooked in the ashes. But Mrs Henderson ate it, so Sophie did the same. It satisfied the hunger, so was — probably — johnnycake, not rock.
They flew on, towards grey cloud mountains that turned purple and then black. The plane bucked like a frightened horse for half an hour, so badly that Sophie shut her eyes and dreamed of Nigel, Miss Lily, crumpets and honey, Maria, the river at Thuringa, the Shillings orchard, her whole life’s experience of love . . .
And suddenly they were down, not crashed but landed, in a paddock with a shed that looked as if it had been built to house a plane with wings that could be folded back, a Gypsy Moth F60.
And it had.
Chapter 47
When you are young you do not realise that you will love many times. When you are older you will know that no matter how many you love, one love cannot replace another.
Miss Lily, 1914
Two hours later Sophie was in a bed with sheets, her stomach filled with tough steak and dripping crisp roast potatoes and queen of puddings, none of which sat easily in a stomach that had been whirled as if in a vast copper with the laundry. But the pillow was soft, a breeze riffled the humidity and even the sudden tenor roar of rain that began as if a giant had clicked its fingers and stopped as abruptly could not stop her sleeping. She dreamed of men’s faces, men she loved. She had left men she had loved. Now she was going back to one.
She woke to a cup of tea in a china cup on a doily, the doily on a tray and the tray held by a maid in correct black uniform. ‘Breakfast is in half an hour, Miss Higgs. Will I bring your bath?’
She bathed, quickly, found the maid had washed her undergarments and even had them dried, as efficiently as her hostess the night before had provided her with a nightdress and toothbrush.
And now breakfast, on a sunny verandah with a view of a grey sea that looked unhappy about the clouds that swirled above. Three women sat at the table already, eating bacon and eggs and toast with guava jelly: Mrs Henderson, coatless, the pearls revealed as very fine indeed; Mrs MacIntosh, in her fifties too, perhaps, and whose acceptance of her friend’s unexpected appearance testified to their deep and long-standing connection; and a young woman Sophie’s age, perhaps, for her face consisted only of her eyes, blue but lashless, two holes for nostrils and a lipless mouth in place of red scar tissue. Other damage was perhaps hidden under her brown leather flying helmet.
Sophie forced herself to smile equally upon them all, and not to let her eyes linger.
‘Miss Higgs, do sit down,’ said Mrs MacIntosh. ‘This is Miss Eugenia Morrison, who will take you up to Calcutta in her seaplane.’
‘I can’t say how pleased I am to meet you —’ began Sophie.
‘Maybe I’ll take you.’ The young woman’s tone was both hoarse and graceless. ‘We have to establish the terms first. Your bloke in Sydney said you were the one who had to agree to them.’
‘Yes,’ said Sophie cautiously. Johnny Slithersole and Cousin Oswald had been given authority to pay whatever was necessary for this journey. What terms did this woman want?
The bright eyes in the shiny red face met hers. ‘This trip’s not going to be safe, or easy. In return — if we make it — I want to fly freight around the north, here and to the islands and New Guinea, and to Singapore too.’
‘Whatever you want me to pay —’
‘Not just money.’ The words were rudely abrupt. They were also, possibly, painful to speak with so much scar tissue. ‘I can’t run a company. Not looking like this. I can manage the flying side but I need a partner to do the . . . negotiating. That’s where you come in.’
‘All right,’ said Sophie. ‘I agree. Whatever you need. Money, manager, secretary and typist.’ She would possibly have agreed, from pity and sympathy, even if Miss Morrison had not offered an exchange. ‘Thank you,’ she added to the maid, as her own plate of bacon and eggs, plus grilled tomato, weeping pale red, was placed in front of her.
She took a mouthful, then glanced at Mrs Henderson, spreading jelly on toast thick enough to bridge a harbour. ‘I don’t suppose you two would care to run it together? Higgs Industries would be the silent financial partner.’
A pause. Mrs Henderson put down her toast. ‘A business? I have never thought . . .’
Women do not do business, thought Sophie. Even when their men had vanished to war or death.
‘They need air transport up here,’ said Miss Morrison gruffly. ‘Especially in the wet. Q.A.N.T.A.S. does well enough in Queensland and the outback, but we need a seaplane service for the coast and islands. Not just freight — medical supplies, food, a doctor.’
