Conquerors of the Sky

by Thomas Fleming

  “Excuse me, mister. Have you seen my mother? The lady was supposed to stay with me but she left me all alone and there was all kinds of noises and I’m scared.”

  The voice belonged to a small figure a half-dozen cautious feet away in the darkness. It was Cliff, Tama Moreno’s six-year-old son by a vanished husband. She took the boy on location with her, claiming she had no relatives or friends to mind him. He was one of the reasons she liked Buzz. She thought he was the kind of father Cliff needed—a man’s man.

  The little boy reminded Frank of Billy, the only person in the world Frank loved at this forlorn point in his life. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, putting his arm around him. “You know me. I’m Frank. Buzz’s friend. We’ll sit here together for a while and talk about planes. Do you like them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would you want to learn to fly them some day?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “If they crash you can get hurt—even killed—can’t you?”

  “Not if you’re a good pilot.”

  Frank described the new planes that were appearing in the American sky—the Ford trimotor, the Sikorsky seaplane, lumbering creatures that were lucky to go 115 miles an hour. He told Cliff someday they would have planes that could whiz across the continent in a single day. Even fly the Atlantic and Pacific.

  “Hey, Sport, where the hell have you been? We were gettin’ ready to drag the lake.”

  It was Buzz, followed by Tama. The night sky was turning gray. It was almost dawn. Tama exploded when she saw Cliff. Why wasn’t he in bed? He tried to explain as she dragged him back to their cottage on the other side of the lake.

  “What’s wrong, Sport?” Buzz asked.

  Frank shook his head. He was not about to do a momma’s-boy act and cry on Buzz’s shoulder. He let the jazzmen wail their woes into the dawn.

  Buzz sat down beside him. He understood what was wrong. Beneath his tough-guy act, he felt as lost and betrayed by the aviation world as Frank. “We’ll figure something out, Sport. I promise you. I want to build those goddamn planes of yours as much as you do. Meantime we gotta keep eatin’.”

  Frank heard another voice saying: we got to eat, kid. It was Craig, speaking through Buzz, telling him he still cared.

  A trumpet howled sardonically. Frank struggled for faith that he was being guided by a presence that would somehow help him survive these wasted years.

  SON AND LOVER

  “Now put your feet on the rudder controls,” Adrian Van Ness said. “To keep level, the nose should cut the horizon just above the top of the engine cylinders. Press the stick and it goes above them. Pull and it drops below. You try.”

  “Marvelous!” Beryl Suydam cried. Adrian understood what she was feeling. Discovering you could control this strange creature in the sky was an extraordinary thrill.

  Adrian and Beryl were two thousand feet above the green Wiltshire countryside in a de Havilland Moth, everyone’s favorite sport plane. At Geoffrey Tillotson’s urging, Adrian had learned to fly to impress potential investors in the aircraft business.

  “For level flying we keep the wings parallel with the horizon. Move the stick to the left and the port wing will drop. Move it to the right and we’ll come back again. Try.”

  Beryl dipped the left wing and they got a glimpse of the landscape Thomas Hardy had made famous in his novels about fate-haunted lovers. She moved the stick to the right and they were level again.

  “Last we have the rudder. It’s like a boat. We steer for a fixed point on the horizon. A gentle push with the left foot and the nose slides left. Reverse, and we recover. Try.”

  Beryl tried and the Moth veered dramatically left. Adrian straightened the plane and explained that the rudder was much more sensitive than the other controls. It did not have to contend with as much air pressure. He let Beryl handle the rudder again and she did much better.

  “Easy, isn’t it?” Adrian said. “Try a turn.”

  Beryl tried it and almost panicked. The nose wavered up and down, the plane skidded and sideslipped. Adrian took charge as they wallowed around. “Feel for the angle of the bank,” he said, “Try again. Use your toes on the rudder. Nothing else.”

  Beryl obeyed and made a remarkably smooth right turn. She was catching on fast. “Adrian, I adore it!” she cried.

  They cruised over the west country, Adrian pointing out places of interest below them. “Those are the Berkshire Downs to the north. That smudge is Reading. Now you can see the channel and the Isle of Wight. There’s Southampton Water.”

