by Nesta Tuomey
After the other pilot’s peevish attack, there had been no question of staying for a nightcap. They had collected their sons who had spent the evening playing cards with the Kane’s children, and gone back to their own apartment.
‘I never saw him in such an impossible mood.’ Her voice floated from the bedroom as she moved about taking off her things.
Through the half open door Graham saw her pull off her diamante top. She was wearing nothing beneath it and he got a glimpse of her breasts, white and jutting below her tan line, before he quickly kicked the door closed to prevent the boys seeing.
When he went into the bedroom shortly afterwards Sile was lying naked on top of the sheet. With a sense of surprise, he noted the red-gold fuzz between her legs. These days he was so used to Kitty’s darkness that he had forgotten just how pale and transparent his wife was there.
‘Come and throw some quivers in me,’ she invited, twisting on her elbow to face him, her breasts bunched enticingly before her.
Normally slow to initiate sex, Sile was hungry for it now, turned on by Christy’s accusation. That other women would fancy Graham was on the cards from the start of their married life, for he really was extraordinarily handsome but Sile had grown complacent about it over the years. She had beauty herself and other men had not been slow to show their appreciation.
Inflamed by jealousy at the thought of some young hostess putting her eye on her handsome husband, his good looks cut her afresh. As he dropped his shirt and pants she let her eyes run over his tanned, muscled body and saw with sly interest how she had aroused him. When he turned off the light and came towards her, she reached up possessively to pull him down to her.
‘It’s been ages,’ she complained, straining against him.
As Graham held her in his arms, he felt a certain guilt at making love to his wife, as well as a bitter self-disgust when he remembered how she had so often denied him her body. But oh God! After weeks of foreplay, it was unbelievable.
THIRTY THREE
Almost two thousand miles north of Marbella, Captain Dan Tully was overnighting in Paris. He entered the room of one of the hostesses and found it in darkness. Lifting the covers he slipped in beside the sleeping figure.
‘Move over, honey,’ he whispered huskily, ‘Your captain needs you.’
‘Dan!’ Poppy Meldon shot up in the bed with a giggle. ‘What the hell kept you?’ With a pleasurable groan, Captain Tully buried his face in Poppy’s enormous chest.
Another night of lovemaking, he thought happily, and all with the blessing of Celtic Airways. Thanks be to Jaysus for the summer!
In Rome, Captain Simon Cooney was sharing an overnight with Orla O’Neill. Previously, they had drunk coffee together on airport turnarounds but never carried the flirtation further. Now this was about to change.
‘Come night-clubbing,’ Simon eagerly suggested, excited by Orla’s full-blown looks and all the rumours he’d heard about her.
‘Love to,’ Orla immediately responded, flashing her dimples. What a hell of a joke it would be to take him away from Maura Kane.
It was the end of August before Maura heard the rumours about Simon and Orla. She waited until he was in a relaxed state after lovemaking before voicing her suspicions.
Simon frowned. ‘You surely don’t believe everything the Checks tell you?’ he protested. ‘It wasn’t the Checks,’ Maura replied evenly. She wore white lounging pyjamas trimmed
with gold and a white velvet bow in her ash blonde hair. The domed light in the ceiling was dimmed and an empty wine bottle upturned in an ice bucket.
Simon looked strained. The summer he had just put in on Europe would have exhausted anyone. On top of that, two-timing Maura was taking its toll. Even Dan Tully would have found the pace hectic!
‘They’re jealous, can’t you see,’ he said persuasively. ‘They’d like to have your job. This is just their way of putting you down, making you feel insecure. It’s how they get their kicks.’
Although this line of reasoning had worked well in the past, somehow Simon didn’t feel so assured this time. There was something inflexible about the cast of Maura’s jaw.
‘I told you it wasn’t the Checks,’ Maura repeated coolly.
She eyed his handsome florid face speculatively. There were always rumours, she thought. But this time the tip-off had come from Judy Mathews.
