A Certain Age (25 page)

Now this. Driving away, away, not caring where you were going as long as your destination was another world from a sweaty marble courtroom, from the rows and rows of people who wanted to know how you
felt.

“Stop the car,” she says.

“What's that?”

“STOP THE CAR!”

He throws back the throttle and hits the brake pedal, and the Ford shimmies to a halt by the side of the road. Sophie yanks the door handle and
springs from her seat, away from the smell of the engine, the hot leather, taking large gulps of air into her chest, and when she opens her eyes she discovers she's standing on the edge of a pasture, inches from a fence of old split rails. The grass is luxuriously green, nourished by a series of recent downpours. About fifty yards away, a pair of horses grazes in a kind of fevered delirium, tearing mouthfuls of tender blades from the earth. One is a bay, the other a luminous chestnut. Their tails whisk away the flies in a strange and unexpected rhythm that reminds Sophie of the beat of a jazz band, long ago.

She places her hands on the topmost rail and the panic recedes, bit by bit, into the long, flicking tails and the idle rattle of the engine behind her.

Octavian comes to a stop at her left shoulder. The corner of his jacket brushes her sleeve. “Look at the fat, shiny things.”

“They're in heaven. All this lovely grass.”

He puts his hands in his trouser pockets and sets one foot on the bottom rail. “It used to amaze me, you know. Up there in the air, you could see the armies, the wrecked towns and the trenches, the craters and the mud between them. And then, a few miles away, pastures like this. Cows grazing. Not many horses; the armies took every poor brute they could get their hands on. But cows and stable yards full of geese and pigs, and crops growing in the fields. Just as peaceful as could be, and yet you could hear the shells screaming, the boom of the guns.”

“It must have been extraordinary, to fly up above the battlefield like that.”

“Yes. When you're in a trench, there's no reason to it. Passages every which way, mud and rats and general disorder. But from the air, you see the pattern. You see what a marvel it all is. Especially the German lines.
Damned
marvelous, you know? Just a remarkable display of human genius, when put to the test, when your life's at stake. And it all looked so peaceful, up there. Like a game, like a kind of bizarre picnic. You couldn't imagine there were men being killed down there.”

“Until the enemy planes found you, I suppose.”

“Yes, then it was all madness.”

Behind them, the engine misses a stroke, catches, and then stalls out. One of the horses—the chestnut—lifts his head, as if noticing their intrusion for the first time. He remains quite still, except for the occasional whisk of his tail, and examines the two of them in drunken, brown-eyed tranquillity, before returning his attention to the richness of the meadow.

“And then afterward,” Octavian continues, “you would land at your airfield, several miles behind the lines, surrounded by all the farms you'd been looking at from above, and you couldn't believe you were still alive. There was just this unreality to it. They would take your plane back to the hangar, the mechanics would, and fix up anything that had gotten hit or broken, and I would go back to my commanding officer and make my report. Tell him if I'd seen anything unusual, who'd been killed, whether I'd killed anyone. Still unreal. And then, when I was dismissed, when most of the squadron went to the mess and drank, I would go out walking. They have these long, straight white roads in France, shaded by trees. I would look at the animals, at the women and children doing the chores, and I felt like an alien being. Like I didn't belong in the world anymore, in the world of fields and cows and women and children. But I liked to watch them, anyway. It made me feel that something was still normal, that things still grew and thrived, even if I wasn't one of them anymore.”

“Yes,” Sophie says, a little like a sob, and his arm falls around her arm, and she turns her face into the hollow of his shoulder, and she doesn't cry. Her eyes remain perfectly dry, against the flat, slightly damp weave of Octavian's jacket, the solid muscle of his understanding. Like a pair of horses standing together, head to rump, flicking their tails in mutual relief of what plagues them.

BY NOW, SOPHIE SUSPECTS SHE
knows where Octavian is taking them, and she's right. He parks the Ford in a lot of packed clay, along a neat row of other parked cars, and sets the brake.

“The squadron came here for final training, a million years ago,” he says.
“I nearly crashed over that bluff, once. Now it's a civilian airfield. They're building a golf course out of part of it, right over there, near the motor parkway.”