  A liner was standing out to sea from Southampton. Adrian thought of his mother and her friends, plodding along on their boats and trains, and felt a gratifying surge of superiority. Geoffrey Tillotson was right. This was the machine of his generation. They were flying over the dull dismal past into the future.

  In fact, they were flying to Ravenswood. The plane had become the smart way to arrive for a country weekend. In a half hour Adrian made a bumpy but adequate landing on the great lawn. A half-dozen other planes, most of them de Havilland Moths, were already parked in front of the house. As they taxied toward this impromptu flight line, Clarissa Van Ness and Geoffrey Tillotson stepped out of his Hispano-Suiza.

  “What a marvelous surprise,” Geoffrey said. Clarissa looked less pleased. A month ago, Amanda had returned to California. Seeing Adrian with Beryl confirmed a long-running rumor she had undoubtedly heard many times. But what could Clarissa say, when she was enjoying the amiable charms of her man of substance again? Adrian found his mother’s dilemma deliciously satisfying.

  For almost two years, Adrian had watched his marriage deteriorate, telling himself it was not his fault, it was a historical process in which he was unhappily participating. Amanda grew more and more melancholy at the prospect of a second winter in England. Her colds accumulated into the grippe and then into a bout of pneumonia—a very serious illness in the 1920s. In a flurry of guilt Adrian had asked Clarissa to return and nurse her back to health. She and Amanda spent the summer at the Tillotson house in Kent—giving Adrian time to pursue Beryl Suydam in London.

  She proved elusive. The ghostly third was a formidable antagonist. But Adrian, convinced he was a man of the future and time was his ally, was tenacious. Slowly, inevitably, Beryl’s melancholy receded. Soon Adrian was her lover, visiting her flat in London at night, lying to Amanda about his long hours at the bank.

  Finally came news from California that Amanda converted into an ultimatum. Her mother’s mental condition had deteriorated so badly, Amanda’s half-brother had placed her in a sanitarium a few miles from Cadwallader Groves. Violently distressed, Amanda reminded Adrian of his promise to quit his job and return to California with her if circumstances warranted it. Here, surely, were the circumstances. Her doctor had told her not to spend another winter in England. Her mother was being hounded into insanity by her monstrous brother.

  Adrian calmly, coldly, declined to go. He said his career as a merchant banker was just beginning to prosper. It took years to accumulate clients. But he urged Amanda to go. In fact, he insisted on it. She had wept and asked him if he were going to divorce her. It was a painful moment. Adrian gave her the only possible reply. “No.” It was a lie, of course. But men of substance regularly lied to their wives.

  That night at Ravenswood, Adrian, Beryl and the other fliers came to dinner in their jodhpurs and flying jackets. Planes were the main topic of conversation at the table, upstaging the establishment of the Irish Free State and the jailing of the German agitator, Adolf Hitler, for attempting a coup d’état in Munich. Later, sipping brandy before the fire while his mother glared in the middle distance, Adrian turned to Beryl and murmured, “Can I come to your room tonight?”

  Beryl understood the significance of accepting Adrian in her arms in this house. It would be a decisive break with her sorrow, with the ghostly third. “I can’t make you happy. I have no happiness in me,” she whispe
red.

  Adrian was not listening. “I want to make you happy,” he said.

  That night for Adrian flight was a new gospel, an escape from his empty marriage, a transcendence of the wounded naive adolescent who had sailed on the Berengaria. Flight fused with his desire for Beryl Suydam, his wish to heal her grief with his American faith in the future. Doubtful yet suffused with a wish to make an escape of her own, Beryl opened her arms to him. For a while that night in her room on Ravenswood’s second floor, the ghostly third who walked beside her vanished.

  The next day, while most of the guests shot grouse, Geoffrey Tillotson suggested a stroll through the woods. “A shame about Amanda going home like that,” he said. “But our bloody climate is hard on Americans. She may well be better off in California.”

  He cleared his throat. “Your mother’s a bit disturbed—as am I—about Beryl Suydam.”

  “Why?” Adrian said.

