The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Promise.’

  She watched him disappear, pushing his mop of hair back with one hand, before turning and blowing her a kiss. Then he was gone.

  Within a few minutes, Fred and Harold appeared. Her brother had travelled down by train. ‘We’ve been looking all over the place for you,’ Fred complained. ‘We couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Neither man had changed much — it was still an effort for Fred to do up his coat buttons — but Harold had had his hair trimmed and slicked back for the occasion, and wore a crumpled white shirt beneath his jacket and an uncharacteristic tie, albeit skewed. He seemed curiously shy to see her.

  ‘How are Alma and the kids?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re good. Good as gold. The kids did some drawings for you.’ He held out an envelope.

  ‘That’s lovely, Harold. Tell them thank you.’

  ‘They’re waiting for you to come out and wave,’ Fred said. ‘When you’ve finished feeding your face.’

  ‘I was hungry. I can get you something to eat if you like.’ She knew she looked odd, sitting alone in the stateroom at the long, solitary table, dressed in her suit and furs.

  ‘They’ve been waiting in the cold for hours,’ Fred said. ‘There’re little children out there. Half of them don’t have coats.’

  That was the note they started on, bad-tempered from the start, although her father was right. There were throngs of people, women shivering in cardigans, children barefoot, men with cigarettes clamped between their lips. But they wanted to see her. There were banners with her name held aloft, and small bunches of flowers being thrust at her, which she couldn’t take because of the huge bouquet that had now been placed in her arms. A brass band was playing, and coming along the street a pipe band was setting up in opposition. ‘It’s just like when the Duchess of York visited,’ someone said. Jean was afraid the woman might drop a curtsey.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ she called to Fred and Harold.

  A car and chauffeur were waiting to drive her to the Grand Hotel, although the car had to stop often because of the crush of people.

  As they drove away, Jean’s Gipsy Moth G-AARB was unloaded from the ship, ready to be reassembled. Later that day there would be a civic reception. She had lost sight of her father and brother. By the time she saw Fred again, Harold had left for home.

  There would be more receptions. Jean would stay in splendour at Government House in Wellington. The Prime Minister, George Forbes, would address the nation, and announce a gift of five hundred pounds to Miss Batten.

  In a few days, Nellie would arrive from England.

  CHAPTER 25

  AMONG THE HUNDREDS OF LETTERS AWAITING HER at the hotel was an angry one from Edward in the same vein as his telegram:

  I feel that I am part of a travelling circus. Can you imagine what it’s like on the floor of the Stock Exchange with one’s colleagues looking sideways at me? Our engagement has been announced, surely that was enough? The wings of love, indeed. Marriage is a private affair. I have no idea what you will say next to the press. If you are going to be one of these famous people, you should think carefully what you say, because others are always involved.

  She didn’t understand this reaction, although she had an idea that the wings from Savelli had caused Edward some discomfort. As if he doubted the manner in which she had obtained them, perhaps. Or it might simply have been that, now that her fame had spread, reporters had turned up at his untidy bachelor’s flat, looking for clues about their lives. The distance between them seemed immeasurable. She longed to end things with Edward immediately, but Charles Ulm would hardly thank her if she did. It wouldn’t do for him to think that one illicit night could claim her heart. She determined to put Charlie from her mind, and settle to being in love with Edward. Besides, the newspapers in Auckland were full of their engagement: OUR JEAN TO BE MARRIED. The tone of her reply was conciliatory. Darling, I will settle down. So much work to be done here, and I must see all the people who are expecting me. I will be paid for my lectures, and that will be useful when we are married. You don’t want a little wife who is always asking for pocket money, now do you?

  The rest of her mail was being answered by a secretary, offered her by the government. She sat and dictated letter after letter. Yes to that invitation, and that one and that. In all she would make nearly one hundred and fifty speeches, flying herself from place to place.

  One of the fuel tanks was taken out of G-AARB, so that Nellie, arrived from London, could fly with her from time to time, although mostly she found it too cold. In Auckland, she and Fred had resumed talking. ‘I suppose he thinks we’re rich now,’ she commented to Jean, but at least they weren’t at war with each other.

