Great Circle: A Novel

by Maggie Shipstead

  England

  August–November 1942

  Just after Marian arrived in London

  First Marian and the others were sent to Luton, north of London, for ground school and flight checks. Everyone, men and women, had to begin at the beginning, regardless of experience. “You might have two thousand hours,” the instructor said, “or you might have two, and you’ll still have to sit here and listen, and you’ll still have to pass the tests.” They wore civilian clothes (their uniforms were being made in London, at Austin Reed), were issued big, amorphous Sidcot suits for flying.

  Ground school Marian found very interesting as she’d never learned about aerodynamics except haphazardly and long ago in the Missoula library, and she’d never learned Morse code or studied, in a systematic way, navigation or meteorology. This was the school of her young dreams: rows of desks occupied by pilots, walls plastered with maps and charts and diagrams of engines and instruments. Safe, not brave. Their instructor repeated this often enough for it to be a kind of mantra. Their purpose was to safely and efficiently transport airplanes wherever they were needed, not to be heroes. The planes were to be undamaged, or at least not damaged further than they already were. Sometimes they’d be flying brand-new aircraft, sometimes battle-bruised ones. Sometimes they’d be taxiing each other home in tired old crates.

  The ATA operated under what Marian considered a clever and audacious system. After completing flight school at Luton in light aircraft, mostly open biplanes, and logging enough cross-country flights, pilots were sent to headquarters at White Waltham, south of London, and were trained to fly single-engine fighters, known as Class II, which included Hawker Hurricanes and, after a proving period, the longed-for Spitfires. Once they’d proved themselves capable, pilots were posted to one of fourteen ferry pools: the northernmost was Lossiemouth in Scotland, the southernmost Hamble, near Southampton, where the Supermarine factory churned out Spitfires that needed clearing away before the Germans could bomb them.

  Each pilot was issued a small book, bound at its top with two metal rings, FERRY PILOTS NOTES and FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY stamped in yellow on its blue canvas cover. This contained information on every plane they might fly; they would be expected to take off in unfamiliar models after only a quick perusal of the notes. If they did well with Class IIs, they would return to White Waltham to upgrade to Class III, light twin-engine planes, and so on up to Class V, the hulking four-engine heavy bombers. Class VI was flying boats, but women were not allowed to fly those, as they would need to be put among a male crew, an intrusion that could only result in chaos.

  “Chief amongst your concerns,” said the instructor, “will be flying below the weather. If you can’t, stay on the ground. To avoid attracting attention, you won’t be using radios, and if your aircraft has guns, they won’t be loaded.” He hesitated. “That is, in theory. If you should happen to find yourself in an armed aircraft, under no circumstances are you to fire your weapons.” Here some of the pilots exchanged rebellious glances.

  “You’ll be completely on your own. So remember: safe—”

  “—not brave,” chorused the pilots.

  “I’ll never understand why they won’t teach instruments,” Marian said to Ruth as they walked back to their billets, two little brick houses on the same street, occupied by families who happened to have spare rooms. Marian’s room belonged to a son gone to Canada for RAF training. A model of a Sopwith Camel biplane hung from the ceiling, and on her first night she had lain looking at the underside of the wings and wondering what had ever happened to the Brayfogles. She’d always thought more about Felix, but now she wondered about Trixie. She ought to have admired her.

  “It’s not as though you can help it if weather closes in on you,” she continued to Ruth. “They say they don’t want to waste planes and pilots, but you’d think fewer would crash if they knew how to fly in cloud.”

  “The bosses are cheap, plain and simple,” said Ruth. “And in a big old hurry.”

  “Do you know how to fly on instruments?”

  “Nope,” Ruth said cheerily, “but I’m planning to be safe, not brave. Anyway, look at Amy Johnson. She knew what she was doing, and she still packed it in.”

  Marian was skeptical of this logic. They were standing at the little wrought-iron gate to Ruth’s billet. “I could teach you some things,” Marian said. “Just in case.”

  “Only if we have our lessons at the pub. I’m getting enough school.”

