Air Bridge

by Hammond Innes

  She smiled. “Else is upstairs dressing. Are you from the aerodrome? Then you must be Mr. Fraser. Won’t you come in? I am Mrs. Ellwood.” She closed the door behind me. “You must find it very cold up at the airfield now. I really think Mr. Saeton should get some proper heating put in. I’ve told him, any time he or his friends want a little home comfort to come over and see us. But he’s always so busy.” We were in the kitchen now and she went over to the Aga cooker and stirred vigorously at the contents of a saucepan, holding her dressing-gown close around the silk of her dress. “Have you had dinner, Mr. Fraser?”

  “No. We have it later——”

  “Then why not stay and have some food with us? It’s only stew, but——” She hesitated. “I’m cook to-night. You see, we’re going to the Red Cross dance at Marlborough. It’s for Else, really. Poor child, she’s hardly been anywhere since she came to us. Of course, she’s what they call a D.P. and she’s here as a domestic servant—why do they call them D.P.s?—it’s so depressing. But whether she’s a servant or not, I don’t think it right to keep a young thing shut away here without any life. You people at the aerodrome are no help. We never see anything of you. And it is lonely up here. What do you think of Else? Don’t you think she’s pretty, Mr. Fraser?”

  “I think she’s very pretty,” I murmured.

  She cocked an eye at me. She was like a little grey-haired sparrow and I had a feeling that she missed nothing. “Are you doing anything to-night, Mr. Fraser?”

  “No, I was just going to——”

  “Then will you do something for me? Will you come to this dance with us? It would be a great kindness. You see, I had arranged for my son, who works with the railways at Swindon, to come over, but this afternoon he rang up to say he had to go to London. I wouldn’t mind if it were an English girl. But you know what country places are. And after all”—she lowered her voice—“she is German. It would be a kindness.”

  “But I’ve no clothes,” I murmured.

  “Oh!” She waved the spoon at me like a little fairy godmother changing me into evening clothes on the spot. “That’s all right, I’m certain. You’re just about my son’s size. Come along and we’ll see.”

  And of course the clothes fitted. It was that sort of a night. By the time I had changed the three of them were assembled in the big lounge hall. Colonel Ellwood was pouring drinks from a decanter that sparkled in the firelight. He was a tall, very erect man with grey hair and a long, serious face. His wife fluttered about with a rustle of silk. And Else sat in a big winged-chair staring into the fire. She was dressed in very deep blue and her face and shoulders were like marble. She looked lonely and a little frightened. She didn’t look up as I came in. She seemed remote, shut away in a world of her own. Only when Mrs. Ellwood called to her did she turn her head. “I think you know Mr. Fraser.’ She saw me then and her eyes widened. For an awful moment I thought she was going to run from the room, but then she said, “Good-evening,” in a cold, distant voice and turned back to the fire.

  She hardly said a word all through dinner and when we were together in the back of the car she drew away from me and sat huddled in her corner, her face a white blur in the reflected light of the headlights. Not until we were dancing together in the warmth of the ballroom did she break that frigid silence and then I think it was only her sense of loneliness in that alien gathering that made her say, “Why did you come?”

  “I was lonely,” I said.

  “Lonely?” She looked up at me then. “You have your—friends.”

  “I happen to work there—that’s all,” I said.

  “But they are your friends.”

  “Three weeks ago I had never met any of them.”

  She stared at me. “But you are a partner. You put up money.” She hesitated. “Why do you come here if you do not know them?”

  “It’s a long story,” I answered and holding her close in the swing of the music I suddenly found myself wanting to tell her. But instead I said, “Else. I want to apologise for the other night. I thought——” I didn’t know how to put it, so I said, “That first night I came to Membury—why were you in the hangar with Saeton?”

  Her grey eyes lifted to my face and then to the cut on my forehead. “That also is a long story,” she said slowly. And then in a more friendly tone: “You are a strange person.”

  “Why did Saeton think I was a friend of yours that night?” I asked. “Why did he call to me in German?”

