As the Crow Flies

by Jeffrey Archer

  I stared up at the picture of a young officer in captain’s uniform and knew I would have to make a journey to Australia.

  CHAPTER

  30

  “When were you thinking of going?”

  “During the long vacation.”

  “Have you enough money to cover such a journey?”

  “I’ve still got most of that five hundred pounds you gave me when I graduated—in fact the only real outlay from that was on the MG; a hundred and eighty pounds, if I remember correctly. In any case, a bachelor with his own rooms in college is hardly in need of a vast private income.” Daniel looked up as his mother entered the drawing room.

  “Daniel’s thinking of going to America this summer.”

  “How exciting,” said Becky, placing some flowers on a side table next to the Remington. “Then you must try and see the Fields in Chicago and the Bloomingdales in New York, and if you have enough time you could also—”

  “Actually,” said Daniel, leaning against the mantelpiece, “I think I’ll be trying to see Waterstone in Princeton and Stinstead at Berkeley.”

  “Do I know them?” Becky frowned as she looked up from her flower arranging.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so, Mother. They’re both college professors who teach maths, or math, as they call it.”

  Charlie laughed.

  “Well, be sure you write to us regularly,” said his mother. “I always like to know where you are and what you’re up to.”

  “Of course I will, Mother,” said Daniel, trying not to sound exasperated. “If you promise to remember that I’m now twenty-six years old.”

  Becky looked across at him with a smile. “Are you really, my dear?”

  Daniel returned to Cambridge that night trying to work out how he could possibly keep in touch from America while he was in fact traveling to Australia. He disliked the thought of deceiving his mother, but knew it would have pained her even more to tell him the truth about Captain Trentham.

  Matters weren’t helped when Charlie sent him a first-class ticket for New York on the Queen Mary for the exact date he had mentioned. It cost one hundred and three pounds and included an open-ended return.

  Daniel eventually came up with a solution. He worked out that if he took the Queen Mary bound for New York the week after term had ended, then continued his journey on the Twentieth Century Limited and the Super Chief across the States to San Francisco, he could pick up the SS Aorangi to Sydney with a day to spare. That would still give him four weeks in Australia before he would have to repeat the journey south to north, allowing him just enough time to arrive back in Southampton a few days before the Michaelmas term began.

  As with everything on which Daniel embarked, he spent hours of research and preparation long before he even set off for Southampton. He allocated three days to the Australian High Commission Information Department in the Strand, and made sure he regularly sat next to a certain Dr. Marcus Winters, a visiting professor from Adelaide, whenever he came to dine at Trinity High Table. Although the first secretary and deputy librarian at Australia House remained puzzled by some of Daniel’s questions and Dr. Winters curious as to the motives of the young mathematician, by the end of the Trinity term Daniel felt confident that he had learned enough to ensure that his time wouldn’t be wasted once he had set foot on the subcontinent. However, he realized the whole enterprise was still a huge gamble: if the first question he needed to be answered yielded the reply, “There’s no way of finding that out.”

  Four days after the students had gone down and he had completed his supervision reports, Daniel was packed and ready. The following morning his mother arrived at the college to drive him to Southampton. On the journey down to the south coast he learned that Charlie had recently applied to the London County Council for outline planning permission to develop Chelsea Terrace as one gigantic department store.

  “But what about those bombed-out flats?”

  “The council has given the owners three months to proceed with an application to rebuild or they have threatened to issue a compulsory purchase order and put the site up for sale.”

  “Pity we just can’t buy the flats ourselves,” said Daniel, trying out one of his non-questions in the hope that it might elicit some response from his mother, but she just continued to drive on down the A30 without offering an opinion.

  It was ironic, Daniel reflected, that if only his mother had felt able to confide in him the reason Mrs. Trentham wouldn’t cooperate with his father she could have turned the car around and taken him back to Cambridge.

  He returned to safer territory. “So how’s Dad hoping to raise the cash for such a massive enterprise?”

  “He can’t make up his mind between a bank loan and going public.”

  “What sort of sum are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Merrick estimates around a hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”

  Daniel gave a low whistle.

  “The bank is happy enough to loan us the full amount now that property prices have shot up,” Becky continued, “but they’re demanding everything we own as collateral including the property in Chelsea Terrace, the house, our art collection, and on top of that they want us to sign a personal guarantee and charge the company four percent on the overdraft.”

  “Then perhaps the answer is to go public.”

  “It’s not quite that easy. If we were to take that route the family might end up with only fifty-one percent of the shares.”

  “Fifty-one percent means you still control the company.”

  “Agreed,” said Becky, “but should we ever need to raise some more capital at a future date, then further dilution would only mean we could well lose our majority shareholding. In any case, you know only too well how your father feels about outsiders being given too much of a say, let alone too large a stake. And his having to report regularly to even more non-executive directors, not to mention shareholders, could be a recipe for disaster. He’s always run the business on instinct, while the Bank of England may well prefer a more orthodox approach.”

  “How quickly does the decision have to be made?”

