TransAtlantic

  —Why don’t you fly anymore?

  He gave a half-smile.

  —We get older, he said.

  She allowed a silence, worked the flesh of her hands into the well of her dress.

  —We compromise.

  The sound of distant laughter from outside broke abruptly, lingered a moment, then faded.

  —I suppose I’m still aloft most of the time.

  He fell then into the recollection: the sheer release of being in the air. He told her of his nights in the prison camp, the return home, the thrill of the Vimy, the way the old bomber handled, the vibration of it through his body, the snow stinging his cheeks, the narrow lines of sight, the desire to see Kathleen, the way the plane had landed, the catch in the bog grass, the surprise to still be alive, the crowds in Ireland, the return home, standing on the Aero Club balcony in London, the knighthood, the prize, the day he shook Alcock’s hand for the last time. He had written a fair amount, he said, and he still made appearances, but his life was largely quiescent, he was happy at home with Kathleen and Buster. He didn’t ask too much, he already had enough.

  She saw an ease come over him. She had thought him, at first, sad—earlier, when he stood in the doorway, shielded by his son—but now she detected a vibrancy in him, a return to his original self. It gladdened her. He had a slow smile that started in his eyes and pulled at his lips, until his face was drawn tighter, more intimate.

  The tea had grown cold, but they poured the last of it into their cups. The shadows lay long in the room. He absently touched his jacket pocket again.

  —One thing, said Brown. If I may.

  He meshed his fingers together as if in some small prayer, and glanced at her. He reached out for a biscuit, dunked it in his tea. He held the biscuit a moment until it tumbled and fell. He fished out the soggy wafer with a spoon. For several moments he did not speak.

  —If you’ll forgive me.

  —Yes?

  —It wasn’t a tragedy.

  —Excuse me?

  —Jackie, he said. Jackie was in his plane, you see. Exactly where he wanted to be. He would not have thought it tragic at all.

  Brown pulled the spoon away from his mouth, but still held the curve of it at his chin. She wished she had brought Lottie so she could photograph him in this pose.

  —Up there. Something else takes charge of your freedom. Do you understand what I mean?

  She heard him inhale.

  —Maybe a child, he said. Perhaps that equals it. Perhaps that is the only thing.

  He was gazing out over her shoulder. She turned to see the young boy, Buster, in the garden. He was framed by the edge of the window and looked as if he was talking to someone. She turned farther around and, through the window, saw Ambrose. A cap tilted jauntily on his head. He was picking up the tennis net from the ground. He shook it out as if there were raindrops on it, then he pulled it taut. It fell to the ground once more. The two were laughing, man and boy, though they could only faintly be heard.

  Lottie stood at the edge of the tennis court, the camera dangling down by her side. She reached for the other part of the net and tautened it, bent down to pick a tennis racquet off the ground.

  —Your daughter, said Brown. Her name escapes me.

  —Lottie.

  —Ah, yes.

  —If you can give her a few moments for a photograph later, we’d be very grateful.

  —And who is the young man?

  —Our driver. He works at the RAF in London. He drove all night to pick us up in Southampton. Then brought us here.

  —We will have to invite him to lunch then.

  The china rattled in Brown’s fingers as he put the cup and saucer back down on the table.

  —Is he a pilot?

  —He wanted to be. He works in communications. Why?

  —One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.

  The saucer dropped noisily on the glass table, and he put his hand into his pocket. Even through the cloth, his fingers were trembling. He stood and made his way through the room.

  —You will forgive me? said Brown, and he went towards the door. He paused a moment, his back still turned. I have something I must attend to.

  HE CAME DOWNSTAIRS fifteen minutes later. His tie was firm against his throat once more, and his cheeks were flushed. He came straight towards Lottie and shook her hand.

  —Pleasure to see you, young lady.

  —And you, sir. If you don’t mind? There’s good light.

  —Ah, yes.

  Lottie jiggled the camera from her shoulder. She guided Brown out to the verandah, asked him to sit on the low stone wall, in front of the rosebushes, overlooking the sea. He placed his walking stick along the top of the wall, squinted a little at the camera, took out a handkerchief, wetted it, shone the top of his shoe.

