The Infinite Air (18 page)

By this time she had had three glasses of champagne. They rustled down her throat, giving her the illusion that she was drinking nothing but bubbles. She turned to him and bit his ear in a playful way. ‘Charlie, if you weren’t married you’d be my very first, you naughty boy,’ she said.

‘Charlie, indeed,’ he said.

There was dancing in the cramped little space near the fireplace, although there wasn’t room for more than one or two couples at a time. She danced with Ulm, and felt her head floating free of her neck. ‘I think I’m drunk,’ she said. He held her close for a moment, his cheek resting on hers. ‘May the first one know what treasure he reaps,’ he said, and let her go.

Mostyn volunteered to escort her home. It was too far out of his way, she objected, and he would have to go on the train with her. This was all the more reason that someone should escort her, it was decided, as if by committee. She wasn’t the only person who needed help to get home. Others sang as they lurched into the starry night. Charles Ulm watched Jean leave, blowing kisses off his hand.

‘Goodnight, Charlie boy,’ she called.

If she had been asked to describe him, Jean would remember
Mostyn as a slight young man, fair, with a touch of ginger in his hair, and brown eyes, but then his image would blur. Nothing appeared clear, and as the train sped them towards London, the shape of things became even less distinct.

John was still up when Mostyn escorted Jean in. His eyes ran over the pair of them.

‘She needs to lie down,’ Mostyn said.

‘I can see that. Jean, since when did I say you could bring people here in the middle of the night?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Mostyn said. ‘I just brought her home.’

John looked at him properly then, his eyes resting on the visitor. The room went deathly quiet. Mostyn was looking back at John, deep colour flooding his cheeks. In spite of her confusion, Jean had a moment of startling clarity. There was something about the way John looked at Mostyn that reminded her of the way her father had looked at her friend, as he held the girl’s waist that day at the beach when she was fifteen. There was longing in the expression, but something more than that. A reckless certainty that he could get what he wanted if he chose. This was the way John was looking at his unexpected visitor, and Mostyn wasn’t turning away from her brother’s gaze.

The two men walked out of the room, their footsteps echoing in the passage, then disappearing down the stairs. Jean lay down on the bed without taking off her clothes, her head spinning. She wondered, briefly, if people died from getting drunk. Then it was morning, and late at that.

John was nowhere to be seen, but his shaving brush stood drying on the windowsill, and a cup and saucer rinsed and left out on the bench. There was nothing to indicate how long he had been gone the previous night. Her head was still spinning but she had a vague memory of what had happened. She remembered her flash of intuition: John really didn’t want her around any more.

She packed her suitcase, not leaving a note as she put her key on the bench and pulled the door behind her. At the post office along the street, she sent a telegram to Frank Norton.
Your offer of loan gratefully accepted. Could you manage twenty pounds? Love Jean.
She
took out the word ‘gratefully’ because it was cheaper. After some reflection, she deleted the word ‘love’.

In the afternoon, she pawned the watch that Nellie had given her for her twenty-first birthday. In the evening she found a room at Hendon, not far from Stag Lane. The rent for a week was a pound, leaving just three shillings in her purse. The view from the window was appealing — cottages with gardens, a bustling street — but the room was like so many that she had inhabited, with dust in the corners and thin grey blankets on a mattress that had slept many. This time she was alone.

The events of the night before were foggy. Had she imagined the look between the two men? John had had enough of her in his flat, that much was clear. But he was her brother and she determined to write him a note and tell him where she was. Sooner or later they would be friends again.

She gazed at her reflection in the mirror hanging above the dressing table. The paint behind it had begun to flake, making spots in the glass, giving her a pock-marked appearance. A woman with a pale, pretty face looked back at her, but the eyes were startled, as if she were seeing herself for the first time. A grown-up woman, with flaws, even if she hid them well from the rest of the world. And a person who, for the moment, was on her own, her splintered family nowhere to be seen.

A bank draft from Frank arrived within days, and she could eat again. She wrote to thank him in her round, perfect handwriting, which had begun to develop little flourishes, taking care not to be too effusive. Soon, she wrote to him, she would have her commercial licence, and would be able to start earning money. Well, she did still need some more hours, but he could trust her: this money would see her through a bad patch. Before long her mother would set out for England and, as he knew, once she arrived, all would be well. She did not write the fatal word ‘love’ at the end of this letter either. It was unsettling to receive a telegram shortly afterwards that said,
My darling, you must not go without anything. I worry about you. More money coming next week.

Nellie was already on her way to England.

Frank’s money continued to arrive, week by week.

CHAPTER 17

VICTOR DORÉE HAD BEEN SELLING SILK AND LINEN
wares in Australia, the place where he first learned to fly. This was now one of his regular destinations. There was talk of him settling there and establishing a branch of the family business in Sydney. On his first night back in London he made his way to the clubhouse at Stag Lane.

