Where Earth Meets Sky Page 34

  ‘Loz! Where the hell are you? He’s never going to believe this . . . He’s going to think I’ve been on the bottle all afternoon . . .’

  Leaping and fizzing with excitement he pulled his hat off and tore across the ground to find his friend.

  He told Helen, straight out with it, a few days later, after the wire had arrived from Piers Larstonbury, and after he had sorted things out with the Austin.

  That had been like a dream as well, going to the old man and telling him what he wanted to do. Herbert Austin stood looking at him in silence for a few moments, considering the situation. Sam knew he was in a strong position. He had been taken on at the Austin as a promising engineer in the years when things were very lean. During the Depression which hit the industry after the war heaps of men had lost their jobs. Who could afford to buy cars then? Come 1919, Austin had had to lay out to re-equip the works for peacetime production and that had set them back; they were installing automated machines to speed production, but the first model, the 3.6-litre Austin Twenty, trying to do something like Ford, had not really taken off. It was too big and clumsy. By last year some of them were doing stints at the works with no wages – Austin was broke. Sam was one of the ones who stuck it out. It had been a hell of a time – living on air almost, Helen keeping on at him to leave and go back to Coventry, and they were still recovering. He didn’t really know why he’d stayed – bloody-mindedness mostly. And Austin had promised him a job for life if he wanted it after that. He knew Herbert Austin felt a debt of gratitude to the engineers who stuck by him. They were the ones who had saved the company in its darkest hour.

  ‘I had a cable from this Major Larstonbury,’ Herbert Austin said.

  Sam stood while Austin sat behind his desk, its surface littered with drawings from the company draughtsmen. There was great excitement at the moment – the new model, known as the Austin Seven, about to be launched. Some thought it was misguided, but Sam was in favour of a car the ordinary man could afford – he might stand a chance himself! He felt a pang of regret.

  Austin slipped the end of his pen in his mouth for a moment, then withdrew it. ‘He’s talking about your being released from us for a year. And he’s going to meet your wages?’

  ‘So he says,’ Sam said. ‘And Loz . . . Lawrence Marks.’

  ‘Hmph,’ Herbert Austin said. There was a pause, which seemed to imply that the man must have more money than sense, but then he said, ‘You wanted to be in the company’s racing team, I seem to remember.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Sam said. ‘I’d’ve liked to. There hasn’t been an opening.’

  ‘I should have found you one, shouldn’t I?’ A little smile played on Herbert Austin’s rather austere features. ‘Then I shouldn’t have had to let one of my finest engineers go taking off. You’ll come back?’

  It was a more of a statement than a question.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve a wife and four children.’

  ‘This Piers Larstonbury – is he an engineer?’

  ‘An architect, I believe. He doesn’t know much about motors at all.’

  ‘Hmph,’ Herbert Austin said again. ‘Well, well. I suppose you’ll have to do it. Don’t you go beating us, though.’

  And a moment later Sam was leaving Austin’s office, feeling as if he had grown wings. Later, he and Loz sat in the pub and grinned at each other for a long moment before they erupted into yells of delighted laughter. They were going to Brooklands! They had been given the chance of a lifetime, to build their own Special and race it – and the old man had more or less given his blessing!

  They downed a pint each at high speed. Loz’s round, boyish face was pink and alight with glee.

  ‘By crikey, Sam – we’re going to do it! We’re going to build the best bloody Special that’s ever gone round Brooklands!’ Then he put his glass down slowly on the table and his face sobered rapidly. ‘Christ – what’s Mary going to say?’

  Mary Marks evidently had quite a bit to say at the idea of her husband taking off to go down and ‘play racing cars’ at Brooklands. But Mary and Loz were good pals and Mary had only two children, and two sisters near. In the end she was also proud and grudgingly pleased for Loz even though she desperately didn’t want him to be away so much.