‘My dear, don’t take offence but there’s a certain little hostess making a name for herself these days with the crews,’ Judy had told her. ‘And this time she has set her cap a little too close to home, if you get my meaning.’
Remembering, Maura frowned. If it had been Eva Hendricks or Beattie Burgenhoffer dropping sly hints, she might have ignored them. But Judy! Her lips tightened. There was no malice in the Chief Hostess Atlantic, merely fellow feeling. Two Celtic queens, East and West. Maura’s gaze flickered reminded of something Judy had once said. ‘It can be lonely at the top, my dear, but I’m damned if we’ll let them advance an inch. We girls must stick together,’ Remembering, Maura’s gaze hardened.
‘Simon, I know... there’s no use denying it.’
Simon flushed. ‘You take it all so seriously, Maura,’ he grumbled, not denying anything. ‘It means nothing, you know that. Just a bit of fun.’
But even as he said it, his pulses raced at the memory of those beguiling brown eyes, that sweetly opulent figure. That this last little indiscretion was different from the others, he recognised. For one thing it was lasting longer. Three weeks was normally his limit. But not this time!
Maura swung her legs off the bed feeling the need of more wine. ‘Able for another glass?’ she queried resignedly. It was a familiar routine. She accused and he confessed and that was that - until the next time.
She took a chilled bottle of Piesporter from the fridge and sighed as she trimmed away the foil. Wasn’t it typical of Simon to act up just when she was at her busiest. She didn’t want to quarrel with him. She had enough on her plate as it was.
As she popped the cork smartly a shrewd glint came into her blue eyes. Perhaps it might be a good idea to transfer A/H O’Neill on to the Boeings out of harm’s way. In the meantime, it would be no harm to keep a close eye on the girl. No harm at all!
THIRTY FOUR
‘You’re taking the Pill?’ Graham repeated in a puzzled voice. ‘My dear Kay, are you ill?’
I shouldn’t have told him, Kay thought, mortified. They were sitting in Graham’s car overlooking the sea, it being too chilly these cool evenings to sit on the beach.
‘The Pill,’ she said with desperate emphasis, ‘You know...’
She hadn’t meant to tell him, but when he touched her breast and remarked in a wondering voice how very full it was, she had found herself blurting out the reason.
In the six weeks since she had started on the contraceptive, this was the first time she could bring herself to tell him what she had done. Now that the words were said, she knew it was a mistake. Their first time together in ages and already it was spoilt by Graham’s admission that he couldn’t stay longer than an hour and now, her own awkwardly blurted confession.
‘But how did you know where to go?’ He was amazed that she had taken such a step. She told him.
Graham said nothing for some moments, genuinely shocked by her revelation. He felt he didn’t know her at all. It was the kind of action he would have expected from the hostesses he had consorted with in the past, or his wife, who without consulting him, had had herself fitted with an inter-uterine device rather than bear any more children. He did not realise how seriously Kay had taken his words on the beach, or how utterly she had believed him when he declared he would no longer be answerable for his passion.
‘You’re angry with me,’ she cried, seeking reassurance that he was not.
Why had she said anything? She knew all along what she had done was open to misinterpretation. It was why she had held back so long from telling him. Didn’t he realise she had done it for him. Well, for them b
oth. Gone to all that trouble and embarrassment just so that they could make love without anxiety.
Perhaps he didn’t like her fuller figure, she thought, aware that he admired willowy girls like Jean Shrimpton and Audrey Hepburn. To Kay’s intense mortification she had gained a half stone since going on the Pill. The Chief Hostess had commented on it at the last weigh-in.
‘Well you’re fairly tall, Miss Martin,’ she had conceded with a smile, ‘so I suppose you get away with it. But only just. For heaven’s sake don’t put on any more.’
She was the second person to remark on it.
‘It suits you,’ Dave had said but even the unusual compliment coming from him had not reassured Kay. She couldn’t care less what Dave thought. Only Graham’s opinion counted.
