The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Romantic weather was another thing. Young men were plentiful in the vicinity, and in spite of her marriage, Tam had had her heart injured if not broken on more than one occasion and had inflicted a few wounds of her own. (Men were both frightened out of their wits and driven mad with desire by the sight, or sometimes even the notion, of these slim young women leaping in and out of aircraft.) Still, there was no question that tearing off into the ether at the controls of one complicated machine after another was the perfect antidote to these dalliances. The earth fell away beneath the wheels – or beneath the belly of the plane once Tam was flying equipment with a retractable undercarriage – and most earthly things fell away as well. No entanglement, Tam had believed, would ever be able to compete with this intoxicating mixture of risk and joy. All of them had felt this, even innocent Elspeth.

  On a typical day, Tam might have been required to taxi five other pilots in an Anson from Cosford to Prestwick, then to ferry a Dakota from Prestwick to Speke, then a Spitfire from Speke to Lynham, then a Mosquito from Lynham to Kemble, and another Spit from Kemble to Lichfield, where an Anson would be waiting to taxi her and several others back to the base at Cosford. It was during these return flights that the knitting she would later speak to Niall about had taken place.

  From the first, Tam and Elspeth had always talked after lights out, replaying their routes or revisiting childhoods that would seem so surprisingly sedate in comparison to the crazy stimulation of what had become their daily lives. They confessed their proclivities and dislikes and, never speaking above a whisper, acknowledged the strangeness of quiet and calm after a day of mechanical noise and speed. Within weeks Tam felt closer to this arbitrarily chosen roommate than any of the girls she had encountered at school. Unlike some of the others in the Ferry Pool, who were more or less of Tam’s “class,” Elspeth had been born in the Midlands, daughter of a free-thinking village butcher who had done what he could to help out when his daughter announced that she wanted to learn how to fly. Tam had adored the sound of Elspeth’s whisper, its hint of a Midlands accent. Sometimes as they were falling asleep they would say the names of the children they intended to have. “Brian,” Elspeth would say, “Sally, Rebecca.”

  There had been another kind of meteorological variable to contend with, one that concerned airborne balloons, though not the sort of balloons that Niall’s father had so punctually launched in Kerry.

  The Maps and Signals Officer was an older woman whose bouts of bad nature were famous in the Pilots’ Routing Room. Still, it was she who provided the warnings about anti-aircraft installations and practice ranges of the RAF and the Balloon Barrages that discouraged the enemy from attacking the factories, to and from which planes were delivered. Each day a new corridor was established through these balloons, which were tied to the ground by long, thin wires, so that pilots could take off and land. “Don’t annoy me,” Maps and Signals would say to the girls. “Pay attention to these corridors.”

  But sometimes there was fog. And, one piercingly bright and crisp day, Wendy Weather had said there might be fog in Stirling. Elspeth had been given a chit to fly a wounded Fairchild to Stirling for repair at the factory there. She had made the final call, she had taken the weather. Tam never saw her again.

  The morning after the accident, Tam had accepted the day’s weather predictions from a subdued, red-eyed Wendy. They had clasped hands for a few moments but not said anything. Maps and Signals, however, was noisy with grief and rage. “So bleeding unfair!” she shouted when she saw Tam approaching. “She was so full of life!”

  Looking now into the density of the fog, Tam remembers something else. A few weeks after she had stopped the nightly weeping, she had taken a vow. If she ever had a child, she had decided, she would call it Brian or Rebecca.