  The sky behind him was a spectacle of raincloud, gray shot through with blue. A white rosebush drooped over his shoulder.

  —So, Mr. Brown. A question.

  —Ah, a quiz.

  —Do you remember the color of the carpet in the Cochrane Hotel?

  —The carpet? he said.

  —On the stairs.

  Brown shaded his eyes against the light. For a moment the gesture reminded Emily of that she had seen back in Newfoundland a decade ago.

  —Red, he ventured.

  —And in the dining room?

  —Is that correct, red?

  Lottie changed her angle, caught more of the shadow on the side of his face, moved fluidly along the wall.

  —And the name of the road you drove along? To get to Lester’s Field?

  —I see. A photographer’s trick. The Harbour Road, if I’m not mistaken. Do they still have those fishing boats?

  —People still talk about you there, Mr. Brown.

  —Teddy.

  —They talk of you fondly.

  Emily watched her daughter load another roll of film. The exposed roll went into the pocket of her dress. Over the years she had become sharp and skillful: she could reload in seconds.

  —I have a shot of you shaving, she said. Do you recall the basin at the end of the field?

  —We heated it with a bunsen burner.

  —You were leaning forward into the basin.

  —Just in case we were to fly in the evening.

  As she spoke she dragged a chair across the verandah. Without asking, she guided Brown into the chair. He moved without complaint. The cloudshapes behind him shifted.

  —You made our sandwiches, he said. That morning.

  He smiled broadly. She changed her lens, hunkered down close to the ground, shot wide.

  —I’m terribly sorry about your letter.

  —Mother told me.

  —I was awfully neglectful.

  —It got across, Mr. Brown.

  —Indeed, it did.

  She lined up another angle, moved him slightly in the chair.

  —It was green, by the way.

  —Excuse me?

  —The carpet, it was green. In the Cochrane.

  He threw his head back and laughed.

  —I could have sworn it was red.

  Moments later a tennis ball shot high in the air and landed in the rosebushes behind Brown.

  —Careful, he called out to Buster.

  Brown walked across the verandah, and clambered on top of the low wall. He used his walking stick to poke the white ball from among the roses. It took several attempts. A small leaf clung to the edge of the ball.

  Brown stepped down off the wall, arched his back, and flung the ball through the sky with surprising agility. She shot him midthrow, the leaf in flight behind him.

  —Got it, said Lottie.

  IN THE EARLY afternoon they took lunch on the verandah: Brown, Emily, Lottie, Ambrose, Kathleen, and Buster. An array of sandwiches with the crusts carefully cut. A dark fruitcake. A teapot kept warm under an embroidered cozy.

  Emily was not surprised to detect a faint roll of
whiskey coming from Brown. So that was why he had left the room. That was the ease he had felt with the photographs. But why not? He deserved a novelty of sensation, she thought.

  She saw him lean close to Ambrose and touch the young man on the arm.

  —And how are things beyond? asked Brown. In London?

  —Perfectly fine, sir, said Ambrose.

  —That’s quite an assignment. To drive these pretty ladies.

  —Yes, sir.

  —You’re Irish?

  —Northern Ireland, sir.

  —Jolly good. I like the Irish.

  Ambrose faltered a moment, said nothing. Brown sat back in the chair, nodded, gazed off into the distance. His jacket flap fell open. She saw the peep of a silver flask. Kathleen placed her hand on Brown’s forearm to lock him there, to keep him to the ground, as if he might, in alcohol, take off. He nodded to her as if to say, Yes, dear, but just this one time, allow me that.

  The afternoon light lapped around the verandah. At the end of lunch Buster bounded off towards the tennis court. He came back holding three racquets and a white tennis ball.

  —Play tennis with me, please, please, please.

  Lottie and Ambrose glanced at each other, stood up from the table, took the boy’s hand, strode across the lawn together.

  —Ah, said Brown.

  Emily watched from her garden chair. The net had been fixed and tightened. Her daughter bounced the tennis ball up and down on the racquet strings several times, then knocked it across the net towards Ambrose. A fine spray of moisture rose from the ball in the sunlight.

