The Kindness of Women (13 page)

“No Chrysler for you, Jim, more like some gravel-rash MG.” David patted my shoulder as we stood outside the RAF recruitment office in Kingsway, after enlisting on short-service commissions. “But at least you'll get a ringside seat at World War III.”

*   *   *

Needless to say, this shrewd guess summed up my real reasons for joining the RAF. During our three months of basic training at RAF Kirton in Lincolnshire, as we learned the rudiments of meteorology, scaled hangar walls on assault courses, and fired submachine guns at the rifle range, I never once lost my belief that at last the real elements of my life were coming together. I was preparing myself, in the most practical way, for the Third World War, which had already begun at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and whose first instalments were the Berlin crisis and the Korean War. Somewhere over the skies of Central Europe Armageddon would wake from my dreams.

*   *   *

As it happened, we fledgling pilots were sent, not to a frontline base in West Germany, but to one of the remotest corners of the world, RCAF Moose Jaw in Saskatchewan. As part of the NATO agreement, the air crews of its European members received their flight training in Canada. We crossed the Atlantic in the
Empress of Britain,
a prewar liner of the Canadian Pacific fleet, sitting under the baroque ceilings of the vast staterooms. Miriam drove her motorcycle up to Liverpool to see me off and stared with awe at the magnificent gilt furniture and attentive stewards, as if I were going off to some strange and lavish war in which every private soldier travelled to the front in his own Rolls-Royce. When she embraced me on the gangway she had clearly taken for granted that she would never see me again. I waved from the rail long after the Liver building had dropped below the horizon.

Surviving the Atlantic, a subarctic realm of vertical seas, deranged ice, and voracious seabirds, we landed at Montreal and began a pleasant, month-long acclimatisation period at a Toronto air base, being prepared for the social and psychological hazards of a waffle-and-turkey lifestyle that David and I eagerly embraced. Even the endless hours of propaganda and VD films—which carried the message that the entire female half of the human race was dedicated to infecting us—failed to cool our pleasure at being in North America.

At last, after a four-day train journey from Toronto, we arrived at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. We stepped from the train with our suitcases and stared at the small prairie town, a mixed group of suspicious Turks, stoical Norwegians, hungover Britishers, and impatient Frenchmen.

“I wish Miriam could see this.” I gazed at the immensity of the Saskatchewan plain. “Where does it end? This is the wrong planet.”

“If visitors from outer space ever land on Earth they will choose this place,” David reflected gloomily. “Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, will remind them of home.”

But Moose Jaw was more interesting than we realised. Beyond the 49th parallel were the great cities of the American Midwest. The rearming United States of the Eisenhower years enjoyed a confidence and prosperity unknown in Europe. Fleets of baroque vehicles soared along its highways, as if a race of interplanetary visitors were landing on a recreational visit. On our second day David bought a used Oldsmobile, and we began to take long drives in any direction. The Canadians were a hospitable and tolerant desert people, living on the edge of a wilderness of snow and permafrost. Winnipeg, Regina, and Saskatoon were cities of the northern desert, Samarkands of ice. At the end of every street there were white horizons of emptiness. My mind leapt, expanding to fill the void …

*   *   *

A shadow veered across the Harvard, darkening its wings. I woke as a blare of engine noise drummed at the canopy. A pilot of the French training flight swept past in a shallow dive, so close that the torque from his propeller almost rolled the Harvard into a high-speed stall. I secured my harness, put out the cigar I was smoking, and prepared for a chase, when a second Frenchman dived past my starboard wing, climbing away into a steep half-spiral that would put him back onto my tail. The two planes had crept behind me as I cruised over the snow-covered wastes of Deer Lake, listening to the country music broadcast from a Medicine Hat radio station.

For the next five minutes we hauled the ageing trainers around the sky in a mock dogfight, and only scattered when a dual-control Harvard with a Canadian instructor in the rear seat sped towards us from the south. Deer Lake was out of bounds, while mock air battles and unauthorised low flying were court-martial offences. The mink farmers of Saskatchewan, a powerful political lobby, were our sworn enemies, and their farms were marked on our maps like so many German ball-bearing factories in World War II. We liked to overfly their farms, so low that the angry farmers were unable to photograph our identification numerals, engines so loud that the frantic beasts tore down their cages and scattered to the safety of the snow.

