The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘Because they die. Every man I’ve ever got close to has died.’

  ‘So that’s why you won’t go to bed with me? You’re afraid you might kill me off.’

  ‘You have no idea what it’s like.’

  He leaned forward. ‘I know about death, in the same way you know about birds. More than you think. I’m willing to take a chance.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no.’

  ‘I’d like to sleep with you. You’re a bit past your prime but I think you could still make it a pleasant enough pastime for both of us. I could whip you if it would make you feel better about all those dead blokes. I like whipping women.’

  She stood up. ‘You’re disgusting. I have to go.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me why you came.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘The Swede. Axel Wenner-Gren. I knew nothing about his connections with Germany. I swear that.’

  He tapped another cigarette on the table, his fourth since her arrival. ‘We decided he probably wasn’t a Nazi agent anyway. What does it matter now?’

  ‘What does it matter? I lost everything, every last thing that I valued. There was nothing more to hold onto.’

  ‘You got paid for your plane.’

  ‘It didn’t bring it back.’

  ‘Buy another one.’

  She clenched her fists. ‘Stop it. Just stop.’

  As she got into her car, he called out to her. ‘Let me know if you change your mind about anything.’ She saw his face behind the flame of his cigarette lighter.

  THE WAR. IT WAS STILL THERE, BEHIND HER EYES some mornings when she woke. The war where she never truly belonged. She believed herself patriotic. When she made her speeches she had spoken about the ties of empire, which she had helped to foster. The King and Queen had received her as if she were a friend. It was no time to abandon her country, but her country seemed to have abandoned her. She turned to the French, whom she was sure would find a role for her. The Anglo-French Ambulance Corps ran a mobile hospital in France, staffed by some British doctors and nurses. The French did indeed welcome her, and she was soon wearing their uniform, driving ambulances in Britain, in preparation for being mobilised to France. Before that could happen the German army had over-run France and that door was closed behind her. She found herself working in a munitions factory in Poole in Dorset, inspecting the guns that were used on Spitfires. Her twelve-hour days on the assembly line began at 7.30, six mornings a week. At nights, pieces of plaster from her bedroom walls fell around her ears during the German bombing that Poole suffered night after night. When she had leave, she retreated to the Hertfordshire countryside, where Nellie was now living. She would be waiting with whatever nourishing hot soups her ration cards could run to, pressing her daughter to go to bed and sleep. While Jean slept, she sat beside her bed and watched.

  ‘I’m not going to be invalided out, Mother,’ Jean said once, opening her eyes unexpectedly. ‘I told you, I’m not sick.’

  Perhaps she was not. Perhaps it simply happened that way, but Jean would wonder if her mother had a hand in what happened next. An organisation called the National Savings Committee was raising money for the war effort. They saw, in Jean, an ideal person to promote their message. The Air Inspection Directorate, to whom she was responsible, opposed her discharge from the factory, but in the end the committee won the day. And so, as she told Fleming, and repeated the next time she confronted him, she had travelled the length and breadth of the country.

  He had narrowed his eyes through cigarette smoke. ‘But I knew all that,’ he said. ‘Why do you think I sought you out? You were bloody brave. Now tell me something I don’t know.’

  HE DIDN’T LIKE TO BE BORED. ‘TELL ME A STORY,’ he would say on the days when Jean came and sat on the edge of his verandah. So she would tell him. About how she came from a little country far away on the edge of the world. About caves and glow worms. About wanting to fly, and running off to Australia to meet up with Smithy, and ride in his plane. About Stag Lane, and rolling the Prince of Wales into the back of a laundry van, and the day she saw the R101 on her first solo flight. Of the nights stranded in the desert, alone with the Baluchi men in their robes. Most of all, she recounted the way she was supported by a frail wooden craft in the limitless dark nights, the immensity of the sky by day.

  ‘You knew Kingsford Smith?’ Fleming said, awe in his voice.

  ‘But of course I did.’ She told him then about the ups and downs of her hero’s life, and the Coffee Royal scandal, and how it altered the course of her own life — things she hadn’t written in either of her two books.