On seeing Jean, he said, with a note of accusation, ‘You disappeared. I looked everywhere for you.’

She explained the hurried trip back to New Zealand. A family crisis, now resolved, was how she put it. They would have dinner the very next evening, he declared. Nellie, reunited with Jean, and installed in the room at Hendon, was impressed.

Victor bought Jean a corsage, and drove her into the city to dine at a restaurant near the Ritz. He ordered oysters for their first course, and poached salmon with mousseline sauce and cucumbers, followed by roast duckling, at which point Jean cried, ‘Enough. I couldn’t possibly eat more than that.’

By candlelight, he coaxed her to tell him what she had been doing in the last year or more, apart from vanishing to New Zealand, how her flying was progressing, what she hoped to do next. He gave a low whistle when she told him that she was within hours of obtaining her B licence.

The white silk dress, worn for this special occasion, was fraying and bedraggled. ‘You’re finding things a bit tough, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I mean, financially?’ She wondered if he had caught the whiff of cheap talcum powder. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean to pry.’

‘Is it that obvious?’ she said.

‘I don’t know how you make ends meet,’ he said ‘Flying’s a pretty expensive pastime.’

‘My mother’s a remarkable woman,’ Jean said. ‘She’s living here in London with me. She’s had to sell property in New Zealand to pay for all this.’

‘That makes you all the more special,’ he said, full of admiration. ‘Two determined women. You’d honour my family if you brought your mother to visit us.’ The drawing room at Oakleigh was long, with an ornate ceiling and fine furniture worn to a patina with care and the passage of years. The lampshades were made of embroidered silk, the rugs came from Persia, statues stood at intervals in alcoves. The filtered light gleamed through stained-glass windows above a Steinway piano standing at the end of the room.

‘Do you happen to play?’ Victor Dorée’s mother asked, on Jean and Nellie’s first visit. She carried herself with the pleasurable certainty of a woman who has successfully raised five sons. Her pepper-andsalt streaked hair was caught up in a loose soft style, small tendrils escaping round her face. The dress she wore that evening was made of a satiny fabric with elaborate pin tucks over her bosom, expensive yet slightly dowdy. ‘I play, of course, and so do the boys, but they seem to grow out of it when they’re older. Sometimes I wonder if any of them have retained a tune in their heads.’

Nellie said, ‘But of course. Jean can play now if you would like.’ Jean seated herself in front of the piano and immediately began to play her favourite Chopin prelude. Mrs Dorée’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘Exquisite,’ she breathed. ‘Mrs Batten, you have a very accomplished daughter. But I’m sure you know that.’

Jean continued, while Victor and his family — some of his brothers, like him, still lived at home — listened with rapt attention. They appeared bantering, cheerful young men, but they sat in deferential silence while Jean played.

‘Why, you could be a concert pianist,’ Mrs Dorée cried, clapping her hands.

‘That was the intention. Jean is one of those young women who can do anything she sets her mind to,’ Nellie said, her voice full of pride. The pair of them slid into the life of the Dorée household as if they had always been part of it. Jean showed Victor the outside of the building she and her mother occupied. ‘You’ll forgive me if I don’t ask you in,’ she said, and he had understood.

‘There’s no need,’ he said, ‘when you can visit me. Besides, I wouldn’t want you to live any further away from me. Closer still would be nice, but we’ll have to wait until we’re married.’

So there it was again. Marriage. This wasn’t even a proposal, rather an expectation, taken for granted. She looked at his closely shaven chin, his broad, seemingly kind face, caught the scent of his expensive cologne. She supposed it might be possible. She wasn’t yet convinced that she loved him as much as he imagined, but surely it would happen in time.

Nellie had met Madeleine Murat and disapproved. She thought her a flighty, show-offy kind of girl. John, she told Jean, had mentioned the possibility of marriage, which Nellie thought outrageous. The girl had a dirty mind; it was clear she was hanging around the film studio at Elstree in order to gather material for more of her rubbish. She didn’t know how he could entertain the idea of marrying her, although it was clear Madeleine had set her cap at him.

‘He can’t marry her,’ Jean exclaimed.

‘Oh well, I suppose there’s nothing to stop him, except common sense,’ Nellie said. ‘Well, is there?’

‘Not that I know of, darling,’ Jean said, wondering who she was soothing, her mother or herself. If Nellie wondered at the silence between Jean and John, she didn’t dwell on it. She could understand, perhaps, that Jean found the girl’s company intolerable, and besides, they had their own friends now.

This business of marriage, Jean reflected. It happened to everyone sooner or later, or so it seemed. She thought she might be falling in love with Victor Dorée, but how could one be sure?

Amy Johnson had just married a man called Jim Mollison. They
had met on a commercial flight and agreed to marry within eight hours of setting eyes on each other, while the plane was still in the air. Jim had set a new record flying from Australia to England the year before. Earlier in the year he’d set an England to South Africa record.

