TransAtlantic (2 page)

There were rumors of a rich Texan who wanted to try, and a Hungarian prince and, worst of all, a German from the Luftstreitkräfte who had specialized in long-range bombing during the war.

The features editor of the
Daily Mail
, a junior of Lord Northcliffe’s, was said to have developed an ulcer thinking about a possible German victory.

—A Kraut! A bloody Kraut! God save us!

He dispatched reporters to find out if it was possible that the enemy, even after defeat, could possibly be ahead in the race.

On Fleet Street, down at the stone, where the hot type was laid, he paced back and forth, working the prospective headlines over and over. On the inside of his jacket his wife had stitched a Union Jack, which he rubbed like a prayer cloth.

—Come on boys, he muttered to himself. Hup two. On home now, back to Blighty.

EVERY MORNING THE
two airmen woke in the Cochrane Hotel, had their breakfast of porridge, eggs, bacon, toast. Then they drove through the steep streets, out the Forest Road, towards a field of grass sleeved with ice. The wind blew bitter blasts off the sea. They rigged wires into their flight suits so they could run warmth from a battery, and they stitched extra fur on the inside flaps of their helmets, their gloves, their boots.

A week went by. Two weeks. The weather held them back. Cloud. Storm. Forecast. Every morning the men made sure they were carefully shaved. A ritual they performed at the far end of the field. They set up a steel washbasin under a canvas tent with a little gas burner to heat the water. A metal hubcap was used as a mirror. They put razor blades in their flight kits for when they landed: they wanted to make sure that if they were to arrive in Ireland, they would be fresh, decently shaved, presentable members of Empire.

In the lengthening June evenings, they fixed their ties, sat under the wingtips of the Vimy, and spoke eloquently to the Canadian, American, British reporters who gathered for the flight.

Alcock was twenty-six years old. From Manchester. He was lean, handsome, daring, the sort of man who looked straight ahead but stayed open to laughter. He had a head of ginger hair. A single man, he said he loved women but preferred engines. Nothing pleased him more than to pull apart the guts of a Rolls-Royce, then put her back together again. He shared his sandwiches with the reporters: often there was a thumbprint of oil on the bread.

Brown sat on the wooden crates alongside Alcock. He already seemed old at thirty-two. His bum leg forced him to carry a walking stick. He had been born in Scotland, but raised near Manchester. His parents were American and he had a slight Yankee accent that
he cultivated as best he could. He thought of himself as a man of the mid-Atlantic. He read the antiwar poetry of Aristophanes and admitted to the idea that he would happily live in constant flight. He was solitary but did not enjoy loneliness. Some said he looked like a vicar, but his eyes flared a far blue, and he had recently gotten engaged to a young beauty from London. He wrote Kathleen love letters, telling her that he wouldn’t mind throwing his walking stick at the stars.

—Good God, said Alcock, you really told her that?

—I did, yes.

—And what did she say?

—Said I could lose the walking stick.

—Ah! Smitten.

At the press briefings, Alcock took the helm. Brown navigated the silence by fiddling with his tie clip. He kept a brandy bottle in his inside pocket. Occasionally he turned away, opened the flap of his tunic, took a nip.

Alcock drank, too, but loudly, publicly, happily. He rested against the bar in the Cochrane Hotel and sang
Rule, Britannia
in a voice so out of tune that it was loaded with whimsy.

The locals—fishermen mostly, a few lumberjacks—banged on the wooden tables and sang songs about loved ones lost at sea.

The singing went on late into the night, long after Alcock and Brown had gone to bed. Even from the fourth floor they could hear sad rhythms breaking into waves of laughter and then, later still, the
Maple Leaf Rag
hammered out on a piano.

ALCOCK AND BROWN
rose at sunup, then waited for a clear sky. Turned their faces to the weather. Walked the field. Played gin rummy. Waited some more. They needed a warm day, a strong moon, a benevolent wind. They figured they could make the flight in under twenty hours. Failure didn’t interest them, but in secret Brown wrote out a will, gave everything he owned to Kathleen, kept the envelope in the inside pocket of his tunic.

Alcock didn’t bother with a will. He recalled the terrors of the war, still surprised at times that he could wake at all.

