JON CLEARY

High Road to China

Dedication

To Marina and Aubrey Baring

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Author’s Postscript

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Preface

William Bede O’Malley died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 22 July 1974, aged 80. He left behind him an autobiography called, plainly, AN ADVENTURE; it ran to over 1500 pages of manuscript. He left no instructions as to whether he wished it to be submitted for publication. After much discussion his family offered it to me, a distant cousin, to use as I thought fit.

I decided to tell the story of what I think was one of the best of Bede O’Malley’s adventures and it was agreed that I could use excerpts from his manuscript. I wished to include them because I thought that, with some minor editing, they would give a sense of perspective to a story that took place when I was only three years old, a time of which my memory is, to say the least, hazy. The year 1920 is almost as remote as 1492 or 1066 to a lot of people today.

I found that certain incidents did not accord with historical fact in respect of time, but Bede O’Malley was writing without benefit of diary or notes and an old man’s memory does not always recognize the calendar. But it does not alter the truth of what he experienced.

He was an adventurer, a dying breed: but who of us does not still dream of being one?

Chapter 1

1

‘So far I’ve shot only one man.’ Eve Tozer patted the gun-case beside her as if it were a vanity bag containing all she needed to face the men of the world. ‘Elephants are easier.’

‘Of course.’ Arthur Henty kept his eyebrows in place. ‘Did you kill the, er, man?’

‘One couldn’t miss at ten yards. He was a perfectly ugly Mexican who was trying to rape me.’

‘Ten yards? That was rather distant for rape, wasn’t it?’

‘He was trouserless. His intention was distinctly obvious, if you know what I mean.’

Henty hung on to his eyebrows from the inside, wondering if one could dislocate one’s forehead. He was a tall balding man in whom the bone was very evident, as if the skeleton had already decided to shrug off the flesh; but his eyes were bright blue, shrewd and amused, and he had no intention of stepping into an early grave. Not while women as attractive as Eve Tozer presented themselves to his gaze. Even if that was as far as the presentation of themselves went.

He had never met Bradley Tozer’s daughter until he had gone down to Tilbury this morning to escort her from the ship that had brought her from China. Several people in the Shanghai head office of Tozer Cathay Limited had written him that she was every inch her father’s daughter and now, with a glance at the gun-case on the seat of the car, he was prepared to believe they were right. He studied her, wondering what the perfectly ugly Mexican had thought of her as, trouserless and lance pointed, he had rushed towards her and the fate worse than he had anticipated.

Eve was staring out at London as it slid by outside the car and Henty looked at her closely, yet managed not to stare. It was a trick he had learned in ten years up-country in China, where the stranger’s gaze could never afford to be too frank. He saw a girl above average height with a figure that would attract men less violent and point-blank than the unfortunate Mexican. She was dressed in a beige silk travelling suit with tan stockings and shoes that, even to his inexpert eye, looked expensive and hand-made. The skirt, he noticed, was of the fashionable length, just below the knee; his wife Marjorie was always trying to educate him in such trivialities. But he also noticed that she was wearing her dark hair cut unfashionably short and there was a touch of rouge on her cheeks, something that Marjorie would have labelled as ‘fast’.

‘It is six years since I was last in London.’ Eve looked out the window of the Rolls-Royce as they drove along the Embankment. Grey skies and a thin muslin drizzle of rain had not kept the August Bank Holiday crowd at home; the English, she guessed, were as dogged about their pleasures as they had been about winning the war. England was still settling uneasily into the new peace; during last year’s summer holidays, she had read in The Times, there had still been a disbelief that the long agony was really over. This long holiday weekend, however, the citizens were determined to enjoy themselves, come what may. Buses, bright in their new postwar paint, rolled by; on their open top decks passengers sat beneath their umbrellas, teeth bared in resolute smiles. Excursion boats went up and down the Thames, their passengers bellowing ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ as they went past the Mother of Parliaments. A newspaper poster said, Woolley: Duck, and Eve wondered at the strangeness of the English language as spoken in England.

‘What’s a woolly duck?’

Henty frowned in puzzlement, looked back, then laughed. ‘That’s Frank Woolley, one of our more famous cricketers. He scored a duck. Nil runs.’

‘Oh. Some time, not this trip, I must go to see a cricket game. When we were last here, Mother wanted to see one, but Father wouldn’t hear of it. Said it was too slow for him. Instead we went to Wimbledon. We saw Norman Brookes beat Tony Wilding in the men’s singles. I remember I fell in love with Tony Wilding.’

‘He was killed in the war. At Neuve Chapelle. My two brothers were killed there, too.’

‘Was that where you got your, er, wound?’

‘No, on the Somme.’ Henty tapped his stiff right leg with his walking-stick. ‘The bally thing plays up occasionally. When it rains, mostly.’

‘You shouldn’t have come all the way down to the ship.’ But she turned away from him, looked out the car window again. She could shoot animals without a qualm and had shot the rape-minded Mexican and left no mental scar on herself; but she felt helpless in the face of other people’s suffering. ‘That was a beautiful summer, 1914, I mean. I read that they are calling it the long golden summer, as if there’ll never be another like it.’

Perhaps there never will be, thought Henty, but not in terms of weather. It had been a summer, he mused, which even some people not yet born would look back to with nostalgia. But he had looked up the weather records and they had shown that it had not been a ‘long golden summer’: that had occurred four years before, in 1910, the last season of the Edwardian reign, of a king meant for pleasure and not for war. But memory, Henty knew, had its own climate and regret for a time gone forever created its own golden haze. So people now believed the sun had been shining through all the months and years up till August 1914. Suddenly his leg began to ache. But he knew it had nothing to do with the rain or the shrapnel still lodged beneath his kneecap.

The Rolls-Royce turned up towards the Strand and a few moments later pulled into the forecourt of the Savoy Hotel. It was followed by the smaller Austin in which rode Anna, Eve’s maid, and the luggage. Henty, who did not own a car and usually rode in buses and taxis, knew he had done the right thing in hiring the Rolls-Royce in which to bring his boss’s daughter up from the ship. He had been warned that Bradley Tozer expected nothing but the best for his only child; and, Henty had remarked to himself, evidently Miss Tozer took for granted that only the best was good enough for her. At least she had made no comment when he had escorted her off the ship and down to the car. The Rolls-Royce was good enough for the Savoy, too: a covey of porters and pages appeared as if royalty had just driven up to hand out grace and favour pensions to the common herd.

The head porter showed no surprise as Eve handed out her gun-case: it could have been that American ladies arrived every day at the Savoy with their guns, Annie Oakleys every one of them. He passed the gun-case on to a junior porter, then took the small lacquered wooden box which Eve pushed at him.

‘Tell them to be careful with that. My father would have my scalp and yours if what’s inside that box should be broken.’

‘Yes, miss,’ said the head porter, wondering if the father of this dark-haired beauty could be a Red Indian; but miffed at the suggestion that anything, other than perhaps the guests’ virginity, should ever be broken at the Savoy.

Going up in the lift Arthur Henty said, ‘I’m sorry your father couldn’t come with you. I was looking forward to seeing him after so long. It is almost seven years since I said goodbye to him in Shanghai.’

‘He hasn’t changed.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Henty ventured and was relieved to see Eve smile.

‘He still believes China belongs to him.’

Inside the suite Eve moved to the windows, opened one of them and looked out on the river, dull as unwashed quartz under the grey skies. It had stopped raining, but it was still a miserable day. A day for going to bed with a good book or a good man. She smiled to herself: her Boston grandmother would have commended her for the first thought and banished her for the second.

Henty studied her again, the heiress to the Tozer fortune, legatee of that part of China which her father thought belonged to him. Tozer Cathay had been started in Shanghai in 1870 by Eve’s grandfather, a windjammer captain from Boston turned merchant. Rufus Tozer had died in 1903 from a surfeit of bandits’ bullets while estimating a price for a repair job on the Great Wall of China: or so the company legend went. His son had run the firm ever since, had built it into the major competitor for trade in China of Jardine Matheson, the British firm that, until Tozer Cathay began to develop, had thought that it owned China.

‘How do you feel about China?’ Henty himself had loved it and its people, but he knew his leg would never allow him to go back there and take up his old job as a traveller. He had been grateful when Bradley Tozer had made him general manager of the London office.

Eve shrugged, turned from the window. The reflected light from the river struck sideways across her face, accentuating the slight slant of her eyes and the high cheekbones. Years before, Rufus Tozer had taken home a half-caste Chinese bride and Boston, already feeling itself invaded by the Irish, had resented this introduction of a possible further invasion, this time by the Yellow Peril. Since then, however, Pearl Tozer, having conveniently died at the birth of her son, had been forgiven and forgotten for her intrusion into decent Boston society: after all, her son had grown up to play quarterback for Harvard, gaining both All-American selection and a bride who was a distant cousin of the Cabots. Pearl’s granddaughter, grown to extraordinary beauty, was admired and, though given to such eccentricities as big-game hunting, piloting an aeroplane and smoking cigarettes in public, was still considered more acceptable than the Irish.

‘It’s not my cup of tea, if that’s the appropriate metaphor. I get upset by poverty, Mr Henty, and there is so much of it in China. I like to see happiness everywhere.’

He hadn’t thought she would be so shallow-minded and his voice was a little sharper than he intended it to be. ‘The Chinese are happy. Things could be better for them, but they are not un-happy.’

‘You think I’m shallow-minded for making such a remark, don’t you?’

Henty hung on to his eyebrows again. He should have recognized that she had probably inherited her father’s almost uncanny perception. But he was not a cowardly man: ‘Your remark did suggest that to me. I apologize. Perhaps we had better talk about something else. What are your plans while you are in London this week?’

Eve smiled, forgiving him. He was right, of course: she was shallow-minded. At least if that meant preferring happiness to misery. ‘I want to do some shopping at Harrods and a few other places. And Father wants me to order him some shirts at Turnbull and Asser’s. They have his measurements. How long will they take to make them?’

‘Two, three days, no more. I have tickets for the theatre every night – you can take your choice. Chu Chin Chow – ’ Then he, too, smiled. ‘But not if you don’t like China.’

She shook her head. ‘I’d like to see some of the new matinée idols. I’m mad about good-looking men, Mr Henty. Does that shock you?’

‘Not really,’ said Henty, wondering if she took her gun when she went in pursuit of good-looking men. ‘I understand it’s a perfectly normal thing with young girls.’

‘I adore you, Mr Henty. You try to sound like a stuffed shirt, but you’re not, are you? I read about a new leading man, Basil Rathbone. I’d like to see him, no matter what show he’s in.’

He held up a fan of tickets. ‘He’s in a new play opening next week, one by Somerset Maugham. I’ve included it amongst these.’

‘You’re perfectly slick, Mr Henty.’

He took it that that was a compliment: he was not up on the latest American slang.

Then the luggage arrived, supervised by Anna. She was a tiny Chinese who had been born in New York and had hated every moment of the three months she and her mistress had just spent in China. She had a New York accent but a Mandarin attitude towards servants less than herself. And in her book hotel porters were much less than the personal maid to a millionaire’s daughter. She clapped her tiny hands in tiny explosions and fired off orders with machine-gun rapidity. The two porters, silent and expressionless, Leyton Orientals, but boiling with thoughts about Yanks and Chinks who were mixed together in this midget witch, carried the trunks and suitcases into the main bedroom of the suite.

Eve took the small lacquered box from the page-boy who had brought it up and put it on a table. ‘When I left Father he was heading for Hunan to look for the companion piece to this. It’s a jade statue of Lao-Tze, the Taoist god. I believe there is one something like it in a museum in Paris, but Father says if he can get the pair of these, he’ll make all the museums and collectors sick with envy. You know what he’s like about his collection.’

Indeed Henty knew. On their trips into the Chinese hinterland all Tozer Cathay representatives were expected to keep an eye out for any items that might prove worthy additions to the famous Tozer collection.

‘Isn’t it risky, carrying it with you? Wouldn’t it have been safer to have shipped it straight home to America?’

‘That was Father’s original idea, but then he became afraid it might be stolen on the way. I persuaded him to let me bring it with me. I – ’ For the first time she looked embarrassed. ‘I wanted to prove I could be useful. I owe my father a lot, Mr Henty.’

Henty felt at ease enough to be frank: ‘I understand he thinks the world of you. So perhaps the debt is mutual.’

‘You’re perfectly sweet, Mr Henty.’ She smiled, then shook her head, nodding at the gun-case lying on a sofa. ‘He took me tiger hunting in Kwelchow this summer. He didn’t want to go, he was frightfully busy, but I wanted to go and he took me. He’s been doing that ever since my mother died, spoiling me terribly. He’s a kind man, Mr Henty, too kind. At least to me.’

Henty was glad of the qualification, though he couldn’t detect whether she had said it defensively. Bradley Tozer had no reputation in China for kindliness; he hunted business with all the rapacity of an old China Sea pirate. Henty guessed there would be few people in China who felt they owed Bradley Tozer anything.

He was saved from an awkward reply by the ringing of the phone. Eve, a lady who, despite the admonitions of her maternal grandmother, could never resist the temptation to answer her own telephone, picked it up. It was the reception desk.

‘A gentleman to see you, Miss Tozer.’

‘A gentleman? English?’ Basil Rathbone, perhaps? Eve was not so spoiled that she didn’t have girlish dreams occasionally. ‘Did he give his name?’

A hand was obviously held over the mouthpiece downstairs. Then: ‘Mr Sun Nan. A Chinese gentleman.’

Eve looked at Henty. ‘Do you know a Mr Sun Nan?’

‘No. Is he downstairs? I’ll go down and see what he wants.’

Eve spoke into the phone again. ‘Mr Henty will be down to see him.’

She put down the phone, but almost at once it rang again. ‘I am sorry, Miss Tozer, but the gentleman insists that he see you.’ The tone of voice suggested that the Savoy reception desk did not approve of the cheek of a Chinese, gentleman or otherwise, insisting on disturbing one of the hotel’s guests. The hand was held over the mouthpiece again and then the voice came back, this time in a state of shock: ‘He insists he see you at once.’

‘Send him up.’ Eve put down the phone once more and stopped Henty who, leaning on his stick, was already limping towards the door. ‘You had better stay. This Mr Sun evidently has something important he wants to tell me.’

‘If he’s selling anything or wanting to buy, he should have come to the office. Let me handle him.’

‘No, leave him to me,’ Eve said, and Henty suddenly and ridiculously wondered if Mr Sun, whoever he was, might meet the same fate as the unfortunate Mexican.

Mr Sun Nan was brought up to the suite by one of the reception clerks, as if the hotel did not trust pushy, demanding Orientals to be wandering around alone on its upper floors. He was ushered into the suite, a smiling li-chi of a man who seemed amused at the attention he was being given.

‘A thousand apologies, Miss Tozer, for this intrusion. If time had allowed, I should have written you a letter and awaited your reply.’ He spoke English with a slight hiss that could have meant a badly-fitting dental plate or been a comment on the barbarians who had invented the language. ‘But time, as they say, is of the essence.’

