6

The English girl bent her head to light a cigarette. Hunched to shelter the flame as if from a draught. Couldn’t be more than nineteen or twenty. Maybe even younger, with those knee-high socks and turned-in toes. The boxy jacket handed down from a broad-shouldered aunt or sister.

Joyce waved. But there were too many people milling about, and the girl kept her head down. Joyce came around the counter and picked her way past the crowd huddled with their coffee and yesterday’s ham sandwiches, and the nuns picking postcards at the novelty booth. Wove through a crowd of soldiers sprawled across the floor, looking more like schoolboys on an outing in their oversized fatigues, playing cards or sleeping against their duffel bags. Stepped around a handsome, olive-skinned man snoring on a bench, his stocking feet propped in the lap of his wife, who did the crossword.

The English girl had taken the farthest end of the farthest bench.

“Excuse me, Miss Peckford?”

The girl looked up, startled. Her lips pulled back around grey, crooked teeth.

Joyce sat next to her. “We’ve got your connection sorted out as far as Toronto.”

“Toronto?” The word meant nothing to the girl. Joyce should have brought a map. She slowed her voice, as if addressing an especially thick child.

“Toronto is between here and Edmonton. You’ll fly there, and they’ll get you on your flight to Edmonton.”

“Oh,” said the girl. She buried the cigarette in the sand of the ashtray and tucked her hair behind each ear. Reached for her purse and clutched it with both hands.

“I will phone ahead to Toronto. I’ll let them know you’re coming. They’ll arrange to get you on to Edmonton.”

“Only, they won’t ask for money?”

For God’s sake. They had been through this. “Your passage to Edmonton is booked and paid for,” said Joyce, in what she hoped was a firm but patient voice. “You will get a hot breakfast on board and dinner as well, after you leave Toronto.”

Talk of in-flight meals didn’t help. The girl went tight, and a crack in her bottom lip showed blood. Joyce guessed that she had made ample use of the sickness bag on the flight from Heathrow. It had been a bad night for turbulence, with every overseas arrival adding to the mountain of used bags in the trash bins behind the control tower. Late flights and missed connections had everyone scrambling to rebook. On cigarette breaks, the agents huddled in the restaurant or retreated to the baggage hold, cursing the arrogant Yanks and pushy Wops and the Frogs who carried on “like their shit don’t stink,” as Mose Whitehead put it.

Joyce escorted the English girl to the other end of the lounge, in view of the departure door. “You’ll go through here when the flight is called, in about forty minutes.” She held out the boarding pass. The girl looked at it but didn’t make a move. Both hands on her purse.

“You’ll need this,” said Joyce. “Don’t look for your bags in Toronto. They’re checked through to Edmonton.”

“I see,” said the girl, who didn’t see at all. Though she finally took the boarding pass. Held it tight until Joyce took the hand and guided it into her purse.

“Tuck it away until you need it. I’ll come back and we’ll get you on. Do you still have the toiletry kit?”

“Oh,” gasped the girl, bringing her fingers to her lips. “But I brushed my teeth. Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. Just keep it handy.” Complimentary toiletries were for First Class only. But Joyce was indiscriminate with them. “You’ll want to freshen up. You’re in for a long day.”

“Do they know if he’s there?”

“Well, he’s the one bought your ticket, so he knows your arrival…” Joyce stopped. Who was she to say whether the poor thing’s fiancé would be waiting in Edmonton as promised? The girl had shown his photo earlier this morning. A puffy-faced soldier with sparse brown hair and a wide smile. Older than her by a decade or more. Overdue to settle down and fatten up on roast beef dinners and lemon meringue pie.

“We’ll call Toronto,” said Joyce. “And Edmonton. Don’t worry.”

“I believe she’s expecting,” said Mary, when Joyce resumed her place behind the ticket counter. They could see the girl, both hands on her purse. Grimacing. Probably holding her pee.

“No,” said Joyce.

