Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “They shut at ten,” he said briefly. “It’ll be quarter past nine by the time we get there. That long won’t kill you.”

  They drove for half an hour, and drew up at the pub. The Barley Mow is a large modern public house strategically placed at the junction of two arterial roads; it stands on the corner in two acres of grounds, one and a half acres of which is car park. Inside, the saloon bar is a discreet mixture of imitation Tudor oak and real chromium plate; it is warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and the place is split up into little corners and alcoves where a man can tell his friends a blue story without telling every lady in the room. Mr Turner loved the Barley Mow better than almost any other local he frequented.

  For one thing, there always seemed to be people there that he knew. That night there was Georgie Harries and his wife, and Gillie Simmonds with a new girl friend who was on the stage, and fat old Dickie Watson, the bookmaker, with a party. All these greeted Mr Turner— “Jackie, you old sod!” “What’s it to be, Jackie?”— “Jackie, d’you get home all right last Friday? (sotto voce). Never see anyone so pissed in all my life”— “Evening Mrs Turner, got him on string tonight? What’ll you take for it?”

  It was the atmosphere that Mr Turner loved. He drank pint after pint of beer, while Mollie stood in bright forced cheerfulness with a gin and ginger, one eye on the clock. Smoke wreathed about them and the voices rose and the place grew hotter and the atmosphere thicker as the minute hand moved forward to the hour. Mr Turner stood red-faced and beaming in the midst, mug in hand, the great wound pulsing in his forehead, telling story after story from his vast repertoire. “Well, this porter he went on the witness stand and told the Court of Inquiry that it was his first day with the Company. The chairman asks if he see the accident. He says: ‘Aye. I see the express run right into the trucks.’ The chairman asks him what he did next. ‘Well, sir, I turns to the ticket collector, and I says: “That’s a bloody fine way to run a railway!” ’ ” In the shout of laughter that followed, the manager said: “Time, ladies and gentlemen, please!” and turned out half the lights. One by one the company went out into the cool night air; starters ground in the car park, and lights shone out in beams, and the cars slipped off up the road to London.

  At the little Ford Mollie said acidly: “Good thing I’m driving you, after five pints of beer.”

  “Four pints,” said Mr Turner. “I only had four.” The air was fresh upon his face, the moon clear above him in a deep blue sky. It was perfect in the night. He felt relaxed, as if all his fatigue and distress was soaking out of him. A week was a long time to go without a bit of a blind.

  “It was five,” said his wife. “I counted them myself.”

  He was relaxed and happy, and now she was nagging at him. He turned on her irritably. “What the hell does it matter if I have four or five? I’ll have fifty if I want, my girl. I won’t be drinking anything this time next year, if what they said at the hospital is right.”

  She stared at him. “What did they say at the hospital?”

  “They said I’m going to die before so long.” In the quiet serenity of the night that did not seem very important; it was only important that she should shut up and not spoil his evening. “Now you get on and start her up, and shut up talking.”

  She opened her mouth to give as good as she got, but said nothing. What he had told her was incredible, and yet it was what she had secretly feared for some time. Beneath her irritation with him she was well aware that his condition had deteriorated in the last six months; he was not physically the man he once had been. Moreover, it was no good arguing with him when he had just drunk five pints of beer; from past experience she knew that much. She got into the car in silence and started the engine; in silence he got in beside her and slammed the door, and they started down the long white concrete road to home.

  They did not speak again till they turned into the garage of the little house at Watford forty minutes later. Closing the doors, she said to him: “What was that they told you at the hospital?” She spoke more gently, having had time to reflect.

  By this time Mr Turner was more firmly upon earth. It was quiet and still and moonlit in the garden, and it was warm. “Let’s get the deckchairs out ‘n sit a bit,” he said. “I got to tell you all about it sometime, ‘cause you ought to know.”