  Shortly after the war, the government had purchased the family’s Edgeworth Hall in Cornwall, which was now bordered by the recently decommissioned airfield, and the back acreage attached to it, in order to create a cattle breeding and agricultural research station. Tam’s father, who had decided the future was in concrete and had invested accordingly, had set up the offices of Edgeworth Enterprises on Fleet Street and had opened a number of quarries in a half-dozen country locations. Even a rumour of limestone in Shropshire, Devonshire, or Yorkshire would cause him to become inordinately fond of the locale, and he took more and more trains – seemingly every two or three days – to distant parts of the country. In the course of the phone calls he made nightly to his tired and uninterested wife, he would enthusiastically praise the skills of his geologists and drill-core men and carry on about the virtues of the surrounding scenery he was about to destroy. Opening things up appealed to him. I can’t wait to see what’s underneath, he announced after a lyrical description of some valley or another. A pleasant afternoon to him was one spent watching dynamite lift the green “overburden” out of a field. He liked things to be blown apart.

  Perhaps that is why he chose the last standing house in London’s St. John’s Park to be “home base,” as he liked to call it. Tall, wide, white (except on its east side, which had been scorched black by the fires that had destroyed the rest of the neighbourhood), it stood in the wreckage like a still-intact ocean liner in a scrap yard. The views from its windows included a fascinating jumble of beams, roof slates, collapsed staircases, smashed glass, and the rubble of broken bricks. “A survivor!” he announced to the confused estate agent who had wanted to show him houses in the more undamaged parts of town. “I’ll take it. They are going to need a lot of concrete in this neighbourhood. It will be a pleasure to watch it pour.”

  But he was rarely seen at home base, was instead chasing after limestone that lay, undisturbed since the Ice Age, all over England. He revelled in new, large discoveries, but older, smaller, and discrete pre-existing operations were of interest to him as well, and he purchased every piece of property he could. Even humble gravel pits on farms were appealing. Gravel, he was wont to say, is simply a premonition of limestone. It was obvious, as well, that gravel itself would be needed to rebuild everything that had been smashed.

  After a year in the grips of extensive travel and a frenzy of mad acquisition, he came to the conclusion that swift transportation was of the utmost importance. “We’ll be needing a lot of heavy equipment,” he assured potential investors over port and cigars in the exclusive London club he had joined shortly after buying the house, “and we’ll be needing to get that equipment rapidly to the sites. Then we’ll need to get the product into the bombed cities expeditiously, and on a daily basis. You’ve heard, I dare say, of Hitler’s Autobahns?” They had. “It will be necessary to have a lot of autobahns all over this country,” he continued enthusiastically. Those autobahns, he told his new friends, would be made of gravel and concrete.

  After a lunch at the club, he liked to walk back to the last standing house in St. John’s Park – the only occasion when he would be indulgent with his time – because he was curious about the pattern the bombs had left in the city. There was something, he later told his bewildered wife, something poetic about it. Not in terms of human suffering and loss: he wasn’t entirely indifferent to that, but it wasn’t the suffering that interested him. What caught his imagination was the manner in which things were broken. Sometimes a Tudor beam from a structure that was otherwise pulverized beyond recognition would remain intact. Decorative stonework endured admirably, when simple hewn blocks, from what he could see, had not. And concrete, he was saddened to note, had apparently succumbed in a way that great slabs of old plaster, with their lathing and horse hair, had not.

  He was fascinated by the walls and large shards of plaster that had survived the bombing of some of the poorer districts he strolled through. They seemed so personal, so vulnerable, with their coloured paint and floral wallpaper on display. More than once he had passed a block of bombed-out flats with the roof gone and three of the walls collapsed. It was not uncommon to see pictures of serene landscapes, and framed family photos, ba
rely askew on the last remaining wall. This was not the case in St. John’s Park. Apart from his own solid house, everything in the surroundings had been so thoroughly annihilated, not even a whisper of the personal remained.

  It was to this destroyed landscape that Tam returned after leaving her husband, Reggie: there really was nowhere else to go. She arrived in August, shortly after a country house garden party during which her tolerance for Reggie’s jocular behaviour completely vanished. By then her father had built walls around the house and her mother was overseeing the installation of an elaborate garden. Both parents were distracted; her father by his growing entrepreneurship and her mother by plants and garden statuary. This meant that there was little discussion of Tam’s separation, much to her relief, and she was left almost entirely on her own.

