The Infinite Air Page 10

  ‘What have you got against it?’ she asked him.

  Fred ran his hands through his hair. ‘Haven’t I told you,’ he snapped. ‘Flying is men’s business. It’s too dangerous by far. Remember how I told you about the planes falling out of the sky when I was in France. Besides, there was talk there of prostitutes taking up the job. There was a Frenchwoman who was straight out of a brothel when she found herself a rich man with an aeroplane. The fool married her.’

  ‘Marthe Richard,’ Jean said. ‘She set a record. I read about it.’

  ‘And her poor sod of a husband was killed in the war. Then she married a spy. Is that the kind of person you want to be?’

  Jean was silent then. Her mother would call this dirty talk. Her father was agitated, his eyes narrow. After a while he went along the passageway to the kitchen he shared with other tenants on his landing, and came back with tea and some toast spread with home-made blackberry jam. A treat, he said.

  That morning, before Jean had gone out, Nellie had put on a stylish hat and picked up the big bag. ‘I’m gone for the day.’ When she returned, her face was lit with a small, understated smile of triumph.

  ‘We’re going to Australia,’ she said.

  NELLIE HAD DECIDED THAT IF CHARLES KINGSFORD SMITH could teach Jean to fly, all would be well. She had written to him, on the strength of the meeting the year before. She knew, Nellie said, as if she understood more about him than Jean, that he was a happy-go-lucky man, keen to offer flights to people. ‘You’ll see, when he meets you on your own, away from all those people, he’ll see how smart you are, how much you really want to fly. Aren’t you pleased?’ Nellie’s eyes glowed with excitement.

  ‘I’d never have asked him,’ Jean said. She was over-awed that her mother had had the nerve to do this.

  ‘No, of course you wouldn’t. But I have.’ Nellie produced tickets from her bag. ‘We’re booked on a steamer that leaves tomorrow, and a week from now you’ll go for a flight in the Southern Cross. What d’you say to that?’

  ‘I’m so happy.’ Jean was caught up in the contagious warmth of her mother’s excitement. ‘I’m the luckiest girl.’

  When Kingsford Smith saw her, he scratched his head, a roll-your-own behind his ear, and grinned, appearing to remember her. ‘I don’t know what to make of you. You’ve got a mind of your own, I’ll give you that.’

  They had gone to the aerodrome of the Royal Australian Air Force near Sydney at eight that morning. Nellie and Jean’s ship had berthed the night before, but neither of them had slept well in their hotel, afraid they would wake too late. ‘I want to fly,’ Jean said to the pilot. This time she didn’t feel shy. On the journey over she had sat on the ship’s deck and looked at the sea and the sky, and it seemed as if they were sailing to her destiny. She had dressed with care for this adventure, in a blue knee-length coat with a pleated skirt that would allow her to move easily as she climbed into the plane, a plain cloche hat that fitted snugly over the tops of her ears, and flat sensible shoes.

  ‘Well, we’ll take the old bus up for a spin, eh?’ Smithy took the cigarette from behind his ear and pointed to where the Southern Cross stood on the tarmac.

  ‘Just you and me?’

  ‘You scared of me, eh?’ He chuckled at himself. ‘I can’t do much while I’m flying a plane.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’ Jean blushed.

  ‘Don’t worry, my mate here’s coming along with us.’ Then she recognised Charles Ulm, who had also been at the dinner in Auckland. He had been Kingsford Smith’s companion when he set his records. His black hair was tangled with wild curls, his complexion olive. He made flourishes and gestures with his hands, in a way that reminded her of her brother John, only more instinctively sexual. His voice held a faint exotic trace of an accent.

  ‘Is Maman coming with us?’ Ulm asked.

  Jean shook her head. She and Nellie had already decided that she would make the flight alone, lest it be thought that Jean lacked courage. Her mother was ensconced in the clubhouse, watching through binoculars. ‘You’re French?’ she said.

  ‘My father,’ he said. ‘An artist who ended up in Australia.’

  ‘Take your eyes off her,’ Kingsford Smith said. ‘He’s trouble with women, I can tell you.’