  “You won’t listen there.”

  “Then we’ll reward ourselves after with trips to the pub.”

  “Twist my arm,” Marian said, waving goodbye.

  After a few hours up with an instructor in plodding Tiger Moths and Miles Magisters, open to the wind and rain, Marian soloed. Funny to “solo” after years of flying alone, but she refrained from smirking or complaining, dutifully entered the occasion in her new logbook. After soloing, the next step was twenty-five cross-country flights around Britain, navigating by compass and paper map, following railroads and rivers and Roman roads. Quick hops. The mosaic landscape droned by below, grouted with hedges. On good-weather days she could knock off three or four flights (she was still adjusting to the smallness of this country, which could fit in Alaska’s pocket), but fine days were interspersed with more that hung low and gray, sometimes turning flyable only after the pilots had been told to clear off home. Even when the weather was passable, a dirty miasma hung over Luton, stinging Marian’s eyes as she passed through in her open biplane. After Dunkirk, the Vauxhall auto factory there had been converted to produce Churchill tanks and army trucks, and the smoke from its chimneys mingled in a dense, acrid soup with smoke from houses and from the smudge pots intended to shield the factory from German bombers. Elsewhere (everywhere, it seemed) she had to worry about barrage balloons tethered on chains around airfields and factories to ensnare or at least deter German planes.

  Both Marian and Ruth had Monday as their day off and adopted a routine of going to London on Sunday evenings. They usually saw a movie or a play and spent the night at the Red Cross Club, which was cheaper than a hotel and more fun. There was a penny jukebox and a good snack bar and central heat, and American soldiers and nurses were always around and sometimes pilots they knew. At the PX, they bought salted peanuts and Nestlé bars and cans of beer. Several times they were obliged to go for uniform fittings at Austin Reed. They were to have a skirt, a pair of trousers, two tunics, a jacket, and a greatcoat, all in RAF blue, cut uncomfortably tight for Marian’s taste, not tight enough for Ruth’s.

  Some of the more sophisticated girls, ones like Zip who’d gone to fancy colleges or who were especially beautiful like Sylvie, got invited to cocktails at the embassy or for dinner at Jackie Cochran’s flat in Knightsbridge, but Ruth and Marian were happy enough to spend most of their time as a solitary pair or with the transient acquaintances Ruth was always picking up.

  “I’m surprised you’re not Jackie’s favorite,” Marian said to Ruth once after they’d run into Sylvie on the street, who’d let slip that Jackie had served real blueberries the night before. “You’d think she’d want you around to charm all her impressive friends.”

  “No,” Ruth had said, drawing on her cigarette and squinting in contemplation. “I’m too brassy. No one can say Jackie’s not remarkable, but she’s not really fun, deep down. She tries, but you can see the strain. Just as well. I’m glad not to have any more obligations.”

  “If you don’t mind, then I don’t,” said Marian. “I’d be sorry to be left out if you were invited, and she’d never invite me. She probably thinks I’d show up in a burlap sack.”

  “No, it’s the opposite. You’re the one she’d have if we weren’t thick as thieves. She’d like to improve you.” Ruth linked her arm through Marian’s and rested her head against her shoulder. “Silly goose doesn’t see there’s nothing that could possibly be improved.”

/>   But in September Jackie was gone, back to America, to head up an all-female domestic version of the ATA, the WASP. No more cocktails in Knightsbridge. Helen Richey, famous for being the first female commercial pilot in the United States, was put in charge of the American contingent. But by then Jackie’s girls were deep into their training, with little need for a den mother.

  Everyone in London seemed to drink a lot, to never sleep enough, to be ravenous for fun. The mood in the nightclubs and dance halls was deliriously defiant, and Ruth led Marian into the thick of things. Ruth was a flirt but never let any of the men even kiss her, so far as Marian knew. She always talked about her husband on nights out, more than she did other times. Marian, though, if the hour was late, might let a man kiss her in a shadowy corner of a dance floor, or she might let her knees part as someone ran his hand up her leg in a dark taxi. If there had been an opportunity, she might have done more, but always Ruth appeared and laughingly but firmly extricated her, shepherded her back to the chaste dormitory rooms of the Red Cross.