Mary narrowed her eyes. Her glasses were new, with a caramel-coloured frame and a diamond shape on each earpiece. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something in how she carries herself.”

A pregnancy didn’t jibe with the girl’s story as told to Joyce. It had been a wartime romance. But her father said she was too young to marry, and she had given up hope when her soldier went home to Canada. Then after several years of silence he initiated an exchange of letters, the most recent of which had proposed marriage. Her family opposed the union until he sent the fare. Heathrow to Edmonton was four hundred dollars or more. A serious commitment.

“I’d say you could rob every house on her shabby little street and not come away with four hundred dollars,” said Mary.

“Her man doesn’t look like much,” said Joyce. “Not from his picture.”

“She doesn’t look like much herself. But she won the jackpot. Putting an ocean between herself and Mummy. Every English girl’s dream.”

“Is it so bad over there?” Mary’s husband was English, and had taken her and the kids home to Coventry for a visit in the spring.

“The rationing is awful,” she said. “And Joe’s sister, she never had the sense to get out. She’s stuck now. Mother got her worn down to the bone. There’s another one.”

A hollow-eyed young woman limped past, one shoulder tilted with the weight of an overstuffed bag. Taller and thinner than the Peckford girl, but with the same glazed look.

“On the run from dear old Mum,” said Mary. “Couldn’t even afford a decent pair of stockings for the trip. You can bet there’s some young buck waiting wherever she’s going, ready to fill her up with babies.”

//////

Joyce had always known she would leave Cape St. Rose. She didn’t make a fantasy of it. She didn’t imagine herself at Parisian cafés or New York ballrooms, the way the other girls did when they flipped through their magazines. She just wanted to get out.

It was the death of her mother that set her in motion. Joyce had helped Mrs. Stoodley and her daughter wash the body and lay it out. Then she inherited the kitchen. Spent three solid days in there, while her father and Marty brushed off their Sunday clothes and faced the tide of mourners. Marty threw himself into it, gripping every hand and holding every hug, returning every blessing. He never stopped, not even for a drink. A drop of rum was good for Marty. Slowed him down and settled his nerves. Made him think a bit. But since his disappointment with the girl from Branch, he had given it up altogether.

Nothing changed after the funeral. Joyce replaced her mother everywhere except her father’s bed. She was eighteen years old, and not so foolish as to imagine a radically different life. But even an ugly husband would be a more welcome sight than Marty, stomping through the door at the end of his shift and calling for his dinner. Always complaining about the gravy. Can’t you do a gravy, girl? It’s right bitter. From her mother she had learned how to clean and cook in anger, slamming dinner plates down on the table. But she wanted to slam them on her own table. For that, she had to leave.

Gloria had sent a mass card and letter, apologizing for not making the funeral. She sent a postcard as well, a map of the world with Gander, Newfoundland, in the middle. There were lines curving from the middle like red ribbons, connecting Gander to Europe and America.

Joyce showed the postcard to Father Coles, who said a little town had some gall to place itself at the centre of all humanity, and to Mrs. Pine at the school, who said the map ought to tell the glory of the British Empire. After that she kept it to herself, under her mattress. It was illicit, like the dirty picture she had found when she was sweeping Marty’s room. A girl in nothing but her small clothes, bent over to point her bottom at the viewer, her head turned to show a shameless smile on her painted face.

Joyce’s father was still a young man, younger than Marty in many ways. He would be fine without her. Wasn’t Bridge Fallon already at his heels? Stopping him outside the church, just to mention she had been up to the hill that very morning. “…Oh, no trouble at all. Was up there anyway to see to Mom…. You got to watch the new graves especially. Gone right to dandelion if they get half the chance.”

