Till We Meet Again (79 page)

He let her go, and drew her head down on his chest, against his uniform. With one arm he held her lightly and with the other he smoothed her hair as if she were a child. “It’s after the school prom, Freddy, and all I want is to hold you here next to me for a long, long time. I can’t believe my luck. I can’t believe that there’s a beautiful, redheaded, blue-eyed girl who wants to fly as much as I do. I’m wondering if there’s a chance that one day we’ll go flyin’ together. That’s about as far as my imagination will let me go, because I’m only sixteen.” He laughed joyously. “I’m much too young to think that I could ever dream of doing anything else with a girl as perfect as you.”

Freddy relaxed against him, feeling a willingness to let him talk on and on as if every word were a tiny assurance that she still had her whole unblemished life in front of her, as if enough of his words could be added together and they would somehow make it true. Jock was so beautifully, unexpectedly sweet, she thought dreamily, so earnest in his clumsy way, as straightforward as a little boy. She’d thought he looked like
a chivalrous Viking when shed first laid eyes on him … perhaps she hadn’t been wrong. There was such naked longing in his voice—if he’d loved her forever, it would explain why he’d always seemed a little angry at her—anger that would have armored him against showing his love.
If he’d loved her
. Suddenly every doubt vanished. She recognized the voice of love when she heard it again after so many years without it. Freddy reached up and twined her arms around Jock’s strong neck, lifting herself up so that she could press her willing lips on his, giving him the first kiss he hadn’t taken on his own, an impetuous, wholehearted, passionate kiss in which, for the first time, she held nothing back.

“Jesus!” Jock gasped. “How could any man be fool enough to leave you? I told Tony he was out of his mind! Every time I saw him with that girl, I warned him he was nuts—thank God he didn’t listen to me.”

Freddy felt as if he’d jammed a fistful of pointed pins into her eyes. “You … 
saw Tony with her—you told him!
” Her arms fell rigid to her sides.

“Well … you know … guys, friends, naturally they—uh—communicate.”

“My God, the two of you sat around and talked about me!” Freddy choked with horror. “You
conspired
with him—you went out and sat around with my husband and his mistress, and when you were having your sniggering little heart-to-heart chats, no doubt he confided in you, didn’t he, all the ugly, sad,
private
details of what was going on between us—you knew everything all along and I never dreamed—never dreamed—” Violently she wrenched open the door of the car. Before Jock could move, Freddy had scrambled out of the front seat, run up the pathway, unlocked her front door, vanished inside and slammed the door behind her with a sound whose finality he could not doubt.

During the few hours that were left of that night, Freddy sat, sunk in an easy chair in her bedroom, locked into a circle of fury and hatred. At one point she grew cold enough to get up to strip off her dress and put on a warm robe and socks, but otherwise she didn’t move from the chair except to run into the bathroom and vomit until there was nothing left in her stomach but bile.

Obsessively she repeated every word of the conversation with Jock in his car. A target of opportunity, that’s what he’d
taken her for, she told herself over and over again. A disabled plane, out of ammunition, separated from its companions, left behind to straggle back alone over enemy territory, the pilot praying only to get home before he was spotted and shot down—a helpless, pathetic, defenseless target of opportunity, the kind of kill that even the greenest pilot wouldn’t boast about, a target that a boy on the ground with a rifle could shoot at and hope to hit. Nothing better. Nothing finer. Nothing
easier
.

How could she have allowed herself to believe him for even a few minutes? Freddy raged at herself in such impotent humiliation that she welcomed the bouts of nausea as a relief. She couldn’t even fool herself. She had believed him. She had actually believed him when he told her that crap about loving her and she had, oh God, how often could a woman be as pig-stupid,
she had liked it
. Oh yes, she had liked it so very, very much that she would never stop hating herself for those minutes. Yet she knew Jock Hampton, that foul-mouthed bastard, she knew the kind of women he went for, she’d seen enough of them come and go, right back from the first days of her marriage to Tony. British Brendas and American Brendas, they’d all been the same girl, but one minute of sweet talk—drunken sweet talk, at that—and she was ready to fall for his line.

