The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Look out there,’ he said. ‘London. It feels as if it belongs to me, which isn’t the case I know, for it belongs to millions. But if you’ve had the good fortune to be Lord Mayor of a city so magnificent, it’s difficult not to feel proprietary. I feel as if every brick and stone, every tower and cathedral is in some way a part of me. See down below?’ And here he pointed out the window to the street. ‘Where this building stands was once the base for the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading organisations in the world. Elizabeth the First threw them out, because she was afraid England would be overrun by the Germans. Well, who knows, she might have had a point. It’s a street with a long history. But you know, sometimes I look out here and I think, this is mine, I own this same piece of land, and the thought makes me humble, that I’ve had so much of life’s riches. Sit down, Miss Batten.’

  He insisted on helping her to remove her coat, then pressed a bell on his desk. A woman appeared. ‘Please take Miss Batten’s coat for her,’ he said. ‘And bring us a nice hot cup of tea, and some milk and sugar lumps. I think some biscuits would go well, too. You like chocolate biscuits? Of course you do, all young creatures like chocolate biscuits, even when they say they don’t.’

  He studied her again. She was beginning to feel like one of de Havilland’s butterflies pinned to a wall.

  ‘I like your attitude. I will do whatever I can to assist you with this flight, Miss Batten. You’re not just the most beautiful aviator who has ever entered my door, but I think you have brains, and courage as well. Don’t look so startled. I’m an old man, my compliments are harmless. My wife and I weren’t blessed with children, but there are some fearless free spirits about who, from time to time, we like to think of as our offspring. Like good parents, we’ll help them as we can. You don’t need to worry yourself over the fuel. At each of my depots along your route, there will be Castrol available and, wherever possible, one of my agents to consult if you should run into difficulties.’

  He held up his hand to prevent her from speaking. ‘Just drink your tea. I could sit here and look at you all afternoon, just for the sheer pleasure of it, but I have another appointment in quarter of an hour.’

  As she was leaving, he said, ‘Forgive an old man’s impertinent question, but I see you’re wearing a ring? You’re to be married?’

  ‘I’ve met someone,’ she said, blushing.

  ‘I hope he appreciates you. Is he happy for you to make this flight?’

  Jean sighed. ‘I don’t think he finds my desire to fly across the world my most admirable trait.’

  Wakefield laughed out loud. ‘Think carefully about this proposal of his. You deserve a man of courage.’

  Edward had told her he loved her. He really did. How could he prove it except with the ring he had given her? Afterwards, she wondered why on earth she had accepted it. At least there was an announcement in the paper. She kept reminding herself of the importance of marriage.

  When he kissed her, she summoned up what she hoped passed for passion, as if she needed to find the conviction for both of them. She was twenty-four and feared that her lack of feeling was unnatural. Of his first wife, Edward spoke little, other than to say that she was a cold fish. Jean hoped the day wouldn’t come when he said the same of her. He placed his hard, long tongue inside her mouth and held her buttocks firmly in both hands as he pulled her towards him. ‘We should get married now,’ he said.

  ‘We hardly know each other,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll be ready to settle down when you’ve got things out of your system,’ he said.

  By things, she supposed he meant long-distance flying. There was an old familiar chime to this conversation.

  Nellie had been asking for advice about how to invest money. She had none, she admitted, but the time might come and she wanted to be prepared.

  On 21 April, two newspapers were alerted to the flight Jean was about to make. A small headline in one of them read: THE TRY AGAIN GIRL.

  CHAPTER 22

  1934. THEY LOADED THEMSELVES into Edward’s green Armstrong-Siddeley. As he opened the door for Nellie, her hand stealthily stroked the polished surface. She sat up very straight in the front beside Edward, her hat, even at this hour of the morning, tilted rakishly over one eyebrow. As he started the motor, he remarked that Jean’s mother seemed content for her daughter to disappear without trace. Jean caught a glimpse of Nellie’s face reflected in the side mirror and saw how it crumpled, the glint of unbidden tears. Nothing more was said on the drive to the Lympne airfield. Jean shivered inside her flying suit. It was hard to tell in the dark, but the edges of the road were becoming more difficult to discern, blurring in the headlights. The forecast was for fine weather but she had an uneasy feeling that it was wrong.

