by Nevil Shute
She laughed. ‘When I want a bit of slap and tickle I’ll arrange it for myself, thank you. I’m having a marvellous time just like we are.’
‘Well, have another drink. The mind of an old man moves on a higher plane. An alcoholic one.’
‘If I have another I’ll probably go to sleep this afternoon.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘You won’t see me.’
We lunched and drove on in the hot afternoon, and I think I may perhaps have dozed in the car as perhaps she did, because we passed the big beach hotel at Korolevu without seeing it. When I came back to earth we had passed from the sugar cane country into the coconut country where the higher rainfall brings the lusher type of tropical scene. We passed by coral beaches white on the border of a brilliantly blue sea where the surf thunders on the reef some way out. There were dazzling little bays between the promontories where the coconut trees hang slanting forward over the water so that the nuts drop into the sea. She said once, ‘It’s simply marvellous!’
I nodded. ‘Real South Sea stuff.’
‘Fancy having a beach party at a place like that, and swimming in the lagoon!’
‘Sharks,’ I said.
‘Pat Petersen says the sharks don’t come inside the reef.’
I laughed. ‘Famous last words.’ As a matter of fact, I had good reason to say that, because I had met one a few days previously when I had been spear-fishing with Jim Hanson. I had been fifteen or twenty feet down beside the coral gardens of the reef, and it had come at me from curiosity, I think; a great shadowy thing seven or eight feet long in the pale green water. I poked it on the nose with the spear gun and it went away, and I got out on to the reef damn quick. Jim Hanson was still down and I was terrified for him, not knowing what to do, and I didn’t recover until we were in the boat. Jim never saw it at all.
I told her about this incident as we drove on down the coast, and she was very much concerned. ‘You oughtn’t to go taking risks like that,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth it.’
I smiled. ‘Keeps you young.’
‘It doesn’t if you get taken by a shark.’
‘I don’t intend to be,’ I said.
‘But you might be. Or Captain Hanson might have been. It’s frightfully dangerous.’
‘It’s a lot of fun.’
‘If you won’t think of yourself, you might think of your relations.’
‘I haven’t got any,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a sister in Hamilton, but we’ve not met for years.’
‘Don’t you write to her?’
I shook my head. ‘I send her a Christmas card, or a short letter then. I’ve got some cousins, but I never write to them.’
‘Well, Captain Hanson’s got a wife and family.’
I laughed. ‘That’s a matter that’s strictly personal between him and the shark.’
We stopped at the hotel at Ndeumba for a cup of tea, and walked down through the garden to the beach. The reef there is a long way out, and the matter of the sharks was still upon her mind, because she asked if there were any there. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s like the Australian coast, I think. It’s not a very good thing to go swimming out to sea.’
She nodded. ‘One never does at home, of course. Only in the Bay.’
We drove on to Suva. Stanley McEwen lives in a fair-sized tropical house outside the town up on the hill by the reservoir, and we drove straight there. It would suit him better to live at Nandi but there are no schools there for his children, so he lives at Suva and spends four days of each week at the aerodrome. I know his wife, of course, and introduced the hostess to her, and she showed us to our bedrooms. In the evening light we joined them for short drinks in their big lounge with the magnificent view overlooking Suva Bay and the mountains to the west.
The talk that night, of course, was all of AusCan and the running of the line, and I think we got a lot of useful work done. It’s liable to be that way when one can get out of the surroundings of the immediate job; one can take a more detached view of the problems. I said something of the sort to Stanley when we were having a final whisky before bed. ‘We ought to do more of this,’ I said. ‘Get away from the aircraft and stand back and look at them.’
He grinned. ‘Put that to Billy Myers when he comes out next, and see if he’ll stand the expenses. I know what the answer will be.’
‘It’s a good idea, all the same. Anyway, put it to him about leaving Sydney an hour earlier. We’d get them through the Customs half an hour quicker at the Honolulu end, and it can be pretty hot in that building. Jim Hanson had a passenger faint there the other day.’
