The Last Letter from Juliet - Melanie Hudson Page 0,12

Charles, my fiancé, who was waiting for me at Lanyon, I attempted to tidy my hair, which was beyond redemption. I quickly glanced down at my clothes. I was wearing a flying jacket (my father’s, far too big for me and ripped on the right sleeve) and, over thermal long-johns, men’s overalls, covered in oil, rolled up at the ankle and pulled in at the waist with a wide belt. The icing on the cake was my footwear – muddy, fur-lined flying boots.

Taking a cloth from my pocket, I gave my face and hands a quick wipe. The two men were only a few steps away now. The younger one paused out of earshot to speak to the other man, who snorted in my direction before turning tail and heading towards the barn, using a long stick to usher the cows with him.

The man approached. His expression did not soften.

‘Well, hello, there,’ I said, cheerily.

He stood there for a moment, not speaking. A kind of apoplexy seemed to have set in (this often happened to a man who found himself unexpectedly face to face with a female pilot. It was the shock, you see). I decided to wade straight in with an apology. Farmers could be ever so touchy about aircraft landing in their fields without invitation. It was best to take the wind out of their sails with a smile.

‘I’m so sorry for the …’ I glanced towards the cows. Their backsides lumbered from side to side as they began to disperse. Tails flicked with annoyance ‘… disturbance. I meant to land in front of a large house, up the way there.’ I paused to look in the direction of the house. ‘It’s the one with the four gables and twelve chimneys … or is it four chimneys and twelve gables, I can never remember …? Do you know it?’

‘Lanyon?

‘Yes.’

‘Of course. But look here …’

My bright smile and humble apology fell on blind eyes and deaf ears. He began to chide – really chide – something about the utter irresponsibility of landing an aircraft in a field full of cattle … could have killed myself, etc. etc. He went on for quite some time about all kinds of things that might possibly have happened had luck not been on my side, but I really couldn’t concentrate because he was just so damn gorgeous and to top it had a slight American twang in his accent, too, and I had a very definite soft spot for a soft American accent on a man, probably because of all the movies we watched in those days.

I was just trying to work out what an American was doing working on a Cornish farm when he stopped preaching and returned to his preoccupation of staring at me. I realised he was waiting for me to respond to his disciplinary lecture, but not knowing quite how to respond, and rather than answer and annoy him further, I simply kept quiet and ran my fingers through my tangled mop of thick hair, just as the cold wind nipped at my face and turned my nose into a dripping tap. I wiped my nose with the cloth and we stood in a kind of ‘what now?’ silence while the Tiger Moth rocked on its wheels in the wind. He was obviously going to wait it out until I spoke. There was nothing left to do but to shrug and apologise again.

‘You’re absolutely right, of course,’ I said, adding a suitably big enough sigh. ‘Landing on a cliff in a field full of cows was not my finest spot of airwomanship, but to be fair, I didn’t see the cows and if you think about it, nothing bad actually did happen so I wonder, could we start again because, you know, ’tis done now, and what else can I do but say to that I’m so very – very – sorry.’

I tried my best to look remorseful.

He took a deep breath. His eyes were cold, steady.

‘I’d say that was a perfunctory apology.’

‘Perfunctory?’ I repeated.

‘Yes, perfunctory.’

He had more.

‘You think that because you’re a beautiful woman you can do whatever you want – gallivant around, hither and thither …’

Hither and thither? An American saying ‘hither and thither’?

I let him rant on again, completely unaware of what he was saying because frankly, he could say what the hell else he liked. No person on the planet (other than my parents) had called me beautiful before – even my fiancé had never