  Helen was a different matter. As he came out with it, blunt and direct because he couldn’t think of another way of doing it, Sam saw her face close up, as if he had frozen something deep in her. But he could do no other, he knew that. The opportunity was irresistible to him. And under and within it also, running like a deep, subterranean river of new life, was the thought of Lily. He tried not to think of Lily, keeping his mind on the practical things, the cars and engineering, his head swarming with ideas and plans. But in quiet moments, in bed at night beside Helen’s resentful sleeping form, or at odd moments of the day, the memory of her came to him overwhelmingly. However much she had hurt him, he knew she felt something for him. Her eyes had given it away just in those seconds when they met, and the pull of her now was far too strong. He was going south, could only go south to do the things he burned to do – and to be near her.

  ‘You’re leaving me,’ Helen stated.

  He told her the day he saw Herbert Austin, that teatime. He was astonished by the way she just plunged in like that, as if she could see it all so clearly.

  ‘Don’t talk daft!’ he said. ‘It’s for a year – overall. But I’ll be back up to see you!’

  This was said with a kind of guilty optimism. He knew he probably wouldn’t come often. He had been careful to tell her straight away that there would be money – the equivalent of his wages. She wouldn’t go short, so she needn’t worry on that score. When the wire of confirmation had come through to him so promptly and to Herbert Austin, he knew the man was not fooling him. And he also knew that Lily was behind it. Of course, Lily wanted to get that Fairford boy on to the track. That was part of the deal. But was it not more than that? Was it not seeing him again that had spurred her to use her influence over Piers Larstonbury? He did not think she was in love with the man, though it was hard to tell. A pang of jealous suspicion filled him at the thought. But she had said she would see him . . . She wanted to see him.

  Over those days Helen rocked between resentment, anger and a pathetic sadness. She had lost him and she knew it. And she was full of rage and grief and at times begged and begged him not to go.

  ‘But I’ll be back – very soon,’ he assured her. ‘It’s a great chance – old man Austin even thinks so. I’m doing this for all of us – for the girls and you . . .’

  ‘You don’t love me – you never have,’ she said one evening, perched in utter misery by the range.

  And he knew with terrible clarity in that moment that what she said was true. But he said, ‘Don’t talk daft. You’re my wife, aren’t you?’

  She looked across at him, with tear-stained cheeks.

  ‘But you’re still going, aren’t you? Whatever I say?’

  Quietly, able to do no other, he said, ‘Yes, love. I am.’

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  July 1922

  ‘So—’ Sam stood up from where he had been bending over the open engine as Loz rushed into the shed – ‘are we on?’

  Loz’s hair was standing on end from his habit of running his oily hands through it. Like Sam, he was dressed in an old boiler suit smeared with oil and there was a good helping of it on his face, which was otherwise pink and beaming with excitement.

  ‘Yep – Shelsley Walsh, Saturday! We’ll be ready by then, easy!’

  Sam grinned, flexing his stiff back. He wiped his left eye, which was watering badly this morning, then gave the car’s bodywork a fond pat. She’d held up well on the test hill here at Brooklands. It was a specially built incline where the motor cars could be put through their paces on a gradient as steep as one in four in parts. But now it was time for a new challenge.

  ‘Better send a wire to the major. I expect he’ll want to be there.’

  And if the major came a
ll the way over to Shelsley, and Cosmo Fairford, surely she might come too. The thought made Sam ache.

  They had been installed at Brooklands for five weeks now and he hadn’t seen Lily or heard from her. Piers Larstonbury, who seemed to have been infected by huge enthusiasm for the project he had taken on, had been down to visit for four out of five of the weekends since they began. He had learned very fast, soaking up information and learning from their expertise. Sam saw that the man was genuinely humble and lacking in arrogance. He treated Loz and Sam as equals and Sam soon came very much to respect and like Major Larstonbury.

  During those earliest days, while the two of them tried to decide on the key specifications for the motor, the major had perched on an upturned crate in the shed listening to all the animated conversations about the ratio between power and weight so that it would be as fast as possible but still hold the road, how rigid the structure should be, what size the brakes. Every so often he asked questions.

  ‘Thing is,’ Sam explained enthusiastically, ‘we need to keep the frontal area down – the cross section. The size of hole it makes in the wind, in other words. Smaller it is, faster she’ll go.’

