Bad Girls Good Women

Julia opened her clenched fists. Her fingernails had left red arcs in the skin of her palms and she was sweaty between her shoulder blades, but she felt her fear loosening its grip.

Josh took his hands off the controls and casually unfolded a map. The plane hummed on, pointing its nose into the blue haze.

‘I thought we’d head out over the Channel,’ Josh announced, ‘and then take a look at the French coast.’

‘That sounds fine,’ Julia murmured. She thought, France. She had never left England in her life. Fascination overcame Julia’s fear.

The Channel appeared beneath them, the sheeny water dotted with tiny ships that drew a white gull’s feather of wake behind them.

Josh pointed ahead and said, ‘Look, there’s France. Cap Gris Nez.’

A headland pointing into the sea, with brackets of beaches on either side of it. Then came the French countryside, bigger fields lined with poplars instead of fleecy elms, whitewashed villages instead of grey ones. When Josh said that it was time to turn back Julia was ready, and the roll of the horizon and giddy veering of the landscape didn’t bring the sweat out on her skin.

‘Do you like it?’ Josh asked her.

She nodded carefully. ‘It makes everything look so beautiful.’

‘We’re almost home,’ he told her at last.

Julia was wondering how he would find the strip of tarmac amongst the little, domestic jungle of the English countryside when she heard Josh say, ‘Shall we have five minutes’ fun first?’

She just caught sight of his face, his white smile and a new glint in his eyes, before everything overturned.

The wing-tip beside her flipped up and the blue, innocent dome of the sky revolved and disappeared under the earth, where fields and trees leapt up at her and she fell helplessly towards them so that her stomach sprang suffocatingly into her mouth, and her mouth opened, gagged by terror. She felt her seat straps bite into her shoulders and she was pressed into the hard contours of her seat, and then they were over and sky was coming up again to take its place over her head.

She heard Josh laughing. ‘Better than the fairground, any day. That’s a sideways roll. Now the other way, and over she goes.’ The same terrifying plunge, the same displacement of earth and sky. Julia closed her eyes and she heard herself whispering, Stop. Please stop.

‘Those are the simplest aerobatics manoeuvres,’ Josh was saying, as if they were strolling safely with their feet on a London pavement. ‘Now let’s try this one.’

Tipping forwards now, so that the ground leapt for them again, greedy beneath them and then over their heads. There was a cough, like the engine’s apology. Then nothing but awesome, whistling silence. Julia saw a blade of the propellor motionless with the exquisite, remote safety of the Kent countryside etched behind it. They swooped downwards in the silence.

Julia screamed, just once. ‘Josh!’

The engine started up again at once. The white wing-tip steadied itself at the edge of the her field of vision and they were flying instead of falling. Julia’s head fell back against her seat. She was cold now, and wet down the length of her back and between her thighs. Josh’s hand touched her fist. How could he be so warm, so sure of what he was doing?

‘The engine …’ she whispered.

‘I cut it out. We were gliding. It’s nothing. I’m sorry to frighten you. Look, I’ll take us down now.’

When Julia opened her eyes again the airstrip was ahead and below, and she could see the Nissen huts and the mechanics in a group, and the MG waiting for them beyond. The ground came closer, and the perspectives were almost right again; she felt a gentle bump as the wheels made contact with solid earth and the huts and trees whisked past them as they slowed, ran to the edge of the strip, and then swung round and taxied back to the line of aircraft.

Julia sat very still, trying to swallow against the pressure that was rising in her throat. Josh cut the engine again and undid her seat buckle for her. Another mechanic opened the cabin door and held out his hand to help her out. The fresh air blew in her face. Julia stood on the tarmac but it swayed under her feet, and then tilted upwards. Her knees were buckling.

‘Josh. Where’s the …?’

He took one look at her face. ‘Over there. Near door in the nearest hut.’

Julia couldn’t run, but she reached the hut somehow. She pushed the door open and saw a roller towel, a cracked mirror and a washbasin.

She ran the last steps, and was sick into the basin.

She was leaning against the wall, empty and shaking, when Josh came in.

‘Oh, darling,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He put one arm around her waist, and with his free hand he ran the taps in the basin. He took a handkerchief out of the pocket of his leather jacket and soaked it in cold water. Then he wiped her mouth with it, and held it against her forehead.

Julia closed her eyes. If the lino floor would just open up and swallow her, that would be enough.

Josh smoothed the strands of hair back from her face and murmured, ‘Will you forgive me? I was just showing off to you, like some dumb kid. And you were being so brave.’

She laughed shakily. ‘Brave? That’s not what I’d call it.’

‘Sure you were. Everyone’s scared the first time. I was sick the first time, too.’

‘Did Harry Gilbert sponge your face?’

Joshua grinned. ‘He was nowhere around, thank God. Or else I’d still be hearing about it.’

He’s kind, Julia thought. As well as everything else. Oh, Josh. ‘Do you feel better now?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was going to go up again, but now I won’t, as a penance. Is that good enough?’

‘Go up, if you want to.’ Julia would have given him anything, if only she could.

‘No, we’ll go walking instead.’

He took her arm, and led her out to the little black car. The spring came back to Julia’s step, matching itself to Josh’s.

It was an idyllic afternoon. They walked through a beechwood where the falling leaves made ochre and gold tapestries under their feet and the sun slanted in fretted bars through the trees. Josh didn’t talk about aeroplanes or ski-slopes now. He told her about the little town in Colorado where he had grown up, and his mother and father, and the men who worked in his father’s timber business, and their wives and the children who had gone to school with him. Julia imagined the place as a huddle of wooden-framed houses under a mountain ridge, set amongst black pines and empty snowfields. The lights spilling from the windows would look very warm on the snow.

‘Were you happy?’ she asked.

He thought for a moment. ‘I guess so. It was a good life. But I always had itchy feet.’

‘Why?’

He put his arm round her shoulders and the leather sleeve creaked against her ear.

‘I don’t know why,’ he said softly, ‘but I have to keep moving on.’

Julia knew that it was a warning. And it was a warning he had delivered often before. She jerked her head up and looked at the sky through the canopy of beech. It was fading to pearly grey as the light went. She didn’t need a warning, and she would take whatever came. A fierce determination took hold of her. She would spend tonight with Josh. She would make him hers, somehow. She could do it because she wanted it so badly.

She listened carefully to the sound of their feet brushing through the leaves. She had the sense of crossing some divide, here, under the beech trees. I’ve grown up, she thought simply.

Josh felt the set of her shoulders. He was looking at the angle of her face, turned away from him. The skin of her cheek and throat was silky white under her dark hair. Josh knew that he had frightened her and made her ill, and he felt protective as well as drawn to her.