  She didn’t answer for a moment and I thought she was going to ignore the question. But at length she said, “Perhaps I tell you some day.” We danced in silence for a time. I have said that she was a big girl, but she was incredibly light on her feet. She was like thistledown in my arms and yet I could feel the warm strength of her under my hand. The warmth and the music were going to my head, banishing loneliness and the tension of the past weeks. “Why did you come to the farm to-night?” she asked suddenly.

  “To see you,” I answered.

  “To apologise?” She was smiling for the first time. “You did not have to.”

  “I told you—I was lonely.”

  “Lonely!” Her face seemed to harden. “You do not know what that word means. Please, I would like a drink.” The music had stopped and I took her over to the bar. “Well, here is to the success of those engines!” Her tone was light, but as she drank her eyes were watching me and they did not smile. “Why do you not drink? You are not so crazy about those engines as Mr. Saeton, eh?” She used the word crazy in its real sense.

  “No,” I said.

  She nodded. “Of course not. For him they are a part of his nature now—a great millstone round his neck.” She hesitated and then said, “Everyone makes for himself on this earth some particular hell of his own. With Saeton it is these engines, ja?” She looked up into my face again. “When are they finished—when do you fly them?”

  I hesitated, but there was no reason why she shouldn’t know. Living so close at the Manor she would see us in the air. “With luck we’ll be in the air by Christmas. Airworthiness tests are fixed for the first week in January.”

  “So!” A sudden mood of excitement showed in her eyes. “Then you go on to the air bridge. I hope your friend Saeton is happy then.” Her voice trembled slightly. She was suddenly tense and the excitement in her eyes had changed to bitterness.

  “Why are you so interested in Saeton?” I asked her.

  “Interested—in Saeton?” She seemed surprised, almost shocked.

  “Are you in love with him?” I asked.

  Her face hardened and she bit at her lower lip. “What has he been saying?”

  “Nothing,” I answered.

  “Then why do you ask me if I am in love with him? How can I be in love with a man I hate, a man who has——” She stopped short, staring at me angrily. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “You are so stupid. You do not understand nothing—nothing.” Her fingers were white against the stem of the glass as she sought for words.

  “Why do you say you hate him?” I asked.

  “Why? Because I offer him the only thing I have left to offer—because I crawl to him like a dog——” Her face was suddenly white with anger. “He only laugh. He laugh in my face, I tell you, as though I am a common—nutte.” She spat the word out as though she were hating herself as well as Saeton. “And then that Carter woman comes. He is a devil,” she whispered and then turned quickly away from me and stared miserably at the crowded bar. “You talk of loneliness! This is what it is to be lonely. Here, with all these people. To be away from one’s own people, a stranger in a——”

  “You think I don’t understand,” I said gently. “I was eighteen months in a prison camp in Germany.”

  “That is not the same thing. There you are still with your own peoples.”

  “Not after I escaped. For three weeks I was alone in Germany, on the run.”

  She stared up at me and gave a little sigh. “Then perhaps you do understand. But you are not alone here.”
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  I hesitated, and then I said. “More alone than I have ever been.”

  “More alone than——” She stopped and gazed at me unbelievingly. “But why is that?”

  I took her arm and guided her to a seat. I had to tell her now. I had to tell someone and she was a German, alone in England—my story was safe with her. I told her the whole thing, sitting there in an alcove near a roaring fire with the sound of the dance music in my ears. When I had finished she put her hand on mine. “Why did you tell me?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know myself. “Let’s dance,” I said.

  We didn’t talk much after that. We just seemed to lose ourselves in the music. And then Mrs. Ellwood came and said we must go as her husband had to start work early the next morning. In the car going back Else didn’t talk, but she no longer shrank into her corner of the seat. Her shoulder leant against mine and when I closed my hand over hers she didn’t withdraw. “Why are you so silent?” I asked.

  “I am thinking of Germany and what fun we could have had there—in the old days. Do you know Weisbaden?”

  “Only from the air,” I answered and then wished I had not said that as I saw her lips tighten.

  “Yes, of course—from the air.” She took her hand away and seemed to withdraw into herself. She didn’t speak again until the car was climbing the hill to Membury, and then she said very quietly, “Do not come to see me again, Neil.”

