Judith Krantz

by Till We Meet Again

  “Steady on!”

  “Just let me finish my thought—I wonder what Jock means when he says guys will work for practically nothing—how much ‘nothing’ would that be exactly?”

  “Freddy! What the bloody hell are you raving about? A fleet of five cargo planes! You’re not taking this seriously, are you?”

  “Hmm … just turning it over in my mind, only for fun, merely letting it simmer …”

  “Are you indeed?”

  “How does it hurt to imagine it, Tony, just to imagine those DC-3s, loaded to the gills, taking off for New York or Boston or Chicago—but of course I’m being whimsical, it’s not as if we could possibly leave The Grange.”

  “I should damn well think not.”

  “You’ve lived here all your life. How could you begin to consider pulling up stakes and moving to a strange place where the sun shines every day of the year or they give you your money back?” Freddy had walked over to the window and stood looking out at the funereal, inexorable rain that had been falling for weeks, during the English spring. “I wonder what it’s like above the weather?” she murmured. “Is the evening star still there?”

  “What was that, darling?”

  “Nothing.” She smiled at him gently. “Jock doesn’t need us anyway if he wants to get into air cargo. As he said, California is swarming with pilots. And we have our life here—you have the land to manage, and I have Annie and my bazaars and my bridge lessons and the Sunday school. Still … if neither of us took a salary … no, never mind.”

  “ ‘Never mind’—two of the most irritating words in the English language, as well you know. If neither of us took a salary, then what?” Tony demanded.

  “I was just wondering about … well … profits. There wouldn’t be any, not for a while. It wouldn’t be a piece of cake. First we’d have to get there, find a place to live, buy a car, rent an office, arrange for hangar space, pay office staff, interview pilots and crew … it would cost a bundle just to gas up five DC-3s …” Her voice trailed off as she looked at the dripping yews below their window. She seemed to be insulated from the firelit room by a haze of yearning so palpable that it quivered in the air.

  “ ‘Five DC-3s’? Are they that real to you already?” Tony asked, with an enigmatic note in his voice.

  “I’m just remembering all the financial problems I had with my flying school.”

  “It was rough, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep. Real rough.” As she turned to answer Tony’s question, a passionate, wild, hopeful child looked out of Freddy’s eyes for just a second before she lowered her lids, but it was too late and Tony had seen it.

  “Was it more difficult than the cake sale?”

  “Not on the same level.”

  “Rougher?”

  “Considerably.”

  “But you did it well, didn’t you?”

  “I managed.”

  “Was it as thrilling as making potpourri?”

  “Stop teasing, Tony. That’s like comparing … oh, flying to … to … there’s nothing you can compare it to, is there?” With a resolute set to her jaw, Freddy buttoned up her cardigan, sat down and took up her embroidery again.

  “Darling, who do you think you’re kidding? You’re perishing to try this air cargo caper. Do you think I don’t see you stop whatever you’re doing and listen hard every time a plane passes overhead?”

  “Habit, mere habit,” Freddy said, blushing angrily.

  “Rubbish! If your ears could flap, they would.”

  “Well, even if Jock’s idea did intrigue me,” Freddy cried, “how could we ever consider taking such an enormous step? It would mean moving away from your family, it would be a complete change of our way of life. You’d hate it, Tony, I know you would. So let’s just not talk about it anymore.”

  “But you’re dying to give it a try, aren’t you? Try to tell me that isn’t true.”

  “I’m not any good at lying to you, am I? But times have changed. The war’s over, Tony. I’ve … settled down in this sceptered isle … this other Eden … this demi-paradise.”

  “Bullshit, sweetheart. What’s more, you forgot ‘this earth of majesty’ and ‘this seat of Mars.’ That will never do. Oh, you put on a bloody marvelous act, I grant you, but what did the war ever have to do with the way you feel about flying? My poor grounded baby, reduced to one fucking horsepower, and an old farm nag at that.”

  “I’ve never complained,” Freddy said tonelessly.

