Hammond Innes - Air Bridge

His wife was so different it was almost unbelievable. Her father had been a railroad construction engineer. He had been killed when she was seventeen, crushed by a breakdown crane toppling on its side. In those seventeen years she had travelled most of America and had acquired a restless taste for movement and the atmosphere of the construction camps. Her mother, who had been half-Italian, had died in childbirth and Diana had been brought up in a masculine world. She had many of a man’s qualities — a decisiveness, the need of a goal to aim for and a desire for strong leadership. She was also a woman, with a good deal of the hot passion of the Italian.

After her father’s death she became a nurse. And when Pearl Harbor came she was one of the first to volunteer for overseas service. She had come to England as a W.A.A.C. in 1943 and had been stationed at a B17 station near Exeter. That was where she had met Tubby. They had met again in France and had been married at Rouen in 1945. Later she had worked for a short time in the Malcolm Club Organisation, whilst Tubby was flying with Transport Command.

I have said that she was a hard, experienced-looking woman. Certainly that was my first impression, But then I had expected somebody altogether younger and softer. She was several years older than Tubby and her life had not been an easy one. Her brother had been working for the Opel people in Germany, and with no family and no friends, she had been very much on her own in the big hospital in New York. She would never talk about this period. She had endless stories to tell of the railroad camps and of her service life in Britain, France and Germany. But I never heard her talk of her life in that New York hospital.

Tubby she treated rather as a child. I learned later that she had had an operation that had made it impossible for her to have any children of her own. Whether this had anything to do with it, I don’t know. But I do know this, that right from the start she was fascinated by Saeton. She breathed in the atmosphere of drive and urgency that he created as though it were life itself. I had a feeling that in him she found all the excitement and her girlhood again, as though he recreated for her the life she had led with her father on the railroads of America.

But though I got to know these two well, Saeton himself remained a mystery. What his background was I never discovered., It was as though he had sprung like a phoenix from the flames of war complete with his looted engine and the burning dream of a freighter fleet tramping the airways of the world. He’d talk and he’d conjure visions, but he never talked about himself. He had been a test pilot before the war. He knew South America, particularly Brazil, and he’d flown for an oil company in Venezuela. He’d done some gold prospecting in South Africa. But as to who his family were, what they did and where he’d been born and brought up, I still have no idea. Nor have I any knowledge of how he came to be a pilot.

He was the sort of person that you accept as a finished article. His personality was sufficient in itself. I felt no urge to rummage around the backstairs of his life. He seemed to have no existence outside of the engines. He even slept with them after that scene with Randall as though he were afraid an attempt might be made to steal them. When he had warned me that his temper would be short until we were in the air, it was no understatement. His moods were violent and when nervous or excited he used his tongue like a battering ram. I remember the day after I had promised to finance the company he came up to me as I was working at the lathe. ‘I think you agreed to cover us over the building period.’ His voice was angry, almost belligerent. ‘I want some money.’

I began to apologise for not having settled the financial details with him before, but he cut me short: ‘I don’t want your apologies. I want a cheque.’ The rudeness of his tone jolted me. But it was typical of the man, and if I expected deference on account of my financial standing in the company he made it clear I wasn’t going to get it.

He wanted the money right away to meet some bills and I had to go back to the quarters for my cheque book. That was how I first came into real contact with Else, the fifth character in this extraordinary story. She was standing at the entrance to the quarters, calling for Diana.

‘She’s just taken coffee up to the hangar,’ I said.

The girl turned at the sound of my voice. She wore the same brown overall that she’d worn the previous day when Diana had brought her to the hangar and in her hands she held four very still but sharp-eyed fowls. ‘I have bring these,’ she said, making a slight movement of her hands that caused the one cockerel to beat his wings angrily.

‘I didn’t know we were having a feast tonight,’ I said.

‘No, no. Mrs Carter starts to keep chicken for you, I think.’ The girl’s voice, with its marked foreign accent, was like a breath of the old life, a reminder of brief meetings in bars and hotel bedrooms that is all in the way of memories that most pilots take out of the cities where they touch down.

‘She’ll be back in a minute,’ I said. ‘If you and the chickens can wait.’ I started to move through the door and then stopped and we stood there for a moment smiling at each other, not saying anything.

‘You are partners with Mr Saeton now?’ she said at last.

‘Yes.’

She nodded and her gaze strayed to the trees that screened us from the hangar. Her face was rather square, the cheekbones high, the skin pale and dappled with freckles. Her nose tipped up slightly at the end as though she’d pressed it too often against windows as a kid. She wore no make-up and her eyebrows were thick and fair, like the untidy mop of her hair that blew in the wind. She turned to me slowly and her lips parted as though she were about to say something, but she just stood there looking up at me with a frown as though by staring at me she could resolve some riddle that puzzled her. Her eyebrows were dragged down at the corners and her eyes shifted from the adhesive tape on my forehead to meet mine with a direct, level gaze. They were the colour of mist in a mountain valley — a soft grey.

‘What were you doing up at the hangar the other night?’ I had asked the question without thinking.

Her lips moved slightly at the corners. She had a very mobile mouth. ‘Perhaps I ask you why you run away, eh?!

For an instant I thought she had connected me with the police inquiries in the neighbourhood. But then she asked, ‘Are you an engineer?’ and I knew it was all right.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you work on the engines with Mr Saeton?’

I nodded.

‘Then perhaps we meet again, yes?’ She smiled and thrust the birds into my hands. ‘Will you please give these to Mrs Carter.’ She half-turned to go and then hesitated. ‘When you do not know what to do with yourself, perhaps you come and talk with me. It is very lonely up here sometimes.’ She turned then and walked across the clearing and as I watched her disappear amongst the trees I felt excitement singing through my blood.

The story of Else Langen was a jig-saw puzzle that I had to piece together, bit by bit. I asked Saeton about her that night, but all he’d say was that she was a German D.P. ‘Yes, but what’s her story?’ I persisted. ‘Tubby says her father died in a concentration camp.’

He nodded.

‘Well?’ I asked.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you so interested in her?’ he demanded. ‘Have you been talking to the girl?’

‘I had a few words with her this morning,’ I admitted.

‘Well, keep clear of her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I tell you to,’ he growled. ‘I don’t trust her.’

‘But you had her cooking here for you.’