The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘I could be father today,’ Harold said, laughing now.

  John and Jean had fallen silent. She saw the shadow of the swan’s wing again, lifted against the heavy clouded light, like a dark cape. When they got to the house, John ran in, calling out to their mother that Jean had been brave. But the house was quiet, and Nellie wasn’t there. The two younger children sat in silence in the front room until she returned, though neither could have explained the sense of dread they felt. Nothing more had happened, except that they had walked home and then Harold had left, and somehow this felt as if it were their fault. He stayed away until nearly midnight. Nellie came home but she and Fred were not speaking to each other. In the morning, their father took his strap to his eldest son, his strong arms coming down with thwacks that could be heard all over the house. Whether Harold’s misdemeanours were related to Nellie’s malaise was impossible to tell. The explosive word ‘frigging’ hovered in the air, but Jean didn’t know what it meant.

  Frigging. That was Harold’s problem. He’d been trying to frig around with housemaids at the Prince’s Gate Hotel. And him only thirteen, the manager said when he returned the Battens’ son to them. He didn’t know what the girls saw in the kid, the way they egged him on. Too cocky for his own good.

  Fred frigged around, too. Like father, like son, Nellie shouted. She had caught Fred frigging with a patient on the floor of his surgery on a Friday afternoon.

  ‘More services rendered?’ she said when they got home, her voice as bitter as aloe.

  Frigging was what got people into trouble, what broke families up. In time this is what would happen to them, in yet another town, Fred and Nellie living in different houses, Harold gone, disappeared abroad, taking his atlas with him. But by then, John would have gone, too. At least Jean and Nellie would be together.

  That is how it would be. Jean and Nellie.

  CHAPTER 3

  AT FIRST, THE FAMILY LIVED IN AUCKLAND, Rotorua firmly behind them. If Nellie missed the old life of horse riding and theatre, she didn’t say so. The Battens had stepped up in the world as Fred moved into the London Dental Institute to become a dental surgeon rather than just a plain dentist. They rented a house in Parnell, with a garden that had a large pepper tree at its centre. After they left Rotorua, for that brief time when Fred and Nellie still believed they could forgive and forget, Jean thought of herself as content. Nellie and Fred joined a rowing club again; the boys went to school. Her father made a swing for Jean, attaching it to the pepper tree. They were happy, they said. Happy. This is what families are. The past is just that, a place where we lived when we were young and foolish.

  Harold was enrolled at Auckland Grammar School, a great opportunity for him, his parents said. It was next best thing to a private school. Parents fought to have their sons enrolled there. It had a grand brand-new Spanish-mission-style reception area, and the school motto ‘Per Angusta ad Augusta’, which meant ‘Through Difficulties to Greatness’, appealed to Nellie in particular. Harold didn’t find school easy. Here, he would be understood, she was sure.

  Jean started school at Melmerley College, a private school for up-and-coming young ladies, housed in an enormous building in Parnell. She wore a navy blue gym-slip, black stockings and a wide straw boater hat kept on by an elastic band under her chin. She learns very quickly, her teachers told Nellie, noting in her first report how well organised Jean was, always having her pencils sharpened, and her desk neat as a pin. John, who was going to a state school, but would be enrolled at King’s College as soon as a place came up, was a Boy Scout now, and in the evenings when it got dark he would take Jean outside and show her how to signal Morse code with his torch. Short long, that’s A, three shorts, that’s an S and so through the alphabet; then he would flick a message out that might say, ‘Batten calling from Parnell’, his fingers flying so fast on the button that she couldn’t keep up with what he was doing. Over the weeks that followed, whenever John was out, she crept into his room and found his semaphore book, then studied it in her room. One night she asked John to lend her the torch. ‘Jean Batten here, Jean Batten calling from Auckland.’

  ‘How did you do that?’ he asked in wonder. When she didn’t reply, he grabbed the torch from her. ‘You monster, you’ve been in my room, haven’t you?’ And Jean, laughing and exultant, rolled away in the grass, crying, ‘Beat you.’

  John jumped up and ran into the house to tell his mother that Jean had been sneaking around, looking at his things. But when the crime was described to her, Nellie seemed pleased with Jean, not angry at all.

