Till We Meet Again (70 page)

“Darling, any ideas?” Tony asked Freddy.

“Eagles,” Freddy said promptly.

“Eagles? What kind of name is that?” Jock objected immediately. He was still smarting over the fact that Freddy had spent several days teaching him and Tony how to fly the big, unfamiliar, twin-engined planes, after she checked out in one herself, with a mere half hour of instruction. Six years in Spits, and he’d actually had to take hours of instruction from her, as if he were a kid.

“Look,” Freddy said patiently, “you guys are heroes, and you met because of the Eagle Squadron, so it makes sense if we try to get a little mileage out of it. Eagles—short, to the point, easy to remember, no confusing initials.”

“It does have sentimental value,” Tony agreed. “Send your cauliflower to market by Eagles—memorable, that.”

“Jock?” Freddy asked. “What do you think?”

“Looks like I’m outnumbered. ‘Eagles’ is O.K., I guess.”

“Jock, honey,” Brenda drawled, “what exactly was the Eagle Squadron?”

“And where’s Our Lady of the DC-3s this morning?” Jock asked Tony as they sat in their cramped office, plundering copies of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages for prospective cargo clients, while, in their reception room, Brenda ineffectively explained to a crowd of would-be employees that they hadn’t started hiring yet.

“Missing.”

“It figures. Now that you’ve got a good live-in gal to take care of Annie, she probably went shopping. Freddy could use some new clothes, or haven’t you noticed? Maybe she’s getting her hair done, or having a girlfriend lunch … maybe a matinee, maybe a little game of gin rummy … women can accomplish less and spend more in any given time period than you’d believe possible. Is she coming in this afternoon?”

“She’s away for a few days.” Tony was tight-lipped.

“Yeah? Where to?”

“Frankly, I don’t know. Take a look at this note that she left me.” He held out a piece of paper and Jock read it out loud.

“ ‘Darling, please supervise Annie’s supper and sit with her, Helga will prepare Bathe Annie, read to her from red book on night table, not more than twenty minutes, put her to bed, night light O.K. if she wants it. Helga will have dinner for you by seven-thirty. Please check on Annie several times during evening, keep your door open in case she wakes up. Morning, make sure Annie finishes her whole breakfast, Helga will walk her to kindergarten and pick her up. Let Helga know what you want for dinner before you go to office. Don’t worry about me. See you in a few days. Annie understands. Love you, darling. Gone flyin’. Freddy.’ ”

“I found it this morning when I woke up,” Tony said furiously. “This gets on my tit.”

“You notice she said ‘please’ twice? Damn decent of her. What does she mean—‘gone flyin’’?”

“If I knew, I’d gladly share the information with you.”

“What’d she go in?”

“Not one of our planes, I checked first thing. Maybe she talked someone into lending her a kite,” Tony answered grimly.

“Or stole one,” Jock said thoughtfully.

“She’d never have done this back home … not in a million years. It’s
unthinkable
to decamp like that. It must be this fucking place! She hasn’t been the same since she set foot in California. I can’t put my finger on it, but she’s just … different. As if she owns the whole bloody world. Sweet Jesus, I’d like to smack her!”

“Brenda’s scared shitless of her. Says she makes her feel inferior.”

“Brenda’s not as stupid as she looks.”

“Come on, Tony, she is so.”

In the swift racing plane she’d rented, Freddy hopped down to make a number of stops in the Imperial Valley in the Colorado Desert, the southernmost of California’s great farming areas, and then headed north toward the wet delta lands where asparagus and tomatoes grew ten months a year; from there she skipped on to Salinas, with its hundreds of thousands of rich acres, zipped back to Fresno for figs and grapes, setting down many times in the lushness of Imperial County,
Kern County and Tulare County, the nation’s top areas for farm produce. Everywhere she went, she passed over vast farms and orchards that had only grown larger and more profitable since she’d last seen them.

