“To Skye’s head,” Valentin said, raising his glass. “Long may it be attached to her neck.”
Skye laughed and joined in the new toast.
For it didn’t matter a bit to anyone at the table that Skye was the least wealthy flier there and possibly in England too. Her pilot friends were a group of the very early fliers who flew for love rather than because it had lately become an exclusive and voguish pursuit. They were too raffishly bohemian to ever mention money and were more than happy to pay for the champagne at this impromptu lunch that Rose had organized just yesterday. Skye was lucky to have inherited her plane from her mother and could thus fly all over Europe with these people, to Cairo too, and even South Africa once. So long as she took up the opportunities that presented themselves to earn money during the flying circus season in England, or instructing for the Civil Air Guard, which she would do again on Monday after she’d slept off her Parisian all-nighter, she’d been able to keep her little plane airworthy and herself fed and clothed.
Midnight approached and some of the party began to drift away.
“My apartment is nearby,” Valentin whispered to Skye.
She considered his invitation, but she hadn’t drunk so much champagne that she believed indulging in a meaningless physical encounter with a charming Parisian would be a balm against the threat of war. So she refused, and Rose refused a similar invitation from the man at her side, but they both offered the consolation prize of dancing to the music of Django Reinhardt at a jazz club off Rue Pigalle. There, Skye twined her arms around Valentin’s neck and he wrapped his around her waist and she let him kiss her, because sometimes it was nice to have the kind of casual intimacy that came without the prospect of heartache.
The night turned into a perfect Parisian dawn, where rain cascaded like velvet from the sky but the sun shone through too, arcing a double rainbow over the Sacré-Coeur. Surely it was a promise of a future without warfare—except that Valentin pointed to the morning newspaper and its headline that read: Hitler Invades Poland. The rainbow fell from the sky.
The drive to the airfield was silent. Until Rose said, “I feel as if today is a day for grand gestures.”
“It is,” Skye agreed, and she let Rose take the front seat in the Moth while she took the rear. After they’d leveled out, Skye climbed onto the wing and proceeded to perform the stunt they’d spoken of at lunch: wing-walking.
She saw the open and gasping mouths of Valentin and the others as Rose flew in low enough to show them that yes, Skye was walking along the wing of the plane, her cerulean scarf streaming behind her and her hair flying too. She flipped into a simple handstand—she’d always wanted to cartwheel on the wing, but even she wasn’t quite daredevil enough for that—then waved to her friends on the ground.
They came in to land, and Valentin, who really was exceptionally charming and handsome, kissed her goodbye. Skye promised nothing in the way of correspondence—Nicholas had cured her of that.
Back in the air, she waggled her wings at Rose and the others lined up for takeoff in their newer and faster planes, before soaring upward and away, propelled by a tailwind and laughter and possibly still a few bubbles of champagne, trying hard to forget the headline in the newspaper.
But she could no longer ignore it once she landed at the flying club outside London where she taught cocky young men to fly in readiness to join a vastly undermanned and desperate RAF. She parked the Moth in its usual place and climbed out to find Ted, one of her pupils, waiting for her.
“It’s over,” he said.
“What is?” Skye asked.
“Civilian flying. It’s banned after tomorrow. The Civil Air Guard’s being disbanded too. A declaration of war is likely any day, and everyone’s grounded, unless you’re an RAF pilot. They now own the skies.”
Ted’s words made Skye stagger backward, as if a plane had run right through her. She closed her eyes. Everyone’s grounded, unless you’re an RAF pilot. As a woman, she could never be an RAF pilot. Which meant it really was over.
* * *
Two days later, determined to prove Ted wrong, Skye dressed in her most demure navy suit, hoping the dramatically puffed sleeves, nipped waist and flared peplum wouldn’t be considered too modish for an earnest pilot like herself. She walked through an anxious London, where everyone seemed to be searching the skies for signs of the war they were supposedly engaged in, but the only evidence Skye could see was the closed cinemas, the absence of children—they’d all been exiled to the countryside—and the red pillarboxes with yellow squares painted on them to detect poisonous gases.
When she arrived at the Air Ministry, she explained her flying experience to the young man before her.
“Join the WAAF,” he said. “Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.”
“That sounds perfect,” Skye said. “Will I be instructing? Or flying—”
The man interrupted. “The WAAF don’t fly. They pack parachutes and monitor aircraft movements. Or chauffeur the pilots. You’d be good at that,” he said, a suggestive glint in his eyes. “In a car,” he added, as if he needed to underscore the fact that she was bound to earth.
“I’ve never learned to drive,” Skye said flatly.
She visited the Air Ministry every day for a fortnight. Each day, the same man, or sometimes a different man, told her the same thing. At the end of two weeks, she came to a halt in the ministry’s foyer at the sudden and painful understanding that she would never be allowed to fly.
Her cerulean scarf sagged from her neck. She made herself walk back to the desk. “May I have the application form for the WAAF, please?”
The man smirked. “They urgently need typists for the typing pool.”
Skye pictured herself stuck inside a cavernous room with a hundred other women, their typewriters clacking out the frustrations hidden behind their red-lipsticked smiles. She left London then, unwilling to type her way through a war.
Was this the future her mother hadn’t wanted to tell her? That war would come and men would die; and Skye would too, from the inside, cobwebbing over like her grounded plane.
* * *
In the quiet of Cornwall, she would be able to think about what to do. Skye caught the train to Helston and the bus to Porthleven and walked up the path from the village to the cottage. It was her legacy from her mother, along with the Moth, an estrangement from Liberty and enough years in France that Skye had become as close to a Frenchwoman as one born elsewhere could possibly be. Even now the accent clung to Skye’s words.
Atop the cliff, she stared out over the sea. It was white today, bridal, lace frill after lace frill coursing down from the horizon. The sound of a motorcar made her turn around and as soon as she realized the driver was Pauline Gower, Skye cursed herself for not having thought of her sooner. Of course Pauline would know if there was any chance at all of Skye or any other woman flying while this strange war vacillated on with hardly a bullet fired.
Skye and Pauline had flown together during Skye’s first season in Tom Campbell Black’s Air Display. Next to Amy Johnson and perhaps Skye herself, Pauline was one of the most experienced female pilots in the country. Her father was also an MP, which meant Pauline knew everyone who mattered and, as a consequence, knew about everything that mattered. She was like Rose—a blue blood who couldn’t have cared less that Skye’s blood had no blue in it at all.