Most of the townspeople have been suspicious of the air base since that poor girl was murdered a couple of years back, in ’42. Penelope has been prepared to remind Thora that the murder did not actually happen on the base. Bernice Connors had been lured to a field near the Deadman’s Harbour Road by a man she had met at a dance in Blacks Harbour. There, when she resisted his overtures (that is what everyone supposed), he had battered her with a rock, raped her, and then — later, it appeared, after she was dead — cut her throat before burying her naked under a thin blanket of moss. That the murderer happened to be an RAF sergeant armourer was incidental. He only needed to be a man. He might have been any man. And it was all two years ago. Sergeant Hutchings had been found guilty and hanged behind the county jail in St. Andrews. The Connors family was devastated, but fish had gone on being canned under their family name just the same. Miss Shaughnessy and her sister, Mrs. Redmond, had started up the Mercury Club in St. Andrews to give the personnel at the base an alternative to the community hall dances (and the bootleggers) of Blacks Harbour. Thora was not at home when Penelope slipped out of the house, so she has not had to explain herself or defend her destination.
The Mercury Club was where Penelope met Captain Reade. Miss Shaughnessy (they call her the Honourable because apparently that is what she is, being the daughter of a baronet or something) arranges a roster of local young women to assist at the club. In Penelope’s case — probably because she has her mother’s Norwegian good looks and her father’s Loyalist name — assisting is more in the French sense of attending rather than the more mundane English sense that might include changing the bed linens and cleaning the toilets. Those jobs are for other girls, ones who might have performed similar duties at the Algonquin Hotel before it announced it was closing for the duration of the war. The Honourable has something quite different in mind for Penelope. What that is, is never spoken about directly. Penelope does not think it amounts to prostitution per se. More like prostitution without the sex. But with the promise of sex. The important thing is that the men from the air base who spend their forty-eight-hour leaves at the Mercury Club should be shown a good time and distracted from drinking too heavily. That means table tennis and dancing and quite a lot of flirting. Where the flirting leads, that is up to each individual young woman to determine — to the extent that it is under her control.
Captain Reade is very good-looking, Penelope thinks, like Gary Cooper only with a little RAF moustache and a beautiful English accent. He is not very good at table tennis, very good at dancing, and so-so in the flirting department, which is just about the ideal combination. She does not have to push herself very hard to be nice to him, which you do with a lot of the other fellows. She doesn’t mind pushing herself a bit, and does it readily when the Honourable is watching, but with Captain Reade it is just easy. Jonathan, he has said, call me Jonathan.
They have talked about everything, but especially books. He has made the predictable joke about his name — Reade by name, reader by nature — and they have compared notes on Dickens and Austen and Wodehouse and even Rider Haggard. He has read Ibsen, in the Archer translation, which would please Thora if Penelope ever decides to introduce them. Rather than make fun of her for her degree in English Literature, he claims to be jealous. He did Maths at Cambridge, but he really loves literature. Some men might say something like that to try to get into a girl’s knickers — and it might work — but in Jonathan’s case she is sure the interest is unfeigned and without an agenda.
On their second day together (Penelope had traded shifts and the Honourable, who usually discourages such shenanigans, turned a blind eye) she asked him what exactly he did at the base. She knew the broad outlines, of course. Everyone knew those. How the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan had been set up to train RAF and RCAF pilots and crews for deployment overseas. How Dexter Construction had carved the field and built the base in record time, unequalled since the building of the old sardine plant in Chamcook before the first war. How the RAF training unit at Pennfield (Number Thirty-Four) had been transferred there from Greenock in Scotland. What she wanted was something not in general knowledge, something just her own, perhaps with a whiff of enemy fire and death, a little secret, a little dangerous. He had said it might be better to show her than tell her. Although it wasn’t really allowed for civilians to visit the base, he thought he could arrange a limited tour. She said he must be quite important, which she suspected was what he wanted to hear, and she didn’t jump back when the back of his left hand brushed a little too slowly across her right breast when they kissed goodbye.
So here she is, standing in front of what is easily the most ungainly looking aircraft imaginable. Its short, squat body features curved undersides that sweep up to its twin tails. Penelope thinks of Mrs. Sutherland, who taught her English in the tenth grade: the swoop of her belly, her sticklike legs, and her impossibly high bottom. Like an awkward bird.
“This is a Ventura. It’s modelled on a civilian aircraft, the Lockheed Lodestar Model 18. You might have flown in one of those.”
Penelope does not want to admit to never having been in any airplane, Lockheed or no, so she asks a question: “How fast does it go?” Men can be distracted by such things.
“We can get her up to 312 miles per hour. She has a range of about 950 miles.”
“Goodness.” She has no idea whether either of those numbers is actually impressive.
“She has a Pratt & Whitney engine. Eighteen-fifty horsepower. Eighteen cylinder.”
“Heavens.” She can tell that those are large numbers, certainly compared to a horse or a motorbike. What she really wants to ask him about are the guns, the bombs.
“Maybe you’d like to go up one day?”
Penelope is shocked by the proposal. Surely the military can’t be giving joyrides to civilians — even pretty ones, she adds to herself. Then she thinks of how the trainees love to buzz the town, driving some of the older residents to distraction. She supposes that practice is not strictly by the book either. “Maybe.” She gives her response the exact inflection that the Honourable has trained them to use at the Mercury Club. Jonathan blushes.
A young man in coveralls interrupts whatever this is by suddenly tumbling out of the plane. He springs to attention, cracking a tiny smile at Penelope in the split second before he salutes Captain Reade.
“At ease. This is Nielsen. He is training with us from the Royal Norwegian Naval Air Services. Nielsen, this is Miss Arnold, from St. Andrews.” Despite the tea-party tone with which Jonathan has made the introduction, neither Nielsen nor Penelope knows the etiquette for what to do next. She extends her right hand and he goes to take it, then pulls back, holding aloft a blackened palm. They laugh. He has beautiful teeth. He runs his left hand — which she hopes is cleaner than his right — through his blond hair and says he is pleased to meet her. His English is near perfect though heavily accented. She wonders about saying one of the five or six things her mother has taught her to say in Norwegian but realizes more than half of them would be inappropriate. She shouldn’t curse in front of a stranger.
“You must miss home,” she starts, then realizes that Norway is occupied, so this may be a stupid thing to say.
“Some things here remind me of it. The coastline mainly. Some of the people too.”
Penelope looks at Jonathan to see how he will react to this obvious allusion to her appearance, but he seems oblivious. “My mother came from Bergen.”
“Nearly time for mess, Nielsen. Better get cleaned up.”
The man snaps to attention again, turns, and is gone. Captain Reade continues the tour of the aircraft, pointing out that she can carry a 2,500-pound bomb load, and showing Penelope where the eight .303 machine guns are located. She no longer cares about the weaponry. She is thinking about the smile of the Norwegian airman named Nielsen.