  ‘You play the piano and dance as well?’ Ulm said.

  ‘Who told you that?’ She had asked her mother not to tell the men what she did in New Zealand: she did not want to seem unsuited for flying.

  ‘We did our homework,’ Kingsford Smith interrupted, and that was all either of them would say. ‘Mind you, I can’t blame my mate here.’ He offered her a hand up, still grinning. ‘The best-looking skirt we’ve had in the old girl.’

  ‘I expect you say that to all the girls who fly with you,’ she said lightly, surprised at herself, yet not wanting to prolong the banter. She remembered Kingsford Smith’s appraising look at the dinner in Auckland. She was flattered that he had remembered her, but all she wanted was for the plane to lift off, to carry her into the sky.

  ‘You get to sit up front with me.’ Smithy laughed, and touched her back lightly as she settled in beside him.

  As the plane hurtled along the runway, she was overtaken by delirious joy. And then they were airborne, banking away over the city and heading north, climbing higher and higher, and before long the Blue Mountains lay beneath them in the glittering air. Whatever else had occurred in her life until now became insignificant. The sense of speed and of power almost overwhelmed her. Everything that had been dull and ugly ceased to exist. She cried out aloud at this sensation of flight, her face rapt with pleasure. The plane swooped down towards the mountains, the blue gum trees filled with coruscating silver light, and she glimpsed the floor of the world through their leafy branches, before the plane banked and rose again through the sky, seeming to ride the edge of a cloud. ‘This is it,’ Jean shouted above the roar. ‘This is what I have to do.’

  When they were back on the ground, she turned to Kingsford Smith and said, ‘Will you teach me to fly?’

  He scratched his head again and lit the cigarette that had stayed in position throughout their flight. ‘I dunno about that. Look at you, you’re just a slip of a girl. We’ve got a lot on, some big trips planned. You serious about this?’

  ‘Never more serious in my life. I know how to use a compass.’

  As if sensing that his friend was going to make a commitment he might regret, Ulm said, ‘You’re too pretty for this game. If you’ve got a gift for music you should make use of it. I can see you in a concert hall. All you’d have to do is smile and you’d be a star.’

  ‘I don’t see that my looks have got anything to do with it,’ Jean said hotly. She felt a tension in herself as he looked at her.

  ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ he said.

  ‘Twelfth Night. Act one. Opening line.’ She understood that she could have him if she wanted. For what, she wasn’t sure, but he was there for the taking.

  ‘Quick,’ he said, impressed. ‘This one’s got flavour, Smithy.’

  But Kingsford Smith hesitated. ‘You say you know how to use a compass, eh? Get yourself some flying lessons. There’s a flying school in Auckland. Come back at the end of the year and let me know how you’re getting on.’

  ‘So that’s your advice,’ Jean said, downcast.

  ‘Yeah, well, a couple of things. If you do take up flying, don’t ever fly at night, you won’t be able to get your bearings. And don’t go after men’s records. Blokes make the records.’

  Ulm took her by the shoulders and kissed her on either cheek before they parted, holding her a moment longer than was necessary. Kingsford Smith said, ‘See you, kid.’

  Jean hoped that the backing of her hero would soften her father’s heart, but within weeks of her return to New Zealand, Australia was rocked by a scandal involving Kingsford Smith and Ulm. The pilot and his crew set off at the end of March to fly from Sydney to England to arrange for the purchase of more planes. King
sford Smith was at the controls when the Southern Cross was forced to make an emergency landing on a desolate mudflat near the mouth of the Glenelg River in Western Australia. They were lost for a fortnight, during which time the crew lived on a diet of coffee and brandy. Two airmen, Keith Anderson and Bobby Hitchcock, who had joined the ensuing search, crashed and died in the desert from heat and thirst.

  It turned out that, at the beginning of the 1928 endeavour, when Kingsford Smith and Ulm made the flight from the United States, these two men had been part of the original crew, but they had fallen out. Anderson sued his former friend for breach of promise, bitter because he had not shared the glory of the epic flight. Kingsford Smith had made an out-of-court settlement for one thousand pounds, with which Anderson and Hitchcock had bought a small touring plane, intended for sightseeing. It was this they used to look for Kingsford Smith and Ulm.

