by Nevil Shute
‘We’ll go there one day, dear. Perhaps next summer.’ Then they went in to tea.
After tea Keith unpacked his suitcase and got out the little presents he had bought for them in Honolulu and in Papeete, and gave them to Janice and to Katie. There was so much to tell them that Katie allowed Janice to stay up for half an hour longer, but it was a school day next day, and Katie took her off to see she washed her ears and neck properly in the bath after playing hockey and to see that she brushed her teeth and said her prayers and went to bed without reading.
Keith washed the dishes while all that was going on, and when Katie came up from the basement room where Janice slept they were free to talk. ‘First thing,’ she said practically, ‘have you got any money, Keith?’
He nodded. ‘I was trying to sort it out on the plane,’ he said, ‘but it’s all foreign, so it wasn’t too easy. I didn’t have to spend very much.’ He pulled a muddled sheaf of notes from his breast pocket, with a black wallet of traveller’s cheques. He shuffled the pack. ‘There’s a pound note,’ he said, pulling it from the mess. ‘And there’s another. These things must be francs. You see what you can make of it.’ He passed the lot to her.
She opened the little wallet. ‘There’s forty pounds here that you haven’t used!’ she exclaimed.
‘Is there? I knew there was a good bit left.’
‘Well, thank the Lord for that,’ she remarked.
‘Are things tight?’
‘Not worse than they’ve been before. We don’t owe anything. I’ve got a little over three pounds in my purse. But there’s ten guineas to pay next month for the school. Still, this will put us right. I think we’ve got about eight pounds in the bank.’
‘We’ve got more than that,’ he said comfortably. ‘I paid in a bit over six thousand pounds this afternoon.’
‘That’s Janice’s money,’ she replied. ‘We can use that for her school fees, but we can’t use it for living on ourselves. We’d better open another account for her money.’
‘It’s not her money,’ he retorted. ‘That’s coming along later. This is ours.’
It was midnight before they went to bed.
Next morning he wrote a letter of thanks to Mr Hirzhorn and packed it up with the coil winder in a little box to go to him by airmail. He spent most of the rest of the day in sorting out his vast pile of letters and answering the most urgent ones, thinking regretfully of Julie in her office in the house at Wauna and how she would have made a meal for them. Perhaps, he thought idly, one day Janice would become a secretary and would be able to help him. He gave up the correspondence early in the afternoon, and turned for relaxation to the design of the hydraulic models.
Next day, rested and refreshed, he took his hydraulic sketches up to Mr McNeil in the office of the Miniature Mechanic, and told him most of what had happened on his journey, and about Sol Hirzhorn and his Congreve clock. They lunched together at a nearby Lyons, and talked about the serial that Keith proposed for the hydraulic mechanisms. ‘We’ve got quite a few subscribers in the Seattle and Tacoma district,’ he told his editor. ‘They told me that there are six or seven in Boeing alone.’
‘I’ll get hold of the subscription figures,’ said Mr McNeil thoughtfully. ‘I think a serial on model lumber mechanism is a good idea - especially if you incorporate the bandsaw. After all, that’s useful in the workshop, too. Besides being something really up to date for the Canadians and the Americans …’
Keith stayed quietly at home for the next six weeks, catching up with his work, developing the hydraulic models, and writing the serial. Then the Clan McAlister docked, and he was called down to the docks to see his packing case through Customs. Presently it was delivered to the house in Somerset Road upon a truck. He got the truck driver to help him roll the case on short lengths of steel bar from the workshop through the front gate and the front garden, and down beside the house to the back garden, where they left it in the middle of the garden path. Keith gave the driver five shillings for his help.
Next morning, after Katie had gone to the shop and Janice had gone to school, he unscrewed the sides of the packing case. The engine seemed in fair condition, though a good deal of external corrosion was evident all over it. He got an enamel basin from the kitchen and drained the oil from the crankcase, spilling a good deal on the garden path to Katie’s subsequent annoyance. She wasn’t too pleased about the condition of the basin either, which she used for washing vegetables.
He had no chain blocks to lift the engine with, nor any ropes or tackle. He undid the main holding-down bolts from the wooden bearers, put a couple of coal sacks where the head would hit the ground, and turned it rather roughly on its side, using a length of one-inch round steel bar as a crowbar. In that position he could undo the bolts holding the sump in place.
That afternoon he rang up Mr Carpenter, the solicitor, at his office in Bedford Square. ‘This is Keith Stewart speaking,’ he said. ‘You remember? Commander Dermott’s brother-in-law.’