  “Of course I shall,” I said.

  “No.” She said it almost violently, her eyes staring at me out of the darkness. Her hand gripped mine. “Please try to understand. We are like two people who have caught sight of each other for a moment through a crack in the wall that separates us. Whatever the S. S. do to my father, I am still a German. I must hold fast to that, because it is all I have left now. I am German, you are English, and also you are working——” She stopped and her grip on my hand tightened. “I like you too much. Do not to come again, please. It is better so.”

  I didn’t know what to say. And then the car stopped. We were at the track leading up to the quarters. “You can return the clothes in the morning,” Mrs. Ellwood said. I got out and thanked them for the evening. As I was about to shut the car door, Else leaned forward. “In England do you not kiss your partners good-night?” Her face was a pale circle in the darkness, her eyes wide. I bent to kiss her cheek, but found her lips instead. “Good-bye,” she whispered.

  The Ellwoods were chuckling happily as they drove off. I stood watching until the red tail light had turned into the Manor drive and then I went up the track to the quarters, wondering about Else.

  It was to be nearly three weeks before I saw Else again, for Saeton returned the following evening with the news that the Air Ministry now wanted the plane on the airlift by the 10th January, and airworthiness tests had been fixed for 1st January.

  In the days that followed I plumbed the depths of physical exhaustion. I had neither the time nor the energy for anything else. And it went on, day after day, one week dragging into the next with no let-up, no pause. Saeton didn’t drive. He lead. He did as long as we did at the bench, then he went back to the hangar, typing letters far into the night, ordering things, staving off creditors, running the whole of the business side of the company. My admiration for the man was boundless, but somehow I had no sympathy for him. I could admire him, but I couldn’t like him. He was inhuman, as impersonal as the mechanism we pieced together. He drove us with the sure touch of a coachman who knew just how to get the last ounce out of his horses, but didn’t care a damn what happened to them in the end so long as he made the next stage on time.

  But it was exciting. And it was that sense of excitement that carried me through to Christmas. The airfield hardened to iron as the cold gripped it. The runways gleamed white with frost in the sunshine on fine days. But mostly it was grey and cold with the ploughed-up earth black and ringing hard and metallic like solidified lava. There was no heating in the hangar. It had the chill dank smell of a tomb. Only the work kept us warm as we lathered ourselves daily into a sweat of exhaustion.

  Saeton was working for engine completion on December 20, installation by December 23 and first test on Christmas Day. It was a tight schedule, but he wanted a clear week for tests. But though we worked far on into the night, we were behind schedule all the time and it was not until Christmas Eve that we completed that second engine.

  The final adjustments were made at eight-thirty in the evening. We were dead beat and we stood in front of the gleaming mass of metal in a sort of daze. None of us said a word. We just stood back and looked at it. I produced a packet of cigarettes and tossed one to Saeton. He lit it and drew the smoke into his lungs as though smoke alone could ease the tension of his nerves. “All right, fill her up with oil, Tubby, and switch on the juice. I’ll get Diana. She’d like to be in on this.” He went over to the phone and rang the quarters. I helped fill up with oil. We checked that there was petrol in the wall tank, tightened the unit of the petrol feed and switched on.

  There was a tense silence as we waited for Diana. Five weeks’ work stood before us and a touch of the starter button would tell us whether we’d made a job of it. It wasn’t like an engine coming out of a works. There everything moves with an inevitable progression from the foundry and the lathes and the electrical shop to the assembly and the final running in. This was different. Everything had been made by hand. One tiny slip in any of the precision work … I thought of how tired we were. It seemed incredible that everything would work smoothly.

  A knock on the door of the hangar sounded incredibly loud in the silence. Tubby went to the door and let his wife in. “Well, there it is, Diana,” Saeton said, pointing to the thing. His voice trembled slightly. “Thought you’d like to see what your cooking has given birth to.” Our laughter was uneasy, forced. “Okay, Tubby. Let her go.” He turned away with a quick nervous twist of his shoulders and walked down to the far end of the bench. He wasn’t going to touch that starter switch himself. He wasn’t even going to watch. He stood with his back towards us, puffing at his cigarette, his hands playing aimlessly with the pieces of metal lying on the bench.

