The Infinite Air Read online

  From Batavia to Rambang in a storm. From Rambang through hail, then sweltering heat, through a cloud of volcanic ash from the Ender volcano, towering red-hot and dangerous, causing her to veer off-course, until she righted her direction and came to the island of Timor.

  She feared she would never see land as she feverishly wrote in her logbook on 23 May:

  6 a.m. From Kupang on Timor Island on the last hop to Australia

  8.30 a.m. Revs 1821, oil 40 lbs, height 600 ft

  9.30 Engine running smoothly — sun shining sea choppy

  10.30 Winds seem to have dropped sea calm

  11.00 Wish time would pass more quickly

  11.10 Hot work pumping petrol by hand —

  11.15 Should see land soon now

  She trusted her navigation. As a gardener who knew how to prune roses, or a chef who could make a perfect soufflé, she knew how to find her way, whether in sight of land or not. Now was no time to doubt herself. Her fuel was running dangerously low. Even if she were flying in the right direction, would there be enough to get her to her destination? She remembered, with a start, that she hadn’t allowed for a deviation error in her compass, caused by the massed metal in her long-range tanks. She compensated by altering the compass seven degrees, even though she was out of sight of land. A rising panic threatened to overwhelm her.

  11.30 Headwind must have increased have pumped all petrol through to top tank

  She tried to steady her breath. It occurred to her that perhaps she had missed Australia altogether. There was no way back now. Besides, it seemed almost preferable to die than to fail a third time. Her lunch-box had been packed with roast chicken drumsticks and sliced mango. A Thermos of coffee had grown tepid. She jotted again in the logbook strapped to her knee:

  12.00 pm Having lunch must see land soon

  The food helped to calm her but now she felt a terrible weariness seeping into her bones.

  12.20 No land in sight yet

  12.30 Should have seen land by now wonder if petrol will last out

  And then, there on the far horizon, she saw a small dark cloud, and the weather was still perfect, so she knew that it must be Australia, and as she flew nearer, the country’s red dust and the smoke of fires rose before her.

  12.45 HURRAH LAND hurrah must be about 30 miles away

  1.15 About 20 miles south of Darwin will have slight following wind up coast

  1.30 Landing DARWIN

  She remembered later, thinking of the moment as she taxied across the airfield towards a waiting crowd, that despite having flown over some of the most ancient and beautiful cities of the world, none had been as magical as this little township, surrounded by angry bush fires. She had broken the existing solo record for women by four and a half days. Her legs trembled as she climbed out of the cockpit. In the distance she saw reporters running towards her. Hands reached out to grab her, hold onto her, touch the miracle of what she had done. The locals wore pith helmets and threw them in the air. A Fox Movietone camera was trained on her, watching her every move.

  An official party now made its way across the runway. The first person to greet her was Captain Bird, the Castrol representative, who had arrived just a few minutes earlier in a plane that was to escort her across the Australian outback to Sydney.

  In the morning, she received telegrams. As she opened each one, she understood more clearly what she had achieved. The first one was from Lord Wakefield:

  Warmest congratulations upon your splendid achievement Stop Your courage and perseverance have won for you a well deserved success. Wakefield of Hythe.

  And then the telegram deliveryman handed her one that made his hands shake.

  Please convey to Miss Batten the congratulations of the Queen and myself on her wonderful flight. George R. I.

  There were more of the great sheaves of yellow cables with their capital letters — from the Governor-General and the Prime Minister of New Zealand, and the Prime Minister of Australia.

  And there was this, from Fernhurst in England:

  Warmest Congratulations was sure you would do it.

  Amy Mollison

  A heart more generous than her own, Jean thought. All she had wanted was to beat Amy’s record, and now she felt almost a moment of guilt, her success so overwhelming that she guessed no woman would catch her now. As the newspapers arrived with their enormous headlines proclaiming her success, Jean prepared herself for the reception that awaited her on the other side of the continent.