She followed a gloriously erratic flight plan that depended only on whim and mood. She strayed, she wandered, she hedgehopped, she zoomed and dove and chased her tail, and danced the plane from one end of the state to the other. She never bothered to calculate, so long as she had enough fuel, and her navigation was based on instinct and memory and meandering, rambling, arbitrary fancy. She was fancy-free and free for anything fancy, she sang to herself, as she lost herself in the delirium of flying again, flying without rules or regulations, flying in a rapture of freedom that she had given up seven years ago, liberated again for brazen adventure and high old times with the winds and the sky and the clouds and space.
Space!
God, how she’d missed space in England. The ATA routes had been so constricted that it was like snaking your way through a maze to deliver a plane, but California was an ecstasy of bright, endless, flowing space, space that again belonged to her. How had she lived so long without this direct connection with the horizon, she wondered. How had she held out, how had she fooled herself into believing that anything could replace the sublime astonishment of sky?

Whenever she spotted the main buildings of each enormous agricultural holding, she looped a couple of spectacular loops, added a few showboating Immelmanns and spine-chilling Chandelles to announce her arrival, before she set the plane down elegantly in a half-filled parking lot or, failing that, a field, under conditions that anyone in the ATA would have regarded as laughably easy.

As she swaggered into the office, looking for the boss, she carried an official-looking notebook and a fine new Parker pen, with a fat gold nib. She wore a uniform of her own confection, consisting of her trim ATA skirt and RAF blue shirt, tieless and unbuttoned almost to her bra, with her four-inch-wide wings sewn above her right pocket. Her combustible hair was pulled back in a businesslike way and fastened with fraudulent severity at the nape of her neck, where it kept escaping conveniently from its inadequate velvet bow. Her skirt had been shortened four remarkably attention-getting inches, and belted in red patent leather, tightly enough to warrant a court-martial. Freddy had traded her sensible
ATA lace-up shoes and black stockings for sheer nylons and a pair of the highest-heeled red shoes she’d been able to find in all of Los Angeles. If the boss didn’t happen to be in, he soon arrived, as word reached him of the visitor.

In four days, Freddy managed to make warm and admiring friends with the largest shippers of farm produce in the major growing area of the entire world, as she announced to them, with the most delicately outrageous divergences from the truth, the formation of a major air cargo company. She made judicious and frequent references to its large corps of American Eagle Squadron pilots, who had all, each and every one of them, been among the heroic Few to whom the Many owed so Much. Eagles could handle as much farm produce as the farmers could grow, she told the interested men, as she leaned earnestly forward, her breasts straining the fabric of her shirt, her sales pitch almost landing her in their laps. Her notebook grew fat with potential orders, with valuable facts and figures and the names of major big-city wholesalers all over the country who were clamoring for California fruit, vegetables and flowers, which they could sell at premium prices, enough to include the cost of air shipping, if the cost of air shipping were not pegged too high.

The hungry New York City flower market alone, dependent on greenhouses, could absorb incalculable tons of fresh-cut flowers every week if the right connections were made, Freddy realized as she sat in the café at the Santa Paula airport, just before the final short hop home, and meditated over two pieces of fresh peach pie. How many tons of fresh peaches could they sell in Chicago? And if the peaches were made into pies here by, say, Van de Kamp, what could a chain of East Coast bakeries charge for them in the middle of winter? How would you ship peach pies without breaking them?
Stay out of baked goods, you dumb broad! When will you learn?
Well, then, how would you ship peaches without bruising them? How would you ship grapes, strawberries, tender Bibb lettuce, fresh salmon from Monterey Bay? How would you ship
orchids?
Eagles could change the face of the college prom corsage.

All that’s a secondary problem, she said cheerfully to herself, as she set about worming the recipe for the pie from the owner of the café. Let Tony and Jock worry about the details. They’d be so thrilled when she came back with all this information—but it had been absolutely necessary to go
alone. Her husband, to be sure, had flown all through the Battle of Britain, but the Honorable Antony Wilmot Alistair Longbridge wasn’t exactly a Yankee Doodle Dandy, jock was as American as an all-night crap game, but he had just missed flying in the Battle of Britain and it would have cramped her style to have had to misrepresent … only slightly … the mighty pilot corps of Eagles if the two of them had been standing there listening. Or, God forbid, talking.

“Where’s the new Brenda?” Jock yelled desperately as he clasped two phone receivers to his chest so that the pair of grape growers he was trying to talk to simultaneously wouldn’t hear him. “I need some help here, pronto!”

