There was a dull ache in her breast, a tingling in her nipples. The occasional cramping she’d felt in her abdomen these past weeks was more a nuisance than a hindrance, which is why she’d agreed to make the trip with Frank. He had seen so much in her, saw her future in flying spread out before her in a way that she had not put thought to. It was hard to say no to him, but still she knew her body was sending coded messages, ones she was trying to interpret. Was this her body’s way of finally relinquishing her last baby?
Frank wanted to fly to London to see the balloons. They needed the practice and could go via Croydon to familiarize themselves with various routes.
It was the best thing for her, she knew, to be up there at four thousand feet. It gave perspective. It took her away from a body that seemed unwilling to give up the signs of pregnancy. Almost two months now, she calculated, and there were days when she imagined she was conjuring symptoms, a way of not letting go, a constant and gentle reminder of failure. She was tired, too, and that made her question everything: Edmund’s brisk cheeriness, Frank’s unwavering support, her own ability to navigate to Croydon. She’d worked on the map for the past week. How had she come to see the Earth like this? How had she felt this need to place herself in the landscape? She’d taken the map of Hampshire, four miles to an inch, then plotted the landscape details and redrew the entire thing, highlighting their route with rail lines, identifying towns and villages as she’d seen them from the air, a church steeple, a windmill, the curve of the high street, the green roof of a country manor. She used a colour-coded system to memorize the routes: churches—red; rail lines—black; rivers—blue. She’d questioned pilots on what they’d seen and pieced it together, and now at four thousand feet, she was mentally ticking off each landmark.
The barrage balloons had her worried though. It seemed a ludicrous effort, as if they were still playing at war despite the peace agreement. The city had decided to do a demonstration of them, a run-through to make sure they worked, to make sure the barrage operators knew how to raise and lower them effectively. Her friend Mildred had told her about them.
“Have you seen pictures of them?” Miriam asked Frank before they took off. “Elephants, they call them. Three times the size of a cricket pitch. Four hundred and fifty of them over London.”
“A flimsy bit of nylon to stop those German bombers. Is there a kind of genius in that?”
“What do you mean?”
“A simple solution. Fill the balloon with hydrogen, suspend them with heavy cables, and no German pilot wants to get near enough to drop his bombs. We’ll win the bloody war with puppets!”
“But there is no war, and it seems a waste. Everything seems a waste these days. Why are we still pretending? And these balloons will be a threat to our pilots, too. I heard them talking at the airfield. That means they’re increasing risk, not lessening it.”
“Well, I hope we get close enough to see them. A remarkably simple bit of engineering.”
In that moment she saw him as he might have been as a boy, the wonder of discovering engineering feats, the awe that would come at a moment when he saw an invention that would all but overwhelm him.
“What happened to your leg,” she’d asked him not long after they’d met. She’d known about the Wentworth family. Rumours adrift, in and out of the village like morning fog. She’d probably seen him once or twice; she knew he was a cripple, probably even knew he’d been born with the affliction, yet she asked, because she wanted to hear the story from him.
“What happened to your leg?”
Part of her wanted to hurt him that day in the hangar, to embarrass him. The luncheon had left her feeling scorched, their kindness like a weapon readily released. She was no longer a hero; she was a visitor. Each role had its own mantle. That’s why she’d grabbed at the offer of flight. Snatched it from Peter’s hand. Knowing she would never get the chance again and wanting somehow to even out their places in the world.
She’d felt a cramp in her abdomen just then, as if her body were convening with his in some way.
His story told her that he’d suffered, the braces, the horrid wrench; she had forgiven him everything then—his class, his money, his misdirected invitation. Suffering, the unexpected equalizer.
They couldn’t fly directly over London, Miriam told him before they left. They would need to see the balloons at a distance.
His disappointment worn like his own deflated balloon, so that she understood this meant more to him than just a spectacle. We’ll get close enough, she told him.
And they did, following the perimeter of London.
“They’re better viewed at a distance,” she shouted into the mouthpiece. She knew about perspective, angles, scale. At that height, not a thousand feet above the balloons, the angle narrowed the distance between them so they appeared almost touching. It was true they were a sight, the bloated oval shapes in shimmering steel grey nylon held in place by cables that anchored each to the ground.
