“I felt like I was flying inside a tin can. The vertigo made me so ill I thought I was dying.” Frank sat opposite Peter, their tea and biscuits on the table between them. “Mad youth,” he continued. “Barely sixteen and wondering what all this flying business was about, so I crouched onto the floor of the back cockpit, then I popped up midflight. The pilot was a family friend. He thought I wanted to steal the airplane, but later forgave me. It’s a wonder I ever flew after that.”
He was talking too much. The sitting room dim, the air like the inside of a cupboard. Could he open a window? he wondered. Would that be rude? Instead, he kept talking, asking Peter questions: was he in any pain, would he be able to walk with his sprained ankle, could he get him anything.
“You must come to lunch. A celebration. A successful airplane crash.” Frank not knowing how to pull back, how to just be.
“Is there such a thing?” Peter asked, shifting his leg from the ottoman, Frank jumping up to adjust the cushion. “A successful crash?”
“You’re alive. And these days we must celebrate any small thing.”
Peter looked at him as if assessing whether this might be a joke.
“Yes, I suppose we are more alive after having been up there.” He looked skyward then reached for his tea, pushing Frank’s cup toward him.
“Were you frightened?” Frank moved forward in his seat. “I should say I would be.”
“I was focussed on not being frightened. That’s what it is to fly, wouldn’t you say?”
“Such control you have.”
“You have not been tested in that way. You would have done the same, I’m sure.”
“No, I suppose I haven’t been tested.”
To be tested. That is what Frank was still thinking about when he left Peter’s room half an hour later. Because this is what he felt, tested, but not in the way Peter meant. They had talked not of the news of the day, not of family gossip, but of the beauty of flight, the privilege of seeing Earth at a distance, a separation that forced one to consider who they were in the world. The beauty, and the thrill, and the satisfaction, that’s what they’d talked about, and how difficult it was to be on the ground. As if gravity held a greater force for those who flew, as if it were pulling all the component parts in their body into soil, claiming it for some unknown purpose.
“That woman. Miriam,” Peter had said before Frank left. “You must take her flying.”
“I meant to take you in my airplane when it’s complete.”
“I know. As does she. That’s why you need to take her.”
Frank felt the heat in his face.
“Take my airplane. She needs to be rewarded. Then when you finish your Gipsy Moth, I’ll go flying with you.”
An hour later he pulled open the hangar door at Hackley Aerodrome and went to Peter’s airplane. He began inspecting it, pushing it out from the hangar, its retractable wings tucked back against its body like a mechanical beetle, its tail appearing to drag along the grass. He went over every inch of it, feeling Peter’s touch, the meticulous care. He made note of the sheathing on the wings, the plywood-covered fuselage, the resilient fabric that covered the surface. He checked the instruments and noted the placement of the compass, filled his notebook with diagrams and notes. He had rescued his airplane from conditions of neglect, so Peter’s seemed excessively brilliant in its construction and care. Frank’s airplane had come through a family friend who had known of someone who had had aspirations to fly. A single attempt barely saw the machine off the ground before it nosedived, enough to keep the man grounded. The entire folly of flying was abandoned, and so, too, the airplane. Five years it sat in the back of the shed. Weeds looking for a place to wander wove their way into seams and crevices, hip-high grasses sought to conceal the airplane until one day, after hearing of its deterioration, Frank offered to take it off his hands.
What had Frank learned of Peter since the crash? He was a Canadian, living nearby with his uncle, who’d invited him to stay and teach him to fly. He had a reputation as a good flyer, a stickler for checking his equipment before each flight, kept detailed log notes, and had flown through some challenging weather. To have crashed on a fine day due to a petrol leak might have been an embarrassment, although Frank had seen no evidence of it.