When the arrangements were made in Gander, Gloria sent the train fare. Joyce said nothing until two days before. I never would have thought, her father said. Of course he wouldn’t. Marty was away, hunting bull birds down in the mouth of the Chute. But when he got wind of it he was back. He hauled her into his room and threw her on the bed, slapping at her with big meaty palms and scratchy calluses. Don’t you go near that train, he shouted. From her back, Joyce raised her legs. He grabbed them, but she kicked until she saw an opening and got him good in the stomach. Felt her heel sink into his belly, which was harder then it looked. He sprayed her with spit, and doubled over gasping. Joyce was shaking. Smelled what she thought was blood, though there was no blood. Ready to lay in another boot, if he made a move to come back at her. Instead he gathered himself and walked out.

//////

Joyce had to wait for a seat at the lunch bar, and her tomato soup took forever. The woman on the next stool introduced herself as Alice Henley from central laundry.

“Awful mess coming off the overnight flights,” she said. “The linens and uniforms.”

“You do the laundry for the airlines?”

“Everything. Airlines, hotels. That serviette in your lap, that’ll be through the wash by dinner.”

Alice had a creamy complexion and healthy figure, hefty arms straining the short sleeves of her starched white uniform. She joined and twisted her hands, quick eyes taking in the crowd around them.

“Funny smell off the Europeans, eh?” she whispered.

“Sometimes,” said Joyce. A rush of deplaning passengers arrived on a gust of fresh air, with undercurrents of bad breath, fuel exhaust and boiled vegetables. A passing whiff of vomit and toilets as the service crew got to work. The boys on the crew claimed to have a nose for every airline. The English and Irish smelled of old water. The French of their pungent, sweet cigarettes. Italians were spicy, Germans greasy, and so on. Joyce suspected it was all just talk, just men on their noisy smoke breaks. But one night a crowd of Greek soldiers came through, carrying a wonderful, toasty smell of sugared pastry on their billowing white costumes. Mary said she’d run away with any one of them, sight unseen.

“Awful smell off the stuff from the Russians,” said Alice. “You don’t want to even open the bag. Right cabbagey. And God only knows what they’re up to here, with everything the Rosenbergs told them.”

“Who told them?” asked Joyce.

“The Atom Bomb spies. Don’t you read the paper? Sent to the chair, and it took two extra shocks to kill Ethel. Smoke coming off her. That’s how nasty she was.”

Joyce didn’t read the paper. But there had been much talk of spies.

“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Alice. “Do you have children?”

“No.”

“But look at you. You’re bursting for babies. Once they start coming you’ll want to clear out of here. No place for youngsters, old air force base.”

But Gloria had already had her baby, and he seemed perfectly at home. Joyce had been to Chestnut Street just last night, and held him, all warm and powdery and washed clean. There was a deep scent from him that must have been the smell of fresh skin. New skin, bursting to life. Expanding like soap suds in a running bath.

“We’ll be off the airport long before I have any babies,” she said. The distant grind of heavy equipment was unrelenting lately. The sound of land being cleared for the new town site, a couple of miles east. “They’ll put up nice homes in the new town.”

“But the place will still be full of Russians and whoever. Negroes. Italians. My husband went through Italy with the Fusiliers. Took shrapnel at Monte Camino. He says the Italians know which side their bread’s buttered on, and no mistake.”

Joyce guessed Alice to be six or seven years older than her. But having a husband in the war widened the gap between them.

“He says around here it’s just as bad as the war. You know when those poor people got cut to ribbons? Just standing there at the end of the runway? Back in ’46.”

“Oh, yes,” said Joyce. She had heard the story on her first night shift, from Mike Devine. Half a dozen folks had been at the edge of Runway 14, watching the takeoffs and landings on a warm Sunday evening after church. The roar of the engines so loud they had no idea of the Lancaster bomber coming in behind them. Cut to ribbons, Mike had said, nearly drooling with excitement.

“Cut to ribbons,” said Alice. “It was Henley drove the ambulance.”

“Who?”

“Henley. Bernard. My husband. Picked them up and piled them aboard the ambulance. Piece by piece.”

“Oh!”

“My God, don’t be talking.”

