The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘You shouldn’t have stopped flying.’

  ‘Your government decreed it,’ Jean said.

  He paused, his stomach rumbling, while he cleared his brain. ‘Oh yes, that Nazi fellow, of course.’

  ‘Only he wasn’t, as it turned out.’ She turned the stem of her glass around in her fingers, before placing it on a side table. ‘That’s life, I suppose, always half-full.’

  Churchill blew a long stream of cigar smoke towards the window. ‘We couldn’t be too careful in those days.’

  ‘I think I should be going now, Prime Minister. If you’ll excuse me.’

  ‘Well, we can talk about it another day,’ he said.

  His wife had remained seated at the table while this exchange took place.

  She looked anxious. ‘Winston, that’s enough. Jean, you’ll come back and see us again, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, I expect so, some day,’ Jean said, her voice deliberately vague.

  Jean had seen Garbo at Cap d’Ail. She had glimpsed, one day, a woman sitting alone at a table in an outdoor cafe, smoking a cigarette, a glass of rosé in her hand, seemingly unguarded. A large hat shaded her face, and she wore dark glasses. But Jean knew. She had studied the angle of the woman’s head, a certain way of turning it, for so many years, that she knew she wasn’t mistaken. Garbo had not worked throughout the war and there had been rumours about where her sympathies lay — unfounded, as it had turned out, just as they had been about Jean. She hadn’t worked since then, and in this, too, Jean saw herself as a kindred spirit. Garbo knew the work that had gone before was its own statement.

  Jean hovered, wondering if she might approach the star. Garbo moved uneasily, as if she felt eyes on her, the aura of self-containment about to be undone. Jean understood then, that what she had seen was enough. They were connected, even if the actress did not know it, never would.

  Sooner or later she knew that she and Nellie would have to stop moving and find a home. Jean wanted a place that was quiet, somewhere where she didn’t have to make an effort any more.

  Nellie was now in her eighties and a decision about a home couldn’t be delayed much longer. It came about quite suddenly. They were in a small fishing village called Los Boliches in the south of Spain. The houses were white on the hillsides and the twin bays as blue as any they had ever seen, even in the Caribbean. Nellie caught a chill, despite the warmth of the sun. A doctor was called, who suggested bed rest for a week or two. She recovered quickly, but their weeks in the village stretched into months, and before they knew it, they had found the perfect villa on a hillside and bought it.

  They called it La Paloma. The name was suitably Spanish and, Nellie claimed, it was the song Fred was playing in the room next door while she gave birth to Jean. She spoke of Fred more often, of late, and with a fondness that appeared to overlook their parting. Jean didn’t always respond warmly when Nellie’s memory stretched back into the past.

  ‘Remember how happy we were in Rotorua? I can still see you climbing that gate and setting off down the street. You were a determined little creature even then. And Fred coming home and lighting his pipe while I prepared the dinner, and all five of us sitting round the table.’

  ‘I’m happy now,’ Jean said.

  ‘I know, I know, dear. I was just saying.’

  ‘How happy we were in Rotorua. Well, perhaps, but I was too young to remember much. Thank goodness we’re in a place where nobody knows us now. That makes me happy. No one can find us.’

  They may have believed they were the only people to have discovered the village, but soon others came. Tourists filled the streets and the villas on the hillsides began to fall into British hands. Jean found herself glancing behind her, as if someone might tap her on the shoulder, say her name. It was time to go again. They sold La Paloma, and all their possessions except for their clothes, and some battered suitcases containing documents and old newspaper clippings, then set forth for a holiday in Morocco.

  From there the car was shipped to the Canary Islands. They decided that this was where they might stay, on Tenerife, a place that seemed remote and too difficult of access to attract any but the most dedicated traveller. They liked the wild and varied nature of the landscape, the mountains and the ravines below, and the steady climate. The Island of Eternal Spring — warmth all year round, without excessive heat. The population had dwindled during the Spanish Civil War, as thousands of its inhabitants had fled, and parts of the island seemed virtually uninhabited.

