The Breaking Wave

by Nevil Shute

  She went on tidying up her things, for the light was failing and her work was over for the evening. “It comes to all of us,” she said. “You think a thing’s going on for ever when you’re young, and then you wake up and you find it doesn’t, and you’ve got to find something fresh to do. New interests.”

  She finished putting her things away, gave me another sherry, stood for a minute looking at her painting, and then went through to another room to wash and get ready to come out to supper. I sat down off my feet and rested, pleasantly lulled by her sherry, studying her pictures. She had made a better job of adapting herself to Peace than I had.

  She came out presently, pulling on a raincoat over her blouse and skirt. “There’s a little restaurant just round the corner that I go to,” she said. “In the Earls Court Road. Will that be all right for you?”

  “Anywhere you say,” I replied.

  She turned to a cupboard, opened it, and stooped down on the floor rummaging among the contents. “There’s something here I’d like to show you,” she said. She pulled out a big, floppy sketch book, discarded it upon the floor beside her, pulled out another and another, and finally stood with one in her hand. “I think it’s in here.”

  She flipped the pages through and turned the book back, and laid it on the table before me. It was a vigorous drawing of a Wren firing an Oerlikon at an aeroplane flying very low towards her. The drawing was in sepia crayon. The Wren was a broad-shouldered, dark-haired girl, hatless, leaning back upon the strap that held her in the shoulder rings, tense, unsmiling, intent upon the sights. I had only met her once six years before but she was unmistakable to me.

  “Janet Prentice,” I said.

  She nodded. “I did that the same evening, in the Wrennery. I was in the boat alongside when the thing came over.” She paused. “I think that’s pretty well what it looked like.”

  “Cynthia told me she had shot a Junkers down,” I said. “I never heard the details. I think that must have been after I met her.”

  “Probably it was,” she said. “I think it was after your brother got killed—no—I’m not sure about that. I can tell you what happened, though.” She paused, and then closed the book. “Let’s go out now and have supper.”

  She took me to her restaurant and I ordered dinner. They had no very good wine because it was a cheap little place, but they produced a bottle of claret, very ordinaire and probably Algerian, the sort of wine we would pay seven and six a gallon for at home. The wine helped, no doubt, and I found Viola Dawson easy to talk to, so that when we were sitting smoking with a cup of coffee I had no difficulty in speaking to her frankly about Janet Prentice.

  “I want you to understand where I stand in this matter,” I told her. “I only met her once, that day when she took Bill and me to Keyhaven in the boat. I don’t think they were engaged, but they were pretty near it.”

  She nodded. “They were never engaged,” she said. “She wanted to be. They were waiting until after the balloon went up.”

  “I know,” I said. “Bill told me that. He was my only brother, you know. We were very close.”

  “He thought a lot of you,” she said. “Janet was afraid of meeting you that day because Bill had told her about you. Three rings, D.F.C. and bar, Fighter Command and all the rest of it. She wasn’t a bit happy when she went off with the boat that morning. She was afraid she wouldn’t make the grade with you.”

  I stared at her. “I’d never have thought that …” I paused, and then I said, “She made the grade all right. I told Bill afterwards. You see, my father and mother came into it. They’d have wanted to know about her if Bill had got married in England. I thought she was a fine girl, and she’d have made Bill a good wife. I told him that I’d write and tell them so at home.”

  “She was quite happy when she came back to the Wrennery that night,” Viola said. “She wasn’t worried after that. The only thing is, I think she was a bit puzzled.”

  “What about?”

  She smiled. “About what she was marrying into, if she married Bill. She thought he was a sheep farmer’s son. She’d got herself accustomed to the idea that she might be marrying—well, a little bit beneath the way she’d been brought up. She didn’t worry about that because she was in love with your brother, but she knew she’d have to make adjustments, that she might find her new relations a bit raw.” She paused. “Your brother was a sergeant, of course. Then you came along and it turned out you were a Rhodes scholar, which rocked her a bit, and then it seems you told her that both you and Bill had been at some school in Australia—I forget the name. She found out afterwards that it was a sort of Eton in Australia, and rather expensive. Then she didn’t know what to think.”

