by Betty Beaty
‘They’re all as happy as sandboys in there.’ Joanna Trent reappeared quickly from the flight deck and grimaced. ‘A most sepulchral silence! You know, even I would boggle at keeping the jolly old conversational ball rolling with Prentice beside me. Poor Bill Maynard!’ She yawned. ‘Ah well, sooner him than me. And now I’ll take first turn off. Wake me if anything catastrophic happens. But if it’s just drinks or eats, you can cope, can’t you?’
Patsy said that she could.
All the same, time went by slowly. Several times she held up her watch to her ear to make sure it was still going. It was a strange thing to feel about an aircraft in full flight but everything was terribly quiet.
Gradually the magazine slipped from Patsy’s hand. Then she rested her elbow on the galley table. Then her head on that. And then she was away—a late starter perhaps, but now asleep like the rest of them.
A small movement in the galley wakened her. She was aware first of all that her arm was numb. Then, out of the corner of her eyes, just before she turned her head, she saw a blue sleeve with gold bars around it, and Patsy was immediately wide awake.
‘Here,’ said Captain Maynard, drawing a second cup of coffee from the urn behind Patsy. ‘I think you need one, too!’ He handed her the cup and smiled.
‘I’m awfully sorry, sir,? Patsy said. ‘I didn’t mean to go to sleep. I—’
‘Drink it while it’s hot.’ And then quite gently, ‘I don’t suppose there’s anyone flying who hasn’t slept when, they oughtn’t to have done.’
‘Except—’ Patsy began. She was going to say ‘Captain Prentice’ but she managed to stop herself.
As though he had finished her sentence for her, Captain Maynard’s quick smile turned a little sour. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. And then quite nicely again, ‘Still, I found you.’
‘Yes,’ Patsy said.
There was a companionable silence in which they both drained their coffee cups.
‘Biscuits?’ Patsy brought some of them out of the tin, and arranged them neatly on the plastic plate. Captain Maynard took one and munched it slowly.
‘D’you think you’ll like it?’ he asked, eyeing Patsy gravely. ‘Bit of a strain at first, isn’t it?’
Patsy said that it was, but she did like it. Very much.
‘Oh, yes. Once you get your supervision over and done with you’ll be well away.’ His face clouded over for a moment. His normally mobile mouth set in a thin line, as though he remembered that he, too, was under supervision.
He looked at his watch. ‘Time I was getting back up front.’ His face wore a half rueful, half quizzical expression. Somehow it conjured up for Patsy a vision of Captain Prentice waiting in the cockpit, stop-watch in hand.
She watched Captain Maynard go up the cabin, and through the flight deck door. Like Joanna Trent, she sympathized with him—sitting there so close to Prentice.
It was odd, she thought as she gazed abstractedly out of the porthole, that so young a man should yet belong to the Captains of the Old School. The clap-’em-in-irons variety. A spiritual brother of the Bloods and the Blighs. Bill Maynard was much easier to get on with, far more natural.
On the hour, she loaded up a tea-tray and took it up front. Bill Maynard was lying on the crew rest-compartment bunk. The navigator nodded at her. Otherwise, the sepulchral silence on which Miss Trent had commented seemed to be still going strong.
At the slight scrape of the tray on the throttle pedestal, a dark shadow of a head turned away from the gleaming green roundels of the instruments.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ Captain Prentice said, the tone of his voice implying his surprise at seeing her actually employed.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And how are the passengers?’
‘All sleeping, sir.’
‘Miss Trent sleeping, too?’
‘Well, she’s having a bit of a lie down.’
‘Good!’ He took the teapot and poured himself a cup. Deliberately, he poised a lump of sugar over the steaming liquid. ‘And how,’ he asked, ‘is the scenery at the back?’
‘No scenery now,’ she said stonily.
There was a pause. Then he said, ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Miss Aylmer. Look at that sky!’ He pointed through the windscreen at the dark clumps of Atlantic cumulus surrounding them, the stars flicking on and off as the cloud curtains covered or uncovered them, the ghostly blue-white tinge to the north of the Aurora Borealis. ‘What more could you want?’