  “It should have been settled one way or the other by the time you get back from America.”

  “What about the future of Number 1?”

  “There’s a good chance I can knock it into shape. I’ve the right staff and enough contacts, so if we’re granted the full planning permission we have applied for I believe we could, in time, give Sotheby’s and Christie’s a run for their money.”

  “Not if Dad keeps on stealing the best pictures—”

  “True.” Becky smiled. “But if he goes on the way he is now, our private collection will be worth more than the business as selling my van Gogh back to the Lefevre Gallery proved only too cruelly. He has the best amateur’s eye I’ve ever come across—but don’t ever tell him I said so.”

  Becky began to concentrate on the signs directing her to the docks and finally brought the car to a halt alongside the liner, but not quite so close as Daphne had once managed, if she remembered correctly.

  Daniel sailed out of Southampton on the Queen Mary that evening, with his mother waving from the dockside.

  While on board the great liner he wrote a long letter to his parents, which he posted five days later from Fifth Avenue. He then purchased a ticket on the Twentieth Century Limited for a Pullman to Chicago. The train pulled out of Penn Station at eight the same night, Daniel having spent a total of six hours in Manhattan, where his only other purchase was a guidebook of America.

  Once they had reached Chicago, the Pullman carriage was attached to the Super Chief which took him all the way to San Francisco.

  During the four-day journey across America he began to regret he was going to Australia at all. As he passed through Kansas City, Newton City, La Junta, Albuquerque and Barstow, each city appeared more interesting than the last. Whenever the train pulled into a new station Daniel would leap off, buy a colorful postcard that indicated exactly
where he was, fill in the white space with yet more information gained from the guidebook before the train reached the next station. He would then post the filled-in card at the following stop and repeat the process. By the time the express had arrived at Oakland Station, San Francisco, he had posted twenty-seven different cards back to his parents in the Little Boltons.

  Once the bus had dropped him off in St. Francis Square, Daniel booked himself into a small hotel near the harbor after checking the tariff was well within his budget. As he still had a thirty-six-hour wait before the SS Aorangi was due to depart, he traveled out to Berkeley and spent the whole of the second day with Professor Stinstead. Daniel became so engrossed with Stinstead’s research on tertiary calculus that he began to regret once again that he would not be staying longer, as he suspected he might learn far more by remaining at Berkeley than he would ever discover in Australia.

  On the evening before he was due to sail, Daniel bought twenty more postcards and sat up until one in the morning filling them in. By the twentieth his imagination had been stretched to its limit. The following morning, after he had settled his bill, he asked the head porter to mail one of the postcards every three days until he returned. He handed over ten dollars and promised the porter that there would be a further ten when he came back to San Francisco, but only if the correct number of cards remained, as precisely when he would be back remained uncertain.

  The senior porter was puzzled but pocketed the ten dollars, commenting in an aside to his young colleague on the desk that he had been asked to do far stranger things in the past, for far less.

  By the time Daniel boarded the SS Aorangi his beard was no longer a rough stubble and his plan was as well prepared as it could be, given that his information had been gathered from the wrong side of the globe. During the voyage Daniel found himself seated at a large circular table with an Australian family who were on their way home from a holiday in the States. Over the next three weeks they added greatly to his store of knowledge, unaware that he was listening to every word they had to say with uncommon interest.

  Daniel sailed into Sydney on the first Monday of August 1947. He stood out on the deck and watched the sun set behind Sydney Harbour Bridge as a pilot boat guided the liner slowly into the harbor. He suddenly felt very homesick and, not for the first time, wished he had never embarked on the trip. An hour later he had left the ship and booked himself into a guest house which had been recommended to him by his traveling companions.

  The owner of the guest house, who introduced herself as Mrs. Snell, turned out to be a big woman, with a big smile and a big laugh, who installed him into what she described as her deluxe room. Daniel was somewhat relieved that he hadn’t ended up in one of her ordinary rooms, because when he lay down the double bed sagged in the center, and when he turned over the springs followed him, clinging to the small of his back. Both taps in the washbasin produced cold water in different shades of brown, and the one naked light that hung from the middle of the room was impossible to read by, unless he stood on a chair directly beneath it. Mrs. Snell hadn’t supplied a chair.

  When Daniel was asked the next morning, after a breakfast of eggs, bacon, potatoes and fried bread, whether he would be eating in or out, he said firmly, “Out,” to the landlady’s evident disappointment.

  The first—and critical—call was to be made at the Immigration Office. If they had no information to assist him, he knew he might as well climb back on board the SS Aorangi that same evening. Daniel was beginning to feel that if that happened he wouldn’t be too disappointed.

  The massive brown building on Market Street, which housed the official records of every person who had arrived in the colony since 1823, opened at ten o’clock. Although he arrived half an hour early Daniel still had to join one of the eight queues of people attempting to establish some fact about registered immigrants, which ensured that he didn’t reach the counter for a further forty minutes.

  When he eventually did get to the front of the queue he found himself looking at a ruddy-faced man in an open-necked blue shirt who was slumped behind the counter.