“Can we go inside?”

“That's the general idea.”

He turns off the engine and gets out of the car. Sophie, rather than waiting, opens the door herself and shakes out her rumpled clothes. She's still wearing her court suit, a neat skirt of navy blue and a high-necked ivory blouse, though she's taken off the matching low-waisted navy jacket and discarded it on the back seat. Her hair is pinned low, just above her nape, and her shoes are square and low-heeled. Her hat, fashionably small, is really insufficient against the sun, and she holds her hand to her brow to obstruct the glare as she gazes across the field.

“Why, it's enormous!”

“It was even bigger before, trust me. Swarming with planes and men. Come along. It's getting late.”

He takes her hand and leads her along the rutted pathway to the hangars, which rise up from the field in a series of white barrel roofs. Easily distinguished from the air, Sophie thinks. The low, busy drone of an airplane engine begins to build in her ears, and she looks up just in time to see a pair of pale wings pass overhead, wobbling back and forth, making for the wide plain of shorn grass to her right. She stops to watch. She's never actually seen an airplane land before, and her body reacts as if the whole world's at stake. Her pulse accelerates, her hand tightens around Octavian's fingers. The machine looks so fragile, like a moth. She imagines that a single improper gust could send it tumbling through the air. Her breath stops. It's going too fast, too fast, it will never make the runway, it will crash into the grass.

And then it touches the earth. Bounces, touches again, rolls speedily away until the sound of the engine fades, and another one takes its place. Sophie turns, amazed, to Octavian. “I thought he was going to crash! How do you do it?”

“Oh, there's nothing to it, as long as your plane is sound and the weather's not too bad. Although you couldn't pay me to fly an old tub like that Vickers Vimy.” He tugs on her hand. “Come along. I'm going to show you a real airplane.”

ROOSEVELT FIELD. NAMED AFTER PRESIDENT
Roosevelt's son Quentin, who was killed in combat over France, one beautiful summer day. “Did you know him?” asks Sophie.

“Yes.”

He doesn't elaborate. He's walking briskly, a half step ahead, still holding her hand. Ahead of them, at the end of the narrow roadway, the row of identical plain white hangars catches the angle of the afternoon sun, much larger than they appeared from a distance. Each one is painted with the name of some optimistic aviation company. Octavian heads past a line of shining biplanes, propeller noses tilted eagerly to the sky, straight for the third hangar from the left. The doors are wide open, the atmosphere lazy and scented with machine oil: the smell of Sophie's childhood, the smell of discovery. A man sits in a chair, just inside a triangle of shade from the roof, reading a newspaper.
NO SMOKING
, reads a large sign above his flat cap. He looks up, and his face, deeply tanned, stretches into a toothy young smile.

“Why, Mr. Rofrano! What brings you here today?”

“Afternoon, Taylor. Miss Fortescue here is curious about airplanes.” Octavian releases her hand and motions to the small of her back, not quite touching her dress.

“Then she's come to the right place with the right fella. Want me to show her around for you?”

“Thanks a million.” (Heavy on the irony.) “But I think I've got this covered. Is the new Curtiss inside?”

“No, she's right out there.” Taylor nods to the row of biplanes. “Take her for a spin?”

“Maybe later. Sophie?”

She follows him into the shadows. The floor is beaten earth, the windows dusty and not very light. The place seems to have been baking in the sun all day, and without the breeze to cool her skin, Sophie feels as if she's stepped into an oven. Except this oven contains airplanes instead of bread—two of them, in fact, each being operated on by a couple of sweaty, grease-smudged surgeons in dungarees and nothing else.

Sophie stops and covers her mouth. “Oh, my.”

“What's that? Oh.” Octavian laughs. “I guess things can get a little masculine around here. I hope you're not offended?”

“Of course not.”

But she says the words a little too loudly, and the men all turn in a kind of astonished unison, hands still stuck on the wings and the engine parts. Someone whistles, so soft it's almost respectful, and another one mutters something Sophie can't hear.

“Say that again,” Octavian calls out amiably, not breaking stride, “and I'll knock your lights out.”