Patsy said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, but in the end, he answered himself: ‘It’s new to you, of course. In time you’ll learn to appreciate that sort of scenery, too.’
Patsy still said nothing. He. looked back at the instruments, and then adjusted the automatic pilot. And taking this as a form of dismissal, Patsy removed herself from the presence to the opposite end of the aeroplane. An hour later, when she brought up another tray rather apprehensively, she was greatly relieved when Captain Prentice took no notice of either her or the tea.
On the whole, the second part of the night passed more quickly than the first. Patsy was just bringing some tea to a passenger who’d woken up, when she heard the engine noise grow softer, and she felt the nose dip down.
‘Only half an hour to New York,’ Joanna said jauntily to her.
But to Patsy, that seemed like two hours. She found herself mechanically helping in the galley and collecting the breakfast trays and chatting to the passengers. Yet all the time, the scene in the cabin was a blur, and the long-awaited first sight of New York airport was just a grey crystallization of that same feeling in her mind—four chimneys and two gasometers and the rain beating down on a conglomeration of criss-cross runways, stuck like a huge sticking-plaster patch on a sandy, windswept coastline.
Miss Trent shepherded her through Immigration and Customs, took her along to the accountant’s desk where she collected the buff envelope containing the eighty dollars which were to buy her meals for the next three days, bundled her into the waiting crew bus, and instead of pointing out the great cliff of skyscrapers, truncated by the low cloud, that suddenly came to meet them as they crossed the East River by the Queensboro bridge, let her sit quietly blinking in the back seat.
The two girls had rooms side by side on the twenty-fifth floor of the hotel on Lexington Avenue where the crews were accommodated. As Patsy fumbled with the key of 2561, Joanna Trent said kindly, ‘First time always takes it out of you, but you’ll get used to it. Have a good rest now, and we’ll go shopping tomorrow.’
Then the door of 2561 gave a welcoming click. Patsy walked into a cheerfully furnished room with chintz curtains on the window.
And there, over in the corner, like a prize she had come right across the Atlantic to collect, was a dainty divan bed covered in a pink chenille spread.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘Now,’ Joanna Trent said next day, as the two girls sat on Patsy’s central-heating radiator, gazing down at the busy length of Lexington Avenue, over two hundred and fifty feet below them, ‘the sixty-four-dollar question is ... how many dollars have you got left?’
It sat rather stiffly and primly like a stranger, as though it hadn’t quite got to know her head.
From her bag, Patsy took out the envelope she had been given at the airport. ‘I slept until past eight,’ she said. ‘Then I felt hungry and went to a restaurant for supper.’
‘Which restaurant?’
‘The one on the corner.’
Miss Trent gave a sigh. ‘And what did you have?’
‘Well, the waiter said the steak was nice—’
‘And the bill!’ Miss Trent said rather testily, as though she could bear the suspense no longer. ‘How much?’
‘It was twelve dollars and forty cents.’
Joanna Trent looked scandalized. ‘Say thirteen dollars with tax and tips. Or translated, your supper cost nearly seven pounds! Ah well, at least it solves the problem of where to have breakfast today. If you’re going to do any sh
opping at all, it’s the Automat for us. So get your coat.’
While Patsy went to the wardrobe, Joanna’s attention was caught by the busy race of bright-coloured cars below them, the taxis painted orange or black and white check, rushing up-town, and she said, ‘Everything’s so pulsating, isn’t it?’
‘Now just you see, we’ll catch it too. The crew start to come alive over here. I saw Bill Maynard yesterday, and he suggested a crew party in his suite tonight. Ready?’
Dispassionately, she surveyed Patsy in her oatmeal-coloured coat. ‘You look nice.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Nicer than in uniform, that is.’ And, after that enigmatic compliment, disappeared into her own room, and came out resplendent in military red.
The two girls walked side by side down the carpeted silent corridors. Everywhere Patsy found it a little more than comfortably warm. But outside there was a sharp blustery wind that waved the white clouds around the heads of the tall skyscrapers. New buildings seemed to be going up everywhere around them.