He nodded. ‘I heard about that woman. It’s a good idea …’
His house is nearly a thousand feet up, and much cooler than the AusCan hostel at Nandi. We slept very well indeed, and I got up thinking of Tasmania. The tropics are all right; I can adjust myself to them and live very comfortably, but there is no denying that there is a freshness in the morning after a good sleep in a cool room that one never gets in a hot place. I dressed thinking of the little town of Buxton with the virtually unused grass aerodrome. I had a week’s leave coming to me in a month’s time, and I thought I would go there and have another look at it. Victoria in Vancouver Island would be all right, of course, but there were people operating on the field already; there would be hard competition from the start, and I was getting a bit old for that. In Buxton I might well be the king of the castle, a big frog in a very little puddle.
I got a taxi in the middle of the morning and drove the hostess down to the market in the town. Monday is a slack day and half the stalls were vacant, and perhaps it was a better day for her to see it than in the great bustle of a more busy time. She bought a couple of shell necklaces and bracelets from a Fijian woman, whose husband offered us a drink of kava from a coconut shell dipped in a tin basin. We took it for politeness and moved on, looking at the vegetables and the fish. ‘Tastes like toothpaste,’ she said.
‘That’s paying it a compliment.’
We found our way slowly through the little town to the Grand Pacific Hotel, and had lunch there. Sitting over coffee after lunch I asked her, ‘What would you like to do this afternoon?’
‘I’ve got to iron my frock some time,’ she said. ‘Have you got anything else you want to do down here?’
I shook my head. ‘You’ve not seen much of Suva.’
‘Is there much more to see?’
I thought for a minute. ‘There’s the Botanical Gardens, and the Museum.’
She laughed. ‘I’m not going to wear myself out before this evening. I think we’d be more comfortable back in Mr McEwen’s house, sitting in a long chair looking at the view.’
‘You can’t do that all afternoon.’
‘I can. If you say I’ve got to play tennis, I’ll hit you with something.’
I smiled. ‘He hasn’t got a court. You can play six sets tomorrow to make up for it.’
‘I know what you can do this afternoon,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Write a letter to your sister in Hamilton.’
I stared at her. ‘Why on earth should I do that?’
‘Tell her what you were telling me this morning about Buxton.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘I think you’re going to find it lonely when you retire to a little place like that,’ she said. ‘After all this. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to keep in touch with what people you’ve got.’
I got up. ‘Wait there,’ I said. ‘I’ll just see the porter and see if he can whistle up a taxi.’ I moved away from the lobby because I didn’t want to carry on that conversation. I had been in airline flying of one sort or another for twenty-seven years. For twenty-seven years I had moved about the world, living in hotels and airport hostels and in clubs. For twenty-seven years I had had men of my own sort to talk to and to do things with in all my working and my leisure hours. I was tired of it now, and wanting a house of my own, a settled base where I could hang up all my photographs and souvenir
s, have all my toys out of the boxes in the stores of London and of Montreal and of Vancouver, and arrange them all around me. I had wanted that almost more than anything, but deep in my subconscious I had known it would be lonely. I had refused to admit that to myself, refused to face the stark fact that lonely it was going to be, hellishly lonely, utterly divorced from what had been my working life. And now this girl had put her finger straight on to the weak point of my plan. I wasn’t very pleased with her for doing it.
I turned the conversation as we got into the car and we talked about the Indians in Fiji, so much more advanced in the Western sense than the Indians of their native land. When we got up to the McEwens’ house I made an excuse and went and lay down on my bed, still deeply troubled. Victoria, B.C., might be a better place for me than Buxton in Tasmania. I could retire to either because as a Canadian in AusCan my pension was payable in dollars, and both of them had good fishing. Victoria would be closer to the people that I knew and had made my life with, but at Victoria the competition would be fierce upon the aerodrome, and I was getting an old man. At Buxton I could still do useful work for many years, but nobody that I had ever known would come to see me there. It all wanted a bit of thinking about.
