The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

‘You don’t mind sharing with one of the kids,’ Alma said, more as a statement than a question, as she introduced the children who clung to her knees. There was another one in a cot. She eyed Jean’s canvas bag with some suspicion. ‘We’re not fancy here,’ she said. ‘We kill our own beef, there’s ripe plums on the tree if fruit’s what takes your fancy. And we share our bath water. No sneaking water. You can go down the road to the river if you want your own bath.’

  ‘I understand.’ Jean knew she was being tested to see how much she would accept without demurring, to see whether Harold should turn the truck around and take her back down the winding road.

  ‘She talks flash,’ Alma said to her husband. ‘She sounds like a Pommie.’

  Jean smiled at her. ‘I like it here. I’ve brought licorice all-sorts for the kids. And some cigarettes.’

  Alma’s face softened. ‘Ah, those won’t go amiss. I hear you play the piano.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jean agreed.

  ‘The folk down the road say you can tickle the ivories there if you want while you’re here,’ Alma said. ‘There’s a lot of Scots people round here. Most of them came via Nova Scotia. They had hard times. Then there’s the ones that followed their families out from the old country. They keep themselves to themselves until you get to know them. But they all like their music. They’ll take to you if you’re any good.’

  Her voice was drowned out by another reverberating roar. ‘Work to do,’ Harold said. ‘Morning until night. I’ll bet our mother wouldn’t have let you come up if she’d known what goes on here.’ His face cracked into another strange gleeful smile.

  ‘You’re right,’ Jean said. ‘Mother wasn’t so keen.’

  He looked at her curiously. ‘So why did she send you?’

  Jean busied herself with picking up her coat and bag as if to put them away. ‘She had some business to do with our father. It was his idea that I come.’

  ‘That figures. Tearing strips off each other as usual. So how is the old lady then?’

  ‘Don’t talk about our mother like that.’ Jean felt she was always defending one or other of her parents.

  They left it there. Jean helped Alma around the house, wiping the children’s snotty noses, rinsing out their handkerchiefs before she put them in the tub, scrubbing grass stains from their shorts. The food was as Alma had described it: meat with threads of yellow fat from beef cattle they killed on the farm, potatoes that were surprisingly sweet, fresh from the ground. It pleased Alma that the children followed Jean on her walks. These children were her nephews, her flesh and blood, not like the children at Birkdale that she had ignored. She taught them how to make whistles with blades of grass, stretching the blade between thumb and forefinger and blowing on them, the way Fred had shown her when she was a child, and to do cat’s cradle.

  This was how the summer passed, among the threadbare rocks, with occasional trips to the township and calls on the neighbours. On the far side of the town, the people took their religion with great seriousness. Harold and Alma didn’t visit there. Along the Caves road there was a mixture of families who drank beer and smoked and swore. Someone, although she couldn’t be sure who, because nobody ever said, had a whisky still: moonshine. The people spoke a mixture of English and half-remembered Gaelic, and late at night they sang. She didn’t understand the songs and didn’t offer to play their pianos. After one of these nights, they would drive back up the hill, Harold and Alma in the front, Jean and the children on the tray of the truck. Later, when she heard Harold’s rough shouts of lovemaking, Jean would roll over and put her fingers in her ears.

  It wasn’t until she was invited to the McLeans’ house, in the area known as North River, that she had the opportunity to play. This was a family known for its industry. Their daughter, Kathleen, was a quiet young woman, a little older than Jean, although she had vivacious, dark eyes in a tanned face, her body fine-boned and sinewy from working around the farm. She could have been a dancer, too, the way she carried herself.

  ‘Why don’t you stay the night?’ she said, late one afternoon. ‘We could play cards and have a bit of a singalong.’ Jean was caught up in Kathleen’s enthusiasm. Besides, it was a long walk back to the caves at this hour.

  After the meal, the family gathered around the piano. Jean played some Chopin to polite applause, then Kathleen and her parents took it in turns to play the piano and sing old songs from Scotland. They didn’t stay up late; there were cows to milk in the morning. Kathleen dropped into a deep sleep the moment her head hit the pillow. Jean lay under her eiderdown and listened to the even breathing in the other bed, and to the rustle of the North River night, to the sound of moreporks calling and pukeko in the swamp near the river. This was friendship of a different kind to any she had experienced, warmhearted and uncomplicated. She soon fell into a pattern of practising at the McLeans’ place, and staying overnight. On one of these visits she and Kathleen rode along North River Road towards the little township.

