The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  The sergeant on duty said that yes, they could, at least, do that. In the meantime she should check the recruiting office. This wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Harold could have enlisted in any little town between Wellington and Auckland. Jean came home in the afternoon to find her mother standing in the parlour of the front room, white-faced. The sergeant stood with his notebook in his hand. Yes, he told her, the boy had been seen getting off the train soon after he left Wellington. The guard remembered him, because Harold had chatted to him, not long after the train left, although, as he recalled, the boy was fidgety. Harold told him he was eighteen, and reckoned he could do any man’s job — shovel coal, drive a jigger. Perhaps, he said, he could get a job on the railways. The guard had gone away to clip tickets and when he came back, after the next stop, Harold was gone.

  ‘Did you know what he was planning to do?’ Nellie demanded of John.

  John looked evasive. ‘Did you, or didn’t you?’ Nellie shouted, and to her daughter’s astonishment, began raining blows on her brother’s head. She was bigger and still much taller than John. John, the delicate dark boy who, it seemed, never caused anyone trouble. ‘Truth,’ she cried, ‘I want truth out of you.’

  John put his hands up to stop her. ‘He took some money from milk buckets when he was home in May. He told me they didn’t feed him properly down south.’

  ‘Did he just? Well, bigger fool anyone who leaves money lying around these days. What else?’

  John stood up, regarding his mother with his cool, beautiful eyes, seeming all of a sudden to be much older. ‘You didn’t notice he went down to the shipping office every day that he was here?’ he said. ‘I reckon he’s gone off to sea.’

  Nellie sank into the now-battered green armchair. ‘What will I tell your father?’

  ‘So what did you expect?’ John was talking like an adult, the man of the house, as if he were acting a role. He was fourteen but he had developed a certain elegance in his manner. Since the beginning of the year he had gone to King’s College. ‘You think Harold could become a lawyer or an accountant, Mother? You really think he’s that special?’

  Nellie rested her chin on her hand. ‘I thought that he might be able to make something of himself, that’s what I thought. If he tried.’ She corrected herself. ‘If we all tried hard enough. It’s this war, I suppose. Why didn’t you tell me, John?’

  ‘I wanted him to stay away.’

  ‘Oh you did, did you? Why was that?’

  John looked away, a child again. ‘He said nasty things.’

  ‘Nasty things. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words never hurt anyone. John, I thought better of you.’

  This, too, was a moment that marked change. Nellie and John’s relationship slid downhill after that. John, the traitor. Not that it was remarked on again, it was just that the closeness melted away between them, as if John might be as capable of misdeeds as Harold. Besides, Nellie couldn’t afford to keep him at his new school, and so he had the humiliation of returning to his old one. But then, neither could their mother go on paying for Jean at Melmerley. All round, it was a disaster. No news of Harold emerged. Nellie wrote to Fred, but as she said, he could hardly catch a boat home. When some weeks had passed, she decided that perhaps no news was good news. Harold was a big boy and strong. Somewhere, he was sure to be all right.

  SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENED.

  An extraordinary lead story in the Truth newspaper reported that a twenty-year-old Sydney student, described as looking very young for his age, had appeared in court on forgery charges. He called himself William Sanders but in the box he gave his name as Harold Batten. When arrested, he was found to be carrying several letters he had written to insurance companies, threatening and wheedling them for discharge documents from a merchant shipping company, in exchange for information about threats to blow up their ships.

  ‘I was just being silly the day I wrote those,’ the boy told the detective who interviewed him. ‘Someone did want me to blow up ships, but I wouldn’t do that; I’m British, you know. There’re lots of Germans here that you don’t know about. They’re always plotting to get people to blow up ships. You know, I just wrote those to let the insurance companies know.’

  At his lodgings the police found more letters, and plugs of gelignite, fuse and powder, as well as detonators, enough to blow a hole in the side of a ship.

  ‘It can’t be him,’ Nellie said. The police in Auckland didn’t seem to think so either, although nobody could be sure. ‘His name is Frederick, it’s only the family who call him Harold.’