‘It would be a . . . valuable service,’ said Mrs Henderson, tasting the words. ‘Shall we discuss it when you return?’
Miss Morrison did not grin. Her scars obviously would not stretch enough for that. But her voice was an edge less angry when she said, ‘I’d better make it back safely then, hadn’t I?’
Sophie lifted her
teacup. ‘To safe journeys and returns. How did it happen?’ she added bluntly.
Silence hung like she had flung a curtain across the room. One did not ask questions like that, especially at a breakfast table, especially when one was a guest. Miss Lily would not have approved.
Or possibly she would. Because this woman’s wounds were ripping at the heart of each one of them, yet they were saying nothing.
Miss Morrison looked out at the sea. ‘I was a VAD. A plane came down — it was 1917, near Poitiers. I got the pilot out, then it exploded. I managed to get my arm across my eyes, which saved my sight. The pilot wasn’t so lucky. But he manages.’
‘You still hear from him?’
‘We married. He looks after the house; I pick up what work I can ferrying freight. Or people. But his face is even worse than mine, so he can’t front a business either.’
‘You call yourself Miss?’
A shrug. ‘I am myself. Why should I take a man’s name?’
The thought had never occurred to her. ‘Good point.’ She took more toast.
Another almost invisible grin from Miss Morrison. ‘No questions about our route? The dangers?’
Sophie matched her shrug. ‘You’re the expert. I’m the cargo. Would you pass the jelly, please? It looks delicious.’
Across the table Mrs Henderson was crying, silent tears of loss and hope she wiped away with a delicately embroidered handkerchief. Mrs MacIntosh took her hand.
Lives went on, thought Sophie, but only if you worked hard to make them do so.
Chapter 48
If travel had all the familiarity of home, there would be no point in travelling.
Miss Lily, 1902
The seaplane bobbed at its mooring.
Sophie hauled herself aboard and glanced around the interior. She calculated that the plane could seat six, although the rear area was now filled with boxes and what her nose told her were jerry cans of fuel wrapped in oilcloth. At least this plane had a cabin, wooden panelled with cushioned seats, and a basket of what might be lunch — or tools in case of a breakdown.
Miss Morrison nodded briefly, her scar twisted in perhaps a smile. She didn’t speak — Sophie was sure now that speech itself hurt. She wondered briefly about the communication between a husband and wife, both speechless, faceless, with only one who could see. It could either be distant, a matter of convenience for two outcasts. It might also be deeply close, a communication of touch of the whole body, man and woman coming together, as she and John . . .
The engine stirred, then roared, a far deeper note than the Gypsy Moth’s had been, cutting back the thought she had refused to think ever since that morning, that she had hoped not just to find him with her, but to go together from there to . . .
The plane surged forward in the water, erasing all but blue-green bubbles rising up the windows, and Sophie’s sudden terror that Miss Morrison might have decided to dive rather than fly, and end their lives in one dramatic downwards swoop.
Then all at once the nose was up, not down. They were above the water . . . no, down in it again . . . then with a waggle of wings firmly headed skywards, as bumpy a road as any paddock trail. The Moth’s erratic airborne swerves had seemed bird-like. Every time this more substantial plane lurched, she thought they would fall . . .
She glanced down to see a too-white strip of sand on one side, mud and mangroves on the other, the turbulent green sea. Australia was now behind her once again, further away with every second. The place she loved, where she belonged, and she was leaving not just because she had to, for Nigel’s sake and Jones’s, but because she could not bear to stay. Once more she needed to find another Sophie Higgs and knew she would not find her there.
And yet . . .
She was singing. At first she thought the engine’s roar drowned out her voice, then realised that there was a hum accompanying her, the music made by a mouth that could no longer sing.
‘Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountainside.
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.’
Now she had gone, John could return to his gate, knowing he need not face her, and her importuning him, again. No one in Australia truly needed her, as Nigel did, and Lily perhaps, if she could ever be found again, and Jones. Those who loved her could now come to England sometimes too.
‘But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow,
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,
It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow —
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!’
