The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  It hadn’t been nearly as bad as that; but Jane could imagine the number of times Michael would have bored people with the story.

  ‘I am a ridiculous person,’ she thought to herself, ‘for loving him.’

  After the initial reaction, there was talk in the tourist section of ‘air pockets’—that magic term used by passengers which covers everything from a thermal to violent turbulence in cloud.

  Jack Hubb clasped his hand to his tie and said to Dulcie: ‘That scared me stiff.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dulcie, struggling for calm herself, ‘I wouldn’t say that made you original. Take a look round!’

  Most of the passengers were very still. There were no jokes this time. Danger had walked the length of the aircraft and nearly tipped it on end.

  Susan rushed forward to the cockpit, where Crooke hadn’t taken his hand off the call-bell since he’d righted the aircraft. Geoff had picked himself up from the floor, but if he had injured himself in the fall he didn’t show it. Perkins was holding Truman back in the seat; but the co-pilot’s arms had gone limp. There was no conflict in him now.

  Crooke spoke to her without looking at Truman. ‘Give him as much sedative as is safe and get him out of here.’

  ‘Where shall I——’

  ‘Just get him out of here!’

  *

  That had happened fifteen minutes ago. Now, Crooke looked across at Geoff and smiled. Geoff Simmonds couldn’t fly a kite from his back garden, but the captain felt at that moment there was a case for a companion whose hands would remain clear of the controls. ‘How are you feeling, Geoff?’

  ‘My fuselage sustained purely superficial damage. It hurts but I am intact.’

  ‘You’re lucky. So are we all. If we’d been going faster than a measly three hundred knots Truman would have snapped the elevators off.’

  He lit a cigarette and Geoff glanced at him while the match glowed. There wasn’t a weak line in that face; but Geoff saw, for the first time, that there was a great deal of sadness. He wondered why.

  Geoff said: ‘Whatever made him do that last crazy thing?’

  ‘Did you see his face?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I did. And it’ll be a very long time before I can forget it.’

  Chapter Eight

  Robert Fleming felt detached from the staring eyes of the radar scopes, from the chatter of radio conversation and the quiet, orderly attitudes of the men around him. To them the emergency was serious enough, but not inlaid with the deep personal significance which Fleming himself was feeling. Their concern was the ordinary human anxiety for human lives threatened in any contingency.

  Nor did they feel a deadness. Nor would they have been alert to what that deadness meant in Fleming, which was so different from the deadness within the mind of Truman.

  They were equal and opposite; and like a see-saw, or a balanced pair of scales, their equilibrium hinged on the point that coupled them.

  It was inevitable that Fleming should find himself focusing on this point now, when so much was happening around him to highlight it. His mind darted around as the controllers jabbered into microphones and the radar tubes blinked their information.

  Until he was back in that warm room with Julie, the day before his last flight.

  *

  ‘I’m flying with Jimmy tomorrow.’

  Julie didn’t respond, but remained curled in her knee-hugging escape from the cold.

  She always felt the cold; and now she remained in a tight little ball, scorching herself and her tell-tale cat fur until parts of her body were rouged from the heat. She stared at the glowing elements of the electric fire and rocked almost imperceptibly back and forth upon hips tightened into a rocking-movement through her knees being clasped protectively to her breasts. Like this she was quiescently sensual, alert to the lines of her own body but folding her awareness inwards as if determined not to share it. A symbol in silk pyjamas, breathing, living, yet utterly withdrawn, she saw to it that she gripped the situation static, so that Fleming could move it neither in one direction nor the other.

  Her eyes held luminously on the heater, so that the irises were tinged red. Fleming watched her in profile, and marvelled at the calamitous fact that someone could be so physically close yet metaphysically so far away. Her thoughts, he knew, were neither on him nor on Truman; but they concerned that part of her which some dismissed as evil and others defined as psychopathic. Whichever it was, the barrier was impregnable, yet Fleming always, as now, found it a compulsive necessity to intrude.

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right after a while.’

  ‘Do I have to exist in a vacuum whenever you happen to feel like it?’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘You mean, I might just as well walk out.’

  ‘If you want to.’

  ‘I don’t. I just want to know what’s been going on between you and Jimmy.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘How do I know that?’

  ‘You don’t. You’ll just have to take my word for it.’ She continued to stare into the fire. For her, the conversation was not really taking place. She was indifferent to him, to the world, to events. Any other stimulus but Fleming could have restored her to realities. If the phone had rung at that moment, she would have emerged and answered it quite normally. Then she would have resumed the mood she was in now. Fleming knew that.

  He also knew, by instinct, all he needed to know which would have sent him upstairs to pack his bags.

  But the truth of the present wasn’t important to Julie. It didn’t matter to her that Fleming was there; it wouldn’t have mattered to her if he had not been there. It didn’t matter to her that he intuitively knew the truth which seemed unimportant now that he was unimportant.