—There’s puff all else they can throw at me now.

He slapped the side of the Vimy with his palm, took a look at the clouds massing far off in the west.

—Except of course some more ruddy rain.

ONE GLANCE DOWN
takes in a line of chimneys and fences and spires, the wind combing tufts of grass into silvery waves, rivers vaulting the ditches, two white horses running wild in a field, the long scarves of tarmacadam fading off into dirt roads—forest, scrubland, cowsheds, tanneries, shipyards, fishing shacks, cod factories, commonwealth, we’re floating on a sea of adrenaline and—Look! Teddy, down there, a scull on a stream, and a blanket on the sand, and a girl with pail and shovel, and the woman rolling the hem of her skirt, and over there, see, that young chap, in the red jersey, running the donkey along the shore, go ahead, give it one more turn, thrill the lad with a bit of shadow …

ON THE EVENING
of June 12 they take another practice run, this one at night so Brown can test out his Sumner charts. Eleven thousand
feet. The cockpit is open to the sky. The cold is fierce. The men hunker behind the windscreen. Even the tip ends of their hair begin to freeze.

Alcock tries to feel the plane, her weight, her dip, her center of gravity, while Brown works on his mathematics. Below, the reporters wait for the plane to return. The field has been outlined with candles in brown paper bags to make a runway. When the Vimy lands, the candles blow over and burn briefly in the grass. Local boys run out with buckets to douse the flames.

The airmen climb down off the plane to scattered applause. They are surprised to learn that a local reporter, Emily Ehrlich, is the most serious of all. She never asks a single question, but stands around in a knit hat and gloves, scribbling in her notebook. Short and unfashionably large. In her forties or fifties perhaps. She moves with a hefty gait across the muddy airfield. Carrying a wooden cane. Her ankles are terribly swollen. She looks like the type of woman who might be working in a cake shop, or behind a country-store counter, but she has, they know, an incisive pen. They have seen her in the Cochrane Hotel, where she has lived for many years with her daughter, Lottie. The seventeen-year-old wields a camera with surprising ease and style, a flirtation. Unlike her mother, she is tall, thin, sprightly, curious. She is quick to laugh and whisper in her mother’s ear. An odd team. The mother stays silent; the daughter takes the photos and asks the questions. It infuriates the other reporters, a young girl in their territory, but her questions are sharp, quick.
What sort of wind pressure can the wing fabric withstand? What is it like to have the sea disappear beneath you? Do you have a sweetheart in London, Mr. Alcock?
Mother and daughter like to stride across the fields together at the end of the day, Emily to the hotel room where she sits and writes her reports, Lottie towards the tennis courts where she plays for hours on end.

Emily’s name banners the Thursday edition of the
Evening Telegram
, nearly always accompanied by one of her daughter’s photos. Once a week she has a mandate to cover whatever she wants: fishing disasters, local disputes, political commentary, the lumber industry, the suffragettes, the horrors of the war. She is famous for her odd tangents. Once, in the middle of an article on a local trade union, she darted off on a two-hundred-word recipe for pound cake. Another time, in an analysis of a speech by the governor of Newfoundland, she strayed into the subtle art of preserving ice.

Alcock and Brown have been warned to be on their guard, since the mother and daughter have, by all accounts, a tendency towards nostalgia and fiery Irish tempers. But they like them both, Emily and Lottie, the odd edge they give to the crowd, the mother’s strange hats, her long dresses, her curious bouts of silence, her daughter’s tall quick stride through the town, the tennis racquet banging against her calf.

Besides, Brown has seen Emily’s reports in the
Evening Telegram
and they are amongst the best he has read:
Today the sky was truant over Signal Hill. Hammer blows ring across the airfield like so many bells. Each night the sun goes down looking more and more like the moon
.

THEY ARE DUE
to leave on Friday the 13th. It’s an airman’s way of cheating death: pick a day of doom, then defy it.

