A WEEK AFTER Christmas, Izzy had a flight into Yorkshire, and something to be moved on waiting there for her.
Diane and Julia were headed for the Cotswolds, Claire was on taxi duty and Dick Wills was off to Siberia. ‘Lovely flight. Excellent views.’
‘Up the coast,’ said Izzy.
‘No,’ said Dick. ‘I prefer to fly over land, even if it is mountainous.’
‘That’s too dangerous for me,’ said Izzy. She hated going to Kirkbride, nicknamed ‘Siberia’ because it was so far north, in Cumbria, cold, isolated and wild. But she could see it offered Dick a chance to smoke, loop, roll and skim low between mountains.
‘Darling Izzy,’ said Dick. ‘You must learn not to shy away from danger. Taking risks is addictive. You get into a spot of bother and your heart starts pumping, you can almost smell your blood. You sweat. You forget to breathe. Then it’s over, you land. All is well. And you ache to get up there again. Taking risks again. It’s a thrill, dicing with death.’
Izzy didn’t agree. She never took risks. She obeyed the rules – always on the ground twenty minutes before dusk, never flew in adverse weather, kept below any clouds, checked in at the mapping room and meticulously went through her pre- and post-flight routines. She didn’t think dicing with death at all thrilling.
She checked her route in the map room. Then she went to the met room to check on the weather with Nigel.
‘Lovely day,’ he said. ‘Clear and perfect. Little bit of a front coming in late afternoonish, about five. But you’ll all be safely down and headed home for tea by then.’
‘And what’s the flavour of the air today?’ asked Julia as they climbed into the van.
‘Green,’ said Izzy. ‘Not fresh spring green, but mouldy damp green. The air tastes of murk.’
She took off after the taxi Anson. This was her moment, it wasn’t just a physical whoosh speeding along the runway, into the air, ground slipping away beneath her, it was an emotional whoosh, too – a thrill almost euphoric. This was why she stayed home nights, never got drunk, didn’t date and this was why she always obeyed the rules. She didn’t want anything to take the edge of this buzz, and she didn’t want to get fired and lose it all.
She cruised out over the sea, a gasp of ozone, then she banked, a glimpse of water below, turned the plane inland, pulled the cockpit shut, climbed and settled on her course. There was a slight mist rising, but it was nothing. Nothing at all.
She saw the road she’d follow, a thin black ribbon winding below, after that she’d pick out the rail tracks, straight and gleaming. Sometimes, Izzy followed a road exactly, every loop and twist and turn just for the fun of it. Mostly she did it to prolong her time in the air, the joy she felt.
On days like this, when the weather was clear – no clouds – and engine and airframe sounded as they should, Izzy relaxed. She’d watch the world below – fields, treetops – keep an eye on her instruments, daydream a little and sing a little.
Today she sang ‘I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby’ as the plane waltzed from side to side A thousand feet high, and alone, this was the only place in the world she could let her voice roll. It was too flat, too tuneless to be set free anywhere else.
‘Izzy,’ Elspeth had once told her, ‘as your music teacher, I have to be honest. You are tone-deaf. You will never master the piano. And your singing voice is painful to the ears.’
For Izzy, this had been a relief. She had known this all along. She gave up trying to play the piano, ponderously ploughing through simple tunes she didn’t like and had allowed Elspeth to instruct her in other matters – art, music, love and, mostly, life. Life, according to Elspeth Moon, was a lot more joyful and juicy than life according to Hamish Macleod, whose views on the inevitable dire comeuppance of sinners Elspeth found alarming.
This arrangement suited them both. Izzy loved to listen to stories about a life more adventurous than the one she’d led so far. Elspeth loved to talk.
After the piano lessons stopped, they had spent most Saturday afternoons listening to Elspeth’s wind-up horn gramophone, which they carried out into the woods behind her cottage. They lay under the trees, looking up at sunlight sifting through branches above listening to Mahler, Mozart and Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral Symphony’, drinking Pimm’s. Elspeth had instructed Izzy on matters of love. ‘It is a wonderful thing. It will make your heart float and sing, and it will bring you the most glorious and fulfilling misery you will ever know.’ Izzy believed everything she was told. It had to be true. Elspeth was wise. She was four years older.