The couple had appeared at the clubhouse soon after the wedding, Amy clinging to her new husband’s side, a huge smile illuminating her face. The newspapers had run a story that morning dubbing them ‘The Flying Sweethearts’.

‘It won’t last,’ Nellie muttered darkly to Jean when this was related to her. ‘That man’s a known playboy. You mark my words, he’ll be off as soon as a pretty woman looks at him. Amy’s a fool. He’s just after a famous wife.’

The marriage had hardly taken place when Amy set off to break Jim’s record to South Africa. This was to become the pattern of their marriage, Jim setting a record, Amy breaking it. Jean and Victor dined out with the couple from time to time, but Jean could see it already, Jim falling more silent as Amy became more animated.

Later that year, her brother John married Madeleine Murat, in what Madeleine glowingly described to the newspapers after the event as a ‘secret wedding’.

‘My own son,’ Nellie said, her eyes glazed with unshed tears, her British upper lip for once trembling, when she read about it. ‘They only live a couple of miles away. Was I that bad a mother, that I didn’t get asked to his wedding?’

‘Darling,’ Jean said, putting her arms around Nellie, ‘you’re the very best mother in the world.’ It occurred to her that John would not have wanted her at the ceremony when the congregation was asked if there was any reason why these two people shouldn’t marry. But then again, perhaps she was imagining something that wasn’t there, and it was just Madeleine’s flair for the dramatic that had prompted this public revelation of the ‘secret’ marriage. The couple would be going back to Hollywood soon, she said in one interview.

FRANK NORTON APPEARED ONE EVENING ON THE DOORSTEP
of the room in Hendon. Jean had supposed he would return to New Zealand when he finished his tour of duty in Quetta. In the back of her mind a nagging doubt persisted as she recalled, in bad moments, his promise to come to London, but she hadn’t believed him. Or, worse, hadn’t wanted to believe him. Now, when she saw him, she couldn’t believe her failure to understand that he had meant it.

‘Frank Norton,’ Nellie said, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’ Frank stepped inside before she finished speaking and opened his arms, as if he expected Jean to walk straight into them. She held out her hand. ‘It’s very nice to see you, Mr Norton,’ she said.

‘Mr Norton — oh that’s a good one. How English you sound, my darling girl.’ He looked around them, at Nellie’s disapproving face, the cramped room. ‘Come on,’ he said, his voice full of urgency, ‘I’ll take you somewhere we can talk.’

This was a small pub across the road, low-beamed and heavy with cigarette smoke. He ordered drinks, a beer for himself, a lemonade for her.

‘I’ll have to get you out of that place,’ he said. ‘I should have sent more money.’

‘It’s been enough to help me with my flying,’ she said. ‘I do appreciate it. I hope to start repaying you soon.’

‘No hurry,’ he said easily. ‘I’m flush. I’ve had my pay out from the air force. Five hundred quid. Enough to buy a house when we get back home.’

‘Home?’ she said.

‘New Zealand.’

‘Frank, London’s my home. Don’t you understand?’

He didn’t, and there appeared to be no way of convincing him that she wanted to stay where she was. ‘Frank, you don’t know me,’ she said, ‘really, you don’t. Once my mind’s set on anything, it’s useless to try to swerve me from my purpose, or take away my enthusiasm. I love it here. I’m going to finish what I set out to do.’

But he had bought a car, he told her, so that they could go touring
around the countryside, up to Scotland perhaps. It was as if she hadn’t spoken. They might as well see a bit before they settled down. And he’d joined the club at Stag Lane, so they could fly together.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that.’

‘Jean,’ he said, ‘stop this nonsense. I can join any club I like. I want to spend as much time as I can with you from now on. We’ve been apart for too long. We’re only staying here in England until you’ve got your licence and then we’re going home, the way I said. You can earn some money back there. There’s no reason why you can’t keep flying until we start a family. I’ll keep helping you out until you’ve finished.’

‘I don’t want us to get married,’ Jean said, straining so hard to speak that she could hardly get the words out.

‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’d have been sending you all that money if you weren’t going to marry me?’

‘I’m going to fly to Australia,’ she said, holding back angry tears.

ON A MURKY NIGHT IN NOVEMBER, TRAVERS INFORMED
Jean that it was time for her to make the return night flight from Stag Lane to Croydon airfield, followed by the aerobatics test the following day. This was the final test for her commercial licence. She had been flying steadily in the weeks before, mounting up the final hours as fast as she could. Frank Norton paid for the use of an aeroplane each time she needed one. The faster she could obtain the licence, she now believed, the faster she could escape him. In the evenings, she no longer went to the clubhouse, lest Victor Dorée should appear. She and Nellie continued to dine once a week at Oakleigh, and some evenings she and Victor went in to the city. She did not want gossip about her, she told Frank icily when he invited her out. She had other friends, other commitments, it was not possible to spend every evening with him. There was something trusting about Frank that almost made her pity him. Pity, she thought, was very close to contempt.