  They fetched deckchairs from the cupboard under the stairs and set them up upon the lawn. Mr Turner lit a cigarette as they sat down. “There’s bits of shell inside my head going bad on me,” he said. “That’s what they told me at the hospital. They give me about another year, as far as they can judge.”

  She said: “But, Jackie, can’t they operate ‘n get them out?”

  “They say not.” She had not called him Jackie for some time; it was what his friends all called him, and he warmed towards her. “They say they’re too deep in.”

  She said quietly: “I’m ever so sorry.”

  He laughed. “Not half so sorry as I am!” He thought for a moment, and then said: “I didn’t mean that nasty. But I must say, I got a bit of a shock when he told me.”

  “I should think so, too,” she said.

  He sat in silence in the deckchair, lying back and looking at the stars. Vega burned near the deep blue zenith, with Altair on his right and Arcturus to the left. He did not know the names of any of them, but he found them comforting and permanent. They would be there when he and all others like him had gone on; it was good to sit there and lie back and look at things like that.

  “It’s time we had a bit of a talk about it,” he said presently. “I mean, I dunno how long I can go on working. These giddy fits and that, they won’t get any better now. Six or eight months maybe; then I’ll have to go in a home or something. That means you’ll have to start and think about a job again.”

  “I know that,” she said slowly. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  He said: “I got a little money saved, but not so much. It’s going to take a bit, seeing me finished off. There won’t be much after I’m gone — nothing to make a difference, really.” He turned to her. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “I can brush up easy, ‘n get another job.”

  He nodded. “I reckoned that you could.”

  She turned to him presently. “What about you, Jackie? Will you go on working, long as you can?”

  He said slowly: “I suppose so — I dunno. I got to sort of clean things up — one or two things I got to see about that might take a bit of time. I dunno.”

  She said: “What sort of things?”

  “One thing,” he said. “I got to try and find a nigger.”

  CHAPTER 3

  SHE TURNED TO him in astonishment. “For the Lord’s sake,” she exclaimed, “what do you want with a nigger?”

  It was quiet in the moonlit garden. The scent of roses was around them; in the white light the rows of similar, gabled houses were ethereal, the castles of a dream. The beer still had full hold of Mr Turner, freeing him of repressions and of irritations, making him both simple and lucid. “You remember that time I got in prison?” he inquired.

  She said quietly: “I do.” It had been one of the disasters in her life, that had made her both cynical and bitter. She had a good deal of excuse. She had married a young vigorous man in her office back in 1939, when war broke out; they had lived together very little because he joined the Army almost immediately. He became an officer and quickly rose to captain, and she was terribly proud of him. Then he was sent out to North Africa.

  Within three months he was back in England and at death’s door from the wound he had got in the aeroplane. When she went down to see him at the hospital in Penzance she discovered that he was no longer a free man; there was a little matter of three truckloads of Army sugar sold in the black market to be settled first. She knew him for a warm business man in the office when she married him; she had not known that he was quite so hot as that. He was in hospital for a long time before c
ourt martial; then he got a year’s imprisonment and was discharged from the Army, His Majesty having no further use for his services. He came back to her in February 1945, a perky, irrepressible little man in civvy clothes, apparently not conscious of any very great disgrace, and with that huge wound that terrified her till she got accustomed to it. From that time she had been a bad wife to him, and she knew it, and she hated him for it.

  “I dunno if I ever told you much about that time,” he said. “There was four of us all in the ward together, at that place down in Penzance. Just the four of us together.” He hesitated, and then said: “They had a guard, you see.”

  She nodded. “I remember.”

  “I’d like to know what happened to them other chaps, the three of them,” he said. “They used to come and talk to me. Hours on end, they did.”

  “Talk to you?”

  “They used to come and sit inside the screen there was all round my bed, and talk to me. Hour after hour, sometimes.”

  She stared at him. “What did they do that for?”