  Tubby watched him, hesitating.

  “Go on—start it.” Saeton’s voice was a rasp.

  Tubby glanced at me, swallowed nervously and crossed to the starter motor which was already connected up. He pressed the switch. It groaned, overloaded with the stiffness of the metal. The groaning sound went on and on. He switched off and went over to the engine, his practised eye running over it, checking. Then he went back to the starter motor. The groaning sound was faster now, moving to a hum. There was a sharp explosion. The engine rocked. The hum of the starter took over again and then suddenly the stillness of the hangar was shattered by a roar as the motor picked up. The whole building seemed to shake. Tubby switched off, hurried to the engine and adjusted the controls. When he started it again, the roar settled to a steady, glorious hum of power, smooth and even like the dynamos of a power station.

  Saeton ground out his cigarette and came back along the bench. His face was shining with sweat. “She’s okay,” he shouted above the din. It was part statement, part question. Tubby looked up from the controls and his fat, friendly face was creased in a happy grin and he nodded. “Garburetion wants a bit of adjustment and the timing on that——”

  “To hell with the adjustments,” Saeton shouted. “We’ll do those to-morrow. All I care about at the moment is that she goes. Now switch the damned thing off and let’s go and have a drink. My God, we’ve earned it.”

  The roar died away as Tubby cut off the juice. The hangar was suddenly still again. But there was no tension in the stillness now. We were all grinning and slapping each other on the back. Tubby caught hold of his wife and hugged her. She had caught our mood of relief. Her eyes were shining and she just didn’t seem able to contain her excitement. “Anybody else like a kiss?” I was nearest to her and she reached up and touched her lips to mine. Then she turned and caug
ht hold of Saeton. She pressed her lips to his, her hands tightening on his overalls. He caught hold of her shoulders and pushed her away almost roughly. “Come on. Let’s get a drink.” His voice was hoarse.

  Saeton had kept a bottle of Scotch for this moment. “Here’s to the airlift!” he said.

  “To the airlift!” we echoed.

  We drank it neat, talking excitedly of how we’d manage the installation, what the first test flight would show, how the plane would behave on two engines. Saeton planned to use the outboard engines for take-off only. With the extra power developed by the Satan Mark II all flying would be done on the two engines. We bridged in our excitement all the immediate problems and talked instead of how we should develop the company, what planes we should buy, what routes we should operate, whose works we should take over for mass production. In a flash the bottle was empty. Saeton wrung the last drop out of it and smashed it on the concrete floor. “That’s the best bottle of Scotch I’ve ever had and I won’t have it lying on any damned rubbish heap,” he shouted. His eyes were dilated with the drink and his own excitement.

  Our glasses suddenly empty, we stood around looking at them in silence. It seemed a pity to end the evening like this. Saeton apparently felt the same. “Look, Tubby,” he said. “Suppose you nip on the old bike and run down into Ramsbury. Bring back a couple of bottles. Doesn’t matter what it costs.” He glanced at me. “Okay, Neil? It’s your money.” And as I nodded, he clapped my arm. “You won’t regret having backed us. If you live to be as old as Methuselah you’ll never make a better investment than this. More Scotch, Tubby!” He waved his arm expansively. “Get on your charger, boy, and ride like hell. This bloody dump is out of Scotch. Come on. We’ll hold your stirrups for you and we’ll be out to cheer you as you ride back, bottles clanking in your saddle-bags.”

  We were all laughing and shouting as we trooped out to the store-room where the bike was housed. Tubby roared off, his face beaming, his hand whacking at the rear of the bike as he flogged through the gears. His tail-light disappeared through the trees and we fell suddenly silent. Saeton passed his hand across his eyes. “Let’s go in,” he said moodily and I saw that the nerves at the corners of his eyes were twitching. He was near to breaking point. We all were. A good drunk would do us good and I suddenly thought of Else. “What about making it a party,” I said. “I’ll go down and see the Ellwoods.” I knew they wouldn’t come, but I thought Else might. Saeton tried to stop me, but I was already hurrying down the track and I ignored him.