  The Southern Cross crew were accused of staging a forced landing as part of a publicity flight that had gone wrong, and, as quick as an ocean wind, the saint turned sinner in the eyes of the public. Anderson and Hitchcock had sacrificed their lives for the sake of a cheap stunt. Or so it was now said. An inquiry was called for. Again, tabloid headlines stared back at Jean on street corners, dubbing the scandal the Coffee Royal incident. The affair raged all year as Kingsford Smith faced his inquisitors.

  ‘Where did you go?’ Freda quizzed Jean, after her return to Auckland.

  ‘Australia,’ Jean replied shortly.

  ‘Quite a holiday.’

  ‘My mother had a windfall.’

  ‘Oh well.’ Freda put her chin in one hand, her eyes narrowed. ‘As a matter of fact, Jean, I’m going to Australia next week, too.’ Her voice was flat. They were sitting in Milne and Choyce’s having tea. Jean hadn’t been keen to have this conversation. If word got about that she had been flying, Fred would be furious, as would Alice Law.

  Besides, she and Freda seemed to have drifted apart. It was hard to put her finger on what was wrong — perhaps her interest in aeroplanes rather than dance? But Freda had pressed the invitation, as they changed into their street clothes at Madame Valeska’s: ‘Please Jean, I do need to talk to you.’ Her face was pale and set.

  Freda had money, as she usually did, and had ordered tea, a plate of sandwiches and a cream puff each.

  ‘We’ll get fat,’ Jean said, then watched in astonishment as Freda’s eyes filled. ‘Only joking, you’re skinny as can be.’

  Freda was devouring the food as if it were her last meal. Cream and jam glistened on her lip. Even so, Jean couldn’t help noticing the beautiful curve of eyebrows, how perfectly she had applied her make-up. ‘You’re not to tell anyone? Jean, you promise.’

  ‘What’s not to tell?’

  ‘I thought you might pick it. I’m in the family way. Jean, don’t look at me like that.’

  Jean reached out across the table and gripped her friend’s hands in hers until Freda pulled them away. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘People will stare at us.’

  Something had happened that Jean couldn’t imagine. Sex, the longing and desire that people had for each other, none of it seemed to have done much good to anybody she knew. It didn’t make sense to her. A dull ache of shame flooded through her, as if she were guilty of some nameless misdemeanour. When Freda had teased her and egged her on to try out the forbidden, she had thought it a joke. But Freda did know.

  ‘Who’s the father?’ she asked at last.

  ‘You sound just like my mother. “Oh, the shame of it.” I’ve been hearing that for days. Well, I should be relieved it’s not your mother, she’d be kicking up a worse stink if it were you. Look, it doesn’t matter who the father is.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell me?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m not telling anybody.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Are you getting married in Australia?’

  Freda said, ‘I’m getting things fixed up over there. I’m not going to have the baby. I thought perhaps, well, I thought maybe that’s why you’d been to Australia.’

  ‘Is that why you wanted to talk to me?’

  Freda gestured helplessly. ‘Well, you could have told me what they did to you.’

  Jean stood up shakily, brushing crumbs from her skirt. ‘As if you would think …’ She stopped, put her hand over her mouth.

  ‘Well, it seemed surprising. No, of course I wouldn’t think it of you.’ After a moment in which they stared at each other, as if they had never been friends, Freda said, ‘Goodbye, Jean.’

  ‘You’ll come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. I might die there, mightn’t I?’

  ‘I think you’re being dramatic.’ Jean was aware how cold she sounded. It wasn’t how the words were meant to come out, but they did. She walked away as quickly as she could.

  MONTHS DRAGGED PAST WHILE KINGSFORD SMITH and his witnesses were interrogated before the Air Inquiry Committee. In the end he was exonerated, and Jean awaited the outcome with dwindling hope for her own chances. When the outcry, for and against, began to subside she approached Fred again, hoping he would relent and pay for her flying lessons.