She wished again she hadn’t told him. Now everything was spoiled. Something had changed between them since that lovely relaxed day they had shared by the sea a month before.
It had been the last Sunday in August, a perfect summer day. Graham had brought a delicious picnic basket stuffed with good things, smoked salmon and cold roast chicken as well as salad, fruit and several sticks of French bread which they had washed down with chilled wine from his fridge. Kay had never been happier.
They had stayed on the beach all day and then reluctantly gathered up the picnic basket and rug to head back to the car, where they found a note awaiting them on the windscreen. It was from Graham’s brother-in-law, Garry, informing him that Sile and the boys had returned that evening from Spain.
Not the perfect ending to a perfect day. In the month that followed she had heard a few times from Graham but had not met him again until now.
Kay stared miserably down at her hands, remembering the disappointment when Graham’s notes began arriving cancelling their dates. What was wrong, she wondered, her green eyes troubled.
Graham gazed out the window and thought how all the time he had been away from Kay, he had been comparing her innocent loveliness with his own brittle, hostile wife, whose jealousy had grown out of all proportion since Christy Kane had planted the suspicion in her mind that he was having an affair.
His brief visit to Spain had been marred by Sile constantly re-hashing the subject. Never had he seen her so enraged. Worst of all had been the sight of Jeremy and Nicky’s shocked faces as they listened to them fighting.
To make matters worse, the day after his wife’s unexpectedly early return from Spain, she had come found Kay’s swimsuit in the back of his car. When he got home she was on the step to meet him brandishing the evidence.
‘If you are fooling around Graham, you’ll soon regret it,’ she threatened. ‘And you won’t even get a glimpse of your precious sons. I’ll make sure of that!’
Knowing her, Graham could well believe it.
For a while afterwards, he had made the effort to be a dutiful, if not loving, husband sticking close to home on his days off.. But finally he got tired of pandering to her. His marriage was past saving anyway. Even before Nicky was born, it was in shreds. Sile was a jealous woman, to whom he had given cause for suspicion. She didn’t particularly love or need him, he told himself grimly. She was holding on to him because she liked being married to an airline pilot and the style of living his top-ranking job entitled them.
He resolved not to put off meeting Kay any longer. Even if it was only for an hour, he longed to see her and be reaffirmed of her devotion. This last had become vitally important to him in the miserable weeks since his wife’s return from holiday.
Now he was aghast at her admission that she was on the Pill. Good God! Didn’t she trust him! He found himself cynically wondering if she still had that virginity he had been at such pains to preserve.
A muffled sob from beside him made Graham turn his head. One look at her face and all the unworthy suspicions he had been harbouring were swept away by the desolation he saw there. With a muttered exclamation, he caught her to him.
‘Forgive me, darling,’ he said contritely.’
With an abrupt change of mood, he saw Kay’s action as brave and selfless and was horrified at what the past weeks had done to him.
‘Give me a glimpse of that lovely smile, or I’ll begin to think you don’t care for me anymore,’ he continued. ‘How could you think I’d be angry with you?’
But you were, you were, thought Kay. . You looked at me as if you despised me. ‘Oh Kitty, darling,’’ Graham murmured, some notion of how deeply he had hurt her dawning on him. ‘I’ve been going through hell these past weeks. If you only knew....’
He thought of the last minute rush to get the boys into boarding school, the explanations and the lies necessary to cover the true state of affairs at home.
‘But why Dad? Why?’ a tearful Nicky kept sobbing, as they drove down to Mellwood College. ‘Aren’t you and Mummy friends anymore?’
The wrenching goodbye had remained with Graham on the drive back to town. Deliberately turning his mind away from the disturbing memory, he held Kay close. In time, he was aware this affair must end like all the others had but now he needed her badly. His eyes were suddenly wet, as he buried his face in her thick hair. In time, his mind echoed, but not yet.
Seeing how truly distraught he was, Kay responded .She was unable to understand why he was so anxious not to antagonise his wife, when he had repeatedly assured her that they went their separate ways, but she didn’t question it.
