by Nevil Shute
They had machines on the production line coming through and they gave me twenty-six days delivery, from noon the next day. It was getting towards evening by that time, and they pushed me their way like as if I was a little boy. They’d got accommodation for me in their own hotel just by the works, and they gave me a mass of drawings to study that night. They arranged a demonstration flight for ten o’clock next morning for me, and they made it very clear that they expected me to confirm the order then with another twenty thousand pounds. After that I was to go away and not bother them any more — they told me the time of my train — for twenty-five and a half more days. I could come back then, with another twenty-five thousand pounds, and fly my aeroplane away exactly at noon, unless I care to stay for lunch. The only thing they didn’t make exactly and precisely clear was if I had to pay for lunch.
I’d never have got anywhere with those people if I hadn’t been able to pay cash down. Their business was, quite simply, to make the best aircraft in the world — not to lend money.
I didn’t have to go back to Southampton by train, as it happened. There was a Proctor there owned by my old company, Airservice Ltd., that had come over for some spares. I knew the pilot slightly and he knew me; he had been out in Cairo for a bit, and I had met him once or twice when I had taken a load there in the Carrier. He was interested to see me with the sales people, and he said that Mr. Norman Evans, my old chief, would be very glad to hear I was in England, and would be sure to want to meet me. I said I’d be free for the next three weeks and gave him my address; he wanted the telephone number, but of course he was unlucky. However, he was genuinely pleased to see me, and we got along so well I touched him for a lift to Eastleigh; it was a bit out of his way but he said the firm would be glad to do that for me. So I was home with Dad and Mum that evening in time for tea, instead of about midnight, as I thought I would be.
Mum wasn’t expecting me so early. When I went into the house there was a girl there in the kitchen with her, Doris Waters, the schoolteacher that I’d met when I was home before, daughter of old Waters, the plumber. They’d got Ted’s school atlas spread out on the table that they’d marked in ink with lines to all the places I had been to, and a lot of picture postcards that I’d sent home, and some photographs I’d brought back with me. Mum had been having a grand time, telling this girl all about me.
Ma said as I went in, “Hullo, Tom. Thought you weren’t coming home till late?”
“I got a lift back to Eastleigh,” I said. “Evening, Doris.”
She smiled, and said, “Good evening, Tom. Your mother’s been telling me about your travels. Haven’t you been a long way?”
“You don’t have to believe everything Ma says,” I said a bit awkwardly. Doris had filled out since I was home last, got more mature; she must have been twenty-four years old or so. It was years since I’d spoken to a young woman like her. She was quiet, and graceful, and pretty; I could hardly take my eyes off her.
“He’s a bad, wicked boy,” said Ma. “You can believe that, anyway. Doesn’t write home enough, and when he does he doesn’t tell us anything. We have to wait till he comes home to hear what he’s been up to, and that’s only when he wants another aeroplane. When he’s got all the aeroplanes he wants we shan’t see or hear from him at all.”
The girl said, “Oh Mrs. Cutter, how terrible! He must be a great disappointment to you.” She was grinning.
“Don’t you ever get married, Doris,” said my mother. “You’ll find children more trouble than they’re worth.”
“One thing,” I said, “is that they’re always wanting their tea.”
“I don’t know there’s anything for you,” said Ma. “I didn’t think you’d be home, so I only got three kippers; one for your pa, one for Doris, and one for me. I dunno what you’re going to eat, Tom, unless you slip down to Albert’s and see if he’s got another one. There was plenty in the box this morning.”
Doris said, “I’ll go, Mrs. Cutter.”
“No,” I said. “I’ll go.”
“Well, don’t start fighting over it,” said Ma. So she stayed to clear the table and put the kettle on, and Doris and I walked down to the fishmonger’s together.
I knew, of course, that Ma hadn’t engineered this meeting, although she was quite capable of it. Doris was in the habit of dropping in to see Mother once or twice a week; I knew that from Ma’s letters. I was glad of that, because with us kids all out in the world and mostly living in other places, it must have been a bit lonely for Ma with Dad away all day, especially now that Ted and Lily had moved out and set up their own home. I tried to tell Doris something about that as we walked down the street.
“Nice of you to keep coming in so often to see Ma,” I said. “She looks forward to you coming.”
“I like it,” she replied. “Your father and mother are such genuine people, and they’re so proud of what their children are all doing. Specially you.”
I walked on for a moment in silence. “Wish I wasn’t so far off,” I said at last. “They’re neither of them getting any younger.”
“I know.” She hesitated. “Your mother was really worried last winter, when your father got that pneumonia.”
I stared at her. “When did Dad have pneumonia?”
“Last January. Didn’t you know?”
“Not a word. Are you sure?”
“Of course. It was just after Christmas, Tom. He was off work all January.” She had reason to know, because the crisis had come in the school holidays, and I found out later that she had been in the house with Mother every day, and sitting up several nights.
I was worried. “Ma told me that he’d had a cold and been off work a bit,” I said. “I didn’t think much of it.”