  As she came into Sydney a week later, sixteen planes flew out in formation to meet her. To the right of her Moth, she saw Smithy’s Southern Cross, filled with waving passengers. The roofs of buildings were crowded, the roads jammed with cars as people tried to reach Mascot aerodrome and join the tumultuous throngs waiting to see her arrive.

  She stepped down from the plane, wearing her white helmet and white flying suit, and made her first public speech.

  The Wakefield agent discreetly slipped her an envelope. It contained a cheque for one thousand pounds.

  In the evening a huge reception had been arranged in the Sydney Town Hall. Jean knew that people liked her in white, the way she dazzled in a crowd. She chose a white lace gown, a short white fur coat and silver shoes, carefully inspecting herself in the mirror of the handsome hotel where she was staying. When she walked through the foyer, she reminded herself of the way Madame Valeska had taught her dancers to carry themselves, with a graceful flick of their hair, chins level, as if they might be going to rise on their toes at any moment, light on their feet. It made heads turn. At the town hall a red carpet had been rolled out for her to walk down, and all along it were women in beautiful dresses, their perfume heavy on the air, and stout men in their straining black evening jackets, like a herd of cattle waiting to charge. Cameras flashed in her face. She kept on walking, smiling, touching a hand reached out to her here and there. It was only a matter of weeks since she had walked the streets of Rome, her face bruised and swollen, seeking parts for her plane, and now here she was, in the hot Sydney night, fêted by the rich and famous, and the Lord Mayor of the city.

  Charlie Ulm was there, giving her a hard time for being more famous than him. ‘Who am I?’ he wailed. ‘Just some joker making way for la belle dame.’

  ‘Oh go and palely loiter,’ she said, laughing at him. ‘Do we need Keats tonight?’ The banquet laid out for the guests had been cleared away and they were dancing, his hand reassuringly firm and surprisingly cool, resting in the hollow of her back.

  ‘And you want to know something,’ he said, ‘I just love it that you’ve made it, kid. I’ll never forget the day you turned up demanding to hitch a ride with Smithy.’

  Then they were hurried away to do a live broadcast together, to thirty Australian radio stations, plus all the English and New Zealand stations, in what someone said was the largest broadcast ever organised from Sydney. Later there was a shortwave broadcast to the United States.

  She told herself, I’m living in a dream. But it’s a dream of my own making.

  In London, Nellie had gone into hiding from the hordes of reporters pounding at her door. She kept a rolled wad of notes inside her brassiere, waiting for a moment when she could escape and book a passage home.

  In New Zealand, Fred Batten was coming to terms with being the father of a star. With some hesitation, he was telling the newspapers how proud he was of his daughter.

  CHAPTER 24

  IT ASTONISHED JEAN HOW EASILY SHE COULD HOLD people’s attention when she spoke. There would be a great murmur of anticipation. Then she would walk onto a stage and the silence was sudden and immense. When she recounted her adventures, the three attempts on the record, the obstacles to overcome, and the loneliness — yes, sometimes she touched on that, too — there was nothing but a rapturous stillness that ended only as she finished speaking, rent by a vast roar of approval.

  There were moments when the loneliness came back. It caught her when she least expected it, in beautiful hot
els, where a maid had come in and turned back the bed covers and placed a flower or a chocolate on the silk sheet. This was where she would curl up by herself, with nobody to call out to in the night. Or she would walk into a tiled shining bathroom, the brass taps gleaming, and catch sight of herself in the mirror — the flawless make-up, the perfectly arranged hair, the dress that might be a gift from an admirer (some urged her to go into the best shops and ‘choose yourself something nice, and the bill will be paid’) — and not recognise the person she saw. She would ask herself what she was doing alone with this woman. Who was she? Charlie Ulm’s question, though made in jest, had touched a raw nerve. There were days when she was so exhausted that she wondered how she would get up in the mornings.