  “No, and that’s the scary part. It’s so unlike you to be docile—it makes me nervous. Look here, Freddy, I honestly, truly wouldn’t mind a bit of a change. I get in Father’s way a hell of a lot. He’s much less impatient than I am with red tape, and a damn sight more experienced. If he really needed me here I couldn’t even consider it, just couldn’t, you know that, but it’s not as if it were forever—I mean, why the hell not? Old Jock’s not stupid, got the spirit of enterprise, that boy does. And when we blow all the money, and come back with our tails between our legs—”

  “It’ll be my nickel?” Freddy exclaimed, still not believing him. Tony nodded at his wife, withholding nothing.

  “YIPPEE!” Freddy catapulted out of her chair, so high into the air that her wide-flung fingertips brushed the beams of the ceiling.

  A tiny knock sounded at their door and Annie slipped in, dressed for bed in a long, flowered flannel nightgown. “Yippee what?” she asked.

  “Guess what, little Annie, we’re all going to visit your pal Jock in the place your Mama grew up in—the City of the Angels, she used to call it,” Tony said.

  “Like in Sunday school?” Annie asked, wary, but ready to be enchanted.

  “Nothing like that at all. Like a summer day, like a big, warm, blue trip to the seaside, and do you know the best thing about it? Your Papa won’t have to play bridge with your poor Mama any more because—don’t tell her I told you—but she still hasn’t figured out the difference between trumps and spades, and odds are she never will.”

  “So what are we going to call it?” Jock asked, as he poured himself a beer in the backyard of the tiny house Freddy and Tony had finally found near the Burbank Airport.

  “Something confidence-inspiring, I should think,” Tony answered. “What do you make of ‘National Airfreight Express Limited’?”

  “A bit windy, old chap, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Undoubtedly you have a better suggestion, old buddy?”

  “I kinda like ‘Fast Freight Forward.’ ” Jock grinned proudly at his inventiveness.

  “I wouldn’t give my business to an outfit with a name like that,” Freddy protested. “It sounds like a football play on a high school team … a second-rate high school.”

  “Why Freddy, I think that Jock’s name is just plain fabulous,” protested Brenda, Jock’s latest girl and their volunteer office manager. “You could even call it ‘Fabulous Fast Freight Forward’—I bet I could get Hedda Hopper to use it as an item.”

  “Brenda, you don’t exactly have a vote here,” Jock said hastily. “Brenda knows a lot of people in show business,” he explained, turning to Freddy and Tony.

  Freddy inspected Brenda with wonder. Her dark hair was so long and shiny that she looked as if she had puddles on her shoulders. Her astonishing tits indicated full female maturity, yet could she possibly be old enough to have graduated from high school? Where did Jock find them? He had sworn that she could type, take dictation, file and answer phones, but she looked as if she’d never even done her own long and perfect dark red nails. And why did she have a Southern accent, when she said she was from San Francisco?”

  “Darling, any ideas?” Tony asked Freddy.

  “Eagles,” Freddy said promptly.

  “Eagles? What kind of name is that?” Jock objected immediately. He was still smarting over the fact that Freddy had spent several days teaching him and Tony how to fly the big, unfamiliar, twin-engined planes, after she checked out in one herself, with a mere half hour of instru
ction. Six years in Spits, and he’d actually had to take hours of instruction from her, as if he were a kid.

  “Look,” Freddy said patiently, “you guys are heroes, and you met because of the Eagle Squadron, so it makes sense if we try to get a little mileage out of it. Eagles—short, to the point, easy to remember, no confusing initials.”

  “It does have sentimental value,” Tony agreed. “Send your cauliflower to market by Eagles—memorable, that.”

  “Jock?” Freddy asked. “What do you think?”

  “Looks like I’m outnumbered. ‘Eagles’ is O.K., I guess.”

  “Jock, honey,” Brenda drawled, “what exactly was the Eagle Squadron?”

  “And where’s Our Lady of the DC-3s this morning?” Jock asked Tony as they sat in their cramped office, plundering copies of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages for prospective cargo clients, while, in their reception room, Brenda ineffectively explained to a crowd of would-be employees that they hadn’t started hiring yet.