  ‘Won’t that engine – all that power – just destabilize the whole structure?’ Piers Larstonbury asked. They had got hold of a Mercedes chain-driven chassis and an airship engine. It had worked for Count Zborowski, they reasoned. All the power in that engine!

  ‘No – that’s the beauty of it.’ Loz was fizzing with enthusiasm. ‘You can put a much more powerful engine in without too much problem. Course, the crankshaft speed is so low in an engine that size that you have to up the gear ratios no end, but it’s easy enough.’

  Piers Larstonbury joined in hours of conversations and watched Sam and Loz chewing over all the figures and alternatives of what they might do. They saw their patron become quite boyish and excited about what he had taken on and the skill of the men carrying it out.

  ‘That’s really thoroughly splendid!’ he would say and often he gave a happy laugh as he said it.

  And the weekdays Sam and Loz spent in a blissful state, something Sam celebrated in himself several times a day, when he thought how grindingly different everything would have been if he had never met the major. Even if he and Loz had ever got together enough money to begin building a motor, which was very doubtful, they would have been incredibly lucky to have found anywhere that touched this in terms of a place to build it. And they would have been at it after a day’s toil at the Austin, squatting about in some cramped place God only knew where, on dark evenings when they were hardly able to see, and every hour they could spend of their weekends with their wives nagging them to stop. But at Brooklands they had their own shed in a row of others, amid the buzzing hive of activity round the racetrack, and they could absorb themselves totally in their passion with monkish single-mindedness.

  Race days were only a small part of what went on at Brooklands. Cars were designed, built, tested, rejigged . . . Some chaps went through a great to-do about covering up the engines of the cars they were working on if anyone came close, as if guarding highly innovative secrets. But mostly Brooklands felt like a college or university. They met engineers from all over the place, talked, shared problems and ideas, all endlessly fascinated by the same challenges and triumphs of the motor car. And they could spend all day there, sunshine pouring in through the windows on to the cluttered space: the plentiful supply of tools which Major Larstonbury had ensured they were provided with hung all round the walls, and the smells of metal and rubber and oil, meant Sam felt he had found paradise.

  ‘I’ll let the major know,’ Loz said. He paused, about to go out of the door again. ‘Sam – are you sure about that Fairford bloke?’

  Cosmo was to undertake his first drive at Shelsley Walsh. Previously they had only seen him on runs round the test track at Brooklands. Loz had taken an instant dislike to Cosmo Fairford. Sam knew it was partly that he was of the class Loz was forever making fun of and he just wasn’t comfortable with him. But it was more than that: Loz didn’t trust him. He hadn’t said outright, but Sam could tell.

  ‘He’s a good driver by the look of him,’ Sam said. ‘We’ll give him a try.’

  Loz stared at him for a moment as if trying to work something out. Why are you risking our precious motor to this toff who you’ve only seen drive a handful of times? Then he went out again.

  Sam stood, hands on waist, watching him through the window as he walked away. There was a slight frown on his face. Loz was right. They hadn’t fully got the measure of Cosmo Fairford – they were taking a risk. But they needed a driver. Neither of them was up to it, not at race speeds, and Loz hadn’t suggested anyone better, had he? He was not prepared to explain his reasoning to Loz. Lily loved Cosmo. And he knew that this was why he and Loz were here at all, because Lily Waters had such influence over Piers Larstonbury, because the major was in love with her. Cosmo was part of the arrangement whether they liked it or not and Sam hoped to God he was as skilled a driver as he claimed to be. He found Cosmo petulant, and arrogant, but none of that mattered so long as he could hold that motor through the wind and take her as fast as she’d go! And out of a sense of loyalty and respect for Cosmo’s father, Captain Fairford, and the child he remembered Cosmo to have been, and of gratitude for those weeks in Ambala, he was prepared to give him a chance. And because of Lily. Of course because of Lily.