  An air force Moth was to accompany Jean around the country on a tour that would take six weeks. The first flight would take them to Blenheim, a good aerodrome to start from, with clear signals. And the Marlborough Aero Club’s first Moth had been presented to it by Viscount Wakefield. Before she left, she was made a life member of the club.

  Sheep roamed free on most of the aerodromes and it was important to phone ahead so that they could be cleared from the landing strip. Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ might well be her theme song, she thought, humming it to herself while she circled various airports as the last stray lamb was shooed away.

  In Invercargill, Nellie’s birthplace, six planes escorted her in over the town, Jean’s silver plane in the centre, red and yellow machines on either side, swooping over the green pasture, spread at the foot of the mountains, as they approached the town. People stood on roofs to get a better view. When the speeches were over, and there were many, she said, ‘Please, now show me the Theatre Royal.’ She stood in front of the old building and imagined Nellie, as a girl, playing the Fairy Queen. Then she turned and looked at the town, with the ornate water tower looming at its heart, and saw Nellie, in a pair of bloomers, flying along the wide streets on a bicycle. It made her laugh out loud. ‘My mother,’ she said, ‘was a bit of a character when she lived here.’ She supposed that a part of her own self, her identity, had begun here, with the wild tomboyish mother who had had dreams of her own and was now living them through her. It didn’t bear dwelling on too much.

  There were several buildings like the Theatre Royal, with balconies and colonnades and decorated ceilings, scattered through the country, in small towns that were often no more than specks on open plains. When she arrived, they were decorated with flowers and bunting in her honour. People paid one and sixpence a head to hear her speak, and the queues stretched outside the venues, just as they had for Pavlova. Jean gave speeches to aero clubs and women’s sports clubs, visited schools and hospitals. Where there were no aerodromes, she landed at the nearest airport and drove herself to and from more distant venues, day and night. When she got back to her hotel room, she spent a few minutes recording her impressions in her journal. She feared if she didn’t write everything down she would forget it all: the deserts, the camels, the wild rides over lonely seas, and now the long spines of land that made up her own country. New Zealand was like another universe, and sometimes it frightened her. In Hokitika, a man in the audience yelled, ‘What about the workers? None of us got five hundred pounds. Who do you think you are?’

  ‘Come and see me and I’ll buy you a pint afterwards,’ she shot back. She would have, too, but the mayor had a banquet arranged in the hotel.

  And at Westport, miners’ territory, she saw women wearing dresses made out of flour sacks, and children dressed in sugar bags. She wanted to explain that she had lived on sixpenny steak and onion pies in London, if she was lucky, that she knew what it was like to go to bed with nothing but a cup of tea for dinner, but it seemed like an exercise in futility. She made a donation at the maternity hospital ‘For the welfare of the mothers’.

  Wanganui, sheep grazing. Hawera, weather report available from the postmaster, prevailing winds westerly, more sheep grazing, a Maori haka of welcome. New Plymouth, gales frequent from the south-east,
the prediction true enough as the storm threw the plane up and down in violent gusts of wind.

  Late one night, driving by road to Paeroa, she came across a stranded motorist, a middle-aged man hunched over the bonnet of his car, torch in hand.

  ‘You all right, sir?’ she called.

  ‘Bloody oath I’m not — it’s as cold as a frog’s tit out here.’

  She got out of her car, walked over and peered into his engine. After tweaking a wire, she told him to turn the motor over. It spluttered uneasily.

  ‘Give me the crank handle.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Never mind. Just pass it over.’

  She cranked a couple of times and the car roared to life. As she got back into her car, the moon came out from behind a cloud. ‘You’re not …? Strewth, you’re her,’ he said. ‘You’re Jean Batten, aren’t you?’

  But she had gone, and the clouds moved back over the moon.

  In the morning she was due to go to Rotorua but a surge of tiredness overwhelmed her. Suddenly it was too much, and the idea of speaking and being welcomed again was more than she could bear. She rang Nellie in Auckland.

  ‘I’m going to fly back up and rest. Never mind Rotorua,’ she said.