  She felt this loneliness again when the newspapers ran a story about the aircraft wings she had borrowed from her fiancé, Mr Edward Walter. FLOWN ON THE WINGS OF LOVE. Edward had sent her a furious telegram demanding why she had spread their private business around. She had thought he would be proud. After all, their engagement had been announced.

  Boarding the Aorangi and leaving Sydney for Auckland had been a relief. As it turned out, Charlie was travelling to New Zealand on business. He was setting up a commercial postal air service between the two countries, and was going to some meetings.

  They had time now to talk about what they did and why. His hero, he said, was the aviator turned writer, Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry. It was the French in him, he supposed, but he loved everything he wrote. Jean must read Night Flight, a novel about an impossible flight made in Patagonia. The main character, Fabien, flies for the Patagonia Mail Service. His boss wants him to fly in a thunderstorm, then he never comes back, and Fabien’s ghost will haunt him forever. But, Charlie pointed out, Fabien has the choice to turn back and he doesn’t. The story would break her heart, but it might also explain to her why she found it so hard to resist the temptation of danger, why she’d become a slave to it. ‘“Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life”,’ Charlie quoted. ‘That’s from the book.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ she asked.

  ‘I suppose I must.’

  They were sitting on deck chairs, gulls wheeling past, when he told her this, although it was the end of June and they huddled in their coats to keep out the cold. New Zealand would be upon them the next day. Charlie had come across her in one of the saloons, writing in her journal. This was something she had taken up since her arrival in Australia, in spare moments in hotel rooms — an account of her journeys, the three attempts to reach Australia. Writing it had helped her put together notes for the speeches she had been asked to give. Charlie wanted fresh air, he said, somewhere where they could smoke without old biddies waving their hands in front of their faces and sniffing. They were both smoking Camels.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Jean. ‘You’re leading me astray.’

  ‘Tobacco’s a dirty weed. I like it. It satisfies no normal need. I like it.’

  ‘You talk rubbish.’

  ‘It’s a poem,’ he said. ‘Honestly. “It makes you thin, it makes you lean, it takes the hair right off your bean.” Haven’t you heard that one?’

  He turned serious again. Although he was full of quips and flirtatious banter, he saw how she was often troubled. He had had these moments, too, he told her, moments when he didn’t believe in himself, when he’d been judged. The Coffee Royal scandal had altered things, changed how he felt when he saw admiring crowds. They could turn on you in the blink of an eye. And, in a way, it had changed his friendship with Smithy. It was hard not to go back to that dreadful year of the inquiry, the things that were said of them.

  His first marriage had ended abruptly. He had married at the end of the war, he explained, when he was just twenty-one. The failed marriage had caused his wife more distress than it did him, because he had a life to go on with, the famous aviator with a career, while she was condemned to the status of the divorced woman. So there was that, too. ‘I couldn’t have stayed alive in that marriage,’ he said. ‘But I did that to her and it stays with me still.’ He had remarried and was happy enough. He and his new wife had custody of his son, his only child, from his first marriage.

  ‘Divorce is hard on women. I do know that,’ Jean said.

  ‘I can’t dwell on it any longer,’ he said. ‘It happened and it’s past.’

  ‘But you do,’ she persisted. ‘You’ve just told me about it. My mother feels like an outcast. Not that my parents are divorced.’

  ‘Do you ever wish they were? Wouldn’t you like your mother to get married again?’

  Jean looked at him in astonishment. ‘My mother remarry? I don’t think so.’

  ‘She has you?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

  He pulled a hungry lungful of smoke and blew it into the sea air. ‘What about you? You’re getting married?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She sighed.

  ‘Hey, don’t pull such a long face.’ He reached out his hand and held hers briefly. ‘You do know you’re gorgeous.’

  ‘You keep telling me that, Charlie. You’re the nicest man I know.’

  There was something about Charlie that reminded her of Savelli, with his European charm, and his nearness. When she thought about Edward, she felt none of this. Nor had she, really, with Victor, who had become a shadowy figure, someone she could no longer visualise. As for Frank Norton, she tried hard to shut out the memory of what she had done with him. That had nothing to do with how she had felt in Rome, and now, here, on board this ship with Charles Ulm. She felt herself trembling.

