Spitfire Girls Page 6

  ‘You will be my guest, a kind of untouchable. Thank you for letting me see how they live in this country.’

  ‘Don’t take us as examples. We’re Shabbas goyim.’ She opened the front door as an ice-cream man rattled by in his van, its bell jingling in rhythm with the trolley cobbles underneath.

  ‘Like the German ones,’ said Raine with a smile.

  They stared at each other as the street outside fell silent. ‘Tomorrow, as dawn breaks.’ Raine left them.

  At once Errol protested:

  ‘You must be nuts, flying some Nazi bitch to Germany.’

  ‘Burt Malone will think it’s great. Imagine having to ferry somebody back home just for a piece of film. Tell my parents – tell everybody, will you? I might cross the Channel and join the RAF.’

  ‘They don’t take gals.’

  ‘Yes, they do. I’ve heard Valerie Cobb is recruiting right now.’

  ‘There will be a war and I will lose thee to fortune and men’s eyes. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Yes, you can, Errol. You have to – because we’re not supposed to think certain thoughts about each other. Maybe our grandchildren will be allowed to think thoughts about each other, but we can’t.’

  There were no more ice-cream vans and the room went dark as Errol reached out and the one lamp left burning was extinguished.

  Night had never brought excitement to her skin, and Edith knew it was necessary to have the forbidden experience before she undertook her first transatlantic flight. Her father had at one time been an elder in the synagogue and she had experienced the humiliation of orthodoxy, sitting in the upstairs section reserved for the women. Later he stopped serving, and her family stopped praying, and in their home the women prayed with the men. Seder had come and gone each year, and she had remembered the symbolic foods, not so much for the ritual but to provide answers for Christian questions. Girls from her street would be banished for dating gentiles, but now she had acquired a questioning Christian who had a fierce intelligence and was also coloured brown.

  Darkness had descended on her house, and that was the way she wanted it to be, as they walked up the old wooden stairs together. One light from the Acme Market pierced the blackness and made red, white and blue streaks on the menorah atop the bookcase, as if its glow sought out the holy object for some future thief. Now Edith worried that her black poet might become the animal against whom women of all white faiths had been warned.

  Why did Negroes worship Christ?

  At the top of the stairs Errol put his hands on her buttocks and drew her to him, lifting her off the floor. She was transfixed as his hardness throbbed through the clothes that covered them in respectability and which now seemed capable of burning into hot vapour, leaving them on the brink of nakedness.

  Now they were on her bed and they were naked, and in a split second she thought of her sister who had shared her bed all those years and then died. It was possible to die now. Errol took her breasts between his hands and squeezed them, his tongue devouring her cleavage as she grasped his head and let her hand slip down his back. He arose and she looked, and as his mouth met her navel she fought to rid her mind’s eye of the grim shammas glaring up at her in the women’s section of the synagogue. She would have to push the image away because her magnificent lover had begun to kiss her tongue of frenzy which had never before been unclothed. Now she could not control guilt or her heaving thighs or the pleading penis trying to make its way inside her so relentlessly that it seemed to cry out through Errol’s head, now raised above her.

  Dogs barked in the night.

  Errol shivered.

  In the Deep South he would be dragged out into the dirt road and beaten until he bled for doing what he had just done, and if her neighbours knew why she had moaned all through this night she would be one of the living dead. Tomorrow she could leave and take her secret with her, and pray never to have to sit in the women’s section again.

  Philadelphia was seeing the birth of an oil refinery and on its perimeter was an airfield and its first terminal building with lettering on its side:

  WELCOME TO PHILADELPHIA

  THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE

  Edith had been ashamed and had wanted to burn the sheets in the morning. Not having slept, she had wild imaginings of her parents returning and calling in police, their canine corps instantly detecting a black man’s scent. She folded one sheet and pushed it to the bottom of her duffel bag. He had gone, and had left her a handsome bit of writing:

  O lest the world should task you to recite

  What merit liv’d in me, that you should love,

  After my death, dear love, forget me quite,

  For you in me can nothing worthy prove.

  Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,

  To do more for me than mine own desert,

  And hang more praise upon deceasèd I

  Than niggard truth would willingly impart:

  O, lest your true love may seem false in this,

  That you for love speak well of me untrue,

  My name be buried where my body is,

  And live no more to shame nor me nor you.

  For I am sham’d by that which I bring forth,

  And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

  ‘Niggard truth, niggard truth,’ she muttered, and placed the paper in her pocket. She was dressed now, and would walk in her clumsy shoes to the airfield, wishing her religion had provided accommodation for confession.

  When she had reached the small brick building that served as air terminal, Edith made her way to the cable room, where she had become a well known and respected visitor. Her Life magazine cover had given her access to places Burt Malone envied, including free training by the US Signal Corps at the Customs House. Now she despatched two overseas telegrams, one to Valerie Cobb and one to Press-Shots UK, Malone’s British affiliate. She knew that by the time America had breakfasted her news would be travelling, and she expected a well organized reception in London. Walking from the telegraph room to the tarmac, she could see her neatly dressed passengers.

  Waiting for her, Raine looked ill at ease. Scrutinizing Edith, she commented:

  ‘Something has happened to you during the night.’

  ‘Raine, are you a witch?’

  ‘You are different – make sure it doesn’t affect our mission.’

  They entered the aircraft and the man on duty wondered if these two would ever make it as far as the coast, let alone the main ocean crossing.

  Inside the cabin, Edith was astonished to discover stowaways: two German males looked at her with disdain as they fiddled with wires.

  ‘You will get to know Hartmut and Zuki as we cross the ocean,’ Raine said calmly.

  ‘Where the hell are the fuel tanks, then?’

  ‘This is not a primitive American aeroplane – the tanks are elongated and are directly underneath our two men.’

  ‘If they’re elongated how can they deal with altitude and pressure?’

  ‘Our designers have thought of everything,’ she replied. Her two men were strangely silent. Edith suspected they understood English but had remained reticent for a reason.

  ‘I had better not ask too many questions or you will think I am a Yank spy.’

  ‘Our countries are not at war, Edith.’

  ‘Hopefully our Philly ground engineers have copied the layout of this baby, war or no war.’

  ‘Hopefully we will be allies – if there is one.’

  ‘If there is what, Raine?’

  ‘A war.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you meant we might be allies if there were a three-ring circus.’ The sarcasm in Edith’s voice was palpable.

  ‘Valerie Cobb lives in a circus,’ Raine observed, as Edith familiarized herself with the streamlined controls that resembled a Jules Verne prophecy. Its twin engines purred into life at a touch of the American’s hand.

  As the little plane, laden with ingeniously injected fuel, made a surprising roar and v
eered out over a giant new oil drum, an ice-cream man prepared his van and thought he could see a gloved hand waving and a lipsticked mouth smiling from the cockpit soaring out towards Heimat.

  10

  For years Sir Henry Cobb had had to stave off rude remarks about his daughter’s desire to cohabit with another girl. Until 1934 his life had been satisfactory because his wedded union had been perfect – during his wife’s life he had often wondered if all men his age, let alone MPs his age, found sex the most exalting of human experiences. Now Julia was dead, and he had become irritable. Other men in the House sought satisfaction in peculiar ways amidst the fog and rain of London’s back streets while his needs had disappeared with her ashes. In recent years he had become obsessed with the affairs of the most adventurous of his daughters, principally her business ventures.

  From the time she was a small girl Valerie’s interests had been far from the norm: her arms became strong in the pursuit of archery, and constant battles with her mother were the result. A sister, Annabel, had remained in the background, thinking her sibling mad and dangerous. When Valerie reached her first teenage year she had wanted to be blooded like the boys and it was no help when other Sirs began to find her figure enticing when she rode to hounds. As Lady Cobb became iller and frailer, so did her husband’s cronies increase their imaginings of comfort with his attractive child.