  Fleming had laughed when she told him that she had written her autobiography when she was twenty-nine. ‘How could you have thought that your life was over then?’ he had asked her.

  ‘It was,’ she said, putting her head in her arms. ‘Believe me, it was.’

  ‘But that was before you lost your plane.’

  ‘That was the last straw,’ she said. She didn’t tell him about Beverley.

  There were some things she couldn’t say to Fleming, whatever the things were that she could do with him.

  ‘WE DON’T REALLY WISH TO RECEIVE MR FLEMING and his wife,’ Lady Mitchell said. ‘Mrs Fleming, of course, knows everyone in society, but I think she’s beyond the pale now.’

  Sir Harold Mitchell and his wife, Mary, owned Prospect Plantation near Ocho Rios, a thousand acres planted in pimentos, allspice and lemons. Their house was a vast eighteenth-century mansion set among gardens tended by dozens of West Indians.

  Mary Mitchell was as close to a friend as Jean had had, apart from her mother, since her years in Auckland. Mary’s husband had made his fortune from coal and oil, coffee and farming, in widespread interests across the world. He had withdrawn his money from Great Britain when a rail company he owned was privatised after the war. The couple had a daughter, a little girl called Mary-Jean.

  The child had taken an instant liking to Jean, following her about and asking questions.

  ‘I think she sees you as her aunt,’ Mary said.

  ‘She’s a beautiful little girl,’ Jean said. Mary-Jean made her think of her brother’s children, and the summer she had spent with them. ‘Do you think she’d like to learn dancing? I could teach her, if you like.’

  This was an arrangement that suited everyone. Jean called more and more often at Prospect, and Mary-Jean’s dancing improved with every visit.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that I see Mary-Jean so much,’ Jean said, on one of these occasions.

  ‘Mind? Of course I don’t mind. Why should I? She adores you.’

  ‘I have to remind myself sometimes that she’s your little girl.’

  ‘You’d have liked one of your own?’ Mary said.

  ‘I would have liked children,’ Jean said, her voice suddenly wistful.

  Important guests arrived in a steady flow at Prospect. Mary faithfully invited the Battens to dine on each of these occasions. Often, they declined, and Mary never seemed ruffled. The invitations still came. Nellie’s eyes sparkled when Charlie Chaplin was about to be entertained, but when it came to the point she begged off. She was coming down with a cold, she decided.

  Winston Churchill was a different matter. There was no question but that they would attend. Already Nellie had bought herself a new, fitting black velvet dress, with full silk net sleeves. It was this occasion that had Mary worrying about the Flemings.

  ‘What else could Rothermere do but divorce her, when she got pregnant again?’ Mary pondered. ‘All so quick, so public. And now here she is, six months gone, and the pair of them holed up there at Goldeneye, as large as life. Or in her case, rather larger. Have you met her?’

  ‘Yes. She looks remarkably like the Duchess of Windsor,’ Jean said, without elaborating further. She had, indeed, met the sharp-tongued woman with shrewd green eyes and a bright red mouth. Noël Coward had insisted that they pay a visit. Coward had been shaken by his part in the drama. Ann, it seemed, had been saying f
or years that she was visiting him in Jamaica when really she was with Fleming. It had been an embarrassment. Fleming was disturbed by the prospect of marriage. He was forty-four and he’d managed to evade it up until now. Yet Coward had been a witness at the wedding, one of the two people present.

  Now his friend was writing a book to help him get over the loss of his bachelordom.

  ‘I think we should put him off the whole idea, don’t you?’ Coward said to Jean.

  When they arrived at Goldeneye, Ann Fleming was sitting in front of an easel dabbing away with a paintbrush, a palette perched in her hand. On the verandah, Fleming sat with his cigarette holder clenched between his teeth, typing at furious speed on a gold-plated typewriter.

  ‘I’m writing a novel,’ he said to Jean, without really pausing. ‘It’s a spy story called Casino Royale. Sound familiar? Royale-des-Eaux, it’s the name of a town in France. I’ve just made it up.’

  ‘And the hero is called Ian Fleming, I suppose?’

  He stopped typing and grinned. ‘I reckon James Bond sounds good. I’ve pinched it from some ornithologist fellow. You know I like birds.’