‘Not a Chinese saying, I’m sure,’ said Eve.

Sun smiled. ‘No. I only use it because you will be the one to profit by our saving time.’

Henty introduced himself. ‘If you have anything to sell or wish to buy, you should be talking to me.’

Sun smiled at him as he might have at a passer-by, then looked back at Eve. ‘It would be better if we spoke alone, Miss Tozer.’

Henty bridled at being dismissed and Eve stiffened in annoyance at the smiling, yet cool arrogance of the Chinese. ‘Mr Henty stays. If time is of the essence, don’t waste it, Mr Sun.’

‘I was warned you might resemble your father in your attitude.’ Sun gave a little complimentary bow of his head, then the smile disappeared from his face as if it had been an optical illusion instead of a friendly expression. ‘The matter concerns your father. He has been kidnapped.’

Through the open window there floated up from the Embankment the cheerful mutter of London on holiday: the ordinary, reassuring sounds that made Eve think she had not heard Mr Sun correctly. ‘Did you say kidnapped?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ The smile flickered on his face again, but it was no longer apologetic or friendly; Sun smiled as a relieving movement to relax what was indeed a badly-fitting dental plate. ‘My master has him in custody and will kill him on 21 August by your calendar, eighteen days from today. Unless – ’

Eve went to the window and closed it, shutting out the ordinary, locking in the macabre. The clouds were lifting a little, but there was no break in them. She caught a glimpse of a plane high in the sky to the west: it had just written a giant O in dark smoke, an empty circle barely discernible against the grey sky. The pilot’s effort at sky-writing on such a day seemed as ridiculous as what she had just heard Mr Sun say. She turned back into the room in a state of shock.

She heard Henty say, ‘Is this some frightful joke by Jardine Matheson? If so, I think it’s in deucedly bad taste.’

‘It is no joke, Mr Henty.’ But Sun smiled at the thought of Jardine Matheson’s being involved; he thought that was a joke. ‘My master is a very serious man at times. If he says he will kill Miss Tozer’s father, then he certainly will.’

‘You said unless.’ Eve had to clear her throat to get the words out. ‘Unless what?’

‘You have a small statue, I believe. Of the god Lao-Tze riding on a green ox – ’

Surprised, puzzled, Eve gestured at the box on the table. ‘It’s in there. But it belongs to my father – ’

Sun shook his head, face stiff now with impatience and denial. He was a Confucian, but he had a more immediate master, the tuchun, the war lord, in Hunan who laid down timetables which had no place for etiquette and ritual. ‘It belongs to my master.’

‘Where did your father get it?’ Henty asked Eve.

‘He bought it from some provincial governor. General Chang something-or-other.’

‘Chang Ching-yao,’ said Sun. ‘My master’s enemy. My master has the twin to the statue. He owned both of them, but Chang stole one of them from him. Open the box. At once, please!’

Henty grasped his stick as if he were going to use it for something other than support for his leg. ‘This has gone far enough! I think we had better call the police – ’

‘It would be foolish to call the police.’ The hiss in Sun’s voice was even more pronounced now. ‘My master does not recognize any other authority but his own. Even in China.’

‘Miss Tozer, you can’t let him get away with this! How do we know this isn’t some bluff to swindle you out of that statue? The cleverest swindlers in the world are the Chinese – ’

Sun bowed his head again, as if he and his countrymen had been paid a compliment. Then he took a gold watch and chain from his pocket. He was dressed in a dark suit that was too tight for him and he carried a black bowler hat; he looked like a civil servant, a non-white from Whitehall. He looked at the watch, then held it out on the palm of his plump hand.

‘Do you recognize this, Miss Tozer?’

Eve took the watch: it ticked like a tiny gold bomb in her hand. ‘It’s my father’s. I gave it to him last Christmas.’

‘Your father was captured the day he arrived in Hunan province, two days after you left Shanghai on your ship. I travelled overland to Hong Kong and the intention was to speak to you there. Your ship was supposed to spend four days in that port.’

‘We were there only two days. The schedule was altered for some reason or other. None of us minded,’ she said irrelevantly; then added very relevantly, ‘At the time.’

‘I caught another ship and followed you, but at each port I just missed you.’

‘You could have sent a wireless message to the ship.’ Eve, assaulted by reason, now believed everything she was hearing: no swindler could be so cool about his facts.

‘How to word it, Miss Tozer?’ Sun smiled again, as if admitting even the cleverness of the Chinese would have found such a code beyond them; he marvelled sometimes at the stupidity of white foreigners, whose minds never seemed to work as quickly as their tongues. ‘My master wants secrecy. If I had sent a wireless message, even if you had believed it and not thought it a hoax, you would have contacted the authorities in Shanghai, am I not correct?’

Eve nodded, and Henty said, ‘You said something about – how long? eighteen days? – in which to return the statue. Return it to where – Hunan? That’s absolutely impossible, you know that.’

‘I regret the limited time allowed, but I am afraid there is no way of changing my master’s mind. If I do not have the statue back with him on the day appointed, I too shall be killed.’ Sun was abruptly grave, as if the thought of his own possible death was suddenly a surprise to him. Then he shrugged away the possibility: he was that acrobatic philosopher, an optimistic fatalist.

‘Why is there such an absolute deadline?’ Henty asked. ‘Can’t you ask your master for an extension?’

Sun shook his head. ‘The only wireless in Hunan is controlled by Chang Ching-yao. I should have told my master before this that I had missed you, had it been possible. I have been in a veritable state of frustration ever since I took ship at Hong Kong. What to do? I kept asking myself.’

‘How did you manage to arrive here today then, if you were always so far behind Miss Tozer?’

‘My ship went to Constantinople – I caught the Orient Express from there. A very funny name for a train, one that stops over 4000 miles from the real Orient. But very comfortable and full of very strange people. It saved me several days getting here.’

‘It hasn’t saved us enough to get us to Hunan in eighteen days.’

Eve looked at the watch in her hand. Somehow she knew, with a sickening feeling of certainty, that it was all the evidence she needed to know that her father had indeed been kidnapped. But with despairing hope she said, ‘What if I don’t believe your story, Mr Sun? You could have stolen this watch – ’

Sun Nan produced a piece of folded notepaper from the inside of his jacket and handed it to her. As soon as she unfolded it she recognized the handwriting, bold, assertive even while it asked for her help: Eve darling, These fellows, I’m afraid, mean business. Give them what they want. And don’t worry. Dad.

‘I don’t understand why the Shanghai office hasn’t cabled us your father is missing,’ said Henty.

‘Mr Henty, China hasn’t changed since you left. Up-country, two days out of Shanghai, and you could be on the other side of the moon as far as keeping in contact.’ She turned back to Sun Nan. ‘Will your master, whoever he is, really kill my father if he doesn’t get back that statue?’

‘I’m afraid so, Miss Tozer. He does not value lives highly, especially those of foreigners. He often jokes he would have made a very good imperialist.’ He smiled, but Eve and Henty did not share the joke.

‘What about you? Do you value foreigners’ lives?’

Sun spread his hands. ‘I value my own. I am a humble messenger. Does the telegraph boy carry the burden of every telegram he delivers?’

‘Good Christ, now he’s spouting bloody aphorisms!’ Then Henty hastily looked at Eve, wobbled on his stick. ‘I’m frightfully sorry. I usually don’t swear in front of ladies – ’

‘It’s all right, Mr Henty. Everything is bloody at the moment.’

Eve felt choked: with helplessness, fear, premature grief for her father who was about to die. She had felt grief before but that had been bearable; her mother, gone suddenly with cancer, had been spared what the doctors had said would otherwise have been a long lingering death. But Bradley Tozer, for all his adventurousness, had always seemed to her invulnerable. Though they had often been separated in the years during and since the war, she living in America with her grandmother and he coming home from China on his annual visits, she had never thought of life without him. The bond between them had never been severed or even frayed by distance. Distance …

‘How far is it from London to Hunan by air?’

‘By air?’ Henty’s eyebrows went up this time as if he had had a sudden spasm; then they came down again in a puzzled frown. ‘By aeroplane, you mean? But there’s no aeroplane service that far. The furthest it goes is to Paris.’

‘I can fly. Father and I have our own machine back home. We usually fly from Boston down to our winter place in Florida. We were planning to do so next month.’ She heard herself already speaking in the past tense; and tried to sound more resolute. ‘We can buy a machine here and fly to China. How far is it?’

‘I don’t know. Seven, perhaps eight thousand miles as the crow flies. But you wouldn’t be flying as the crow flies. It’s out of the question, Miss Tozer – ’

‘Nothing is out of the question, Mr Henty, if it will save my father’s life. Unless you can think of an alternative?’

Henty thumped his stick on the carpet in frustration. ‘No, I can’t. But such a flight – ’ He trailed off helplessly.

‘Some men – what was their name? Smith? – flew out to Australia only last year.’

‘Ross and Keith Smith. But there were four of them, they had an engineer and a mechanic and they flew a Vickers Vimy bomber. Even so they took longer than eighteen days. A month at least, I think. And another half a dozen chaps have tried to follow them and got less than half-way.’

‘China is not as far as Australia and the Smiths were not as hard pressed for time as I am.’

‘I wish there were some other way – ’

‘There isn’t,’ said Eve. ‘Where can I buy an aeroplane?’

2

Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:

George Weyman always said he could read my sky-writing better than he could the handwritten notes I used to leave for him in our office. Perhaps that was because he suffered from what we now call dyslexia; or perhaps it was because the only sky-writing contract we ever had was for Oxo, the meat extract. Or more correctly, nearly had. Because at the time I am writing of, we were no more than on trial. The first sky-writing had been attempted by an American way back in 1913, but nobody had yet come up with a formula for keeping the smoke coming consistently out of the exhaust pipes of our machines. Letters kept breaking off in mid-stroke; if the world at large had been able to read Mr Pitman’s shorthand we might have been successful. There were plenty of advertisers waiting to use our services once we proved, as it were, that we were not illiterate. That summer we had been approached by a sweets manufacturer who wanted his name, plus a gumdrop in green, sketched above half a dozen seaside resorts. The producers of the motion picture Why Change Tour Wife? had also been in touch with us; they wanted the name of their film in purple smoke and that of the delectable actress, Miss Gloria Swanson, in red, hung, as one of their publicity men described it, on God’s marquee. The thought of Miss Swanson in cirrocumulus across London’s sky had excited me, but reason had forced us to say no to them. There was no point in taking on a 35-letter contract when I still hadn’t succeeded in spelling out Oxo.

This weekend was our last chance and our luck was running its usual course. George and I had stood in our shed all morning watching the rain; as soon as it stopped I took off. The clouds were still too low for good sky-writing, but that couldn’t be helped. The writing, if I managed to get it out of the exhaust, was going to be just that much lower to the ground. The shortsighted citizens, if not the executives of Oxo, would be pleased.

I finished the first O, shut off the smoke and took the Sopwith Camel up to begin the first stroke of the X. But half-way down the stroke I knew our luck had finally run out; there was nothing but a dribble coming from the exhaust. I did a half-loop and climbed back up again, rolled over into another dive. But it was no use: Oxo was no more than a giant cypher in the sky, drifting west towards Berkshire, a county not noted for Oxo drinkers. I cursed the smoke mixture, the weather and God Himself and headed back towards earth and bankruptcy.

I took the Camel down over the Thames towards Waddon aerodrome near Croydon. I passed over the Oval. Surrey was playing Notts that day and play had started; spectators sat around the ground in their raincoats and watched the flannelled fools on the mud-heap out in the middle. I hoped Surrey was batting and I waggled the Camel’s wings as an encouragement to Hobbs and Sandham. Cricket is, or was then, a peaceful game; but none of the cricketers down there knew the peace I sometimes felt up here in the sky. Excitement, too; but mostly peace these days, as if the air was my one true element, the one to be trusted. Debts were never airborne with me, nor any other worries. That gave the sky a certain purity, if nothing else did.

Waddon aerodrome came up on my starboard wing and I banked to go in, making sure there were no other machines with the same idea at that particular moment. I could see four or five machines at various heights around the aerodrome; they would be the joy-riders, ten minutes for ten bob. There was a control tower at Waddon, but they had little control over you if you chose not to look in their direction. It was the days before the bureaucrats began cutting up the sky into little cubes with aeroplanes’ markings on them. Too many damned people flying these days. Egalitarianism should never have been allowed to get off the ground.

I came in over the long sheds of the Aircraft Disposal Company. I always wanted to weep when I thought of what stood there beneath those long roofs. Hundreds of aircraft, like birds that had died at the moment they had spread their wings for flight. Pups, Camels, SE5a’s, Bristols, DH4’s and 9’s, Handley Pages, even some Spads and Nieuports: the no-longer-wanted chariots of a war everyone was trying to forget. The Aircraft Disposal Company had brought them all here when the war had ended. It had been expected there would be a rush to buy them, everyone wanting to be airborne on the euphoria of peace and a cheap aeroplane. But it had turned out that the wartime pilots had other, more pressing things to do with their money. Such as getting married (what use was a Sopwith Pup to a couple intent on adding to the postwar baby boom?), buying a house if you could find one (the housing shortage wasn’t a recent invention), emigrating to Canada or Australia: money went no further in 1919-20 than it does now. There’s just more of it now, that’s all, like promiscuity. The satisfaction with what you get hasn’t been increased.

There were a few of us who felt no immediate need of a wife, a house or a new country. I had no nostalgia for the war, none at all. But two years of tossing an aeroplane about the sky, uninhibited but for a natural desire to avoid German bullets, had worn threadbare any yearning for what the editorial writers were then calling the fruits of victory. Already they, the fruits not the editorialists, looked speckled. Though come to think of it, what those editorialists wrote had the sound of second-hand words in which they didn’t truly believe, the harangue of men caught at a corner where they weren’t sure from which direction came the echoes they could hear. In that year the Roaring Twenties was still just a distant whisper. In the meantime some of us flew aeroplanes, ignored our debts and called Waddon home.

There were two landing fields at Waddon in those days, separated from each other by a public road, Plough Lane. I put the Camel down on the grass of the field called Wallington, holding it against the cross-wind. Landing was usually no problem, if you watched the wind; but taking off, a cross-wind could sometimes flip you over on your back. You don’t get that sort of thrill these days in those damned great cattle trucks they call jumbos. I swung the machine round at the end of the field and taxied back towards the level crossing over Plough Lane, feeling as I always felt when I came back to earth, deflated. I’ve heard it likened to post-coital blues, though personally I never felt any such blues till I was too old to be coital.

I crossed the road, waving a royal hand to the envious and resentful motorists and cyclists waiting beyond the gates, and taxied towards our shed near the ADC’s hangars. George Weyman was waiting for me, ready to put the Camel away as he always did. George still flew, but he was the mechanic of the two of us and he looked after our single machine as if he, and not the Sopwith Company, had given birth to it. He loved it as an aeroplane, but he also loved it as our only asset.

