The Challenging Heights (7 page)

He tossed across the menu he’d been scribbling on. On the back was an expert caricature of Dicken sitting in a miniature aeroplane wearing RAF rondels facing a caricature of Udet himself in another miniature plane wearing the German cross.

‘You could earn a living at this,’ Dicken said.

Udet grinned. ‘I prefer flying. Und shooting. Not at men. At targets. You fancy a flip? We haf an old Rumpler. Dual controls. I could fly one half. You could fly the other.’

What time they left the night club Dicken had no idea. Udet’s wife and Janzi Lechner had both disappeared with most of the other customers, and the waiters were standing in the doorway yawning and waiting to close the place. They had drunk a lot of what Udet called ‘sekt’ – sparkling Rhine wine – and Dicken woke up on a settee to see the numbers of aeroplanes decorating the walls with British and French cockades.

Udet appeared soon afterwards. ‘Some grosstadtbummel,’ he grinned. ‘Some pub crawl! Lo goes to stay mit a friend. She often does when I am out on the tiles. Let’s get out to the airfield. We’ll pick up coffee there.’

The German pilots made Dicken welcome, then they went outside to watch Udet perform stunts in an old Fokker DVII marked D-UDET, trailing his wing tip inches above the ground as he howled across the field.

He seemed to have sobered up when he reappeared – even become sombre. ‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘Lo will leave me. She says she cannot stand my bad habits.’ He stared round. ‘You’re unlucky today. Lothar von Richthofen – the Ritttmeister’s brother – comes in occasionally. Also Bruno Loerzer. He’s around a lot mit Goering, who takes over the Richthofen Circus when the Rittmeister iss killed. The Iron Man, he called himself. All discipline. But he vasn’t a Richthofen, you know, despite what he think. He has gone into politics. Fancies himself as Reichschancellor or something. Let’s haf a drink.’

Like so many flying men who had survived the war, Udet was restless, edgy, itching for excitement in a world that had suddenly become dull. ‘Born in the war; died in the war,’ he said. ‘That’s us flying men.’

That night he took Dicken on another round of the night clubs, this time without his wife or Janzi Lechner. At one point, Dicken remembered him shooting a cigarette out of the mouth of one of his friends, who seemed quite confident that he wouldn’t get the bullet through his head. Whatever else could be said of him, he wasn’t dull and, as he landed back in England, aware that the two nights spent in Berlin with him had been the most interesting he’d passed in almost a year, Dicken realised he was hankering after the lost community feeling of being in the RAF. Disillusioned with the whole commercial scene, he needed to leave Lord Ruffsedge, yet he knew if he did he was probably cutting himself off from aviation altogether. Then, as he was walking down the Mall, he realised he was approaching a tall moustached figure he recognised. It was Sir Hugh Trenchard, by this time firmly in his seat as Chief of Air Staff. To Dicken’s surprise, he stopped in front of him. ‘Quinney, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes, sir, it is.’ It surprised Dicken that the great man even knew of him.

‘What are you doing now?’

‘Flying for Lord Ruffsedge, sir.’

Trenchard peered at him searchingly. ‘Bit dull, isn’t it? Chauffeur to a millionaire.’

Dicken smiled. ‘Yes, sir, it is.’

Trenchard eyed him from his tremendous height, shaggy somehow despite his immaculate civilian clothes and bowler hat. He looked Dicken up and down.

‘I was sorry to lose you,’ he said slowly. ‘The RAF could do with men like you. Why not come back?’

‘You must be mad!’

Clad in surprisingly short skirts and a smart hat, her dark hair done in kiss curls, Zoë Toshack looked more beautiful than Dicken had ever seen her.

‘Fancy wanting to go back to that stuffy lot,’ she said, her contempt enormous. ‘All they’re good for is saluting on parade.’

‘They do a lot of flying,’ Dicken pointed out gently. ‘Good flying. Better than some of these people who’re getting flying a bad name going round the country giving exhibitions to make money.’

