Flightsend

by Linda Newbery

  ‘And I went on holiday there when I was about ten,’ Kathy continued. ‘I think I’ve seen that painting too, the famous one.’

  She passed the book to Charlie, who read the entry more closely.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? That we’ve got the same name as a famous painter?’

  ‘Never thought of it, I suppose. We’re not related, as far as I know. And I don’t think he’s all that well known. Not what you’d call a household name, like Picasso or Monet.’

  ‘Yes, I think if my name was Charlotte Picasso, I’d have made the connection by now.’ Caspar shifted his head, and Charlie reached a hand down to feel her skirt. Yuk! Her fingers met warm slobber. She stood up and tore off a piece of kitchen roll. ‘Mum, do you think I should do Art next year, instead of Biology?’

  ‘But I thought you’d made up your mind. You can’t do Art just because of Philip Wilson.’

  Charlie dabbed at her skirt and wiped dried mud off one of her shoes. ‘Art was always the other one I might choose. Perhaps I’ll do both. Some people keep four subjects in year thirteen.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think you’d better be one of them,’ her mother said candidly. ‘You wouldn’t cope.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘I’m being realistic,’ Kathy said. ‘You’re a conscientious slogger – you wouldn’t cruise through four A-Levels. People who do four are usually taking related subjects, like Sciences and Maths, not four entirely different ones. It’d be too much. You’d end up not doing well in any of them.’

  Charlie humphed. Conscientious slogger sounded dull and worthy, far less exciting than artist, which was what Mr Locke had called her. ‘Right, I’m going,’ she said, pushing Caspar away before he could dribble on her again.

  Her mother put a bottle of white wine in the fridge door; Anne was coming over for the evening. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow – you need to get it sorted out. What’s brought this on, then? Have you decided Oliver’s more handsome than you first thought?’

  Charlie decided to treat this remark with deserved contempt.

  ‘Have a nice evening. And don’t get too girly and giggly with Anne,’ she said, as her parting shot.

  Mr Locke, however – she couldn’t get used to thinking of him as Oliver – seemed to assume that she’d already made up her mind about sixth-form Art. He made her jump, calling her name as she crossed the courtyard. She hadn’t seen him, in the shade of the wall, where he was sitting on the bench with a sketchpad and a glass of wine. The two cats were with him, Puss on the bench, Boots sprawling underneath.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t mean to startle you. You looked miles away.’

  Charlie had jumped because she’d been thinking about him as she came through the gate, and now here he was, as if her thoughts had conjured him up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, hoping he couldn’t read her mind.

  Dumb question; it was obvious what he was doing. It looked quite idyllic: the sunlight on warm brickwork, the climbing roses, the shady bench, the cats and the wine. He smiled and said, ‘Hiding, really. I like these courses but it gets on top of you after a while, people always asking questions and wanting help.’

  She moved closer. ‘Can I see?’

  He held out his sketchpad. He was drawing the archway into the herb garden; a soft pencil sketch, with the detail of the stonework and a rambling rose; shade in the foreground, looking through into sunlight.

  ‘That’s lovely!’

  He looked at her. ‘No better than you could do, with practice.’

  Yeah, right.

  ‘I’ve found out what you meant, about my name,’ she said. ‘Philip Wilson Steer. English painter, influenced by the French Impressionists. Born in eighteen-something and died in nineteen-forty-something.’ ‘You’ve been researching?’

  ‘My mum knew.’

  ‘Steer’s your father’s name, presumably?’ He had put down his wine-glass and was stroking the cat, caressing his head and ears and making him purr like a small engine.

  ‘No, it’s Mum’s. My father left when I was two. He went back to Canada and I never see him. His name’s Colin Cudrow. Mum and I were called Cudrow at first but when he left, Mum went back to Steer.’ Charlie wasn’t sure how much Mr Locke knew about her mother, or about Sean or the baby; whether it was common knowledge among the staff.