Freddy, trapped behind her desk, telling three disappointed but still eager ex-bomber pilots that two hundred and fifty dollars a month was the maximum Eagles could offer for the time being, shouted over their heads. “She quit yesterday—I haven’t had time to find another.” Why was she in charge of finding Brendas, she asked herself in irritation? There had been four changes in office manager in the two weeks since the original Brenda had broken her last fingernail and left in tears of rage, that fate had so conspired against her. Brendas did not thrive on hysteria, Brendas couldn’t handle panic, and Freddy’s trip had started an avalanche of premature customer demand that they couldn’t possibly control without a half-dozen competent office people.

“Who’s answering the phones in the reception room? It sounds like a New Year’s Eve party out there,” Jock said wildly. “I could almost swear I hear Annie’s voice.”

“You do, Squadron Leader. Helga’s taking the phones, Annie’s with her.”

“Where’s Tony, for Christ’s sake?” Jock screamed.

“The Wing Commander’s on his way back from Newark. He delivered those three and a half tons of carnations. Colonels Levine and Carlutti delivered the strawberries and tomatoes to Detroit and Chicago—they’re on their way back too.”

“Any joy?” Jock asked, using the two words with which, after a sortie, RAF pilots had asked each other if they’d shot down any enemy planes.

“Nope,” Freddy answered, her brief reply meaning that none of the three Eagle pilots had been able to scare up cargoes for the return trips, the essential backhaul without
which there would be no profit on the deliveries. The three planes were all returning to L.A. as “deadheads,” the most awful word in the business except for “wreck.”

“Fellas, could you just wait outside for a minute?” Jock asked the pilots who were following their conversation with interest. “I need a quick meeting with my partner here.”

“This isn’t going to work,” he said frantically to Freddy, when the room was empty. “How can we be turning away business and operating at a loss at the same time? How? How long do you think that can go on? How long? Here we are, grounded ten feet under a ton of office work, when the original idea was that the three of us would be flying without salary; those Brendas of yours disappear overnight; we still haven’t hired enough mechanics; I have a full load of ripe peaches waiting to leave from Bakersfield—do you have
any
idea how perishable they are?—but I can’t turn even one single plane around without more pilots than Tony, Levine and Carlutti, and today I got orders for three more loads for tomorrow—oh shit! Me and my big ideas! In another few weeks we won’t be able to meet the payroll. We’ll
owe
money!”

Freddy tipped her desk chair back so that she was almost reclining in it, hoisted her sublime legs up onto the desk, lifted her skirt a few inches above her knees, and crossed her spike-heeled red pumps at the ankle. She seemed to be silently consulting the ceiling while Jock drummed violently on his desk, waiting for her to say something. She groped in her handbag for her compact and carefully applied a fresh layer of bright red lipstick, looking at her image approvingly. Then she swung her legs to the floor, got up, and started, light, lissome and larky, toward the door.

“You can’t leave me here alone! Where the hell do you think you’re going? Flying again? That’ll finish us for sure!”

“Squadron Leader Hampton,” Freddy said with a deliberately, unfairly, unrighteously jazzy smile,
“do
try to calm down, I hate to see you in such a flap. You’ll get an ulcer. Take deep breaths. Think good thoughts … even
your
mind must be capable of a good thought from time to time. Actually, you don’t look terribly well, do you?” she crooned, ruffling his hair and tweaking his ears casually. “Have you been eating right, Squadron Leader? Getting enough vitamins? I know what, you can have Annie’s lunch … yum, yum, eat it all up. I’ll take her with me and feed her.”

“You’re really leaving?” he said in incredulous fury. “I don’t fucking believe it!”

“Helga will watch over you. I’m going—to buy a mink coat.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch!” Jock roared as his two phones and Freddy’s two phones all rang at once. “Now I know why you didn’t let me die when you had a chance. You were saving me so you could kill me yourself!”

“Aren’t you getting a little paranoid? I didn’t even know you then,” Freddy said sweetly, as she closed the door softly behind her.

Jock let the phones ring on, not trying to answer them. He shook his blond head from side to side, an expression of consternation subduing his untamed features. Why did he suddenly feel so fucking
lonesome?
Why did he feel as if he’d been abandoned? “Paranoid”? He only prayed that was the answer. He’d settle for merely paranoid any day.