The compasses are swung, the transverse tables calculated, the wireless primed, the shock absorbers wrapped around the axles, the ribs shellacked, the fabric dope dried, the radiator water purified. All the rivets, the split pins, the stitches are checked and rechecked. The pump control handles. The magnetos. The batteries to warm their flight suits. Their shoes are polished. The Ferrostat flasks of hot tea and Oxo are prepared. The carefully cut sandwiches are packed away.
Lists are carefully ticked off. Horlicks Malted Milk. Bars of Fry’s Chocolate. Four sticks of licorice each. One pint-sized bottle of brandy for emergencies. They run sprigs of white heather on the inside of their fur-lined helmets for luck, and place two stuffed animals—black cats, both—one in the well beneath the windscreen, the other tied to a strut behind the cockpit.

Then the clouds curtsy in, the rain kneels upon the land, and the weather knocks them back a whole day and a half.

AT THE POST
office in St. John’s, Lottie Ehrlich skips across a cage of shadow on the floor, steps to the three-barred window where the clerk tips up his black visor to look at her. She slips the sealed envelope across the counter.

She buys the fifteen-cent Cabot stamp and tells the clerk that she wants to get a one-dollar overprint for the transatlantic post.

—Oh, he says, there aren’t no more of them, young lady, no. They sold out a long time ago.

AT NIGHT BROWN
spends a lot of his time downstairs in the lobby of the hotel, sending messages to Kathleen. He is timid with the telegraph, aware that others may read his words. There’s a formality to him. A tightness.

He is slow on the stairs for a man in his thirties, the walking stick striking hard against the wood floor. Three brandies rolling through him.

An odd disturbance of light falls across the banister and he catches sight of Lottie Ehrlich in the ornate wooden mirror at the top of the stairs. The young girl is, for a moment, ghostly, her figure emerging
into the mirror, then growing clearer, taller, redheaded. She wears a dressing gown and nightdress and slippers. They are both a little startled by the other.

—Good evening, says Brown, slurring a little.

—Hot milk, says the young girl.

—Excuse me?

—I’m bringing my mother hot milk. She can’t sleep.

He nods and tips at an imaginary brim, moves to step past her.

—She never sleeps.

Her cheeks are flushed red, a little embarrassed to be caught out in the corridor in her dressing gown, he thinks. He tips the nonexistent hat again and pushes the pain through his bad leg, climbs three more steps, the brandies jagging his mind. She pauses two steps below him and says with more formality than it requires: Mr. Brown?

—Yes, young lady?

—Are you ready for the unification of the continents?

—Quite honestly, says Brown, I could do with a good telephone line first.

She takes one step farther down the stairs, puts her hand to her mouth as if about to cough. One eye higher than the other, as if a very stubborn question got lodged in her mind a long time ago.

—Mr. Brown.

—Miss Ehrlich?

—Do you think it would be a terrible imposition?

A quick eye-flick to the floor. She pauses as if she has just propped a number of stray words on the tip of her tongue, odd little things with no flow to them at all, no way to get them out. She stands, balancing them, wondering if they will topple. Brown imagines that she, like everyone in St. John’s, would like a chance to sit in the cockpit if there is another practice run. An impossibility of course, they cannot bring
anybody up in the air, least of all a young woman. They have not even allowed the reporters to sit in the plane while it waits in the field. It is a ritual, a superstition, it is not something that he will be able to do, he wonders how he will tell her, he feels trapped now, a victim of his own late-night strolls.

—Would it impose greatly, she says, if I gave you something?

—Of course not.

She negotiates the stairs and runs down the corridor towards her room. The youth of her body moving in the white of the dressing gown.

He tightens his eyes, rubs his forehead, waits. Some good-luck charm perhaps? A memento? A keepsake? Silly that, to have allowed her a chance to speak at all. Should have just said no. Let it be. Gone to his room. Disappeared.

She appears at the end of the corridor, moving sharply and quickly. Her dressing gown exposes a triangle of white skin at her neck. He feels an acute and sudden pang of desire to see Kathleen and he is glad for the desire, the errancy of the moment, this odd curving staircase, this far-flung hotel, the too-much brandy. He misses his fiancée, pure and simple. He would like to be home. To nudge up against her slim body, watch the fall of hair along her clavicle.

He holds the banisters a little too tight as Lottie approaches. A piece of paper in her left hand. He reaches out. A letter. That is all. A letter. He scans it. Addressed to a family in Cork. To Brown Street of all places.