Only four more weeks and Lily and Nigel could be gone . . .
‘Four weeks,’ said Sophie slowly. ‘But it will take six weeks at least to get there, even if we sail tomorrow.’ I should have sailed months ago, she thought, instead of coming here. Should have walked with Nigel hand in hand among the apple trees, spent afternoons with honey and crumpets with Miss Lily. All the afternoons that now could never happen. ‘You need a slow tailing-off of all the wartime urgencies before you can find true peace.’ Who had said that, or something like that?
No, she didn’t want to remember who had said it. It didn’t matter now. Finally her need to change the world fast had gone, and all she wanted was the quiet of Shillings under a blanket of snow, and dear familiar arms around her.
Too late. She had been a fool. Or, perhaps, another casualty of war, putting loss so far behind her that she had left love behind as well. She had known she missed Nigel, loved Miss Lily so very deeply, and yet had not gone back to England, even after she had created her empire, and grown bored with maintaining it.
‘I want to be on the next ship to England anyway,’ said Green, her voice shaking. Yesterday Green would simply have made sure she was on that ship. Today . . . the world had changed, today.
‘Call Oswald. He’ll make it happen. I . . . I need Giggs.’
‘She’s still asleep,’ said Maria. ‘I thought you should see this first.’
‘Wake her. I’m going to England,’ said Sophie. ‘And somehow I am getting there before Nigel has his operation.’
‘You’ve just said it’s not possible . . .’ began Green.
‘It has to be possible . . .’ I am the demanding child who must always get what she wants again, she thought. But this is the most important thing I have ever wanted. Not important for the world, like mustard gas. Important for me.
She turned to Green. ‘Call Oswald and arrange the passage for yourself. No expense spared, even if he has to lease a ship to get you there. Pack what I will need in England too, please. But I won’t be on the ship.’
Green stared. ‘Then how will you get there?’
‘I don’t know. Fly, part of the way. Car, yacht, ship, camel . . . I don’t know. Whatever Cousin Oswald and the Slithersoles are able to organise, from one point to the next. I may not even know till I get there how I am going to get to the next point from wherever I am. But I am not going to sit on a ship eating pâté de foie gras while Nigel may be dying.’
She slammed the car door then ran up the steps.
Chapter 46
Decisions made in haste are sometimes necessary. If haste is not vital, do not make decisions swiftly, but let them brew.
Miss Lily, 1914
She should pack, but Greenie would do that more efficiently. She should do . . . something. Instead she stood, gazing out the window, letting the tears and snot flow unchecked. She needed to be with Nigel now, and half the earth stood in her way.
A knock. Maria Thwaites entered. ‘Sophie. Sophie, darling.’
It was better in her arms. Like being six years old and having a broken toe soothed and the whole world ahead of her and she would never fail, and those she loved would never die.
‘Sophie, do you really want to do this thing?’ asked Maria quietly.
Sophie stepped back, accepted the offered handkerchief, blew. ‘Yes.’
‘You love him that much?’
Them, she thought. I love them both. But instead she answered: ‘Yes. I just didn’t realise until now how much. I wanted other things as well and thought it was the wrong kind of love . . . and it was complicated.’
Maria looked at her closely. ‘And now it’s not?’
Sophie managed a smile. ‘It is still complicated. But I’ve finally realised that there is never a wrong kind of love. If it is, then it’s an “I want”, not love. And complications don’t matter. Or yes they do, but can be sorted out. I’m good at sorting out.’
‘Yes,’ said Maria dryly. She looked at Sophie with the sympathy of a woman who’d loved for decades privately, so the world did not see, and who had lost her love, just when she might claim him. ‘Flying is fastest,’ Maria added carefully. ‘But dangerous. I doubt you could fly all the way either. Not with fuel and repairs and spare parts. Not in four weeks.’
