It was a week after she’d rescued the dead moths that Miriam dreamt of babies.
It was an intensive week of flying, false landings, stalled engines, the airplane flipped over entirely, all part of the basics Frank insisted on. You’re a good pilot, he told her, you need to get better, you need to be better than all of us for this race. She was going up two, sometimes three times a day, Frank urging her on to the brink of disaster, insisting it was part of her safety training. Through this her mind itself like a Spitfire, revving, agile, as if she, too, were breaking away from herself. The flying had now become a test, not only one set by Frank.
The first baby she had named Catherine, though she was only four months along in her pregnancy when she miscarried.
There were those who thought it was a step down when she married Edmund because her father was an educated man, but on this she would never agree. Not a word uttered. Instead, rumours of what might have been were brushed aside like spider silk before they’d had a chance to gain purchase. Her father liked to tell her that Albert was the better man, more ambitious, more outward. This, her father’s version of truth.
She heard he owned two shops selling cars now.
But Miriam knew there were different ways of measuring a man. The drink lessened some, a temper, others. Arrogance, ignorance, a roving eye, all things to watch out for, but Miriam saw none of this in Albert. At first it was a too quick and uneasy laugh that set her thinking. Too eager to please, a promise swiftly whispered. It could have been the easy life. But on a jasmine-scented day when she went to meet him, she heard voices as she neared the garage, low and conspiratorial from inside the building. Albert and a man whose voice she didn’t recognize, then Albert’s laughter, a brash cackle she’d learned to ignore. Then, Watch it, the other man’s voice a sharp rebuke, while in the background the sound of liquid pouring. Silence followed, marking a task undertaken with concentration before the conversation resumed, Albert telling the man he was engaged to be married. A pretty face, he said, but her mother is a right cow and the father a stupid bastard. The words shot through her, pinned her to the side of the building as she listened to him talk of others, imbeciles all, who came to his garage for service, too backward to realize he siphoned petrol from them while fixing their car. A wee bit off each one, he boasted, against the squeal from the lid as he tightened it on a barrel that held his booty.
Miriam walked away that day and kept walking until she fell into Edmund’s arms some two years later. She walked across fields, down country lanes, through villages, traipsing to shed herself of the man she now knew was evil—not evil in a criminal manner but in his outlook, in the world he created where everyone was a mark, someone deserving of being taken. Until she found Edmund, who was not outward or ambitious, and whom her father politely tolerated.
She walked away all those years ago and thought she’d escaped, but now Albert was appearing in her dreams, a ghost that presented children as though part of a deal they could strike. These were children she might have had with him, she knew, their faces grotesque versions of him, aged, their skin hoary.
By the third night she had to escape her dreams, so she crawled out of bed, pulled her cardigan from the hook, and went downstairs, out the door, and through the maze of gardens until she reached the public right-of-way to the field. She had no thought of where she was going. The moon ablaze, throwing long shadows on the back of fence posts, illuminating the night so she glimpsed two rabbits dart across the field, saw fists of fog crouching in hollows, silhouettes everywhere.
She sat on a fallen tree, pulled out the pack of cigarettes left behind by one of the pilots at Hackley that she’d pocketed after the last wild ride. She sat watching the glory of the moon, thinking of Edmund sound asleep, unaware of her torment. How could she talk to him of these grotesque babies?
It was different falling in love with Edmund. Where Albert had taken her to dances, long drives to the next village for dinner, Edmund would pack a flask of tea along with sandwiches and suggest a hike across the downs, mushroom gathering, or a picnic, and because she was young and didn’t yet know who she was, she was unsure which was the true form of courtship, which one she could trust.
She’d met Edmund in a field not unlike where she now sat. He came up to her, scarf in hand, asking if it was hers. She’d not noticed it gone. The heat of the day had prompted her to undo the scarf, and the wind had gathered it up and sent it sailing into his hands as he made his way to visit a friend. She’d been sketching the landscape, oblivious to everything but the view. He stood over her, holding the scarf as if he were selling it, so that her first thought was that he’d stolen it. Seeing her startled look, he apologized and crouched beside her to see what she was drawing. The swift movement, from his holding the scarf while looming over her to making himself so small that she was looking down at him, brought a sudden intimacy to their meeting.
“You have a talent,” he told her. “You don’t take care of your belongings,” he continued, holding up the scarf, “but you’re a dab hand at drawing.”
That she had been so intensely assessed, insulted, and complimented in the same sentence, confused her. No one had ever observed her with such singularity, and she was not sure what to do with it. But that was so long ago, his own distractions now clouding his perspective. She inhaled the cigarette deeply and watched the smoke wither before her.
How had she not seen what was happening to her? How had she not seen why these nights were haunting her? Earlier it was the magnolia tree that got to her. She’d been tired and unsettled by a day of flying, Frank pushing her harder, banking, spinning, loops, and rough landings. Then a manoeuvre that left her disoriented, rattled, and everything about her day unravelling. Mistakes made, confidence slipped, then finally the blessed words, return to base.
On the walk home her bones had ached, and the sun streamed through the magnolias, their limbs drawing spidery prints across the path that somehow made her weep. Tears welling for the pain, the frustration of the day, so that the sparkle of the evening, the complete and utter magic of the image was her undoing. Chastising herself, her mood suddenly wary. The tyranny of that magnolia tree. After all this time it could still undermine her.
It had been six years since that spring. Late daffodils and even later blossoms on the trees, and Miriam pregnant. She’d known life to be hopeful then, had not learned it did not run on a straight trajectory. The change in course was abrupt and brutal. The magnolias at the end of the street ablaze with blossoms, only for the glorious spring to collapse under a cold wind that ripped branches off trees, threw slate tiles from rooftops, and her body reacting to the weather, giving up a baby that was still only a mass of cells not four months along. The magnolia, too, suffered, its pink blossoms frayed and curled, turned brown overnight. This she saw as an omen.
Miriam drew figure eights with her cigarette and dropped her head into her hand, releasing tears that spotted her dress. She pulled her body in, knee to chin, arms wrapped around her legs, and replayed the scene that triggered this string of useless memories. A landing, a forced false landing, lower, lower, power reduced, then one wheel making contact and Frank shouting at her to power up. She, knowing she wasn’t to touch ground, panicked and pulled the throttle too quickly so the thrust was intense. She knew that it could stall at any time, yet they were flying higher, breaking through the low scattered clouds, her heart suddenly like a locomotive out of control, her hands quivering, her only thought to get to the ground. But they went higher and higher until once again they were in the clouds, her hands shaking so that she could hardly grip the controls. Her hands ached with the force of holding on as they made one last circle around. The landing was uneventful, Frank congratulating her on her skills which told her his experience of the flight was altogether different from hers.
Her frailties, that was what had occupied her since she’d left the airfield. Her weakened body, too damaged to produce even a single baby. Her shattered nerves that had left her panicked as she flew above her home. Her inability to slough any of this off.