  In the days that followed, she would stand in the second and third storeys of the house, gazing out the windows and into the wreckage. Everything she looked at seemed to her to be a mirror of her life. She knew this notion was self-involved and not at all fair when considered in the light of others who had survived, or not survived, this war. But she had been grounded and miserable on the one hand and bored on the other. The garden was too new to be a comfort. There was often fog. Rain was constant, and, once reconstruction was underway in the neighbourhood, so was noise. She missed the girls she had flown with. She missed the flying. But there was no going back to that life. It was a sad observation, she concluded, that war was more palatable to her than peace, but that almost seemed to be the way it was. There were parties, of course, but everything about them was to her mind retrospective or pointless in nature, anecdotes of the war dominating the conversation while the rest of the evening was given over to energetic dancing, frequent passes, and no conversation at all.

  One evening after an uncomfortable dinner during which she felt her father was sitting in judgment of her at the head of the table, she went out for a twilight walk in the vicinity of the rubble that she had decided was the only phenomenon on earth – animal, vegetable, or mineral – that she could understand. There was scaffolding in some spots, and some new structures were, as her father would say, beginning to be poured (it was the groaning of concrete mixers that she had wakened to each morning). But destruction was still ruled to such an extent that it was impossible to imagine what had been before.

  She stood on the edge of an as yet unreclaimed site, looking into mud, broken stone, and fractured wood flooring. She wanted to care about the human beings who had lost all this, perhaps their lives as well, but was having trouble bringing to mind what all of that had been. A failure of character on her part, she thought, a kind of neutral vacancy. So little was left behind it was as if there had never been anything but debris. But still, that word debris wasn’t right somehow. Armageddon wasn’t quite right either, she thought; it would be brighter, bolder, would not be painted in shades of grey and brown. Then she noticed a spot of colour sitting in the midst of blackened bricks, only five feet or so beyond the wire that cordoned off the site, and she slipped between the barbed strands and saw that it was a china sugar bowl, whole and undamaged.

  Everything about it was heartbreaking to her, the gold edging, the dark reds and purples of the roses painted on it, and the deep green of the thorns. The sad fact that the top, also undamaged, sat so perfectly in its place. Later she would tell Niall that she didn’t know whether to celebrate or mourn, but she would not be telling him the truth. She was celebrating, utterly. She was celebrating the return of feeling, which was as painful as the return of blood to a limb to which it had been denied access.

  She stood there on the broken bricks with the bottom of the sugar bowl filling the palm of her right hand, weeping like a mad fool and full of gratitude, relief.

  When she returned to the house, her mother told her that Teddy had been hired to oversee the garden. She neglected to notice that her daughter was holding an empty sugar bowl.

  He had been working as a casual labourer since the end of the war on various building sites, no one wanting aeronautical mechanics now that the war was over, and he had been in touch with the family, once his father had told him they had moved to London. Her mother had been delighted by this single conduit back to what had once been, to her, generations of stability, and had hired him on the spot, assuming that Teddy’s father’s gardening prowess had been imprinted in his son’s genes. He was to live in the coach house at the back of the property, which had been only partially damaged, and was, at least at first, to spend part of his time roofing this structure and the rest digging manure and topsoil into the dank London clay.

  “It’s not much different,” he had confessed to Tam once they began to spend time together, “than what I was doing on the sites.” They had fallen back into a kind of childhood repartee in the garden, with such simple ease that she felt he might produce the toy lorries and motorcars she remembered.

  “Did you hate that?” she asked. “All that digging?” It didn’t occur to her to ask if he hated it now.

  “Not really,” he told her. “The lads I worked with were mostly Irish. We lived rough, but they were a good lot.”

  Irish. Until that moment she had never even thought about the Irish. She recalled, however, that they had opted for neutrality during the war. When she asked what the Irish were doing in London, he had looked at her, surprised. “No work at home,” he said and then, “Don’t forget, I’m Irish myself.”

