The Infinite Air Read online

  After a nervous glance in Jean’s direction, the girl played on, her notes faltering. Alice Law told Jean coldly afterwards that if she didn’t behave herself she would suspend her tuition. Jean apologised. ‘I don’t know what possessed me, Miss Law,’ she said. But she did know: she had to be the best. It was the only way out, or so it seemed. Otherwise she would be coaching rich boys to dance with rich girls for eternity. Besides, she was caught in the middle. Valeska’s studio was home to her piano. She couldn’t have one without the other.

  THEN DASHING AMERICAN CHARLES LINDBERGH FLEW solo across the Atlantic in a monoplane he called the Spirit of St Louis. It was 1927, and the world stopped to applaud. Jean found herself at the news stand each morning, breathless to learn more about the aviator. Here was something more important than arpeggios or pirouettes.

  Spurred on by this exploit, two New Zealanders, George Hood and John Moncrieff, decided to try their luck by flying across the Tasman from Australia to New Zealand. Both of them had flown in the war, and Hood had lost half his lower right leg in a crash. Now he earned his living driving taxis. In a photograph taken the day before the flight, in January 1928, he was a balding solid man, looking older than motor mechanic Moncrieff, intense and handsome with a tanned complexion. Jean and Nellie sat transfixed by a battered Radiola in what their landlady described as her sitting room, in order to follow the flight, then rushed out to buy the morning newspapers.

  Hood and Moncrieff had disappeared. Their radio signals continued for twelve hours after they departed from Australia, but they left no trace of where they had been swallowed up, either in the deep sea or the mountain passes of the South Island. The wives of the two lost airmen were photographed, dressed in cloche hats and fur stoles, with corsages pinned to their breasts. Hood’s wife wore her hat pulled down so that it shadowed her eyes; her mouth was set in a stoic line. Moncrieff’s wife was pouting a little, her lips parted, as if to make a good impression for the photographer. Feathers jutted from her hat around the ears. ‘She doesn’t understand yet,’ Nellie said. ‘They’re not going to come back.’

  ‘Of course she understands,’ Jean said. ‘They would have known the risk their husbands were taking. You can’t afford to be afraid if you’re going to fly. They wouldn’t be married to women who wept every time they left the ground.’

  Nellie said she supposed Jean was right, but she still thought the Moncrieff woman was in shock.

  ‘The fools,’ Fred said, when Jean spoke to him next. ‘They should have known they’d land up in the drink.’

  Just a month later, an Australian called Bert Hinkler flew a tiny biplane from England to Australia. No flying suit for him: he wore a double-breasted suit and tie. The journey took him fifteen days, with landings to refuel and sleep briefly along the way. ‘It’s possible, Mother,’ Jean breathed. ‘People really can fly across the world.’

  One day soon after this, Alice Law looked at Jean, bent over the piano, with a worried frown.

  ‘Jean, stop,’ she commanded.

  When Jean lifted her head, Alice said in a quiet voice, ‘You play each note to perfection. I would trade you for a dozen pupils who played half as well.’ She might have added, and paid twice as much. ‘What is it? Where’s the passion gone?’

  ‘You’re mistaken. I’m just a little tired.’

  ‘It takes more than talent and energy to be a great pianist,’ her teacher said. ‘The search for perfection brings its own problems.’

  Jean turned back to the piano, her hands rising and falling adroitly in a show of exuberance. Alice watched her and sighed.

  Jean turned towards her. ‘What problems?’

  ‘There’s such a sense of loss if you fail.’

  ‘You’re talking about the concert? I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It should be enough to seek perfection for the music’s own sake, not just for an audience. You didn’t play at the concert and now the music means less to you.’

  ‘So it was a test?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘And I failed it?’

  ‘You’re still a fine pianist, Jean. You could have the world at your feet if you wanted it badly enough.’

  ‘I’ll pass my exams, won’t I?’

  ‘Oh, the examinations? I’m sure you will.’ Alice pushed a damp grey curl behind her ear. ‘Just think about what you really want.’

  WHEN JEAN GOT HOME SHE SAID TO NELLIE, ‘I want to fly to Australia faster than Bert Hinkler. I know if I learned to fly that I could do it.’

