Flightsend

by Linda Newbery

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Sean said. ‘I’m not going to start ignoring you. I just have to be aware of what people might think.’

  ‘Let them think what they like! I don’t care – why should you?’

  ‘Because it’s different for me. It wouldn’t matter if you weren’t a student here. You’re sixteen, not a child. If we were just two people, no problem. But I’m a teacher, and that means hundreds of people – parents as well as kids – know me by sight. Whenever I go into town I’m recognized. Teachers have to be aware of that. It’s a bit like being a social worker or a doctor – you have a professional relationship with people and it’s wrong to take advantage.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You have to be careful not to put yourself in a position where people might think you’re taking advantage.’

  ‘But you’re not—’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  Arguments circled wearily in Charlie’s head. She could go on repeating the same points, but she saw that it wasn’t simply a matter of standing up for Sean against Mr Fletcher, nor a matter of dismissing what onlookers thought. Sean’s reputation could be called into question, whereas she would be seen as gullible victim. Sean was the teacher, the adult.

  ‘Then how am I going to see you?’ she appealed. ‘I can’t see you at home because of Mum, and now I can’t see you anywhere else because of what people might think. Don’t expect me to make do with the odd glimpse around school, because it’s not enough. I miss you! I want to see you! You’re my—’ Her what? ‘My friend.’

  Sean looked at her without speaking. She wanted to cry. Everything about him was so familiar – the bones of his face, the set of his mouth, the way he stood with feet firmly planted and hands thrust deep into the pockets of his shorts. His muscular brown legs, with a scar on one knee where a dog had bitten him when he was eight. His way of tying the laces of his trainers in a double knot and bow. She thought of the card he’d written to her mother; imagined him in the florist’s, writing it. The only answer was for him to marry Kathy, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sean said.

  He was going to give her up, she thought. He wouldn’t have time for her. Why should he, when her mother had rejected him over and over again? She saw the drab wastes of a Sean-less future stretching into the distance, and felt a tug of misery deep in her chest. It came to her, suddenly and disturbingly, that she didn’t want Sean to marry her mother, not any more. She didn’t want him to marry anyone. She gazed at him hopelessly.

  Then he said: ‘I’ll come and see you at Flightsend. Kathy will have to put up with it.’

  A Midsummer Night’s Dream was slick and funny. Charlie sat in the audience with Rowan and Russell and watched stern Theseus, resentful Helena and the other Athenians unfold their story, alternating with Peter Quince’s bumbling crew, and ethereal Titania and her fairy entourage.

  From Angus’ first entrance as Oberon, Charlie saw that no one was going to make fun of him. There was nothing half-hearted or selfconscious about his performance. He strode on to the stage, swirled his cape, brooded jealously over Titania and her Indian boy and gave peremptory orders to Puck.

  The play should have held Charlie’s attention; she tried to enjoy herself, and to stop reliving the conversation with Sean. It was a clever, stylish production. The cast had been well trained in covering up any errors they made, so that when Puck entered without his magical flower, one of the fairies clod-hopped on to the stage and presented it with a twirl to him and a curtsey to the audience, getting an unscheduled laugh.

  Charlie felt weird. Almost sea-sick, she could have said. She didn’t know quite when the ground had shifted, but it had, and now she was feeling her way in strange territory, sensing the unevenness, the tilting. It was no use pretending that she wanted Sean back for her mother’s sake, nor even for his own. No use pretending that she wanted him as surrogate father or older brother.

  She just wanted him.

  She wanted him to want to be with her, and no one else.

  She glanced at Rowan, who was whispering something to Russell, and thought: I can’t tell anyone. Not Rowan. Not Mum. Least of all Sean himself. He mustn’t know; it would spoil everything. Especially in the light of what he’d told her. If she wanted to go on seeing him, she mustn’t give him anything to hide. In any case, he’d be horrified. And he still loved her mother; she had written evidence of that, from less than a week ago.

  ‘Wake when some vile thing is near …’

  When Charlie had been about twelve, old enough to take an interest in such things, she had asked both her mother and Sean, separately, about how they met, why they’d liked each other. She knew that their first real conversation, soon after Sean joined the school, had been at a staff social event, a meal at a restaurant. Sean, arriving late, had sat at the only spare seat, next to Kathy.