Charlie Lemaitre’s dinner party was quite a formal affair, with the Governor and his lady, eight couples from the Secretariat, the McEwens, the hostess, and me. It was still hot in Suva and they had it at a long table laid in one of the cloisters of the hotel, a very pleasant setting overlooking the gardens, the palm trees, and a moonlit sea. We men were in white dinner jackets and the women in evening dress; the table was lit by candles in glass shades, and there were many white-coated, soft-footed Indian waiters moving around behind us. The food was good and the wine passable, and the whole set-up was very, very pleasant. I was about the middle of the table talking to a good-looking woman about the lack of hotel accommodation for New Zealand tourists and the new Mormon church and the spread of Mormon faith through the South Seas, when towards the end of dinner I happened to look down the table to where the air hostess was sitting on the other side near the Governor. She was talking to the Director of the Public Works Department, laughing at something he had said. Something in her attitude rang a bell, and everything clicked into place. I knew now why she had reminded me of someone when I saw her first. She was like Brenda Marshall.
It was only just a momentary flash, a movement of the hand or of the head that put the idea into my mind, and then it was gone. She was nothing like Brenda Marshall, really. She was quite different, in hair, face, figure – everything. She was Peggy Dawson, senior hostess in my aircrew. It must have been the wine, and I was tired, too; worried about Buxton, possibly, and loneliness. Loneliness, and the wine; that added up to Brenda Marshall, and it always had done so, for twenty-seven years. I sat there in a morbid reverie, far away from Suva, and my charming companion rattled on about the tourists and the Mormons till the conversation flagged through my absent-minded answers, and she turned to her partner on the other side. I roused myself then to do my stuff again, and began to talk to the wife of the Colonial Secretary, newly out from England, about Fijian art, a subject that I knew less than nothing about.
From time to time, when my companion was going well and I had my next remark all ready to bring out as soon as she had finished speaking, I stole a glance at Peggy Dawson. I saw no resemblance again to Brenda Marshall. The hostess was what she was, a pleasant, competent Australian girl with quite a marked sense of duty and responsibility. She dressed tidily enough but she wasn’t particularly glamorous; even in these surroundings I felt that I could sense the nursing sister in an evening dress. She was different from the English wives of the colonial officials at the table; she was trying hard, but she had no common background with the other women, none of the social experience that was their stock-in-trade. She was from a different world, but Brenda Marshall could have held her place in this colonial society with no effort at all.
The dinner party came to an end at about ten-thirty, for we had started early and there had only been one short speech by Charlie Lemaitre and a shorter reply by the Governor. We got up from the table and strolled about in little groups upon the moonlit lawn until the Governor and Lady Norman said good-bye, and then we all started to go, too. The McEwens drove us back up to their house up on the high ridge above the town and we had a whisky as a nightcap looking out over their view, and then we went to bed. We were to go back to Nandi on the first plane of Fiji Airways in the morning, to take the Tuesday night machine to Honolulu as usual.
I stood at my bedroom window for a time before undressing, looking out over the mountains. I was still a little upset at the reminder of Brenda Marshall that this girl had given me, and that was unreasonable because they were so different. I was unduly sensitive, of course. Many women between the age of twenty-five and thirty must have similar mannerisms; with all the women in the world it would be queer if they had not. At certain ages they would move their hands or turn their heads a certain way; ten years later those attitudes would be forgotten and they would be doing something different, stemming perhaps from an older style in hair-do or in dress.
That was all right, but now that the resemblance was in my mind it would not be put aside. Tenuous and unsubstantial, there was a definite resemblance to Brenda Marshall. It was nothing physical, nothing to be photographed and set down as a specimen and studied. Since my marriage in the First World War I had led rather a solitary life till Brenda had burst on me for a brief year of glory. In that year for the first time I had known what it was to have somebody really care about me, really care whether I lived or died. After it was over I had lived a very withdrawn life, avoiding contact with women so far as is possible for a man in my position, something of a recluse. Now, the resemblance that had arisen was a resemblance of caring for my welfare, a resemblance of caring whether I lived or died. It was nothing really that I could put my finger on, but after twenty-seven years it came as a bit of a shock. Quite unsought, without any conscious effort on my part, it looked as though that fortune was being given to me again.