  At fourteen Valerie was excelling at lawn tennis and on one afternoon when she had beaten all the village she decided she would go to the most beautiful room in the house and stretch out on the ancient bed. She wondered, some years later, how many previous generations of village fathers had entered that room and ravished other people’s girl and boy children on that same bed after the boys had been secretly playing with dolls and the girls had been secretly beating men at their own games.

  After Sir Henry’s chums had had their way with his daughter she shunned anything to do with tennis and the people in the village lamented the loss of a potential Helen Wills. Valerie decided she would take up a sport in which she would not be wearing enticing gear – a sport which took place out of the reach of her village and her father’s hunt warriors … She had told her mother about her weird post-match encounters and shortly afterwards the wasted woman died. Valerie tried to recall some things she knew about her mother, but she could not. Having already seen a great deal of life at the age of seventeen she could recall far more about herself. Indeed, she regarded her mother’s childbearing an irrelevant achievement if it meant having had to submit to the strange man on the ancient bed who at other times was Sir Henry Cobb M P.

  Her father.

  Time passed.

  On this day in 1937 Cobb was reading a confidential government report on the Hindenburg Disaster and on the build-up of arms and aircraft in Hitler’s territories. Valerie was due to arrive at any moment. Tightness in his chest was the symptom he suffered whenever he had to face his unruly daughter. Others saw her as charming and even stunning, but he could see her only as an imagined ex-lover of hordes of huntsmen, a fiendishly attractive goddess to whom he had also given the gift of life. When she was in his presence his imaginings drifted in and out and he wondered if it was any easier for fathers of adopted girls.

  His other daughter, Annabel, had fallen in love with an Oxford undergraduate as obsessed with the Spanish conflict as his sister Angelique was with flying aeroplanes. Though Zack Florian’s anti-fascist ravings had alarmed the elder Cobb, Annabel had seemed destined for a conventional life. When her man turned his rage into actuality and left for a rebel cell in Zumaya with his brother Paul, she had been inspired to do the same by following them a week after their departure. Unfortunately, she had gone about her mission so clumsily that no-one knew she had left England until one of the Cobbs had been missed at a dinnerparty; furthermore the rampaging fiancé had had not an inkling of her unusual travel plans and was not expecting her arrival. He joined others in Spain and they embarked on the road to solidarity, while Annabel Cobb entered the same convulsing country and several hours later disappeared.

  Sir Henry could never fathom his odd lot in life: scores of daughters across the British Isles fitted so comfortably into the landscape. Why not his own?

  ‘Haydon has been snooping around again, Henry.’ Valerie had arrived. Her libertarian habit of calling him by his Christian name vexed him to an unusual degree today, but he knew he needed to be alert in her energetic presence.

  ‘You had a visitor from Germany. In East Anglia news travels faster than passion, my girl.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Tim has always had his eye on you and Shirley, and now he’s pinning his frustration on the presence of a German spy. He knows you’re more interested in the spy than in him, so he has got a bit jealous. That’s all.’

  Valerie bit her lip, something she had done since childhood whenever there was talk of boys. Suddenly she felt a kind of protective affection for her father.

  ‘The man Haydon saw, Dad, was not German. He is an Austrian. How did your dear fellow get his incorrect information?’

  ‘You know jolly well he loves to watch you from afar, as the saying goes.’ Sir Henry had become more subdued – it was an occasion on which he had been called Dad.

  ‘I do wish he could get over his infatuation. Anyway, Shirley and I aren’t having an unmentionable sort of relationship, if that is what he wants so much to see through a peephole.’

  Sir Henry Cobb bristled. It was the one subject which made his orderly brain feel shipwrecked.

  ‘In his position as MP for an adjoining constituency, he is concerned about aliens wanting to do business in this area. What did this Jew ask you?’