‘Of course I remember, Mr Stewart. You’ve been away, haven’t you?’
‘Just a short holiday,’ Keith said. ‘You know those diamonds that we were looking for?’
‘I do.’
‘Well,’ said Keith. ‘I believe they’ve turned up. My wife Katie — she was turning out the boxroom yesterday and she found a suitcase that she didn’t think belonged to us, full of clothes. She showed it me when I got home and they were uniforms and things like that, and books and things. It must have been one that John left behind he hadn’t told us about, or we’d forgotten. Anyway, there was a little box in it full of white stones, cut like jewels, if you understand me. Do you think they’d be the diamonds?’
‘Did you count them?’ asked the solicitor. ‘How many of them are there?’
‘Half a minute, and I’ll count them now,’ said Keith. There was a pause. ‘Forty-seven,’ he said.
‘That is the number of the stones that Mr Franck sold to John Dermott,’ the solicitor replied. ‘I should think you probably have found them, Mr Stewart. That’s very fortunate, very fortunate indeed.’
‘What had I better do with them?’
Mr Carpenter thought for a moment. ‘They’ll have to go back to Mr Franck as soon as possible,’ he said, ‘to be sold for the benefit of the estate. We shall have to re-open the matter with the Estate Duty Office - but that comes later. I’ll ring Mr Franck at once. Could you bring them up to my office tomorrow morning, if I ask him to come round? Say about ten-thirty?’
‘That’s all right for me,’ said Keith.
‘You’ll have to be careful of them tonight,’ said the solicitor. ‘If they’re the diamonds, they’re worth twenty-seven thousand pounds. It’s just like having so much cash in the house with you. Does anybody else know about them?’
‘Not a soul,’ said Keith. ‘I haven’t even told Katie. And there’s no one in the house now, to hear us talking.’
‘Well, be careful of them, and don’t tell your wife or anyone. You’d better take a taxi in the morning, straight from your house right up to this office. I’ll expect you at ten-thirty.’
Keith walked into the solicitor’s office next morning, dressed in his soiled old raincoat and holding his dirty old felt hat in his hand. There was a florid man with Mr Carpenter, with curly black hair, middle-aged. They both got up when Keith came in. The solicitor said, ‘Good morning, Mr Stewart. Mr Stewart, this is Mr Franck, of Rosenblaum and Franck, the diamond merchants.’
Keith said, ‘Good morning,’ and shook hands.
Mr Carpenter asked, ‘Did you bring those stones up with you, Mr Stewart?’
‘I’ve got them here,’ said Keith. He pulled a little cardboard box out of his jacket pocket and gave it to the solicitor. Mr Carpenter opened it, glanced inside, and handed it to Mr Franck.
The diamond merchant took it, glanced at the contents, and frowned. He took a monocle magnifying-glass from his waistcoat pocket and fitted it in his right eye. Then he selected one of the larg
est stones and carried it to the window for a better light. He stood in silence for a minute scrutinising it. Then he scratched it with his thumbnail and examined it again.
‘What’s this yellow stuff all over them?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Keith. ‘That’s how I found them. Is there something wrong?’
‘There’s this yellow, gummy deposit on them,’ said the diamond merchant. ‘Have they been stored in oil?’
‘Not since yesterday,’ said Keith truthfully. ‘That’s all I know.’ He paused, and asked a little anxiously, ‘Would it matter if they had?’
Mr Franck shook his head. ‘It’ll polish off. I can scratch it off with my nail. They’re diamonds all right,’ he said. ‘At least, this one is.’
He came back to the desk and put the stone in the box with the others. From his attaché case he took a little black leather case, opened it on the desk, and erected a tiny set of scales with minute weights handled by a pair of forceps. He weighed them all together, very carefully. Then he pulled a typed list from his pocket and consulted it. ‘Ninety-seven carats,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The diamonds that I sold Commander Dermott totalled ninety-two carats. But then, they’ve got this deposit on them now …’ He took the two largest stones and weighed them carefully, and the two smallest stones, again consulting his list. He counted them for number.
Finally he put the lid on to the cardboard box and put away the scales. ‘I think there can be very little doubt that these stones are the stones I sold Commander Dermott,’ he said. ‘I can’t be absolutely sure until we have them polished and examine each stone individually. I should like to take them and have that done, giving you a receipt for them, of course. Then I suppose that you would want them to be sold?’
A few minutes later he left the office, taking the diamonds with him, asking the office girl to call a taxi to the door. Keith said, ‘Well, I’ll be getting along. You’ll let me know what happens?’ He got up and reached for his old, shabby hat.