  “I’m trying to trace an Englishman who came to Australia at some time between 1922 and 1925.”

  “Can’t we do better than that, mate?”

  “I fear not,” said Daniel.

  “You fear not, do you?” said the assistant. “Got a name, have you?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Daniel. “Guy Trentham.”

  “Trentham. How do you spell that?”

  Daniel spelled the name out slowly for him.

  “Right, mate. That’ll be two pounds.” Daniel extracted his wallet from inside his sports jacket and handed over the cash. “Sign here,” the assistant said, swiveling a form round and placing his forefinger on the bottom line. “And come back Thursday.”

  “Thursday? But that’s not for another three days.”

  “Glad they still teach you to count in England,” said the assistant. “Next.”

  Daniel left the building with no information, merely a receipt for his two pounds. Once back out on the pavement, he picked up a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald and began to look for a cafe near the harbor at which to have lunch. He selected a small restaurant that was packed with young people. A waiter led him across a noisy, crowded room and seated him at a little table in the corner. He had nearly finished reading the paper by the time a waitress arrived with the salad he had ordered. He pushed the paper on one side, surprised that there hadn’t been one piece of news about what was taking place back in England.

  As he munched away at a lettuce leaf and wondered how he could best use the unscheduled holdup constructively, a girl at the next table leaned across and asked if she could borrow the sugar.

  “Of course, allow me,” said Daniel, handing over the shaker. He wouldn’t have given the girl a second glance had he not noticed that she was reading Principia Mathematica, by A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

  “Are you a mathematics student, by any chance?” he asked once he had passed the sugar across.

  “Yes,” she said, not looking back in his direction.

  “I only asked,” said Daniel, feeling the question might have been construed as impolite, “because I teach the subject.”

  “Of course you do,” she said, not bothering to turn round. “Oxford, I’m sure.”

  “Cambridge, actually.”

  This piece of information did make the girl glance across and study Daniel more carefully. “Then can you explain Simpson’s Rule to me?” she asked abruptly.

  Daniel unfolded his paper napkin, took out a fountain pen and drew some diagrams to illustrate the rule, stage by stage, something he hadn’t done since he’d left St. Paul’s.

  She checked what he had produced against the diagram in her book, smiled and said, “Fair dinkum, you really do teach maths,” which took Daniel a little by surprise as he wasn’t sure what “fair dinkum” meant, but as it was accompanied by a smile he assumed it was some form of approval. He was taken even more by surprise when the girl picked up her plate of egg and beans, moved across and sat down next to him.

  “I’m Jackie,” she said. “A bushwhacker from Perth.”

  “I’m Daniel,” he replied. “And I’m…”

  “A pom from Cambridge. You’ve already told me, remember?”

  It was Daniel’s turn to look more carefully at the young woman who sat opposite him. Jackie appeared to be about twenty. She had short blond hair and a turned-up nose. Her clothes consisted of shorts and a yellow T-shirt that bore the legend “Perth!” right across her chest. She was quite unlike any undergraduate he had ever come across at Trinity.

  “Are you up at university?” he inquired.

  “Yeah. Second year, Perth. So what brings you to Sydney, Dan?”

  Daniel couldn’t think of an immediate response, but it hardly mattered that much because Jackie was already explaining why she was in the capital of New South Wales long before he had been given a chance to reply. In fact Ja
ckie did most of the talking until their bills arrived. Daniel insisted on paying.

  “Good on you,” said Jackie. “So what are you doing tonight?”

  “Haven’t got anything particular planned.”

  “Great, because I was thinking of going to the Theatre Royal,” she told him. “Why don’t you join me?”

  “Oh, what’s playing?” asked Daniel, unable to hide his surprise at being picked up for the first time in his life.

  “Noel Coward’s Tonight at Eight-thirty with Cyril Ritchard and Madge Elliott.”

  “Sounds promising,” said Daniel noncommittally.

  “Great. Then I’ll see you in the foyer at ten to eight, Dan. And don’t be late.” She picked up her rucksack, threw it on her back, strapped up the buckle and in seconds was gone.

  Daniel watched her leaving the cafe before he could think of an excuse for not agreeing to her suggestion. He decided it would be churlish not to turn up at the theater, and in any case he had to admit he had rather enjoyed Jackie’s company. He checked his watch and decided to spend the rest of the afternoon looking round the city.

  When Daniel arrived at the Theatre Royal that evening, a few minutes before seven-forty, he purchased two six-shilling tickets for the stalls then hung around in the foyer waiting for his guest—or was she his host? When the five-minute bell sounded Jackie still hadn’t arrived and Daniel began to realize that he had been looking forward to seeing her again rather more than he cared to admit. There was still no sign of his lunchtime companion when the two-minute bell rang, so Daniel assumed that he would be seeing the play on his own. With only a minute to spare before the curtain went up, he felt a hand link through his arm and heard a voice say, “Hello, Dan. I didn’t think you’d turn up.” Another first, he had never taken a girl to the theater who was wearing shorts.