‘Not more than any of us can be said to have one. But that’s a very good sample of what I mean. When the rest of us are out for an evening we take what’s going. But Bill will go off by himself to some other quarter of the town where he has picked something more to his fancy.’
‘What town?’
‘Any town we happen to be in. Kuwait, Masquat, Quatif, Mukalla. Anything from Aden to Karachi, if it comes to that. Most of us fly scheduled routes, but some fly tramps. Take anything anywhere.’
‘What did—does Bill fly?’
‘He’s flown all sorts. But lately he’s been flying between the Gulf and the South Coast.’
‘Arabia, you mean.’
‘Yes. It’s a damned dreary route but Bill seemed to like it. Me, I think he was too long on it. If you’re too long on one route you get stale.’
‘Why do you think he was too long on it? Had he changed at all?’
Mr Cullen hesitated. ‘Not exactly. He was just the old Bill, easy-going and nice. But he got so that he couldn’t leave it behind him.’
‘Leave his work behind, you mean?’
‘Yes. Most of us—all of us, in fact—drop work when we turn the bus over to the ground staff. We don’t remember it until we say hullo to the mechanic in charge next morning. But Bill got so that he would pore over maps of the route as if he had never flown the hop before.’
‘Why this interest in the route, do you think?’
‘Well, I did think maybe he was figuring out a way to avoid the bad weather areas. It did begin—the interest in maps, I mean—one time when he came in very late after being blown out of his way by one of those terrific hurricanes that come out of nowhere in that country. We had nearly given him up that time.’
‘Don’t you fly above the weather?’
‘On a long hop, of course. But when you’re flying freight you have to come down at the oddest places. So you’re always more or less at the mercy of the weather.’
‘I see. And you think Bill changed after that experience?’
‘Well, I think it left a mark on him. I was there when he came in. In the plane, I mean. I was waiting for him, on the field. And he seemed to me a bit—concussed, if you get me.’
‘Suffering from shock.’
‘Yes. Still back there, if you know what I mean. Not really listening to what you said to him.’
‘And after that he began to study maps. To plan his route, you think.’
‘Yes. From then on it was in the forefront of his mind instead of being something that you drop with your working clothes. He even began to come in late as a habit. As if he went out of his way to look for an easier route.’ He paused a moment, and then added in a quick warning tone: ‘Please understand, Mr Grant, I’m not saying Bill has lost his nerve.’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Lost nerves don’t take you that way at all, believe me. You get quite the opposite. You don’t want to think of flying at all. You get short in the temper, and you drink too much and too early in the day, and you try to wangle short hops, and you go sick when there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s no mystery about lost nerve, Mr Grant. It announces itself like a name on a marquee. There was nothing like that about Bill—and I don’t think there ever will be. It was just that he couldn’t leave the thing behind.’
‘It became an obsession with him.’
‘That’s about it, I suppose.’
‘Did he have other interests?’
‘He read books,’ Mr Cullen said, in an apologetic way; as one confessing a peculiarity in a friend. ‘Even in that, it showed.’
‘How: showed?’
‘I mean, instead of the books being the usual story affairs they’d as likely as not be about Arabia.’
‘Yes?’ Grant said, thoughtfully. Ever since this stranger had first mentioned Arabia, Grant had been altogether ‘with him’. Arabia to all the world meant one thing: sand. And what was more, he realised that when he had had the feeling, that morning in the Scoone hotel, that ‘singing sands’ did actually exist somewhere, it was with Arabia that he should have connected them. Somewhere in Arabia there were in fact sands that were alleged to sing.
‘So I was glad when he took his “leave” earlier than he meant to,’ Mr Cullen was saying. ‘We had planned to go together, and spend our leave in Paris. But he changed his mind and said he wanted a week or two in London first. He’s English, you know. So we arranged to meet at the Hotel St Jacques in Paris. He was to meet me there on the 4th of March.’
‘When?’ said Grant; and was suddenly still. Mind and body still, like a pointer with the bird in sight; like a man with the target in his sights.
‘The 4th of March. Why?’