  ‘Don’t you understand the meaning of the word no?’ he said. ‘Look at this thing in Australia. Death and disgrace. If I’d known your mother was taking you to see Kingsford Smith I’d have put a stop to it, I can tell you.’

  ‘You introduced me to him.’

  ‘The bigger fool me. I didn’t know what a shyster he was.’

  ‘He was cleared. He wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

  ‘That’s enough, Jean.’ He sounded weary of her. ‘Get back to work on your music. You’re not paying attention to what’s important.’

  ‘Well …’ She hesitated.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘If I’m going to be a concert pianist, perhaps I need more experience. I’ve gone as far as I can with Miss Law. I really need to go to England.’

  ‘That’s a nice idea. A good dream. A better sort of dream. Not something I can afford.’

  ‘I can see that, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve been wondering if perhaps I should sell the piano. It would pay for our fares. Mother would have to come with me, of course. I wouldn’t know where to start without her.’

  CHAPTER 11

  JEAN CAME TO THE CAVES, NEAR WAIPU, in the heat of summer before leaving New Zealand. This was where Harold now lived, high on a hill, along a dirt road winding through bush. He collected her from a bus that travelled north out of Auckland, over a mountainous pass opening onto far-flung islands lying in an indigo sea. The small town consisted of a straggle of low buildings along either side of the main road. Harold was dressed in ragged overalls, the bib done up in a loose knot over a checked shirt, the hair touching his collar as dark as Jean remembered it, teeth gleaming in his tanned face. He led her to a flat-deck truck, its tyres bare to the tread, not unlike Belle’s vehicle at Birkdale. They set off, Harold blaring his horn at hens that strayed into his path. He pointed out landmarks — the store at the crossroads, a high, bare house standing back from the road. A tall, slender woman dressed from neck to ankle in black, hair scraped up into a severe bun, was sweeping the verandah. ‘They reckon she’s a witch,’ Harold said. ‘Never talks to anyone.’ Further on, as they moved inland, they passed low-lying farmland, and a river that coiled its way through paddocks of grass and late buttercups. Trees pressed in against the speeding vehicle; it bounced from side to side, leaves whipping the windscreen, stones flying through the air and smacking the glass as they approached another curve. This road led to underground caverns, and fields of limestone rocks with scant blades of grass between them.

  The house where Harold lived with his wife, Alma, and their children overlooked a limestone quarry that Harold had developed. This was what he farmed — rocks. Grey-blue rocks that he blasted from the reluctant earth, setting detonators among the gullies. He and his men ran lines of cordite to the gunpowder that would explode and bring slabs of the limestone crashing down. Harold’s love of explosi
ons had come into its own. The sound of the detonations shook the air as the truck approached the farmhouse, the lime crusher silhouetted against the sky rattled and echoed around the canyons, the engine was a continuous whine, as the clouds of pale dust swept towards them. To Jean it looked like a scene from a hell. Her brother’s darkened face gleamed with an unholy joy, laughter on his lips as he took in her astonishment.

  She turned to him, and something about his glee was contagious. ‘Harold,’ she breathed, ‘this is amazing, the most wonderful place.’

  ‘I reckoned you’d like it.’

  ‘It’s so dangerous.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘A man could die up here in the wink of an eye. Or a sheila.’

  His accent had roughened, his vowels mirroring his wife’s Australian twang. Going by a photograph on the mantelpiece of their wedding day, Alma had been a slim, pretty girl then. Broken Hill, she came from, hard mining country. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t seen it all before. But already she was weathering into motherhood, her waist spreading beneath her apron, her hands raw from boiling napkins in the copper, an art Jean would soon learn. As Jean came to know her she would notice an anxious shadow lurking in her expression that never seemed to entirely disappear.

  The house was square, three bedrooms, a kitchen that also served as a sitting room, a lean-to where the copper and a tin bath were sheltered and a verandah — more a shelf where Harold could stand and keep an eye on the quarry than a place to sit and contemplate.