The Atlantic Sky (9 page)

Which was exactly what Patsy did. The next two trips went like sunlit, starlit, neon-lit flashes. She did her first ever trip on her own with Captain Laycock. And, exactly as Cynthia had said, he was helpful, and wonderfully easy to fly with. Patsy found herself doing better than her best. Because she wasn’t being watched, and because she wasn’t nervous, her hands were deft and her feet seemed tireless.

And the next trip—once more to Montreal—she enjoyed, too, although they had head winds all the way westbound.

‘Another good trip,’ she told Cynthia, when the other girl arrived in from New York, a day later. ‘And don’t you think somehow, it seems to be getting easier?’

Cynthia yawned. ‘I’ve got news for you—’ she began, and looked at her friend sideways.

‘No,’ Patsy sighed. ‘Don’t tell me!’ That expression of Cynthia’s was only used on the airline for the
most unpleasant
news.

‘You can guess.’ Cynthia kicked off her shoes and massaged her feet. ‘They feel as though I’d walked. There
and
back.’

‘One of us is out with Prentice,’ Patsy said hopefully.

‘Dead right!’ Cynthia rubbed her heels and then grinned. ‘And it’s not me.’

‘My
next
trip?’

Cynthia nodded. ‘I spared a moment to pop in to Ops, and there was old Jennings just pinning up the roster.’ She flung herself into one of Mrs. Waterhouse’s best chairs and closed her eyes. ‘I’m beginning,’ she said wearily, ‘to see what Janet means about flying.’

‘I’ll make you a cuppa,’ Patsy said. ‘You’re sure you didn’t make a mistake?’ she called over her shoulder.

‘What about?’ Cynthia still lay with her eyes closed. ‘About you being out with Prentice?’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Sorry, old thing. You know my 6/5 eyesight and all that. Not a hope.’

Patsy made the tea and poured it thoughtfully. Cynthia took one of the cups, and began to drink thirstily. ‘Ah, that’s better. Cheer up, child! He can’t actually eat you. Sometimes, I admit, he looks as though he’d like to. You especially, Patsy ... just to be cheerful. But he doesn’t really scare
me.’
She laughed airily.

Patsy stared at her meaningly across the rim of her cup. ‘Well,’ Cynthia said, ‘he doesn’t
petrify
me...’

Patsy still stared.

‘Well, not absolutely and completely and utterly petrify...’ Cynthia smiled apologetically. She looked again at Patsy. ‘All right, he has me trembling in my size fours from the moment I set eyes on him. Is that better?’

‘Much,’ said Patsy, and smiled.

‘But what can we do about it? Absolutely nothing. He may,’ she said unconvincingly, ‘have a heart of gold. No? Silver, then? No, I thought not. Not even lead?’

‘Stone,’ Patsy said. ‘Flint.’

Cynthia started to get up and stretched. ‘It’s me for bed now. You’ll probably find that it isn’t so bad after all. Oh, and by the way, I nearly forgot. I saw Geoff and he’s got some free seats for the ice show. You know how some of the firms send in their tickets for adverts and all that. Well, he drew four ... and wasn’t he a poppet—he suggested he took the
three
of us, if Janet’s back by Thursday.’

‘Sounds all right,’ Patsy said. ‘If she’ll go.’

‘Which she won’t. But nice of him to offer.’

‘There may be a last-minute change, of course,’ said Patsy.

Cynthia raised her thin eyebrows. ‘Are you with us, my dear? Change the ice show? No, don’t tell me. Change the roster.’ She took Patsy’s arm firmly. ‘Bed for you, child. And me, too. Anyway,’ she ended heartily, ‘he’s probably heaps nicer than we think he is.’

They went silently up the stairs. At the first landing, Cynthia said, ‘And we’ll enjoy the ice show ... and you’ve got three more days stand-off first.’

But the ice show, which was colourful and spectacular and to which Janet did (very surprisingly) go, came and went. And the three days’ stand-off was two and then one and then none, before Patsy had time to do more than write letters and telephone her mother and wash and iron and worry about the trip.