Gander took pride in its extraordinary tales of death and destruction. Everyone made a show of respectful silence, as if the tragedies were too awful to speak of. Then the silence would break, and you would hear about the tangled wrecks dotting the town’s perimeter. Massive American bombers crushed like eggs. Lightweight single-engines impaled on spruce trees. The DC-4 slicing through half a mile of brush, bodies flung from the wreck with enough force to contort their features and tear off their boots. A Fortress bomber that disappeared into the lake, sunk so deep that no one would ever find it. The men who went up Dead Wolf River and hacked through two miles of deep woods to rescue the survivors of the Sabena crash, and which of them stayed behind to burn the bodies and how they couldn’t even talk about it after. The disasters were usually unexplained, and this element of mystery was recounted with special relish. It’s the strangest thing, they’d say. Clean mechanical record. Experienced crew. Fuel and weight conformed to specifications. The last radio transmission was normal. The next thing you know…. They would sit back, scratch the backs of their necks and shake their heads.

Alice laid her sandwich on its plate and rubbed her forehead. “No place for a child,” she said. “For a decent family.”

//////

Joyce got Flight 535 away and took a moment at her locker to unwrap a stick of gum and examine her fingernails. Resolved to stop biting them and stop picking at her cuticles.

Gert came through the swinging door and headed to the bathroom stalls. “Gord Delaney’s asking for you out front.”

“We’re doing the tribute night for Mr. Wells,” he said, when she appeared at the counter.

“Good morning to you, too.”

“It’s the seventeenth. Can you manage it?”

“Who’s Mr. Wells?”

“School principal. Drowned last fall, remember?” He tapped the calendar taped to the counter between them. “The seventeenth. Whole town’ll be out because the family’s moving back to Plate Cove and we’re putting up a few dollars to send them on their way.”

“I didn’t think my singing was up to snuff.”

He waved this away. So her singing was fine? Or it didn’t matter, so long as she was available? Joyce wanted to ask, but instead she agreed to do the show.

British Overseas offered the Caribou Club, and the ladies from the school put on a spread. The widow Mrs. Wells stood and smiled for every envelope of cash from the school, from the churches, from Captain Geist on behalf of the airlines, from Newhook’s Jewellery where she worked, and from Oceanic Area Control where Mr. Wells had worked several summers. Joyce, still uncertain about the songs, sat in a corner, reading the words over and over from the sheet music.

Finally the line of well-wishers ran out. The widow thanked everyone and said she was very sorry to be leaving town. She spoke as though she had failed some kind of test. They gave her a big round of applause as she handed the microphone to Gordon, who said it was time to get everyone on the dance floor. The band played a couple of instrumentals, and by the time Joyce stepped up for her first song—sheet music in hand, just in case—a nervous energy had taken over the room. Everyone relieved to be done with the widow and her tragedy. The band didn’t know how to respond, and the uncertainty held them back a little. That made it easier for Joyce, who remembered all the words and enjoyed herself, closing her eyes to sing. She didn’t mind anything, not even the awkward moment when Dr. Duchene asked the widow to dance, leading her onto the floor and clutching her waist to his for “That Ol’ Black Magic.”

//////

Jules travelled, and when Joyce saw him around the airport he was only in town for a night, or not even that, before setting out again. The morning after the show for the widow Wells, Joyce spotted him in his truck and flagged him down. “I’ll need a drink after work,” she said. “We were out till all hours with the band.” He offered her a ride.

“I’d like to play with them,” said Jules, his unruly hair whipped by the breeze through the open window. “But I’m never around, and I’m not sure they’re respectable, to be honest.”

Joyce laughed. “You sound like my father.”

He brightened, appearing to take it as a compliment. “Your father must have been in the war.”

“No,” said Joyce. “He had a general store. Do you really think the boys from the war are any more respectable than anyone else?”

“They did their duty.”

War veterans were easy to spot, and nothing like her father. They were comfortable in transit, slouching through the terminal, not bothering to stifle their yawns. Swore at small things, but shrugged off genuine irritants like mechanical problems and weather delays. They asked where they were, and laughed when she told them. Another far-flung outpost. “Keep your jacket buttoned,” Gert had warned. “They’ll look you up and down, bold as brass, and don’t give a hoot if you catch them at it.”