‘I know.’ Sophie also knew something of her own state of mind, she who had seen so many men so caught up in war’s urgency that they felt they must do something, even if that something meant their death, rather than face loss they could not bear. She too had almost reached that state. Her body, her mind, felt back in 1917, flung there by failure and rejection and the probability of more loss to come. In 1917 you had to do, and keep on doing, or you might sink.
‘I have a friend who will help you get part of the way,’ said Maria with surprising matter-of-factness. ‘We met in my suffragist days and have corresponded ever since. We have just talked on the telephone, about other aviators who might be of use to, or know someone in the right place. We cannot put together an entire journey for you today, but we can start you on it and trust that at the next stage, and the next, we can get you further.’
Maria looked at her searchingly. ‘Sophie, you do understand . . . if any one of those stages fails, you may be stranded for weeks or even months. A ship wouldn’t get you to England until after the surgery, but at least you would be sure to get there.’
‘There is not much point, if Nigel is dead,’ said Sophie flatly.
‘You aren’t thinking clearly,’ said Maria softly. ‘Failing to survive an operation may mean he dies weeks after it, not during it. A ship might still get you there in time to be with him.’
‘And it might not. That’s not the point anyway. I need to be with him before the operation. To hold his hand, to smile at him, to tell him that he will survive. To make sure every doctor and nurse who get within a mile of him know how to avoid infection . . .’
‘You must love him so very much indeed.’
No, she thought. I love Miss Lily that much and Nigel, and Jones and Shillings and its people. And just now I do not particularly care for myself, nor my tomorrows if I must go on without them . . .
Her body ached from the night before, part discomfort, part physical satisfaction and wholly loss. John had run from her, just as Angus had . . .
Miss Lily had been right all along. Women could manage the world, but they frightened men when they did so too openly. Erase nearly all of us and all we did from the history of the war, she thought. Push us away when we seduce you, as she had tried with Angus and succeeded with John, sending the poor man running from her through the morning.
‘I want to fly.’ Leave it all behind, she thought. Leave the corned-beef empire, the women who had worked so hard for her election and felt it a triumph, not a loss. Leave myself behind. Leave John free. He would always give to those in need and she had known that . . .
She was going back to the last time she had felt truly secure, at Shillings, in Miss Lily’s drawing room, in 1914. Perhaps, this time, her life would go in the right direction.
‘I thought that’s what you would decide. My friend will be here in half an hour,’ said Maria, her voice shaking just a little. ‘She can get you to Darwin. We will arrange to have a banker’s draft and other things waiting there for you and plans to get you on your next leg. She says to wear trousers and a jacket and a scarf for your hair. Riding boots. She has a spare helmet.’
‘She?’
‘Her name is Mrs Randolph Henderson,’ said Maria and this time, as she held her, she cried too.
The plane landed with wings waggling in the back paddock, the last of the cattle shoved out the gate as the small craft circled, then sank through the air to the grass, running neatly across the tussocks and cattle dung.
It was not much of a plane, far flimsier than the aircraft Sophie had seen during the war. A fruit box was made of sturdier wood, and the fabric covering looked like it wouldn’t provide much protection against even a gentle breeze.
<
br /> The pilot climbed out of the small cockpit onto the wing, then jumped down.
Sophie had expected a woman her own age — dashing, white scarf and goggles, but of course this was Maria’s friend. Mrs Henderson was possibly in her fifties, wearing tweed trousers and a matching long flying tweed coat that she must have had specially tailored, a pale pink shirt and pearls just showing under the collar. She stood by her plane as Maria strode towards her, followed by Moonbeam Joe carrying a jerry can of petrol and Sophie, who was empty handed.
Mrs Henderson had warned Maria that even the weight of spare underwear or toothbrushes would reduce the distance the fuel would take them. Gold, that looked so portable and useful, was far too heavy. Sophie wore woollen slacks, and matching jumper as well as socks and riding boots, the lightest but still warm outfit she had.