  And then, as if all that were not enough, Charles Kingsford Smith did fly across the Tasman Sea, with a crew of three men in a plane called the Southern Cross. When he landed in Auckland, thirty thousand people waited to greet him.

  The flight of the stars, the newspapers exulted.

  CHAPTER 9

  WHEN FRED ARRIVED TO TAKE JEAN TO DINNER, Nellie had gone out. If she could avoid seeing her husband, she did. Nearly seven years had passed since they began living apart. Although Fred was thickening in middle age, his suit buttons tightening, his dentist’s hands remained delicate in their appearance, fingernails perfectly trimmed and manicured. He had continued to live in the block of Auckland flats called Courtville, next door to a vacant section where wild fennel bloomed in summer and loquats hung heavy on the trees. Nellie spoke sharply of his situation in comparison with theirs, wondering aloud how he could afford such luxury, while they lived in squalor. Sometimes, just for peace, Jean reminded her that Fred had to share a kitchen and bathroom, just as they did. Nonetheless, Fred had endeared himself to his landlady and appeared to be living a comfortable life. He told his wife and daughter there was nothing more he could do. Times were hard, people weren’t paying to have their teeth done. Or they would come to him in agony with a toothache and he couldn’t bear to turn them away, even though they couldn’t pay. Nellie couldn’t have it all ways: an education for their daughter plus a smart address. And after all, it was she who had left him, and not the other way around. This Nellie said, was a sophistry. What else could she have done?

  On this particular evening, in order to avoid him, she had taken herself off to the Temple of Higher Thought where, she maintained, reason prevailed. She had forsaken the Spiritualist church, disenchanted by séances that she had decided were rigged. There was no sign of her missing son, nor did she expect any longer to find him in this life. The red-brick temple with its arched door stood in the centre of the city. When she wasn’t at the theatre, Nellie took herself there for solace and contemplation. It offered, she said, the opportunity for people to study the principles of religion and the mysteries of the universe, without dogma or prejudice, and to learn how to solve their own problems. You wouldn’t catch her having hysterics, or taking Veronal, so beloved by society women, to calm her nerves. Logic and careful planning would see her through in the end, just wait and see.

  ONE OF FRED’S PATIENTS, ONCE WELL-TO-DO but now down on her luck, had given him tickets for a dinner in honour of Charles Kingsford Smith, traded for his treatment of her abscessed tooth.

  Jean met Fred in the entrance to the latest boarding house in Symonds Street, surrounded by ancient smells, the stale rush of stew, unaired blankets in rooms with full chamber pots, windows covered with brown paper to stop passers-by from looking in. She was wearing a white silk sleeveless dress that fell in graceful gathers from her waist and swirled around her knees. Her mane of hair, so like his, was parted neatly on the side.

  ‘I couldn’t have asked for a better-looking date. I like the outfit.’

  ‘I wear it to play at the dances. It’s something I designed myself. I admire simplicity.’

  A woman on the stairs, wearing a cardigan with holes in the elbows, asked for the price of a wad of tobacco, her voice shrill. ‘You could spare it,’ she shouted, ‘even if Miss La-di-dah here won’t part with a penny.’ She spat a stream of rotten phlegm at their feet. Fred pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and passed the woman
two, as he stood, still appraising his daughter.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ she said, when they were outside in the fresh evening air. It was September, the oak trees overhead green with the new tender light of spring leaves, the salt-laden breeze from the sea dispersing the smell of the old building they had left behind.

  ‘She’ll be nicer to you now,’ Fred said, ‘you’ll see. You want to remember that, girl, it pays to give a little now and then.’

  ‘You have to have something first,’ she answered.

  ‘That’s enough,’ her father said, tucking her hand under his arm. ‘I’m taking you somewhere, aren’t I? This is what you wanted. You’ve been talking about aviators and flying machines for as long as I can remember.’