She must be so desperate that it was branded on her forehead. “Please, mister, throw me a mercy fuck”—that was what a man must see when he looked at her. Even a hug was enough to make her melt. Just one lousy hug. He was the only person in the world, except Tony, who knew that she hadn’t been made love to in far longer than a year. He knew how vulnerable she was, and he had taken advantage of it the first minute he could.

Or—wait a minute—was Jock the only one who knew? Had Tony told Swede? Had he told anyone else? Maybe everyone knew! Maybe it was common gossip, Tony Longbridge and his mistress, Tony who’d dumped her, Tony who’d wanted out so badly that he couldn’t stand to touch poor old Freddy.

Nobody had said a single word to her about Tony tonight. There she was, all dressed up like an idiot, parading her wings, no less, and miracle of miracles, everyone had had the supreme tact not even to look the least bit curious or embarrassed. Yet they
must
all know about the divorce, she didn’t kid herself that in a small world like that of the Eagle Squadron,
such news wouldn’t have spread quickly, particularly since they all had had so much publicity. Obviously everyone—certainly every man—must have been sure that she was Jock’s girl. Otherwise there would have had to be some sort of recognition—a gesture, a word of sympathy—something. Tony had gone back to England right after they’d signed the divorce papers … it would have been only natural if even one person had said something, but nobody had.
Jock’s girl
. Oh God, they all thought she’d fallen right into Jock’s bed … a bed that would still be warm from the last girl who’d been in it. Easy pickings.

When would it be dawn? When? Even in California, in winter the dawn came late. Before the sun rose, Freddy was dressed in her warmest flying clothes, leaving a note for Helga and Annie in the kitchen, and as it rose she was at Burbank, pulling her Bonanza out of the hangar. She had rarely flown it since the day she’d shown Tony the house. It was the top of the line, the plane she had thought that they would all go out in, she and Annie and Tony … the family plane that had never had a family in it.

During the last year Freddy had made several attempts to gentle her heart out of the whiplash of misery her divorce had aroused, by taking the Bonanza up for an afternoon’s spin, but, disappointingly, she hadn’t been able to recapture the bliss of flight that healed More and more often she’d found temporary forgetfulness only in burying herself in work at the Eagles office, where her loneliness was peopled with fellow workers and a constant stream of problems that needed solving. She’d needed the sound of human voices, the contact with secretaries and accountants and marketing managers and all the other human beings she dealt with in the course of a day, to balance the roiling solitude of her evenings after Annie was asleep.

But this winter morning there could be no question of going to the office, of risking an encounter with Jock or Swede. Jock had robbed her of Eagles too, she thought, as she started to check out the plane. She’d sell her stock and get out of the air cargo business. She couldn’t remain in a partnership with him. It was unthinkable. But she’d deal with ways and means to put Eagles behind her later, when she came back from her flight, for if ever there had been a time, since she’d returned to California from England, when she had to drink the solace of sky, it was today.

Freddy glanced overhead. There was almost no visibility. The low, foglike winter clouds of California’s rainy season thinned out a little bit at the end of the runway, but on the ground it was dark, dank and miserable. Not a tempting day, a nonpilot would think, to take up a plane. But once above the clouds, once she’d broken through into the sunlight, it would be as good a day as any other, except that she wouldn’t be able to see the earth. And that was just as well, Freddy thought, as she walked watchfully around the Beechcraft, it would be better not to be reminded that no matter how high she flew, mankind still crawled below. Just sky. Just horizon. And most important, clouds to play with. She craved that more than anything.

The Bonanza had been maintained by one of the Eagles’ most experienced mechanics, but Freddy took extra care in her visual and physical inspection of the exterior of the plane, since she hadn’t personally checked it out in several months. She forced herself to be particularly meticulous because she was so anxious to be off. The airport was quiet at this early hour of the morning, and because of the weather, there were no other private pilots landing and taking off. She taxied out to the end of the runway, heart beating with a captive’s eagerness for escape, as she sped efficiently through the preflight checklist, saw that none of the needles on her instrument panel was in the red, and finally, released from discipline, let loose into the oblivion of the elements, headed down her home-base runway toward the beckoning promise of sky.