  As they came near to the house where the woman in black lived, Kathleen reined in her horse. ‘This is my Aunt Kitty’s place,’ she said. ‘We’re going to collect some butter. She’s famous for her butter.’

  ‘You mean the witch?’ Jean saw at once, by the look on her friend’s face, that she had said the wrong thing.

  ‘Kitty’s no witch,’ Kathleen said. ‘She simply prefers her own company. What’s the harm in that? You wait until you taste her lemonade.’

  When they arrived at the house, Kitty immediately came out on to the verandah, her face lighting up with pleasure at the sight of her niece, as she gestured for them to sit down.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ Kathleen said. ‘My aunt is a little deaf.’

  Jean found herself tongue-tied with embarrassment, having spoken as she had.

  ‘Jean wants to know why you live by yourself,’ Kathleen said, laughing at her friend’s red face.

  ‘Aha, everyone wants to know that. What did you say your name was, girlie?’ She put her hand behind her ear.

  ‘Jean Batten,’ Jean shouted.

  ‘No need to shout. I’m not in the habit of discussing my affairs with outsiders.’

  Jean dropped her head.

  The woman’s voice softened. ‘You’ve got a bonnie face, lass. It’s like this, you see.’ She paused to gather her thoughts. ‘When my parents died, Kathleen’s grandparents, you understand, I wasn’t of a mind to leave. I missed them a lot. I still do. We came from Gairloch in Scotland. You could say I never really got used to the ways of people here.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Jean felt that she was being honoured, despite the woman’s strangeness, or perhaps it was just reserve. The lemonade Kitty had given them was very good indeed, cool and freshly made.

  ‘You see,’ Kitty continued, ‘the months passed and then the years. I like the sea out there, and that big macrocarpa outside my bedroom window. I used to be able to hear it scratching at the window, but I can’t now. Still, I know it’s there.’

  When Kathleen had collected the butter, Kitty withdrew soundlessly, without bidding them goodbye, almost as if they hadn’t been there at all.

  Kathleen said quietly, as they rode on together, ‘In a funny sort of way, she’s my inspiration. I want to get married some day, but not until I’ve done my nursing training. When I look at her, I know it’s possible to be happy without rushing off and marrying the first person you meet.’

  ‘But she’s never married anyone,’ Jean protested.

  ‘I guess she just didn’t meet the right person. I’ll know when I do.’

  ONE DAY, NOT LONG BEFORE JEAN WAS DUE TO LEAVE, the children took her to see the mouth of the caves, picking their way through boulders, the bush hacked away around them. They weren’t allowed to go into the caves, they told her, just to show her where they were. In the side of the hill, the first cave arched over a shallow riverbed. To the children it was just a hole in the ground, and soon they ran off, chasing a rabbit with a stick. When they were out of sight,
Jean moved closer into the mouth of the cave. An unearthly stillness surrounded her. The interior was like a magnet, a darkness she wanted to enter. She shivered. Beside the river ran a ledge of rock. She crawled down the bank and stepped onto the ledge.

  Harold’s face appeared above her. ‘I told the kids not to go in there,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not one of the kids.’

  ‘You’re not to go in.’ He stood silhouetted against the sky, menacing above her. She drew a deep breath. Harold had got the better of her when she was a child but she decided on an impulse that it wasn’t going to happen now.

  ‘I’ll do what I like,’ she retorted.

  ‘Christ, wait for me then. I’ll get a light from the truck.’

  He came back in a few minutes, a torch in his hand. ‘You know you’re going to get wet through.’

  ‘I don’t care. I need to go in there.’

  So they knelt and crawled their way into the cave, and in a short while they came to a place where they could stand. In the total silence inside the earth, the darkness was lit by the glow worms’ million stabs of light, creating an eerie iridescence, the stalactites shedding a milky glow. They stood beside each other, brother and sister, almost touching, neither of them speaking. Harold’s breath was short in his chest.