She stared at him angrily. She had returned from Canada full of excitement. She had found Casey Harmer, who noticeably had not given her the job she’d hoped for, and for a time she’d belonged to a group of wildcat young men who had flown round the country barnstorming in the ballyhoo atmosphere of a circus. Since returning, footloose and eager for a challenge, she had drifted into the same background in England and, equally inevitably, since she lived in Sussex and Charley Wright operated along the south coast, had thrown in her lot with him. On the table, for Dicken’s perusal, were Canadian posters she’d brought back, billing her as Zoë Toshack, the Zip Girl of the Sky. The praise she had expected from Dicken had not been forthcoming, however, and she was argumentative and defensive.

‘There’s nothing wrong with making money out of flying,’ she said.

‘There is if it’s dangerous.’

‘I’m not afraid.’

‘
I
am,’ Dicken said quietly. ‘You forget I know Charley Wright and I’ve seen some of his machines. They’re badly serviced and badly maintained because he’s neither the money nor the time for anything else.’

She didn’t answer and he looked at her under his eyebrows. She had grown more attractive as age had fined off the roundness of her features and he suspected now that, instead of her envying her older sister, Annys, she might well be envied herself.

‘How’s Annys?’ he asked, trying to change the subject.

‘Finding Arthur Diplock a bit of a bore, I suspect,’ Zoë said shortly. ‘
I
would.’

‘Annys is different from you. She goes with Parasol Percy.’

She grinned at the name they’d given her brother-in-law. ‘I think he feels uniform and what goes with it suits him,’ she said. ‘He’s a squadron leader now and a bit peeved because he feels he ought to have been a wing commander.’

‘He should grumble,’ Dicken said. ‘I’m only a flight lieutenant and the amount of war flying
he
did was virtually nil.’

‘He has several languages,’ she pointed out. ‘And he had the Wing Colonel for his best man and as godfather to his son.’ She smiled, her manner suddenly different, and crossed to Dicken to kiss him. ‘I’m sorry I was sarcastic with you, Dicky Boy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be. You bring out everything that’s bad in me. And knowing you were back where there are aeroplanes –
real
aeroplanes – makes me mad, because that’s where I want to be. That’s the only thing I want to do. And the only way I can do it is flying with Charley Wright. It fetches the crowds when they learn a woman’s flying. They still don’t believe it possible. Male pilots are rare enough to be a curiosity; when a woman flies it makes news.’

‘And when she crashes and kills herself,’ Dicken said dryly, ‘it’s naturally more regrettable and better news than if she were a man.’

She made a gesture of dismissal. ‘In the States there are plenty nowadays. Laura Bromwell was one.’

‘And she’s dead,’ Dicken pointed out quietly.

‘There are plenty more. They’re flying all the time over there. They’re famous. I want to be famous, too. Not just somebody’s wife.’

Dicken didn’t try to argue her out of her ambition. He knew it was impossible. Instead he tried to change her course because he knew that if she stayed too long with Charley Wright and his air circus she’d kill herself. Charley Wright, careless, noisy, hard-drinking, resentful of authority yet curiously attractive to women with his lunatic humour and a flowery manner that could charm the ducks off the water, obviously appealed to her but she was wrong about his skill. She wasn’t even right about Dicken’s proximity to aeroplanes because so far he’d done little since his return to uniform except act as adjutant at No 2 Flying Training School at Duxford. It had come as a shock that the RAF didn’t want him even to demonstrate his skills to newcomers as an instructor.

‘You have to be good to become famous,’ he said gently. ‘Are you good?’

‘Yes, I am. I’ll show you.’

From the field where Charley Wright was operating, she took him up in one of the old dual-control Avros, performing tight turns, loops, spins and stalls for him. Though there were parts of her performance – an apparent inability to hold her height in a tight turn and loops that were sloppy at the top – which were lacking in precision, he found he never had to consider grasping the dual controls to help.

‘Any good at navigation?’ he asked as they clambered from the cockpit.

‘Who’s worried about navigation?’ she demanded.

‘Flying’s more than just doing stunts. Suppose you want to get from one place to another?’

‘Follow the railway line,’ she said. ‘You can come down at every station to read the sign and check your position.’

This kind of flying – what was known as flying by Bradshaw, after the name of the railway guide – was looked on with contempt by skilled navigators. He tried to interest her in the subject, even contrived to teach her some of it, but she either didn’t grasp it or was uninterested, though she was willing enough to fly him about the countryside.

‘Know where you are?’ he asked her through the speaking tube as they came to the coast.