  In the village of San Marcos, Jean found rooms for them to stay in while they searched for another perfect home. There was a tiny kitchen, and a toilet outside. The main room was airy and white-walled, furnished with two beds that served as couches during the day, a gate-legged table and two upright chairs standing near the window. Behind the house stood a volcanic mountain, and before them lay the sea, lapping against a shell-shaped beach of black sand.

  Nellie would turn ninety in three months’ time. Her movements had become slower. When Jean suggested a walk Nellie would agree, on condition that it be short. If they were to do more travelling, they must keep fit, Jean would remind her mother.

  Nellie said to her one day, ‘Darling, I think I’m going downhill a bit.’

  ‘Of course you’re not,’ Jean cried. ‘You’re just not eating enough.’

  Nellie folded her hands in her lap, and didn’t reply.

  Jean looked at her mother, her thin frame supporting shoulders that had become slight. She took up her basket and set off for the markets, choosing freshly caught parrot fish, oranges and green beans. When she returned to the room, where Nellie still sat in the same position, Jean steamed the delicate seafood and the beans, and sliced an orange.

  ‘Come on,’ she coaxed, ‘eat up, darling.’

  To please her, Nellie sat at the table Jean had laid and decorated with a small vase of white daisies. She picked at the food, and murmured, ‘Delicious.’ After a few mouthfuls, she put her fork down. ‘I’m sorry, darling. That’s all I can eat for now.’

  She didn’t eat the next day, or the day after. ‘I’m going for the doctor,’ Jean said.

  ‘I don’t want you to leave me,’ Nellie whispered, ‘not just now.’ She had dressed that morning, with Jean’s help, putting on a grey silk dress and a cardigan, even though it was midsummer.

  ‘I’ll ask the landlady to call him,’ Jean said firmly.

  She left the room for a few minutes and returned to find Nellie standing at the window, her face towards the sea. She turned to Jean, her eyes glazing, as she began to fall. Jean rushed forward to catch her, holding her tightly as she guided her towards a couch, where Nellie collapsed. ‘Mother, don’t leave me, darling,’ Jean implored.

  Nellie murmured, ‘Now none of that or you’ll make me feel unhappy.’

  And then she was gone.

  The Spanish doctor, who had been called, pushed open the door, walked over, closed Nellie’s eyes and crossed himself.

  ‘She’s not dead,’ Jean cried frantically.

  ‘Her spirit is moving away from us. Talk to her for a little while, perhaps she’s still listening to you,’ the doctor said. ‘Let her hear that you are releasing her in a joyful way.’

  JEAN HAD NOW TO FIND A PLACE TO BURY NELLIE. She turned to the vice-consul in Puerto de la Cruz, some distance away. ‘It must be Protestant,’ she said.

  He suggested the Anglican cemetery there — very old, very respectable, he said. Jean prepared her mother for burial. She ordered a mahogany coffin, lined with glass and padded with mauve satin and, when the time came, lifted her mother’s seemingly weightless body, and placed her in it. How, she wondered, had she not noticed how tiny Nellie had become?

  As she asked, a white hearse took Nellie to the All Saints Church, a simple stone building. Jean stood alone at the front. The vice-consul and the vicar’s wife arrived for the service, but when they saw Jean, her manner warned them that she didn’t want company. They stood at the back. An organist played ‘
The King of Love My Shepherd Is’, and the vicar, as Jean had discussed with him, delivered a eulogy. The casket was placed in a niche in a wall, so that, if she wished, Jean could take it with her if she left Tenerife.

  When the service was over, the vicar suggested she might like to return to the vicarage where his wife would make some tea. Jean gave him a withering look and turned on her heel.

  Later, she returned to see the vicar and apologised. ‘Mother’s service was beautiful,’ she said, ‘just what I wanted. But I had to be on my own, you understand?’

  When he said, gently, that he did, she explained that she planned never to leave Tenerife without Nellie.