  The dinner was held in the dining room of the Grand Hotel. Jean shivered with pleasure as they entered. She had often walked past the ornate frontage on her way to music lessons, longing to enter, and the interior was as beautiful as she had imagined. Near the entrance was a spiral staircase, and alongside the lower steps, a Victorian open-shaft lift with an iron grille, designed, her father told her, to resemble a smart French hotel. Alongside the grille was a black oak board bearing the words A Message Awaits engraved in gold lettering. The pigeon-holes where messages awaited were also embossed in gold. There were potted palms and large chandeliers, and to Jean it seemed as if she were in a dream. The doorman looked at the reception card Fred handed him, bowed and directed them to the dining room, where a waiter led them to their seats. The tables were an ocean of white linen and silver. Jean felt she would choke if she so much as breathed.

  They were barely seated, when Kingsford Smith himself was there, taking his place at the next table. The aviator was small in stature, slim and fair, with a long hawk-shaped nose. He looked over at the Battens, his smile revealing widely spaced teeth, but he seemed to Jean older than his age. He was just thirty-one, but already he had served in a war, shot down German planes, had half his left foot blown off and had a Military Cross pinned on his chest by King George V. Not that he gloried in war. It was a massacre, he said, a horrible thing to look back on, not something he remembered with pride. All that had happened before he turned twenty. Now he held records: for an around Australia flight, the first Pacific Ocean flight, the first non-stop flight across Australia, and this latest, the first Tasman Sea crossing.

  There was nothing quiet about Kingsford Smith, who was already in animated conversation with fellow guests at his table. He carried himself with jauntiness, reminding Jean that since his feats in the war he had also been a flying stuntman in Hollywood. Anything to raise the cash, he’d told reporters. The three companions who had flown with him on the historic flight across the Tasman were dotted around at other tables, but it was Smithy who was the centre of attention. When Jean came to describe the evening to her mother, she couldn’t remember what she had eaten, just that after the main course, before dessert was served, the famous pilot had stood and spoken of the flight, the way the wild Tasman Sea had lived up to its reputation, with torrents of rain whipping at the sides of the plane, and fifty-mile-an-hour gusts of wind hitting the Southern Cross side on, spinning her about. Ice had formed on the wing tips, weighing the plane down. He remembered then, he said, the New Zealanders who had already lost their lives trying to fly the Tasman, and it made him humble that he and his crew had made it, when they did not. He called for a toast in memory of Moncrieff and Hood, and asked the guests to make it in silence. They should never forget, he said, that flying was a great adventure, but also a risk. And then he was away again, recalling how they had outflown the storm, suddenly finding themselves in sunshine, with Christchurch lying beneath them.

  As he spoke, radiant points of light showered on him from the chandeliers, so that he seemed larger than life and bathed in a golden aura. Jean felt she had reached a point in her life from which there was no turning back.

  Later, she told Nellie that they might have had trifle, because her head was spinning from its sherry, but really she couldn’t remember much else, except that Kingsford Smith had walked over to her table and asked her name.

  When she told him that she was Jean Gardner Batten, he turned to Fred and said, ‘She’s a good-looking sheila, this daughter of yours.’

  ‘She’s clever, too,’ Fred said, pride in his voice. ‘She’s going to be a concert pianist.’

  ‘Actually,’ Jean said, ‘I’m going to learn to fly.’

  Smithy looked at Fred and laughed. ‘I reckon your little girl’s got ideas of her own. Flying, eh?’ He rapped on the table, calling people to attention again. ‘Raise your glasses,’ he said. ‘This young lady is going to learn to fly. Let’s drink to it.’

  Around her, people laughed and cheered and threw down another glass of port, for the wheels on the party were now well oiled.

  ‘Dad, let’s go,’ Jean said.

  Outside the hotel, Fred said, ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s what I want to do. They didn’t need to laugh.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ Fred said. ‘Girls don’t fly.’

  But Jean knew there were women who flew aeroplanes and so would she.

  ‘I expect they’re very like men in their ways then,’ Fred said. ‘You’re having one of your moods, my dear. You know you must stay calm.’

  ‘I am calm. Don’t say I’m not calm, Father. I tell you, there are women who fly.’

  ‘Name one,’ he said.

  ‘Millicent Bryant, the Australian. Like Smithy.’

  ‘Oh, yes, and look what happened to her. She’s dead.’

  ‘Not from flying.’

