44

THE morning sky resembles a child’s painting with finger-streaks of pink and orange and yellow. Harry leans forward, tense and eager, rising up in his seat to admire what he can see in the distance.

‘Just take a look at that,’ he exclaims as the Darracq enters the paddock. His Voisin is out of its canvas hangar. Every strut and support and cable has been given a spectacular backdrop by the sunrise, as though the machine was winched on to a theatre stage and bathed in flattering lights. ‘What a beauty!’ Harry says. ‘Isn’t she magnificent, my sweet?’

The setting is perfect: the colours; a clean sharp scent of grass and leaves; the conditions, warm and calm. Yet from where Bess sits in the rear of Jordan’s motor car, with Mayer Samuel on the bench-seat beside her, the Voisin still resembles a piece of farm machinery. Bess would like to echo her husband’s enthusiasm but feels disoriented after the long drive, which has reminded her of the ghost train at Coney Island with its dips and lurches and darkness. Yet she knows her husband needs her today: needs to hear her wish him well before strapping on his goggles and securing the leather flying-cap with its dangling flaps like a beagle’s ears. So Bess tries to sound positive.

‘It looks ready to go,’ she says, raising her son up so he can see.

Harry nods, but he is impatient. He jumps from the Darracq before Jordan brings it to a halt, staggering briefly on the ground before regaining his balance and running the fifty yards to the Voisin, carrying the small bundle he has kept by his feet during the drive. Brassac is tinkering with the propeller; Bess guesses it is him by the outline of his hat.

‘So – we’re all set?’ Harry asks him, not even bothering with a greeting. The mechanic gives the slightest of shrugs. He strokes his dark moustache and then raises his head like a dog sniffing the air. Not even a zephyr caresses his cheeks, and when Brassac returns his attention to the propeller and his spanner without raising any objections, Harry knows he will not hold him back this time. But suddenly Harry is unsure what he should do first. He must put on his cap and goggles, which he has brought with him; the Voisin’s engine must be warmed up; then the controls tested with a trial run around the paddock. And he must pray for no breeze. He turns, distracted by a voice behind him.

‘Allow me – no, I absolutely insist.’

Ralph Banks is leading Bess from the Darracq towards the Voisin. He has introduced himself and offered her his left arm, as if escorting her to a grand ball. In his other hand he carries a stool.

‘Morning, Old Boy,’ he calls out to Harry as they approach.

He places the stool on the ground, helps Bess settle down, then shakes Harry’s hand too enthusiastically. The gash on his chin has still not healed.

Brassac steps back from the machine and acknowledges the new arrivals.

‘Bonjour, madam,’ he says, wiping his hands on his apron and then lifting his hat. Bess smiles. Nods.

‘Bonjour, Antoine.’

The mechanic raises his hat again, then turns to her husband.

‘Allez!’ he grunts.

‘He’s right,’ Banks tells Harry. ‘You should make haste while conditions are favourable.’ He looks him up and down; whistles softly. ‘You’re looking very smart, Old Boy. Almost too smart for these surrounds.’

Bess has been too tired to take much notice of her husband’s appearance. He is wearing a cream-coloured cotton suit over a stiff-collared white shirt and a striped neck-tie, more suited to a gentleman’s soiree in the tropics. He had the suit tailor-made in Port Said during the Malwa’s two-day stopover. Did he intend even then to wear it for this flight? Then she realises it is as she imagined it the previous morning: her husband in a stiff collar and tie. Again she feels a flicker of unease.

‘Houdini …’

‘What is it, my love?’ His eyes are bright. He is anxious to get on with it.

‘I wondered if your clothes are practical, that’s all. You will surely get grease on that suit.’ How silly she sounds.

‘This is a significant day,’ Harry replies, addressing Banks as well as Bess. ‘I must look my best. There will be a crowd, perhaps a photographer.’

He looks around, frowns.

‘There is nobody else here?’

Brassac shakes his head.

‘It’s barely past dawn,’ offers Banks.

‘Should I wait?’ Harry asks, his gaze flitting between the three of them.

‘Allez!’

‘Okay. A rolling trial first?’ The mechanic nods.

Harry jams his cap over his hair but leaves the sides hanging down. Then he straps on his goggles and pulls them up so they are resting just above the peak of his cap. Their dull reflection in the early-morning light gives him the appearance of an insect. He hesitates for a moment before clambering inside the machine, ducking beneath a pair of flaps at the front, which have been turned vertically to permit entrance. Banks assists by holding a wing-strut to steady the apparatus, which rocks with Harry’s weight as he wriggles himself into the cramped seat between the controls and the engine. Behind this is the propeller, made of metal and almost twice the height of Bess. He is alone now, at work, fiddling with levers, summoning the concentration he needs for any of his routines. With this intensity comes a kind of peace: while he is performing, almost everything else is forgotten.