  When they had parked, Nellie said to Edward, as if out of nowhere, ‘That was unnecessary. What you said. Very cruel. My daughter is,’ and here she hesitated, ‘she’s my life. My whole life. Perhaps she’ll become yours, too. Or perhaps not.’

  Jean had cleared Customs the night before, so that nothing would hinder her departure. She carried with her eight small bags, each containing money in the currency of the countries she expected to land in on her way: guilders and rupees, francs and lira, and others. For months in advance she had compiled lists of the places she would fly over, schedules of petrol and oil depots around the world, tables of times for sunset and sunrise and the Greenwich time wherever she would be, the number of hours of daylight for each day’s flight.

  There was indeed mist over the field when they arrived, but the ground staff told her it was of no concern, just a light fog that would lift over the English Channel. In France the weather would be fine. The aerodrome officer, a man called Mr Dupe, said that he would leave all the lights on, and instructed her to fly towards the red light on the hangar building. This would give her a point of reference to take off. And to help even further, everyone would leave their car lights on.

  Edward saw her looking around her as if searching for someone. A man from Wakefield’s Castrol company appeared, and shook her hand, introducing himself.

  ‘You were hoping Wakefield might come,’ Edward said, with an edge in his voice. ‘Instead he’s sent his lackey.’

  ‘Ted,’ Jean said in a quiet voice she hoped nobody else could hear, ‘you came to say goodbye to me. Don’t let’s quarrel any more.’

  He nodded his head wearily. ‘I’m not much good in the mornings, am I? Something I’ll have to improve on when we’re married. I promise I’ll learn to do better.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘Good luck, old thing.’

  It was her mother’s turn now to embrace her. ‘Darling. Darling. I’ll be with you every mile, every moment of the way.’

  Mr Dupe, her mother, the man from the Wakefield company and Edward clustered together to form the farewell party, waving through the mist that had become as thick as paste, brushing long, wet tendrils in her face. All she could see was the smudged outline of the hangar. ‘Are you sure it’s not getting worse?’ she called to Mr Dupe.

  ‘Just keep your eye on that red light,’ he shouted back, ‘and lift her off.’ As if to reinforce his point, he called out again that the weather over France was beautiful. ‘Le ciel est bleu,’ he added in excruciating French.

  Taking off according to his instructions might have been easy, had the plane not being carrying sixty-one gallons of petrol. Fear snaked through her belly as she turned the plane to face the wind. Just before she opened the throttle, she heard Mr Dupe’s voice wailing in the distance for her to stop.

  The oil company representative came running over. ‘The lights seem to have all gone out,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask everyone to put them on again.’

  Jean switched the engine off and sat in the plane for several minutes. She was desperate to be on her way. The monsoon rains would soon arrive over Asia and the walls of water that sheeted down for months on end would obliterate her little plane.

  In a little while, Mr Dupe came back, shamefaced, to tell
her that all the lights were on, but the fog was now so dense that it was impossible to see them. The oil company man had gone off in a different direction and was lost altogether.

  ‘That fool,’ Jean said to Nellie, when they were back in the inn that afternoon. ‘I could have killed myself.’

  ‘Duped, indeed,’ Nellie said acidly, then laughed. ‘Darling girl, I’ll have you all to myself again until the weather clears. We’ll have a splendid dinner, roast lamb if they have some, as if we were in New Zealand, and lemon meringue pie for dessert.’

  Edward had been banished, or rather had banished himself, to the City where he was needed at the stock exchange. He promised to return when conditions improved, however long it took.

  ‘Would you like to be back in New Zealand?’ Jean asked. It was a question she had asked her mother many times, but the answer was always the same, that Nellie would rather be with Jean than anyone in the world, and those she had left behind in New Zealand were as nothing to her now.