  Soon she would buy a tiny apartment in Puerto de la Cruz, a small desperate act of self-preservation, before grief overtook her, like an illness.

  Melancholy was how Churchill might have described it. She had heard how Diana Churchill had committed suicide, some years before. Now she, herself, was fighting to stay alive, but she didn’t have a name for this continuous sadness. She slept black, dreamless sleeps, eating when she remembered, walked endlessly when she finally dragged herself from bed, and visited the wall where Nellie’s coffin had been placed each day. ‘I love you, darling,’ she would whisper.

  After a time she did begin to dream again. Slowly, at first. There was a morning she woke up and thought she smelled sulphur, heard mud bubbling in the ground. Another night, towards morning, she was woken by a dream she had to fight to remember. She saw vaguely the depth of caves, a woman in black. The next night, it was the scent of wild strawberries. She put the light on to see if her hands were stained with juice. This seemed better. She rose early and went to the markets, a basket over her arm to collect fruit.

  Sometimes people tried to speak to her, but she would turn away.

  She began to dream more often of Kitty, the woman in the house near the caves, and wished she had returned to see her again. She was, surely, long dead. Jean would have liked to talk to her about solitude. She imagined the morning light, by which the old woman could decide how to spend her day, whether to lie in bed a little longer, or go to the verandah and listen to the cicadas in the grass, the sound of the birds or, in the winter, to listen to the sweet singing rain on the tin roof of the old house, creaking near the sea. Then she remembered Kitty’s deafness. But I still know it’s there, she had said of the sighing macrocarpa.

  As she knew Nellie’s bones were close, she wanted to stay near them. If she stayed there long enough she believed, sooner or later, her mother’s face would come back to her, too. For now, it escaped her.

  Tenerife would be her home for the next sixteen years broken, in time, by forays back into the world. But these were still a long way off.

  CHAPTER 35

  FRED WROTE TO JEAN AND ASKED HER TO COME HOME. It was his last letter before his death, a year after Nellie’s. John wrote and offered her a home with him. He had stayed in New Zealand until Fred died, but now he was going back to England. Jean didn’t reply.

  This was the pattern of her days. She would eat breakfast, put on a large hat and leave the apartment to walk the town, or into the hills, have an early meal at a café where she usually read a newspaper, and then retire home to bed. Apart from regular haircuts, and laundry that kept her clothes spotless, her appearance didn’t concern her much. Sometimes she read books, but the words soon blurred and lost their meaning.

  Jean wondered if she were dying, too. It was the dreams that persuaded her that she wasn’t. There was light in them now, even though her days appeared dark. Three years had passed: it was 1969. On an impulse, she booked herself a flight to London, and made an appointment with a Harley Street specialist. After a thorough check, he told her she was in perfect health, her body more like that of a woman half her age. He listened with patience when she described the shadowy life she was living in Tenerife, the way her hands sat in her lap some days and she didn’t know what they were doing there and who they belonged to, the way she woke each day with a sense of hope behind her eyelids, and how it disappeared the moment she opened them.

  ‘That is grief,’ he said. ‘One day, you’ll wake up and your mother’s death will seem a little further removed. There will come a morning when it’s not the first thing you think about.’

  ‘How can you be sure of that?’

  ‘It’s true that some people die of grief, usually because they take their own lives, or neglect themselves so badly that they perish.’ His voice was measured and kind. ‘But, Miss Batten, you’ve come to see me, which suggests that deep down you want to survive. You’ve had a great deal of practice at surviving the odds, wouldn’t you agree?’

  He talked to her at length, prescribed some medication and made another appointment for her to visit him. He was sure, he said, that she would come back to London.

  On her return to Tenerife, almost on cue, an invitation arrived for Jean. British Petroleum and the Royal Aero Club were planning to commemorate the anniversary of Ross and Keith Smith’s first England-to-Australia flight, fifty years earlier. Would she like to start the race at Gatwick, with yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester?