  But the harm was done. The daily newspaper picked up the story and roaring headlines followed them. At Jean’s new school, the first thing the children asked the next day was whether she had a brother called Harold. She said she had a brother called John. Her face was set in a stony stare. Miss Stand-off, they called her. A boy asked in front of his mates if she were planning to run away to sea any time soon. Voices followed her around the school ground as she walked on her own. ‘Harold, Harold,’ they chanted. ‘Where are you, Harold?’

  She considered going to the swimming baths for the day, but if she did that she would miss the geography lessons that made sense of the maps she and John studied, the arithmetic she excelled in, and English, which always earned her the best marks in the class. If she learned what she needed to know, she decided, she would rescue herself, in time.

  Her teacher, a skinny older man with a hairless head, told Nellie, grudgingly, that her daughter had a gift, but there was no need for her to be forward. She shouldn’t get ideas above her station. Girls needed to be practical in their disciplines, and when it came to being top of the class it would do her no good at all if she let the boys see how clever she was. Besides, with trouble like theirs, it didn’t do to stand out.

  ‘We do not have troubles at home,’ Nellie said.

  ‘Oh, then please accept my apologies, Mrs Batten,’ the little man said, his eyes glittering with amusement.

  The truth was, they still didn’t know where Harold was. The scandal, real or imagined, wasn’t going away easily. The ‘case of Harold Batten’ rumbled on through the news for several weeks. The boy in Australia was now reported as having been born in Melbourne under a different name again. It didn’t seem possible that he was their Harold Batten. Nellie said that Jean must remember to refer to Harold as Frederick if she were ever asked about him.

  It was around then that Nellie began betting on the horses, going to the tote on her own, carrying a big bag with a brass buckle.

  CHAPTER 4

  JEAN LEARNED TO USE A COMPASS after her father returned from the war.

  The letters from Fred had continued to arrive in bursts from overseas. There would be long silences and then a flurry of his correspondence. Some contained descriptions of places he had visited, though little of the horrors he witnessed, just a passing reference now and then to ‘some poor devil with both his legs blown off’. He told them about Paris and the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, about the way the French drank wine and ate well even though food was scarce, but it was amazing what they could do with a snail or two, and food gathered from the countryside, about the lilac trees blooming, the little chimney pots on the roofs of the houses, the horse-chestnuts greening all along the vast length of the Champs-Elysées, the most beautiful avenue in the world, though by Jove he wouldn’t mind the sight of the oak trees along Symonds Street.

  Elysées was the French name for the Elysian Fields, he wrote, the place of the blessed dead in Greek mythology. This elicited a sharp snort of laughter from Nellie. ‘He needn’t give us the Greeks and French wine,’ she said. ‘We actually need more food of our own.’ All the same Nellie wrote steadfastly every week whether there had been a letter from Fred or not. ‘Although what have I got to tell him?’ she asked Jean one Sunday. Sunday was her day for writing letters: to Fred, and also to one of her two brothers still fighting overseas, and to her mother in Invercargill, failing in health and still longi
ng for ‘the old country’. Her mother had never got over homesickness, and now, Nellie said with a catch in her voice, she would never go home.

  ‘Nothing but gloom,’ Nellie continued, answering her own question. ‘Harold in trouble and nowhere to be found. John gone all peculiar on me, up and staying out late. And never enough money. No wonder Fred doesn’t write much. What can he say about our problems?’

  Jean stroked the side of her mother’s face. Nellie took her hand in hers. ‘I’ve got you, my darling,’ she said. ‘I write and tell Father every week what a good girl you are.’

  Then a letter came from London, not long after Armistice Day, full of endearments and news of Fred’s anticipated departure for New Zealand. He wished he was coming home for Christmas, but he thought it would take a bit longer than that. He couldn’t tell his dear wife how much he longed to see her. As Nellie read this letter to Jean and John, over breakfast, her eyes filled with tears and longing.