‘They change ’em like cars,’ Joanna said, following Patsy’s glance up a high Meccano-like structure of steel on which gangs of builders, their heads protected with brown helmets, were cheerfully working. ‘Next turning! Don’t cross the road till the lights are green. Or you’ll get mown down, believe you me!’
‘Wonderful shops,’ Patsy said, half lingering by a window display of beach-huts and bathing belles beside a big notice which said For Nassau.
‘Later ... if you’ve got the dollars.’ Joanna took her elbow firmly and hurried her past. ‘Now, here we are! Not bad, is it?’
She led Patsy into a wide cafeteria, where they picked up trays. All four walls were panelled with slot machines, divided into small square glass-fronted boxes.
‘Bacon,’ Joanna said, ‘sixty-five. Egg only twenty. The egg it is.’
They dropped their coins in the slots. Coffee, toast, egg and cereal, it was all provided by the little glass boxes.
‘There we are,’ said Joanna, banging her tray down on one of the tables. ‘Two dollars and quite a spread.’ She started arranging her little haul in front of her. ‘Of course, if you want to buy any presents, it’ll have to be lunch as well. And if you’re going to have your hair done, it may have to be supper, too.’ She sipped her coffee and murmured ‘Wonderful!’ and then went on. ‘There’s a salon in the hotel, you know, and it’s nice to have it done before the party.’
‘The one you mentioned earlier on?’
‘That’s right. You’re coming.’
‘But no one’s invited me.’ Patsy gave a shy little laugh ‘I can’t just go, and anyway I’d much rather—’
‘Much rather nothing .,. you’re coming. And of course no one invites you. It’s a crew party. Are you or aren’t you a member of the crew?’
Patsy admitted proudly that she was.
‘Besides which, take it from me, it’s the done thing to go. And it would look very bad; very unsociable, if you didn’t go. Why’—she polished off the rest of her toast—‘they’d begin to think you were the stand-offish type. No togetherness. No camaraderie. No—’
‘No more,’ Patsy laughed. ‘I’ll come.’
‘But of course,’ Joanna said. ‘Besides which—’ she was not to be cut short on such a valuable seam of one-sided conversation, ‘—that’s how you get to know people. And who,’ she asked, ‘would the men dance with, if we didn’t go?’
Half an hour later, they were happily riding the escalators of the New York stores. Joanna Trent was a mine of information on where to get the cheapest tights, the gadget for her mother’s kitchen that would just about make her a lady of leisure, and the dashing socks (she doubted if he’d ever wear them) for her father.
Then as though this was a day when everything went right, they got back to the hotel, went downstairs to the marble, glass and chromium hairdressing salon, and got their hair appointments right away.
Even here it was different from the small hairdresser’s at home, where for special occasions Patsy would sometimes have her hair shampooed and set. The salon was filled with ladies, all having their hair washed, and the air was filled with a constant murmur of voices, through which a thin thread of laughter seemed to run, handed around from chair to chair like an Olympic torch. There was the smell of shampoos and tonics and brilliantine and wet hair.
Then they went into another room, where another vast number of ladies were sitting under driers, most of them having their hands manicured at the same time. Joanna shook her head violently as she saw Patsy look rather longingly from her own kitchen to the pink-tinted trolley of pampering creams and lotions. ‘The earth,’ she whispered from under the drier. ‘It’ll cost the earth! A couple of lunches at least.’
And the hour and a half in the hairdresser’s was well spent. Patsy emerged feeling exactly in the mood for a party. She put on the new dress which she’d bought at the end of her first month with World-Span, and not too surely added the large gilt necklace which Joanna had declared was absolutely her in Macey’s.
At eight o’clock sharp, Joanna telephoned. ‘We might as well go in together, so if you start walking now for the elevator, I’ll meet you outside.’
Patsy gave a last look in the mirror, and then closed her room door behind her.
‘Captain Maynard’s got a suite on the seventh floor,’ Joanna told her, putting her finger impatiently on the lift button and keeping it there. ‘You’ve got to do that, otherwise they don’t bother,’ she said. ‘Oh, here it comes ... at last.’ She ignored the lift-boy’s dark stare. ‘Seventh,’ she said, and rustled inside after Patsy. Down and down they went, till they stopped with a jolt and the iron gates clanged open.