  ‘I like to think of him as an Austrian industrialist, rather elegant, who wants to set up an aircraft firm in the county. Hopefully he will not wish to build on the fox’s covert.’

  ‘That’s no joke, Val – Haydon Senior is Master of the Hounds.’

  They both smiled and for a rare moment father and daughter shared the slight contempt that at times they held gleefully for their own class and for its ignorance of catastrophes pending.

  ‘You should meet him, Dad. He needs support. The stories he tells from over there might worry you – if not Churchill.’ She went to the old mahogany sideboard and poured herself a small sherry. ‘Frankly, we think he’s either mad or a prophet.’

  ‘Jews have been known to manufacture such stories on odd occasions. When are you going to stop your nonsense and live like a human being?’

  His harshness had started its usual journey into Valerie’s gut. She drank.

  He continued:

  ‘Everything you two do is under scrutiny, my dear girl. I’m hearing about this Austrian chap because Haydon and his chums have nothing better to do than be voyeurs.’

  Valerie downed the liquid in one gulp, with a premonition of worse to come.

  ‘What galls me more than anything, however, is that you think you can go to the Air Ministry behind my back.’

  For a moment Valerie faltered. Then she said:

  ‘I went like any citizen. They have new information buzzing. I’m a pilot, Dad, for Christ’s sake.’ For a moment she felt like a baby, defending herself behind the bars of a crib. ‘They want people of all ages to fly, and the Ministry is dropping the cost down to practically nothing.’

  Furious, Cobb growled:

  ‘Two shillings and sixpence from four pounds – I know that, and I knew it weeks ago.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’ she fumed. ‘God, Dad, we work against each other and it’s disgusting.’ She wanted to smash the fifty-year old glass into the fireplace – but she didn’t, knowing it would hurt him more deeply than any confrontation about honesty.

  ‘I didn’t tell you because I still have a bizarre dream about you settling into a normal life, even if there is a war. What the devil is wrong with Tim Haydon anyway?’

  ‘He bites his nails.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ />
  ‘Dirty fingernails.’

  ‘Who the devil cares about fingernails?’

  ‘He smells, Henry.’

  Cobb eyed his daughter oddly, as if she were a priceless yearling gone lame.

  Valerie thought of Kranz, and of Shirley, and of a mission she knew she had to pursue – and she felt in the presence of death.

  But the dead man was still talking:

  ‘Wherever you go, Valerie, be it the tobacconist’s or the Air Ministry, you represent my name.’

  She looked at him sadly. How many times had she listened to the Tobacconist Speech?

  ‘I represent your name,’ she recited, ‘therefore how humiliating for you to have a daughter who lives with a female ground engineer in a caravan by a circus tent, and who takes strange men on joyrides.’

  ‘You should stay away from the war business. Please.’

  ‘Dad, if my motive was to go behind your back, it was to prove I can persuade without the mantle of male attire, or an MP’s credentials.’

  ‘Your credentials are my name!’ he thundered.

  ‘Credentials and names have not got women into the RAF,’ she said. ‘If they did we would have a Women’s Air Force to match the one in Poland. There are a hundred ladies in this country who are qualified to be squadron leaders and the best they can aspire to are instructors’ jobs in remote clubs, where the next war heroes will be produced. Who gets the glory?’

  ‘There is nothing wrong with what you seek, Valerie. But you embarrass me by the manner in which it is pursued. Speaking of carrying a name,’ he continued, quietly, ‘Lord Truman’s daughter has disappeared. Scarpered. Flown the coop.’

  Valerie bowed her head. ‘Tell me,’ she murmured.

  ‘Her fiancé was the other Florian boy. He went over to Spain with that anti-Franco mob and left her behind, but she disappeared from Truman’s estate soon after. Police in the county haven’t dug up one clue. Neither has Scotland Yard. You don’t suppose she’s run off to join him, do you?’

  ‘Tim Haydon seems to know everyone’s whereabouts. Why don’t you ask him?’