  Fred worried about the swing he had improvised in the back yard, suspended from the branch of the pepper tree. Jean swung higher and higher, becoming increasingly reckless. He implored her to let him replace the swing with something stronger, but she told him, ‘I’d rather use this one. It’s lighter, don’t you see, and the angle is just right.’

  When he appealed to Nellie, she said that Jean was a tomboy right now, and she thought she would continue whatever they said. Fred threatened to remove the swing, but Jean took little notice. The sensation of soaring towards the sky was so exhilarating that she couldn’t stop, even when she glanced down and the earth seemed a long way away. She simply waited until Fred was out of sight and resumed her aerial games.

  Still, in spite of her dismissive tone to Fred, Nellie kept an anxious eye out the kitchen window.

  There was talk of war in the air, but nobody believed it would happen.

  Fred still took part in army manoeuvres, on stints of duty for his Taranaki regiment, but what was happening in Europe was so far away from New Zealand, it was impossible to think that anything could make a difference in Auckland. Then the Austrian ruler, Archduke Ferdinand, and his wife were assassinated, and all of a sudden the torch was lit, the proclamation made. Britain was at war, and so was New Zealand. ‘There’s nothing for it,’ Nellie cried, her eyes blazing. ‘Of course we should follow the mother country.’ Fred was standing very tall by the breakfast table, his fists clenching and unclenching.

  Harold looked gleeful, as if he could already see himself on his way to fight, no matter that he was still a school boy. He and Auckland Grammar didn’t agree on much; in fact the school would be more than ready to see the back of him. Nothing they could put their finger on, just that he was a disruptive influence in every class, and he had a menacing tongue. Some of the boys were afraid of him, and the ones who weren’t came off worse when they did resort to fists.

  ‘Thank God,’ Nellie said suddenly, ‘none of you will have to go.’

  ‘What sort of talk is that?’ Fred said, shaking his head vigorously.

  ‘I mean …’ Nellie’s voice trailed away. ‘It’s all very well, war, isn’t it? But I couldn’t bear to think of you going away.’

  ‘I’ll have to,’ Fred said. ‘It’s duty, Nellie. One does one’s duty.’

  ‘You’re too old, Fred. Don’t you see?’

  Fred didn’t say a word, just turned and walked out the door.

  The city began to empty of young men. Troops dressed in khaki marched through the streets, hemmed in on either side by cheering crowds. Fred was thirty-five, and nobody expected him to join up. Don’t be ridiculous, Fred, Nellie repeated whenever the subject was mentioned. Fighting was for the young and fit. Still, Nellie watched him anxiously for any sign of a sudden move.

  For a while there was a run of young men getting their teeth fixed before they went overseas, paid for by their parents, or, more often than not, having all their teeth pulled and replaced with artificial ones so that they wouldn’t have trouble while they were away. Sometimes Jean was allowed into her father’s surgery when he was working in the evenings making dentures. The porcelain teeth sat in rows in small flat containers, gleaming like polished fingernails. Fred would pick them out delicately between tweezers, fixing them one after another into the gum that would fit inside someone’s mouth. Jean liked to touch them, imagining the smile that they would make. Or the bite. ‘Can yo
u make them sharp?’ she asked once, making both her parents laugh. After a while this work began to run out, as people gave their money to the war effort instead. There was a restlessness about her father, as if he would rather be anywhere but at the London Dental Institute in Queen Street. The first waves of men who had gone away were coming back now, arriving on hospital ships bearing the wounded and maimed, unrecognisable as the laughing boys who had left. Fred turned his face away, unable to look at them.

  ‘The Medical Corps are crying out for more hands,’ Fred said to Nellie, on one of these evenings when she had brought his dinner to the surgery, because he had had a sudden urgent order to fill, a rich woman who wanted new teeth before her daughter got married. It was 1916 and the war had already been in full swing for more than two years.

  ‘Fred, you can’t,’ Nellie said with exasperated patience. ‘Perhaps at the beginning of the war it might have been different.’

  ‘You told me then I was too old,’ Fred reminded her. ‘Everyone is getting older. I’m in good health.’

  ‘What would we do without you here?’