  ‘He’ll have to say goodbye to all his French girlfriends, won’t he?’ John said.

  ‘Don’t you say that about our dad,’ Jean said.

  ‘I think you’d better leave the table, John,’ his mother said, her face rigid, throat crimson.

  John, now sixteen, uncurled himself from his chair like a graceful cat. Jean would remember the way he carried himself then, the poise of his shoulders, the eloquent gestures of his hands. There were days she wanted to go after him when he left the house but somehow he had outgrown her, making her feel childish and small.

  Fred’s discharge didn’t arrive until early in January and it was April before he made it home on the Ionic. When he showed them his British War Medal and Victory Medal, Nellie’s face shone with pride. She softened and mellowed, made plans to help Fred restart his dental practice. He would go back to his old rooms and she would be his nurse. Fred had rented a house in Epsom for them all, a step up from their lodgings during the war.

  Fred’s trunk contained treasures that Jean seized on as they were unpacked. There were manuals about warfare and maps and a compass. She watched its needle slide this way and that. When her father explained that it showed the direction between one place and another, she demanded to be shown how it worked. ‘Why, little Mit, I think you’re serious,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to see about that.’

  He had bought a motorbike, and now he took her on his pillion for a ride into the bush on the edge of Auckland, equipping them with maps and a compass so they could determine their route. He showed her how to orientate a map, using the compass to work out a heading for their destination. And straightaway, it seemed, Jean had worked out that they must travel south-east from the Waitakeres if they were to get back to Epsom. ‘Amazing kid,’ Fred told Nellie on their return. ‘I can’t believe how well she got it. She understands navigation.’

  He took her on more expeditions in order to test his first impression of her skill. She never failed him. On the motorbike, her arms wrapped around her father’s waist, Jean had her first real sense that she was flying. The feel of the wind rushing past her face, the road uncurling beneath the tyres of the motorbike, made her so happy that she never wanted to let go. Her heart, pressed against Fred’s back, waltzed with the pleasure of his nearness.

  That same year, 1919, news came through that two men had crossed the Atlantic in a plane. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown had taken fewer than sixteen hours to fly from Newfoundland to Ireland, in a former wartime bomber modified to carry enough fuel for a long-distance flight. It was June, summertime in the Northern Hemisphere.

  ‘Hurrah, for Jack and Teddy,’ Nellie cried, brandishing a newspaper at dinner as rain pelted against the windows and damp seeped under the eaves. A flickering gas fire added little warmth.

  ‘You don’t know them, Nell.’ Fred’s tone was caustic.

  ‘That’s what everyone calls them,’ she said. ‘Oh my goodness, they’ve won ten thousand pounds. Can you imagine it? And the King has given them knighthoods. They’re heroes.’

  ‘They crashed their plane in Ireland. Hit a bog in Galway. They just got lucky,’ Fred said.

  ‘What’s eating you, Fred? They’re brave, they served in the air force in the war. Alcock was taken prisoner.’

  ‘People did what they had to in the war,’ he said, sounding weary and a trifle defensive.

  When he and Jean were next in the Waitakere Ranges, plotting their way back to Auckland, Jean said, ‘Did you see the planes fly in the war, Dad?’ They were deep in bush, along a gravel track near one of the waterfalls, a cavalcade of water prancing on dark rock.

  ‘Of course I saw them,’ Fred said. ‘They were all around and above us.’

  ‘I love planes,’ Jean said.

  ‘I know you do. But aeroplanes fall out of the sky. I saw that, too. I saw flames overtake them, and men spin out of them like flies on fire, and when we picked them up, there was nothing left of them, just teeth and bones and the rags of their clothes And the smell of what was left of them.’

  Jean was silent.

  ‘I’m sorry. You’re too young to know about such things. Just don’t think about aeroplanes.’

  ‘I can’t help it.’