‘Someone has just been on the telephone,’ he said when the Camel was safely stored away in the shed that was its hangar, our office and our home. We could not afford a telephone and I knew he must have been called over to the ADC’s office. ‘Chap named Henty. He said you would remember him, Arthur Henty.’

‘We were in the same battalion together, before I transferred to the RFC. What did he want? Not some bloody regimental reunion, I hope.’

‘He said something about wanting to buy an aeroplane. Or maybe two.’

‘We’re not going to sell him the Camel,’ I protested in anticipation. ‘We’ll pay off our debts some other way.’

‘What other way? I saw what just happened to Oxo.’ He nodded up towards the sky. The O I’d written was now just a flat dim vowel in the greyness. ‘You’re not thinking of taking up joy-riders, are you? They’ll expect a seat, not be standing out on the wing.’

George Weyman was a big man with a high voice and a low boiling point. He never went looking for a fight or an argument, but somehow he seemed to spend half his time swinging his fists to defend a point or holding someone down to force an argument down his throat. He was prickly with prejudices and one had to be careful one didn’t rub against them; which was not always easy to do, since they seemed to cover the whole spectrum of human bias. So why did I choose him as my friend and partner? Because he was loyal, honest, good company when he wasn’t arguing and the best damn aeroplane mechanic I’d ever come across.

‘Did Henty say why he wanted to see me? If he wants a machine, why doesn’t he just go over to the ADC?’

‘He said he’d like your advice as an old army mate.’

‘Henty would never use the word mate.’

‘Righto. Friend. He said he’d be down within the hour. What are you thinking about? You’ve got your swindler’s look again.’

I was staring across at the ADC’s sheds. ‘How many cheques do we have left in our cheque-book?’

‘Four. There’s just one snag. We don’t have any money in our account. They closed our overdraft on Friday.’

‘Today’s a bank holiday. If I write four cheques, who’s going to be able to call the bank to see if there’s any money in our account to meet them?’

‘What are you going to write four cheques for?’

‘Deposits on four machines. We’ll give Henty a choice – you said he wanted a machine, perhaps two. You said he also wanted my advice. My advice will be to buy from us, not the ADC. We’ll be more expensive than the ADC, but he won’t know that.’

‘I don’t know how you got your commission as an officer and a gentleman. I was only a bloody sergeant and I’m twice the gentleman you are.’

‘You’re wrong, chum. Honesty has nothing to do with being a gentleman – that’s a myth put out by gentlemen. Simmer down, George. I’m not about to do something they can send me to Wormwood Scrubs for. All I’m going to do is put our name – ’

‘Your name. Not mine.’

‘Righto, my name. I’ll sign the cheques and leave them with the ADC. If Henty buys a machine, or two, I’ll cancel the deposits on those he doesn’t want. I’ll get him to give us his cheque today and we’ll be down at the bank in the morning when it opens to deposit it to meet the cheques we’ve paid out. Now what’s dishonest about that?’

‘It’s not what I’d expect of a gentleman, that’s all.’

‘That’s because you’re not a gentleman. You socialists always expect more of us than we claim for ourselves. You secretly wish you had our honest hypocrisy.’

Half an hour later we saw the Rolls-Royce pull up outside our shed. It came down the perimeter of the field as if the chauffeur wasn’t quite sure that he wasn’t going to be attacked by the aeroplanes coming in and taking off. Arthur Henty got out, steadying himself with a walking-stick. He turned and helped out a girl. Even through the dirty windows of our office one could see she was a stunner, an absolute beauty. I know I’m looking back through a rose-coloured telescope and the girls of an old man’s youth always have an aura about them. But Eve Tozer was not only beautiful, she had what was later known as It or, still later, sex appeal; and she also had what is now known as class. Even through the grime of that office window and the rheum of an old man’s eyes, I can still see her that afternoon fifty years ago and still remember the feeling that, up till then, I had only experienced when looping the loop. And not in bed.

‘Holy Moses, did you ever see such a girl!’

‘They’ve got a bloody Chink with them,’ was all George said. He was only slightly prejudiced against women, but he had a consuming aversion to all the world’s populace who weren’t white, especially those outside the Empire. ‘We’re not going to sell any machine to him! Those buggers want to conquer the world.’

‘Let me do the talking, George. Just don’t declare war on China till we hear what Henty has to say.’

We went out to meet them. A Chinese had come round from the passenger’s side of the front seat and stood by the rear door behind Henty and the girl. As we walked towards them I whispered to George, ‘The Chinaman looks like a butler. Stop worrying about the Yellow Peril.’

Henty introduced himself and Miss Tozer, ignoring the Chinese, and came straight to his point. ‘Miss Tozer needs an aeroplane for a long-distance flight, O’Malley.’

The O’Malley was a measure of the sort of friends we had been. We had been fellow officers sharing a mess and several trenches together, but he had been wounded and demobbed before we had been through enough to get down to first-name terms. ‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘I saw that piece in the Illustrated London News on your attempts at sky-writing. I cut it out and kept it. One likes to keep track of chaps one knew in the army, y’know.’

It wasn’t a liking of mine, but I was glad it was one of his, if it meant he brought Miss Tozer to meet chaps he’d known in the army. ‘How long is the flight you’re planning, Miss Tozer?’

‘To China.’ I felt George start beside me. ‘I’d like to leave tomorrow at the latest.’

‘Are you serious?’ said George, starting to boil. ‘We don’t like having our leg pulled.’

‘I’ve never been more serious in my life, Mr Weyman. I am an experienced pilot, I know what I’m attempting should have more preparation than a day’s notice allows. But I just don’t have the time. I am flying to China because it is urgent, terribly urgent, that I get there by a certain date.’

‘How soon?’

She looked at Henty, then back at us. ‘21 August. I’ll need an aeroplane with maximum range and a good cruising speed. One that will carry myself as pilot and a passenger.’

I glanced at Henty and he shook his head. ‘Not me. Mr Sun Nan.’

The Chinese behind them stared at George and me. I almost said inscrutably, but there was a certain nervousness about him, tiny cracks in his mask. ‘Does Mr Sun Nan fly?’

‘No,’ said Henty. I became aware that he and Miss Tozer did not want to take me and George into their confidence. This flight they were talking about was no eccentricity, no madcap adventure by a bored rich girl; they were far too serious for that, too strained-looking. But I was certain that Miss Tozer, for all her claims to being an experienced pilot, really had no idea of what lay ahead of her. Henty must have seen the sceptical look on my face, because he went on, ‘On our way down here I’ve been talking to Miss Tozer about taking a second machine and pilot with her.’

‘Mr Henty vouched for you as a pilot and a gentleman,’ said Miss Tozer.

George coughed and ran his hand like a crab over his mouth. I wasn’t sure that Henty knew anything about my value as either a pilot or a gentleman; but he was one of those, now almost all gone, who believed that if a man came from a certain class he was taken as a gentleman until proven otherwise. He had told me so one night in our mess at Salisbury, before we had gone to France and found the Germans made no class distinctions as they shot at us. He knew nothing about my cynicism: that had developed after we had parted company.

‘What would the pay be?’ I said, ungentlemanly.

‘We could come to terms,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘There would be no quibbling on my part. My only concern is to get to China as soon as possible. And I think we are wasting time even now. May we look at the aeroplane you suggest I buy?’

‘It’s over there in the ADC sheds,’ I lied. ‘They let us store our machines there. We have four.’

‘Five,’ said George, determined to get a grain of truth in somewhere. ‘We have a Sopwith Camel, but that would be no good for your purpose.’

Mr Sun Nan stayed with the chauffeur and we led Miss Tozer and Henty across to the Company’s sheds. Being a holiday there was only a skeleton staff on duty; no salesman followed us as we made our way down past the long lines of parked aircraft. The first machine I showed Miss Tozer was a Vickers Vimy. It could carry four people and extra fuel tanks could be fitted; it had been a good bomber in the last days of the war. George had not come across with me to look at it when I had paid one of our rubber cheques as a deposit on it; but ten minutes’ inspection now told him it would need at least a week’s work before being ready for any long-range flying. It was the same with the De Havilland 9 and 4 on which I had also paid deposits; I could see our quick profits disappearing even quicker than that O in Oxo. We were left with only the Bristol Fighter at the end of the line.

‘There’s another DH4 at the other end of the shed.’ George suddenly sounded as if he had been a used aeroplane dealer all his life. ‘But I’d take the Bristol over it. The range is about the same, but the Bristol is about five miles an hour faster and it can climb about five thousand feet higher. You’ll be crossing a lot of mountains, I suppose.’

‘What’s the range?’ Miss Tozer asked.

‘The Bristol will stay up for three hours,’ I said. ‘I flew one for a while during the war. Say about three hundred miles or a little over.’

‘We could stretch that by fitting extra tanks,’ said George. ‘Assuming you cruise around ninety to one hundred miles an hour, with the extra tanks you’d probably get another hundred, possibly more, to your range. Let’s say four hundred and fifty miles maximum.’

Miss Tozer stared at the Bristol Fighter. It had been a great warplane, a two-seater almost as manoeuvrable as any single-seater and twice as effective because it had carried two guns, one fired straight ahead by the pilot and the other able to be fired in a complete circle by the observer. George and I had flown as a team in one of them and in three months we had brought down nine Huns. Miss Tozer walked round the machine, then came back to us.

‘Mr O’Malley, could you get us some maps? I think we need to sit down and have a talk. Perhaps we could go back to your office?’

Two people in our office crowded it; a four-person conference would have split it at the seams. ‘We’ll go back to our shed – we can find a spot there where we can have a talk. George will have to scout around for some maps – all we have are some of England and some old war maps of France and Belgium. But before he goes scrounging – ’

‘Yes?’

‘This machine won’t do for what you have in mind. For one thing, it can carry only you and Mr Sun Nan. There won’t be room for a second pilot. You mentioned the possibility of a second machine, but all we have is our Camel. It wouldn’t have sufficient range.’

She was quiet for a moment. She had a habit, that I was to come to recognize later, of holding her chin in one hand, almost as if she had a toothache; but it was her pensive attitude, as if she were holding her head steady while she deliberated. Then: ‘How many other Bristol Fighters are there here?’

‘At least half a dozen,’ said George. ‘Two of them are in as good condition as this one.’

‘They happen to be two on which we have an option,’ I said.

‘I thought you might have,’ said Miss Tozer, and suddenly I knew she had already begun to doubt Henty’s recommendation of me as a gentleman. ‘How much would they cost?’

I almost quoted the ADC price; but then I thought, nothing risked, nothing profited. ‘Roughly £750 each. How many were you thinking of buying?’

Miss Tozer looking at George, the honest broker. ‘What would you say they would cost, Mr Weyman?’

George swallowed, didn’t look at me. ‘By the time the extra tanks and everything had been fitted, about £750.’ There went our profit: I had forgotten all the extras that would be needed. ‘It’s a fair price, Miss Tozer.’

‘I’m sure it is, Mr Weyman,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘Do you have a pilot’s licence?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll buy three.’ She took her hand away from her chin; she had all her thoughts sorted out. ‘I’ll fly this one and you and Mr O’Malley can fly the other two. We’ll fit extra tanks to each of them – we can put an extra tank on the top wing, can’t we? – but your two machines will also have extra tanks in the rear cockpits. In other words we can carry our own emergency supply dump.’

I was amazed at the calm, cold efficiency of this beautiful girl who, without benefit of maps, with no knowledge of the route she would have to fly, had already anticipated some of the basic problems such a trip would present. It was as if she had had a satellite’s view of the world between England and China. Except, of course, that in those days anyone would have been locked up who had suggested such a view was possible. Only God’s eye was the empyrean one then and I’m sure He occasionally shut it in disgust at what He saw.

‘Could you find some maps, Mr Weyman? In the meantime, Mr O’Malley, I’d like some tea.’

George, looking slightly dazed, went off. I said, ‘Pardon me for mentioning it, Miss Tozer, but I don’t think George and I have yet agreed to accompany you. I’m not taking off at twenty four hours’ notice to fly all the way to China and not know why I’m going.’

‘You’ll be well paid. Isn’t that a good enough reason for going?’

‘It’s a good reason, but it’s not enough.’

We had now walked back to our shed. The Camel stood in the middle of it, the star lodger. Against one wall were the camp beds of the other two lodgers, George and me. Near the beds were a kitchen table, two chairs, a cupboard with a sagging door, a stove that looked like something that had fallen off George Stephenson’s Rocket; pots and pans hung on nails on the wall, like the armour of the poor, and a length of old parachute silk was a curtain that hid the rack on which hung our skimpy wardrobe. In the far corner there was a chipped bath and a rough bench on which stood a basin and a large bedroom jug. The bench continued along the wall, holding all George’s tools, till it came up against the cubby-hole that was our office. The only hint of affluence in the place was the Camel and it already showed the pockmarks of the surrounding poverty.

Miss Tozer looked around her. ‘Who lives here?’

‘We do.’

Even Henty looked stunned, as if he had bought a ticket for Ascot and found himself in the Potteries. He rushed to our defence: ‘It’s only temporary, I’m sure.’

‘That’s what we said when we moved in here over a year ago. Don’t apologize for us, Henty. We’re broke. Kaiser Bill could raise more credit at our bank than we could.’ Since George had already wiped out the profit I’d been anticipating, I could afford to be honest; it was about all that I could afford. I turned to Miss Tozer, took a nose-dive. ‘Never mind the reason why you want to fly to China. We’ll go with you. As you said, the money is good enough reason.’

‘I admire your honesty, Mr O’Malley.’ But she sounded as if she was surprised by it, too. She walked out again to the open doors of the shed, stood staring off into the distance – towards China? Perhaps: she was looking east. She took something from the pocket of her suit, fondled it without looking at it: it was a gold watch and chain. Then she came back to us. ‘I’ll tell you why I have to fly to China.’

Which she did, her voice faltering only once, when she mentioned that her father would be killed if we did not reach Hunan by the deadline date. My ear faltered, too, because I found it hard to believe what she was telling me. But the proof was there in her face and in that of Henty behind her.

‘It may be dangerous, Mr O’Malley. Perhaps now you won’t want to come.’

‘She needs your help,’ said Henty before I could volunteer to be a hero; then looked at his crippled leg with hate. ‘I wish to God I could go!’

George came back, one big hand clutching a roll of maps, the other holding a school atlas. I told him why Miss Tozer wanted us to fly to China with her. He listened at first as if I were telling him about a proposed joy-ride to the Isle of Wight; then abruptly he exploded. He swung round, pointing a rifle-barrel of an arm at Mr Sun Nan still standing beside the Rolls-Royce.

‘Is he part of this? You mean you take that sort of threat from a – a damned Chinaman? I’d kill the swine!’

‘If we kill him, Mr Weyman, we’ll probably also kill my father. If you dislike the Chinese so much, perhaps you’d better not come with us.’

‘He’ll come,’ I said. ‘We need him. We’ll go with you, but it will cost £500 for each of us and our return fares.’

‘Five hundred each!’ Henty, I hadn’t suspected, had a bookkeeper’s mind. ‘That’s preposterous! You’re making money out of someone else’s difficulty!’

