The Infinite Air Read Free Page B

activity, but she knew the truth, that nothing would happen if someone didn’t lead with a bit of spirit.
    Louis Blériot’s exploits stood for everything she had ever imagined, the power to propel oneself through the air. In her dreams, she would confide to Jean, she sometimes found herself walking around a room, a library perhaps, with very high walls lined with books, and she would be reading the volumes on the top shelves, her feet just walking along the air beneath her. After Blériot’s flight, she told astonished members of the gardening circle committee that she saw herself as he did, alone in space. Only the other side remained unattainable, the far shore.
    The horse she rode was lent to her by an American called John Hoffman, a big man with a crest of hair already turning white, although he was of an age with Nellie. He had emigrated at the turn of the century and ‘gone native’, as it was said, marrying a Maori woman, and already there was a child every year. Nellie found it most peculiar, but she needed a horse and liked Hoffman. He kept two or three and raced them from time to time. He needed his horses to be ridden, he said. The white mare had nice shoulders and a good steady eye, nice for a lady to ride, especially as she took her little girl with her more often than not. Sometimes he would wink, and whisper in Nellie’s ear as she dismounted at his stable. ‘A bit of a flutter?’ he would ask, and laughing she would hand over some coins. The next time he saw her, he would press the palm of her hand. ‘You’ve got a good eye for a horse,’ he often said in his soft drawl.
    ‘And you’re leading me astray,’ she invariably responded. Once she said, ‘Now don’t you dare tell my husband. He thinks I’m cleverer with money than I really am.’
    ‘Oh, but I think you are. I think you study form more than you’re letting on.’
    By the time Jean was four she had grown strong, with wild unruly curls that reached to her shoulders. She and her second brother, John, bore a close resemblance to each other, small-boned and dark-featured, with the same alabaster complexion that came more from their mother than Fred. Harold, the older of the two brothers, was taller and, in a way that was hard to define, more awkward in hisskin, as if something were slightly broken in him already. Sometimes Jean noticed displeasure in her mother’s voice when she spoke to Harold that was never apparent when she talked to her and John. It was years and years later, after flights that circled the globe, after fame, and loss, and despair, when Jean came to bury her mother in a foreign country, that the marriage and birth certificates she carried revealed that Harold’s birth had occurred a few short months after her marriage. This had happened in a town down south, before Fred and Nellie’s move to Rotorua. Not that this could have accounted for the way Harold was, except perhaps for an inner core of desolation Jean sensed, which might have stemmed from this beginning, the embarrassment he would have caused his mother.
    Still, it was Harold who wanted an atlas, to study maps of the world. He wanted to become an explorer, like Dr Livingstone. His father sent away for a
Times Atlas
and, when it arrived, Harold invited John and Jean to join him in poring over more than a hundred coloured maps of the world. He traced his finger over country after country, noting where there was still not enough information for the cartographers to fill the gaps. Africa, thanks to Livingstone, looked well coloured in. ‘There’s Russia. And Asia. Look, I could go to China, there’s lots to discover there,’ he said, full of longing. His voice had just broken, and his limbs gangled across the floor.
    ‘There’s a hole in the middle of Australia,’ John said.
    ‘Oh, that’s not far away, someone will find it soon I expect.’ It was Harold’s habit to contradict nearly everything his brother said. He never ‘played’ with John, the