Singing sands were anyone’s interest. Men who fly for OCAL were two a penny. But the wide, vague, indefinite affair of Bill Kenrick who was obsessed with Southern Arabia and did not turn up to his appointments in Paris narrowed suddenly to one small focused point. To a date.
On the 4th of March, when Bill Kenrick should have turned up in Paris, the London mail had come into Scoone bearing the dead body of a young man who was interested in singing sands. A young man with reckless eyebrows. A young man who, on looks, would have made a very likely flyer. Grant remembered that he had tried him, in imagination, on the bridge of a small ship; a fast small ship, hell in any kind of a sea. He had looked well there. But he would look just as well at the controls of a plane.
‘Why did Bill choose Paris?’
‘Why does anyone choose Paris!’
‘It wasn’t because he was French?’
‘Bill? No, Bill’s English. Very English.’
‘Did you ever see his passport?’
‘Not that I can remember. Why?’
‘You don’t think that he might have been French by birth?’
It wouldn’t work out, anyway. The Frenchman was called Martin. Unless his English upbringing had made him want to adopt an English name?
‘You don’t happen to have a photograph of your friend, do you?’
But Mr Cullen’s attention was on something else. Grant turned to look, and found that Zoë was approaching them along the river bank. He looked at his watch.
‘Hell!’ he said. ‘And I promised to have the stove going!’ He turned to his bag and fished the primus from it.
‘Your wife?’ asked Mr Cullen, with that refreshing frankness. In the Islands it would have taken five minutes conversation to have elicited that information from him.
‘No. That’s Lady Kentallen.’
‘Lady? A title?’
‘Yes,’ Grant said, busy with the stove. ‘She is Viscountess Kentallen.’
Mr Cullen considered this in silence for a little.
‘I supposed that’s a sort of marked-down Countess.’
‘No. On the contrary. A very superior kind. Practically a Marchioness. Look, Mr Cullen, let’s postpone this matter of your friend for a little. It’s a matter that interests me more than I can say, but—’
‘Yes, of course, I’ll go. When can I talk to you again about it?’
‘Of course you will not go! You’ll stay and have some food with us.’
‘You mean you want me to meet this Marchioness, this—whatyoumaycallit, Viscountess?’
‘Why not? She is a very nice person to meet. One of the nicest persons I know.’
‘Yes?’ Mr Cullen looked with interest at the approaching Zoë. ‘She’s certainly very nice to look at. I didn’t know they came like that. Somehow I imagined all aristocrats had beaky noses.’
‘Specially provided for looking down, I take it.’
‘Something like that.’
‘I don’t know how far back in English history one would have to go to find an aristocratic nose that was looked down. I doubt if you’d find one at all. The only place to find a looked-down nose is in the suburbs. In what is known as lower-middle-class circles.’
Mr Cullen looked puzzled. ‘But the aristocrats keep themselves to themselves and
look down on the rest, don’t they?’
‘It has never been possible in England for any class to keep themselves to themselves, as you call it. They have been intermarrying at all levels for two thousand years. There never have been separate and distinct classes—or an aristocratic class at all in the sense that you mean it.’
‘I suppose nowadays things are even-ing up,’ Mr Cullen suggested, faintly unbelieving.
‘Oh, no. It has always been a fluid thing. Even our Royalty. Elizabeth the First was the grand-daughter of a Lord Mayor. And you’ll find that Royalty’s personal friends have no titles at all: I mean the people who are on calling-terms at Buckingham Palace. Whereas the bold bad baron who sits next you in an expensive restaurant probably started life as a platelayer on the railway. There is no keeping oneself to oneself in England, as far as class goes. It can’t be done. It can only be done by Mrs Jones who sniffs at her neighbour Mrs Smith because Mr Jones makes two pounds a week more than Mr Smith.’
He turned from the puzzled American to greet Zoë. ‘I’m truly sorry about the stove. I’m afraid I got it going too late to be ready. We were having a very interesting conversation. This is Mr Cullen, who flies freight for Oriental Commercial Airlines.’
Zoë shook hands, and asked him what kind of plane he flew.
From the tone of his voice when he told her Grant deduced that Mr Cullen thought that Zoë was merely taking a condescending interest. Condescension was what he would expect from an ‘aristocrat’.