  “Missing.”

  “It figures. Now that you’ve got a good live-in gal to take care of Annie, she probably went shopping. Freddy could use some new clothes, or haven’t you noticed? Maybe she’s getting her hair done, or having a girlfriend lunch … maybe a matinee, maybe a little game of gin rummy … women can accomplish less and spend more in any given time period than you’d believe possible. Is she coming in this afternoon?”

  “She’s away for a few days.” Tony was tight-lipped.

  “Yeah? Where to?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know. Take a look at this note that she left me.” He held out a piece of paper and Jock read it out loud.

  “ ‘Darling, please supervise Annie’s supper and sit with her, Helga will prepare Bathe Annie, read to her from red book on night table, not more than twenty minutes, put her to bed, night light O.K. if she wants it. Helga will have dinner for you by seven-thirty. Please check on Annie several times during evening, keep your door open in case she wakes up. Morning, make sure Annie finishes her whole breakfast, Helga will walk her to kindergarten and pick her up. Let Helga know what you want for dinner before you go to office. Don’t worry about me. See you in a few days. Annie understands. Love you, darling. Gone flyin’. Freddy.’ ”

  “I found it this morning when I woke up,” Tony said furiously. “This gets on my tit.”

  “You notice she said ‘please’ twice? Damn decent of her. What does she mean—‘gone flyin’’?”

  “If I knew, I’d gladly share the information with you.”

  “What’d she go in?”

  “Not one of our planes, I checked first thing. Maybe she talked someone into lending her a kite,” Tony answered grimly.

  “Or stole one,” Jock said thoughtfully.

  “She’d never have done this back home … not in a million years. It’s unthinkable to decamp like that. It must be this fucking place! She hasn’t been the same since she set foot in California. I can’t put my finger on it, but she’s just … different. As if she owns the whole bloody world. Sweet Jesus, I’d like to smack her!”

  “Brenda’s scared shitless of her. Says she makes her feel inferior.”

  “Brenda’s not as stupid as she looks.”

  “Come on, Tony, she is so.”

  In the swift racing plane she’d rented, Freddy hopped down to make a number of stops in the Imperial Valley in the Colorado Desert, the southernmost of California’s great farming areas, and then headed north toward the wet delta lands where asparagus and tomatoes grew ten months a year; from there she skipped on to Salinas, with its hundreds of thousands of rich acres, zipped back to Fresno for figs and grapes, setting down many times in the lushness of Imperial County, Kern County and Tulare County, the nation’s top areas for farm produce. Everywhere she went, she passed over vast farms and orchards that had only grown larger and more profitable since she’d last seen them.

  She followed a gloriously erratic flight plan that depended only on whim and mood. She strayed, she wandered, she hedgehopped, she zoomed and dove and chased her tail, and danced the plane from one end of the state to the other. She never bothered to calculate, so long as she had enough fuel, and her navigation was based on instinct and memory and meandering, rambling, arbitrary fancy. She was fancy-free and free for anything fancy, she sang to herself, as she lost herself in the delirium of flying again, flying without rules or regulations, flying in a rapture of freedom that she had given up seven years ago, liberated again for brazen adventure and high old times with the winds and the sky and the clouds and space. Space! God, how she’d missed space in England. The ATA routes had been so constricted that it was like snaking your way through a maze to deliver a plane, but California was an ecstasy of bright, endless, flowing space, space that again belonged to her. How had she lived so long without this direct connection with the horizon, she wondered. How had she held out, how had she fooled herself into believing that anything could replace the sublime astonishment of sky?

  Whenever she spotted the main buildings of each enormous agricultural holding, she looped a couple of spectacular loops, added a few showboating Immelmanns and spine-chilling Chandelles to announce her arrival, before she set the plane down elegantly in a half-filled parking lot or, failing that, a field, under conditions that anyone in the ATA would have regarded as laughably easy.