  Slowly Marian had grown accustomed to the blackout and to discerning the people moving through it like benthic fish, flashing their white gloves or phosphorescent boutonnieres. She enjoyed the shock of passing from the outdoor darkness into a nightclub: loud and humid, sparkling like the inside of a geode. Here was the subterranean persistence of life. The peaceful world had been burned away, but its roots were intact, safe down in the dark, nourished by booze, smoke, and sweat.

  One especially frigid night Ruth and Marian were put on fire watch together, which meant they were to sleep on cots at the Luton airfield. By eight o’clock, when it had long been dark and there was nothing to do but sleep, they lay shivering on their cots in their wool underwear and Sidcot suit liners until Ruth said, “Do you think you could bear to squeeze in with me? I’m so cold I’ll never fall asleep.”

  “All right,” Marian said, and Ruth lifted the blankets for her. Lying back to back, Marian felt acutely conscious of the slight difference in the rhythm of their breathing, but when she synchronized herself to Ruth, the feeling was even stranger, as though they had fused into a pair of lungs. She was aware, too, of the softness of Ruth’s rear against her own, aligned since Ruth (much shorter than she) had scooted down and covered her whole head with the blankets. Marian knew she could sleep—she could always sleep, anywhere—but she was not sure she wanted to.

  “I haven’t heard from my brother in a while,” she offered. “Not since we arrived.”

  Ruth scooted up above the covers so her voice was unmuffled. “Maybe his letter’s just stuck somewhere. I got a batch yesterday and some of them were ancient.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I had a letter from Eddie. He’s gotten his crew now. They sound all right. One guy gets airsick every time but no one tattles on him, not even after he decided to drop his barf bag down the flare chute and the wind blew it back up and splattered everyone. Their last training flight was over water so he thinks it won’t be too much longer before they go overseas.” She shifted, her shoulders pressing against Marian’s. “He said they’re all getting along, which is a relief.”

  Marian had little sense of Eddie beyond the fact that he’d washed out of pilot training. “Were you worried?”

  “A bit. People don’t always know what to make of Eddie. Don’t get me wrong—he’s terrific. But sometimes…I don’t know.” Ruth rolled over, squeaking the cot’s springs. Now the softness against Marian’s back was breasts instead of rump. “You’re warm,” Ruth said. She snaked her arm under Marian’s and held her hand in front of Marian’s face. There were red, swollen patches at her knuckles. “Do you have these? Chilblains? They’re awful. I have them on my feet, too.”

  “You need to do a better job drying your socks and boots,” Marian said, and it seemed natural to take Ruth’s hand in her own and draw it beneath the covers, holding it against her sternum to warm it.

  “Your heart is beating fast,” Ruth said after a minute.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It is.” This in a loose, sleepy voice.

  Marian didn’t answer. Something about the way Ruth talked about Eddie was odd. The elliptical idea came to her that if she were Ruth, she would figure it out. Ruth would get everything out of Ruth without even seeming to try. She found she wanted to go to sleep quickly, before Ruth could change position again, and so she did, falling away into herself.

  England

  November–December 1942

  Continuing on

  A letter finally came from Jamie, dated back in September. He was going to be an artist in the navy:

  Who would have thought such a thing existed? I wouldn’t have, but Sarah Fahey wrote to tell me. At first I thought I should just enlist anyway, but I came around to thinking maybe I should do this instead. After all, they want artists, and I am one. I leave for training in San Diego soon, and from there I don’t know. I hope you won’t worry, at least not as much as I worry about you.

  So it was done. The war had come for Jamie, too. Worry wasn’t the word for what she felt. Dread, perhaps. Anticipatory grief for what he would see, how he would be changed. Caleb was gone to the army, too, but there was nothing she could do for either of them, so she tried to set her fears aside.