  ‘Won’t he mind?’

  ‘Oh, who cares? I don’t expect he’ll ever read it. Anyway, my chap’s got a code name. It’s 007.’

  Ann turned her head in Jean’s direction.

  ‘Get rid of her,’ she said.

  NELLIE STRUCK UP AN INSTANT RAPPORT with Winston Churchill. She told him her age, something she called her ‘state secret’. Churchill was seventy-eight. During a conversation with his host, he turned in Nellie’s direction and remarked: ‘I am the oldest person here. By two years.’ He raised his glass to Nellie. ‘To the most beautiful woman in the room,’ he said.

  Nellie raised her glass back to him, with the air of a girl.

  Noël Coward rushed over and kissed her while she pretended to faint with delight.

  ‘It doesn’t come much better than that,’ Nellie said, as they drove home later that night. ‘Did you enjoy the evening, Jean?’

  ‘Oh, it was pleasant enough,’ Jean said, keeping her eye on the winding road unfurling beneath them.

  ‘Not a sign of the Flemings,’ Nellie said.

  ‘I’d say she was a little overripe for dancing right now, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ Nellie said.

  ‘You know, I think I’ve seen enough of the people here,’ Jean said. ‘The same people, every time. Don’t you ever get sick of them?’

  ‘Just like that? We had such fun tonight.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s as good as it gets.’

  ‘What would you like to do instead?’ Although her voice was cautious, Nellie’s interest had quickened.

  ‘Europe should have calmed down by now. We could have a look around.’

  ‘I would like to go back, yes. There are a lot of places we haven’t seen.’

  ‘Just you and me, darling, just you and me.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything I’d rather do,’ Nellie said.

  ‘I’ll miss Mary-Jean,’ Jean said softly. ‘I’m sure we’ll keep in touch.’

  THE GATE WAS UNLOCKED, JUST LIKE THE FIRST TIME Fleming had let himself in. Nellie and Jean were surrounded by boxes and packing cases.

  ‘You didn’t have to go,’ he said to Jean.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘You knew I would.’

  ‘The publishers like my book.’

  ‘Well, congratulations. You must send me a copy. Send it care of Thomas Cook.’

  ‘I’m writing another one.’

  ‘You must have found your vocation at last.’

  He came up and stood close to her. ‘There’s a beautiful woman in it, with dark hair. She wears white silk dresses, and she doesn’t like men. Or so she says.’

  ‘How fascinating.’ Jean didn’t look at him.

  ‘Her name is Solitaire. A game for one player.’

  ‘Goodbye then, Mr Fleming,’ she said. ‘Or should that be 007?’

  He narrowed his eyes against a coil of smoke. ‘Jean, I could never figure out,’ he said, ‘why you put a swimming pool between your house and such a beautiful stretch of the sea. Was it something you were afraid of?’

  CHAPTER 34

  NELLIE HAD TAKEN GOOD CARE OF THEIR MONEY in Jamaica. They declared it ‘their’ money because, although Jean had earned it, it was Nellie who had invested and made it grow. ‘Thanks to good old Edward Walter’s tips,’ she would say. ‘Ted did have his uses.’ She once said to Noël Coward, at dinner, ‘I started out with horses and did very well. Now it’s the stock market, and it’s as big a flutter as the gallops. Amazing how it works out.’

  On the island, Nellie and Jean had bought land here and there. When it came time to divest themselves of the various properties, the money mounted higher. They were ready to spend some of it. It was enough to keep them drifting through Europe for the next seven years.

  After they left, Jean wrote often to Mary, always giving their address as Barclay’s Bank. We’re in Monte Carlo, and guess how much Mother won? No, she wouldn’t tell me, the wicked old thing. The climate suited them better than that of Jamaica, the air was drier. Provence was all that they dreamed of. They would spend days walking in the mountain villages. At the village of Èze, near Nice, Jean had discovered an artists’ colony and taken painting lessons. She thought her watercolours weren’t too bad, and they would return so she could learn more later on.