  “Bill was telling her the truth,” I said. “We are sheep farmers. But there are little ones and big ones in Australia.”

  “You’re one of the big ones?”

  “Yes.” I paused for a minute to collect my thoughts. “She was very good for Bill,” I said. “I thought that day that he was feeling the strain a bit—the work he had to do.” She nodded. “She was just the right person for him, as I saw it. I was grateful to her then,” I said. “I’m grateful to her now.”

  “They should have given him a rest,” she remarked. “The trouble was, of course, there were so few of them that had the skill to do the job, and so much to be done before ‘Overlord.’”

  “I know,” I said. “They were expendable. The thing that matters now is this. She made Bill very happy in his last weeks. I should have kept in touch with her, and I didn’t. She should have been a friend of the family for the remainder of her life, but it’s not worked out that way. I tried to get in touch with her three years ago and I’ve been trying ever since. All I’ve succeeded in discovering has been bad news. Things haven’t been too good for her. That’s what’s worrying me now.”

  I went on to tell her why I hadn’t kept in touch with Janet Prentice, about the show at Evère aerodrome, about my time in hospital, about my self-centred preoccupation with my own affairs before I went back to Australia. “Not so good,” I said quietly at the end. “But that’s what happened.”

  “I lost touch with her, too,” said Viola. “I’m just as bad, I suppose, because she needed her friends after the war. But—one can’t keep up with everyone.” She glanced at me. “You know that she was trying to get back into the Wrens?”

  “No,” I said. “I never heard that about her.”

  She thought for a minute. “I went and saw her just after the invasion, at Oxford,” she said. “I was on leave. She wasn’t up to much then—sort of weepy and very, very nervous. It was just before she got her discharge from the Wrens and she knew that it was coming. She took it as if it was a sort of disgrace, I think. The Junkers she’d shot down was worrying her, too.”

  “I don’t know anything about that Junkers,” I said. “What was it that she did?”

  She told me as much as she knew. I called the waiter and ordered a fresh pot of coffee, and lit another cigarette for her. At last I was learning something real about Janet Prentice.

  “It was all a bit depressing,” Viola said at last. “She’d been such a fine person a few months before, and now she was all to pieces.”

  I said nothing.

  “I saw her again in the summer or autumn of 1946,” Viola said. “I can’t remember what month. I saw her mother’s death in the Telegraph, and I was driving to Wales or somewhere so I wrote to her and fixed up to have lunch with her in Oxford on my way through.” She paused. “It was just after the funeral and she was packing up the house and selling everything. Her one idea was to get back into the Wrens.”

  “Why was she so keen on that?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Why do any of us look back on our war service with such pleasure, in spite of everything?” she demanded. “Answer me that. You’d be glad to be back in the R.A.F. in another war, and you know it. If it happened again, I’d be back in the Wrens like a shot.”

  “Did
she get back into the Wrens?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “They wouldn’t have her.”

  “Why not? She must have had a very good war record.”

  “I know.” There was a pause, and then she said, “They’re very, very careful who they take in. Even in peace time there are many more girls trying to get into the Wrens than they want. They can afford to be choosey.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I know a girl who stayed on in the Wrens,” she told me. “She’s a Second Officer, in the Admiralty. She tells me that they won’t have anyone back, however good, if there’s the slightest hint of any nervous trouble on the record. She says they get a lot of cases like that, and they turn them all down, just on principle. They want girls with untroubled minds, who sleep soundly at night.”

  We sat in silence for a minute. “When you saw her in 1946,” I asked presently, “was she really bad? I mean, I’d like to know.”

  “She wasn’t raving, if that’s what you mean,” Viola said, a little sharply.

  “I want to try and understand,” I told her.