  “The whole bloody family is full of socialist rot, dear boy. Socialist rot of the worst sort. Which makes her a bit inconsistent with your profession.”

  “We don’t talk politics.”

  “You will, I assure you.”

  “I can handle politics quite nicely,” Adrian said. “I’m not a fanatic on the subject.”

  “Not politics with a woman, old fellow,” Tillotson said. “They add a dimension that can be quite devastating.”

  Adrian strode along, his eyes on the leafy path. “You and Clarissa don’t talk politics? Is that the secret of your success?”

  Now it was Tillotson’s turn to walk a dozen paces in silence. He put his arm around Adrian’s shoulder. “We must have a good talk one of these days.”

  Two weeks later, after a leisurely lunch, Tillotson led Adrian to a secluded corner of the Athenaeum Club’s long lofty library. He ordered a turn of the century Sandeman’s port and told Adrian how he had fallen in love with Clarissa Van Ness. His older brother’s death in a climbing accident in Switzerland had brought him back from India, where he had been supervising Tillotson’s numerous investments. He had married the daughter of a British civil servant out there and found her incapable of making the transition to social London. He was thrown on his own in society and seldom saw his wife, who preferred to remain “buried in Yorkshire.”

  When he met Clarissa Van Ness in 1898, Geoffrey Tillotson was a lonely man. She was a lonely woman. “Your father—her husband’s—failure made him—how shall I say it?—less than adequate. Do you understand me?”

  He finished his port in a nervous gulp and ordered another glass.

  “Wrong as it was, her love has been the solace of my life, Adrian,” Tillotson said. “And you, dear boy. I won’t attempt to tell you what you mean to me now. Though I realize I don’t have the slightest claim on you. I wanted to tell you immediately after your—your—mother’s husband—your unfortunate father—I suppose you will always think of him that way—died. But your mother couldn’t bring herself to do it. Of course you understand you must never tell her of this talk.”

  “Of course,” Adrian said. He was too astonished to think or feel anything. He had just discovered Robert Van Ness was not his father. He was not the legitimate son of a failure, but the bastard son of a man of substance.

  On a shelf behind Geoffrey Tillotson’s head, illuminated mostly by the glow from the nearby fireplace, was a leatherbound book with a title in faded gold: The Essays of Sir Francis Bacon. The first man to write frankly about the pursuit of wealth and power. Thackeray had sat in this room writing Vanity Fair, another book that told how the world worked.

  Something indefinable, an acceptance of the world’s ways, filtered into Adrian’s soul. It did not change his anger into milky benevolence. The wariness, the suspicion that life was a maze of secrets, would always be there. Along with a stubborn loyalty to the ruined speculator who had given him his name. But now this vortex of feelings belonged to a different man.

  A man who saw himself telling Beryl Suydam he was half-English, ready to love her not as a visiting American but as a part of her own country, prepared to share its destiny with her at his side. For a little while, suffused with love and sonship, Adrian was no longer American.

  A week later, Tillotson summoned Adrian to his office. “The chancellor of the exchequer—Winston Churchill—has asked me to form a commission to investigate our airline problems. We need a clever fellow who can find out how much money these confounded Europeans are losing whilst they pretend to prosperity. I’m quite sure the bloody beggars are all getting money from their governments. While our fellows are wobbling along on the edge of bankruptcy.”

  “I know someone who might be rather good at that,” Adrian said.

  Adrian was talking about his old schoolmate, Carlo Pontecorvo. He had returned from Africa when his father died in 1922 and assumed the family’s ancient papal title. He was now Prince Carlo. But Italian politics had made his position precarious. His father, a believer in democracy, had opposed Mussolini and the Fascists had expropriated the family’s estates in Calabria. They had been forced to sell their African lands at a catastrophic loss. In spite of his comparative poverty, Ponty was still passionately interested in flying. His letters to Adrian were full of descriptions of the latest airliners being developed by designers such as Antony Fokker and Gianni Caproni. He seemed to be in touch with all aspects of the European air world.

  Tillotson approved the choice. “It’s a job for a young fellow. Everyone in the business is young. Tell him we’ll see that he’s well treated for his time and trouble.”

