the ends of the runways, and would rise in huge flocks into the flight-paths of airliners at take-off. Melville’s real interest had been in the island itself, a World War II airbase and now refuelling point for trans-Pacific passenger jets. The combination of scuffed sand and concrete, metal shacks rusting by the runways, the total psychological reduction of this man-made landscape, seized his mind in a powerful but ambiguous way. For all its arid, oceanic isolation, the Wake Island in Melville’s mind soon became a zone of intense possibility. He day-dreamed of flying there in a light aircraft, island-hopping across the Pacific. Once he touched down he knew that the migraines would go away for ever. He had been discharged from the Air Force in confused circumstances, and during his convalescence after the accident the military psychiatrists had been only too glad to play their parts in what soon turned out to be an underrehearsed conspiracy of silence. When he told them that he had rented a house from a doctor in this abandoned resort, and intended to live there for a year on his back pay, they had been relieved to see him go, carrying away the X-ray plates of his head and the photographs of Wake Island.
‘But why Wake Island?’ Dr Laing asked him on their third chess evening. He pointed to the illustrations that Melville had pinned to the mantelpiece, and the technical abstracts lavishly documenting its geology, rainfall, seismology, flora and fauna. ‘Why not Guam? Or Midway? Or the Hawaiian chain?’
‘Midway would do, but it’s a naval base now — I doubt if they’ll give me landing clearance. Anyway, the atmosphere is wrong.’ Discussing the rival merits of various Pacific islands always animated Melville, feeding this potent remythologizing of himself. ‘Guam is forty miles long, covered with mountains and dense jungle, New Guinea in miniature. The Hawaiian islands are an offshore suburb of the United States. Only Wake has real time.’
‘You were brought up in the Far East?’
‘In Manila. My father ran a textile company there.’
‘So the Pacific area has a special appeal for you.’
‘To some extent. But Wake is a long way from the Philippines.’
Laing never asked if Melville had actually been to Wake Island. Clearly Melville’s vision of flying to this remote Pacific atoll was unlikely to take place outside his own head.
However, Melville then had the good luck to discover the aircraft buried in the dunes.
When the tide was in, covering the sand-flats, Melville was forced to walk among the dunes above his beach-house. Driven and shaped by the wind, the contours of the dunes varied from day to day, but one afternoon Melville noticed that a section below the ridge retained its rectilinear form, indicating that some man-made structure lay below the sand, possibly the detached roof of a metal barn or boat-house.
Irritated by the familiar drone of a single-engined aircraft flying from the light airfield behind the resort, Melville clambered up to the ridge through the flowing sand and sat down on the horizontal ledge that ran among the clumps of wild grass. The aircraft, a privately owned Cessna, flew in from the sea directly towards him, banked steeply and circled overhead. Its pilot, a dentist and aviation enthusiast in her early thirties, had been curious about Melville for some time — the mushy drone of her flat six was forever dividing the sky over his head. Often, as he walked across the sand-flats four hundred yards from the shore, she would fly past him, wheels almost touching the streaming sand, throttling up her engine as if trying to din something into his head. She appeared to be testing various types of auxiliary fuel tank. Now and then he saw her driving her American sedan through the deserted streets of the resort towards the airfield. For some reason the noise of her light aircraft began to unsettle him, as if the furniture of his brain was being shifted around behind some dark curtain.
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