  “I know,” she replied, more gently. “She was very lonely, for one thing, I think. She was missing her mother, of course, and she didn’t seem to have any relations left in England to speak of. She didn’t seem to have made many friends, either.”

  “She didn’t make friends easily?”

  Viola shook her head. “She did in the Service, but that’s different. When you’re sleeping thirty in a hut you just can’t help making friends. But in civil life, living at home and looking after her mother—I don’t think she would have done. She was rather shy, you know.”

  “I’d never have thought that of her,” I remarked.

  “You only saw her in the Navy,” Viola said. “It’s so totally different, living with men and working alongside them. You can’t do a job in the Navy and be shy. But it can come back afterwards.”

  “Was she still nervous?”

  She shook her head. “Not in the way she was when I saw her before, the time I saw her just after the invasion. She’d got herself under control. I don’t think anything was very real to her that had happened since she left the Wrens, though.”

  “Was she still worrying about the Junkers?”

  Viola nodded. “It was still very much upon her mind—that, and your brother’s death. But what really did worry me was the way she talked about the dog.”

  “What dog was that?” I asked.

  “Your brother’s dog,” she said. “He had a dog that he called Dev. I thought you’d have known.”

  “I know he had a dog,” I said. “A sort of Irish terrier. They had him with them in the boat that day. What about him?”

  “Bert Finch brought him over to her after your brother’s death,” she said. I sat in silence while she told me about Dev.

  Ten minutes later I said, “It was that that really finished her? When the dog got killed?”

  She nodded. “You see, it wasn’t just a dog that she’d got fond of. It was your brother’s dog. She told me in the Wrennery that evening that she’d let your brother down by not taking more care of his dog. Of course, I didn’t pay much attention to that at the time, because she was in a sort of a breakdown and going off on leave next day. But after her mother’s death, more than two years later, she told me the same thing. I tried to tell her it was my fault as much as hers, that I shouldn’t have let him out of the boat on to the hard. But it didn’t register with her. She seemed to have got a sort of horror and disgust with herself that she hadn’t looked after Bill’s dog better.”

  “She never had another dog, after the war?”

  Viola shook her head. “Oh no—I shouldn’t think so.” There was a pause, and then she said, “Something broke in her when that dog got killed that took a lot of breaking, and would have taken a lot of building up. And it never got built up …”

  She looked at her watch presently, and it was half-past ten. “I must go,” she said. “I’ve got to work tomorrow.”

  I paid the bill and we left the restaurant. We walked slowly together the short distance to her flat, and paused for a minute on the pavement outside before I left her. “There are one or two other people who might possibly know where she is,” she said. “There’s a girl called May Spikins, the other O.A. Wren who worked with her. I think I might be able to get you her address. You ought to see Bert Finch, too.”

  “I’ve been in touch with him,” I said. “He’s in China, or on his way home now. I’ll be seeing him before Christmas—about Bill.”

  She nodded. “Of course. I think you might find he knows something about Janet Prentice. Anyway, I’ll find out about May Spikins for you.”

  I saw a good deal of Viola Dawson after that. She rang me up a few days later to give me information about May Spikins, who was May Cunningham by that time, and when I suggested that we might have lunch together she seemed pleased. She was almost as anxious as I was to find Janet Prentice, for having been close friends in the war Viola was genuinely worried to find that they had drifted so far apart that she had lost all touch with her. On my part, I soon found that Viola knew a great deal about Janet Prentice that had not come out at our first meeting—not important things, for she had told me all of those, but little touches, little incidents that happened in their Service life together that helped me to build up a picture of the Leading Wren that Bill had loved.

  I went to see May Spikins in her new house in the new town at Harlow, and she put me on to Petty Officer Waters in his tobacconist’s shop in the Fratton Road at Portsmouth. Then, about Christmas time, Warrant Officer Finch came home and I went down in January after he came back from leave and saw him in his mess in Eastney Barracks. From him I got the account of Bill’s death, and in the Long Vacation of 1951 I went to France and spent some time endeavouring to find out where Bill had been buried. As I have said, I failed, but it wasn’t very important to know that in any case.