‘They’re very heavy in hand, aren’t they?’ Zoë remarked sympathetically. ‘My brother used to fly one when he was on the Australia run. He was always cursing it.’ She began to open the packets of food. ‘But now that he works in an office in Sydney he has a little runabout of his own. A Beamish Eight. A lovely thing. I used to fly it when he first bought it; before he took it to Australia. David—my husband—and I used to dream of having one too, but we could never afford it.’
‘But a Beamish Eight costs only four hundred,’ Mr Cullen blurted.
Zoë licked her fingers, sticky from a leaking apple tart, and said: ‘Yes, I know, but we never had four hundred to spare.’
Mr Cullen, feeling himself being washed out to sea, sought some terra firma.
‘I oughtn’t to be eating your food this way,’ he said. ‘They’ll have plenty for me back at the hotel. I really ought to go back.’
‘Oh, don’t go,’ Zoë said with a simplicity so genuine that it penetrated even Mr Cullen’s defences. ‘There is enough for a platoon.’
So to Grant’s pleasure in more ways than one, Mr Cullen stayed. And Zoë, unaware that she was providing the United States with a revised view of the genus English Aristocrat, ate like a hungry schoolboy and talked in her gentle voice to the stranger as if she had known him all her life. By the apple tart stage, Mr Cullen had ceased to be on his guard. By the time that they were handing round the chocolates that Laura had included he had surrendered unconditionally.
They sat together in the spring sunshine, full-fed and content. Zoë lying back against the grassy bank with her feet crossed and her hands behind her head, her eyes closed against the sun. Grant with his mind busy with B Seven, and the material that Tad Cullen had brought him. Mr Cullen himself perched on a rock looking down the river to the green civilised strath where the moors ended and the fields began.
‘It’s a fine little country, this,’ he said. ‘I like it. If you ever decide to fight for your freedom, count me in.’
‘Freedom?’ said Zoë, opening her eyes. ‘Freedom from whom or what?’
‘From England, of course.’
Zoë looked helpless, but Grant began to laugh. ‘I think you must have been talking to a little black man in a kilt,’ he said.
‘He had a kilt, yes, but he wasn’t coloured,’ Mr Cullen said.
‘No, I meant black-haired. You’ve been talking to Archie Brown.’
‘Who is Archie Brown?’ asked Zoë.
‘He is the self-appointed saviour of Gaeldom, and our future Sovereign, Commissar, President or what have you, when Scotland has freed herself from the murderous burden of the English yoke.’
‘Oh, yes. That man,’ Zoë said mildly, identifying Archie in her mind. ‘He is a little off his head, isn’t he? Does he live around here?’
‘He is staying at the hotel at Moymore, I understand. He has been doing missionary work on Mr Cullen, it seems.’
‘Well,’ Mr Cullen grinned a little sheepishly, ‘I did just wonder if he wasn’t over-stating things a bit. I’ve met some Scots in my time and they didn’t seem to me to be the kind of people to put up with the treatment Mr Brown was describing. Indeed, if you’ll forgive me, Mr Grant, they always seemed to me the kind of people to get the best of whatever bargain was going.’
‘Did you ever hear the Union better described?’ Grant said to Zoë.
‘I never knew anything about the Union,’ Zoë said comfortably, ‘except that it took place in 1707.’
‘Was there a battle, then?’ Mr Cullen asked.
‘No,’ Grant said. ‘Scotland stepped thankfully on to England’s band-wagon, and fell heir to all the benefits. Colonies, Shakespeare, soap, solvency and so forth.’
‘I hope Mr Brown doesn’t go lecture-touring in the States,’ Zoë said, half asleep.
‘He will,’ Grant said. ‘He will. All vociferous minorities go lecture-touring in the States.’
‘It will give them very wrong ideas, won’t it?’ Zoë said mildly. Grant thought with what a blistering phrase Laura would have expressed the same idea. ‘They have the oddest ideas. When David and I were there, the year before he was killed, we were always being asked why we didn’t stop taxing Canada. When we said we had never taxed Canada they just looked at us as if we were telling lies. Not very good lies, either.’