‘I’m not going to bargain – ’

‘Neither am I!’ Miss Tozer was suddenly fierce. ‘You sound as if you’re putting a price tag on my father’s life!’

‘On the contrary. I was putting a price on our lives. I don’t think I’ve over-valued them. We’re cheaper than the machines you’re buying.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I had the idea that Miss Tozer was not accustomed to apologizing. I also had the idea I had hurt her and that hadn’t been my intention. ‘I’ll pay whatever you ask. Now may we please get down to planning the trip?’

I made tea, got out our four cracked and only cups, pulled the chairs and two boxes up to the kitchen table, spread out the maps and got down to planning an 8000-mile trip to China, everything to be ready within 24 hours. Moses, Columbus and Captain Cook, three other voyagers, would have laughed at us. The roll of maps George had scrounged took us only as far as Vienna. The rest of the proposed route, over which we had some argument, was sketched out on a school atlas on which the inky fingermarks of its former owner, some unknown juvenile, were sprinkled like a warlock’s mockery. I began to wonder what George and I had let ourselves in for. I felt like Columbus or Magellan, heading for the edge of the world, flying into an unknown sky.

‘We can’t take a direct route,’ George said. ‘We’ll have to fly by way of places where we can refuel. And there’s no guarantee we can do that all the way. There are bound to be stretches where they’ve never seen an aeroplane.’

‘We’ll have to risk that,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘Can you have everything ready by tomorrow morning?’

George nodded. ‘I’ve already asked half a dozen chaps to stand by to help us. I promised them a pound each if they would work right through the night – all right?’ Eve nodded, but Henty looked as if George had promised them life pensions. ‘I didn’t tell them where we are going, just that the machines have to stand up to some hard, long flying. They’ll have them ready in time.’

‘I’d like to take off at noon tomorrow. Is there anything I can get up in London, things we’ll need?’

I had been making out a list. ‘We want to keep things down to a minimum because of weight, but there are still essentials. You’d better get flying suits for you and Mr Sun – ’

‘Let the swine freeze,’ said George.

I ignored him. ‘We have our wartime suits. You’ll need some good strong boots – just in case we have to walk. We want a spare compass for each machine – and you’d better get us a spare sextant. Four sleeping bags, a Primus stove and eight water-bottles, two each. Make sure the bottles are silver or nickel-plated inside, the water tastes better. You can buy them at Hill’s in Haymarket. We’ll need a medicine kit – John Bell and Croyden in Wigmore Street will make up one for you. And maps – the best place will be the War Office.’

‘I’ll get those,’ said Henty.

‘We’ll supply the cooking things. A rifle will come in handy, just in case we have to shoot something for food. You can advise her on that, Henty.’

‘Miss Tozer has her own gun. I gather she is very competent with it.’

‘What do you shoot?’

‘Elephant, tiger. And the occasional man.’

George and I looked at her with cautious interest this time. Then George said, ‘We’ll bring our service pistols. And I’ll fit machine-guns – the ADC has some spares.’

‘Isn’t that illegal?’ said Henty. ‘I mean arming a civilian aeroplane?’

‘Yes,’ said George. ‘But we’ll be out of here before anyone knows. I’ll put a couple of Vickers forward on Bede’s and my machines and I’ll mount a couple of Lewis guns on the Scarff rings in our rear cockpits.’

‘I hope we shan’t need them,’ said Miss Tozer soberly.

We were all silent a moment. The machine-guns suddenly made the other equipment seem superfluous; George and Henty and I were all at once back to the values of war. For the first time it struck me that the actual flying to China might not be the worst part of the trip.

‘We’ll wait till they fire first,’ I said, denying a wartime principle. ‘Whoever they are.’

Hently took out a cheque-book and I left him to George, who was our book-keeper, when we had books to keep. I got up and went outside. Miss Tozer followed me. She took a cigarette from a gold case, fitted it into an ivory holder, looked at me.

‘I don’t smoke. I haven’t any matches, I’m afraid.’

She searched in her handbag, took out a box of matches fitted into a small gold case, handed it to me. I don’t think I was awkward with women, even in those days; but I was fumble-fingered just then. I had never lit a woman’s cigarette before; I held the spluttering match towards her like an apprentice on Guy Fawkes’s team. She smiled, puffed on the cigarette, then stood looking around the aerodrome as the last of the joyriding machines came gliding in.

‘Mr Henty told me you were an ace. Thirty-two aeroplanes, is that right?’ I nodded. Or 44 men, if you wanted to count it another way: some of the machines had been two-seaters, such as the Albatros C7. But I never counted it that way, couldn’t. ‘Do you miss it all? The war, I mean?’

‘No. Only lunatics and generals love war.’

That’s a glib statement these days, something you see on demonstrators’ banners, but no less true for being glib. But the Battle of the Somme was only four years behind us then: I July 1916, when the British Army alone lost 60,000 men, the day that finally put an end to the glory of war. I was there that Saturday morning, in the third wave to leave the trenches. I saw the men ahead of us going up the hill, strung out like a frieze against the skyline, a frieze quickly ripped to pieces as the German machine-guns cut them down. The second wave went on, never hesitating, just walking smack into death. When I led my platoon over the top I already knew half of them would not live to reach the top of the hill. They died like flowers under the scythe and by the time I reached the top of the hill and could go no further, was trapped in a shell crater with three dead men and another one dying, I wasn’t wanting to fight the Germans but to turn back and go hunting for the blind, stupid, living-in-the-past generals who had ordered this massacre. I survived that day and I didn’t go hunting the generals. Instead, I joined the Royal Flying Corps, where you were above the carnage and the muck and, if you had to die, you died a clean, sensible death.

‘I miss the thrill of flying, I mean the way we flew in the war. I’m grateful for this job, Miss Tozer. Not just for the money.’

‘It won’t be fun, Mr O’Malley. Not for me, anyway.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of it as fun. I was thinking that once again I’ll be flying an aeroplane somewhere for some purpose.’

I looked east, towards Kent, the Channel, France and everything that lay between us and China. In the foreground stood Mr Sun Nan, bowler-hatted, black-suited, patient-faced. I couldn’t hate him, not even if I’d had George’s prejudices. He was the one who had rescued me from Oxo and all the other graffiti I had planned to scrawl on the sky.

End of extract from O’Malley manuscript.

3

General Meng had started life with the burdening name of Swaying Flower: his mother, going against the grain, had wanted a daughter instead of a son. At the age of six, already ferocious, he had changed it to Tiger Claw; by the time he was eighteen and had already killed six men he had had half a dozen other names. Now, at fifty and with countless dead behind him, he called himself Lord of the Sword. He knew there were people who called him other names and if he chanced to hear them he terminated their opportunities to call anyone any name at all.

So far Bradley Tozer had called him nothing but General. ‘You are a respectful man, Mr Tozer.’

‘Not really, General. Just circumspect. I call you other names, but only to myself.’

General Meng nodded, unoffended; if he had to kill this American he would do so for other reasons. He pulled back the sleeve of his voluminous blue silk robe and waved a decorated fan in front of his face. He had come originally from the cooler steppes of Sinkiang and he had never really become accustomed to the more humid heat of Hunan. He was a tall man with a handsome Mongolian face and a head of thick dark hair that was his main vanity. Every morning one of his concubines brushed the black hair for fifteen minutes. It shone like the feathers of a mallard, reflecting any lights that shone on it; the walls of his yamen, his palace, were lined with mirrors to add to the light. Meng could admire himself from any angle at any time of day and his head, the object of his admiration, gleamed like an evil totem to the scores of people who served him in the palace.

He looked at himself in a convenient mirror, then back at the American who could have been his half-brother. ‘I’ll kill you if the statue is not returned in time. I am a man of my word. At least, when it pleases me to be.’

They both spoke in Mandarin, the words a little awkward in their mouths: each in his own way was a foreigner to Peking. Tozer could also speak Cantonese, but Meng had only contempt for the dialect of the shopkeepers from the south. They were not warriors like himself.

‘My daughter will bring the statue. I told you, General – I prize the statue, but not above my own life.’

‘Are you afraid, Mr Tozer?’

‘No,’ said Tozer, hoping he sounded unafraid.

He was taller than Meng, with a hard-boned thrusting face and impatient eyes; he had inherited some of his mother’s features but none of her placidity. Never having known his mother, he had decided to be an American: to have been chosen All-American had brought him a double satisfaction that no one else had known of. He had no time for fools or incompetents, but he was a fair-minded man and he paid better wages than his competitors, and those who survived his stringent standards and demands usually stayed with him for years. He was also a sensible man and he knew there was no sense in applying standards or demands in the present circumstances. Also, he knew enough of Meng’s reputation to believe that the General would be a man of his word. When it pleased him to be.

‘Why is this statue so important to you, General?’

Meng continued to fan himself. He looked at the two bodyguards standing behind him. They were Mongols from the Tsaidam, muscular men in blue coarse wool robes, worn with a sash beneath which the skirt of the robe flared out. Their riding boots had upturned toes and each man had his long pipe stowed in the side of the boot. The robe was worn with one arm free and the shoulder exposed, a décolleté effect that was more threatening than provocative, since the hand of each bare arm always rested on a broadsword hung from a loop in the sash. The martial effect was only spoiled by the flat tweed caps they wore, suggesting a trade union frame of mind that had so far escaped their master. They hated the local Hunanese and were in turn hated, a state of affairs that kept them constantly alert for their own safety and, by projection, that of General Meng.

He waved the fan at them, dismissing them, and they went out of the small room, their heels clumping on the bare wooden floor. Meng waited till the door closed behind them, knowing they would take up their stance outside it, then turned back to Bradley Tozer.

‘Neither of those men speaks Mandarin, but one can’t be too careful. I can’t have them thinking I’m less than perfect.’ He looked at himself again in a mirror, nodded in satisfaction as if the mirror had told him he was as close to perfection as it was possible to be. ‘I am superstitious, Mr Tozer, my only failing. The twin statues of Lao-Tze have brought me good fortune ever since I acquired them some years ago.’

‘How did you acquire them?’

‘I made their owner, a landlord in a neighbouring province, an offer he couldn’t refuse. It’s an old Chinese custom which I believe a certain secret society in Italy has now copied from us.’

‘What was the offer?’

‘His head for the statues. Unfortunately, one of my bodyguards misunderstood an order I gave and the landlord lost his head anyway.’

‘I hope your bodyguards don’t misunderstand any orders you may give about me.’

Meng smiled. ‘I admire you, Mr Tozer. I think you are secretly very afraid, but you won’t lose face, will you? It is so important, face. That is why I want my statue returned.’

Tozer knew not to ask how Meng had lost the statue to Chang Ching-yao in the first place; the matter of face forbade such a question. He waited while Meng fanned himself again, then the General went on:

‘The dog Chang came to see me, under a flag of truce, to suggest an armistice between us. We have been fighting for two years now, as you know. I welcomed him, being a man who prefers peace to war.’ He looked in the mirror again, but the sunlight coming in the window had shifted and the mirror was, by some trick of refraction, momentarily just a pane of light, like a milky-white blind eye. Annoyed, he turned back to Tozer, his voice taking on a ragged edge. ‘While he was here, enjoying my hospitality, he had one of his men steal the statue he eventually sold you. How much did you pay him for it?’

‘Ten thousand American dollars.’

The fan quickened its movement, like a metronome that had been angrily struck. ‘Aah! You know it is worth much more than that, don’t you? Even so, it is enough to buy him two or three aeroplanes. You know that is what he wants, don’t you? He is already recruiting foreign pilots down in Shanghai. I knew it was a dreadful day when he stole that statue. So many things have gone wrong since then. Our harvest has been poor, I’ve had four opium caravans ambushed, yesterday I learned two of my concubines have got syphilis – ’ The fan stopped abruptly, was snapped shut and pointed like a pistol at Tozer. ‘My good fortune will not return until that statue is returned, Mr Tozer. And neither will yours.’

Chapter 2

1

The three Bristol Fighters took off on time at noon on Tuesday. O’Malley and Weyman had worked till midnight the previous night, then left the servicing of the planes to the six mechanics Weyman had engaged. Extra tanks were fitted into the rear cockpits of two of the planes and an extra gravity-feeding tank was mounted on the upper wings of the three aircraft. Spare parts were split between O’Malley’s and Weyman’s machines to divide the weight: a spare propeller, six magnetos, vulcanizing kit for repairing burst tyres, an extra-strong lifting jack. When the mechanics fitted the Vickers and Lewis guns they asked questions, but George Weyman told them to mind their own business. Just before take-off he turned up with four boxes of ammunition.

‘All we can afford to carry. We’re right on our weight maximum.’

‘Have you filled the tanks?’ O’Malley asked.

‘Right to the brim. Three and eightpence a gallon – I’m glad our lady friend is paying and not us. It’ll be a pleasure to get away from inflation. How did she handle the machine when you took her up this morning?’

O’Malley had taken Eve Tozer up on a test flight to see how she could handle the Bristol. He had warned her that it had its peculiarities: an inadequate rudder, ailerons that were inclined to be heavy, a tendency for the elevators to be spongy at low speeds; and when he had got into the passenger’s cockpit behind her he had wondered if perhaps they might not get further than Purley, just over the ridge at the end of the aerodrome. He had fitted the Gosport tubes into the earpieces in his flying helmet, picked up the speaking tube and wished Eve good luck, then sat back rigidly in his seat and waited for possible disaster. Like so many pilots he was a bad passenger. However …

‘You’d have thought she’d been flying Brisfits all her life. She’s a natural, George.’

‘I don’t think she liked me laying down the law about how much baggage she could take with her. That Chink maid who came down with her must have thought she was going in a Zeppelin. She’d packed four suitcases for her.’

Henty, Sun Nan and Eve came across from the Rolls-Royce, where Anna, the maid, stood with the three suitcases that had been refused by Weyman. Eve and Sun were dressed in brand-new flying suits and both wore helmets; Eve carried the lacquered wooden box, now wrapped in hessian, under her arm and Sun carried his bowler hat under his. Eve looked pale but determined and Sun looked pale and scared.

‘Mr Sun tells me he has never flown before,’ Eve said.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Weyman. ‘We could run into rough weather all the way across France.’

‘Mr Weyman, we had better get one thing straight before we leave. I need both you and Mr O’Malley, but I need Mr Sun much more than either of you. He refuses to tell me who his master is or where he is to be found, for fear that as soon as we take off Mr Henty will cable the authorities in Shanghai and try to have a rescue mission mounted from that end. I shouldn’t want to risk my father’s life by having such a mission look for him, but Mr Sun doesn’t trust me. So I need him to guide us to where my father is being held captive. Don’t forget that – and keep your anti-Chinese feelings to yourself. I’m paying you for your skill as a mechanic and pilot, not for your opinions on the Chinese.’