She began to notice all the small things about her pre-flight preparations to see if they gave her an omen of what kind of luck she would have on the trip. Mrs. Waterhouse was late with her breakfast, which was a bad sign, and her hair which she had washed the night before was too soft to lie neatly under her cap. But the day was bright. Sunshine slanted along the grey London pavements. And the crew car, which came quickly along the road and pulled itself up with a flourish in front of Mrs. Waterhouse’s gate was, like herself, dead on time.

Mrs. Waterhouse, of course, never missed the opportunity to come to the door and wave her off.

‘Have a good trip,’ she said to Patsy in a conspiratorial whisper, eyeing the five male occupants of the nice modern vehicle which allowed you as good a view as if they’d been arranged in a shop window.

‘Goodbye,’ Patsy called over her shoulder.

‘Cheerio,’ Mrs. Waterhouse called, rather less surely, having met Captain Prentice’s unsmiling eyes.

Then he turned and acknowledged Patsy’s ‘Good afternoon, sir,’ with a slight nod and a brief ‘Good afternoon.’

‘Nice day,’ the radio officer said, moving up a little at the back to make room for Patsy. ‘First on your own?’ he asked, and smiled at her nicely.

‘Third!’ Patsy said so indignantly that they all smiled. Except Captain Prentice, of course. In his seat by the driver, his back was towards them, and it expressed nothing at all except the strictest airline rectitude.

The conversation continued in vague companionable snatches. They talked about their stand-off and what they’d done or hadn’t been able to do because it wasn’t long enough. Someone else had been to the ice show and the navigator had seen Patsy with Geoff in the coffee bar afterwards. It made the journey up to the airport pass quickly. The easy friendliness warmed the atmosphere up a lit
tl
e, despite the chill of Captain Prentice’s calm disapproval.

‘Here we go again,’ the navigator said, picking up his brief-case, as the crew car stopped outside the Operations block.

Patsy heard Captain Prentice tell the engineer to go straight to the aircraft, while the navigator and the First Officer obediently followed him into Operations. Then she walked down the pavement and across the apron, towards the Catering Section. She was beginning to get the feel of her job. Just as her uniform and her cap and her shoes had
moulded
themselves to her,
so now, she and the job had to know each other and somehow fitted in.

There were eighty-two passengers on the manifest. There was no note to say that
Sir Somebody-or-other
would be travelling on her service and commending him to her special care. The menu was only very slightly different from her previous trips. There was pineapple juice instead of soup, and fruit salad instead of strawberries.

But all the same, the job was not well enough known to her to have become stale or just routine. It was still quite exciting to check your stores and equipment like a well
-
trained mother of the eighty-two passengers, and the five crew that she had to feed and care for. It was still thrilling to see under Aircraft G-AHAK at the top of the sheet, the sum total of their little world summarized in the words that called up sailing ships and storms and stress—ninety-three Souls on Board.

But for fifteen minutes after she mounted the passenger steps,
she
was the only soul on board, inside the empty cabin of the Astroliner. She filled up the galley refrigerator, checked the water supply and that the taps were working. Then she set up her bar and her equipment, saw that the cleaners had done a good job on the cabin interior, laid out lovingly the exotic creams and powders and lotions in the Ladies’ Powder Room. The cellular blankets and the small pillow for each passenger she folded and stowed neatly on the baggage rack, checking at the same time that the company folders, complete with a map of the North Atlantic adorned with dolphins and sea-monsters, a picture postcard of the Astroliner they were flying in, a coloured pencil and a comment card, were right in front of everyone’s nose, and seeing that the little waxed bags in case of sickness were handy (but not obtrusively so) while the lap straps were easily and neatly placed on every seat.

‘And that’s that,’ she said to herself, because there was still no one else around. She counted off her jobs on the fingers of both hands, and there didn’t seem to be one left unaccounted for.

And then suddenly, the First Officer opened the flight deck door and came through the deserted cabin towards her.
‘All set?’
he asked.

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ Patsy said. ‘Just waiting for the passengers.’ The First Officer, she noticed, had a kind and gentle face. The sort of person who would
not
get in Captain Prentice’s way. ‘Is it a good forecast?’

‘Fair to middling poor,’ he smiled. ‘Could be better. Could be a good deal worse.’