  Ponty accepted Adrian’s proposal by return mail. He planned to pose as the spokesman of a syndicate of investors who were considering the purchase of one or several existing airlines. He would refer doubters to Tillotson Brothers, who would confirm his authenticity. “I would also suggest setting up an account in the name of a third party in a Swiss bank,” he wrote. “There may be a need for a certain amount of douceurs. Or as you Americans say, sweeteners.”

  Oakes Ames’s great-grandson had no hesitation about suggesting all this, including the douceur account, to Geoffrey Tillotson, who approved it with a nod of his head.

  Two months later, Ponty flew into Croydon Airport aboard a French Loire et Olivier Air Union biplane with reams of information on how much money all the European airlines were losing and how much their governments were paying to subsidize them. He also included some startling information on how Lufthansa, the German airline, was secretly training pilots for their military air force.

  “Good job,” Geoffrey Tillotson said after reading Adrian’s digest of Ponty’s espionage. “But we won’t send this stuff to anyone in the government just yet. Let’s take some of that Liverpool fellow’s money and put two hundred thousand into Air France, two hundred thousand into Lufthansa and the rest into Alitalia.”

  “What about Lufthansa training military pilots?” Adrian asked.

  “Forget that. It would raise hob with the stock,” Tillotson said. “They’re just playing the great game. As we’d be playing it if we lost the war.”

  Within a month, the British government announced a plan to consolidate the four faltering British airlines into Imperial Airways, with a government subsidy to keep it flying. Tillotson Brothers had, of course, bought into the company at bargain prices weeks before the announcement. Forethought at work again, Tillotson said, with his insider’s smile. To reward their secret agent, a nice block of stock was signed over to Prince Carlo Pontecorvo.

  Meanwhile, Adrian enjoyed Ponty’s companionship. He combined aristocratic Italian good looks with a nonchalance that put men at ease—and if Beryl Suydam was a sample—women found enchanting. His stories of flying in Africa—crash-landing in the Nile, daring the downdrafts of Mt. Kilimanjaro—soon had him on everyone’s list for dinner parties and country weekends.

  On one of these outings, Beryl asked Ponty if he would give her flying lessons. Adrian’s sporadic instruction had taught her the basics of flight but she had yet to solo. Po
nty was evasive about his “commitments” in Rome. That night he took Adrian aside and asked him if he approved the idea.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Learning to fly disturbs the equilibrium of many men,” Ponty said. “I would be uneasy, if I were you, about its effect on a woman.”

  Adrian dismissed this warning as offhandedly as he had ignored Geoffrey Tillotson’s concern about Beryl’s politics. She had moved into his Islington Mews flat. True, she was working for a left-wing publishing house that seemed to specialize in books praising the Soviet Union. She was violently critical of the Conservative government that was ruling England. But Adrian saw this as a continuation of his contest with the ghostly third and avoided arguments by claiming an American should be neutral in British politics.

  Within the week, Adrian and Beryl were airborne with Ponty in a biplane called the Lucifer 3 Seater. To Adrian’s chagrin, Ponty was soon pronouncing Beryl a born pilot. She had the indefinable instinct that blended human and machine in the air. Adrian on the other hand was constantly trying to think his way through the process. The result was safe but clumsy flying.

  Adrian simply did not understand Ponty when he urged him to “let the plane tell you what to do.” The plane was an unthinking collection of struts and wood and metal that would kill him if it got a chance. Beryl had no such apprehension. She borrowed money from her father to buy a de Havilland Moth and was soon flying all over England, ferrying her authors to speaking engagements and participating in air shows, where she rapidly acquired a collection of prizes.

  Adrian was not particularly troubled by Beryl’s superiority in the air—until he began hearing more and more about a writer named Guy Petersham, who had been her late fiance’s roommate at Cambridge. He had just published a book about his visit to Russia. She invited him to dinner one night, along with Ponty and one of the half-dozen young Englishwomen who had fallen in love with the prince. Petersham arrived wearing baggy unpressed trousers and a dirty Shetland sweater. Tall, languid, he was totally convinced of his own intellectual brilliance.