  ‘I’d seen her at school and thought she was attractive,’ Sean said, ‘but it never occurred to me that we’d – you know – click like we did. She’s older than me and she looked sophisticated, intelligent, and I knew she had a daughter so I just assumed there was a husband or partner as well. And there was me, the new boy, the clueless new teacher straight from college. Well, we started talking and we could have talked all night. Other people went home and the waitresses were clearing up around us and we were still there talking. We had about ten cups of coffee and then she gave me a lift home. Even so, it was ages before I had the guts to ask her out, and I thought she’d just laugh and brush me off. But I’m glad she didn’t.’

  Mum, asked about Sean, had said: ‘I’d got him all wrong. Stereotyped him, really. I thought – young man, good-looking, sporty, athletic – he’s bound to be arrogant. But he wasn’t at all. I liked that.’

  ‘What thou seest when thou dost wake, Do it for thy true love take …’

  Sean and Mum. Mum and Sean. Charlie had thought they were a fixture. Sean’s devotion to her mother was constantly expressed in hugs, touches, kisses; he was by far the more demonstrative of the two. Newly-curious about adult relationships, Charlie had learned to recognize the muffled sounds through the bedroom wall which meant that Sean and her mother were making love. Maybe she had even been listening when the baby was conceived. Rowan, currently engaged in a should-she/shouldn’t-she dilemma about whether to go on the Pill, couldn’t bear the thought of her parents having sex. ‘I can’t imagine it! I mean, my dad, with his beer gut! Do you think they actually still do it, at their age?’ Charlie had known that her mother and Sean did, even before the pregnancy made it obvious; she didn’t feel disgusted, like Rowan, only rather intrigued.

  Now she thought: I’m in love with Sean. With my mother’s ex-lover. She tried it out, hearing the way it sounded. No, to explain would be to cheapen it, turn it into a TV soap, a situation rife with conflict and dramatic potential. Alternatively, she was a teenage girl with a crush on a handsome teacher, like countless others who drew entwined initials on their pencil-cases, who batted their eyelids and flicked back their hair. That, too, reduced it to cliché. And what she felt wasn’t just a crush, a temporary feeling for someone she hardly knew. She knew Sean better than anyone except her mother. They had walked up Lake District fells together; they had played tennis; she had brought him hot LemSip when he was ill with flu, and had waited at the hospital when he cracked a bone in his forearm. They’d made Mum’s birthday cake together. He’d mended punctures on her bike and had gone with her on the sponsored ride for Oxfam. He and Charlie had taken Conker to the vet to be put to sleep, and he’d cuddled Charlie when she cried afterwards. She knew his likes and dislikes, his favourite music, his moods. She knew his irritating habits, like leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor, and whistling the same tune over and over again while she was trying to do homework. Charlie and Mum would chorus, ‘Oh, Sean,’ but now she could only see these things as lovable. She wanted to be with him. Hear his voice. Have his attention.

  ‘Stay, though thou kill me
, sweet Demetrius …’

  It felt wrong to be thinking of him in this new way. Almost incestuous. She thought: if Rose had lived, I wouldn’t feel like this. If. Sean would be with Mum and everything would be simple. It’s all Rose’s fault.

  She couldn’t help it. She sat in the welcome semidarkness, watching the play at one remove, lost in her thoughts.

  ‘What angel wakes me from my flowery bed? ‘

  Titania, bewitched by the magic juice, was falling in love with Bottom, who now wore a ridiculously hairy, floppy-eared donkey’s head. Bottom was led off by bustling fairies; people were applauding, standing up, dropping their programmes, as the interval music began to play and the hall was flooded with light. Charlie stood blinking and dazed, suddenly faced with the need to make conversation, to say something about the play.

  ‘Come on, Charlie, you don’t look quite all there,’ Russell said.

  Rowan giggled. ‘She’s stage-struck. With Angus. He’s brilliant, isn’t he?’