Patsy nodded and smiled. She was not unduly daunted. Already she had discovered that pilots were like farmers. In their lifelong battle with the weather, they never handed their adversary a compliment.

The First Officer glanced out of the window. ‘They’re coming now, I think. Your passengers. Yes, here they are. I can see Miss Fairways. Do you know her?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Patsy leant out of the open doorway, and smiled down.at the vanguard of her
protégés
for the flight. ‘At least, only by sight. I saw her the last time I was out with Captain Maynard and Captain Prentice.’

‘Quite a coincidence!’ the First Officer said, and laughed. But Patsy was only half listening. She was looking down at Miss Monica Fairways, and
really
seeing her for the first time.

‘Hello,’ Miss Fairways said from the bottom of the metal steps to Patsy at the top. Patsy murmured back at her. Now she could see why even Captain Prentice fell in love with her. The enormous dark eyes, the pink-and-white petal skin, the really jet-black hair would be enough. But for good measure, there was the tall, slender figure, the full red mouth, and the delicately modelled nose.

‘I said, have a good trip,’ Miss Fairways called up, and Patsy said, ‘thank you, and went on adding to her mental list die white even teeth and the soft husky voice.

But before she had entirely completed her catalogue of Miss Fairways’ many and beautiful attributes, she noticed that the Traffic girl had not done a smart right-about-tum after leaving her passengers and proceeded straight back to the Section. No—she had hurried, quite gracefully but still very quickly, under the port wing, and as the first passenger said his name was O’Rourke and Patsy said that seat twenty-one was the last but three on the starboard side, she was deep in what appeared to be a pleasant conversation with Captain Prentice.

‘Good evening, sir. Yes, just on the right. Shall I take your coat?’ She went on saying, ‘Good evening, madam. Yes, it’s a lovely evening, isn’t it?’ And yet all the time she was wondering with half her mind if they were
still
talking and if so—about what?

And then the last passenger was coming up the steps. Or rather the last but one. For Mrs. Branston (it must be, because she was the only one left unmarked on her list) was followed slowly by Timothy John. Patsy had heard, with a
fair
degree of disbelief, the other, older stewardesses boast that they could always tell the passengers who would be difficult. But now—a sign of maturity no doubt—she could feel the stirring of that very same instinct in her bones.

Not that it would have needed a psychologist to tell, because it was fairly obvious. Timothy John did not want to come aboard.

‘Good evening, Mrs. Branston,’ Patsy said welcomingly, and as Timothy John was still trying to anchor his mother to the last step of terra-firma, she said with a crisp elder-sisterly wisdom to her very last passenger, ‘I have some sweets
...
a lot of
sweets inside.’

And half an hour later, Timothy John was firmly established aboard Astroliner Able King as the perfect antidote to Captain Prentice. Patsy had reported up front, had taken round the magazines, the cigarettes, the sweets. She had watched a seemingly effortless take-off without technically appreciating anything more than the sweet swift sensation of rising up smoothly into the clear evening sky. She had taken a load of tea and ham sandwiches up front, and been undeterred by the brusque ungrateful nod of her captain. For every time she walked down the aisle, she saw the small tautly frightened figure, bolt upright in the seat beside his mother, of the Boy Who Didn’t Like Flying.

At first, the barley sugars, the coloured fruit drops and the packets of chewing gum had helped. Then Patsy had found a small advertising model of an aircraft (of much more manageable proportions than the one he was flying in) which he still clutched in his hand. But as the lights of London fell back and then died away under their starboard wing, and the four yellow-tailed engines continued their steady roar towards the black sky ahead, Timothy Branston began to whimper.

‘Perhaps he’ll go to sleep,’ Patsy suggested, sitting herself down in the seat in front of the two of them, and smiling cheerfully to show that the thin banshee noise of a frightened child’s wailing was disturbing to no one. ‘Let me read him a story, while you have a cup of coffee.’ She went back quickly, poured a cup from the urn, sifted quickly through the pile of children’s books suitable for a five-year
-
old, and then walked leisurely down the few paces of the aisle to the Branstons’ seats. ‘Coffee, Mrs. Branston?’ she said, handing her a small tray. ‘Biscuits are there if you’d like them.’