  ‘Darling, you have to go, there’s a huge welcome laid on for you there. Guide Bella Papakura is going to meet you and take you onto the marae. It’s a huge honour.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t go to the meeting houses in Rotorua,’ Jean said.

  There was a silence down the phone. ‘You’ve done so well, my darling,’ Nellie said after a moment. ‘I think this is something you should try to do.’ Jean noted a dangerous edge to her mother’s voice. They were coming close to a quarrel. ‘For my sake,’ Nellie said, ‘I’d like our family to be honoured in that town.’

  ‘All right then,’ Jean said. ‘All right, Mother.’ For an instant she saw a small girl crouched in a hallway, while her parents tore each other apart.

  ‘Jean, don’t fly when you’re like this,’ Nellie said ‘You can catch a train down from where you are. I’ve checked it out.’

  Jean booked a first-class carriage, hoping to be alone, but a woman in a brown tweed suit, accompanied by a child, was already ensconced. ‘Good morning,’ the woman chirped, expectancy gleaming in her eyes.

  Jean inclined her head and turned away. Later, as they alighted from the train, the child said, ‘Who is that woman?’

  ‘Oh her,’ the mother said. ‘That’s Jean Batten. She flies aeroplanes.’ Her face was cold.

  Jean wanted to say, I don’t have to talk to everyone, I have to stop, I have to leave you all behind sometimes. But she could see it wouldn’t do. The woman wouldn’t have understood.

  By this time heavy rain was drenching the town. Jean was driven to the elegant new Blue Baths tearooms, faintly Mediterranean, in the Government Gardens. There she ate tiny cakes and cucumber sandwiches and tried to remember her walks through the park. Only the sulphuric smell of the earth’s gases was familiar. The rest was a cloud as dark as the sky outside. The house where she had lived with her parents had been demolished.

  ‘I’ve been looking at all the things I’m expected to remember, but I’m sorry to say that I don’t,’ she said in response to the civic welcome that awaited her. She felt ungracious and bad-tempered and shook herself, trying to be the Jean Batten the crowd was expecting. The woman in the train had cast a pall over her.

  She was greeted by Mita Taupopoki, the most famous chief in the district, held in high regard not just in New Zealand, but overseas as well. She was aware of the honour being accorded her. Taupopoki, wearing a kiwi-feather cloak and a taniko-bordered headband, chose to welcome her in Maori, while Bella Papakura translated. The famous guide was wearing a small hat, not unlike Jean’s, with a feather in it; her cloak was finely woven from flax.

  ‘You coming here reminds me of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith,’ Guide Bella said. ‘He came here and I greeted him. Do you know him?’

  ‘He’s my friend,’ Jean replied. Some warmth started to return, as if she had lost blood during the day, and was recovering.

  Taupopoki began to speak. ‘I knew your father,’ he said. ‘I never thought that one day I would be welcoming his little daughter to our marae, as the great jewel of the Pacific. You have come here in your flying waka through the skies. Your courage is our treasure, our taonga. In return, we have a gift for you.’

  The gift, an ancient greenstone tiki, was placed around her neck. In her reply, she paid tribute to the Polynesian navigators who had guided their waka through the water to New Zealand. The words came easily to her, and she felt a stirring within herself, some chord of belonging. Late at night, when she returned to the Prince’s Gate Hotel, a flautist, a pianist and a violinist were playing near the fire in the lounge. She closed her eyes, and saw her father, young, a touch flamboyant, entertaining the guests twenty years earlier.

  In the morning, the mayor brought a horse to the door of the hotel, and invited her to mount it and recreate Nellie’s journeys through the town. Jean and a group of riders set off towards the lake, just along the road. The rain from the previous day had cleared, and the water lay pale grey and mauve before her. Black swans glided past. She saw it all then. The lake in the summer and the water closing over her head, the sun dazzling her eyes as her father plucked her back, holding her above his head and laughing, the family walks, the nights when they sat in the baths together, all their skins touching. The day when the swans came after her. Harold. John, who was her best friend, and now seemed lost to her. The leaving. Always, the leaving.

