The Infinite Air (40 page)

CHAPTER 36

THE QUEUE WAITING TO HAVE THEIR BOOKS AUTOGRAPHED
snaked along Queen Street in Auckland. The author, Jean Batten, looked up and flashed her famous smile as she handed back each copy. It wasn’t the first time it had been in print, but now the story of her life had a new title,
Alone in the Sky
, and a shiny fresh cover with the Percival Gull pictured against clouds. On the back cover, she was pictured in a flying helmet, with goggles on top of her head. The inside of the dust jacket dated the picture: Jean Batten at Stag Lane aerodrome, on gaining her pilot’s licence in 1930.

Over forty years had passed since then. If you didn’t know, it would be hard to tell how old the writer was, nor would there have been many clues in the book, for the text was almost exactly the same. Her new publishers had tried to persuade her to update the story, but she had been adamant that there was nothing more to tell. Let the records tell the story, she said.

Her hair was blonde at this appearance, although in recent times it had been black, and again flame-red. Over the past ten years, since she turned sixty, she had become a public figure again. The ‘come back kid’ she sometimes called herself.

Her looks had changed from the cool glamour of the 1930s. At first, she wore incongruous mini-skirts and high white boots and floppy leather caps, as if she were much younger. ‘I suppose I’m young at heart,’ she said, ‘because I’ve never really grown up. That’s what my mother used to say, anyway.’ She referred to her mother often. Sometimes her eyes would fill with tears when she alluded to her. ‘She didn’t need glasses until she was eighty-nine,’ she would
marvel. ‘She was tall and elegant, with a beautiful head of hair until she died. In my arms,’ she added once, before hastily turning away. When asked, she would describe her life in Tenerife. ‘I swim there every day, and paint, and cook very nice meals. After I’ve had my daily swim I always have a small bottle of champagne,’ she told one interviewer.

For there were still interviews to do when she came to New Zealand, and talks to be given to schools. One school had been named in her honour. Her dress style had toned down since her new beginning. More often she wore a white kid coat with a mink collar, and stylish, form-fitting dresses.

She saw family, too, when she came to New Zealand. In the north, she had a niece and nephews, her brother Harold’s children, and they had children, too. ‘Fancy,’ she said. ‘Grown up, all grown up.’ She had hired a white chauffeur-driven limousine to drive her to their farms on her first visit back. Strange, she hadn’t meant to lose touch with them all, but that was the way it had happened. She was sorry she hadn’t seen Fred one last time, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the place where Nellie was buried in Tenerife. She just couldn’t.

The niece and nephews took her to see their father. Alma had died, but then so had the marriage, long before. Jean didn’t recognise Harold, shrunken and wizened, ranting at the people who took care of him in a hospital. But then he didn’t know her either, his eyes dulled with medication.

‘Our mother died, Harold. Did you know that? I put a blue scarf over her hair when she was in the coffin — you know how nice she always liked to look. I put some perfume in a little sachet in her pocket. And I got a great big spray of red roses. Ninety red roses, can you imagine that?’

When he didn’t answer her, she put her hand briefly on his restless head. ‘I’m still here,’ she said. Something in him stilled for an instant, and then he moved away from her touch. Now Harold had died, too.

And then there was John to think about, who had come back to New Zealand, then left again. For a long time, he had been a radio
announcer in Auckland. People who had heard him on the radio said his voice was beautiful. So that was another lapse of time to contemplate, one she found difficult to dwell on. But yes, it was fifty years since they had seen one another. Why had they quarrelled? She didn’t really recall. She had thought they were at one with each other when they were children, but they turned out to be different. That was all she could really put her finger on. Perhaps she could have tried to understand more, at least when she grew older. But where would one begin after so long?

THAT AFTERNOON, AS SHE SAT SIGNING BOOKS,
a woman came up and presented her purchase.

‘Are you going to catch up with Freda?’ she asked.

‘Freda?’

‘You know, Freda Stark,’ the woman said with a touch of impatience. Her severely styled hair and black-rimmed spectacles suggested an academic. Jean glanced at the woman’s shoes and, sure enough, they were brogues. ‘You and she were friends, weren’t you? That’s what she told me.’

‘Oh yes, Freda. I do remember. She had some trouble, didn’t she?’

‘That was a long time ago.’ The woman’s voice sounded sharp. ‘You’ll know about her dancing of course? She was simply amazing.’