Bess gets up from her stool, puzzled that her husband hasn’t made any farewells, let alone wait for a kiss. Should she say something reassuring now, before he goes? Then she feels Banks’ hand on her arm.

‘This will be a test run to warm the engine,’ he explains. ‘He won’t leave the ground just yet. But I’d secure your hat for when things start up.’

In her handbag she has a lightweight scarf of pale blue Chinese silk, which she tosses over her hat and ties with a bow under her chin. She is attending to the scarf when the Voisin’s engine ignites. She is expecting the noise, but its power and proximity still cause her to flinch. Smoke, thick and dark, streams upwards but does not drift towards Bess, who has Banks standing behind her. They are soon joined by Brassac, who has swung the propeller then moved aside, and also Jordan. The driver has feigned indifference, but curiosity wins out when he hears the engine’s clear-throated throb.

Harry works the controls and allows the shuddering Voisin to creep forward. Even with a pilot aboard, the weight is at the back: the front wheel dangles down, wobbling. Brassac holds his spanner like a musician with a tuning-fork. Bess senses from his posture that he is using his ears even more than his eyes.

Leaning forward, his lips close to her right ear so she can hear him, Banks begins a commentary.

‘He’ll check the throttle, to ensure fuel lines are clear. There – you hear the engine noise rise and fall? Now, watch those front panels. They control ascent. He’ll push the steering-wheel forward when he wants to take off.’

Banks accompanies his lesson with sweeping arm gestures, but the Voisin is bouncing as it rolls away from them and Bess finds it hard to detect the movement of individual parts. The whole thing is in wild motion.

Even the ‘HOUDINI’ signs, painted in large capital letters on the front and rear side panels, are blurred as if they were placards held by a leaping child in a crowd. It would not surprise her to see the whole thing shake itself apart, strewing pieces over the ground. Banks doesn’t share her concerns.

‘To steer, he’ll use the vertical rudder at the rear of the outriggers, controlled by cables from his wheel,’ he continues. ‘It doesn’t take much to turn. Easy does it or you can tip over. There, see him change direction? And again.’ Banks stands up.

‘What’s he doing now? Something’s amiss.’

Harry has swung the machine around in a long, slow arc. Bess hears Brassac muttering as the Voisin sways drunkenly from one side to another. The engine noise is a dull throb as it approaches, its propeller churning up a storm of twigs and leaves and dust and dry grass. When the machine is twenty yards away Harry cuts the engine. The sudden silence is interrupted by a mellifluous bird call. Harry leaps down. Even as he straightens up he is calling out to his mechanic.

‘There’s a problem at the rear, Brassac. I can feel it pulling to one side, as if the rudder is out of kilter.’

Harry is irritated. After all this waiting, another hold-up. Bess knows to stay back. But then they hear another engine, insignificant compared to the flying machine’s noise. A motor car is making its way into the paddock. Its driver changes direction, unsure which way to head, before spotting the Voisin and the small gathering around it.

‘A Ford,’ says Jordan, identifying the vehicle before they know who it is carrying. Its sides begrimed with dust, the Ford stops close by. Bess sees the driver slump back in his seat, evidently relieved to have arrived. Then two familiar figures emerge.

‘Franz!’ Harry exclaims, greatly pleased. ‘And James, too!’ Kukol and Vickery get out, consider their surrounds, and accept Harry’s handshakes.

‘We figured we should be here, boss,’ Kukol says.

‘Seeing as it could be historic and all,’ Vickery adds.

Someone else has extracted himself from the vehicle, a short, weedy man with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a scuffed jacket. He stretches and looks around, like a punter evaluating horses at a racetrack.

‘McCracken,’ he says. ‘From The Argus.’

‘Swell!’ Harry replies. ‘Do you need to speak with me now?’

‘Later, perhaps,’ says the Argus man, without removing his cigarette.

‘If there’s anything to talk about.’ He gazes at the Voisin sceptically.

‘You have a photographer?’ asks Harry, looking past him.

‘No, mate. He’s busy taking portraits of visiting yachtsmen.’

‘Yachtsmen?’ Harry is perplexed. ‘I see. Still, I’m delighted you’ve come. You can all be official witnesses … But how did you come to be here?’

‘Mr Rickards arranged it with the reporter and a driver he knows,’ Vickery says. ‘Oh – Mr Rickards himself sends his apologies. Detained, he was.’

‘Sanderson!’ Jordan says, recognising his fellow driver, who is inspecting the wheels of his Ford. Jordan wanders away to speak with him as Brassac re-emerges from behind the Voisin.

‘Nuts loose,’ he says. ‘I have fixed rudder.’

‘So I can have a crack?’ Harry asks. Brassac pockets his spanner.

