The Infinite Air (39 page)

‘I’ll ask the landlady to call him,’ Jean said firmly.

She left the room for a few minutes and returned to find Nellie standing at the window, her face towards the sea. She turned to Jean, her eyes glazing, as she began to fall. Jean rushed forward to catch her, holding her tightly as she guided her towards a couch, where Nellie collapsed. ‘Mother, don’t leave me, darling,’ Jean implored.

Nellie murmured, ‘Now none of that or you’ll make me feel unhappy.’

And then she was gone.

The Spanish doctor, who had been called, pushed open the door, walked over, closed Nellie’s eyes and crossed himself.

‘She’s not dead,’ Jean cried frantically.

‘Her spirit is moving away from us. Talk to her for a little while, perhaps she’s still listening to you,’ the doctor said. ‘Let her hear that you are releasing her in a joyful way.’

JEAN HAD NOW TO FIND A PLACE TO BURY NELLIE.
She turned to the vice-consul in Puerto de la Cruz, some distance away. ‘It must be Protestant,’ she said.

He suggested the Anglican cemetery there — very old, very
respectable, he said. Jean prepared her mother for burial. She ordered a mahogany coffin, lined with glass and padded with mauve satin and, when the time came, lifted her mother’s seemingly weightless body, and placed her in it. How, she wondered, had she not noticed how tiny Nellie had become?

As she asked, a white hearse took Nellie to the All Saints Church, a simple stone building. Jean stood alone at the front. The vice-consul and the vicar’s wife arrived for the service, but when they saw Jean, her manner warned them that she didn’t want company. They stood at the back. An organist played ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’, and the vicar, as Jean had discussed with him, delivered a eulogy. The casket was placed in a niche in a wall, so that, if she wished, Jean could take it with her if she left Tenerife.

When the service was over, the vicar suggested she might like to return to the vicarage where his wife would make some tea. Jean gave him a withering look and turned on her heel.

Later, she returned to see the vicar and apologised. ‘Mother’s service was beautiful,’ she said, ‘just what I wanted. But I had to be on my own, you understand?’

When he said, gently, that he did, she explained that she planned never to leave Tenerife without Nellie.

Soon she would buy a tiny apartment in Puerto de la Cruz, a small desperate act of self-preservation, before grief overtook her, like an illness.

Melancholy was how Churchill might have described it. She had heard how Diana Churchill had committed suicide, some years before. Now she, herself, was fighting to stay alive, but she didn’t have a name for this continuous sadness. She slept black, dreamless sleeps, eating when she remembered, walked endlessly when she finally dragged herself from bed, and visited the wall where Nellie’s coffin had been placed each day. ‘I love you, darling,’ she would whisper.

After a time she did begin to dream again. Slowly, at first. There was a morning she woke up and thought she smelled sulphur, heard mud bubbling in the ground. Another night, towards morning, she
was woken by a dream she had to fight to remember. She saw vaguely the depth of caves, a woman in black. The next night, it was the scent of wild strawberries. She put the light on to see if her hands were stained with juice. This seemed better. She rose early and went to the markets, a basket over her arm to collect fruit.

Sometimes people tried to speak to her, but she would turn away.

She began to dream more often of Kitty, the woman in the house near the caves, and wished she had returned to see her again. She was, surely, long dead. Jean would have liked to talk to her about solitude. She imagined the morning light, by which the old woman could decide how to spend her day, whether to lie in bed a little longer, or go to the verandah and listen to the cicadas in the grass, the sound of the birds or, in the winter, to listen to the sweet singing rain on the tin roof of the old house, creaking near the sea. Then she remembered Kitty’s deafness. But I still know it’s there, she had said of the sighing macrocarpa.

As she knew Nellie’s bones were close, she wanted to stay near them. If she stayed there long enough she believed, sooner or later, her mother’s face would come back to her, too. For now, it escaped her.

Tenerife would be her home for the next sixteen years broken, in time, by forays back into the world. But these were still a long way off.

CHAPTER 35

FRED WROTE TO JEAN AND ASKED HER TO COME HOME.
It was his last letter before his death, a year after Nellie’s. John wrote and offered her a home with him. He had stayed in New Zealand until Fred died, but now he was going back to England. Jean didn’t reply.