  The delay in Lympne went on for days. She should, perhaps, have stopped then, waited another year, but she had waited long enough. She and Nellie picked bluebells in the damp woods, reminding them that a year had gone by since the first attempt.

  When the meteorological office at last issued a fair weather outlook, Jean set off again. The same retinue was there, minus Edward, because there wasn’t time for him to make it back to the aerodrome when the all-clear came. They waved until she could no longer see them, her mother’s face growing smaller and smaller into a tiny pale dot, not a person any more. She had forgiven Mr Dupe.

  And she was alone up there, and soon the English Channel lay beneath her, flecked ghostly white as the light of morning increased, and she felt the familiar exultant surge that always overtook her in the sky.

  THE WEATHER WAS CLEAR AND STILL, with a gentle following wind. The conditions were much as they had been on her first journey along this route.

  But this time, the weather turned as she neared Marseilles. Visibility worsened, and soon she was flying into thick fog over the south of France. Eight hours had elapsed. There was no question, this time, of flying on to Rome without refuelling.

  At the aerodrome, on the edge of Lake Berre, the ground staff told her more bad weather was forecast. The whole southern coast of France now lay shrouded in fog and Corsica was surrounded by an intense depression. When she asked if the weather was likely to improve the next day, the man in the meteorological office shook his head with sorrow. ‘It will get worse,’ he said.

  ‘Then I should get on my way as quickly as possible,’ she said, ‘and try to get ahead of it.’

  ‘Non, non.’ That was not possible, he said, with horror. She would surely die in any attempt at such folly. ‘Il fait mauvais temps,’ he said over and over again.

  She did some rapid calculations. Since the aerodrome was under water, it would be impossible to take off with a full load of petrol. Instead, she ordered that forty-five gallons be put in the machine, enough for about seven hours’ flying, and she should reach her destination in four to five hours.

  When she climbed into the cockpit, she shouted ‘Contact’ to the ground staff, but nobody moved. She looked at the impassive faces of the men on the ground below her. She understood that they were not going to help her. There was nothing for it, but to climb out and swing the propeller herself. At that point the meteorologist reappeared, carrying a piece of paper. It was, he explained, in halting English, a document she must sign to say that she had received the bad weather report and decided to carry on at her risk. He made a throat-cutting gesture and pointed at himself. She took the paper from him and, noting his distress, signed it in her neat round handwriting.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘Là. Don’t worry about this. I can turn back to Marseilles if the going gets too bad.’

  After an hour, as predicted, the weather did become worse. The fog was now so thick that she could not distinguish the coastline at all. Somewhere beneath her in the swirling mists lay the high mountain peaks of Corsica, but she couldn’t see them, didn’t know where they were. She saw herself caught in the trap, neither able to fly back to Marseilles nor in a direct line to Rome. In order to avoid the mountains, she now decided to fly south around the island and over the strait that lay between Corsica and Sardinia.

  That took time. When she next glanced at her watch she saw that the plane had made very little headway. The headwinds battered her with relentless force, so that she seemed almost at a standstill.

  Hours passed and the coast of Italy seemed further away. Then darkness overtook her. She passed the solitary glow of a lighthouse beam, and thought herself near to Italy, but realised there was still a long crossing over the sea ahead. At least the wind had dropped and the air felt calmer around her.

  Within the path of light, she noticed a line of ripples following her on the surface of the water, and understood in a flash that this was the wake of her propellers and that she was just a few feet above the sea. The petrol gauge was reading zero, but still she must climb upwards or drown. For a moment, she longed for Edward’s revolver. She found herself praying. God had seemed more absent than usual on this flight. To make sure there was no fuel left in her auxiliary tanks, Jean turned on both petrol tanks, pumping hard, holding the nose of the plane up until it nearly stalled, so that any fuel left would fall back towards the pump. The pump gripped once, twice, and she knew there must be a little petrol left. Enough perhaps, to carry her the last miles to Liguria, the airport in Rome, near the Tiber River. But perhaps not.