Weyman flushed and for a moment it looked as if he was going to explode in a fury of abuse and walk away. Eve wondered if she had been too outspoken; if George Weyman did walk away it might be too late to get someone to replace him. But she could not back down; he had to understand there were other considerations that over-rode his stupid prejudices. She stared at him, painfully aware of the tightness of her jaw; her tear ducts were ready to burst, but she kept them dammed. She was determined there would be only one boss on this journey and it would be she. It was her father they were setting out to rescue and nothing was going to stop her.

‘Righto,’ Weyman at last said, ungraciously. ‘But don’t ask me to let him ride in the cockpit behind me. I’ll never trust the blighters.’

Then he did turn and walk away, but Eve knew she had established who was boss. Eager to be gone before more complications arose, she went across and said goodbye to Anna, who wept, then sat down on the suitcases, like a refugee stranded with nowhere to flee to. Eve left her and went back to Henty.

‘Goodbye, Mr Henty. I’ll cable you whenever possible to let you know how we’re progressing.’

‘I have your route,’ said Henty. ‘If there is any word from your father in the meantime, I’ll send a wireless message to the British embassies. Good luck.’

He ignored Sun Nan, passing him to shake hands with O’Malley. Then he walked back to the Rolls-Royce and stood beside it, now and again jabbing his stick into the ground, still frustrated by his helplessness. He knew China better than any of those who were about to take off, with the exception of Sun Nan, but he knew his leg would not have stood up to the journey that lay ahead. Sick at heart, envious, he watched the three planes taxi down to the end of the field.

In the lead Bristol, O’Malley checked his instruments, looked to either side of him at the other two planes, then raised his hand. He pushed the throttle forward, set the rudder to neutral, let the plane pick up speed as it began to roll. He had always flown by the seat of his pants, knowing the exact moment when whatever had to be done should be done; but this Bristol was carrying a bigger weight load than he had ever taken into the air before and he kept an eye on the airspeed indicator. He saw it go past the 45 miles an hour when one could usually lift the machine off the ground; he let it build, 50, 55, then he gently pulled the stick back and felt, or rather sensed, the ground slip away from beneath him. As soon as he was airborne, knew he had enough power to keep climbing, he looked back. But there was no need for him to be anxious. Eve Tozer and George Weyman were climbing behind him, coming up smoothly and banking to follow him as he set the course down through the valley to Redhill, then to follow the railway line to Ashford in Kent and on to the coast. They were flying in wartime V-formation with O’Malley as leader. Three armed warplanes flying in war formation, heading for some sort of showdown on the other side of the world: I’m dreaming, thought O’Malley. Then he looked up at the clouds closing down on him, heard the sirens of the wind singing as they brushed by him, felt their fingers against his face, knew the dream was the heart of reality and rejoiced.

That day the world was having its usual convulsions. Bolshevist troops were advancing on Warsaw and falling back before Baron Wrangel’s White Army in the Crimea; Parer and McIntosh landed in their DH9 in Darwin, having taken exactly eight months to fly the 10,000 miles from London; there was heavy selling on the New York Stock Exchange; Landru, the French Bluebeard, was swapping jokes with newspapermen while police sifted the ashes in his villa for the bones of his victims. News was being made that might become history or just another tick in the continuing tremor of time passing.

But O’Malley, Eve and Weyman knew none of that and would not have cared if they had known. Sun Nan, heart in mouth, bowler hat pressed to his stomach like a poultice, had never had any interest in the world outside China anyway. He peered ahead through his goggles, looking for the Middle Kingdom beyond the grey horizon.

They crossed the coast at Folkestone, O’Malley watching the thunderheads building up in the Channel to the south of them. Twenty-five minutes later they were over the mouth of the Somme, the thunderstorms behind them.

A few more minutes’ flying, then familiar territory to O’Malley and Weyman lay below. O’Malley looked back and across, pointed down at the ground. Weyman nodded, then O’Malley saw him thump his gloved hand on the cockpit rim in an angry gesture. O’Malley understood, but gestures now were futile and too late. He looked down at the flat landscape, searched for the hill he had walked up that July morning four years ago; but at this height there were no hills. He saw the trenches zigzagging across the earth, the scar tissue of war; weeds and bushes and wild flowers were growing in them now, but in his mind they were only proud flesh on the wounds. He flew over the shattered towns and villages, saw the rebuilding going on; people stopped in the squares and looked up, but nobody waved. A cleared patch of ground stood in the loop of a winding road; crosses, like white asterisks, stood in ranks, the dead drawn up for inspection. They died in ranks like that, O’Malley thought. Oh Christ! he yelled aloud into the wind and behind his goggles his eyes streamed.

Eve saw the wings of the plane ahead of her wobble; she moved up closer, wondering what message O’Malley wanted to convey to her. But he didn’t look towards her; instead she saw him push his goggles up and wipe his eyes with a handkerchief. Then she looked down at the ground, saw the trenches and the ruined farmhouses and the church with the shattered steeple like a broken tooth, and remembered Arthur Henty telling her that more men had died that first morning of the battle on the ground below her than on any other day in the entire history of war. And for what? Henty had said; but she had known he had not been asking the question of her. Then she saw O’Malley looking across at her and she lifted her hand and waved. It was meant to be a gesture of sympathy, but there was no way of knowing that he understood it.

They landed at Le Bourget to refuel. The French aerodrome official checked them in, looked at their planes, went away and came back with two gendarmes. He gestured at the rear cockpits of O’Malley’s and Weyman’s planes. The Lewis guns were locked in position and covered by canvas sleeves, but there was no mistaking what they were.

‘It is not permitted, m’sieu, for private aeroplanes with machine-guns to fly across France.’

‘These are not private machines.’ O’Malley’s French was adequate if not fluent. A six months’ affair with a girl in Auxi had improved his schoolboy French in every possible way. ‘We are delivering them to the Greek government in Athens.’

‘Have you papers?’

‘We were told the Greek embassy in Paris would arrange for our transit. Everything was done in a hurry. The machines were only ordered yesterday. Things are very bad in Thrace, as you know.’

The official didn’t know, didn’t even know where Thrace was, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He said doggedly, ‘You need papers.’

‘M’sieu, I admit we should have papers, but there wasn’t time. It was a holiday in England yesterday – the French embassy was closed – and everything is so urgent. As you know, the Turks are attacking and winning.’

The official once again didn’t know, which was just as well, since the Turks were losing badly. But the sergeant of the two gendarmes opened his eyes wide, then nodded. ‘Damned Turks. I fought against them in Syria. We were supposed to have beaten them.’

‘The Greeks will beat them with these machines,’ said O’Malley. ‘Your government is also supplying them with some of your wonderful aeroplanes. With your Spads and Nieuports and these machines of ours, the Turks will be beaten in a matter of weeks.’

It was the official’s turn to nod, but he wasn’t going to give up so easily. ‘Who is the lady?’

Eve, whose French, learned at Boston’s Winsor School, was good enough to allow her to follow the conversation, was about to introduce herself when O’Malley, with a bow to her, said, ‘She is the daughter of the Greek Foreign Minister. She is hurrying back to be with him.’

‘Does she speak French?’

Before Eve could answer for herself O’Malley said, ‘Unfortunately, no.’

‘Does she have a passport?’

‘As you know, the Greek government, since the war, has not got around to printing passports.’

The official once more didn’t know; as O’Malley hoped he wouldn’t, since he didn’t know himself what was the Greek situation on passports. ‘Who is the Chinese gentleman?’

‘The Foreign Minister’s butler. The Minister used to be the Greek ambassador in Peking.’

‘Let them go,’ said the sergeant. ‘We’re holding up giving those damned Turks a hiding.’

The official sighed, shrugged. ‘Just don’t fire your machine-guns at anything before you cross out of France, m’sieu.’ He bowed to Eve, shook hands with George Weyman, then followed O’Malley across to his plane. As the latter climbed into his cockpit the Frenchman said, ‘I always admire a good liar, m’sieu, and the English are so good at it.’

‘And the French, too,’ said O’Malley, taking a risk. ‘Let’s give credit where credit is due.’

The Frenchman acknowledged the compliment. He was a thin man with sad, bagged eyes in a bony, mournful face. He was still weary from the war, too old to be hopeful about the peace. ‘Just where are you going, m’sieu?’

‘China.’

The Frenchman smiled. ‘A good lie, m’sieu. Keep it up. Bon voyage.’

They took off again, heading almost due east. They ran into rain squalls south of Strasbourg and O’Malley gestured to the others to widen the gap between them; they flew blind for ten minutes, then came out into bright, almost horizontal sunlight. They flew on yellow rails, through brilliantly white clouds, and at last slid down towards the sun-shot blue of Lake Constance, the Bodensee. They landed at Friederichshafen, going in past the huge Zeppelin sheds. They parked their planes at the end of the field and at once saw the big Mercedes staff car speeding down towards them. It skidded to a halt on the grass and two men jumped out.

‘Sprechen sie deutsch?’ He was a plump, blond man, hair cut en brosse, a personification of the cartoon German.

‘Unfortunately, no,’ said O’Malley. ‘Sprechen sie englisch?’

‘Yes,’ said the plump man and twisted his little finger in his ear as if getting ready for the foreign language. ‘I was a prisoner of war for two years.’

The other German, a younger man with dark hair and eyes that would never admit surrender or defeat, only half-hid his sneer. ‘Herr Bultmann is proud of his English and where he learned it.’

‘At least I survived,’ said Bultmann, as if that had been the purpose of war. He explained to the ex-enemy, ‘I flew in Zeppelins. Unfortunately we were brought down. Herr Pommer was ground crew. He learned his English from a book.’ He looked at O’Malley and Weyman, as if he knew they would understand that ground crew could never be shot down. Then for the first time he saw the guns on two of the planes. ‘You are armed? Why?’

‘We are on our way to Turkey,’ said O’Malley. ‘As you know, things are going badly for your ex-allies there. These machines have been bought by the Nationalists.’

‘British aeroplanes?’

O’Malley shrugged. ‘You know what governments are like, even our own. They will sell anything to anyone, if there is a profit in it. Herr Weyman and I are just paid civil servants.’

‘But the Treaty of – where was it? Sèvres? – I thought the Turks were not allowed to have any military equipment. Like us.’

‘Ah, what are treaties? They’ll be turning a blind eye to you, too, in a year or two.’

‘If they do, the wrong people will get the equipment. Who is the lady?’

‘Daughter of the ex-Foreign Minister of Turkey. She speaks neither English nor German, unfortunately. The Chinese is her father’s butler.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Bultmann, still smiling and friendly, his prisoner-of-war English impeccable. ‘I do not believe a word of it. You will have to come with us, please.’

Then another car came speeding down the field. This was another Mercedes, but this one had never been a wartime staff car; it was a private one, badly needing a coat of paint but still looking huge and powerful and opulent. The man who got out of it, though not huge and powerful, also had a suggestion of opulence about him. He wore a homburg, a winged collar with a grey silk cravat, black jacket, grey waistcoat, striped trousers and grey spats. He could have been a diplomat, a successful lawyer or a gigolo. Only when he got closer did Eve, who had an eye for such things, see that everything he wore was like the car, pre-war and frayed at the edges.

‘What is the trouble, Herr Bultmann?’ He spoke in German in a soft voice that didn’t quite disguise the harsh Prussian accent.

‘No trouble, sir. The English party just have to explain why they are flying armed aeroplanes over German territory.’

The newcomer turned to face O’Malley and the others. He was a very tall, lean man with a bony, handsome face that gave no close hint of his age: he could have been an old twenty or a young forty. He had cool, insolent eyes, a sensual mouth and an air of contempt for the world and everyone in it. Eve thought him one of the handsomest men she had seen in a long time.

He took off his hat, exposing sleek blond hair, clicked his heels and bowed to Eve. ‘I am Baron Conrad von Kern,’ he said in English. ‘I live just along the lake. I saw your aeroplanes come in and I was curious. The last time I saw a Bristol Fighter was two years ago. I shot it down in flames.’

‘Bully for you,’ said O’Malley.

‘It was pointless,’ said Kern, not looking at O’Malley but at Eve. ‘We had lost the war by then. Where are you taking these machines now?’

‘To China,’ said Eve, and introduced herself, O’Malley and Weyman. She did not include Sun Nan in the introductions, but Kern had already dismissed the Chinese as baggage that could be ignored. ‘It is imperative, Baron, that we are not delayed.’

‘There is something fishy here, sir,’ said Bultmann, showing off his colloquial English. ‘A moment ago the lady was supposed to be Turkish and unable to speak English.’

‘You said you didn’t believe us,’ said O’Malley, as if that disposed of his lie.

‘How soon do you wish to leave?’ Kern was still giving all his attention to Eve.

‘Tomorrow morning.’ Eve recognized the Baron for what he was, a lady-killer, and she accepted the opportunity to take advantage of it. After all, there was little risk of his attempting to emulate the unfortunate Mexican. ‘All we want is an hotel where we can spend the night, to refuel our machines in the morning and to be off first thing.’

‘One has to be careful, sir,’ said Bultmann. ‘You have read what the Bolshevists have done in Saxony, they have taken over some of the towns, declared Soviets.’

‘Do we look like Bolshevists?’ said Eve indignantly.

‘If I take them as my guests and leave their aeroplanes in your charge overnight, will that satisfy you, Herr Bultmann?’ Kern put it as a request, but he made it sound like an order.

O’Malley looked at Bultmann and Pommer. He hated Prussian militarism, had fought against it, had rejoiced that it had been defeated. But it had not been, not entirely; and now he was glad of it. Bultmann stiffened to attention, clicked his heels.

‘Yes, Herr Baron. First thing in the morning I shall telephone my superiors for instructions.’

‘Do that, Herr Bultmann. In the meantime, Fräulein Tozer – ’ He gestured towards his massive car.

‘Thank you,’ said Eve. ‘What about Mr O’Malley, Mr Weyman and Mr Sun Nan?’

Kern looked at the three men as if surprised he should be asked to play host to them. Then he looked at Bultmann. ‘Can’t you accommodate them, Herr Bultmann?’

Bultmann was prepared to go just so far in interpreting a request as an order. He allowed himself a touch of Bolshevism: ‘It will be enough for me to look after the aeroplanes, Herr Baron. They are your responsibility, sir.’

Kern lifted his chin and his mouth tightened. But he didn’t threaten to have Bultmann court-martialled: he knew better than any of those present that the old days were over. He stalked to his car. ‘You will ride in front with me, Fräulein Tozer.’

George Weyman spoke for the first time. ‘I’m not leaving these machines here with these Huns.’

‘It is some time, Herr Weyman, since Attila and his Huns were through here,’ said Kern. ‘Herr Bultmann and Herr Pommer are good Germans, nothing more, nothing less.’

Weyman looked as if he was about to deny there were any good Germans, but O’Malley cut in: ‘George, we don’t have any choice. These aren’t our machines, they’re Miss Tozer’s.’

‘And I say we leave them with Herr Bultmann,’ said Eve. ‘Get into the car, Mr Weyman.’

Weyman flushed, looked at O’Malley as if accusing him of being a traitor. But the latter was already pushing Sun Nan ahead of him into the back seat of the car. He pushed Sun Nan across the seat, sat himself in the middle. ‘Come on, George. You’re next to me.’