  ‘You’d manage,’ Fred said. ‘That’s what you’d do. You always have.’

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t that you just want to get away from us?’

  Jean stayed very still, waiting to hear the words she dreaded. Finally, Fred said, ‘Nellie, you know you want the children to have good educations. We can’t afford that. They’ll have to go to ordinary schools like everyone else. At least the army means regular pay.’

  ‘You’ve enlisted, haven’t you?’ Nellie said, her voice dull.

  When he agreed that, yes, this was so, she told him how much she loved him, that she didn’t know how her life would carry on if he didn’t come home. They seemed to have forgotten Jean standing there, as they folded their arms around each other, and Nellie wept. ‘Buck up, old girl,’ he muttered, bent over her shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right, you’ll be splendid.’ Then he put down the teeth he had been creating, little neat teeth. ‘Someone else can finish those,’ he said. He gathered Jean and Nellie together, locking the door of the surgery behind them. They walked down Queen Street, along the wharves, rank with the smell of fishing boats and noisy with sailors on leave, and home. In the morning, he packed his kit and left for camp. He was being seconded for duty with the 3rd Auckland Regiment, retaining his Territorial captain’s rank.

  Before he left New Zealand, Fred made arrangements for Harold to go to a boarding school in Wellington. It was for the best, they agreed, as they all saw Harold off on the night train that would bear him hundreds of miles away. A fresh start. John gripped Jean’s hand tightly, holding her back from the edge of the platform.

  When Harold was on board, Jean heard Nellie murmur, ‘A relief,’ but there was something shaky about her voice. Steam billowed in their faces as the train snorted, heaving into life. The whistle blew and the guard said, ‘Stand back, please.’ If Harold minded, he wasn’t showing it. ‘It’ll be a lark,’ he’d said. He didn’t wave back to them standing there on the platform, just stared straight ahead. In his shiny new Wellington College blazer, he looked young and vulnerable, his hair cut very short back and sides, like a plucked chicken. For a moment, Jean had an odd feeling of remorse, as if it were she who had sent her brother away. The family had begun on their separate ways.

  Next it was Fred leaving, only this time there were streamers to hold onto as the ship pulled out from the shore, and a brass band played, while the men on the decks of the ship tossed their lemon squeezers in the air. Nellie, who wore a particularly large navy hat, adorned with ostrich feathers, pulled the veil over her eyes.

  Mail arrived from the other side of the world, two letters from London, the other from ‘Somewhere in France’. Nellie had bought them some maps of their own, and John and Jean traced lines across the world, working out the location of the cities from where the letters were written. ‘All the way across the sea to Australia, and across the equator, right away up there,’ John said.

  Harold came home for the May school holidays, and joined in these searches, just as he had when they were small, his yearning to be far away as strong as ever. In his first months at his new school Harold had been writing home saying he hoped the war would last forever because soon he would be old enough to join up and he could put this b_____ school behind him.

  ‘I’m going to London some day,’ Jean said. Her brothers thought this funny.

  ‘I’m not going back to Wellington,’ Harold said to his mother one morning, when the time for him to leave drew close. ‘I told you I was going to join up.’

  ‘Stop that nonsense,’ Nellie said. ‘You’re too young.’

  ‘Too old, too young, that’s all you ever think about,’ Harold said, venom in his voice. ‘There’re kids in the trenches who are fifteen. I know, I’ve heard about it. One of the boys in my house has a cousin in England and he ran away to the war.’

  ‘Yes, and they would have caught him and sent him home,’ Nellie said.

  ‘Oh no they didn’t.’

  ‘I knew I’d have this trouble with you when your father went away,’ Nellie said, her face red with exasperation. ‘He’s hardly gone and you’re trouble. I don’t know how he ever expected me to keep control of you.’ She was standing at the kitchen bench, peeling potatoes. Her hand lifted, holding the knife, as if she were about to strike her son.

  ‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said. There was something about his face that reminded Jean of the day by the lake, when she had been challenged by the swan. She was eight now, and had forgotten about it until then, but the memory bubbled up unbidden.