  She’d have to do better than this. Besides, the play deserved her full concentration. When the lights dimmed for the second half, she made herself pay attention. Angus would want her opinion, in detail.

  The display of acting talent was formidable. All the main players were good, especially Pippa Woodford as Titania and a girl from year ten as a fiery Hermia, but Angus stood out. There was an expectant focus each time he came on stage; he could provoke laughter with the lift of an eyebrow.

  ‘He looked good, too,’ Rowan said in her father’s car on the way home. ‘Great costume, green tights and all. And that make-up. It made him look – not evil, but sort of dangerous.’

  ‘Quite butch for a Fairy King.’ Russell was next to her in the back seat, with Charlie in front. ‘Pippa looked gorgeous, didn’t she? And Hermia, in that clingy dress – what’s that girl’s name?’

  ‘Hey! Eyes off!’ Rowan warned, and her father said, ‘I’m glad you found it such an educational experience, Russ. Never could get my head round Shakespeare when I was at school but it sounds like I should have come.’

  Charlie said, ‘Everything we saw – all those people, the costumes, the set – it happens once more tomorrow and then it’s finished. All that effort, all that energy, and suddenly it’s gone. If you weren’t there, you missed it. They’re taking the set down at the weekend, Angus said.’

  ‘Someone was making a video,’ Russell said. ‘Those two blokes at the back. Didn’t you see them?’

  ‘But that’s not the same at all,’ Charlie said. ‘And as soon as you watch it, it’s in the past. That’s what makes it a bit sad, really. I mean, never in their whole lives will all those people get together like that again.’

  ‘They’ve had a great time doing it, though,’ said Rowan’s dad. ‘Why be sorry because it can’t go on for ever?’

  Charlie thought of the last time she’d been given a lift home along these same country lanes. This time she had a great deal more confidence that she’d arrive home safely. It was a still, perfect summer evening, not quite dark; she saw the graceful shapes of trees above misted fields. Through the partly-open window she could smell cut grass, and see the mown hay laid out for drying. Suddenly she longed to be at home, alone.

  ‘See you in a fortnight,’ Rowan called as Charlie got out at the end of her lane. ‘And we’ll send you a postcard.’

  ‘Have a great holiday! And thanks again for the lift,’ Charlie said to Rowan’s dad.

  Kathy was reading in bed. Charlie went up, told her briefly about the play, then went down again and let herself and Caspar out into the garden.

  She could smell the fresh dampness. In this still-not-darkness the white flowers gleamed as if floating in the dusk. She heard a fox bark and, in a field some way off, the baaing of sheep. The night air was cool, scented with grass and roses. Stirred up by the play and the midsummer night and the disturbing emotions that had got hold of her, she was reluctant to go indoors. She walked slowly down the path, touching the white phlox flowers, bending to breathe them in; at Frühlingsmorgen she stopped, and touched one of its fading blooms. She thought of Dietmar, and his arrival in their lives so unexpectedly – as if their discovery of his memorial rose had brought him here. If only the power of thought, or of wishing, could always be as effective. Quite what she wished for, she couldn’t have said. Not long ago, if a midsummer fairy had appeared at the bottom of the garden and offered to grant one wish, she wouldn’t have hesitated. I want everything back the way it was before, she’d have said. I want our old life back, with our old house, and Mum and Sean together. And the possibility of Rose, that wouldn’t be snuffed out in the world of dream-wishes. But to wish for all that would be not to want Flightsend, or Caspar, and she wanted both those things.

  ‘Sean.’

  Caspar came bumbling up to her, leaning his weight against her legs and waving his tail wildly, turning his head to look at her. Only then did she realize she’d whispered the name aloud. Sean. She wanted everything, all ways at once. She wanted Sean as family and as not-family. She even wanted the ache that tugged at her now.

  ‘Good boy. Let’s go in.’

  She gave Caspar a few biscuits, then went up to her room. She thought: you can’t call the past back, and there’s no point trying. You can only have it while it’s present. Like the play tonight, it happens and then it’s gone.

  In the drawer where she kept her sweaters she had hidden the florist’s card retrieved from the dustbin. She took it out, covering the top line of script with her thumb so that it read: I love you. Sean.