“Magnificent,” he mouthed when she banked the airplane.
Later they would talk about this sight, which at once displayed engineering boldness, and yet they were ominous, as though an alien presence, unidentifiable, almost monstrous.
“Time to head back,” she said into the mouthpiece.
Thirty minutes into the return, the weather turned. She readjusted in the seat to ease the strain in her back and kept her eye on a horizon that was getting lower with each mile. Rain forecast, they’d been told at Hackley, but they’d be home in time.
There were dark streaks of rain ahead, as if lead were melting from the sky, and she felt the pressure change in her head. She took one hand off the controls and held her arm against her breasts as if they needed protection, but it was her entire body she wanted to protect, not from the weather, or even any kind of war that might erupt, but from itself, an existence that had her enslaved to its hormonal shifts, the constant monitoring and nurturing that had left her weak in spirit. She should not feel this way, up here in the clouds, her place of refuge. She shifted her attention to the airplane—throttle, flaps, airspeed—touching the instruments as she did when doing a pre-flight routine, muttering the fundamentals of flight, re-engaging with the machine that would deliver them home.
“Weather ahead,” Frank’s voice bellowed.
Miriam saw that the ceiling had lowered even more, rain falling in sheets now less than two miles away. Her mind on her map and the landscape on either side of the path she’d chosen. She needed to drop into the valley ahead, keeping to one side in order to give herself room to manoeuvre should she need to escape.
“Diverting west,” she shouted, as she banked the plane. She gripped the controls as the plane swooped, suddenly feeling birdlike, a hawk patrolling its territory. Do birds see boundaries in the air? she wondered. How do they know when to leave one place for another?
Miriam had no appetite for competition, no juice in her blood that would help make the King’s Cup Race a success. Flying was a personal quest. Each flight a discovery of landscape, the reading of the wind, the rush of propulsion, the exhilaration of a landmark detected. She focussed on the technical aspects when she was flying but remained dreamlike on the impression it had on her. The visual sensation summoned a new language. The verdant pastures, the cobalt rivers, the demarcations that put sheep in one field, cattle in another. Stone and brick brought structure to the landscape, a signifier. Industry, innovation, patience. This is what she saw when she was flying. Not the finish line.
But they’d agreed. A race from London to Manchester. And the trial run, under the pretense of seeing the elephant balloons, was really an opportunity to test their mettle. The bad weather was perfect. Ready-made to challenge their strength, her fortitude, her knowledge of how to dodge a storm cloud.
This an unspoken arrangement for Frank, who was unable to express his desire to win when he’d asked her to co-pilot the race. But he’d showed her in so many ways how much it meant to him. In his casual but direct comments that resided in a question—your landings are improving, you might want to ease up on the aileron when banking, have you noticed how the elevator sticks a bit when taking off?—an opportunity to seek an opening as they made their plans. He could hardly contain himself, she saw, the will to win so strong he kept himself harnessed from the strain of it.
She checked her map, not wanting to rely entirely on her instincts that told her there was a dip in the landscape ahead, not quite a valley but a rising to the west that they could snug into, a hope for some protection from the rain and the wind.
“I’m taking it to twenty-five hundred feet,” she said, pushing in the throttle.
Frank was calculating their time, she knew, comparing it to that of the trip he’d made with Peter—the rain would skew things, of course, but they’d have to adjust if it rained on race day.
She pushed hard, her concentration so intense she forgot about her body, the race, the barrage balloons that would save them from Hitler’s planes, and focussed on the airplane and the rain that was thrashing around them. The ceiling so low she felt she could reach out and touch treetops. The wind buffeted them, the turbulence staying with them for a few miles, then they were in the valley, outwitting the elements.
She scanned the sky and saw a break ahead, saw her chance to get them back by going farther west, over the downs and to the north of Ashleigh. Another gust lifted her from her seat, but she was gripping the instruments so hard she barely felt it. The rain was letting up, her face washed in the constant stream, cooled in the wind that came in from the west. She would be there soon, she knew, this test a decent one. She had got them through the worst of it, had held her own map in her head as she’d guided the plane to where it needed to be. The race seemed possible now, even a challenge she might enjoy.