‘I thought she gave it up.’

‘But surely you know what she did in the war?’

Jean shook her head. ‘I’ve been away a long time.’

‘Goodness, she was sensational. She entertained the troops at the Wintergarden cabaret every night. Our boys and the Americans. They called her the Fever of the Fleet. She used to be covered from head to foot in gold paint, just a G-string and a feather head-dress. You don’t know about that? Well, she was a breath of fresh air, absolutely famous in her own right.’ Again, there was a hint of rebuke as if to remind Jean that she was not the only person who had made a name
for herself. ‘Freda shook New Zealanders up, they needed it.’

‘I had no idea. Where is she now?’

‘Oh, she works at the university. I’ll tell her I saw you.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Jean saw an elderly man standing at the door, looking in.

‘Well, it was nice to meet you,’ Jean said, signalling that the encounter was over. The woman collected her book, raising her eyebrows as if in some disbelief at Jean’s ignorance.

The man still stood at the door, frail-looking, nearly bald, just threads of hair springing from the back of his head. He wore a shirt and tie knotted under a pullover, and a heavy woollen zipped jacket. But she knew those eyes, the high cheekbones.

The next woman in the queue noticed her distraction. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Batten,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got to pick up the kiddies after school, and the book’s for my dad’s birthday.’

Jean picked up the pen, and wrote her name quickly, still in the round hand of her girlhood, with a slight flourish, an ornate round capital ‘J’, the top stroke missed off the first ‘t’ in ‘Batten’, a firm line beneath her surname.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for coming today.’

He would wait for her, surely he must.

‘Excuse me,’ she said to the next person in the line, ‘I’m sorry, but there’s someone I have to catch.’

She ran to the door of the big shop. ‘John,’ she called wildly down the street. But he had gone.

One of the booksellers had been guarding the door, directing customers to the queue. ‘There was a man here,’ she said.

‘Yes, Miss Batten. He said he knew you from a long time ago.’

‘Did he tell you who he was?’

‘He said his name was John.’

‘Batten? Did he say his name was John Batten?’

Recognition dawned on the bookseller’s face. ‘Of course, I thought I knew that voice. I’m sorry, I did suggest he wait a minute or two. But he said he was on a cruise ship and it was just in port for
a few hours. He said it was a bit of a shock to see you, because he thought you were in Tenerife.’

In the afternoon, when the shop had cleared, she walked along Queen Street to the port, the old ferry building, the wharves that she remembered, only everything was built up now, familiar but changed. A big liner was pulling away to sea. She stood and waved until it was out of sight.

For a moment, she thought that she was back up there in the sky, and that while she was up there, the whole world had simply disappeared.

POSTSCRIPT

JEAN GARDNER BATTEN DIED IN PALMA, MAJORCA, IN 1982.
She had shifted from Tenerife, to a modest serviced apartment in Palma not long before. Some time earlier, she had told a couple in England who had befriended her that she was ‘going to ground for a while’.

There is no account of why Jean moved from Tenerife to Majorca, nor any real information about what she did there. Perhaps she returned to the ancient monastery at Valdemossa where Chopin had composed his music on a stormy night, and listened in her head to the scattering raindrops of his prelude, her fingers flexing over an imaginary keyboard. Or she may have sat under a large umbrella in the town of Palma, and watched the sun dropping and a dark red moon rise over the sea. Somewhere, on one of her walks, she may have caught sight of a shadow among the trees, and called out her mother’s name, listening for a voice to come back to her.

But nobody knows any of these things.

What we do know is that Jean had been ill in the days before her death. She had gone for a walk and been bitten by a dog. The wound had become infected. She declined medical assistance until the hour of her death when, it appeared from later reports, she became aware of the seriousness of her condition. The maid, who had gone for help, returned to the room and found Jean Batten lying dead, fully dressed, on her bed.

The authorities, not knowing who she was, buried her under the name Gardner, in a paupers’ common grave.

Because it had been her habit to disappear for long periods of time, five years would pass before anyone became seriously concerned
about where she was. Nobody sought her until 1987. Two television documentary-makers, researching a film about her life, discovered her whereabouts that year.

By then, it was impractical to disinter her remains from the common grave where many lay buried.

Her body had disappeared, in a sense, as did those of so many of her fellow fliers: into infinity.