‘Here we are now. Turn right, I think. Yes, that’s it.’ She sighed enviously at the more luxurious carpet and the more delicate decor. ‘They always give the captains a super-duper suite. For morale and discipline. Makes it nice, though. Means there’s an extra sitting-room, when we want to have a get-together.’
‘Like tonight?’ Patsy said. She was feeling shy and nervous and was doing her best to conceal it from Joanna. She kept wondering if Captain Prentice would be there, and sincerely hoped that, if so, he would have a pleasanter, easier personality that he assumed for high days and holidays.
Joanna murmured, ‘That’s right,’ and then rapped smartly on the polished oak door. She hummed softly under her breath. ‘Just feel like dancing, don’t you?’
‘Then you’ve come to the right place.’ Captain Maynard swung open the door, and gave them each a little welcoming smile. ‘We were waiting for you two.’ Behind him there was a murmur of voices and laughter. Bill Maynard slipped an arm through each of theirs, and said, ‘Of course, you know all these types,’ moving them across the large luxuriously furnished sitting-room to where their own crew, and some others who were obviously World-Span too, were sitting talking.
‘Oh, I was forgetting,’ Captain Maynard gave Patsy’s arm a slight friendly squeeze, ‘you don’t.’ He bent his head nearer to hers. ‘It’s Patsy, isn’t it?’ and then as she nodded he waved to the group by the imitation fire, ‘Meet Patsy!’
Patsy wished herself a long way away, but Joanna moved in on the party as happily as a duck to water. She sat herself on the arm of the eastbound stewardess’s chair and said, ‘What’s new, Margot?’ and then drew a gossiping circle around the pair of them.
Patsy stood exactly where Bill Maynard had left her. Her own crew said ‘Hello, there!’ which she shyly echoed. The strangers looked at her and smiled and said they were glad to know her. But they weren’t getting to know her, Patsy thought wistfully, perching herself rather stiffly on a chair. She was suddenly frozen into an icicle of her own shyness. She tried hard to think of something interesting to say. Just as she thought of some simple sociable remark to make like ‘Have you been with World-Span long?’ or ‘This looks like being a very good party’ (which it didn’t) the intended recipient of such a remark would turn away and start a conversation of such in
credible technical complication with the man on the other side of him that Patsy would freeze even further into her shyness.
She wished that Bill Maynard would move back to her—he was telling someone or other about weather conditions on the way over—or that there was someone near her that she knew. She would even have welcomed the familiarly disapproving face of Captain Prentice. But either he was going to arrive late, or he wasn’t going to arrive at all.
‘You all right, Patsy?’ Joanna leaned back behind a crowd of men and waved at her. Joanna’s face was flushed with the heat of the room, and the sheer pleasure of non-stop talking and the warm climate of being among friends. It seemed to emphasize the coldness of her own little corner. In desperation, she drew a deep breath, glanced at the nearer of the two men sitting at her right, who were staring straight ahead of her in complete silence. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said with a courageous attempt at party gaiety, ‘to see New York for the first time.’
The young man removed the pipe from his mouth and, still staring at the identical spot on the opposite wall, said, ‘In that case I’d go into Rated Power, and start climbing out of the stuff.’ He turned for confirmation to the man who had obviously set this technical poser. ‘What did you do, Nick?’
And because there was no one else around, and because she hadn’t the courage to cross the carpeted floor and try to sit with the other girls, Patsy had to listen to the highly complex and arduous consequences that Nick had found himself involved in.
‘Why, there you are!’ Bill Maynard appeared suddenly. ‘Don’t let these two types monopolize you.’ The two men looked up, showed a fleeting surprise that Patsy’s chair was occupied at all, half smiled at Bill Maynard’s just assessment of their party prowess, and, as he led Patsy away towards a table laden with sandwiches and hamburgers and hot dogs, resumed their conversation.
‘I had these sent up from the Coffee Bar,’ Bill Maynard said, ‘and if I know anything about stewardesses on first trips to New York, you’re half starved.’ He grinned down at Patsy. ‘Here,’ he said, getting her a plate and a cup of coffee. ‘My turn to wait on you!’