  BROWN WAS SLEEPING by the time they left. Curled in a lawn chair with a blanket up at his neck. A caterpillar worked its way, green, across the stonework. Brown’s eyelids flickered. Emily reached out and touched his hand, cupped her palm around the edge of his fingers. His body shivered and it looked as though he might waken, but then he turned sideways in his chair and blew air through his lips, exhausted.

  Emily stepped away from his chair. She would not mention the alcohol in her article, she knew. No need. No point. She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity. To hear a whoop as he flew out over the treetops.

  She tucked the flap of the blanket around his chin. His shallow breath on her fingers. Small hairs that he had neglected to shave. She turned and shook Kathleen’s hand.

  —Thank you for your hospitality.

  —You’re most welcome.

  —Your husband is a fine man.

  —He’s tired, that’s all, said Kathleen.

  Ambrose cranked the car and put it in gear. He eased forward. They curved down the road, under the chestnut trees. It would, he said, be a long drive to London.

  Emily glanced back and saw Kathleen and Buster standing on the steps of the house. Kathleen had her arms wrapped around her son, her chin perched on his head. The gravel crunched under the wheels.

  The trees bent down to the road. The twigs jostled. A small wind shivered the leaves. Buster broke away and Kathleen turned, then disappeared into her house.

  WHEN EMILY WOKE hours later—in the car, in the gathering dark—she was not surprised to see her daughter asleep with her head on Ambrose’s shoulder. She looked as if she were fitting into something already made to her shape. Lottie’s hair spread across the lapel of his jacket.

  Ambrose held steady to the wheel, driving as carefully as he could so as not to disturb her.

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, they were married. The wedding took place in Belfast, in a Protestant church off the Antrim Road. It was September, but the day was delivered on a coattail of summer. Leaves skittered green on the trees. A flock of starlings harried the air.

  Emily and Lottie arrived in a white car, the ribbons pulled taut in the breeze. They entered through the black ironwork gates. Emily stepped out carrying the hem of her daughter’s lace. For a moment she even forgot her walking cane. Only a tinge of arthritis. She crossed the shadow into the dark of the church. The pews were filled to near bursting point. Dark suits and elaborate hats. Young men in RAF uniforms. Girls in long flapper dresses. Old women with a strategic handkerchief tucked in their sleeves. Ambrose’s family owned a mill that specialized in aero-linen. Many of the employees had come along. Hard-looking men in gray suits, flat hats stuffed in their pockets. There were bouquets of flowers from Short Brothers, from Vickers, one in the shape of a Wellington glider. Emily sat in the front pew, conspicuous in her aloneness, but she didn’t care: the young vicar began the service by holding his arms high in the air, like a man about to guide a plane towards landing. Emily had not been in a church in many years. She listened closely to the service as it unfolded. She was pleased by the lilt of the northern accent.

  A gauntlet was made as the couple walked down the aisle. Ambrose appeared embarrassed at the fuss. His cheeks flushed red underneath his gray top hat. Lottie wore flat heels so as not to tower over him. A rain of white confetti came down outside. The couple kissed on the steps of the church.

  In the hotel afterwards, Emily was taken outside to the small garden. Ambrose’s father brought her a chair. She sat in a square of sunshine, her cane positioned across her lap. There were a number of ice sculptures on the lawn. The afternoon melted slowly around her. The hard cry of horses, harnessed up in a Missouri dawn. Her mother’s overcoat shaped by the wind. Her father’s eyelashes frozen together. Ice shard. Prairie storm. It was odd to Emily how life could be so very expansive and still return to the elements of childhood. Lottie in the corridors of the Cochrane Hotel. Walking down along Paton Street on her first day at Prince of Wales. The day Lottie first discovered a camera, a bellowed Graflex. How, at Wimbledon, just four months ago, they sat together at center court, mother and daughter, watching the quarter final, and Lottie turned to tell her what she already knew. The lover’s fine sense of crisis. The circumference of Lottie’s world had shifted. She would stay now. She had fallen in love. Emily nursed a moment of joy that turned to jealousy and then returned once more to a fascination with the swerve of the world. What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other. The long blades of an ice saw cutting sparks into a block of cold. Sharpening the blades, seating them, slotting them into handles. Leaning down to make the cut. A brief leap of ember in the air.