She nodded. “She didn’t want to worry you. I mean out there, you couldn’t do anything to help.”
“Course I could,” I said. “The show can get on without me for a bit, almost any time. I could have been home in thirty-six hours, if there was any trouble with Dad or Mum like that.”
She said, “Flying home? It’ld cost an awful lot. Your father wasn’t as bad as that.”
“Not much sense in flying home just for the funeral,” I said a bit shortly. “What happened? Did he go to hospital?”
“They hadn’t got a bed,” she said. “It was all right at home.”
Mum and Dad like our house and they’d never move away from it, but it’s not much of a place to nurse a serious illness in, with no running water upstairs and the only toilet out in the back yard and shared with the house next door. “Did they try and get him into a nursing home?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “It comes a bit expensive, you know.”
I said, “For Christ’s sake!” I was worth twenty thousand pounds, all made in about three years. It wasn’t real money, of course, to Dad and Mum. It wasn’t very real to me.
“I wish I’d known,” I said. “I’d have been home inside two days and got all that fixed up. There’s plenty of money for a nursing home, or anything they need.”
“I’m very glad to know that,” she said seriously. “I’ll remember it.” We walked along in silence for a bit. I was worried, thinking what a bad son I had been. “If that happens again, Tom,” she said seriously, “would you like me to send you a cable?”
I turned to her. “I wish you would. But if you do that, send it good and early, so that I can get home in good time and do something. I’ve got all the money in the world to help them if they’re sick. Don’t wait to send a cable till they’re dying.”
She hesitated. “It might mean bringing you home on a wild goose chase,” she said. “You wouldn’t thank me then.”
“I would. I’d rather have it that way. I don’t get home to see them enough, anyway. If you cable me like that, I wouldn’t hold it against you if Dad was back at work again when I got home, or Mum out at the pictures.”
“Do you really feel like that about it, Tom?”
“Of course I do. I
ought to be home every six months, but I’m not. I could be, but one gets stuck into things; you get so that you can’t bear to take a holiday. But for a thing like this I’d come home any time. Will you let me have that cable?”
“I’ll do that,” she said.
“Full rate,” I said. “None of this deferred or night letter nonsense.”
She laughed. “All right.”
We came to the shop, and I went in and got my kipper, and they wrapped it up in a bit of newspaper for me, and we turned to stroll home. “How long are you back for this time, Tom?” she asked.
“Three weeks,” I said. I told her about the delivery of the Tramp. “It’s not worth going back to the Persian Gulf and coming out again.”
“That’ll be nice for your mother,” she said. “She loves having you at home.” We walked on in silence. “Will you fly the new aeroplane out to Bahrein alone?”
I shook my head. “I think I’ll get my chief pilot back here two or three days before. We’ll fly it out together.”
“Gujar Singh?”
I turned to her in surprise. “Yes. You know about him?”
She smiled. “I think I know all about you that your mother knows, Tom. You mustn’t mind that. She loves to talk.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. I didn’t, either. “He’s a Sikh. Do you know what a Sikh looks like?”
She nodded. “I’ve got a book at the school with a picture of a group of Sikhs. I brought it home and showed your father and mother. They look terribly fierce. Your mother was quite frightened.”
“Gujar’s not fierce,” I said. “He comes to work each day on a lady’s old rusty bicycle. I’ll introduce you to him when he comes, if you like. But he’s married, so don’t get any ideas into your head. Got three children, too.”
She laughed, and then she said something about East being East and West being West and the twain never meeting. Poetry, I think it was. “That sounds like bolony to me,” I said. “If you fly East and keep on going, past Rangoon and Bangkok and Manila and Wake Island and Hawaii, you’ll find you’re back in the West again, although you’re still going East.”
“That’s only geographical,” she said. “What Kipling meant was that the peoples of the East are so different to us we’ll never understand them.”
“That’s bolony, too,” I remarked.
“You’re very fond of them, aren’t you?”
“I get on all right with most people,” I said. “Asiatics are just the same as anybody else. I’ve not found them any more different to us than Spaniards, say, or Czechs.”
She was quite unconvinced. “Anyway, I wouldn’t want to marry Gujar Singh,” she said a little stiffly. “I think mixed marriages are horrible.”
“So does Gujar Singh,” I replied. That put the lid on it, and we walked the last hundred yards in silence. Dad was home and Ma cooked the kippers and I told Dad a little bit about my trip and how Norman Evans wanted to see me and I’d probably go up to London one day for that. Then we all had tea, and after tea Doris Waters got up to go.
I went with her to the door. “Sorry if I was rude about Gujar,” I said. “He’s a friend of mine.” I paused. “Like to come to the pictures tomorrow night?”
She hesitated, wondering, I suppose, if I was quite hygienic. “I’d love to,” she said at last. “I don’t know what’s on.”
“It’s all one to me,” I said. “I haven’t seen a picture for two years.”