  Oliver tried it out. ‘Charlotte Cudrow. No, Charlie Steer’s much better.’ He wrote it in the air with his pencil, like someone signing a painting, with a final flourish. ‘Charlie … Steer. Cudrow sounds like a line of cows in a milking parlour. Join me for a few minutes? There’s wine in the entrance hall – shall I fetch you some?’

  ‘I can’t! Jon would go ballistic.’

  ‘The temperamental chef? If you had one glass of wine?’

  ‘If I sat out here chatting. There’s a great pile of lettuce and tomatoes waiting for me in there.’

  ‘You get time off during the day, though? Why don’t you join my group tomorrow? You’ve got far more talent than most of these people, I can tell you.’ Charlie, unable to help feeling flattered, shook her head. ‘I’ve still got exams to revise for. Geography and German. I didn’t do as much as I meant to, today.’

  ‘You’ll have finished by next weekend, won’t you? I’m going to be around, on and off, for the next few weeks. Portraiture next weekend; Life Drawing after that. It’d be a good chance for you to get some work in your sketchbook.’

  Charlie knew he meant the sketchbook that formed part of sixth-form coursework. He smiled at her, relaxed and unhurried, leaning against the back of the bench. She was beginning to feel flustered – partly because she expected Jon to appear at the store-room door any moment and yell at her. ‘But I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ she said. ‘It’s only a possibility.’

  He looked at her seriously. ‘Charlie, if you don’t do Art, it’ll be a criminal waste of talent.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I mean it. You’d do well, perhaps even brilliantly. With good teaching, of course.’

  She looked at him sitting there on the bench. Yes, OK, Mum and Anne were right. He had the sort of face that grew on you, so that after a while you couldn’t think why you hadn’t noticed immediately what a good-looking man he was. He had an intent way of gazing at her that made her feel she was worth looking at. A shaft of sunlight fell across the arm that was resting on the side of the bench; he wore a white linen shirt with wide, short sleeves. Charlie looked at his shapely forearm, his hand resting on the curve of wood, and thought: I could draw that.

  ‘I’ll be late,’ she said. ‘No, I am late. See you later.’

  Inside, washing, shredding and chopping the salad, she thought again about her subject choices. She had talent, he’d said; said it twice. Charlie wasn’t used to being thought of as talented. Her mother’s view, conscientious slogger, was shared by most of her teachers. You have worked conscientiously this year was a phrase that appeared often in her subject reviews. She took it to mean that she was quite unexceptional.

  ‘You’d do well,’ he’d said, ‘perhaps even brilliantly.’

  Brilliance, talent – the words danced in her head like taunting fireflies. Should she slog away at her academic subjects, or take the chance to do something at which – if he’d been sincere – she might excel?

  She began to like the idea of herself as artist. The people who did Art in the sixth form were a group apart, more like college students (Mum said) than like school pupils; on friendly first-name terms with their teachers, drifting in and out to work on their projects or just to chat. The exam results were always exceptionally good, and each year several students went on to Art Foundation courses. Her existing combination of subjects began to seem less than enticing: each would involve hours of reading, essay-writing, sitting in classrooms. She would drop Biology. Pleased to have decided, she went cheerfully about her waitressing duties. When she went to his end of the table to serve the main course, Oliver Locke gave her a conspiratori
al smile, as if it was all settled between them.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ Kathy said next morning, when Charlie fetched the lead from the hook behind the door. She was drinking coffee and flicking through the Sunday paper, having already changed from the faded jeans she wore for gardening into a smarter pair of trousers and a cream top. ‘I said I’d go round at eleven.’

  Charlie looked up at the kitchen clock. ‘Why are you ready so early, then? It’s only quarter past ten.’

  Her mother gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Nerves, I s’pose. It’s ages since I’ve been anywhere other than the builders’ merchants or the supermarket.’

  Charlie looked at her, noting the carefully brushed hair, the discreet make-up. Kathy hadn’t worn makeup for ages.

  ‘You’re only going round for a chat,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s not like a job interview. Fay isn’t at all off-putting – you know that, you’ve seen her. And Dan’s all right, too.’