  She felt suddenly grateful. You wake one morning in the howl of a northern Missouri winter, and moments later you are on the deck of a transatlantic cruiser, and then you are alone in Rome, and a week after that you are in Barcelona, or on a train through the French countryside, or back in a hotel in St. John’s watching a plane break the sky, or in a hat shop in St. Louis watching the rain come down outside, and then, just as suddenly, you sit in a hotel in Ireland watching your daughter across the lawn, moving between the ice sculptures, passing a tray of champagne amongst a hundred wedding guests. Emily could sense the skip in her life, almost like the jumping of a pen. The flick of ink across a page. The great surprise of the next stroke. The boundlessness of it all. There was something in it akin to a journey across the sky, she thought, the sudden shock of new weather, a wall of sunshine, or a pelt of hail, or the emergence from a bank of cloud.

  She had a sudden urge to write to Teddy Brown and tell him that she understood entirely now, in this raw moment, why he did not want to fly anymore.

  Emily rose from the chair and moved across the lawn. Her walking cane sunk into the soft ground. She found herself attended to by a number of Belfast widowers. They leaned in close. She was surprised by their flirtation. They were eager to meet an American, they said. Short, earnest men, well-shaved, teetotalers. She could imagine them easily in their orange sashes and their bowler hats. What would she do now? they asked. What part of the world was she bound for next? They had heard she lived in a hotel in Newfoundland, and not to be rude, but was that any place for a woman? Would she not like to find herself a place to settle down? They’d be quite happy to show her around if she de
cided to stay in Northern Ireland. There was a fine spot in Portaferry. She should see the glens of Antrim. The windy beaches of Portrush.

  The dinner bell rang in the late afternoon. She joined Ambrose’s parents at their table. He was a short man with a generous laugh, she a stout woman under a net of tight hair. They were glad to have a Newfoundland girl in their family, they said. Many of their own had gone west over the years: there weren’t many came in the other direction. They grew curiously quiet when Emily told them the story of Lily Duggan. A maid? From Dublin? Is that so? Her name was Duggan, you say? She thought for a moment that they were interested in the particulars of the story. The details returned to her, sharply—the clothes uncracking upon the warm bar of the stove, the groan of the ice as it was pulled across the lake, a glove slowly blooming with blood, her mother looking up from the body of her father—until Mr. Tuttle leaned across the table and tapped her gently on the forearm and asked if this Lily Duggan went to church, and she launched again into the story, until, finally he leaned across the table in exasperation: Was this Lily Duggan a Protestant, then? It sounded as if it were the only question worth asking. Emily thought a moment that she would leave the answer unsaid, that it didn’t deserve the question, but she was on new turf, and it was her daughter’s wedding, and she told them that Lily had converted to marry, and she saw a quiet relief step into their faces, and a straightforwardness came over the table again. Later she saw Ambrose’s father at the bar singing Soldiers of the Queen. She shuffled her way up the hotel to go to bed. She was stopped on the stairs by Lottie and Ambrose. It was hard to believe: Mr. Ambrose Tuttle and Mrs. Lottie Tuttle. How odd to think that she and Lottie had spent virtually every day of their lives together. This, then, was the moment of release. It was far easier than she had imagined. She kissed her daughter and turned on the staircase, labored her way upwards. Dark drew down. She slept with an abandon, her gray hair splashed around the sheets.

  She was taken the following day south to Strangford Lough. A small convoy of motorcars. Out into the countryside. Over the years the Tuttle family had owned a number of islands along the lake. Among the marshlands and tiny islands that they called pladdies. The windbent trees. The curving country roads. For a wedding present Ambrose and Lottie had been given five acres with a cottage that they could use as their summer home. A beautiful, dilapidated affair with a thatched roof and a blue half-door. An overgrown lawn stepped down to the lake. A small fishing shack sagged on the edge of the water. A crew of magpies perched in the swaying lakeside treetops.