This time Harry farewells everyone. He shakes hands again with Banks and Kukol and Vickery and gives a cheery wave to the two drivers, who are discussing the fragility of tyres. Brassac has already taken up his position by the propeller, having directed the others to coax the Voisin around. Bess waits. Her husband places his hands on both her shoulders. She raises her face so he can kiss her. His lips brush hers. She steps away.

This time he fastens the flaps of his cap under his chin and pulls the goggles over his eyes once he is seated at the controls. Again the flaps wobble as he fiddles with levers. Words pass between her husband and his mechanic, but she cannot make them out. But she does hear Brassac, holding one end of the propeller, as he counts down.

‘Un. Deux. Trois …’

Then he swings the blade and the engine noise is a wave crashing over her.

Banks has instructed Kukol and Vickery to help him hold down the rear of the machine. But as the engine noise rises and the force increases they can restrain it no longer. Banks takes a few stumbling steps as the Voisin rolls forward, then falls and has to let go. He barely bothers to dust himself down as they watch the machine move away from them.

It lurches. It sways. It bounces. It cannot stay straight.

And then it rises.

It happens much quicker than Bess expects. The machine has travelled only a hundred yards or so away from them when her husband changes the angle of the elevator flaps and the whole clumsy construction leaves the ground, the rear section trailing down as if reluctant to let go.

Squashed between the controls and the thundering propeller, his bottom teeth pressing hard into his top lip, Harry senses the sudden smoothness. The jiggling and rattling have been replaced by an unsteady floating sensation. He glances down for a moment, just to confirm he is aloft, and when he looks ahead once more he sees the top of a tree, one of the very few in the paddock, directly ahead. He is heading for its uppermost boughs. The spectators see this too.

‘Attention!’ Brassac calls out, though he cannot possibly be heard.

Every one of Harry’s muscles feel taut. But there is no fear. His mind is perfectly clear and he knows exactly what he must do. Applying steady force, he works the controls. He wills the shuddering nose of the Voisin to rise, watching the elevator flaps turn down. The tree top is looming. Harry can see white birds stirring in alarm in the branches.

And then his machine rises up, clattering over the canopy of leaves. The wheels under the rippling fabric of the wings are like an eagle’s talons poised for prey. Brassac releases his breath and Banks whoops.

All the tension has left Harry. He sits back, relaxed despite the rhythmic thudding of the engine and the breeze buffeting his face. When the Voisin cleared the tree, a restraining bond was severed. He is free of the uncertainty and dread that has held him down. Now he is in control.

He would like to stay aloft longer, but has promised Brassac that this will be just a test run. The mechanic wants to ensure that everything is holding together under the strain of flight. Besides, they have used a minimum amount of fuel to keep the weight down. So Harry gently turns the wheel, feeling the tension in the cable as the rudder is engaged. On the ground he had feared that a dragging wingtip could be scraped and damaged when turning. Now there is nothing but air to embrace it.

The machine completes a sweeping half-circle and heads around to where it began its brief journey. Harry squeezes back on the controls and feels the Voisin dip. He braces for the thud, trying to hold it steady. He is down. A cracking, grinding noise as the wheels spin on the ground. Everything vibrates: he is strapped within a cocktail-shaker. Then he cuts the engine. At first the absence of noise and vibration is disorienting. He hears voices.

‘You did it!’ Banks.

‘Congratulations, boss.’ Kukol.

Brassac is past him, swiftly completing a circuit of the Voisin, searching for cracks in the struts or splits in the fabric, and only when he is satisfied that his machine has not been broken does he look at Harry.

‘Bon,’ is all he says. Then tips his hat.

Harry extricates himself, his arms and feet and buttocks still slightly numb from the vibrations, takes off his goggles and cap and strides to Bess, who is standing beside the stool.

‘I saw you, Houdini,’ she says, noticing that his hair and forehead are streaming with sweat. He moves closer, reaching out, unsure how to respond to her at such a significant moment. But then McCracken is upon him. McCracken with a pencil and his notebook out of his jacket pocket.

‘How long would you say you were up?’ he asks. Harry realises he has no idea at all. It has been like one of his escape routines in which time and space lose all significance. But Kukol can help.

‘Close to one minute,’ he says. ‘I had my watch on it.’

‘And how would you describe the sensation?’ Having licked the tip of his pencil, McCracken is waiting. But Harry struggles to find the right words.

‘Freedom and exhilaration, that’s what it is,’ he says at last. ‘Oh, she’s great. She’s like a swan. She’s dandy.’

Brassac is beside him, an emptied tin of motor fuel in his left hand. ‘Encore,’ he says. Harry nods.

‘I must take her up again while conditions are calm,’ he tells McCracken, wiping the back of one hand over his forehead. The reporter folds his pencil within the notebook.