  ‘Listen,’ Nellie said, as if exhausted with anger, even though they had been quarrelling for only a minute or so, ‘let’s all go down to the harbour this afternoon. We can look at the flying boats at the training school. They’re training pilots to serve with the Royal Flying Corps, you know. They’ll go to France, just like your father.’

  This seemed, temporarily, to appease Harold. The seaplanes and their pilots were a fast-growing Auckland legend. A youth called Malcolm MacGregor had made a name for himself doing crazy stunts and aerobatics, swooping low over the city’s buses and trains, as well as trying to knock the tops of church spires. He was known as ‘Mad Mac’. When interviewed, he said he was just letting off a bit of steam because he hadn’t been allowed to go to war on account of his age. Harold’s eyes lit up when he heard of these exploits.

  A dozen young men lived in rough huts and tents, between the bush and the water, flying from morning until night. Mac had gone off to war, of age now. The trainees, handpicked by the Walsh brothers who ran the school, dazzled and burned with risk and daring. When the Battens reached the water’s edge, they saw small seaplanes skimming across the water, showering spray behind them before rising into the sky. Like seagulls, Jean thought. The spindly flying boats flew back, circling the bay, sun gleaming on their wings.

  Jean stood on the tips of her toes. ‘I want to do that. Mother, I want to fly aeroplanes.’

  ‘Oh yes, darling, yes,’ Nellie cried. ‘You know how I’d like to do that, too.’ Her face was shining with excitement, the upset of the morning forgotten.

  ‘We can go flying together, you and me. I can drive the plane,’ Jean said.

  On the shoreline, a pilot was beckoning the two boys over to look inside his machine. They ran across the grass to where it was anchored.

  As Harold and John climbed into the cockpit Jean stamped her foot. The pilot saw her and called out, asking if the little girl wanted to look as well. When she ran forward he swung her up easily above his shoulder to join her brothers. She saw the shadowy recesses of the plane’s interior, noting the deep metal seat and the rudder bar, the control column and the instrument panel.

  ‘Is it hard to fly a plane?’ Jean asked.

  ‘Easy as riding a bike,’ he said, laughing.

  That night she dreamed of flying, and though often given to nightmares, rested easily, lifted in sle
ep into the blue blaze of a summer sky.

  Another letter came from Fred, this time just for Jean, bulkier than the ones that had come before. On opening it she found a bunch of wild blue violets pressed between its pages. ‘Do they really grow wild in the woods?’ she asked Nellie. She remembered the violets her mother had tended with care when they still had a garden. There was a garden of sorts where they lived now, a two-bedroom house at the rough end of St Georges Bay Road. It wasn’t big enough to contain all their furniture and some of it had to be sold. Nellie wept the day the piano went, not consoled by the good price it fetched at auction. At night, soldiers lurched down the road singing beery songs in ragged off-key bursts. There were houses where dim lights shone at night, even though they were supposed to be blacked out. When a drunken man banged on the Battens’ door one evening, lurching against the verandah post, Nellie said in a blistering tone that though women did have the right to choose what they did with their bodies she wasn’t one of them, thank you, and if the man wanted a disgusting illness, that was his business and may all his bits rot off. She slammed the door hard, and leaned against it. Then she saw Jean’s frightened face, heavy with startled sleep, in the passageway.

  ‘Get back to bed this instant,’ she cried, as if she were scolding. ‘Jean, go back to bed.’

  ‘I want Dad to come home,’ Jean said.

  In the morning this seemed like one of the bad dreams, the sight of her mother shaking from head to toe, collapsed against the wall. She caressed the violets her father had sent her, their slender stems dried out already and brittle, but when she held them to her face she was sure she detected some wild woody scent.

  HAROLD RAN AWAY FROM SCHOOL. In Wellington, he caught the north-bound night train, but somewhere along the way he had got off it. Nellie had gone straight to the police station with the constable who delivered the news. The police there had their hands full, they said. All these soldiers coming home and there was trouble of one sort or another everywhere. Did she think her son might have tried to join up? Of course, that was the first thing that had crossed her mind. She had to confess that. But, could they not, at least, ask the people at the railways if anyone had seen him? What if he had fallen from the train between the carriages, somewhere on the high central plateau, his body lying on the side of the tracks? By this time, at least a week had passed since his disappearance.