Reluctantly, still awkward with rage, Weyman got into the car, left the door open and sat staring straight ahead. Kern drew himself up; then he closed the rear door with a slam. He went round and got in behind the wheel. He nodded to Bultmann and Pommer as they clicked their heels and stood to attention, then he swung the car round.

‘Wait!’ Eve suddenly cried. As Kern jerked the car to a halt she jumped out and ran across to her plane. She came back with the hessian-wrapped box and a small overnight bag. ‘Thank you, Baron. Flying is no good for a girl’s complexion. I’ll need my creams for repairs.’

‘I have never seen a complexion less in need of repairs.’

In the back seat the two Englishmen and the Chinese glanced at each other, joined for a moment in their contempt for such flattery. The United Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom knew how much encouragement was proper for women.

They drove out of the airfield, past the vast hangars where two airships were moored, their noses sticking out of the sheds like those of giant porpoises. The Zeppelins looked harmless enough, but once on leave in London O’Malley had seen one caught in a web of searchlights over the city and he could never remember seeing anything so eerie and menacing. He looked at George Weyman, who had lost his parents in a Zeppelin raid.

‘And they’re worried about a couple of guns on our machines,’ said Weyman bitterly. ‘All of those should have been burnt.’

‘It’s all over, George,’ O’Malley said, and tried not to sound too weary of Weyman’s hatred; after all, his own parents were safe in Tanganyika, profiting from what the Germans had lost. ‘Try to forget it.’

‘Not bloody likely.’

The road ran along the edge of the lake. Sail-boats were coming in, the sun behind them turning them into huge translucent moths. The water shone like a burnished shield and summer was a great green bloom of trees. If the war had been through here there was no evidence left of it.

‘I was on my way to a tea dance over in Constance,’ said Kern, gesturing at his clothes. In the back seat the three men glanced at each other again: going dancing in the afternoon? ‘I was driving to catch the ferry when I saw your aeroplanes fly over. I turned round at once. I am still fascinated by war machines.’

‘What did you fly?’ O’Malley could not resist the professional question.

‘Albatros D’s and Fokker Triplanes. I was with von Richthofen.’

‘How many kills did you have?’ said Eve.

If Kern noticed the slightly sarcastic edge to her voice he gave no sign. ‘I shot down thirty-two machines. But I never looked upon them as kills.’

‘The same number as Mr O’Malley. It’s a pity we aren’t staying longer. You would have a lot to compare and talk about.’

‘We might have had, at the time,’ said O’Malley. ‘You forget, Miss Tozer, I told you I was glad the war was over. That part of it, anyway.’

Eve didn’t look back, but at Kern. ‘And you, Baron?’

But Kern didn’t answer. He turned the car off the main road and it began to climb a hill. On the crest, on the edge of a sheer drop that fell down towards the lake, stood a small castle. Spired and turreted, light as a pencil drawing, it looked unreal as it perched against the salmon sky.

‘It’s like something from a fairy tale!’ Eve exclaimed. ‘Is it yours?’

‘It is now,’ said Kern, taking the car across a drawbridge and under a portcullis into a small courtyard. ‘It belonged to my uncle, but he and my two cousins were killed in the war. Then my aunt died of a broken heart. Women do,’ he added, not defensively but challengingly, as if the others doubted him.

‘So do men, occasionally,’ said Eve gently.

Servants came out, two men and a woman, all elderly: museum pieces, O’Malley thought, prewar waxworks figures wound up and put back into service. They bowed to the Baron and his guests, but not to Sun Nan; obviously they thought he was just an Oriental mirror of themselves. But their faces showed no surprise when Kern told them to show Sun Nan to a room of his own with the other guests.

‘You have had a long flight,’ said Kern as he led them into the high-ceilinged entrance hall of the castle. The walls were darkly ornate with carved timber, but the floor was flagstones and their heels echoed hollowly. Skeletons walking, thought O’Malley; and shivered. And wondered how many ghosts Kern entertained here in his moments alone.

‘Take a bath and rest for a while,’ said Kern, speaking all the time to Eve; the others could do what they liked. ‘We shall dine at eight.’

An hour later Eve walked out of her bedroom on to a terrace. Refreshed, wearing a clean blouse and skirt that had been in her overnight bag, she felt pleased at the day’s progress. She still had a long way to go to save her father, but the trip had started well. She took the gold watch from the pocket of her skirt, opened it and watched the moving second hand: again the bomb image sprang to her mind and her hand jerked of its own accord as if to throw the watch over the wall of the terrace. Instead she snapped the lid shut and shoved the watch back in her pocket.

She stood beside the stone wall and looked down at the lake turning blue-grey in the soft twilight. Pigeons murmured in the trees below her; out on the lake a last sail-boat drew a silver line behind it towards home. It was all so peaceful, and on the other side of the world her father might already be dead. She put her hand to her throat, feeling the sudden thickening pain inside it.

‘It all looks untouched,’ said O’Malley behind her. ‘It’s hard to realize they lost the war.’

‘Those in the cities know they lost it.’ She took her hand away from her throat, recovering quickly. ‘That’s what I read. Millions of unemployed, money not worth the paper it’s printed on.’

‘You sound sorry for them.’

‘I might be, if I thought about them. I was a long way from the war, Mr O’Malley, and I didn’t lose anyone in it. No fathers or brothers or even a cousin. I might feel differently if I had. Did you lose anyone?’

‘No relatives. Just friends.’ He turned back to looking out at the lake, closing a door on the war. ‘We may be in trouble tomorrow morning if Herr Bultmann gets officialdom on his side. German officialdom is the worst kind.’

‘We can’t afford to lose even a day, not so soon. What do you suggest?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve run out of invention. And Bultmann thinks I’m a liar anyway.’

‘You are a liar, Mr O’Malley, but I’m not sure yet how serious a one. You are also not averse to swindling a lady out of some money, making a quick profit if you can. Am I right?’

O’Malley smiled, unabashed. ‘Anyone who makes a profit out of you, Miss Tozer, deserves a medal. I talked to Arthur Henty yesterday before you went back to London. I wanted to know a bit more about you before I started following you to the ends of the earth. I gather your grandfather wasn’t above a bit of swindling if he could make a profit.’

‘Did Mr Henty say that?’

‘No. But I put two and two together. I don’t think any white man would make a fortune in China if he was entirely honest and stuck to his scruples. I must ask Mr Sun about it some time.’

‘My father is honest.’

‘Arthur Henty didn’t say he wasn’t. And I’ll take your word for it.’

‘Until you ask Mr Sun, is that what you mean?’

Eve realized she was looking at O’Malley carefully for the first time. She had always had a lively interest in men and she had had two serious affairs, one of which had petered out and the other had been broken off sharply when she had discovered the man in question had been as interested in getting into her bank account as getting into her bed. But there had been no disillusionment; as she had told Arthur Henty in London (only yesterday?) she was mad about good-looking men. Quite apart from the worry and distraction of what had happened to her father, perhaps she had not been interested in O’Malley purely as a man because he was not good-looking. He was just above medium height, well-built, clear-skinned and healthy-looking; but he was not handsome. He had brown curly hair that was in need of a cut, a broad blunt face with a long upper lip only relieved by the well-shaped nose above it, and eyes that were too mocking ever to offer an invitation to a girl who believed in romance.

‘I don’t think Mr Sun would be the man to ask. He’d be too influenced by his master, as he calls him.’

‘Just who are you, Mr O’Malley, besides being an ex-ace?’ She cupped one elbow in her hand, put the other hand under her chin.

‘An ex-infantry officer. No kills that I can claim, if that’s your next question.’

‘Who were you before the war?’

‘Nobody.’ He grinned. ‘I’m an only child, like you. My father is in the Colonial Service. He and my mother are out in Tanganyika now, trying to educate the natives that the British Empire will be better for them than the German one was.’

‘Do you think it will be?’

‘I don’t know. If ever I meet a native, I’ll ask him. My father won’t. He believes the British Empire is the closest thing on earth to a well-run Heaven. It may well be. I’m just not interested in propagating the idea.’

‘You sound like a radical. Were you one before the war?’

‘No. I was at Oxford playing cricket and rugger and drinking beer. One term I tried drinking sherry, but I discovered I’m no aesthete. Not as a drinker, anyway.’

‘Was that all you did – played cricket and rugger, whatever that is, and drank beer?’

‘No. Occasionally I read History, but it was considered bad form to swot. I was very much against bad form in those days.’

‘But not now?’

He shook his head and grinned again. ‘I saw too much of what was good form during the war. It killed more men than bad form ever did.’

‘You don’t believe in duty?’

Kern had come along the terrace. He was still dressed as he had been earlier, still the lady-killer; and Eve wondered if he went to the tea dances over in Constance and actually was a gigolo. But despite his foppish image there was something about the Baron that said he would never sell himself to anyone. Least of all to fat matrons at Constance. Though Eve wondered who, in these days of incredible inflation, had money to buy a partner even for a dance. But perhaps, she thought, absorbing some of O’Malley’s cynicism, not all Germans had lost the war.

‘You sound like our government in Berlin,’ said Kern. ‘Schneidemann and Erzberger sneer at the sense of honour we had in our army.’

‘I don’t sneer at a sense of honour,’ said O’Malley. ‘I just don’t admire stupid generals who expect too much of it.’

Kern bit his lip, then nodded stiffly and reluctantly. He was an honest man, too uncomplicated for dialectics; he was a past pupil of an old school that was now just ruins. He turned his attention to Eve. A sense of honour was not so necessary with women: he knew that most of them privately had too much common sense to expect it.

He offered his arm, a courtier from the old school. ‘Shall we go in to dinner, Fräulein Tozer?’

Over dinner Kern held the chair. ‘I am from Koenigsberg. The Poles have our city now. You English and Americans don’t know what it is like to have your home city given away to another country.’

‘You asked for it,’ said George Weyman round a mouthful of potatoes. His dislike of Germans did not extend to their food. He had had two helpings of soup and the meat course and was on his third glass of wine. But he sounded only amiably argumentative. ‘You had to give up something. You can’t lose a war and get off scot-free.’

‘Perhaps Mr Sun has something to say about that,’ said Eve. ‘They have had wars in China for far longer than we’ve had them.’

Sun Nan was seated beside Weyman at the table. O’Malley and Eve were opposite, with Kern at the head. He had said nothing since they had arrived at the castle, but his eyes and ears had been open, absorbing everything that surrounded him. He had been impressed by the castle; he wished his master were here to take an example from the circumstances. The yamen at Szeping had begun to look like nothing more than a grandiose tenement.

‘Losers in our wars lose everything,’ he said. ‘We are not so foolish as to expect mercy.’

‘You sound as if you have never been on the losing side,’ said O’Malley.

Sun smiled, and seemed annoyingly smug to the others. ‘My master is a very able general. Not stupid.’

‘He is a swine.’ Weyman abruptly looked less amiable.

Kern, sitting very still, looked in turn at each of his guests. He still did not understand the presence of the Chinese, but it was against his code of manners to ask. The atmosphere had changed; but he was curious rather than annoyed. He had been bored ever since coming here to the Bodensee six months ago and he welcomed anything that would spark a little electricity in his dull existence. Any war was welcome, even one at the dinner table.

‘For wanting to be master in his own province?’ said Sun Nan, looking sidelong at Weyman as if doing him a favour by answering him at all. ‘You foreigners have no right to be in China.’

‘We have the rights of trade.’ Weyman was flushed; it went against his grain even to argue with a Chink. ‘There are treaties.’

‘They mean nothing. You Europeans invented them to cover up your lies and greed.’ Sun Nan waved a hand of dismissal; then turned to Kern. ‘I am sorry to be in an argument in your house, Baron. But the bad manners are not mine. Forgive me, I shall retire.’

He bowed his head and stood up. But as he pushed back his chair, Weyman grabbed his arm. Ordinarily, despite his low boiling point and his consuming prejudices, he might have contained his temper at a stranger’s table: he was not without social graces. It was ironic that it was German wine that made him lose control of himself.

‘I’m not taking that from any damned Chink!’

‘Getyourhandsoffme!’ The hiss in Sun’s voice ran all the words together; his mouth ached with the awkwardness of his teeth. He said something in Chinese, glaring down at Weyman.

‘Who the hell do you think you are!’

His hand still grabbing Sun’s arm, Weyman pushed back his own chair and stood up. O’Malley, sitting on the other side of the table, saw Sun’s left hand go to his pocket, guessed at once what was going to happen but was too slow to act. The knife came out of Sun’s pocket and slashed at Weyman’s hand; the latter cursed, let go Sun’s arm and swung his other fist. But the knife flashed again and Weyman flopped back in his chair, holding the inside of his right elbow with his bloodied left hand. He drew his hand away and looked in amazement at the blood pumping out of the rip in the sleeve of his jacket. He tried to move his arm, failed, then suddenly fell off the chair in a dead faint.

Kern and O’Malley were already on their feet. Sun Nan, still holding the knife out in front of him, backed off. He was working his jaw and his mouth, still battling with his dental plate, but he looked neither afraid nor apologetic for what he had done.

O’Malley knelt down beside Weyman, wrenched off the bloodstained jacket and wrapped a napkin round the punctured artery. ‘Get a doctor!’

‘I shall get the police, too.’ Kern made for the door.

‘No!’ Eve stopped him. Her mind was a confusion of shock and anger, but at once she saw the danger of further delay if the police were called in. ‘Not the police – please! I’ll explain later. Just get a doctor. Please!’

Kern looked at them all again, then he went out of the room.

Sun Nan moved round to the other side of the table, picked up a napkin and wiped his knife. He put it back in his pocket, did up the buttons of the jacket, bowed his head to Eve. ‘I am not used to being treated like that, Miss Tozer.’

‘Not even by your master?’ She was rigid with anger at him.

‘No white man is my master. Or mistress. You had better remember that, Miss Tozer.’

He left the room, turning his back on them and moving unhurriedly as if he knew neither Eve nor O’Malley would dare to touch him.

‘The bastard!’ said O’Malley.

Weyman stirred, opened his eyes and tried to sit up. But O’Malley pushed him back, while Eve found a cushion and put it under his head. She wrapped another napkin round his wounded left hand. Weyman looked at his right arm, propped up on O’Malley’s knee, and shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened to him.

‘I could kill him.’

‘I’d stop you first,’ said O’Malley. ‘You heard what Miss Tozer said this morning. She needs him more than us. And he knows it.’

Weyman looked at both of them, then at his arm. ‘How bad is it?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not good, that’s about all I can say.’

Kern came back. ‘The doctor will be here in ten minutes. Where is Herr Sun?’

‘Gone up to his room,’ said Eve. ‘He won’t run away.’

‘Perhaps you would do me the favour of explaining all this?’ Kern was coldly polite.

Eve hesitated, then told Kern everything. He listened without any expression on his face. When she had finished he looked down at Weyman. ‘Herr Weyman is not going to be able to fly tomorrow.’