‘Hastings just coming up,’ she said.

‘If you take the trouble to look down there,’ he replied, ‘even you ought to recognise Brighton.’

She was sulky as they landed, and he tried again. ‘If you want to become this famous flier you’re aiming at,’ he said, ‘then learn navigation. The future of aviation’s in long-distance flying. Now they’ve crossed the Atlantic, people are going to find ways of flying to Africa and India. They’ll want to open up the Empire and the people who do it will be those who can get from one place to another without making a mistake. There aren’t any railway stations in the middle of the ocean.’

She gave him a sideways look that was full of reproach and affection at the same time. It jerked at his heart and left him full of guilt that he had not pursued her as ardently as he felt he should; remorse that, because of it, she had drifted into the wrong company; and doubt – tucked away at the back of his mind – because she had never seemed over-eager to rationalise their relationship.

‘Marry me, Zoë,’ he said abruptly.

Her head turned quickly. ‘Why do you ask me that?’

‘Why does any man ask any woman that? I’ve known you since 1914. We’ve been more than friends. You suggested it when I was in Italy in 1918. “Come home and make me an honest woman,” you said. I love you.’

Even as he spoke, he wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. While they’d still been in their teens they had clutched each other in the Toshacks’ summer house on warm summer nights and had finally become lovers during one of his leaves during the war. But little had come of it because shortly afterwards he’d been sent to Italy and had barely seen her since until now.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she was saying slowly. ‘And I think you’re just asking me to get me away from Charley Wright.’

He realised she had hit the nail on the head. There had always been something between them but, though he had a feeling it had never been more than a deep friendship linked with a strong sexual attraction, he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. Not now.

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I expect eventually I shall get posted abroad. They say in Egypt or India you can live like a lord with hordes of servants, so that wives have a wonderful time. You’d get a chance to fly, too, because quite a few people have private aeroplanes and you can pick up war surplus Avros for a song.’

‘What about until you get your posting to India? Would you let me fly with Charley Wright?’

‘If you could manage to give his aeroplanes a pre-flight check that’s more than just a kick at the tyres, a slap at the fuselage and a twang on a bracing wire.’

She laughed and put her arms round him. ‘All right, Dicky Boy,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want.’ She paused then gave a little laugh. ‘You realise, of course, that we shall have to ask Annys to the wedding, and if we ask Annys, we’ll also have to ask her husband, Poisonous Percy.’

‘We’ll balance that out,’ Dicken said, ‘by asking Willie Hatto. His wife, the Hon. Caroline, comes from one of the best families in the country so she ought to more than balance out Percy.’

The wedding was held in Zoë’s home village, Deane. Diplock arrived at the last minute, looking faintly embarrassed and trying to pretend he’d been held back by an unexpected appointment. Dicken wasn’t deluded. Diplock was wary of him and Hatto, because he knew they were well aware of his cowardice and trickery during the late Great War, and he even seemed to be looking round him for Foote, the American, the third member of the triangle of anarchy that had plagued him during that period. Annys, looking beautiful and self-satisfied, almost as if she wore the rank as well as Diplock and was aware that it was higher than that of the man her sister was marrying, was inclined to be condescending to everybody but the Hon. Caroline, to whom she tended almost to touch her forelock.

There was a vague feeling throughout the reception that Diplock might try to introduce some alien and uncomfortable note as Hatto, quite unnoticed by Annys, had at Diplock’s wedding, but he seemed to prefer to stay well in the background.

‘After all,’ Hatto murmured between the congratulatory telegrams, ‘Parasol Percy hasn’t changed. He was never the type to face up fair and square to anything that might be difficult.’

Nevertheless, it probably seemed odd to the other guests that two of the three RAF officers present – all in dress uniform and wearing their medals – should totally ignore the third.

Charley Wright, his red face matching the red carnation in his buttonhole and the red of his eyeballs, insisted on kissing the bride. ‘You haven’t got away with her completely, my old friend and comrade of the desperate years,’ he told Dicken.

‘She’s promised she’ll still fly for me on the days when I’m handy. In fact,’ he added, ‘I rather hoped she’d marry me. But then, what has William Albert Charles Wright got to compare with Dick Quinney, who holds every gong in the book except the ultimate, to get which you have to be dead.’