  “The doctor ‘n the sisters made them do it.” He turned to her. “I had me eyes all bandaged up after the operation ‘cause they didn’t want me to see anything, and they gave me things to stop me wanting to move about in bed. I was lying there all strapped up like a mummy, and I couldn’t talk much, either. But I could hear things going on, ‘n think about things too. Funny, being like that, it was. So as the others got well one by one the sisters made them come ‘n read a book to me, but they read pretty bad, so most times they just talked. I could answer them a little, but not much. They just kept talking to me.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “Themselves, mostly. They were a bloody miserable lot — the miserablest lot of men I ever saw. But they were good to me.” He paused for a moment, and repeated very quietly: “Bloody good.”

  “How do you mean?” she asked.

  The beer was still strong in Mr Turner. He said: “They were sort of kind. Do anything for me, they would. I reckon that I might have passed out that time, spite of all the doctors and the nurses, if it hadn’t been for them chaps sitting with me, talking. God knows they had enough troubles of their own, but they got time for me in spite of everything.”

  There was a long thoughtful pause. Presently she said: “What’s this got to do with a nigger?”

  “One o’ them was a nigger from America,” he said. “The last one to go out. He was the only one I ever see clearly — Dave Lesurier, his name was.” He pronounced it like an English surname. “Then there was Duggie Brent — he was a corporal in the paratroops. And then there was the pilot of the aeroplane, the second pilot I should say — Flying-Officer Morgan. We was all in a mess one way or another, excepting him, and yet in some ways he was in a worse mess than the lot of us.”

  He turned to her. “I been thinking,” he said quietly. “I never seen any of them from that day to this, though we was all in such a mess together that you’d have thought we might have kept up, somehow or another, just a Christmas card or something. But we never. Well, I got through all right ‘n turned the corner. I got a nice house here, mostly paid for, and a good job. Folks looking at me would say I was successful, wouldn’t they?”

  She nodded slowly. “They would that, Jackie. We’re not up at the top, but we’re a long way from the bottom.”

  “Well, that’s what I mean,” he said. “A long way from the bottom. But that time I was talking of we was right down at the bottom, all four of us, me and the other three. And when I was down there they was bloody nice to me. You just can’t think.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “I had it in my mind for a year or more I ought to try and find out what the others were doing,” he said quietly. “Maybe some of them are dead. That nigger, he was charged with attempted rape, and they give them pretty stiff sentences for that in the American Army. The others, too. . . . But I got by all right — I never starved in the winter yet, that’s what I say. We’ve got up a long way from the bottom, and we’ve got money for a nice house, and a car, ‘n holidays, and after that we even save a little. And I been thinking,” he said quietly, “I been a bloody squirt not to have done something to find out about them other chaps, and see how they was getting on. They were bloody good to me, when I needed it.”

  He pulled out his cigarette case, and handed it to her. She took one and he placed one between his lips, and fumbled with his lighter in the left hand, and lit them. “Well, there we are,” he said. In the dim, moonlit garden there was privacy. “I’ve had it now. In a year’s time there won’t be no more of me. I don’t want to go out and leave strings hanging loose. I want to find out what happened to them other three, case any of them wants a hand, or something.”

  She stared at him, bewildered. This was a different Jackie from the one she knew, and she distrusted change. Injuries such as his when they went bad made people funny in the head, sometimes; this business of wanting to look for his companions in the prison ward seemed very odd to her. She tried to head him off. “They’ll be all right,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t worry too much over it.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I’m just going to find out and make sure they’re all right, so as I know.”

  She said helplessly: “What are you going to do then? Write a letter?”

  “I dunno an address for any of them,” he said. “No good writing to the hospital, not after all these years. I’d better try the Air Ministry to get the pilot’s address, and the War Office for the corporal, I suppose. I dunno what to do about the nigger.”

  “You’ll never find them after all this time,” she said. “How would you ever find a nigger that was in the American Army, after the war, and all?”

  “I dunno,” he said. There was a long pause, and then he said: “I want to have a try.”

