The Cessna circled above him like a dull, unwearying bird. Trying to look as though he was engaged in his study of beach ecology, Melville cleared away the sand between his feet. Without realizing it, he had exposed a section of grey, riveted metal, the skin of an all-too-familiar aerodynamic structure. He stood up and worked away with both hands, soon revealing the unmistakable profile of an aerofoil curvature.
The Cessna had gone, taking the lady dentist back to the air-strip. Melville had forgotten about her as he pushed the heavy sand away, steering it down the saddle between the dunes. Although nearly exhausted, he continued to clear the starboard wing-tip now emerging from the dune. He took off his jacket and beat away the coarse white grains, at last revealing the combat insignia, star and bars of a USAAF roundel.
As he knew within a few minutes, he had discovered an intact wartime B-17. Two days later, by a sustained effort, he had dug away several tons of sand and exposed to view almost the entire starboard wing, the tail and rear turret. The bomber was almost undamaged — Melville assumed that the pilot had run out of fuel while crossing the Channel and tried to land on the sand-flats at low tide, overshot the wet surface and ploughed straight through the dunes above the beach. A write-off, the Fortress had been abandoned where it lay, soon to be covered by the shifting sand-hills. The small resort had been built, flourished briefly and declined without anyone realizing that this relic of World War II lay in the ridge a hundred yards behind the town.
Systematically, Melville organized himself in the task of digging out, and then renovating, this antique bomber. Working alone, he estimated that it would take three months to expose the aircraft, and a further two years to strip it down and rebuild it from scratch. The precise details of how he would straighten the warped propeller blades and replace the Wright Cyclone engines remained hazy in his mind, but already he visualized the shingle-reinforced earth-and-sand ramp which he would construct with a rented bulldozer from the crest of the dunes down to the beach. When the sea was out, after a long late-summer day, the sand along the tide-line was smooth and hard Few people came to watch him. Tennant, the former advertising man leading the group digging out the Messerschmitt, came across the sand-flats and gazed abstractedly at the emerging wings and fuselage of the Fortress. Neither of the men spoke to each other — both, as Melville knew, had something more important on their minds.
In the evening, when Melville was still working on the aircraft, Dr Laing walked along the beach from his solarium. He climbed the shadow-filled dunes, watching Melville clear away the sand from the chin-turret.
‘What about the bomb-load?’ he asked. ‘I’d hate to see the whole town levelled.’
‘It’s an officially abandoned wreck.’ Melville pointed to the strippeddown gun turret. ‘Everything has been removed, including the machineguns and bomb-sight. I think you’re safe from me, doctor.’
‘A hundred years ago you’d have been digging a diplodocus out of a chalk cliff,’ Laing remarked. The Cessna was circling the sand-bar at the southern end of the resort, returning after a navigation exercise. ‘If you’re keen to fly perhaps Helen Winthrop will take you on as a co-pilot. She was asking me something about you the other day. She’s planning to break the single-engine record to Cape Town.’
This item of news intrigued Melville. The next day, as he worked at his excavation site, he listened for the sound of the Cessna’s engine. The image of this determined woman preparing for her solo flight across Africa, testing her aircraft at this abandoned airfield beside the dunes, coincided powerfully with his own dream of flying to Wake Island. He knew full well now that the elderly Fortress he was laboriously digging from the sand-dunes would never leave its perch on the ridge, let alone take off from the beach. But the woman’s aircraft offered a feasible alternative. Already he mapped out a route in his mind, calculating the capacity of her auxiliary tanks and the refuelling points in the Azores and Newfoundland.
Afraid that she might leave without him, Melville decided to approach her directly. He drove his car through the deserted streets of the resort, turned on to the unmade road that led to the airfield, and parked beside her American sedan. The Cessna, its engine cowlings removed, stood at the end of the runway.
She was working at an engineering bench in the hangar, welding together the sections of a fuel tank. As Melville approached she switched off the blowtorch and removed her mask, her intelligent face shielded by her hands.
‘I see we’re involved in a race to get away first,’ she called out reassuringly to him when he paused in the entrance to the hangar. ‘Dr Laing told me that you’d know how to strengthen these fuel tanks.’
For Melville, her nervous smile cloaked a complex sexual metaphor.
From the start Melville took it for granted that she would abandon her plan to fly to Cape Town, and instead embark on a round-the-world flight with himself as her co-pilot. He outlined his plans for their westward flight, calculating the reduced fuel load they would carry to compensate for his weight. He showed her his designs for the wing spars and braces that would support the auxiliary tanks.
‘Melville, I’m flying to Cape Town,’ she told him wearily. ‘It’s taken me years to arrange this — there’s no question of setting out anywhere else. You’re obsessed with this absurd island.’
‘You’ll understand when we get there,’ Melville assured her. ‘Don’t worry about the aircraft. After Wake you’ll be on your own. I’ll strip off the tanks and cut all these braces away.’
‘You intend to stay on Wake Island?’ Helen Winthrop seemed unsure of Melville’s seriousness, as if listening to an over-enthusiastic patient in her surgery chair outlining the elaborate dental treatment he had set his heart on.
‘Stay there? Of course…’ Melville prowled along the mantelpiece of the beach-house, slapping the line of photographs. ‘Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility — a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends.’
Helen Winthrop made no comment on this, watching Melville quietly. She no longer slept in the hangar at the airstrip, and during her weekend visits moved into Melville’s beach-house. Needing his help to increase the Cessna’s range, and so reduce the number of refuelling stops with their built-in delays, she put up with his restlessness and child-like excitement, only concerned by his growing dependence on her. As he worked on the Cessna she listened for hours to him describing the runways of the island. However, she was careful never to leave him alone with the ignition keys.
While she was away, working at her dental practice, Melville returned to the dunes, continuing to dig out the crashed bomber. The port and starboard wings were now free of the sand, soon followed by the upper section of the fuselage. The weekends he devoted to preparing the Cessna for its long westward flight. For all his excitability, the state of controlled euphoria which his soon-to-be-realized dream of flying to Wake Island had brought about, his navigation plans and structural modification to the Cessna’s air-frame were carefully and professionally carried through.
Even the intense migraines that began to disturb Melville’s sleep did little to dent his good humour. He assumed that these fragments of the past had been brought to the surface of his mind by the strains of his involvement with this over-serious aviatrix, but later he knew that these elements of an unforgotten nightmare had been cued in by the aircraft emerging around him on all sides — Helen Winthrop’s Cessna, the Fortress he was exposing to light, the blackened Messerschmitt which the advertising man was lifting from the sea-bed.