Preservation Read Online Free PDF Page B

real humour. ‘Don’t you believe it. I know where there are wings. I’ve seen some in the hangar.’
    ‘You haven’t got them yet,’ Molly said.

     
    on reflection, The trouble had really begun the week earlier. It had been an inauspicious beginning. She and her mother had risen and breakfasted at the small inn in Kent where they were staying in readiness for Jean’s flight from Lympne aerodrome. Nellie sat opposite her, encouraging her to eat well because, as she said, she didn’t know where she would get her next decent meal and she must keep up her strength. Her mother, the most handsome of women, was tall and strong boned. She ate what she liked and always looked as if she exactly fitted her skin. When they walked along the street together, Jean, small and neatly put together, barely came up to her mother’s shoulder. Heads turned to look at the pair, alike yet so different. Nellie Batten had regular features that her daughter had inherited, a big sensual mouth, heavy-lidded eyes, a strong chin that she held at an angle as she strode along, her back very straight. To look at her, one would think she had the capacity to laugh but she seldom did. There was a time when she had walked the boards of theatres — very small theatres, she said with a hint of wistfulness that was outside her usual demeanour. New Zealand theatres. As if that said everything. Little theatres in little towns.
    ‘Darling,’ Jean had said, ‘you know my next meal will be in Rome. I’m sure I’ll eat fabulously well.’
    At that point they had been joined, rather later than he was expected, by Jean’s fiancé Edward Walter, who had come from London to say goodbye, and to try once again to persuade her not to go. He was still rubbing his eyes, apologising for sleeping through his alarm. Jean watched him across the table while he ate his way through fried kidneys and three eggs, stopping long enough to remind her that he had bought her the axe, so that if she came down in the sea she could hack the wings off her plane to make a raft.
    ‘I’ve packed it, Ted,’ she said.
    ‘Well, thank goodness for that. You know I wanted you to take a life raft.’
    ‘Much good that will do me if I’m truly lost at sea. You knowhow little room there is in the cockpit — goodness knows, you’ve flown often enough yourself. I’ve got all the essentials.’ She hesitated, on the point of reminding him that he was a weekend flyer, an enthusiast rather than a real pilot, and that although he, too, owned a Gipsy Moth he had never flown further than the next town, or even over the English Channel. Nor did she itemise what she did consider the essentials, although her mother had given a small conspiratorial smile as Jean mentioned them. She had helped her daughter buy face cream and talcum powder, several changes of underwear, a white silk dress for the evenings when she landed. In her breast pocket she carried powder and lipstick and a small bottle of perfume, along with her comb. ‘Make sure your hair is always neatly parted when you land,’ Nellie had advised her. ‘Make sure you look as if it’s effortless.’
    ‘I’d like you to take the revolver I offered you,’ Edward said. ‘It’s in the car.’
    ‘Ted, no. I managed without a gun in Baluchistan. If I start shooting people they’ll shoot back, rather than help me. You’re being dramatic.’
    ‘That’s not what I had in mind. If you go down in the water, and there are sharks, what then?’
    Jean studied him, noting from the angle of his head the bald patch that had begun to spread, the pink gleam of his scalp. He was good-looking enough, with that air of a refined Englishman about him that had attracted her at first, but although his face was lean his chin was collecting soft folds that made him look older than his thirty-three years. ‘You mean I should commit suicide?’ she said.
    He pushed his plate aside with an angry gesture. ‘Now you’re the theatrical one.’
    Jean got to