  ‘Nice. That’s hardly a compliment,’ he said. ‘I’m a little bit in love with you, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. But we like each other too much to spoil things, don’t we?’

  ‘That’s very grown up of you, Miss Batten. But yes, you’re right, of course.’

  Their conversation turned back to aviation, to Jean’s wish to fly all the way to New Zealand some day, his to open up air routes across the Pacific. In the evening, at the last-night party, they danced close together. Jean put her arms around his neck. He lifted two glasses of champagne from a tray carried by a passing waiter.

  ‘See you in the soup, old thing,’ she said, laughing as they drew apart and toasted each other. ‘I need my beauty sleep.’

  Jean had been assigned a stateroom cabin. Before she climbed into bed, she took some of the Aorangi’s headed notepaper and wrote a letter.

  Dear Viscount Wakefield

  In the morning, I will be arriving in my homeland, New Zealand. Now is the moment when I must thank you again for all you have done for me. None of my present success would have been possible were it not for your help. And I was overcome by the generosity of your handsome gift of one thousand pounds upon my arrival in Australia. I will confess to you now that I was hundreds of pounds in debt when I got to Sydney. You will understand how much your generosity really means to me. When I return to London, I hope I may call in and thank you again in person.

  In the night the wind came up and the ship pitched and rolled as it made its way down the coast. When Jean heard knocking she thought at first it was a rope come loose somewhere on the ship, but it was someone tapping on the door. Charlie stood there with a bottle of champagne in his hand.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t be throwing up. The bar’s a mess. Mon Dieu, some people have no stomach at all. I thought you might like a drop.’

  ‘Charlie, no,’ she said.

  ‘You want me to go?’

  She shook her head and held out her hand.

  Towards dawn she slept for a time, her body languid and at ease with itself. He woke her gently, and pointed out the porthole beside the pillow. The ship was sailing into the harbour, surrounded by boats decked with streamers and bunting. Aeroplanes flew overhead. On the quay crowds of people stood waving and cheering.

  ‘What’s it about?
’

  ‘I think it’s about you, love,’ he said. ‘You should get dressed and go out onto the deck.’

  ‘Have we missed breakfast?’

  ‘I’ll order some for you. You can have it when the ship’s berthed; it’ll take a while for people to disembark.’

  ‘Will you come back and have some with me?’ She grabbed his hand.

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Order me a big juicy steak.’

  ‘Little savage.’

  ‘Plus two eggs, sunny side up.’ That was her brother John’s saying, she remembered with a sudden pang, gathered in his Hollywood studio days.

  ‘Let go of me,’ Charlie said. ‘I need to go to my cabin and change. Make sure Miss Batten keeps her reputation intact.’ He slid his hand out of hers and seized both her wrists, holding them briefly behind her. ‘Je t’aime. We can still be friends, oui?’

  ‘Friends? Is that all?’

  ‘I have a son, remember? And a wife who deserves better than me.’

  ‘I think she’s lucky.’

  ‘Jean, look at me: you’ll find somebody soon.’

  ‘A tall, dark stranger?’

  ‘I don’t know what he’ll look like, but you’ll know, and you’ll be happy. Now then?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘friends. My best friend.’

  When she appeared on the deck, a huge cheer went up. She had dressed in a pale blue woollen suit, with a grey mink fur stole around her shoulders, and a cloche hat, so that people could see her face. For a few minutes she stood and waved. It was cold out there, and impossible to distinguish anyone among the crowd. After a time she went back inside.

  Her breakfast was waiting. Charlie stood beside the table, tapping his finger and looking anxious.

  ‘Where’s yours?’ she asked, seeing the place laid for one.

  ‘Your father’s looking for you. The captain brought him and your brother aboard. I’m going now. Just eat your breakfast and try not to be afraid. Promise?’