  As she swaggered into the office, looking for the boss, she carried an official-looking notebook and a fine new Parker pen, with a fat gold nib. She wore a uniform of her own confection, consisting of her trim ATA skirt and RAF blue shirt, tieless and unbuttoned almost to her bra, with her four-inch-wide wings sewn above her right pocket. Her combustible hair was pulled back in a businesslike way and fastened with fraudulent severity at the nape of her neck, where it kept escaping conveniently from its inadequate velvet bow. Her skirt had been shortened four remarkably attention-getting inches, and belted in red patent leather, tightly enough to warrant a court-martial. Freddy had traded her sensible ATA lace-up shoes and black stockings for sheer nylons and a pair of the highest-heeled red shoes she’d been able to find in all of Los Angeles. If the boss didn’t happen to be in, he soon arrived, as word reached him of the visitor.

  In four days, Freddy managed to make warm and admiring friends with the largest shippers of farm produce in the major growing area of the entire world, as she announced to them, with the most delicately outrageous divergences from the truth, the formation of a major air cargo company. She made judicious and frequent references to its large corps of American Eagle Squadron pilots, who had all, each and every one of them, been among the heroic Few to whom the Many owed so Much. Eagles could handle as much farm produce as the farmers could grow, she told the interested men, as she leaned earnestly forward, her breasts straining the fabric of her shirt, her sales pitch almost landing her in their laps. Her notebook grew fat with potential orders, with valuable facts and figures and the names of major big-city wholesalers all over the country who were clamoring for California fruit, vegetables and flowers, which they could sell at premium prices, enough to include the cost of air shipping, if the cost of air shipping were not pegged too high.

  The hungry New York City flower market alone, dependent on greenhouses, could absorb incalculable tons of fresh-cut flowers every week if the right connections were made, Freddy realized as she sat in the café at the Santa Paula airport, just before the final short hop home, and meditated over two pieces of fresh peach pie. How many tons of fresh peaches could they sell in Chicago? And if the peaches were made into pies here by, say, Van de Kamp, what could a chain of East Coast bakeries charge for them in the middle of winter? How would you ship peach pies without breaking them? Stay out of baked goods, you dumb broad! When will you learn? Well, then, how would you ship peaches without bruising them? How would you ship grapes, strawberries, tender Bibb lettuce, fresh salmon from Monterey Bay? How would you ship orchids? Eagles could change the face of the college prom corsage.

  All that’s a secondary problem, s
he said cheerfully to herself, as she set about worming the recipe for the pie from the owner of the café. Let Tony and Jock worry about the details. They’d be so thrilled when she came back with all this information—but it had been absolutely necessary to go alone. Her husband, to be sure, had flown all through the Battle of Britain, but the Honorable Antony Wilmot Alistair Longbridge wasn’t exactly a Yankee Doodle Dandy, jock was as American as an all-night crap game, but he had just missed flying in the Battle of Britain and it would have cramped her style to have had to misrepresent … only slightly … the mighty pilot corps of Eagles if the two of them had been standing there listening. Or, God forbid, talking.

  “Where’s the new Brenda?” Jock yelled desperately as he clasped two phone receivers to his chest so that the pair of grape growers he was trying to talk to simultaneously wouldn’t hear him. “I need some help here, pronto!”

  Freddy, trapped behind her desk, telling three disappointed but still eager ex-bomber pilots that two hundred and fifty dollars a month was the maximum Eagles could offer for the time being, shouted over their heads. “She quit yesterday—I haven’t had time to find another.” Why was she in charge of finding Brendas, she asked herself in irritation? There had been four changes in office manager in the two weeks since the original Brenda had broken her last fingernail and left in tears of rage, that fate had so conspired against her. Brendas did not thrive on hysteria, Brendas couldn’t handle panic, and Freddy’s trip had started an avalanche of premature customer demand that they couldn’t possibly control without a half-dozen competent office people.

  “Who’s answering the phones in the reception room? It sounds like a New Year’s Eve party out there,” Jock said wildly. “I could almost swear I hear Annie’s voice.”