Once above the overcast, it was a day of overwhelming brightness. The cloud cover below was squashed so flat that it was like a lid on an endless can. The alluring cloudscape that Freddy had hoped to find was absent. Even the smallest peak and valley had been compressed into the lid, above which everything was the clear, unambiguous blue of morning, a blue without mystery or variety. A boring blue, Freddy realized in hostile disappointment, a blue that contained nothing that could help her to clear her mind and diminish her anger, the kind of blue a pilot could only drone through impatiently on the way to someplace else.

She headed north, hoping for a wisp of cloud that might have detached itself from the mass below, even a very small cloud, just big enough to tangle with, to tango with. If only she could catch up with a thunderstorm, the sort of storm
every sensible pilot flew around, a vulgar, obvious storm, gaudy with menace, a vow of danger lurking in its turbulence, risk the unspoken covenant in its lightning, a storm that would throw her around in the cockpit and demand every ounce of her ability and experience. There probably wasn’t even a rain shower from here to Chicago, she thought in disgust. The day was all zero visibility and no action.

Freddy looked around the spacious, comfortable cockpit with sudden loathing. What a characterless plane! Its leather was immaculate, its instrument panel shining with newness, the metal of its brake pedal, which didn’t bear the traces of a single foot, so new and unmarked that she scuffed at it in anger. She’d flown thousands of new planes before, right from the factory to the airdrome, that was what the ATA job was all about, but she’d never resented one for being new as she resented this Bonanza.

This plane was not only too new, it was exceedingly uninteresting, Freddy decided grimly, wondering why she had been so eager to buy it. The model had been introduced to the market only a few years ago, the first single-motor plane ever designed to carry four people at a cruising speed of one hundred and seventy-five miles an hour, a highly crash-worthy plane built with great attention to quality in each of its details, a plane that everyone called incomparable. She called it a fucking bloody fat cow, Freddy thought furiously, a flying cow that could carry Ma, Pa, two kids, a picnic basket, overnight bags, a couple of slobbery dogs—why not a potty seat too, while they were about it?

She flipped the Bonanza around the empty sky, ripping through some aerobatics and noting, with a bleakly unimpressed eye, that the cow could stand up to pressure. And why not? She’d certainly paid enough for this airborne limousine, Freddy thought in contempt, filled with an acrid longing to be flying some beat-up, honorable old crate, some ancient kite with history stored in each of its fabric-covered wings, a plane with individuality and valor invisibly engraved on each of its instruments She’d fallen in love with a lot of planes in her day, and not one of them had ever betrayed her, not one had turned on her and made her into the worst kind of laughingstock, a plane didn’t spy out the fact that you were a woman, with a woman’s weaknesses, and use them to sucker you, to treat you as a victim, easy to mock, easy to gull—easy, easy pickings.

There was a small break in the cloud cover to her right, and she flew over and dove through it to see where she had wandered to. She realized that she didn’t really know where she was, and her watch told her that almost two hours had passed since she’d left Burbank. She was out over the ocean, a gray ocean with a horizon that was only one shade less gray. A dense fog was rolling in toward Santa Monica. Every airport for many miles around would be closed to all but instrument traffic, or maybe just plain closed.

This might as well be Lapland, Freddy decided, shaking her head in bitterness, remembering the day she had first flown over the Pacific, so sky-loony that she would have chased the sailboats over the edge of the horizon if Mac hadn’t stopped her. So young, so wild … 
so happy
. It had been that day that she’d soloed. January ninth, 1936—in a few days it would be sixteen years in the past. Half of her lifetime.

Don’t look back, Freddy told herself, don’t
ever
look back. She must be hungry, she decided. She hadn’t had breakfast, she’d thrown up dinner, so even if she didn’t feel hungry she probably needed food. The quickest place to find something to eat was at the airport on top of Catalina Island. She’d been there many times, an unkempt little strip without a tower but the only place to land in the neighborhood with the distinction of being fifteen hundred feet high, on top of a rocky desert island with a romantic name and a harbor that had been a gambling haven in the thirties. There was a coffee shop in permanent operation at the airstrip, for day trippers made Catalina a popular and simple excursion in good weather. She’d have it all to herself today, which fit in with her mood, Freddy thought, as she headed toward the familiar, flat-topped lump far out in the ocean.