You could not begin a journey to England without luggage. It was impossible. So was a fifty-year-old woman piloting a bi-plane. So was Nigel dying . . .
The hand that shook hers was firm. ‘So you’ve decided to risk the flight? Good to meet you, Miss Higgs. Miss Thwaites has told me so much about you. We first met in the Suffrage League many years ago,’ she added. ‘Good times, those. We got things done.’
‘You’ve been flying long?’
A sardonic grin. ‘Long enough to be able to get you to Darwin. This crate will only go about three hundred miles before she needs refuelling, but she takes petrol and we can probably get that wherever we see a car. Two hops today, if we are lucky.’
Mrs Henderson met Sophie’s eyes. ‘My sons were in the air force. Their father too. Richard, my eldest son, was the only one to make it through the war. He and a friend flew their aircraft home — it took them three years. He bought this beauty in March, one of the first off the line, then a month later he got pneumonia. He’d had a bout of mustard gas. His lungs were never up to much after the war . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘So this is all I have of them. I have been flying ever since Richard first took me up.’
And like me you do not care terribly if you die doing so, thought Sophie, still numb.
She hugged Maria. Green and Georgina had already left so that Green could make her connection with the steamer. ‘You really will come to England if I need to stay there for a while?’ she asked Maria.
‘Yes. Oswald and Johnny can manage. We will see each other there,’ Maria said, a little helplessly. One’s chicken should not literally fly from the roost. Sophie had never seen Maria look helpless before, as if she had lost . . .
Me, she thought. She has lost me, and somehow last night and this morning I have lost myself.
A million words to say, but none that could adequately say what she felt. Another hug. Mrs Henderson handed her a thin leather coat, and long leather gloves. She was already sweating, but she donned then obediently and scrambled up on to the plane and into the single seat behind the pilot.
It’s just like being in a car, she thought, as they taxied across the paddock. A car could not fly, and nor could this beast . . . then suddenly the fence was below them, the tiny craft climbing mountains in the sky, as if hunting for a cloud to play with. The wind had become a road and they were travelling along it. A bumpy road; they lurched and stumbled yet did not fall . . .
Nor had the world vanished, because it was below her. All of it, everything she was flying from: Thuringa, its paddocks, and its river glinting like a coiling snake among the trees, the dolls’-house homestead, the speck that was Maria, two men on horseback, impossible to see who they were from up there . . .
The plane made a sharp arc, dipping one wing so Sophie was sure that they would plummet. But the craft remained steady.
Bald Hill, the church hall, the factory and the abattoir, the cattle huddled in the paddock outside so like men waiting to go ‘over the top’: for the first time she felt a horror that all her fortune had been built on death and bleeding cattle.
But she was leaving that too.
And then the McPhees’ and beyond that John’s shack. No smoke rising from the fireplace. She panicked briefly at that, then realised it had only been two hours since she had left. The coals would still be glowing under the blanket of ash, when he needed flames again. She wanted to look away, in case she saw him. She wanted to ask Mrs Henderson to circle until she finally found him, unable to hide from this craft up in the air. She did neither.
If only he could know this plane was taking her away. She hadn’t even remembered to tell Midge to give a message to him, but of course gossip would soon tell everyone in Bald Hill that Miss Sophie Higgs had left Thuringa in an aeroplane, bound for an earl’s castle in England, for all the aristocracy lived in castles . . .
There was the Harrisons’ house set in the neat Moura paddocks, a doll’s house with a verandah. She wanted to wave but there was no sign of Midge or Harry or their children, and they probably wouldn’t see the wave anyway.
Then that too was gone. The world was squares of paddocks, rolls of trees, the river, mountains to their left, the sun to their right.
And she was flying.
At the red soil property of an old school friend of Mrs Henderson’s they stopped for Thermos tea, and scones fresh from the morning’s oven but already hard as cricket balls in the dry heat, spread lavishly with tomato jam to make them edible, then refilled the plane with petrol.