George Weyman was stubborn, but not stupid: at least not about practical matters. ‘I couldn’t handle a machine, not the way my arm feels now.’

‘We’ll have to fly on tomorrow,’ Eve said. ‘We can’t be delayed. Can we leave Mr Weyman and his machine here with you?’

‘There is no alternative,’ said Kern. ‘But you still have to have your other aeroplanes released by Herr Bultmann.’

‘Can’t you help us there?’ Eve pleaded. ‘You can see how much even a day’s delay may mean to us.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime we should get Herr Weyman up to his room.’

‘What do we tell the doctor?’ O’Malley asked.

‘That it was an accident,’ said Kern. ‘This man was my uncle’s doctor for years. He won’t ask awkward questions.’

The doctor didn’t. Old, thin, looking like his own most regular patient, he came, fixed up Weyman’s arm, ordered him to rest. ‘You have damaged the tendon, too. It may be a long time before your arm is perfectly well again.’

‘What did he say?’ asked Weyman, irritated by the doctor’s inability to speak English. Kern told him and he shook his head in angry disappointment. ‘When you get to China, Miss Tozer, throw that swine out of your machine, will you? From a great height.’

Eve smiled, though it was an effort. ‘Just get well, Mr Weyman. Go back to England. You’ll be paid in full.’ Then she turned away, put a hand to her forehead. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them as she felt herself sway. ‘I’m tired. I’ll go to bed, if you’ll excuse me, Baron.’

Kern took her to the door of her room, kissed her hand. ‘We’ll solve your problem, Fräulein Tozer. Just get a good night’s sleep.’

‘My problem isn’t here, Baron. It is in China.’

She closed the bedroom door, undressed, got into the big four-poster bed. She stared out through the open window, saw a star fall across the purple-black sky. She believed in omens, but, exhausted emotionally and mentally, couldn’t remember what a falling star meant. But it reminded her of the flash on Sun Nan’s knife as he had plunged it into George Weyman’s arm. That had been some sort of omen, she knew; and cried for her father, the prisoner in a land of superstitions. She wondered if her father, staring out of his window wherever he was held, had seen the same star fall. Then remembered that it would be already dawn in China, the beginning of another precious day to be marked off by the man who held her father captive.

2

In the morning, at breakfast, Kern said, ‘Would you allow me to take Herr Weyman’s place?’

Eve ed at O’Malley. There were only the three of them at the table Weyman was in his room, still asleep. Sun Nan, careful of his manners, had asked to be excused from eating with them; munching an apple, he was now out on the terrace, admiring the scenery like any unworried, conscience-free visitor. Breakfast made a mockery of the claim that people further north were on the verge of starvation; eggs, bacon, sausages, fruit, three sorts of bread loaded the table like some harvest offering. The fruits of defeat, thought O’Malley, who hadn’t had a breakfast like this in longer than he cared to think about. And looked at Kern and wondered if he could put up with the arrogant ex-enemy.

‘It’s up to you, Miss Tozer.’ He sipped his coffee, tasted the mushy bitterness of it; at least the coffee in England wasn’t made from acorns, as this was. ‘If it won’t offend the Baron to fly a British machine.’

‘You are a flier like me, Herr O’Malley. You know real pilots draw no distinctions between aeroplanes. Your fliers had as much admiration for our Albatroses and Fokkers as we had for your SE’s and Bristols. All one looks for is a machine that gives him pleasure to fly.’

‘At least we have that much in common.’ O’Malley tried not to sound too grudging. ‘If the Baron flew with von Richthofen, he’d be a good pilot. I know – I flew against the Circus.’

‘We may even have flown against each other,’ said Kern.

‘The thought had occurred to me. Were you ever shot down?’

Kern hesitated, but his honesty was equal to his pride. ‘Once. I was flying an Albatros and we ran into an English formation above Rosières. I shot down two machines, two Camels, then a third one got above me, put me on fire. I got back to our own lines, but only just. My mechanics dragged me out, but not before I was burned. Here.’ He ran his right hand down his left side and left arm. ‘It was 22 July 1918.’

O’Malley looked at his coffee cup, pushed it away. ‘I still fly that Camel back home in England.’

Kern showed no surprise: the war in the air had always been a local affair. ‘Did you claim me as a kill?’

‘I’m afraid so. I thought you were a dead duck.’

Kern shook his head, smiled thinly. ‘Your count was wrong, Herr O’Malley. So I am one up on you, thirty-two to thirty-one.’

‘Are you finished, both of you?’ Eve, worn out, had slept soundly; but she had woken depressed. The offer by Kern had given her a momentary lift, but now she was annoyed by these two men and their reminiscences that had nothing to do with what concerned her so much. ‘This is not a lark, Baron – ’

‘The war was no lark, Fräulein.’

Eve ignored that: she knew it had been no lark, but these two talked as if it had been some sort of deadly game in the air. ‘Our arrangement would be a business one. The same terms as I’m paying Mr O’Malley. Five hundred pounds and your return fare. I don’t know what that is in marks.’

Kern smiled. ‘Who does know? Yesterday it could have been a billion marks, today a trillion. The money is immaterial, Fräulein Tozer. But I’ll take it.’

He’s as broke as I am, thought O’Malley. The castle, the big Mercedes, the servants, the big meals: it all floated on God knew what depth of credit. The Junkers still survived, though O’Malley wouldn’t bet on how long. Not even a credit bet, if anyone would give him credit.

Eve stood up, suddenly eager to be on their way again. ‘Could we leave in half an hour, Baron? We hope to make Belgrade tonight.’

‘I shall have to telephone Herr Bultmann before he talks to his superiors.’

‘Is he likely to hold us up?’

Kern shook his head. ‘Herr Bultmann is one of the old school.’

What the hell does that mean? O’Malley wondered; but didn’t ask, because he had already guessed. Certain areas of Germany still echoed to the click of boot-heels; the workers’ soviets might be taking over towns in Saxony, but not here around Freiderichshafen. He determined there would be no heel-clicking between here and China.

Kern went away to make his phone call to Bultmann and Eve and O’Malley went up to say goodbye to Weyman. He was more comfortable this morning but far from cheerful. ‘This is a right do, isn’t it? Stabbed by a blasted Chinaman, replaced by a Boche. I did better than that in four years of war.’

‘Stop laughing, chum.’

O’Malley would miss Weyman on the flight. His mercurial temper was a handicap and they would be flying over terrain where his prejudices would have flourished like weeds; but he was an excellent mechanic and O’Malley had little confidence in his own ability to keep the machines going if any of them should break down. But he was becoming more and more aware of Eve Tozer’s concern for her father, could see that the air of cool control she affected was now no more than a veneer, and he did not want to add to her worries by mentioning what, with luck, might not happen.

‘Good luck.’ George Weyman put out his bandaged left hand, made the gesture of a handshake. ‘You’ll get there in time, Miss Tozer. You can put your money on Bede.’

Eve, an affectionate girl, kissed Weyman on the forehead; he blushed as if she had pulled back the sheets to get into bed with him. ‘Good luck to you, too. See Arthur Henty when you get to London. Tell him so far we are keeping to schedule.’

‘Second day out,’ said O’Malley sardonically. ‘I should hope so.’

‘That’s the only way I can bear to think,’ said Eve. ‘Day to day.’

‘Sorry,’ said O’Malley, and bit his tongue to remind it to be more careful in future.

An elderly servant drove Eve, O’Malley, Kern and Sun Nan in to the airfield. Sun Nan sat in the back with Eve and O’Malley, completely indifferent to the change of pilots in the third plane. He made no reference to Weyman, not enquiring about how his victim was this morning; and on the surface he looked equally uninterested in Weyman’s replacement. But he was studying Kern, certain that the German aristocrat, in his own way, had as many prejudices as the English working man. They were all the same here in the West and he would be glad to get back to China, where all the prejudices were honourable ones.

Bultmann and Pommer were waiting for them at the airfield. One of the airships had been brought out of its hangar and floated against the morning sun as it nosed a mooring mast. The Mercedes drove through the shadow of it and went down to the end of the airfield and the parked Bristols. Kern looked up at the huge shape above them.

‘Some day the sky will be full of those. There will be no room for fliers like us, Herr O’Malley.’

‘Let’s take-off, do a circuit and come back and shoot them down.’

For the first time Kern smiled directly at O’Malley. ‘Jolly good idea.’

The car pulled up in front of the three Bristols. O’Malley, certain that Kern was going to get his way with the class-conscious Bultmann, went to his plane and began to dismantle the Lewis gun in the rear cockpit. Then he did the same with the gun in what was now Kern’s plane. He stowed the guns in the cockpits, but left the Scarff rings still mounted. He jumped down from Kern’s plane as the latter and Eve came across to him.

‘We can put the guns back when we get into hostile territory,’ he said.

‘What is the point of them with nobody in the rear cockpit to fire them?’ said Kern.

‘They were Weyman’s idea. If we’re going to have to fight anyone, it’ll be on the ground, not in the air.’

‘A pity, don’t you think?’

‘Stop that sort of thinking, both of you!’ Eve snapped, turned and strode across to her plane. She gestured curtly to Sun Nan to get aboard, then she clambered up and settled into her own cockpit.

Kern looked across at her. ‘She would be a fiery woman in bed.’

The thought had crossed O’Malley’s mind, but he wouldn’t have voiced it. He was glad of an interruption from Bultmann. ‘I had all the tanks filled, Herr Baron. But there is one, er, small point. Who pays?’

Obviously the thought of payment had not occurred to Kern. He looked at Bultmann in surprise; but O’Malley came to his rescue. ‘Fräulein Tozer will pay you.’

‘A woman pays?’ said Bultmann.

‘A new custom,’ said O’Malley. ‘Equal rights.’

Bultmann, shaking his head at the decadence of the English and the Americans, went across to Eve. There was some discussion, then she handed him some English money. Bultmann looked at it as if not sure of its value, then he stepped back and bowed to Eve.

‘Do you want to take your machine up for a test flight before we start?’ O’Malley asked Kern. ‘You haven’t flown one of these before, have you?’

‘Hardly. But you and I are fliers, Herr O’Malley. Would you wish to have a test flight?’

Yes, thought O’Malley; but said no. But told himself it was the last time he was going to swap bravado with the arrogant Baron. ‘Shall we start then? Vienna is our first stop, to refuel.’

They took off into a cloudless sky, with O’Malley once more leading the way. He looked behind him and saw Kern lift his Bristol off the ground too soon: the Baron hadn’t allowed for the extra weight. The plane flew flat for several hundred feet, the nose threatening to point down; but Kern, as he had claimed, was a flier, a pilot who was part of his machine. O’Malley saw the plane wobble and he waited for it to stall; then the nose lifted and he knew Kern had it under control. It climbed steadily, swung round in a steady bank and fell in behind O’Malley. They headed east and soon were skirting the northern flanks of the Bavarian Alps. The flying was easy and O’Malley lay back in his wicker seat, occasionally turning his face up to the sun, listening to the music of his engine, marvelling at his good fortune. He felt sorry for Bradley Tozer, was apprehensive for him, but the American millionaire, involuntarily and through his daughter, had bought him a few weeks of escape. He looked across to his left and wondered if Kern had the same thoughts.

They landed at Vienna after three-and-a-half hours’ uneventful flying. Kern was first out of his plane and moved across at once to help Eve down from hers. Sun Nan, plump and awkward, was left to feel his own way down to earth. O’Malley, finding an English-speaking official, was left to superintend the refuelling of the planes and Kern, taking a small picnic box that his servant had packed, led Eve to the shade of some near-by rees.

Eve called to Sun Nan, gave him some food and asked him to take some across to O’Malley. The Chinese didn’t rebel at being asked to act as servant; he knew he was as much a partner in this foursome as the others, uneasy though the partnership might be. He gave O’Malley his lunch, then sat down under the wing of Eve’s plane and began munching his bread and sausage. The food was awkward in his mouth, dislodging his dental plate, and he longed for some nice smooth noodles.

‘I was here in Vienna before the war.’ Kern lay back on the grass. He had brought a wartime flying suit with him, but was not wearing it; like the others on this hot summer day he wore just street clothes. He was dressed in grey flannel trousers, a wide-collared silk shirt open at the neck and black-and-white shoes; again Eve had the mental picture of him as a gigolo. He looked at her appraisingly and she waited for him to pat the grass beside him and invite her to lie down. ‘My father was at the court of the old Emperor for six months. He was there on loan as a military adviser.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He was killed at Verdun. My two brothers also.’

She changed the subject. ‘I came here when I was a girl, with my mother and father. We did the Grand Tour.’

They were both silent for a while, lost in the contemplation of something that now had the fragile structure of a half-remembered dream. A bee buzzed above the picnic box and Eve lazily brushed it away. In the distance the end of the aerodrome shimmered in the heat like quivering green water. Eve lay back, somnolent, but wide awake enough not to lie too close to Kern. China, and her father, all at once were as remote as the lost empire of the Hapsburgs.

She heard Kern say, ‘I fell in love with the women of Vienna. They were beautiful, always flirting, in love with love. But I was too young for them then, only eighteen. I vowed to come back and enjoy them when I was old enough. But it’s too late now.’

‘Why?’ she asked dreamily.

‘Because romance blossoms best on a full stomach. One does not flirt when one is hungry – I learned that in Berlin last year. The women of Vienna, I’m sure, are thinner now than they used to be.’

Eve sat up, no longer dreamy. ‘I fear you are a ladies’ man, Baron. Don’t expect any opportunities on this flight of ours.’

Kern, still lying back on the grass, hands behind his head, smiled up at her. He is handsome, Eve thought; and chided herself for the admission. But it was a pity she had not met him in other circumstances, when she could have pitted her wits against him in the flirting game that seemed to be his favourite sport. Then was conscience stricken as she thought of her father. She stood up quickly, brushing the grass from her skirt. Pulling on her flying helmet, she walked across to O’Malley, who stood leaning against the wing of his plane, finishing his lunch.

‘The Baron offend you?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Just the way you got up and left him. I’ve had girls walk away from me the same way.’

God, she thought, are both of them going to give me trouble? ‘How do I pay for the gasoline?’

‘What did you bring?’

‘Pounds and dollars. It was all I could get at such short notice.’

‘They’ll take either. Our money is more welcome than we are. They’re a sour lot, these Austrians.’

‘That’s not what the Baron has been telling me.’

But she didn’t elaborate, just turned her back on him and went across to pay the two men who had brought down the drums of petrol in their ramshackle ex-army truck. Then she moved to her plane, pulling up short as Sun Nan suddenly rose up in front of her from beneath the wing. Preoccupied, thoughts building up in her mind like a honeycomb, she hadn’t noticed him seated in the shadow of the wing.

‘Miss Tozer, if either Mr O’Malley or the Baron makes trouble for you, let me know. I shall take care of you.’

‘Make trouble?’ Then she understood what he meant, marvelled that he should have been so observant. She laughed at the irony that he should be her protector, the defender of her honour. ‘I’m sure I have nothing to fear from them, Mr Sun. But thank you.’