  ‘You mean your mother can’t help it. We all have our weaknesses. Now come on, concentrate on what you’re doing, or we’ll have to spend the night in the bush.’ A shock of wind was jostling the trees around them. Dusk was closing in. Between the branches of tall trees and the tangle of ferns, Jean could see the light leaking out of the sky. ‘There are bats out here,’ said Fred, ‘and you’ll get flying lessons if you run into them.’

  Nellie was no less excited when, that same year, Australian brothers Ross and Keith Smith, with two other men, flew from England to Australia for the first time, over twenty-eight days. One hundred and thirty-five hours in the air all told. Nellie was ecstatic when she read these items aloud to Jean. ‘Oh, it’s really possible,’ she cried. ‘Imagine, flying all that way from one side of the world to another. Wouldn’t you like to do that, Jean?’ She held her arms out as if they were wings and bobbed from side to side.

  This was in December. Nine days later, John Alcock, the Atlantic flier, was dead. His latest plane had crashed in France, near Rouen.

  Fred didn’t say anything when Nellie announced the news in a subdued voice. Still, it was nearly Christmas, and it was agreed there would be turkey and plum pudding with threepences. The war was over. They were all safe. The world would go on.

  None of this rediscovered domesticity would last for long.

  First, a letter arrived for Fred, addressed in unusual handwriting, postmarked Paris. The letter had been sent care of army headquarters and forwarded to Fred at their new address. Nellie was at home on a Saturday morning with Jean when it arrived. She put down a sock she was darning, held the letter up to her nose and sniffed, then put it down quickly, as if it might burn her hand.

  ‘Dad’s friends are writing to him from France,’ Jean said excitedly. ‘That’s nice, Mother. Isn’t it nice?’

  ‘You seem to have mail from a friend in France,’ Nellie said when Fred came home, and Jean knew that somehow this wasn’t nice after all.

  Fred stood looking sheepish in the hallway.

  ‘Well, Fred, aren’t you going to open it?’

  ‘After dinner,’ he said, pocketing the letter.

  ‘After dinner,’ she mocked. ‘After the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. After the apple sponge. Then what? Something a little decadent, perhaps.’

  ‘You’re being silly, Nellie. We New Zealanders made a lot of friends in France.’

  ‘Oh, friends. Well, we all want to share your French friendships. Could we have a reading over dessert then? We could all write letters from New Zealand to your new French friends. Who knows, they might want to come and visit us.’

  Fred picked up the hat he had laid on the chair and walked back out without saying a word.

  ‘Fred Batten, you come right back here,’ Nellie shouted, racing to the door and calling into
the night.

  Fred didn’t return until after midnight. Jean knew, because she lay awake listening for him. In the morning, the house was quiet and Nellie was red-eyed and shiny-nosed, but on Monday morning, Fred dressed with his usual care. Over breakfast, he asked his wife if she would be joining him at the surgery. If she didn’t intend coming in, he’d like to know because he would have to make other arrangements. When she said that yes, of course she would be in, Jean could feel the relief in the room. John had been kicking the leg of the table, and pretending to read a book. A Shakespearean play, Jean thought. She had an idea his class was studying Macbeth.

  Life continued quietly for some months. No more letters arrived for Fred. Nellie had stopped going to the races, a pastime Fred disapproved of. Sometimes she seemed heavy in her movements, but Fred acted more or less as if nothing had happened. He took Jean out on his motorbike and spared nothing to make her smile. When there were silences between him and Nellie, Jean found something to fill them, rushing to tell them about her school day, what she had learned in geography, her favourite subject.

  John had become more withdrawn and took little part in these conversations. His age, Nellie would sigh, if Fred mentioned the boy’s silences. The company of his drama group preoccupied John, and when Jean talked volubly at the table, he was inclined to cast his eyes towards the ceiling and start mouthing in silence, as if he were reciting. When Fred asked him about his day, John was as likely to tell his father that he wouldn’t understand. As if Fred was at best ill-educated or, at worst, an idiot. Talking down, Fred said one night, fury in his voice.