  Requests had arrived from time to time through the circuitous Barclay’s Bank address that she now used. She had sent routine brief notes of thanks and a refusal. But that morning, as she ate breakfast on her balcony, something stirred inside her. In her bedroom, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. It was a long time since she had studied herself. The woman who looked back at her now was sixty years old, and small lines had developed around her eyes. The dark hair was streaked with grey. This was the face of a woman who had been noted for her beauty, and now she would be lost in a crowd. That was what she had wanted, of course, but suddenly she wasn’t sure. The invitation was tempting. And the moment she recognised this temptation for what it was, she understood that she might recover from the grip of her despair, that the thaw had truly set in.

  Her reply to the invitation was swift. Thank you, I will be there, she cabled.

  But before the race, there were things to be done. She flew to London where she attended a round of beauty clinics, make-up lessons, hair-colouring sessions, and shopped for clothes. The way women looked astounded her, their tiny skirts just covering their bottoms, their long boots, their eye-liner a work of art. Carnaby Street was the place to go, a girl on a bus told her, when she asked where she bought her clothes: Mary Quant. The Beatles in Abbey Road. This was all news to Jean. Her spirits soared.

  Her re-emergence startled people. Some had to be reminded who she was. But there were scores of photographers and reporters at the beginning of the air race, and the newspapers and radio stations soon picked up a story at their elbow. Her face was in the limelight again. A reporter was foolish enough to express the belief held in many quarters that she had died. She demonstrated how alive she was with a number of high kicks.

  The race organisers had booked her into the Waldorf Hotel, where she held court for the media, while the race was in progress. None of the competitors managed to break her own solo record, which had now stood for thirty-three years, and this was cause for still more excitement.

  She was asked frequently to comment on women’s liberation. This puzzled her. In spite of the new styles, she couldn’t see that anything else had changed. ‘When I was flying, I was usually the only girl,’ she told one reporter. ‘But I was accepted as just another pilot. There wasn’t any antagonism, oh no. But then nobody took me seriously until I started breaking men’s records.’

  When it was all over, she found herself standing in the street by herself. The thought of going straight back to Tenerife didn’t appeal. In another impulsive moment, she walked into a travel agent’s office and bought herself a ticket to New Zealand.

  PART FOUR

  Home

  1980

  CHAPTER 36

  THE QUEUE WAITING TO HAVE THEIR BOOKS AUTOGRAPHED snaked along Queen Street in Auckland. The author, Jean Batten, looked up and flashed her famous smile as she ha
nded back each copy. It wasn’t the first time it had been in print, but now the story of her life had a new title, Alone in the Sky, and a shiny fresh cover with the Percival Gull pictured against clouds. On the back cover, she was pictured in a flying helmet, with goggles on top of her head. The inside of the dust jacket dated the picture: Jean Batten at Stag Lane aerodrome, on gaining her pilot’s licence in 1930.

  Over forty years had passed since then. If you didn’t know, it would be hard to tell how old the writer was, nor would there have been many clues in the book, for the text was almost exactly the same. Her new publishers had tried to persuade her to update the story, but she had been adamant that there was nothing more to tell. Let the records tell the story, she said.

  Her hair was blonde at this appearance, although in recent times it had been black, and again flame-red. Over the past ten years, since she turned sixty, she had become a public figure again. The ‘come back kid’ she sometimes called herself.

  Her looks had changed from the cool glamour of the 1930s. At first, she wore incongruous mini-skirts and high white boots and floppy leather caps, as if she were much younger. ‘I suppose I’m young at heart,’ she said, ‘because I’ve never really grown up. That’s what my mother used to say, anyway.’ She referred to her mother often. Sometimes her eyes would fill with tears when she alluded to her. ‘She didn’t need glasses until she was eighty-nine,’ she would marvel. ‘She was tall and elegant, with a beautiful head of hair until she died. In my arms,’ she added once, before hastily turning away. When asked, she would describe her life in Tenerife. ‘I swim there every day, and paint, and cook very nice meals. After I’ve had my daily swim I always have a small bottle of champagne,’ she told one interviewer.