This was the pattern of her days. She would eat breakfast, put on a large hat and leave the apartment to walk the town, or into the hills, have an early meal at a café where she usually read a newspaper, and then retire home to bed. Apart from regular haircuts, and laundry that kept her clothes spotless, her appearance didn’t concern her much. Sometimes she read books, but the words soon blurred and lost their meaning.

Jean wondered if she were dying, too. It was the dreams that persuaded her that she wasn’t. There was light in them now, even though her days appeared dark. Three years had passed: it was 1969. On an impulse, she booked herself a flight to London, and made an appointment with a Harley Street specialist. After a thorough check, he told her she was in perfect health, her body more like that of a woman half her age. He listened with patience when she described the shadowy life she was living in Tenerife, the way her hands sat in her lap some days and she didn’t know what they were doing there and who they belonged to, the way she woke each day with a sense of hope behind her eyelids, and how it disappeared the moment she opened them.

‘That is grief,’ he said. ‘One day, you’ll wake up and your mother’s death will seem a little further removed. There will come a morning when it’s not the first thing you think about.’

‘How can you be sure of that?’

‘It’s true that some people die of grief, usually because they take their own lives, or neglect themselves so badly that they perish.’ His voice was measured and kind. ‘But, Miss Batten, you’ve come to see me, which suggests that deep down you want to survive. You’ve had a great deal of practice at surviving the odds, wouldn’t you agree?’

He talked to her at length, prescribed some medication and made another appointment for her to visit him. He was sure, he said, that she would come back to London.

On her return to Tenerife, almost on cue, an invitation arrived for Jean. British Petroleum and the Royal Aero Club were planning to commemorate the anniversary of Ross and Keith Smith’s first England-to-Australia flight, fifty years earlier. Would she like to start the race at Gatwick, with yachtsman Sir Francis Chichester?

Requests had arrived from time to time through the circuitous Barclay’s Bank address that she now used. She had sent routine brief notes of thanks and a refusal. But that morning, as she ate breakfast on her balcony, something stirred inside her. In her bedroom, she looked at her reflection in the mirror. It was a long time since she had studied herself. The woman who looked back at her now was sixty years old, and small lines had developed around her eyes. The dark hair was streaked with grey. This was the face of a woman who had been noted for her beauty, and now she would be lost in a crowd. That was what she had wanted, of course, but suddenly she wasn’t sure. The invitation was tempting. And the moment she recognised this temptation for what it was, she understood that she might recover from the grip of her despair, that the thaw had truly set in.

Her reply to the invitation was swift.
Thank you, I will be there
, she cabled.

But before the race, there were things to be done. She flew to London where she attended a round of beauty clinics, make-up lessons, hair-colouring sessions, and shopped for clothes. The way women looked astounded her, their tiny skirts just covering their bottoms, their long boots, their eye-liner a work of art. Carnaby
Street was the place to go, a girl on a bus told her, when she asked where she bought her clothes: Mary Quant. The Beatles in Abbey Road. This was all news to Jean. Her spirits soared.

Her re-emergence startled people. Some had to be reminded who she was. But there were scores of photographers and reporters at the beginning of the air race, and the newspapers and radio stations soon picked up a story at their elbow. Her face was in the limelight again. A reporter was foolish enough to express the belief held in many quarters that she had died. She demonstrated how alive she was with a number of high kicks.

The race organisers had booked her into the Waldorf Hotel, where she held court for the media, while the race was in progress. None of the competitors managed to break her own solo record, which had now stood for thirty-three years, and this was cause for still more excitement.

She was asked frequently to comment on women’s liberation. This puzzled her. In spite of the new styles, she couldn’t see that anything else had changed. ‘When I was flying, I was usually the only girl,’ she told one reporter. ‘But I was accepted as just another pilot. There wasn’t any antagonism, oh no. But then nobody took me seriously until I started breaking men’s records.’

When it was all over, she found herself standing in the street by herself. The thought of going straight back to Tenerife didn’t appeal. In another impulsive moment, she walked into a travel agent’s office and bought herself a ticket to New Zealand.