  She undid the laces of her shoes and the chin strap of her helmet, and loosened the buttons of her flying suit, so that she could slip these clothes off if she had to swim. A great calmness descended on her. Death might come soon, but that seemed insignificant now. Rather, the regret she was experiencing was for her mother, and for those who had trusted her. She deserved a watery death, but her mother did not deserve this, nor Lord Wakefield. She could not think at that moment of anyone else for whom she should feel responsible. Edward didn’t enter her mind.

  She banked to the right, and for a moment the engine spluttered and cut out, picked up again. Below her, she glimpsed the seaplane station of Ostia, and was tempted to drop her aircraft in the water there. But still the engine purred on and the lights of Rome were visible. If she were to follow the river, she must come to the airport.

  And then the engine died, with a cry like a small meowing cat, and the plane began its inevitable glide towards earth. In the dazzling city lights, she searched for a dark space clear of buildings and saw one ahead. She leaned out of the plane, flashing her torch to see the ground. A red light appeared high above her and disappeared. It was on a wireless mast directly ahead; she swerved quickly enough to avoid hitting it, but no sooner had she turned than another one appeared. Turning left, she steered between the two giant towers. She picked out a row of trees ahead, and there was just enough forward speed left to vault them and then this game of weaving and ducking was over and she collided at last with Rome.

  She touched her face and felt the sticky rush of blood.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, AFTER CONSULTING WITH THE ENGINEERS who would work on her machine, Jean found herself alone in the large hangar where the repairs were taking place. Because it was a Sunday, there was just a skeleton staff on hand. Nobody seemed to mind as she picked her way around piles of machinery parts. The miracle of her landing had been repeated over and again, of how her plane had landed fifteen feet in front of the trees and fifteen feet behind the high embankment of the Tiber. The close proximity of the Church of St Paul had not gone unnoticed. The men who found her had crossed themselves and said that it was certainly St Paul who had protected her and guided her to safety.

  She shivered then, and said to Jack Reason, ‘But they beheaded St Paul, didn’t they?’

  When Molly Reason told her, the day following the crash, she had already heard the bad news: there were no spare wings for her Moth anywhere in the country
. A propeller and other fittings had been located in Berlin, and two compression legs for the undercarriage in Turin, all of which could be delivered by airmail and train within a day or so, but it would take three weeks to build new wings. Her journey would be impossible before the monsoon rains set in. And that would be that, 1934 come and gone, another year without an attempt on the record.

  Jean leaned against a strut in the hangar. The hours since she had last slept were turning into days. Not wishing anyone to see her giving in to this despair, she straightened up and walked further on into the recesses of the hangar, where cobwebs abounded. She almost fell over as she bumped into an aeroplane, so covered with dust, and strewn with dangling wires, that at first she did not recognise it for what it was. But then her eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom. ‘A Gipsy Moth! It’s a Moth, don’t you see,’ she shouted out to the men further down the hangar.

  Someone came running. The men clustered around the crumbling machine, minus an engine. ‘The wings,’ she said. ‘I want the wings.’

  Jack Reason had followed the men, hearing the excitement.

  ‘Yes, it’s a Moth all right,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that belong to Signor Savelli? He flies on the Berlin-to-Rome service. But look at the terrible state it’s in.’

  ‘But it has wings,’ Jean said. She felt excitement bubbling up inside, like a crescendo.

  On closer inspection, the wings could be seen for the sorry objects they were, the fabric covering rotten and broken away, while various ribs were broken.

  ‘They could be reconditioned, couldn’t they? That shouldn’t take too long.’

  ‘But signorina, they belong to Signor Savelli,’ said Signor Chiesi, a Castrol agent who had been detailed to help her.

  ‘Well, find Signor Savelli and tell him I want them.’

  Signor Chiesi opened his hands in a wide gesture. ‘He should be in on the six o’clock run from Berlin. We can ask him.’