However illicit, these air games helped to sustain us. The Frenchmen swung away to the southwest, heading towards Medicine Hat, and the Canadian instructor set off after me. I took for granted that he was shouting at me over the R/T, but my tanks were lighter by fifty gallons and I soon pulled away from him. Gradually he fell behind, then gave up and returned to Moose Jaw.

Scanning the snow-covered wilderness, I searched for a railroad line or highway that would give me my bearings. I was now some seventy miles to the northwest of Moose Jaw, above a featureless terrain of snow-covered lakes. Under the needle-like sunlight the snow had begun to melt, and the pools of darker water resembled bowls of black sherbet. A mile to starboard a grain silo rose from the white plain, like a silver sculpture erected beside the embankment of a railway line. I turned towards it, one eye on my fuel gauge, following the Harvard's shadow across a curious turtle-shaped lake. In one of its arms I saw a submerged structure that resembled a sunken cabin with a flat yellow roof.

Or a Harvard trainer lying inverted in fifteen feet of water? Too short of fuel to make another circuit of the lake, I followed the railroad spur towards Swift Current and set course for Moose Jaw. But as I faked the navigation course on my knee I was thinking of the Turkish pilot, Captain Artvin, who had disappeared two months after our arrival.

Of all the NATO trainees, the Turks were the most unhappy. Older and more senior than the young Canadian instructors, they mustered no more than a few words of English between them. They pooled their pay and bought a secondhand Ford from a Moose Jaw dealer, only to find that there was nowhere to go. They sat silently around the mess tables in their green, American-style uniforms, gold bars gleaming on their shoulders, as the blizzards swept horizontally past the windows. When the snow ceased they stared at the watery skies and the triple suns, as if these optical illusions produced by the vast mists of ice crystals were a signal to some desperate action.

Unable, perhaps, to cope with this Arctic world of snow and mirages, Captain Artvin had disappeared on a training flight. Every Canadian instructor took to the air and searched the wintry landscape within a hundred-mile radius. His fellow Turks refused to assist the enquiry, but none showed the slightest surprise. Curiously, Artvin had taken with him all his possessions, his spare uniforms, his newly purchased electric razor and American radio. Everyone assumed that Artvin had defected to the Russians, but I was convinced that he had simply had enough of RCAF Moose Jaw and decided to fly home.

But the captain's Harvard was never found. Had he managed to land on isolated airfields in Alberta and the Northwest Territories, refuel with the help of Soviet sympathisers, and somehow make his way across Alaska to the Bering Strait? It seemed unlikely, and I preferred to think that Captain Artvin had set off towards the east, ignoring his fuel gauges, and flown on into his own dream.

“Artvin? Poor bugger,” David commented when I told him of the possible sighting. The submerged cabin with its yellow roof had certainly resembled a Harvard. “Are you going to report it?”

“Naturally. ‘Sorry, Group Captain, just happened to be over Deer Lake, all these damned Canadian lakes look the same, you know…'”

“What about the Turks?”

We were changing out of our flying suits, and David passed me the bottle of bourbon he kept in his parachute locker. I watched Captain Hamid stowing his boots, overall, and helmet in the same neat way that I imagined Artvin packing his radio and electric razor. These impressive and overcontrolled men reminded me of the Japanese, hovering perpetually on the edge of a mental crisis. The Danes and Norwegians were self-contained, the British blurry with drink, in the air as on the ground. The French, for their part, were forever staging mutinies, refusing to obey their senior officers until the French military attaché flew in from Ottawa and arranged some concession that briefly calmed them down. North American cooking, the waffles and turkey drumsticks and jugs of milk, was a constant intellectual challenge.

But it was these sombre Turks who would run amok one day. As we sat together in the meteorology theatre during our current-affairs classes, watching the propaganda newsreels and the endless VD films with their demonstrations of how to soap and wash the male genitalia after intercourse, I expected the Turks to seize all the weapons in the armoury and slaughter the English-speaking world to a man.