  ‘I could die in a place like this,’ Jean said at last. ‘A field of stars, that’s what it is.’

  ‘You talk too much,’ was all he said. After a time they left the caves and emerged, back on the surface, blinking in the blinding light of day.

  ‘Show me how you blow things up,’ Jean said. Her cotton dress was steaming around her knees, drying out under the sun.

  This time Harold didn’t seem surprised, as if he expected her to ask this of him. At the quarry he showed her how the ground was dug out, the detonator put in place, the cordite fuse lit to snake its way through the grass until the gelignite was set alight.

  ‘Let me do it,’ she said.

  When the canyon resounded with the blast she’d made, she looked at him with blazing eyes. ‘That was marvellous,’ she said.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said, his tone quiet.

  ‘But you are, too. Mother says so. Mad as a snake, I heard her tell Dad that.’

  ‘We’re two of a kind then,’ he said. ‘Only you’re not supposed to be crazy, you’re the concert pianist. Why are you really here?’

  They were alone in the quarry, while down the hill the men boiled their billy for a brew of tea.

  ‘Mother’s selling my piano to raise enough money for us to go to England. Dad’s not so keen on it. He did pay for it. But, you know, I’m going to the Royal Conservatory of Music, so he can’t really complain. That’s what he wanted me to do.’

  ‘But you’re not going to do that, are you?’

  She hesitated a moment too long. ‘I want to fly aeroplanes,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to learn music any more.’

  ‘Flying, eh? You rotten little cow. You’re telling lies to the poor old sod.’ He seemed half-serious, half-amused. ‘I suppose our mother put you up to this?’

  ‘Why do you talk about Mother the way you do?’

  He shouted with laughter at this. ‘You don’t know? I’m the cause of all her troubles. The old man put her in the family way. She had to marry him.’

  Jean turned towards him, horrified. In the family way. Like Freda. Like Alma with him. ‘I don’t believe you. Mother’s not like that.’

  ‘Please yourself. Ask her. The great dramatic actress strutting the theatre boards and turning people’s heads wherever she went, up the duff. You’ll find out the truth some day. And what did she get out of it? She got me. The mad son.’

  ‘I was joking. About you being mad.’

  ‘But she wasn’t.’ His voice was filled with an old, weary sadness.

  ‘You won’t tell Dad, will you? About the flying.’

  ‘What’s it worth?’ Her back was against a rock face. He had moved close to her again, putting his hands on either side of her body, creating a barrier she couldn’t pass.

  ‘Harold, what are you doing?’

  His voice was hoarse and thick. ‘I like you, Jean.’

  ‘Of course.’ She tried to move away. ‘I’m your sister.’

  ‘You used to play mothers and fathers with little brother. Our brother the Fairy Queen.’

  ‘No. We dressed up, that was all.’ He held her against the rock with one arm, his other hand fumbling at her skirt. ‘No, Harold, please. Don’t do this to me.’

  His breath was hot against her mouth, his saliva acid as if he had inhaled the explosives they had been detonating.

  Then, when she had begun to fall beneath his weight, his body convulsed and arced backwards, spittle flying from the corners of his mouth. His eyes rolled upward in his head and he fell.

  She picked herself up and stepped away, watching with fascinated horror as his seizure abated. He was sitting on the ground, his face suffused with a plum-coloured glow. ‘That was a cracker,’ he said. ‘Lucky that one didn’t blow us right off the planet. You all right?’ He stretched out his hand for her to haul him to his feet, as if nothing unusual had passed between them. It was impossible to tell whether he believed that an explosion had caused him to fall, or his own failing, the ailment she suddenly understood. Somehow she felt safe from him now, that this wouldn’t happen again.

  When they returned to the house, Alma looked both of them up and down. Perhaps she imagined it, but Jean thought her eyes were searching for tell-tale signs of misdoing, as if she had been expecting all along that Harold would try to seduce her. She found herself smoothing her skirt, crumpled and dirty from the excursion into the cave.

  ‘I’ve been a bit crook,’ Harold said.