  Sam and Loz motored to Worcestershire separately from the major and Cosmo, towing their racing Special on a trailer. Like most of the racing cars she had been given a name – Piers Larstonbury had insisted that she be called the Heath Flyer, as befitted a vehicle which he had had fantasies of racing round Hampstead Heath.

  They set off very early, and after pulling into the race ground at Shelsley Walsh in the late morning, soon found Cosmo Fairford’s Morgan and the major’s Daimler parked up side by side, evidently having not long arrived themselves. As he braked and shut off the engine, Sam’s heart gave a lurch to see that climbing out from the Daimler’s passenger seat was Lily.

  ‘You coming?’ Loz said impatiently, as Sam stayed at the wheel, staring across at her.

  ‘Yes, all right, just give me a minute,’ he said absently.

  Loz tutted and went round to unhitch the trailer. Sam sat drinking in the sight of Lily. He just couldn’t stop looking at her: she was so beautiful, with those remarkable, sultry looks, her clothes stylish and elegant and all a deep plum-red, except for the white band round her cloche hat. As he gazed at her, she called out lightly to Piers Larstonbury, obviously reminding him that he had forgotten something, and jealousy flared in him.

  ‘God, she’s lovely . . .’ he murmured, seeing her cherry lips turned up in a gentle smile. He longed with a deep ache just to be able to go over and speak to her in the easy, loving way they had once shared. For her to smile at him, for everything between them to be as it had been for those enchanting days in India, as it should always have continued to be. The hurt which came at the end of those days stabbed at him again like an unhealed scar. She had hurt him, and at times he wanted to hurt her too.

  His eye was caught by movements around Cosmo Fairford’s sporty vehicle. There seemed to be someone with Cosmo in the car, but Cosmo climbed out first, from the driver’s seat. He even managed to do that with a kind of swagger, Sam thought, watching Cosmo smooth back his wayward blond hair. If it wasn’t for Lily’s obvious devotion to the lad, Sam could have developed a serious dislike for him, even though he had to concede, he was a damned fine driver. He had proved that on some of the latest test runs at Brooklands, and even Loz had had to agree. You’d better do all right today, Sonny Jim, he thought, staring fiercely at Cosmo. You’d better not mess up with this baby of ours . . .

  Then he saw the other figure emerge from the Morgan. It took Sam a few seconds to recognize Susan Fairford. She was dressed to the nines in a fashionable, pale green outfit which shimmered in the sunlight. She wore a green cloche hat jauntily tilted on her head a
nd looked every bit the society lady. Sam thought of her that night in France in the last spring of the war, thin and exhausted, yet somehow more real, much more likeable when the class barrier had come down. He wondered sourly whether she would even give him the time of day now.

  Composing himself, he climbed out of the car and, catching up with Loz, went over to greet the rest of their party.

  ‘Ah – Ironside!’ Somehow Piers Larstonbury always treated Sam as the senior of the two of them. Sam was not sure if Loz resented this, but if so he didn’t show it. ‘So – here you are! Journey go all right?’

  ‘Very well,’ Sam said. ‘All in one piece and ready to go. Are you fit, Fairford?’ He always spoke jauntily to Cosmo. He wasn’t going to treat him with any kind of deference.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Cosmo said. ‘Raring to go.’

  Sam saw suddenly that the lad was almost tremulous with nerves and he felt for him. He knew he had to prove himself.

  ‘Mother,’ Cosmo turned to Susan who was coming up beside him. ‘This is Sam Ironside – the chief mechanic. I don’t suppose you remember him from Ambala, do you? Says he delivered a car . . . ?’

  Sam braced himself for Susan’s chill offhandedness. When he looked at her, though, to his surprise, he saw a genuine, warm smile in her china blue eyes and she held her hand out.

  ‘Of course I remember, Cosmo. Mr Ironside and I have met more recently than that.’ She explained, briefly, and Sam saw that she was proud of her months as a VAD. She peered at him with a kind of professional concern. There was still the cut-glass voice of course, but in every other way she seemed to have thawed and her manner was more genuine. ‘My goodness, you were lucky not to lose the sight in that eye. How is it?’