  She sat deep in thought for a few moments. He was a bit queer, she decided. Clinically speaking, I should say that she was right; the obsession was probably related to his lesion. That did not help her in her immediate problem, what to do about it. She knew enough about her husband not to cross him directly; when once he got a fixed idea he held on to it like a dog with a bone. Moreover, for the first time in years she felt he needed her. She said: “What were they like, these three? Was there anything particular about them?”

  He grinned: “Only they were all in such a bloody awful mess — like me.” He turned his head to her; in the white light she saw the gleam of his great wound. “Like me to tell you about them?”

  She said: “Yes.”

  He got up from his chair. “I’m just going in to spill some of this beer. Shall I bring out a rug when I come?”

  It was the first time he had offered to do anything for her for a long time. She said: “Please. It’s getting kind of chilly out here, but it’s nice.”

  He went into the house, and came back presently, and handed her the rug. She wrapped it round her, and settled down to listen to him talking. They sat there on the lawn in the warm summer night, in the quiet grace of the moon, and the stars faint in the bright light. It was windless, still and silent. Around them, in the dormitory suburb, the world slept.

  * * *

  This paratroop corporal, he said, he was a proper card. He was a young chap, not more than twenty, a short stocky young man with a thick mat of curly red hair; he wore it cut short in the army style, but even so there was a lot of it. He had the grey eyes that go with it, and like most red-haired young men, he liked a bit of fun.

  His name was Duggie Brent. In full, his name was Douglas Theodore Brent, but he considered Theodore to be a cissy name, and hid it up as much as possible. His father was a butcher in Romsey, and a lay reader at the Methodist Chapel; when his son arrived it seemed proper to christen him the Gift of God. In later years his father reconsidered that.

  In fact, there was nothing much the matter with Duggie Brent except that he didn’t take kindly to the chapel and he took a great deal too kindly to young women. He ha
d a way with them. He had his first girl trouble when he was fourteen, and that was only the first. By the time he was sixteen and a half his father was paying a paternity order for him, and didn’t like it. When he was seventeen, in 1938, he joined the Territorials for fun, faking his age; in 1939 the war broke out and he was mobilized and sent to Durham. Every mother of girls in Romsey breathed a sigh of relief.

  In the Army, they set to work to make a man of him. In that time of war they did not waste much effort in teaching him barrack square drill or dress parades. First, they gave him a rifle and taught him how to use it. Then they put a bayonet on the rifle and set him running at a line of sandbag dummies. If you gave the rifle a sharp twist after the lunge, they said, the bayonet came out easily and the wound was a lot bigger.

  The next thing they gave him was a Bren gun; he discovered that you could kill a lot of people with that in a very short time, if you got them in open country. In case the enemy were so unsporting as to lie in foxholes, however, they showed him how to use a hand grenade, and how to creep up covered by his pals with the Bren gun to lob these in among the Germans in the trench. After that came the Tommy gun and, later, the Sten gun, and then he graduated in the three-inch mortar.

  All this was elementary, of course, mere high school stuff. He started on his college course in 1941 at an anti-tank school, where he was taught that much the quickest way to kill the people in the tank was to set the tank and all on fire. He did an interesting and instructive little course on Ronson Lighters. He learned that you could kill a lot of people with a couple of hundred gallons of blazing oil, if you went about the matter with discretion and intelligence. After that he did a course of mines and minelaying, and then a very amusing little course in the preparation of booby-traps.

  In 1942 he volunteered for the Commandos, and they really started to teach him to kill people. All that he had learned so far, he discovered, was routine stuff and unworthy of a serious student of the art of combat. Any fool could kill a German with a hand grenade which made a noise and woke up the whole neighbourhood; a man who knew his stuff could creep up in the darkness and do it with a knife from behind, grabbing the mouth and the nose with the other hand to prevent him crying out. You had to be careful not to get bitten, but like all these things it was quite easy when you got the way of it. You had to get into the right position; then you just went so, and so, and so — and there he was, kicking a bit, maybe, but very dead.