She no longer trusted love. It was too easy to love an image your own heart created, as she had with Malcolm, Angus, Dolphie, and yes, perhaps, with John too. Or had she simply loved the peace he gave her?
‘But come ye back when all the flowers are dying,
And I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.’
If she died on this journey or for some other reason did not return, perhaps John would carve a cross for her, if he forgave her, and forgave himself, for breaching the asceticism he had chosen.
‘And I shall hear, tho’ soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.’
But she would come back. Not to him, for that was not possible, but to her land, the river and its sunlight. When at last she slept in peace, it must be there.
Chapter 49
‘She is a lovely lady.’ Does that mean, literally, that she can be loved? I think so.
Miss Lily, 1914
Time passed. Nights and days under gunfire, shelling . . . nothing had prepared Sophie for the terror of sitting in a lurching, staggering box juggled by winds as the monsoon screamed around them.
Surely after the fiftieth lurch her body and mind would accept that this time she was not going to die as they plunged to the ocean below? But even the fifty-first time there was still a real possibility of death.
She did not want to die.
She did not want to fly either. But after the first landing near Surabaya, thirteen hundred miles from Darwin, and well within the limits it seemed of this strange craft, where they would refuel the next day after sleeping cramped in the bobbing plane, there was a choice of going on or going back. But going back meant flying too. Nor would her pride let her show cowardice in front of Miss Morrison.
They made Batavia the next day, once more sleeping in the plane to avoid having to hand over identification papers and go through port formalities. Singapore next, another eight hundred and sixty miles measured in lurches and terror as well as by the map, where she longed to say, ‘Let’s stay a week, in a proper bed after a wonderful scented bath.’
After Singapore they flew into the ground.
They had been staggering through a storm, Sophie’s eyes closed, for there was nothing to see but grey or black or driving rain, and if she kept them shut she might pretend that if she looked again there might be blue sky. She took the crash and shudder for yet another bolt of lightning, the first seconds of fall for what Miss Morrison had muttered was an ‘Air pocket,’ as if any pocket could be miles deep.
They kept on falling, lurched, drifted, Miss Morrison doing frantic hand movements on the controls.
And then they crashed.
Or landed, as the case might be, but this was a landing with the plane suspended in a tree and upside down, not right-side up in the sea. And rain still pelted all around them. She was conscious of that, for possibly three seconds, then blackness.
She woke to find herself on a stretcher in a hut. The rain had stopped, though the air still felt thick with moisture. Children with dark skin and long shorts peeped in at the door gi
ggling and then ran off. And then, impossibly, a woman with tanned but English skin, a faded flowered dress, sandals, and a voice that could cut ice. ‘Ah, Miss Higgs, feeling better now? The boys have nearly got your crate repaired.’
‘I . . . where are . . .?’
‘Luckily you landed near the Mission. Mrs Hartley Bentleigh.’ A firm handshake. ‘My husband is having so much fun. He was a chaplain in the war. Says it’s quite like old times again. He and the boys have mended the wing and carried the whole bird down to the lagoon. Miss Morrison says there is enough room to take off from there. A sporting lass, isn’t she?’
‘Er, quite.’
‘I’d offer you tea, but we’ve had no supplies since the rains began. I can offer you a glass of coconut milk. No? I suppose I should be checking you for concussion but I never was good at that kind of thing.’
‘No concussion.’ Which Sophie had enough experience to know was not true. She was nauseated and her head felt as if it would split and be welcome to do so. She did not even wish to know exactly where they had landed. ‘The ground’ was information enough. ‘Perhaps I might just rest until . . . until Miss Morrison is ready.’
‘Of course, my dear.’ Mrs Hartley Bentleigh strode out again, leaving Sophie to wonder if she had been a delusion.
And then she slept again.
They left the next morning with, miraculously, a break in the weather too. Sophie promised to send a cheque to the Mission (‘So good of you, my dear’) with a note in her pocket telling her exactly what denomination was required, and where the Mission was, information she did not have the strength to absorb just then.
They flew again.
Rangoon, where a blank-faced man of unknown race and magic hands worked on the engine while his companion laboured on the superstructure, and between them had the women flying again within a day. The rains and wind held off as they flew across the water to Calcutta.
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