  Spain delighted them. Jean had long spoken fluent Spanish and found it easy to blend in with the locals. Granada especially appealed to them. They stayed in an old monastery within the palace gardens. We could have stayed there forever. It’s hard to describe the Moorish palace. The gardens were exquisite. Almond trees were in bloom, with the snow-covered Sierra Nevadas in the background. Everywhere we went the Spanish people were so kind to us, hospitable and untouched in their manner by tourists.

  Every letter was finished with an enquiry about the progress of Mary-Jean. Mary would reply with the details of local fêtes, and how her poppies had won first prize at the garden show. Of the locals, she wrote little, and nothing at all about Ian Fleming. Sometimes she enclosed a photograph of her daughter. They made plans to meet in Paris in the spring of 1954, though somehow they missed each other.

  Nellie now fulfilled some ambitions of her own. She had always wanted to go to Italy. ‘Everyone should see Venice once before they die,’ she proclaimed, once she had been there, but really the whole country stole her heart. From Venice, she and Jean drove to Verona, because Nellie wanted to see the presumed home of Juliet Capulet, with its courtyard and stone balcony. And then nothing would do but that she saw Leonardo’s fresco of the Last Supper, so they drove to Milan. They spent some weeks in Florence, where Nellie succeeded in climbing all the stairs to the top of the Duomo. But her ashen face at the end of the ascent frightened Jean.

  ‘I think we should stay put for a while, Mother,’ she said.

  ‘Well, as long as it’s warm,’ Nellie replied, ‘I’m sure I can cope. Don’t write me off just yet.’ She had caught her breath, and put her shoulders back after the descent.

  FOR A LONG TIME THEY WERE TORN BETWEEN Provence, Italy and Spain. In the spring they found themselves often at Cap d’Ail. They would be in London and the sky might be grey one morning when they woke. Let’s go to the Riviera, one of them would say, and they would be packed by lunchtime, ready to take the night train to Dover, followed by the morning train to the south.

  Churchill took his holidays at Cap d’Ail. One day in 1955 a letter came from his private secretary, inviting Nellie and Jean to cocktails, and from then on they were often the Churchills’ guests. Sometimes they went together, other times Jean was alone, driving the Austin she kept in France over the winding road to the Churchill villa. When they had eaten, everyone would stand and look along the sea coast, while they marvelled at the lights, the dazzling colour that swept around the bays, then up to the mountains, towards Italy. One evening in late spring
they ate a simple entrée of rock melon and ham — le jambon, Clementine Churchill murmured, testing her French — a chicken dish to follow, some caramel custard to finish. Jean was sipping a glass of champagne.

  ‘Now don’t you go drinking too much of that stuff,’ Churchill said, ‘not when you’re going driving around those corners. You know the bloody French, you have to watch them.’ He’d drunk four whiskies before dinner, a bottle of champagne with the meal, and had just begun his second Cointreau. ‘I’m laying off on the drink,’ he said. ‘Doctor’s advice. I’ve given up the brandy.’

  ‘Very wise, I’m sure, Mr Churchill,’ Jean said.

  ‘You’re quiet tonight, Jean. In fact, if I may say so, you’re getting like that Greta Garbo. She’s got a place around here. You bump into her at all?’

  ‘No, I’ve always hoped we might meet, but we never have.’

  ‘Yes, I can understand that, what is it they call you, the Garbo of the skies? Now she’s what you’d call a recluse, keeps herself to herself.’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘You don’t want to turn into one of those. You need to get out and about. How old are you? Forties, eh? Same age as my daughter, Diana. She’s a bit melancholy in her ways. Are you melancholic, Jean?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ She had met Diana Churchill once, and found her an agreeable companion at dinner, although she sensed a despair never far from the surface. She didn’t want to compare her own state to that of the other woman.

  ‘Down in the dumps? You get that way sometimes?’

  ‘I think everyone gets sad when they remember the past.’

  ‘Anything in particular?’ he persisted. ‘Oh, excuse an old man’s impudence, but I like you, damn it.’

  ‘Flying was my life, and now it’s gone. That’s all, everything has gone. I tried to get over it in Jamaica. Well, it didn’t seem to work really.’