  She felt ashamed of herself for pretending.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she told herself. Then she put the card back in its place and got ready for bed.

  Part Three

  Scrapbook

  ‘It was fantastic! Just amazing!’

  Kathy was in her dressing-gown, putting croissants to warm in the oven. She’d come in late last night, having phoned to say that she and Dietmar, after their flight in the Cessna, had decided to go to a restaurant for dinner.

  ‘That doesn’t tell me much!’ Charlie said. ‘I want to hear all about it. Were you scared?’

  ‘At first. It was so bumpy, on the runway, and the plane seemed so tiny and fragile, I thought it’d never get up into the sky. I was thinking, Why did I ever say I’d do this? And when it turned, it banked so suddenly that my stomach lurched. I was terrified, to be honest! And afraid of being sick. I mean, I’ve never liked flying in passenger jets, and in the Cessna it’s so different – more obvious that you are flying. You’re sitting in the sky in a tiny box with wings, buffeted about by the wind. But Dietmar was so good. All the time, he told me what he was doing and why, and he was so relaxed that I stopped shaking and started to enjoy myself. And then I wasn’t scared again till the landing, but that was all right, too. I don’t know how long we were up, but it felt like hours – oh, it was wonderful, Charlie! We flew over Northampton and all the lakes and gravel-pits on the east side, and we saw Silverstone racetrack, and Stowe gardens with the avenues of trees – fantastic from the air. And we flew over here – did you see us?’

  ‘No, I was reading in the garden for a while, but then I got engrossed and forgot to look.’

  ‘We saw Flightsend, and the airfield, and the village – it looked so peaceful down here, with the church huddled into its trees, and the green, and all the fields spreading out – grass, and wheat, all soft hazy colours, and a combine harvester in one of the fields. Dietmar said he’ll take you up next time, if you want to go.’

  ‘Will he? Next time?’ Charlie looked at her mother. ‘So there’s definitely a next time, is there?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kathy said promptly. ‘I won’t be so scared now I know what to expect.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant a next time for seeing Dietmar. But obviously there is.’

  ‘Yes. I like him, Charlie. I like him a lot.’ Kathy fetched the warm croissants and put them on the table with the butter and apricot jam. It was
Monday, Charlie’s day off from waitressing, although she was going round to look after Rosie this afternoon. On Nightingales breakfast mornings, there was barely time for a quick mug of tea together before Charlie got into her black skirt and rushed off. Monday breakfasts, more leisurely, had acquired special status.

  ‘The dinner?’ she prompted. ‘How was that?’

  ‘Oh, it was lovely. We went to a country hotel near the airfield. A quiet, elegant place, with a huge dining room overlooking a lake. I felt really scruffy, coming straight from the airfield, but it didn’t matter. We just talked and talked.’

  Charlie said nothing. She wished she could raise one eyebrow in enigmatic query, the way Angus could. Talked and talked. That was how it had started with Sean.

  ‘Don’t start thinking I’m about to marry him,’ Kathy said, pouring coffee. ‘I enjoy his company, that’s all.’

  ‘All. That’s quite a big all. A big, important one.’

  ‘Yes. Well. He’s thoughtful, intelligent, kind – I know he’s a lot older than me, nearly twenty years, but it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘You’ve changed your tune.’ Kathy looked at Charlie, amused. ‘You seemed horrified at first, when I told you about seeing Dietmar again.’

  ‘Yes, but not because of his age! Because of—’

  ‘Because of Sean?’

  Charlie thought: she actually said his name. But Charlie didn’t want to talk about Sean for fear of giving herself away.

  ‘No,’ she lied. ‘Because I thought it might be dangerous, the flying. His age doesn’t matter. Marianne ends up marrying Colonel Brandon and he’s years older than her.’ Charlie’s English teacher, a Jane Austen addict, had suggested Sense and Sensibility for holiday reading; Charlie had just finished it, and she and her mother had watched the film.

  ‘I can’t quite see myself as Marianne,’ her mother said. ‘She’s nearer your age than mine.’