Flightsend

by Linda Newbery

  ‘All those years ago, I could not have stood here like this,’ Dietmar said, breaking the silence. ‘A German. I would have been interrogated as a spy and clapped into an internment camp.’

  ‘And yet you came to live here,’ Kathy said.

  ‘Yes. But now I feel more at home here than I did then. In the village, and at Flightsend. Perhaps, now,’ he said, looking at Kathy, ‘the name really means what I wished for.’

  Flight’s End.

  Charlie understood that with this remark Dietmar had said something rather wonderful to her mother. She also remembered Kathy’s words when they first saw the cottage: ‘That’s what it is, isn’t it? An end to everything that’s gone wrong.’ And she had made it so, in her own way, with determination and courage. Not the way Charlie would have chosen, but nevertheless it was working.

  They walked on, Dietmar and Kathy hand-in-hand. Pretending not to notice, Charlie knew that her mother, if challenged, would say that they were just good friends.

  Why do people say that, she wondered? What’s just about a good friend?

  She thought of Sean, who’d send her postcards from Turkey, who’d come back and take her to the Peak District; who’d remain her friend, though he didn’t have to. She thought of Rowan and Angus. Her friends. She’d see them soon.

  Caspar scouted ahead, nose to the ground, tail high. Although the airfield was only slightly higher than the village, Charlie had the feeling of being above everything, distanced in the strange timelessness of the perimeter tracks and runways. The church tower was squatly huddled into its yew trees, the houses packed close around the green. The day had turned cool, a breeze ruffling the grasses. In the triangles cut by the runways, the barley crop had been harvested, leaving the ground dry and stalky. Swallows skimmed low.

  ‘Swallows, or house martins?’ Kathy said. ‘I always forget how to tell the difference.’

  ‘They’re swallows,’ Charlie said. She knew because Sean knew. ‘They’ve got a reddish bit under their throat. House martins have white rumps and shorter tails.’

  ‘Martin is also a small animal, like a polecat?’ Dietmar asked, and they were off again, sorting their way through words and meanings.

  ‘Marten, E – N. As in pine marten,’ Kathy said.

  Charlie walked ahead, letting them talk. She whistled Caspar and he waited, turning to grin over his shoulder. She was amazed by her own mood swing. Not three hours ago, when Sean left, she could have hidden in the toilet and wept for the end of her silly flight of fantasy. But now she saw that it had been replaced by something better and stronger. She thought of all she had to look forward to: the flight in the Cessna next Saturday, and seeing Rowan, and tennis with Angus; Sean coming back, and the start of the sixth form. Even getting the exam results in two weeks’ time was probably something she could look forward to, rather than dread.

  ‘Come on, Caspar!’ She picked up a stick and hurled it for him. She loved to see him galloping fast, stretched out like a cheetah in a surge of pure speed that was thrilling to watch. She ran after him without a hope of keeping up. He caught the stick, pinned it to the ground with a forepaw and fastened his jaws round it, then trotted back to her.

  ‘Good boy!’ She hurled it again, watched him leap, capture and tussle. She was on the main runway now, at the highest part of the airfield, with Dietmar and her mother walking slowly towards her. From here she could see the dipping, weathered roof of Flightsend itself, beyond the church yews.

  It was still August, but the landscape was taking on the mature colours of autumn. Clusters of elderberries were forming on wine-red stems; the rowan in the hedge was decked with orange berries. Charlie thought of autumn: of misty, cobwebby mornings, of long shadows, of bonfires and Hallowe’en. Things would happen in their proper order.

  She looked down at Flightsend. She thought of the table in the garden, with the remains of lunch. Her mother’s rows of labelled plants in the nursery, the seedlings and cuttings, the smell of fertile, watered earth. Frühlingsmorgen in the garden, soon to be joined by Rose’s rose. Her own bedroom, with its clutter and its secrets and its window overlooking the garden and meadows.

  Home.