“How long since your father passed?” Jules asked as they pulled up at the terminal.

“Oh, he’s still very much with us.”

“I’m sorry,” said Jules. “I thought, the way you were talking…sorry.”

“I could tell you anything at all, and you’d never know if it were true.”

“Yes, you could.”

Joyce had a mercifully quiet shift and Jules met her at the Big Dipper shortly after four. Ordered a whiskey for her but nothing for himself.

“Your crowd over at AOA,” she said. “They’ve had a Stratocaster on the ground for two days now.”

“Propeller number four,” said Jules. “Feathering and stalling. They worked on it all day yesterday. It took off around lunchtime, I think.”

“It didn’t get out.”

“No?”

“It started and gave out again.”

Joyce had been delivering a mailbag to Flight 400 when the Stratocaster called across the tarmac, its engines firing one by one, like notes climbing a scale. She had heard the fourth note die.

“So you know all the business of this airport, do you?” He grinned at her.

“You get to know a few things.”

They lingered long enough that she thought he might offer her another round. He didn’t. But it was payday, so she and Rachel split half a bottle of whiskey from the Moakler fellow who kept a supply in his car.

//////

The band hardly stopped through the fall, into Christmas, and even after. They did the Rotary cookout at Deadman’s, where Joyce lost her shoes. The Port Blandford Lion’s Club, where only three couples danced. The RAF reunion, the Signals dance, the hospital dance. A curiously prim Catholic wedding at the Airport Club, and an Anglican wedding at the Skyways Club where everyone seemed sad. A mad circuit of Christmas dances. A farewell do for the Scandinavian Airlines station manager. Port Blandford again, with a few more dancers.

They juggled three drummers and occasionally did without guitar, because Martin Molloy didn’t want to be at it every weekend. Joyce couldn’t get out of work for a dance in Lewisporte or the Air Force party, so they went back to Gordon singing a few. The Lewisporte dance ended early due to a brawl, the barman with his head cracked open, and half a flat of Haig Ale gone missing, all blamed on a tanker crew that had docked for the night.

She knew the songs now, and knew the band. She still stepped on the piano a good deal. Gordon said it wasn’t her fault. “Eric ought to be in a proper jazz combo,” he said. “He learned his stuff down in the States, you know. Even made his way down to Kansas City for a bit. Saw Count Basie, in the flesh. You just ask him.” Joyce thought a man of such ability and experience ought to adapt to the situation. Perhaps he didn’t want to adapt.

But Joyce didn’t mind any of it, not the difficult piano or Gordon with his nagging. Not the drunken fools, or having to push away their hands. Not the ridiculous hours or the train. She liked to sing, and liked how the microphone stand felt like a shield, protecting her from whatever shenanigans went on in the crowd. None of it bothered her anymore.

Jules must have seen the change in her, because when they went for their usual drink on a miserable evening in February, he was much bolder.

“They did well with you.”

“Who did well?”

“The airline. Putting you behind the counter. A man’s been flying all day, and the plane touches down in the middle of nowhere. He’s tired and he needs a wash. Then he looks up and sees a girl like you. A sight for sore eyes. I bet you could take your pick of those boys. Any one of them would love to rescue a girl like you and bring her home.”

Joyce preferred seeing them in transit. Whenever she imagined a travelling man returning home, he was always diminished, falling into her father’s habits. Rising from an old mattress that held the shape of his frame. Calling for his porridge as he lingered over his morning bowel movement, and don’t forget to give it a drop of tinned milk. Leaving his shaving bowl on the counter, tiny bristles floating in grey scum. Scrubbing himself red with carbolic soap. Drenching his head before working in the pomade to set his hair smooth as a beach rock.

“Oh, but they wouldn’t have me. I’m not respectable, you know,” she said to Jules. “I’m out till all hours with a crowd of men in a band.”