  She was ready to go, too. The country had begun to fill her with melancholy. Back in Auckland, a visit to Madame Valeska’s studio had returned her to a world where she no longer belonged. Valeska told her that Freda Stark was performing in the chorus at His Majesty’s Theatre in an opera called Duchess of Danitz. ‘Her girlfriend’s the star — you could get to see her,’ Valeska said. ‘Thelma Trott, they’re a big number.’

  ‘Her girlfriend? Oh, Freda’s a good friend to have,’ Jean said. ‘She was good to me.’

  ‘Not that sort of girlfriend, darling. Freda’s in love. And Thelma’s husband Eric Mareo is the conductor of the orchestra.’

  ‘I think I’ll leave it,’ Jean said, nonplussed. ‘I’m glad she’s all right. If you see her, send love from me.’ Afterwards, she wondered if that had been the right thing to say.

  An invitation arrived from a Sydney publisher, asking if she would write an account of her three attempts at the record.

  ‘Me, a writer?’ she said to Nellie.

  ‘You could do it, darling.’

  ‘Something to do when I’m an old lady, perhaps.’

  ‘You’ll have forgotten by then.’

  ‘Well, I’ve kept all these journals. I suppose I could turn them into something,’ Jean said. ‘I’d need to get away somewhere quiet.’ Her determination to leave the country was growing.

  Something else happened a few nights after her return to the Grand Hotel. She had come down to the dining room, and there, beside the gilt-engraved post boxes in the foyer, stood Frank Norton. She recognised his bulky frame bundled up in a navy raincoat at once, even though his back was to her. For a moment, she wondered if she might slide past him without being seen, but he sensed her presence, and turned. His face was blotchy, and puffier than she remembered it. She let him speak first.

  ‘You know why I’m here,’ he said.

  ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she said. ‘It’s over, Frank. I told you that long ago.’

  ‘I don’t want you. Why would I? I’m getting married, Jean, that’s what. I need the money I lent you, a fresh start.’

  ‘You had plenty of money the last time I saw you.’

  ‘I didn’t. I gave it all to you.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ she said. ‘There’re reporters everywhere.’

  ‘Oh, that’s important to you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, you
just said you gave me the money. Make up your mind. Remember, you offered it to me.’

  ‘You’re twisting it, Jean. I lent you money for the flying lessons.’

  ‘You got what you wanted.’ She was aware that they were hissing at each other, and drew him away from reception, through the door into the unoccupied dining room. Serried ranks of silver glittered on the tables beneath the chandeliers. She saw Frank’s eyes widen as he remembered perhaps his days of officers’ messes and better times.

  ‘You’re a little tart if you think you’ve paid your debts.’

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ she said. ‘A tart without many choices.’

  ‘Five hundred quid,’ he said. ‘That’s what you owe me.’

  ‘Five hundred. You’re crazy.’

  ‘That’s what I came out of the air force with.’

  ‘Then think about where you chose to spend it, Frank. Five hundred pounds worth of lessons? No. Do the sums and go away. Now, before I call the porter and have you thrown out.’

  He turned on his heel without a word. When he had gone, she took the lift to her room.

  ‘What is it?’ Nellie asked. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Jean said. ‘I really want to go, Mother. I need to leave New Zealand.’ But Jean ended up telling her mother about the encounter with Frank, although there were parts she left out. The information was skilfully extracted the following morning, while Nellie was pouring her second cup of tea.

  ‘Back to London?’

  ‘Not London, not yet. I’ve been thinking about that book. I just need some quiet place where I can think.’ Jean put her fingers to her temples, her face pale and strained. ‘The publisher wants it soon. We could find a quiet place in Sydney, darling, you and me, and I’ll just dash off a chapter a week and drop it into the publisher. It’s pretty much all up here.’

  ‘But what about Edward?’

  What about Edward? Since she had left England, the thought of returning to him appealed to her less with every passing day. Edward, with the clutter of machinery in his bedroom, his pedantic manners and expectations of her wifely role, seemed appalling from this distance. Perhaps they could reform one another, but she doubted it.