  ‘Ah.’ Alma turned her attention to him and nodded in a knowing way, as if satisfied all was well. ‘You’d better have a lie down,’ she said to her husband. ‘There’s a letter there for you,’ she told Jean.

  The letter was from Nellie: Jean was to hurry back to Auckland. Her mother had tickets on a ship leaving for Sydney in three days. From there they would join the liner Oriana and sail for England.

  In the evening, Harold took a battered book from a shelf in the kitchen. It was the old atlas that he and John used to pore over with Jean. He opened it and his finger traced a route from London across the world. Paris. Cyprus. Damascus. He murmured the words, caressing them. Babylon. ‘Do you know how Nebuchadnezzar built Babylon?’ she asked, hoping to impress him.

  He answered immediately, explaining how cylinders and tablets had been unearthed that told in the king’s own words how he had constructed the city, and his palace with its hanging gardens. Nebuchadnezzar and the bath house.

  ‘You remember the bath house when we were kids, Jean?’ he said.

  She lied to him, saying that she didn’t, she was too young to remember. She knew he didn’t believe her.

  When Harold took her to the bus the next morning, they stood on the side of the road. Summer had slunk behind a cloud, and the day had turned dull. They heard the bus approaching before it turned the corner. He took her by the shoulders. ‘You’re the only sister I’ve got.’ He released her and tapped his forehead with his finger. ‘I’ll get old and you’ll still be up here. You remember that when you go flying off in the sky.’

  CHAPTER 12

  AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL IN LONDON, JEAN AND NELLIE researched flying clubs. They decided, or rather Nellie did, that the London Aeroplane Club would be the most suitable to approach for Jean’s flying lessons. It was subsidised by the Air Ministry, which meant it was cheaper than others they looked at. The ministry was keen to train top pilots in case there was another war. Still, it was two pounds and ten shillings an hour for dual control instruction and one pound ten an hour to hire a plane for a solo flight. ‘How many lessons do you think I’ll need?’ Jean asked. ‘Oh, six or eight, I’d say,’ Nellie said, with an airiness that belied her anxiety.

  She had calculated many times on small n
otepads just how far her money would stretch. This was a time when a man was fortunate to earn five pounds a week. Fred was sending her an extra two pounds a week for Jean’s music lessons, over and above the regular three pounds. Jean gritted her teeth and expressed the hope that she would learn to fly very quickly ‘Deep breaths, Jean,’ Nellie said. ‘It doesn’t pay to think about it.’ Whether she was talking about the speed with which Jean could learn or their duplicity in regard to Fred’s allowance wasn’t clear. The Royal College of Music was a forbidden topic of conversation.

  The London Aeroplane Club had another thing in its favour: it welcomed women pilots. Some of them had already become famous. The exploits of Lady Sophie Mary Heath particularly dazzled Nellie. This woman had challenged an international requirement that women could not fly commercial flights because menstruation impaired their capabilities, and she’d won. Trust the Irish, Nellie said. The club was based at Stag Lane aerodrome, which lay among farmland, some ten miles from central London. It was the base for Sir Geoffrey de Havilland’s famous aircraft company: he had been building Gipsy Moths there for the past five years. The skyline was dominated by the company’s hangars and engineering workshops.

  As flying fields went, Jean already knew that Stag Lane had a reputation for being difficult. It sloped steeply from the road, forming a depression like a shallow basin. From the clubhouse, you couldn’t see an aeroplane landing because it was completely hidden in the dip. In winter, the whole field became waterlogged.

  As she and Nellie approached on foot, dressed in tweed suits and good brogues, luxuries purchased in Oxford Street, Jean looked around and shivered. ‘I suppose if I can fly off this aerodrome I can fly off any,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll need to if you’re going to fly across the world,’ Nellie said. ‘Come on, we haven’t come all this way for you to get your tail down now.’ For today’s journey, all they’d had to do was catch the underground train in central London and alight at Burnt Oak Station at the end of Edgware Road, the old Roman highway. It seemed almost too simple. A stone church slumbered between red brick houses with paling fences, quiet and suburban. Like Sunday afternoon in Auckland. But it was spring and oak leaves were unfurling. Daffodils shone in small gardens.