  But there was no point in arguing with Fred. Millicent Bryant had died in a ferry accident the year before, and the story had been carried in the newspapers, but this all seemed beside the point. Fred set his pipe between his teeth, and put his hands in his pockets, as if he had said all he needed.

  They didn’t break their silence as they made their way back to the boarding house. The atmosphere between them had grown hostile. It was all Jean could do to thank her father for taking her to the dinner. Afterwards she thought she had been unkind to him, and this would come back to haunt her, because, after that, their meetings always ended in disagreement. Nellie was her only friend in the family. She supposed John was still her friend, but he didn’t write.

  He had appeared in his first Hollywood movies: a walk-on role in Backstage, the persuasive lover Jimmy Garret in The Chorus Kid, playing opposite Thelma Hill, known as ‘the Mah-jong Bathing Beauty’ for the patterns on the swimming costume she wore. A part of Nellie disapproved. As she’d reminded Jean more than once, she understood all too well the way men fell for women who flaunted their charms. There’s more to talent than flesh, she said. On the other hand, she was pleased that John was making a name for himself as an actor. And money, too. Jean thought, in secret, that it must be nice for Thelma Hill to fall into her brother’s arms for all the world to see, not that she would have wanted to herself, but she missed him. She missed the way they used to talk beneath the pepper tree in the garden, when times were better. He had asked her one day what she wanted to be when she grew up. ‘Famous,’ she had replied, ‘that’s what I want.’ And he had said that, yes, that that was what he wanted, too. She hadn’t seen The Chorus Kid yet, just a picture of Thelma Hill. She wasn’t all that pretty, and she didn’t look especially clever, but Jean could see the proportions of her bust. She had written to John to ask him if he’d met Greta Garbo, but he hadn’t replied.

  ‘Father disapproves of me wanting to fly,’ Jean said to Nellie in the dark that night. They were lying on twin beds, pushed close together with just room enough for a wardrobe in the corner that didn’t fit all their clothes. The landlady had used Lysol to clean up some mess in the passageway, and the acrid smell burned their nostrils as they fought for sleep.

  ‘Does he just?’

  ‘I’m not sure that I want to be a concert pianist after all,’ Jean said. ‘In fact, I’m n
ot sure that I ever wanted to be. It was his idea.’

  ‘I want you to fly,’ Nellie said in a fierce voice. On the other side of the wall beside their heads, someone banged their fist, calling out for them to shut up, and couldn’t a man get a good night’s sleep.

  ‘I’ll get you out of here, dear, just wait. I will,’ Nellie said in a whisper no less passionate.

  CHAPTER 10

  JUST HOW NELLIE INTENDED TO GET JEAN OUT of the boarding house and make an aviator out of her was unclear, nor was it in the weeks that followed the meeting with Kingsford Smith. Shame of one kind or another had brought them low, but they were not on their own.

  In spite of the lavish dinners the rich could still afford, the slump, as they called it, was biting hard. The grey faces of the unemployed began to haunt the streets of Auckland. The normal things of life were slipping away — the chance for jobs, even the hope of getting married. Men could no longer afford to support their families. Nobody trusted the banks any more. If they go under, people said, we’ll lose everything. We’ll wake up in the morning and our last sixpence will have disappeared.

  All the same, Jean wondered if her mother might have something up her sleeve. In the weeks that followed the momentous dinner, they returned over and over again to the subject of Jean learning to fly. The unspoken matter was that of Fred’s opposition. Jean supposed he might have grounds for cutting off their allowance, let alone providing money for lessons. But Nellie was writing mysterious letters and posting them off. She was studying the newspapers, too, and talking to the tobacconist at the corner. Hot tips, some insider information perhaps. He was a man who followed the horses.

  Jean still saw Fred from time to time. They were visits he expected of her, and, in spite of herself, she still felt herself drawn to him. Love, she supposed, was what children should feel for their parents, though what she felt for Fred didn’t resemble how she felt about Nellie. There was something complicated about it. She remembered blue days by the lake when she was a child, the nights when it was all right for him to tuck her into bed, the contours of his knees when she sat in his lap. On one of her visits, she brought up the subject of flying once again.