  In fact Charlie had rarely spoken to Dan, Fay’s husband, who was a musician. His eyes glittered behind round glasses and he had a beaky nose and a tangle of wiry hair, and looked to Charlie like a mad composer. (Gustav Mahler, Jon said.) He occasionally ran courses on madrigals and Early Music and tended to drift around the place humming to himself. He’d been introduced to Charlie, but several times since had passed her without noticing. He wasn’t likely to intimidate Kathy. Charlie had the impression that Fay was the one who took decisions at Nightingales.

  ‘I know, but …’ Kathy looked down and turned a few pages of the newspaper, stopping at the gardening feature.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Charlie said more gently. ‘I won’t be long.’ Her mother had asked her to look after the shop, as she was beginning to call it now that it attracted a trickle of customers.

  Charlie whistled Caspar, calmed his excitable bounding and clipped on his lead. Kathy had been so engrossed in getting Flightsend organized, in setting up the nursery and planning for the future, that Charlie had almost forgotten this aspect of her breakdown: a tendency to panic about going out, meeting new people. The garden chat would be fine, but suppose Rosie appeared unexpectedly? Perhaps, Charlie thought, I should have warned Fay: asked her to keep Rosie out of the way. But that would have meant explaining the whole story, and she didn’t want to give the idea that her mother was neurotic or unreliable. At least Mum knew about Rosie now, and wouldn’t be shocked into bolting out of the gate. Charlie hoped.

  Her feet took the way to the airfield again. There wasn’t time for the complete circuit today, but she felt drawn to the place, in spite of the fear that had tugged at her yesterday. She passed the grazing cattle, the entrance to Lordships Farm; a man in overalls waved at her from the yard. On the airfield, she let Caspar off his lead and watched him leap away in great joyful bounds. Like a clumsy gazelle, she thought. From time to time he turned to wait for her, forelegs splayed, grinning. She could feel the corrugations of the runway through the soles of her shoes. It was a still, calm day with hardly a breath of wind. Already, the sun was hot on her neck and arms; she should have put on sunscreen, or worn a long-sleeved shirt. The buildings at the end of the runway shimmered in a blur of heat-haze. She turned and gazed into the sky. No light aircraft to disturb the silence today.

  She felt almost disappointed by her mother’s statement that no Battle of Britain fighters had flown from here. Just a training airfield. Still, in wartime it must have been a busy place, fenced with high wire, full of daily activity. Leading off the perimeter track were big cul-de-sacs of concrete, much overgrown with nettles and willowherb. Charlie presumed they were parking bays for aircraft. Bombers, her mother had said, not fighters; these concrete aprons were certainly large enough for big, heavy war-planes. How different Lower Radbourne must have been then, Charlie thought, with RAF people going into the pub for off-duty drinking, maybe billeted in some of the houses. The village had probably never seen such activity since.

  ‘Caspar! Caspar!’

  He’d found something. Nose down, tail up, he was snuffling excitedly at the ground, by the base of an ash tree at the perimeter fence. A rabbit hole, probably. She went over to look. She could see only one large entrance, not the network of holes and tunnels that rabbits made. She crouched to look. The soil in the mouth of the hole was well-trodden and there were dried tufts of grass and bracken that she thought had been thrown out from inside. Caspar was making small wuffing noises, pawing the ground. She held his collar to restrain him.

  ‘Not rabbits,’ she told him. ‘Badgers? Let’s not disturb them.’

  If she came here at dusk, she might see one. She’d tell Mum, and perhaps they could come together, with Caspar if he could behave properly …

  Then, gently pulling at Caspar’s collar, she noticed something by the bole of the tree. A cross. A heavy cross, planted in the ground. It was made of iron, with flaking rust in the join of the crosspiece.

  She reached out a hand. Solid, heavy iron, cool to the touch. There was no inscription, no clue to its purpose. It reminded her of the crosses people sometimes left by the roadside at the scene of a fatal accident, with flowers left to wither and decay. No flowers had been left here; there were only the wild campions and cranesbills as a tribute to whoever had died here, or was buried here.

  An odd place to die, she thought. Then she remembered that she had to get back promptly for her mother.