  At each step in this matter Viola and I used to meet to talk things over, often at a restaurant in Jermyn Street. Presently she began coming with me to motor race meetings, and twice I visited her film studio and spent an afternoon upon the set with her, and had lunch with her in the commissary. She was a very easy person for a man like me to go about with, for we had the Service background as a link. I found presently that I was telling her about my life in the R.A.F., almost unconsciously, a thing that I had never been able to talk about to anybody, and I woke up one day to realise uneasily that we were getting very close, that she knew more about me, probably, than anybody else in the world. It was a year after we had met for the first time that I woke up to that, and the realisation troubled me. I liked Viola, and I didn’t want to hurt her.

  It all came to a head next winter, either just before or just after Christmas. She had been to Switzerland ski-ing for a fortnight and had come back with a lot of action photographs, and from these she had been working up a painting of a chap on a snow slope doing a fast turn. It was part of her artistic development that she was getting away from naval subjects now; at long last, perhaps, the preoccupation with her Service life was beginning to fade. She had asked me to come round to her flat to have a look at this picture, and I went with slight reluctance. At some stage I would have to hurt her, and I didn’t want to do it.

  I went one afternoon at a week-end, intending to take her out to a movie and dinner. The painting she was working on was a good, vigorous action picture; if anything, I think she was a better draughtsman than painter and her action drawings were unusually good for a woman. We talked about the picture for a few minutes, and then she went through to her kitchenette to make tea, and I dropped down upon the sofa.

  She had been rummaging in the cupboard where she kept her old sketch books, and the big, floppy things were all out upon the floor. I turned them over till I found the one that I thought contained the sketch of Janet Prentice firing the Oerlikon, and turned the pages. It was full of pencil sketches of naval craft and naval scene
s, with a number of rough portrait sketches, a sort of commonplace book that she had kept with her throughout her service in the Wrens. Presently, turning the pages, I came upon a pencil sketch of Janet Prentice.

  It was a head and shoulders portrait, exactly as I had seen her in the boat at Lymington, as I remembered her. She wore a round Wren cap and a duffle coat, the hood thrown back upon her shoulders. I sat there looking at the square, homely face that I remembered so very well, thinking of that day. Viola came in as I sat motionless with the book upon my knee. She asked, “What have you got there?” and looked over my shoulder.

  “Portrait of Janet Prentice,” I said. “Can I have it?”

  “What do you want it for?” she asked. There was a sharpness in her tone, so that I knew there was trouble coming. It had to come some time, of course.

  “It’s very like her,” I said quietly. I wanted a picture of her very badly. “I’d like to have it, if you can spare it.”

  She did not answer that at once. She crossed to the table and put down the teapot and the plate of cakes that she was carrying, and stood silent for a minute, looking into the far corner of the room. Then she said, “You think you’re in love with her, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think anything of the sort,” I replied. “She was Bill’s girl. If he’d come through she’d have been my sister-in-law. We ought to have a picture of her.”

  “It’s absolutely crazy,” she said dully. “You only met her once for a few hours nearly eight years ago.”

  “It would be absolutely crazy if I was,” I retorted. “You’re imagining things.” I paused, and then I added weakly, “I’m just trying to find her.”

  She turned to me, suddenly furious. “And when you’ve found her, what then? Do you think she’ll still be the same person as she was eight years ago? Are you the same person as you were in 1944? For God’s sake be your age, Alan, and stop behaving like a teen-ager.”

  She was quite right, of course, but I wasn’t going to stay and have her talk to me like that. I got to my feet. “About time I beat it, after that,” I said. I put on my raincoat and picked up my sticks. “I’m sorry, Viola, if I’ve done anything to hurt you. I didn’t mean to.” And I made for the door.