  Fleming got up and walked around the room and chewed his lower lip. He said: ‘Why don’t you tell me the truth?’

  ‘What is the truth?’

  ‘That you don’t give a damn about me. As a matter of fact you probably never did. I don’t think you have it in you to care about anyone. Do you?’

  He looked at her, still hoping to stimulate a reaction which paradoxically he knew he could not effect.

  ‘We’ve been over all that,’ she said. ‘But I’ve told you I need you. Can’t you leave it at that?’

  He walked over to the fire and held her shoulders and felt them alien to him. ‘Do you realise that it’s six weeks since we last slept together?’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Robert. You know I can’t feel aroused at the moment.’

  ‘Is that my fault?’

  She looked at him, but said nothing.

  Fleming said: ‘Could any other man arouse you?’

  ‘That’s not your business.’

  Fleming wanted to strike her across the face, but with difficulty he restrained himself. ‘My God, I’m entitled to know, aren’t I? What is it you “need” me for?—to pay your keep?’

  ‘I never asked you for money.’

  ‘You accepted it all right.’

  Her eyes blazed: ‘I’ll always accept money, if people want to give it to me. So would any other woman. Why don’t you just come right out with it and call me a whore?’

  ‘Because I don’t believe you are. But I think this stalemated situation suits you very well.’

  Her anger subsided, and was replaced by a sense of futility. ‘Where is all this getting us, Robert? Are you just trying to start a quarrel, or what?’

  ‘I just think you’re lying.’

  ‘If I were lying, why would I need you? . . . Or do you still think it’s just your money?’

  ‘Probably because you feel insecure with Jimmy. You don’t want to get left flat and you have no one to punish for it.’

  Her face woke up suddenly. ‘Do you think he would do that?’

  Fleming found himself inexplicably objective. Sometimes they were genuine friends, and could observe themselves and each other as if the tense sit
uation between them really applied to two other people and not them. Fleming found this the more curious since it presupposed certain things which Julie hadn’t admitted, and Which Fleming himself hadn’t faced. He had joined her, for a few minutes in time, on the planet to which she had receded, where nothing meant the same, where different rules applied, and where they were on equal terms.

  Here, on this featureless plainland, which could have been desert or pack-ice so indefinable was its topography, they were two people alone who meant something to each other. In this bare land of nothingwhere, secret and unique to them both, sex and rivalry and the normal patterns of living assumed the dimensions of a distant star—powerful in itself but irrelevant in its influence upon those things which would outlive it.

  In this remote environment they were in love. Their thoughts interlocked in such a way that it would have been impossible to discern to whom they belonged, or which of them had evoked an idea which therefore seemed mutually created. It was as if sexual attraction had been shifted, for some reason, from its primary means of expression and settled on an alternative.

  At once they were at ease with each other, so that Julie’s physical beauty, so often the barrier between them rather than the link, because it was denied him, became merely a necessary back-cloth against which the flow of drama could proceed unimpeded. Fleming lit a cigarette and settled for the conference.

  He smiled and said: ‘I think you could have chosen more wisely!’

  ‘Who chooses?’

  ‘Well, exactly.’ He was smiling broadly at her now, because no choice could have been more disastrous to him than she herself, and they both knew it.

  She said: ‘How well do you know Jimmy?’

  ‘I only know him as a pilot.’

  ‘Is he good?’

  ‘Yes. Very. Hasn’t he told you?’

  She acknowledged the dig silently. ‘But you don’t trust him?’

  ‘I don’t think I would place too much emphasis on what I say about him.’

  ‘Why not? You’re usually pretty reliable.’

  ‘I’m jealous.’

  ‘Can’t you be truthful despite that?’

  ‘I think the truth is that I wouldn’t trust him anyway.’

  ‘Not even as a pilot? You said he was good.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Go on. Say it.’

  Fleming gazed abstractedly at his cigarette, then watched its glow as it swept through an arc with the gesture. ‘For me to make any sense of what I’m saying at all, you’ll have to be much more honest yourself.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What’s Jimmy like as a lover?’

  ‘That sounds funny coming from you!’

  ‘I know.’ He was serious. ‘Tell me. You and I are closer than you’ll ever be to him. That means you can say what you like.’

  ‘Why is it important to the issue?’

  ‘It just is.’

  ‘Something to do with his flying?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  Neither of them cared, at this moment, that the truth was hereby revealed. Yet its answer would be an admission of all that would henceforth exclude Fleming. In a sense, this was his way of tricking her into truthfulness. She, weighing the odds, recognised the device for what it was but also saw the importance of the question in relation to Truman as an aviator. She still stalled him off, because she could foresee the pain and the kickback that would ensue once they had left the mutual nowhereland.

  She said: ‘You’re asking me to tell you something which doesn’t belong to you.’

  ‘I have to fly with him tomorrow. He’s got me puzzled, and I don’t like it. I thought you might know the answer.’

  ‘All right.’ She turned away from Fleming. ‘He’s a marvellous lover . . . only it isn’t him.’