The solicitor got up with him. ‘You’re looking very well,’ he remarked. ‘Much better than when I saw you last. You must have been out in the sun.’
‘I had a bit of a holiday,’ said Keith defensively.
‘A very good thing to do,’ said Mr Carpenter. They moved towards the door. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did you ever do anything about the engine that was salvaged from your brother-in-law’s yacht?’
‘I had it shipped home,’ said Keith. ‘I’ve got it in the garden. But it’s not much good, not really.’
The shadow of a smile appeared on Mr Carpenter’s face. ‘I don’t suppose it is, not now,’ he said. He moved to the door with Keith. ‘I wish some of my other clients took their trusts as seriously as you have done,’ he said. ‘I think Commander Dermott made a very wise choice of a trustee.’
Janice still goes to Miss Pearson’s school in West Ealing, but she is entered for the Royal Naval School for Officers’ Daughters at Haslemere and she will go there next year. After that, Katie would like her to go to Oxford or to Cambridge if she can get in, and Miss Pearson thinks she probably will. Katie says that that’s what Jo would have wanted for her, and she may be right.
Jack and Dawn Donelly are married in a kind of way, though there is still a little doubt about Jack’s marital status. They live on Raiatea Island in the Iles sous le Vent, at the south-east corner, on Baie Hotopuu. They lived first on the Mary Belle at anchor in the bay, mostly on fish and cornmeal fritters, but presently Chuck Ferris sent the Flying Cloud to Raiatea with a prefabricated house for them broken down into small sections for deck cargo, and Captain Petersen helped them to put up the main structure before sailing for home. The completion of this house has kept Jack busy woodworking, which he does very well, and he in turn has kept Dawn busy for she had three children in one calendar year, twin girls in January and a boy in December; I believe there is another one on the way. Of course, she lives some distance from a pharmacy. Chuck Ferris is sending out another house to them, to make a bit more room.
Sol Hirzhorn has just finished the Congreve clock and is thinking about starting off on the hydraulic models in Keith’s serial. Julie still works for him and looks after him in the winters when Mrs Hirzhorn is in Florida. He would like Keith to come out to the West again and bring Katie and Janice with him for a few weeks’ holiday. Keith has deferred this until Janice is a little older, but Julie writes privately that Sol really means it and that Joe says that in view of Keith’s professional services the fares would certainly be chargeable to Hirzhorn Enterprises Inc., so Keith will probably accept the invitation in a year or two.
Keith finally sold the engine salvaged from Shearwater for sixty pounds, but it took him six months to do so. It cost him fifty-nine pounds eight shillings and tenpence in shipping charges from Seattle, so that he made a profit on the transaction.
Katie no longer works in Buckley’s drapery shop in Ealing Broadway. They discovered that the interest on the sterling equivalent of seventeen thousand dollars just about equalled her wages at the shop, and that all Janice’s expenses were amply covered by the interest on her own money, relieving them of the burden they had willingly assumed. At the same time Keith’s correspondence throughout the world was growing to such an extent that some days he did nothing but write letters. So Katie gave up her job and bought a typewriter and a tape dictating machine, and took charge of the letters. She is not a Julie Perlberg and she never will be, but Keith by sitting in his chair and talking into the microphone can clear the heaviest mail in an hour or so, and the letters get done somehow.
If you happen to be in the trolley bus from Southall or from Hanwell at about nine o’clock on a Friday morning, you may see a little man get in at West Ealing, dressed in a shabby raincoat over a blue suit. He is one of hundreds of thousands like him in industrial England, pale-faced, running to fat a little, rather hard up. His hands show evidence of manual work, his eyes and forehead evidence of intellect. A fitter or a machinist, you think, perhaps out of the toolroom. If you follow him, you will find that he gets out at Ealing Broadway and takes the Underground to Victoria Station. He comes up to the surface and walks along Victoria Street a little way to an office block, where he climbs four flights of stone stairs to the dingy, old-fashioned office of the Miniature Mechanic to deliver his ‘copy’.
He will come out presently and take a bus to Chancery Lane, to spend the remainder of the day in the Library of the Patent Office. He will be home at Somerset Road, Ealing, in time for tea. He will spend the evening in the workshop, working on the current model.
He has achieved the type of life that he desires; he wants no other. He is perfectly, supremely happy.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2010
Copyright © The Trustees of the Estate of Nevil Shute Norway
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by William Heinemann in 1960 and subsequently published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House Group Limited in London in 2009.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-47422-3
www.vintagebooks.com
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