High Road to China. Jon Cleary
adviser.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He was killed at Verdun. My two brothers also.’
She changed the subject. ‘I came here when I was a girl, with my mother and father. We did the Grand Tour.’
They were both silent for a while, lost in the contemplation of something that now had the fragile structure of a half-remembered dream. A bee buzzed above the picnic box and Eve lazily brushed it away. In the distance the end of the aerodrome shimmered in the heat like quivering green water. Eve lay back, somnolent, but wide awake enough not to lie too close to Kern. China, and her father, all at once were as remote as the lost empire of the Hapsburgs.
She heard Kern say, ‘I fell in love with the women of Vienna. They were beautiful, always flirting, in love with love. But I was too young for them then, only eighteen. I vowed to come back and enjoy them when I was old enough. But it’s too late now.’
‘Why?’ she asked dreamily.
‘Because romance blossoms best on a full stomach. One does not flirt when one is hungry – I learned that in Berlin last year. The women of Vienna, I’m sure, are thinner now than they used to be.’
Eve sat up, no longer dreamy. ‘I fear you are a ladies’ man, Baron. Don’t expect any opportunities on this flight of ours.’
Kern, still lying back on the grass, hands behind his head, smiled up at her. He is handsome, Eve thought; and chided herself for the admission. But it was a pity she had not met him in other circumstances, when she could have pitted her wits against him in the flirting game that seemed to be his favourite sport. Then was conscience stricken as she thought of her father. She stood up quickly, brushing the grass from her skirt. Pulling on her flying helmet, she walked across to O’Malley, who stood leaning against the wing of his plane, finishing his lunch.
‘The Baron offend you?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Just the way you got up and left him. I’ve had girls walk away from me the same way.’
God, she thought, are both of them going to give me trouble? ‘How do I pay for the gasoline?’
‘What did you bring?’
‘Pounds and dollars. It was all I could get at such short notice.’
‘They’ll take either. Our money is more welcome than we are. They’re a sour lot, these Austrians.’
‘That’s not what the Baron has been telling me.’
But she didn’t elaborate, just turned her back on him and went across to pay the two men who had brought down the drums of petrol in their ramshackle ex-army truck. Then she moved to her plane, pulling up short as Sun Nan suddenly rose up in front of her from beneath the wing. Preoccupied, thoughts building up in her mind like a honeycomb, she hadn’t noticed him seated in the shadow of the wing.
‘Miss Tozer, if either Mr O’Malley or the Baron makes trouble for you, let me know. I shall take care of you.’
‘Make trouble?’ Then she understood what he meant, marvelled that he should have been so observant. She laughed at the irony that he should be her protector, the defender of her honour. ‘I’m sure I have nothing to fear from them, Mr Sun. But thank you.’
‘We have to stick together. Your father is depending on us, not them.’
‘You don’t have to remind me, Mr Sun. But Mr O’Malley and the Baron may still be necessary to us.’
They took off five minutes later. They flew south-east this time, soon crossed into Hungary. The countries lay below them, one merged into another; treaties had broken up the Empire, but the boundaries were only on maps; at 5000 feet nothing appeared to have changed. Harvest-yellow, dotted with green lakes of forest, the lost empire was unmarked: not here the scars of trenches. Then they were over Lake Balaton, sparkling under the afternoon sun like a vast spill of Tokay wine; the sails of fishermen’s boats drifted like tiny moths caught in the web of sunshine. Then Eve, looking up from the bright glare of the lake, saw the clouds ahead.
They hung in the sky like great baskets of evil purple blooms, a hot-house of storm stretching away to the south-west. Lightning flickered, blue-silver against the purple, and she imagined she could hear the crash of thunder above the roar of the engine. She looked back over her shoulder at Sun Nan, saw the fear on his face below the opaque mask of his goggles, wondered what her own face showed. She hated storms, was afraid of thunder and lightning even in the shelter of the safe, weather-impregnable houses she had called home. In America she had never dared fly in the face of a storm, had always looked for a place to land even when she ran into squalls of rain.
Then up ahead she saw O’Malley wiggle his wings, point to his left and then bank away to the east. He was going to try and take them round the storm.
3
Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:
It was a bitch of a storm, the worst I had experienced up till then. I have never been a religious man, at least not down on the ground; and if one is going to be religious, that’s the place to be it, down among the selfish, the cheats, the murderers who are there to test your Christianity or whatever you profess to believe. No, the only time I’ve been religious is when I’ve been up in the air: marvelling at God’s genius and charity in creating the sky or cursing Him for the storms He could whip up out of nowhere, showing off His wrath. This was one of His most wrathful.
The turbulence hit us long before we were into the clouds. I had turned east, hoping to fly round the edge of the storm, but it was moving too fast for us. The edge of it caught us and in a matter of moments we were bucking the giant waves of air as they hit us. I had looked down just before the clouds enveloped us, but there was nowhere to head for as a landing site. We were over hills that rolled up into mountains; and the thought of the mountains frightened me. I had jerked my hand upwards, hoping Miss Tozer and Kern were watching me, then pulled back the stick and began to climb. If we were lucky we might get above the storm, but in any case we’d be above the top of the mountains. Mountain tops and aeroplanes still have an upsetting magnetism for each other and even today, at 30,000 feet, I can’t fly over a range of mountains without feeling them scraping my bottom.
I lost sight of the other two machines as soon as the cloud, a wild dark sea, rolled in on us. From a distance the clouds had looked purple; now they were black and green. The air had suddenly turned cold, made even colder by the rain that hit me like a barrage of knives. I continued climbing, fighting the stick that shook in my hands and threatened to break my arms at the wrists and elbows. The turbulence was like nothing I had ever known before; the yo-yo hadn’t been invented then, but I should have got the inspiration and patented it. The noise was more than noise: it was a physical assault inside my head. I reeled in my seat with it, punch-drunk, deaf but still able to hear. Lightning had been exploding behind the clouds, throwing them into bright relief, making them look solid and impenetrable. Suddenly it burst all around me, a great flash of blue-white light that blinded me, yet in the moment before blinding me painted everything in frightening detail: I saw things, the dials on the instrument panel, the worn rim of the cockpit, the tear in the back of my right-hand glove: I saw them, yet I was inside them. It was an effect I had once experienced as a child during an attack of petit-mal, the splitting of oneself in a split-second dream: you are inside and outside the objects you are witnessing at the same moment. I felt sure now that I was about to pass out, that I was seeing the final, meaningless revelation before dying.
The lightning went and I looked up. And saw the plane only half a dozen feet above me. I didn’t know whose it was, Miss Tozer’s or Kern’s: all I knew was that the pilot couldn’t see me. We flew almost locked together, the wheels of the plane above only a foot or two from my top wing. Lightning flared again; half-blinded I saw the plane above tremble and dip. I plunged the stick forward, hit turbulence, shuddered, then fell away from beneath the other threatening machine. There was no time to look up to see if it was following me.