  ‘It isn’t him? What in God’s name do you mean by that?’ Fleming felt the anger rising now, though at first he didn’t recognise it as such, or as the stimulus that impelled the sudden vehemence of his question.

  Julie spotted it at once and became suddenly defensive. ‘I don’t know,’ she said airily. ‘Probably my imagination.’

  She had vacated the planet; and with this change Fleming felt the full upsurge of hatred against her. Whatever it was that had blocked-off his fury fell away over the precipice, like a boulder breaking away from an escarpment and falling through space to the rift below.

  He damned himself for listening to her, for discussing dispassionately the insanities of the man who had taken his place. He cursed the trick whereby he had been drawn into discussing the one man who to him should have been beyond discussion; and wondered whether the weakness that permitted this outrage of taste had been his.

  He recalled, as he stood watching this small, lithe, torturingly seductive creature, the words Clare had uttered on the top of a hill at dusk. And as he began to think of the blinding felony that he felt had been committed against him by the man who was to be his co-pilot on the morrow, her words seemed to take on a direct significance for the coming flight.

  And he saw how, step by step, he had created the entire situation himself, as if following a prescription whose contents were calculated to damn him. How he had rejected Clare in favour of a female executioner. How he had casually introduced into her life a man whose dedicated purpose in life was to prove his power over other people’s women. How he had contrived to befriend this man, and select him for a companion in the sky. And how the slow suspicion had begun to dawn, in a darkened sky he had refused to scan with the telescope of brutal self-appraisal, that some self-destructive urge had successfully taken root.

  . . . If you are sure you must fail, then you will . . . Only Clare, only a Celt, could have seen this so clearly . . .

  *

  ‘Clare, darling?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  ‘I was thinking how restless you are.’

  ‘I wasn’t moving a muscle.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. I can feel it . . . thoughts buzzing round and round in that complicated head of yours. Can’t you ever relax?’

  ‘I claim no responsibility for what may be going on in my head.’ He sought her eyes and held them, but saw the worry in them, and went on: ‘Does it really matter all that much?’

  ‘Yes. You’re thinking up new things to accuse yourself of.’

  ‘God, you know me well!’

  The eyes slanted toward him and laughed. ‘I know you better than you think. Now look at you! You’re wondering what I mean by that and getting all alarmed about it.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  She put on a funny voice. ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Yes you will.’

  ‘No I won’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Clare searched around for the cigarettes. They both smoked in silence for a while. In this time, Clare’s mood had become serious. After a while she said: ‘I’m hungry. Let’s eat something.’

  ‘Is there anything?’

  ‘There’s a tin of steak and kidney pud.’

  ‘Okay.’

  In the kitchen, Clare said: ‘Shall I tell you something?’

  ‘I hope it’s something nice!’

  She glanced down from the cupboard, where she was reaching for the can. ‘I know you do. I can just see you, steeling yourself in case it’s something horrid!’

  ‘Look, Clare, when you’ve finished psychoanalysing me! . . .’

  ‘That, coming from you, is good.’

  ‘Delete it from the record and tell me what you were going to say.’

  ‘You won’t get cross?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yes . . . here, for heaven’s sake let me open that tin. You’re hopeless with the tin-opener . . . Now, what is it?’

  ‘All right . . . I was going to say, why are you scared of sex?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are. You know damn well you are. Why?’

/>   She made him hold her eyes and just waited until he came up with an answer. He knew he couldn’t evade it, so after a while he pulled suddenly at his cigarette and said: ‘Perhaps it’s because I’m a bad lover.’

  ‘But you’re not. Except on those occasions when you talk yourself into it. Then you’re awful.’

  ‘Was I tonight?’

  ‘That’s the whole point. You should know! And the reason why you don’t know is because you keep asking yourself silly questions about it, instead of the only one which matters, which is did you enjoy it. I mean, what other possible reason is there for making love?’

  He stared at her. ‘What you’re saying is that with me there is another reason.’

  ‘Only sometimes, Robert.’

  ‘Like . . . tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Tonight. I could sense it. Now you’re getting cross, I can see it in your eyes. Or else hurt.’

  ‘You’ve got the gas too high.’

  Clare adjusted the flame. Robert put out his cigarette restlessly and immediately lighted another. Clare said: ‘What I mean, darling, is that you sometimes set out to defeat your own object. And one of your ways of doing it—and don’t hate me!—is to make love when you don’t really want to.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I think you do.’

  ‘God, we are playing the truth game tonight, aren’t we!’

  ‘It’s good for you. Now, why do you do it?’

  He smiled. ‘Okay, you’ve made your point.’

  ‘I hope so. Only, do stop trying to turn a bedroom into a proving flight. Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  She turned to face him. ‘Otherwise that’s what it is going to become. Then you really will be a bad lover. Do you follow?’

  He considered the implications of this while he waited for the steak and kidney pudding.

  But what he couldn’t see was how to stop doing it.