She had told Izzy about her time in Chelsea, posing nude for the artist who lived in the room along the corridor from hers. She spoke of the importance of expressing oneself through free love. ‘We must abandon ourselves to the physical,’ she’d said. Izzy had said, ‘Goodness.’ She wasn’t sure about that. Her father would definitely not approve.
Once, on a stroll by the river, Elspeth had found a small blue almost heart-shaped stone, which she had given to Izzy. ‘This will be lucky for you.’
‘Shouldn’t you keep it, if it’s lucky?’ said Izzy.
‘Oh no. It wouldn’t be lucky for me. Only for the one I give it to. Luck always comes as a gift. Also, you must pass it on. You must share your luck. You will know when the time comes to give your stone to someone new. You will recognise the moment.’
Izzy had that stone still. She kept it with her always. Had it now in the pocket of her flying suit, her lucky stone. She didn’t feel safe without it.
The sprawl of York was below her. She buzzed on, following the rail tracks, till she saw what she’d been looking for – a small wood beside a river and, beyond them, an airbase. She did two circuits, checking the runway was clear, and landed.
Her next plane was a battered old thing that had seen more of the war than she had. It was NEA. – Not Essentially Airworthy – and, walking round it, taking in its failings, Izzy thought it was not exactly airworthy, even, not at all airworthy. She didn’t know if she wanted to fly this plane. She gave it another tour. Checked her delivery chit, one Spitfire, NEA. to Cosford, where it was to be dismantled.
‘It’s fine for one flight,’ said the ground engineer. ‘It passed its daily inspection.’ He stuck his hands into his pockets and looked at her hopefully.
‘So is the fuel pipe OK?’ Izzy asked, considering the pool of petrol on the ground.
‘All fixed.’
Izzy suspected liberal use of sticky tape. She dithered. Cosford was just over an hour away, not far. Then again, taking a sip of the air, she still thought the flavour murky, a deeper damp than she’d tasted this morning. She didn’t like that at all.
But, if she didn’t fly this plane, someone else would. She’d be seen as chicken, afraid of a plane that wasn’t airworthy. Pah! She’d be a woman. For, wasn’t that what women were like – small, frail and not exactly risk-taking?
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’
They were standing at the end of the runway. One or two other engineers had stopped to watch. Izzy had the feeling there were bets on if she would take the plane or not. There had been a small ripple of triumph when she’d said OK.
There was a pale watery sun in the sky, and a breeze blowing. But then, airfields, being open to the elements, there was usually some kind of breeze blowing. They were dull places to look at, Izzy thought, long runways, a tower at one end and rows of nondescript buildings. They were only enlivened by what went on inside them – flight. When a plane flew in or took off, people did what she did. They looked up.
By the time she was ready to take off in the tired old Spitfire, there was quite a crowd ready to look up and wish her luck as they waved her goodbye. If that was what they were doing; she had a notion they were mocking her.
A thick black cloud belched out of the back of the plane when she started the engine. Not a good sign, but perhaps it had been standing idle for a while. She lumbered rather than whooshed down the runway. When it reached one hundred miles per hour, she heaved the plane into the air. There would be no daydreaming, singing or idle waltzing on this trip.
The world below looked dinky. Little cars on ribbon roads, fields were chunks of muddy January land divided by hedges, a train shoved along the rail tracks trailing billows of smoke. The plane’s engine chugged, the airframe sounded out of sorts, and Izzy wasn’t happy at all.
She followed the main southbound railway for a while, then headed across towards Birmingham. She knew there was a front coming in from the west, but she planned to be back on the ground before it arrived.
She checked her instrument panel. She looked at her watch. She’d been in the air for ten minutes. She sniffed, rubbed her nose on the back of her glove. It was cold up here. She traced her route on her map. The road she planned to follow should be below her. She peered down. But the road, railway line, fields and trees she expected to see were gone, enveloped in mist. It had been a matter of minutes, and she hadn’t seen it coming.
The mist engulfed her plane. She lost contact with the ground. She was eight hundred feet up, alone and so scared that she could hear the blood in her veins and feel fear prickle and spread inside her. She felt dread heavy in her chest and, for a few seconds, she forgot to breathe.