There's a chorus of laughter, which Sophie recognizes wistfully as the sound of a happy crew, a group of men working well together, engaged like the gears of an engine. The sound of purpose. Octavian has it, too, whistling a little as he leads her to a door at the back, a small hot office with a north-facing window that Octavian forces open. “That's better,” he says, taking off his hat and tossing it on the corner of a wide, plain desk, stacked with papers. The room smells of pencil shavings.

“But the airplanes are outside,” Sophie says.

He looks up from the desk. “What's that?”

“You were going to show me a real airplane, weren't you?”

“Yes.” He holds up a stack of papers, bound together. “Right here.”

“There?”

“The airplane I'm designing. Enclosed cabin, six-seater. Aluminum skin. Two wing-mount engines. She's a beauty, isn't she?”

Sophie's blood starts in her veins. She moves to stand next to him, before the desk. She stares down at the image on the page, the elegant bird criss
crossed with razor lines and small, sharp notations in capital letters. She flips a page: the front perspective. “You designed this?”

“Yes. I'm on leave from the bank at the moment—too notorious, my supervisor said, in so many words—so I've been coming out here instead.”

She looks up into a face she doesn't recognize, an Octavian transformed from famished into fed. His eyes are warm and happy. “You were put on leave because of me?”

“Not because of
you
. Because of the whole thing.”

“Because of me.”

He turns back to the drawing. “Anyway, I had to do something. I couldn't just hang around the city, bored and useless. And I kept thinking about what you told me, driving back from the Christopher Club, that first night.”

Sophie blinks her eyes, because the memory returns, without warning, and in such acute, daylight clarity that it pains her. “Really? What did I say?” As if she doesn't remember.

Octavian's hand passes across the topmost sheet, smoothing down the curled edges. Unlike her, he's not wearing gloves, and his skin is leathered, his knuckles large, as if he's been using his fingers relentlessly; not in writing and drafting, but in labor. “You said that I couldn't turn my back on the thing I loved most,” he says.

“Oh, that's right.” She lets out a small, soft laugh. “How young and silly of me.”

“You said—I can hear your voice exactly—you said that there was a reason I loved flying so much, and that reason still existed, waiting for the tide to go back out.”

“Well. You have an excellent memory.”

He picks up a pencil and makes a minute adjustment to one of the struts. “I think I remember just about everything you ever said to me.”

She could say,
How flattering,
or something equally light and flirtatious and dismissive.
Charming as ever, I see
. Except that he isn't trying to flatter her, and he's never really been charming, has he? Not nearly as charming as Jay was.

She places her fingers on his fist and draws the pencil away. “Do you know what I'd like?”

“No.”

“I'd like to fly.”

SOPHIE DOESN'T STOP TO THINK
about it, not until she's actually buckled into the passenger seat, staring at the thin, golden strip of skin between Octavian's leather cap and the collar of his jacket, and it's too late.

The airplane rolls with frightening buoyancy toward the end of the grassy field, not far from where the Ford is parked. She leans forward and tries to yell in his ear.
Stop! I've changed my mind! It's all a great mistake!
But her throat is stiff, the words won't rise. The canvas straps hold her in place. She reaches out to touch his shoulder, and then to shake it. He turns and lifts his hand, thumbs up. He's smiling beneath his goggles—she can't see his eyes at all—and the engine whines like a large, impertinent insect in her ear.

Oh, heavens.

How stupid. How awfully, fatally stupid. Octavian can't even imagine that she wants to turn back; she was so enthusiastic, so insistent, practically dragging him to the row of biplanes. She took his hand and levered herself cheerfully into her seat. In her newfound recklessness, she thought she didn't give a damn. She thought she didn't care what became of her. It turns out, she cares after all. She wants to live! But Octavian seems to be mistaking the panic in her face for exhilaration. He pats her hand that grips his shoulder and turns back to the controls, and she wonders how he can even see the field ahead, when they're pointed upward like this, like a pair of fools, watching the blur of the propeller against the blue sky, watching a cloud take shape into a cat. Or is it a zebra? The airplane turns sharply, and Sophie's spasmodic gloved hands grip the slippery metal edge of the cockpit, and she shuts her eyes.