I stood looking out over Suva Bay in the moonlight. A Sunderland flying boat on night landing practice flew across almost at eye-level, and I hardly noticed it. It had begun on that first evening when she had put the clean pillow for me in the crew’s berth on the D.C.6b; it had gone on unobtrusively like that all the time. Someone must have influenced the cooks in the AusCan hostel to bring my breakfast egg and bacon to the table as I like it, fried on both sides. I had not told them; it could only have been one of the two hostesses. In the first week half my laundry was lost or went astray. I had given up the struggle to find the damn stuff and had bought more in Honolulu, but since then it had returned punctually the next day with nothing ever missing. Was that one of the hostesses? It’s not the sort of thing that happens on its own at Nandi Airport. For the first few days I had had one of the dumbest girls in Fiji to do my room, a very jungly type. The Head Girl had succeeded her, a very quick and intelligent part-European, and I had done nothing to arrange the switch. Who had done that for me? And then, on top of everything, had been that very penetrating remark about me being lonely when I went to Buxton. So penetrating, and so true.
The odd thing about it all was that I couldn’t feel that this girl, Peggy Dawson, was ‘setting her cap at me’, as my grandmother used to say. It didn’t seem to be like that, somehow. I have had that one before, of course, in twenty-seven years of airline flying, and I have seen it happen many, many times with other officers. They spend time on their hair and face and eyelashes before coming to the flight deck, and then they come with bright and tinkling vivacity until I slam them down. They dress, off duty, rather better than their pay would normally permit; frequently they start to use scent, and to drink a little more, and to stimulate gay parties. One cannot blame them if they do what every human being does at one time or another; one has to grin and bear it and see that their work is done correctly. I couldn’t feel, however
, that this was one of those. There were none of the usual symptoms, and it didn’t feel like that.
The truth of it was that she was just a very decent girl and a good senior hostess, who took it to be one of her duties to see that her captain was made comfortable as well as her passengers. I turned from the window, smiling a little; by God, I thought, she’d make a wife for somebody, some day! I hoped that didn’t happen before my time was up with AusCan. I didn’t want the jungly girl doing my room again, putting the wet soap in my handkerchief drawer and my clean shoes on the floor of the shower to get filled with water.
We went back to Nandi next morning, played a little tennis, and took the machine on to Honolulu that evening. Our lives slipped back into the normal groove for several weeks. I took my leave and went to Buxton to have a look round, and stayed at the hotel. That was the worst part of the set-up, because the hotel was horrible, dirty and uncouth. It wasn’t a bad little town, however, with good trout streams not much fished within thirty miles or so. I didn’t want to stay in the hotel, anyway, and there were several new houses going up, half built. The aerodrome was a grass field of about five hundred acres that had been laid out for training in the last war and not much used since; it was grazed by sheep and the farmer had the one small hangar full of haymaking machinery and stuff of that sort. A bit of money wanted spending on the roof before it could be used for aeroplanes, but the Shire Clerk told me they would do that if I took it on a five years’ lease. There seemed to be some charter and instruction work offering and several of the mountain graziers wanted superphosphate spread from the air because they couldn’t get it on their rough back country any other way. If I went there I should never make much more than a bare living but on the other hand I shouldn’t have to work very hard. I met most of the locals in the four days I was there and thought them a decent sort of a crowd. I told them who I was and just how I was fixed, and that I’d make my mind up within the next: three or four months whether I wanted to lease the hangar and come there. But when I left to fly to Melbourne I had practically made up my mind, and I spent a morning at Moorabbin airport before flying on to Sydney and Fiji talking to Arthur Schutt to find out how the prices and availability of little aeroplanes were running.