I fixed up to call for her at her dad’s house next evening after school and take her out; she knew a cafe where we could get fish and chips for tea. Then she went away and I went back into the house. “I’m taking Doris to the pictures tomorrow,” I told Ma. “I won’t be in for tea.”
“Well, you might think of a worse way of spending an evening than that,” said Ma. “Doris is a nice girl, Tom.”
“From all I hear she’s earned an evening out,” I said. “What’s this I hear about pneumonia?”
I spent the next day wiring up the house for power. They had electric light and a little cooker in the scullery for using when the range wasn’t lit, but it had never entered their heads to have any heat upstairs in the bedrooms. When Dad had been ill they had bought an oil stove and had it upstairs in his room, which wasn’t so good in a tiny room when you couldn’t open a window. I got a lot of rubber-coated flex and fittings and a couple of electric stoves, and set to work to wire up all three bedrooms and the living-room with power points.
Doris and I had a grand time that night. I don’t know what it was, but everything seemed to go right. The picture wasn’t a particularly good one, and I’ve known better fish and chips, but we enjoyed ourselves. She wasn’t so snooty about the East as she had been the night before; she asked a lot about it as if she really wanted to know. In turn, she told me about her school. She had never been out of England, but she had worked for a time in Leicester during the war, when the schools were evacuated from Southampton.
As we were walking home from the pictures that evening she asked,
“What are you going to do, Tom? Are you going to stay out in the Persian Gulf for ever?”
It was May, and England was a very lovely place. It was a question that I had been asking myself, perhaps subconsciously. “It’s where my business is,” I said. “You can’t run away from that.”
“Is it nice out there?”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s not the part of the East I’d choose to live in, if I had my pick. But there’s not much to complain of, really.”
“Will you ever come back to live and work in England?”
I walked on for a time in silence. “I’m King of the Castle out there,” I said. “Running my own show. I’d never get to that position here in England. Not in aviation.”
“Does it have to be in aviation?”
“I could run a garage,” I said. “That’s about the nearest thing to what I know. A garage, or a haulage contractor’s business, or something like that. I’d be no good at anything else.”
She nodded. “I should think you’d run a garage awfully well. Would you like that, or would it be dull after the East?”
She had put her finger on the point. “It ‘ld be dull,” I said. “But — well, there’s other things to think of, too. I’d like to be in England, now that Dad and Mum are getting on. I think one could settle down all right with a big garage in a little country town, some place like Romsey or Lyndhurst or Poole. I’d like that all right.”
“It would be nice for your father and mother if you ever did that,” she said quietly. “Of all the children, you’re the one they think the most of, you know, Tom.”
“Maybe,” I said. It was a fact that none of the others seemed to do much for the old folks. Ted could have put those power points in for them, but he hadn’t thought of it.
We walked on for a time in silence. “Don’t you ever get depressed out there?” she asked presently. “I mean, away from your own sort, with only black people to talk to?”
“They aren’t black,” I said patiently. She meant her question kindly enough. “They’re brown, and when you’ve lived with them a bit you don’t see them as brown people any more. You see them as just people.”
She laughed. “You are touchy about them, Tom. But don’t you ever get depressed?”
“It wasn’t a riot of fun when I left England,” I replied. “I was depressed when I went out there.”
“You mean, about Beryl?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“That all happened a long time ago,” she said quietly. “I don’t know the rights or wrongs of that. I don’t suppose anybody knows that except you. But I know this much: that there’s nothing in that old story to make you spend your life out in the Persian Gulf, away from everyone you know.” And then she said a very queer thing, very shrewd. “I know why you went. You went to find a sort of hermitage.”
I stared at her. “Well, I dunno.” I had gone there in a tenth-hand Fox-Moth because I was out of
a job and wanted to make some money. Or, had I? And then I said, “Perhaps I did.”
“I know. But it’s time you came back into circulation, Tom. If you stay there alone much longer you’ll go round the bend.”
I smiled, and she thought I was laughing at her. She flushed a little. “I suppose you think that’s silly. But people do go funny when they live isolated from their own sort, out in the Tropics.”
“I don’t think that’s silly,” I said. “What you say is right. I’ve got a chap working for me now that everybody says is going round the bend.”
“I thought you hadn’t got any white staff?”
“I haven’t. He’s an Asiatic.”
“I meant, English people.”
“I know you did. But a Chinese can be further from his home when he works in the Persian Gulf than any Englishman, and lonelier.”
“Is this a Chinese that you’re speaking of, who’s going round the bend?”
“Half Chinese and half Russian,” I said. “Born in Penang, and so a British subject just like you and me.”
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked. “What does he do?”
“He believes in God,” I said a little wearily. “He teaches engineers who work with him to turn to God in everything they do upon the aeroplanes, and he gets people to believe that that’s the sensible way to set about the job of aircraft maintenance. He’s obviously going round the bend. Everybody says so.” And with that my old worries and responsibilities closed down on me. A month was too long for me to be away from Bahrein. Anything might be happening in my absence.
“But surely that’s not wrong?” she asked.
