This new woman in his life was younger than sixty but not much, a slender, sparrowlike lady standing (in the aisle of the bus) barely five feet in her practical heels. She had been pretty once, but that prettiness had congealed into a pixie-ish mask, and her stylish attire bespoke both money and a desire to affect youth-white flannel suit narrowly pin-striped black, black gloves, black soupbowl chapeau with a long sheer shadowy veil designed to serve the same function as Vaseline on a movie lens aimed at a beautiful but aging actress.
“Would you mind terribly scooting over?” she asked ever so sweetly.
Charteris had taken the seat nearest the aisle, to obtain proximity to the Viking blonde, leaving the window seat empty.
“Not at all,” Charteris said, and did so. He thought he caught the barest amused glimpse from the Viking-which was at least an acknowledgment by her that he was alive.
“Thank you, ever so,” his new neighbor said, settling snugly into her seat. “I’m Margaret Mather-Miss.”
She extended a ladylike gloved hand, which he took, introducing himself.
“Oh, the mystery writer! I do so enjoy your novels.”
“Well, thank you.”
She beamed beneath the veil. “The villains always receive their just deserts. Would that real life had the decency to perform the same service.”
He squinted at her. “Are you an American, Miss Mather?”
“Born in Morristown, New Jersey, of all places. Now I consider myself a resident of the world.”
“Do tell.”
“My apartment is at the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome-from the second floor you can see St. Peter’s.”
“Really.”
“But I spend most of my time in travel. I do so adore travel, flying in particular. The Hindenburg should suit me perfectly-all the comfort of a luxury liner, and none of the seasickness…. What takes you to America, Mr. Charteris?”
He was polishing his monocle on his handkerchief. “I’ve been maintaining residences in both England and America, for several years now. Large country estate in the former, a bungalow in Florida… or rather I had a bungalow in Florida.”
“But no longer?”
Reinserting his monocle, he replied, “It’s my wife’s, now. My soon-to-be ex-wife.”
“Oh, you’re getting divorced? How terrible.” But a distinct tinge of “How wonderful” colored her tone. “I do hope this is not too melancholy a time for you.”
“Not at all, Miss Mather. My wife and I are parting friends. We have a wonderful daughter together, and we’ve agreed not to subject each other to any unnecessary unpleasantness.”
“How very admirable.” The smile again beamed beneath the veil. “How very civilized.”
They were in the middle bus, which just now was pulling out behind the lead vehicle. The rumble of the engine joined with the rough music of tires on cobblestone streets, accompanying the drunken folk songs emanating from the rear. None of this racket prevented Miss Mather from filling Charteris in on her life.
Henry James might have written it. Like most spinsters, Miss Margaret Mather-“a direct descendant of Cotton Mather himself”-had a dead fiance in her distant past, due to a sailing accident on Cape Cod, near her family’s Quisset summer home. Her man’s-man father had been a successful lawyer in New York who had once gone ’round the world by clipper ship (“So, you see, my seven-league boots come naturally to me”). After her father retired, the family joined her ailing brother in Capri; the brother recovered, became a professor of art at Princeton, while the family stayed behind. Her mother had died in 1920, and Miss Mather had cared for her father until his death in ’29 at the ripe old age of ninety-four.
“I’m afraid I’m something of the black sheep of the family,” she admitted, “with my two meager years of schooling-but I’ve learned so much in my travels, and I’ve written a bit of poetry.”
“Ah.”
“Perhaps I could impose on you, at some point on the voyage, to read some of my work-the opinion of a professional author would mean so much to me.”
“Perhaps you could.”
What she really loved to do, as she’d indicated, was fly-from the glimmering Mediterranean to the sand dunes of the Sahara, from the Albanian mountains to the capitals of Germany and France, she’d seen them all from the open cockpit of a two-seater, goggles and helmet against the wind.
“You sound like you could give Amelia Earhart competition,” Charteris said. “When did you learn to fly?”
“Oh, I don’t know how to fly, myself. I always hire a pilot.”
Good-looking young male ones, he’d wager.
She continued her flirtatious chatter, letting him know what a woman of the world she was, as he took in the dusk-softened scenery through his rain-flecked window. Young tree toads sang in the farmlands they glided past; and as they neared the airfield, agriculture gave way to beech groves and pine stands, representative of that timeless bucolic Germany that seemed so incongruous in a country overrun with Nazis.
Miss Mather was noticing the scenery, too. “How enchanting, their green young leaves… May I share something rather personal with you, Mr. Charteris?”
“If you like.”
She touched a gloved finger to a veiled cheek. “It may seem absurd, for one who loves travel and flight, as I do… but all this afternoon, I’ve felt a certain… uneasiness.”
“Those thugs at the hotel would make anyone uneasy.”
“Oh yes! Do you know they charged me for fifteen kilos of excess baggage? I pointed out that at ninety-eight pounds I weigh considerably less than the average man, and some compensation would seem logical-but I was told, ‘It’s the rule-only twenty kilos allowed.’”
“Does seem unfair.”
“But no, no, Mr. Charteris, I don’t think it’s the dreadful gestapo that are giving me this sense of… what else can I call it but foreboding? Do you believe in premonitions?”
“Sometimes.”
“Well, would I seem a silly girl if I told you, that when I gaze out at that lovely forest, I find myself thinking, ‘What a beautiful farewell to earth’…?”
She was trembling, almost on the verge of tears. He took her gloved hand in his and held it, rather tightly.
“It will be fine,” he told her.
Beneath the veil, she smiled in gratitude and, for a moment, she was indeed a girl again, and a beautiful one.
They were passing through a town, now-or rather a town in progress. Identical white stucco houses, each with a red tile roof, stood along either side of the autobahn, with dozens more in the process of being built. This, Charteris knew, was Zeppelinheim-a planned village for zep crewmen and their families. Finally, beyond the village, over a bridge, as the trio of buses barreled down a slope, the vastness of the new Rhein-Main World Airport revealed itself.
Many new buildings designed for airplanes had been constructed here in recent days, for what was being planned as a combined airship and airplane harbor, to accommodate passengers from all around Europe seeking passage to North or South America.
But what set this airfield off from all others was the immense zeppelin hangar, a virtual Olympic stadium with a roof, a staggering thousand feet long and twenty stories high, seeming ghostly and unreal in the misty twilight. Just beyond the yawning doors of the hangar, floating on its nose cone tethers, was the great seamed silver ship, an impossibly small ground crew scurrying beneath, like ants carrying off some enormous gourd from a slumbering giant’s picnic.
Miss Mather gasped in wonderment. “Forget what I said, Mr. Charteris…. Such majesty sweeps any of my doubts away.”
The archness of his poetic companion aside, Charteris also felt a wave of elation roll through him. They would soon be boarding the largest aircraft ever to trade earth for the heavens, a ship only a few feet shorter than the fabled ocean liner Titanic.