  His name, O’Brien. But second or third generation, of course. “But not born there,” she said to him.

  “No, but my grandfather was. And then he came here, to England. No work at home in those days either.”

  Home, she thought. What an odd word for him to be using. “And why did you come to work here?” she asked. She suspected, and as it turned out correctly, that her mother wouldn’t have paid him much more than the gangers.

  He was silent for a bit. Then he cleared his throat and spoke, “I came for you, Tam. I had heard that Reggie was gone and that you were here.”

  Sleeping with him had been surprisingly easy to manage. All she had to do was slip out of the house after the evening meal, into the garden, and from there, over to the coach house.

  He was timid at first but that passed. What arrived in the wake of timidity was a shocking amount of sentiment. He was worried, he said, about her honour. When she laughed, he told her he was in love with her and always had been. She was silenced by this and concerned, being genuinely fond of him. But gradually their narrative began to make some sense to her. There was no man with whom she had been as comfortable. When placed against a life in this house – in her father’s world – a life with Teddy was not unthinkable. And then there was the purity, the wholeness of him, set against the broken streetscape, the crushed, bombed streetscape beyond her father’s new walls.

  “What would they do?” she had asked when the idea of an escape with him had begun to solidify. “Perhaps we should go somewhere.” Lying beside him, she believed she was attached to him in a cellular way, their shared past, their love of aircraft. It was odd, she realized, that they had lost both: the past and the aircraft.

  “I’ve been left my grandmother’s cottage in Kerry,” he told her. “There is nothing stopping us from going there.”

  She had lost her compass. She had no idea which way to steer for a happy outcome. It was as if the inner aircraft she was attempting to fly at the moment was too wounded and fragile to get her where she ought to go anyway. She looked at Teddy, who was youthful in a way that neither her father nor Reggie had ever been – his open face, his long, clean limbs. There, enlarged now, were the same knees and forearms she had unconsciously memorized as a child while hovering with him over a dusty bit of earth outside her father’s walls, absorbed by marbles and toy trucks. She had known his wrists and hands since childhood. “Yes,” she said while attempting without success to imagine Ireland. “There is nothing to stop us.”

  On the boat to Dun Laoghaire and during the journey by
train Teddy talked about their destination. She had been feeling tired and could find no way to enter the conversation so she let him continue on his own. He was re-visioning a place he had visited only once or twice as a boy but remembered vividly because any kind of travel had been such a change in the ordinariness of his childhood. It was called Clooncartha, he said, and it was inland on the Iveragh Peninsula, County Kerry.

  There are mountains, he told her, and quite a number of good fishing rivers and streams. He loved to fish and would bring fresh salmon and trout for their suppers. It rains a good deal, but then there is the green everywhere. The cottage came with two fields, one on each side. We could keep a cow, he said. His grandmother had left him a small amount of money as well, though God knows where she got it, he said. She had inclined toward gentility, so the cottage would be nicely fitted.

  They would use some of the money to buy a battered Vauxhall in Killarney while they were staying in that town in a room above a pub. It’s either that or a donkey, Teddy would say, laughing. She had never in England been near a pub that generated the kind of noise this establishment mustered in the evenings: singing and accordion music. She was unable to sleep until the National Anthem had been sung downstairs, a strange, slow, and, to her mind, dirgelike droning, only marginally redeemed by a slight crescendo near the end. Then full dark and silence and sometimes Teddy reaching for her in the gloom.

  The day they arrived in the lane that led to the cottage she knew she would be happy there. There were roses in the hedges and small pink flowers in the grass beside the door. Remarking on these with delight, she recalled she had never been a person who cared about such things. Several mountains stood at discrete distances from one another, and a modest river ran behind the house. The road they had driven into the valley where the cottage stood was used so infrequently that grass and wildflowers flourished in the centre of it. No one, not even her previous self, would ever find her there.