‘We have to stick together. Your father is depending on us, not them.’

‘You don’t have to remind me, Mr Sun. But Mr O’Malley and the Baron may still be necessary to us.’

They took off five minutes later. They flew south-east this time, soon crossed into Hungary. The countries lay below them, one merged into another; treaties had broken up the Empire, but the boundaries were only on maps; at 5000 feet nothing appeared to have changed. Harvest-yellow, dotted with green lakes of forest, the lost empire was unmarked: not here the scars of trenches. Then they were over Lake Balaton, sparkling under the afternoon sun like a vast spill of Tokay wine; the sails of fishermen’s boats drifted like tiny moths caught in the web of sunshine. Then Eve, looking up from the bright glare of the lake, saw the clouds ahead.

They hung in the sky like great baskets of evil purple blooms, a hot-house of storm stretching away to the south-west. Lightning flickered, blue-silver against the purple, and she imagined she could hear the crash of thunder above the roar of the engine. She looked back over her shoulder at Sun Nan, saw the fear on his face below the opaque mask of his goggles, wondered what her own face showed. She hated storms, was afraid of thunder and lightning even in the shelter of the safe, weather-impregnable houses she had called home. In America she had never dared fly in the face of a storm, had always looked for a place to land even when she ran into squalls of rain.

Then up ahead she saw O’Malley wiggle his wings, point to his left and then bank away to the east. He was going to try and take them round the storm.

3

Extract from the William Bede O’Malley manuscript:

It was a bitch of a storm, the worst I had experienced up till then. I have never been a religious man, at least not down on the ground; and if one is going to be religious, that’s the place to be it, down among the selfish, the cheats, the murderers who are there to test your Christianity or whatever you profess to believe. No, the only time I’ve been religious is when I’ve been up in the air: marvelling at God’s genius and charity in creating the sky or cursing Him for the storms He could whip up out of nowhere, showing off His wrath. This was one of His most wrathful.

The turbulence hit us long before we were into the clouds. I had turned east, hoping to fly round the edge of the storm, but it was moving too fast for us. The edge of it caught us and in a matter of moments we were bucking the giant waves of air as they hit us. I had looked down just before the clouds enveloped us, but there was nowhere to head for as a landing site. We were over hills that rolled up into mountains; and the thought of the mountains frightened me. I had jerked my hand upwards, hoping Miss Tozer and Kern were watching me, then pulled back the stick and began to climb. If we were lucky we might get above the storm, but in any case we’d be above the top of the mountains. Mountain tops and aeroplanes still have an upsetting magnetism for each other and even today, at 30,000 feet, I can’t fly over a range of mountains without feeling them scraping my bottom.

I lost sight of the other two machines as soon as the cloud, a wild dark sea, rolled in on us. From a distance the clouds had looked purple; now they were black and green. The air had suddenly turned cold, made even colder by the rain that hit me like a barrage of knives. I continued climbing, fighting the stick that shook in my hands and threatened to break my arms at the wrists and elbows. The turbulence was like nothing I had ever known before; the yo-yo hadn’t been invented then, but I should have got the inspiration and patented it. The noise was more than noise: it was a physical assault inside my head. I reeled in my seat with it, punch-drunk, deaf but still able to hear. Lightning had been exploding behind the clouds, throwing them into bright relief, making them look solid and impenetrable. Suddenly it burst all around me, a great flash of blue-white light that blinded me, yet in the moment before blinding me painted everything in frightening detail: I saw things, the dials on the instrument panel, the worn rim of the cockpit, the tear in the back of my right-hand glove: I saw them, yet I was inside them. It was an effect I had once experienced as a child during an attack of petit-mal, the splitting of oneself in a split-second dream: you are inside and outside the objects you are witnessing at the same moment. I felt sure now that I was about to pass out, that I was seeing the final, meaningless revelation before dying.

The lightning went and I looked up. And saw the plane only half a dozen feet above me. I didn’t know whose it was, Miss Tozer’s or Kern’s: all I knew was that the pilot couldn’t see me. We flew almost locked together, the wheels of the plane above only a foot or two from my top wing. Lightning flared again; half-blinded I saw the plane above tremble and dip. I plunged the stick forward, hit turbulence, shuddered, then fell away from beneath the other threatening machine. There was no time to look up to see if it was following me.

Then the Bristol flipped over, flung sideways by the greatest explosion of sound I’ve ever felt: not heard. My head reverberated with it, an echo chamber that threatened to drive me insane. Sanity, fortunately, has nothing to do with the urge to survive. Unbreathing, paralysed, mind and body dead, the unthinking me refused to let the aeroplane go. My hands and arms worked of their own accord; then feeling came back into my legs and feet. I fought with the only two weapons I had, the stick and the rudder bar; yet they were the machine’s weapons, too, for it was fighting me. It was not in a spin; we seemed to be plunging in a series of tight bucking slides. I still couldn’t see; lightning glared around me again, but it was only a lightening of the darkness in my blinded eyes. I worked by feel, fighting the plane by instinct, going with the slide at times, pulling against it at others, praying all the time with the mind that was slowly coming back to life that the wings would not tear off, that the machine would not disintegrate and leave me sitting there for the last moment at the top of the long drop to eternity. I believed in God then and hated Him for wanting me to join Him.

Then I found I was winning. The Bristol slid to starboard, kept sliding and I let it go, feeling I was getting it under control. I eased the rudder to port, pulled the stick back; the plane responded, straightened out. The wind and the rain were still pounding at me, but now the Bristol and I were part of each other again, ready to fight together. I held the stick steady and we drove on through the storm, the wings trembling as if ready to break off but always holding, the engine coughing once but then coming on again with a challenging note that gave me heart. I glanced at the altimeter: I had dropped 3000 feet since I had last looked at it. I had no idea of the height of the mountains I had glimpsed (were they still ahead of me? Below me?); but I dared not try to climb above the storm again. I had to ride it out at this level; the galleries of hell were topsy-turvy, one stood a better chance of survival in the lower depths. I wondered where Miss Tozer and Kern were, if they were still flying or had already crashed, but there was nothing I could do about going looking for them. I shivered when I thought how close I had been to that other Bristol in the clouds.

It took me twenty minutes, forever, to fly out of the storm. Then, as so often happens, I came out abruptly into bright mocking sunlight. I checked the compass; we were miles off course. But there was no hope of correcting just now; over to starboard the storm still stretched away to the south, its darkness lit with explosions of lightning. I looked back and around for the others. Then I saw them come out of the clouds, too close to each other for comfort; Kern swung abruptly to port to widen the distance between them. I throttled back, waited for them to come up to me. Miss Tozer waved to say she was all right; but Kern pointed to his top wing and I saw the tattered fabric and the splintered strut. He was holding the machine steady, but he would have to do that if he was to keep it in the air; any sudden manoeuvre would rip the wing to shreds. I waved to him, then looked down and about for a possible landing site. But there was none: we were over mountains that offered no comfort at all.

There was nothing to do but keep flying, hoping Kern’s wing would hold, till I saw some place where we could set down without his having to put too much strain on his machine. It was just as likely to fall to pieces as he eased the stick back for the gentlest of landings, but that was something we had to risk.

Then at last I saw the long narrow valley ahead, with the straight white road running down the middle of it. I waved to the others to circle over the valley while I went down to inspect the road. I slid down, aware of the workers in the fields on either side stopping to look up at me, at some of them running in terror for the shelter of neighbouring trees; but I kept my attention on the white dirt road, looking for the thin shadows in the afternoon sun that would tell of ruts or holes in the surface. There appeared to’ be none and I banked steeply and climbed back. I made signs that I would go down first, Miss Tozer would follow and Kern would be the last to land.

I went back to the end of the valley, passing over a large mansion standing among trees, then slid in above the road. There were no telegraph poles bordering it to offer a hazard; and it ran without a bend in it for almost a mile. I put the Bristol down, felt the smoothness of the dirt and knew I was safe. I rolled down the road, eased to a stop and swung off into a field. I jumped down and ran back to the road.

Miss Tozer came in, steady as a bird, bounced a little as she touched, corrected and ran down towards me. She swung off into the field, got out and came running back. She stood beside me and watched as Kern, coming round in a wide flat bank so that he didn’t strain the upper wing too much, prepared to land. He came down steadily and I knew how he would be: one eye on the nose, the other on the wing above him. He was ten feet above the road, holding the nose up, when the wing started to shred off. It went back over his head in tatters at first, as if he had run into a flock of starlings; then the big strip tore off and I saw him duck as it flew straight at his head. Miraculously he jerked neither his hands nor his feet; he kept the plane steady while the upper wing disintegrated above him. I felt Miss Tozer clutch my arm, but I didn’t look at her, just kept my eyes on Kern as he brought his plane down to earth in as beautiful a landing as I’ve ever seen. He came rolling down the road and swung in beside us.

He climbed down, looking much less the dandy who had climbed into the cockpit this morning. I had recognized him for what he was, a womanizing loafer on whom time and his testicles hung heavy; but, God Almighty, he could fly a plane and that in my eyes forgave him a lot. Only I wasn’t going to tell him. With his bloody arrogance he’d have just nodded his head and agreed with me.

‘I got a bolt of lightning.’ He unwound the long silk scarf he wore, tied it round his middle like a belt; he was a Fancy Dan all right, and I wanted to throw up. But he was as cool as if he had just come in from ten minutes of uneventful circuits, and even my prejudiced eye could see that it was no act. He had probably got out of his burning plane, the day I had shot him down, with the same cool aplomb. ‘Fortunately, it was a small one.’

‘I’m just glad you’re safe.’ Then Miss Tozer sniffed the air, looked around. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘I thought it was your perfume.’ She had let go my arm, but still stood close to me.

‘Roses,’ said Kern. ‘What a beautiful sight.’

I turned my head to look behind me, following the direction of his gaze. Intent on watching Kern bring his plane down, I had not noticed before that the whole valley was one vast rose garden, split up the middle by the road. There were workers scattered throughout the fields; the closest were four women on the other side of the road. As Kern and I looked at them they flung their skirts up over their heads, hiding their faces; but everything they owned below the waist was exposed. Pubic hair and bare bottoms are common sights nowadays, but in 1920 we didn’t have the broadening education of television and only those with the fare to Paris or Port Said ever saw a blue movie. These women stood modesty on its head, but every woman to her own standards.

‘A charming custom,’ said Kern. ‘Purely local, no doubt.’

I looked at Miss Tozer, but she was staring up the road. In the distance there was a cloud of white dust, quickly coming closer. Then we saw that just ahead of it was a white horse galloping at full speed and a few moments later we recognized the rider of the horse as a woman sitting side-saddle. She came down on us like a Valkyrie, bringing the horse to a rearing halt only yards from us.

‘Good God, we must be in Roumania!’ said Kern. ‘It’s Queen Marie!’

But it wasn’t, though we didn’t know that at once. She quietened the prancing horse, sat elegantly in the saddle and looked us up and down. She said something in a language I didn’t recognize, then she spoke in heavily accented English. ‘You are English, yes? Those are English aeroplanes, are they not?’

‘We are English, American, German,’ said Miss Tozer and introduced us individually.

‘I am the Countess Ileana Malevitza.’ She had to be an aristocrat of some sort, or an eccentric; or both. She was wearing a bright red tunic, braided with silver and with silver epaulettes, over a royal-blue shirt and dark blue trousers tucked into riding boots that came above her knees. She had a black fur shako on her blonde head and a short sword swung in an enamelled sheath at her waist. Despite her coating of fine dust, the effect of her was striking. We’ve flown through that storm into Ruritania, I thought, and waited for the Drury Lane chorus, somewhere out among the rose bushes, to burst into song. I looked across the road again, ready to be bemused again by the bare bottoms and bellies, something I had never seen at Drury Lane, but the women had dropped their skirts now and stood watching us. That somehow made everything real.

‘You are welcome to my valley,’ said the Countess.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and found myself doing a Kern: I clicked my heels and bowed. ‘Where are we?’

‘In the Valley Malevitza. The border between Roumania and Bulgaria runs down the middle of this road, right through my house. You are in Roumania at this moment.’

‘And the young ladies are Bulgarian?’ Kern gestured towards the women standing among the rose bushes on the other side of the road.

‘Young? Your eyesight is not very good, Baron. Only one of them is young.’ The Countess gave them only a cursory glance, as if they were no more than thorns or faded blooms on the bushes.

‘I don’t think the Baron looked too carefully at their faces,’ said Miss Tozer.

The Countess laughed heartily: it came up out of her belly, like a fat man’s. ‘It is the custom among some of the women. They dare not show their faces to a strange man at first. What else they show is not an invitation. Their menfolk would cut the stranger’s throat if he thought it was.’

I saw the men standing further back in the rose fields. They had risen up from among the bushes; more women and children were also appearing. There must have been a hundred of them spread out through the fields on either side of the road, dark, silent figures among the blaze of red, pink and white blooms. Each man’s hand glittered: it was a moment before I realized each of them held a sharp pruning knife.

Sun Nan had got out of Miss Tozer’s plane. He looked pale and sick, but he put on his bowler hat against the fierce sun and stood holding on to the lower wing of the machine, doing a good job of looking dignified. The Countess glanced at him, but made no comment: like Kern she dismissed him as a servant. Nobody, in her book, would have an Oriental with him or her unless he was a servant.

‘Why did you land here in my valley?’

I explained the circumstances and pointed to the remains of Kern’s top wing. ‘I’m afraid the Baron can’t take off again until we repair that. Is there somewhere around here where we can stay, an inn or something?’

‘You will be my guests. Follow me.’ She swung her horse round. I wondered if we were supposed to gallop after her on foot.

‘Countess, I don’t want to leave the machines parked here with no one to look after them.’

I don’t know what I really expected to happen to the planes, unless I thought the rose-gatherers would attack them with their pruning knives. It struck me that none of these peasants, wild-looking and isolated in this mountain valley, had seen an aeroplane before, at least not on the ground and quite possibly not even in the sky. I had vague memories of reading of Balkan superstitions and there was no guarantee that these particular Balkans trusted the strange contraptions that had fallen down out of the clear hot sky into their midst. I had only a hazy idea where we were, but Dracula country couldn’t be too far away.

‘Bring them with you.’ She dug her heels into her horse and went up the road at full gallop, trailing a long thin veil of dust.

I shrugged, turned to the others. ‘She’s the hostess.’

‘I think she’s mad,’ said Miss Tozer. ‘Do you think we should stay with her?’

‘What choice do we have? Even if I can find some canvas and varnish right away, it’s going to take me at least two days to rebuild that wing.’

She hid her dismay, but I knew she had guessed it was not going to be a ten-minute repair job. Kern said, ‘You can go on without me and I’ll try to catch you up.’

I waited for Miss Tozer to give the decision, but she was looking at me. She was the boss, but with George Weyman’s departure I had become what I suppose one would call the technical manager. ‘I think it’s better we stick together, at least for the time being. We still have a few days in hand.’

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