  * * *

  —

  As winter approached, the worsening weather made cross-country flights more and more difficult to complete, so in early November, when Marian had done only eighteen instead of twenty-five, the ATA shrugged off its own requirement and gave her her wings and four days’ leave. Ruth still needed to catch a few more flights, so Marian went to London alone but found that, without Ruth, even the most familiar parts of the city made her shy and tentative. The Red Cross Club, so lively and welcoming in Ruth’s company, felt daunting. She’d come to rely on Ruth to swing her into conversations like a trapeze artist tossing her partner into another’s grip. When an air force captain tried to strike up a conversation in the snack bar, she managed only the most stilted chitchat and fled at the first opportunity.

  She was, she abruptly understood, in love with Ruth.

  This realization, in those words, came to her fully, finally, on her second day in London. She was at Austin Reed picking up her uniforms, standing and looking at herself in a cheval mirror while the tailor fussed with the cuffs of her blue jacket, and she wished Ruth were there to fill the awkward silence with chatter, and as she thought about Ruth, she saw her own face change.

  She recognized her flushed and fearful expression in a way she had not been able to recognize the inward sensations from which it sprang, and the knowledge shocked her, both that the object of her love was a woman (besides the woman in Cordova, she’d never thought much about women) and that she was capable, after Barclay, after so many years up in the north trying to freeze her heart solid and let the wind erode it down to nothing, of falling for anyone at all.

  But the question was what to do, and the answer was nothing. Ruth was a warm and loving friend, but surely she would find Marian’s feelings strange or disgusting or frightening. Ruth was married. Marian thought she might have sensed a charge between them the night they’d slept nestled together on fire watch, but surely that had been in her imagination. Surely Ruth had only been keeping warm. Surely there was no way Ruth would ever be interested in…Marian didn’t know how to name what she wanted. Possession, maybe. Touch, certainly. Closeness they already had, but Marian wanted something more purposefully important. She couldn’t risk explaining such desires to Ruth. Ruth would want nothing more to do with her, and that consequence was unacceptable—although, even as Marian told herself this, she could not entirely believe that Ruth would banish her.

  Ruth always seemed to understand. Why should she not understand this, too?

  Because it was deviant; because it was offensive; because Ruth would be horrified and betrayed. In any case, even if by some
miracle Ruth understood, understanding was different from reciprocation. Understanding without reciprocation would have the same result as revulsion, really: the loss of Ruth. Had Marian fallen in love right when they first met without even knowing it, when Ruth had taken her chin in her hand and studied her? She had fallen when Barclay looked at her at Miss Dolly’s. Why did she respond so to being looked at?

  Once, the sirens had sounded when she and Ruth were at the Red Cross Club, but rather than going down into the shelter, they’d gone up on the roof, into the calamitous night. Everyone said the sporadic raids were nothing compared to the worst of the Blitz, when huge pink mountains of smoke had seemed to dwarf the sky itself, but still there was the grinding throb of German engines, the soft burst of incendiaries, the dumb blank faces of the barrage balloons, planes caught like moths in the sweep of searchlights. Bombs thudded against the city. Antiaircraft shells flashed white in the sky. Beyond, visible in patches through the smoke and drifting cloud, the stars shone impassively.

  Fires had burned, though not near the Red Cross, and Marian had wondered if there were people inside the flames. Of course there were, but still she hoped that somehow there were not. Ruth, without looking away from the spectacle, had taken Marian’s hand. What disproportionate comfort Ruth’s small hand had brought, her warm grip seeming to counterbalance the city lying belly-up, growing brighter and brighter as the flames spread.

  As she left Austin Reed with her heavy parcel of uniforms, Marian didn’t know how she would face Ruth, how she could pretend nothing had changed. The feeling of safety and ease would be gone, and Ruth’s presence would bring only loneliness and longing. She should wait for her infatuation to pass. People could fall out of love. It seemed almost inevitable that they did. And if she stepped back from the giddy immediacy of her feelings, she saw mercy in the impossibility of their fulfillment: She could not be trapped by love again. She would not be.