Harry catches his wife’s gaze and smiles, but he is already striding back towards the Voisin. Bess, who hopes that Mayer Samuel has been able to see everything from Jordan’s car, ponders how strange it must be for her husband to repeat the same trick so soon. But he is confident now, letting the Voisin rise even quicker than before and keeping well clear of the tree.

‘Almost one hundred feet up!’ Banks calls out.

Brassac has his fingers draped over his moustache. He is watching intently, concerned that the tail section of the Voisin is still drooping.

Harry wants to try a complete circuit of the paddock. Glancing down, he uses a line of fencing, the narrow road, and trees in one corner as his guide. The noise is incredible: the engine; the propeller; a humming from the taut cables. He locks his hands on the wheel, bringing the machine around in a smooth circle. And this time, as something extra for the spectators, he brings the Voisin down directly in front of them, keeping his approach lined up on the motor cars belonging to Jordan and Sanderson.

Too fast. The main wheels skip and skid and fail to grip when they strike the ground. Trying to correct the swaying, Harry pulls back on the controls. The elevators yaw. The front section of the machine drops.

‘Ah,’ Brassac sighs. A fond parent watching an infant tumble.

Now the machine’s tail is up, all its mass momentarily balanced on the front wheel; the one that resembles a dinosaur’s tiny, useless arms. It rolls along like this for twenty yards before Harry throws himself back in his seat, the change of weight just enough to right the balance. The tail subsides and Harry clambers out, vaulting to the ground with a flourish like a gymnast trying to recover his poise after a poor landing on the mat.

‘There!’ he says, rather too quickly. ‘I was wondering whether to jump or not, but decided I could fix it. No harm done!’

But Bess can tell by the colour in his cheeks that he’s had a scare. So he does what he’s always inclined to do when a routine goes awry: he repeats it, proving to himself it was only a glitch. Pausing only to gulp some water from a flask and allow Banks to top up the fuel, waving away Brassac when the mechanic’s expression makes clear his ambivalence about another attempt, Harry takes the Voisin up again. This time he brings the machine around after rising even further than before, the wings shivering with the strain, because he can make out more people below – two figures on horseback and another couple on bicycles wobbling from the direction of the Diggers Rest township.

He’s been noticed! His machine has been seen and heard rising up above ordinary lives. This is the greatest possible tribute: people flocking in during a performance, wanting to see something remarkable. A young fellow, riding bareback on a spirited roan stallion, tries to keep pace with him when he brings the Voisin down, careful not to let the nose dip this time. He kills the engine and lets an electrical current of pride and joy throb through him before he gets out. He strips off his goggles and cap, raises his arms, bows.

Houdini the Magnificent.

‘I can fly now!’ he calls out. ‘I can fly!’

He lets them come to him. Banks first, eager to shake his hand. Then Kukol and Vickery, offering facts and figures to the man from The Argus.

‘Duration of flights between one and three and a half minutes,’ Kukol is saying as McCracken scratches with his pencil. ‘Altitude achieved of, say, one hundred feet. Distance traversed, more than two miles.’

‘At least two miles!’ Harry adds. ‘We must prepare something in writing so that everyone here can attest to it,’ Harry instructs Vickery. ‘You could sign it yourself, Mr Corcoran!’

‘McCracken,’ the reporter corrects him, finding a new page in his notebook. ‘So … did you fear you’d tip over when you came down badly?’

Harry is annoyed that the first question concerns his only mishap, but nevertheless responds with an indulgent smile.

‘Not at all. It’s so quick you hardly know what’s happening. You act unconsciously, just as you might ride a horse without thinking what you are doing. When the plane dipped on her nose I straightened her by instinct.’

The reporter has his head down. Harry can see his wife approaching with his son in her arms, having asked Jordan – to his bemusement – to fetch him.

‘I am completely satisfied,’ Harry says. ‘This is a perfect piece of mechanism. I have never enjoyed any experience so much. With just a little more practice I will be able to fly over Melbourne, and I expect to astonish the people by doing so one day.’

McCracken grunts. Brassac is checking struts on the Voisin’s wings.

‘This morning I have fulfilled all my expectations,’ Harry continues. ‘To set the aviation record, by making the first controlled flight in Australia, is the absolute pinnacle of my career.’

Vickery nods. But the reporter looks up, a sceptical smile hovering around the corners of his mouth.

‘First flight here perhaps,’ McCracken says. ‘Dunno about Australia.’

‘But it’s true,’ Harry responds. ‘I am clearly the first to fly in this country.’

Bess arrives just in time to hear the end of this conversation. The words that seem to drain all the energy and excitement and life from her husband.

‘No, mate,’ the reporter says. ‘It’ll be in this morning’s papers. A bloke got a flying machine up outside Adelaide yesterday. You’re a day late.’

Harry’s goggles dangle limply from his fingers.