“Tell the Turks?” I reflected. “That might not be good for the nerves. I don't want to wake up and find my testicles inside my mouth.”

“I'm glad you've still got testicles, dear sport. It's Friday night and we're heading for the Iroquois.” David took a sip from his bottle, scarcely bothering to disguise it from a Canadian instructor who walked past. “Hard cheese on Artvin. He didn't make it to Mother Russia after all.”

“I don't think he was trying. He didn't defect to the Soviets.”

“So what was he doing?”

“He was flying home. He'd had it here.”

“Well, he didn't get very far.”

“Far enough.”

“Jim?” David was about to hand me the bourbon, but put the cork into the bottle. “What did that mean? I can see the Lunghua look in your eye.”

“There's no Lunghua look.”

“Artvin's sitting upside down in fifteen feet of iced water. That isn't flying home.”

“It's a figure of speech—people create their own mythologies.”

“You should have sung more madrigals. Never mind, we're off to the Iroquois tonight.” David steadied himself against me. Completely sober for a fleeting moment, he said: “When you fuck Yvette and Brigid, promise me you'll think of Miriam…”

*   *   *

Four hours later I lay on a bed in the Iroquois Hotel, my hands gripping the candlewick bedspread. The room rotated around me like a slowly precessing gyroscope. Beyond the room a larger carousel circled in a clockwise direction, carrying the elderly hotel and its shabby ceilings, the noise from the bar downstairs, the streets of Moose Jaw with their filling stations and hardware stores, and beyond those the snow-covered fields and the old bison slumbering by the railroad creek in their overcoats of wallows mud. For some reason I was at the centre of this rotating system, which had begun to tilt, as if banking into a power dive. I was flying the world …

“Jim, are you still with us?” David was calling to me through the glare of the bedside lamp. “Oh my God! Don't look at him…”

I was trying to open the pillowcase, needing desperately to be sick. My trousers lay on the floor beside the bed. Too dazed to think, I vomited into them. Tears welled from my nose and eyes as shreds of turkey and bourbon streaked with blood lay inside the vent like a rancid haggis.

“Jesus, what a spectacle,” David exclaimed from somewhere behind me. “I hate to say it, girls, but there's no sight more disgusting than the British officer class with its pants down. It was men like him who did the dirty on us at Singapore. No wonder the Japs slapped their faces…”

I dropped the trousers to the worn purple carpet and rested against the quilted headboard, stained with the hair oil of a thousand anonymous salesmen. The room had steadied itself, and I could see David lying naked on the next bed, laughing in his happy but slightly crazed way at the two young women who knelt across him, taking turns to suck his penis. In a firm baritone he sang:

“With his mixture rich and his carb heat cold

 He got the highest pressures on his manifold…”

One of the women was a strong-shouldered blonde, naked except for the silk stockings rolled down to her ankles. The other, kneeling with the grubby soles of her feet towards me, wore a black slip around her waist. It rode over her buttocks, which David parted with his left hand as he fondled the dark hair and pink combs of her vulva.

“God, yes, Yvette, yes … watch those teeth, for Christ's sake, this isn't a lunch counter. I'm going to have to take a leak. Jesus, that stink…”

The women ignored him and continued their efforts over his flagging erection, all the while keeping up a brisk conversation about a local beauty parlour that had spurned their custom. I could feel the bites on my penis and the pain in my anus where an untrimmed fingernail had almost stripped away the mucous membrane. I vaguely remembered having sex with the blond girl, Yvette, while David played one of his odd little games in the bathroom, urging Brigid to slap his buttocks with the soles of her high-heeled shoes as he dropped dollar bills into the toilet.

Friday night at the Iroquois was taking its familiar course. First there were two hours of forced drinking in the bar crowded with NATO trainees and railroad workers, our shirts soaked with the beer that swilled across the counter. Then we took Brigid and Yvette to the two rooms on the second floor. As usual, I was so drunk that I could scarcely separate the floor from the walls. Flat surfaces, some carpeted and others with lamps and switches bolted to them, were forever veering at me and striking my face.