From Mr Cullen’s expression Grant deduced that he too had had ‘odd’ ideas about Canadian taxation, but Zoë’s eyes were closed. Grant wondered if Mr Cullen realised that Zoë was quite unaware that he was an American; that it had not occurred to her to consider his accent, his nationality, his clothes or any personal thing about him. She had accepted him as he stood, as a person. He was just a flyer, like her brother; someone who had turned up in time to share their picnic and who was pleasant and interesting to talk to. It would not occur to her to pigeon-hole him, to put him in any special category. If she was conscious at all of his narrow a’s she no doubt took him for a North-countryman.
He looked at her, half asleep there in the sun, and thought how beautiful she was. He looked across at Mr Cullen and saw that he too was looking at Zoë Kentallen and thinking how beautiful she was. Their glances met and ran away from each other.
But Grant, who last night could imagine no greater felicity than to sit and look at Zoë Kentallen, was conscious now of a faint impatience with her, and this so shocked him that he took it out, in his self-analytical way, to examine it. What flaw could there be in this divinity? What imperfection in this princess from a fairy-tale?
‘You know very well what’s wrong,’ said that irreverent voice in him. ‘You want her to get the hell out of here so that you can find out about B Seven.’
And for once he did not try to contradict the voice. He did in brutal fact wish that Zoë would ‘get the hell out of here’. The Zoë whose very presence had made magic of yesterday afternoon was now an encumbrance. Tiny prickles of boredom chased each other up and down his spine. Lovely, simple, heavenly Zoë, do get a move on. Creature of delight and princess of my dreams, go away.
He was rehearsing phrases for taking his own departure, when she gave the abrupt half-sigh half-yawn of a child and said: ‘Well, there is a seven-pounder in the Cuddy Pool that must be finding life dull without me.’ And with her usual lack of fuss or chat she took her things and departed into the spring afternoon.
Mr Cullen looked after her approvingly, and Grant waited for comment. But it seemed that Mr Cullen too had been waiting for the departure of his ‘marked-down Co
untess’. He watched her out of earshot and then said immediately:
‘Mr Grant, why did you ask me if I had a photograph of Bill? Does that mean that you think you know him?’
‘No. No. But it would eliminate people who could not be Bill.’
‘Oh. Yes. Well, I haven’t one in my pocket but I have one in my grip at the hotel. It isn’t a very good one, but it would give you the general idea. Could I bring it to you sometime?’
‘No. I’ll walk down to Moymore with you now.’
‘You will? You’re certainly very kind, Mr Grant. You think you’ve got a line on this thing? You haven’t told me what those words were. That quotation or whatever it was. That’s really what I came to ask you. What the talking-beasts thing was all about. If it was a place he was interested in, you see, he might have gone there, and I could go there too and cross his trail that way.’
‘You’re very fond of this Bill, aren’t you?’
‘Well, we’ve been together quite a time and though we’re opposites in most ways we get along fine. Just fine. I wouldn’t like anything to happen to Bill.’
Grant changed the conversation and asked about Tad Cullen’s own life. And while they walked down the glen to Moymore he heard about the clean small town back in the States, and what a dull place it seemed to a boy who could fly, and how wonderful the East had seemed in the distance and how unexciting close up.
‘Just Main Street with some smells,’ Mr Cullen said.
‘What did you do in Paris during your long wait for Bill to turn up?’
‘Oh, I helled around some. It wasn’t much fun without Bill. I met a couple of chaps I’d known in India, and we went places together, but I was impatient all the time for Bill to be there. I let them go, after a bit, and went to look at some of the places in the tourist folders. Some of those old places are pretty nice. There was one place built right over the water—a castle, I mean—on stone arches, so that the river flowed underneath. That was fine. It would have done very well for the Countess. Is that the kind of place she lives in?’
‘No,’ Grant said, thinking of the difference between Chenonceaux and Kentallen. ‘She lives in a grim, flat, grey house with tiny windows and poky rooms and narrow stairs and a front door as welcoming as the exit of a laundry chute. It has two little turrets on the fourth-storey level, next the roof, and in Scotland that makes it a castle.’
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