Between hugs, Mrs Henderson briefly explained their haste and that she would stop longer, ‘So we can really catch up,’ on her return. A visit to the lavatory — a long-drop dunny at the end of a long line of pear trees that each marked the site of a previous convenience . . . and then they were in the sky again.
Clouds arrived. They flew under them, shaking, through them, shaking even more, then above them, with not quite so much shaking but a great deal of glaring light. There was no way to make conversation in the air, not with the engine noise, the wind and the flying helmets.
I am coming, Nigel, she thought. Coming to Miss Lily too. When she had lost her way in the past decade it had been Miss Lily’s face she saw, her voice advising her, the scent of her powder, her smile in the Shillings shadow.
The telegram might say Nigel. But if she lost Nigel, whom she also loved, she would lose Miss Lily. No other love could possibly replace them both.
Another stop on what seemed to be an endless, featureless grey gravel plain, this time to refuel from a jerry can they were carrying in the back. Up again, flying below the cloud now, Mrs Henderson pulling levers, examining instruments on her control panel. Sophie would have liked to ask her what they meant, but the noise and wind made it impossible. Her face already felt raw from wind and cold and sun.
The horizon turned pink, then red. Sophie had been aware of a strangely straight line below them, like a black mark etched across the landscape. The Overland Telegraph Line. She supposed they were going to follow it to find Darwin. She was vaguely relieved. She’d had images of flying over north Queensland jungles juggling a compass.
There would be jungle enough to come.
The plane nosed downwards, this time onto red plains with wind-twisted, white-trunked trees, and anthills like castles. For five startled seconds as they neared the ground, a piece of the red earth turned into a kangaroo. The kangaroo leaped, and kept on leaping. The plane landed, taxiing in small bumps until it stopped.
Sophie looked for a house, a shed, a tent. None appeared. Nor did Mrs Henderson appear to see any need to explain their lack. She stepped out carrying the cushion that had formed part of her seat and a couple of paper bags.
Sophie pulled at her seat too, and found it came free. She joined Mrs Henderson, now lying with her head pillowed on the cushion. No blanket, and even in November the night there was beginning to cool. But their long coats would keep them warm. Probably.
Mrs Henderson passed her the paper bag. Sophie took out a bottle of water, drank a quarter of it and then found a cheese and salad roll, dry except where it was soggy from the tomato, and an apple. They ate, quietly, Mrs Henderson s
taring up at the sky as it turned pink and then pale once more and finally darkened.
The first star pierced the darkness and then another.
‘This is my favourite time,’ said Mrs Henderson at last. ‘Just looking at the night going on forever and knowing tomorrow I will be up there too.’
‘It’s beautiful.’ The whole sky was jewelled now. The air smelled of hot sand and cooling breeze, and a faint tang of male kangaroo.
More silence. It was so good to be still, the ground steady below her, no engine noise. At last she asked, ‘Where will we reach tomorrow?’
‘There’s a camp not far from here where they’ll have petrol. Darwin by tomorrow night if we’re lucky. The wet’s started, you know. It may get a bit rocky.’
She hadn’t known. Or rather, had not remembered, had not even stopped to consider. Should have.
‘Thank you. You’re taking a great risk for me.’
‘No, don’t think that. Today and tomorrow I am flying for a purpose. You’ve given me that, at least.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sophie softly.
Mrs Henderson accepted it. ‘I was never one of those who waited, you know. Wives and mothers who said, “When the war is over . . .” as if it was going to all be the same as it had been before. I did not cry when I said goodbye because I did not want their last sight of me to be tears, but proud and glad to be my husband’s wife, my sons’ mother. I knew even then that would be my final glimpse of them, waving from the ship. To have Richard back for those years was . . . unexpected. A treasure. And he gave me the sky.’
They watched it again. The air grew still and colder. Each star might have been made of ice.
The Lily and the Rose Page 24