  ‘Come on, Caspar. We can’t be late.’

  Glancing at her watch, she took the shorter way back past Hog Pond, crossing a stile from the perimeter track and through the thistly field that lay behind the Post Office and shop. The pond was near the airfield fence, rather dank and smelly, fringed with willows. Charlie, who knew the name from the map, liked to imagine a medieval pig farm just here, with bristly brown pigs, rather than modern pink ones, snorting and rooting, and wallowing in the mud of the pond. Caspar snuffled along the hedgerow, smelling rabbits, his back end wriggling comically. There was a big signboard just inside the gate, blank on the side nearest Charlie, facing the narrow lane that led down beside the Post Office. She hadn’t seen it before, and the clayey soil around its posts looked newly disturbed.

  ‘Caspar! Here! Good boy.’

  She clipped his lead on, then turned to see what the board was for.

  Honeysuckle Coppice, it said. A development of 12 superior detached country homes.

  ‘This is our last Sunday lunch together, do you realize?’ Charlie said. ‘From now on I’ll be up at Nightingales. So it went well, then, your meeting?’

  ‘Oh yes! Pass the rice salad, I’m starving.’

  Charlie watched with approval as her mother took a quite reasonable-sized helping.

  ‘We had a chat,’ Kathy went on, ‘and we had coffee, and I sketched out a few rough ideas. I’m going to draw up more detailed plans and then go back to show them. They’re nice, aren’t they, Fay and Dan?’

  She didn’t mention Rosie.

  ‘And did you see Oliver Heart-throb Locke while you were there?’ Charlie asked innocently.

  ‘Yes, I did actually.’ Kathy gave Charlie a searching look. ‘He said how pleased he was you’re doing Art next year, and that he’s sure you’ll do well. I didn’t realize you’d been discussing it with him.’

  ‘Well, not really. He just sort of assumes. But I’ve been thinking about it, Mum, and I really do want to do it. Not because of him. Because I want to.’

  Her mother nodded. ‘Make sure you tell Ms Winterbourne in time for the induction course, then.’ Ms Winterbourne was the Head of Sixth Form. ‘Anyway, it’s not written in stone, even then. People keep changing their minds right up till September. Even after September, sometimes.’

  ‘OK.’ Surprised that it had been so easy, Charlie went on, ‘I sold some plants! Two Jacob’s Ladder, one French lavender, one penstemon. Wasn’t that good? To the people from Radbourne House. And they took one of your plant lists and said they’d come back. Oh, but Mum, I found out something awful – there are going to be new houses buil
t in the field behind the Post Office! Honeysuckle Coppice, of all names.’

  Kathy was less perturbed than she expected. ‘Well, it happens. You’ve only got to look at the other villages round here. People need to live somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but – so close to the airfield – I suppose that’ll be built on next, and the bluebell wood! Oh, Mum, it’ll be awful!’

  ‘Have some salad.’ Kathy passed the bowl.

  ‘I can hardly look a lettuce leaf in the face,’ Charlie said, but took some anyway. ‘There are badgers on the airfield! I think so, anyway. I saw a sett.’

  Coming across the builders’ board had pushed the discovery of the cross out of her head. Remembering now, she told her mother about it.

  ‘Odd, don’t you think? I mean, who could have died there? Or been buried there? Do you think it might go back to wartime, to when the airfield was used? But it’s not like a proper war memorial. There’s no name on it, nothing.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Her mother passed a bowl of cherry tomatoes. ‘Have some of these.’

  ‘And you said it was a training airfield. So people wouldn’t have been likely to kill themselves flying, would they? It’s not like one of those Battle of Britain places you were talking about, with dog-fights going on every day.’

  ‘It’s highly likely that people killed themselves flying,’ Kathy said. ‘In fact I should think it’s the most likely explanation. There was a high casualty rate, especially in the early years of the war. Training accidents happened all the time. The aircraft didn’t have sophisticated navigation devices, at first. There were all sorts of fatal accidents with pilots trying to land in fog, or just getting lost. Terrible losses, the aircrew had. More than fifty thousand, in all.’