THIRTY FIVE
A month later, Kay was back in training again, this time for the Boeings. The two week course had far surpassed anything they had previously encountered on Europe but at the time she had heard of her transfer to the Atlantic route, she had been totally fed-up.
‘Poor you,’ Sally had commiserated when the lists were posted. She was down for training on the new BAC 1-11’s and was excited at the prospect of getting the occasional continental overnight. She had begun at last to get over her Dutchman and was looking forward to soothing her bruised spirit in Malaga with her Spanish admirer.
She nudged Kay as some of the Atlantic girls came in off their flight, and whispered, ‘They’re all so old-looking. They must be years flying.’
Kay nodded dolefully, although suspecting tiredness had a lot to do with it. Who wouldn’t look tired after being up all night working such a strenuous flight!
Sally nudged her again, ‘That one must be five months pregnant at least.’ She gave a husky incredulous laugh, ‘How do they get away with it? I mean, she’s sticking out a mile.’
Overhearing her, a reserve remarked, ‘She’s probably one of the married ones back for the summer. They only do it for the free trip.’
The free trip to any part of the world was CA’s carrot to ensure there were enough hostesses working Atlantic routes in the busy season.
None of this made Kay feel any better about her own transfer but she cheered up when Bunny, who was also been transferred to the Boeings, insisted she knew quite a few Atlantic hostesses who were youthful and glamorous. To Kay’s relief it was a view corroborated by Judy Mathews at the start of training. According to the Chief Hostess Atlantic all ‘her girls’ were top notchers, high flyers (whatever about the more jaded specimens sometimes glimpsed about the restroom) and Kay found herself responding to this attractive image.
What excited Kay most was the Atlantic uniform. It was a couture designed dream. Monogrammed pleated silk shirts with cap sleeves and rows of tiny covered buttons; waist hugging jackets over A-line skirts - linen in summer and fine Donegal tweed in winter - and, best of all, cute little flat airline caps with a Yankee flavour. To everyone’s delight the gaberdines had been replaced by turquoise cloaks lined in beige silk, and no schoolgirl hoods to spoil the line.
As she sipped her wine at the demo lunch, Kay reflected that in some ways it was rather restful being back in the classroom after a year spent at the whim of rostering. Another bonus was meeting Graham in the afternoons. When she had told him she would soon be joining him on the Atlantic, he had seemed genuinely pleased
It would be wonderful, Kay thought. A trip away together would make up for all the disappointments they had suffered since his wife’s return had put an end to their glorious freedom of the summer. Regrettably, their time together these days was so frustratingly brief. Certainly not long enough to work up the kind of passion that had sent her fleeing to London for the Pill. Another let down was being restricted to the car once the colder weather set in. Somehow no matter what they had done in the open air, Kay had never been aware of any loss of self-respect, but in the close, leathery-smelling depths of the sports car where his wife and family must often travel, she was conscious of a feeling of degradation, a sensation which was in no way lessened when an object one night, spiking her bare shoulder at the height of ecstasy, turned out to be a muddy golf shoe half-concealed beneath the rug.
‘Dratted thing,’ Graham had growled, shoving it angrily out of sight. The mood was spoiled.
‘This is all wrong,’ he sighed, sitting up. ‘You deserve far better than these hole and corner meetings. Ah if only...’
Regarding him wistfully Kay had hoped he might say if only they had met before, or if only they could be together always.
Instead he continued rather shockingly, ‘If only I had the strength to send you away from me now.’
‘But... but surely you can’t mean that,’ she whispered, feeling as if part of her stomach had dropped away. She shivered and hugged her arms to her chest, afraid she was going to break down and cry.
When he took her hand and gently asked. ‘Would you really mind so much,’ she was unable to reply.
Next time they met Graham had been strangely withdrawn and disinclined to initiate lovemaking. When Kay tentatively asked him if anything was wrong, he muttered something about not wanting to take advantage of her. ‘You’re very young, my dear. I don’t want to spoil your life.’
