by Nevil Shute
She nodded. “They liked what they saw,” she said. “The Queen’s been talking about nothing else.”
“What did she say?”
The girl laughed. “I wasn’t there, of course. I only hear that sort of thing third or fourth hand. Gossip of the servants’ hall, David.” She raised her glass. “Here’s luck to Tare.”
“I’d rather not trust to luck.” He drank with her. “I’m taking Tare off on a trial next Wednesday. We’ve never flown her longer than an hour and a half, and we’ve never flown either of them in tropical conditions. The manufacturers did tropical trials on the prototype, of course. But I think we ought to see one of them function in the tropics before taking our sort of passengers about the world.”
“Are you going far?” she asked.
“We shall only be away one night,” he said. “I’m going down to Gambia, to Bathurst on the west coast of Africa, and spending the night there. Then next day we’ll go northeastwards across Africa to Cyprus, turn there without landing, and back to White Waltham. That makes about a nine hours’ flight, about the maximum safe operating range.”
She said curiously, “Do you feel that you’re really travelling, on an enormous flight like that?”
He shook his head. “You’re just flying. Usually you can’t see the ground because of the cloud layer, and if you can you’re ten miles up, so you don’t see any detail. The sky is almost black, and the sun’s much brighter. You can’t see much.”
“Do you get bored sometimes?”
He shook his head. “It’s what I like doing. I never get bored.”
Presently they went down into the little cabin and began to fry the steaks over the oil stove, with a few potatoes sliced. “One day if you get to Australia, I’ll show you how a steak ought to be cooked,” he said.
She smiled. “How’s that?”
“Grilled, over a fire of gum tree twigs. It’s very quick.” He paused. “It’s the best way in the world to cook a steak, and so far as I know you can only do it in Australia.” He turned to her. “It’s like sugaring in Canada.”
“What’s that?”
“You go up through the snow on skis to a little hut in the woods, and there you find an old man boiling down the sap out of the maple tree to make maple syrup.” He told her all about it as they cooked their dinner, the bright snow, the bright sun, the wood fire under the evaporating pan, and the heavenly smell. “All countries have one taste or smell that others can’t equal,” he told her. “Grilled steaks are Australia to me. Sugaring is Canada.”
Presently they took their plates and sat down at the little table to eat their meal, one on each side of the cabin. They topped up with bread and honey, and with a mug of coffee made out of a tin; then in the warmth and intimacy of the little lamplit room they sat smoking together.
“The Prince said one thing that I didn’t understand,” he told her presently. “When they came to see the aeroplanes. He said, if Frank Cox was away and something happened at White Waltham that I couldn’t handle, I was to get in touch with him at once.” He paused. “What do you think he meant?”
She smiled at him. “Just what he said, Nigger.”
“What sort of thing?”
She opened her eyes wide. “He didn’t tell me.”
He laughed. “All right, you win. I suppose I can put two and two together for myself.”
“I expect you can,” she said. “You won’t get far upon that flight from Gambia to Cyprus and White Waltham unless you can do that.”
She stayed till about half past nine, and then made off for the shore in her dinghy. David watched her rowing off in the bright moonlight, thinking how well she managed her boat, how well her job.
He went ashore for breakfast with her and helped her with the business of putting her dinghy away for the winter. Then they sailed in Nicolette for Hamble, passing down the long channels of the harbour under sail this time with Rosemary on board as pilot, out through the entrance and straight out to sea over the bar, finally bearing away towards the forts at Spithead at the entrance to the Solent, with a light southerly breeze. All day they sailed together in close contact of a little yacht, doing the thing that they both loved to do, happy together.
They passed into the Hamble River at about five o’clock, and took down sail and put the sail covers on as they motored up the river to the mooring. By quarter to six they were on shore packing their luggage into the little car. They had a snack meal at the Bugle Inn upon the foreshore. While they were eating, David said, “We never saw Judy Marsh in Red Coral. What about going to see that before you go to Canada?”
She hesitated. “When could we go? I can’t tomorrow night, or Friday. I’m going home this week end.”
“I’ve got this trial — the Gambia affair.” He thought for a moment. “I’d better get to bed early on Tuesday. Wednesday, Bathurst, and I’ll probably be a bit tired on Thursday night.”
“I should think you might be,” she said drily. “It would have to be next week, but we go off on Wednesday.”
“What about Monday?”
“I should think Monday would be all right,” she said thoughtfully. “Will you ring me at the Palace about lunch time? If there’s an awful lot of work before we go, I might have to wash it out, David. You’d understand that, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll get seats anyway, and ring you lunch time on Monday.”
He drove her up to London and deposited her outside her flat in Dover Street, still in her salt-spotted blue jeans and rough blue jersey. She asked him in, but he refused that, thinking that she had to work next day and ought to get to bed. He drove back to Maidenhead in a dream, and thought of nothing else but Rosemary all night.
That week, with Frank Cox in command and carrying the Canadian crew as passengers, David flew Tare from London to Bathurst in five hours. They stayed, as usual, in the R.A.F. station for the night having refuelled the machine and loaded up with pineapples for private use. They took off at dawn next day and flew to Cyprus in about five and a half hours, turned over Nicosia, and landed back at their home aerodrome in England at tea time, with nothing particular the matter with the aeroplane.
He cruised alone in the Solent that week end and found it cold and lonely.
He picked up Rosemary on Monday evening and gave her a couple of pineapples in spite of her protests that she wouldn’t have time to eat them before leaving for Canada. “You can try,” he said firmly. “I brought them from Bathurst specially for you, and I’m not going to have them thrown back in my face.” They went and dined at the R.A.C., and this time having no confidential business to discuss the dinner was a success. They went on to the movies to see Judy Marsh in Red Coral and sat very close together for two hours.
Coming out, he said, “You don’t have to go home yet, do you? Let’s go to the Dorchester and dance.” So they went up to the Dorchester and danced together for the first time, and enjoyed it, and laughed a great deal, till the orchestra played God Save the Queen and woke them to the realization that it was two in the morning.
He drove her back to Dover Street in his small car and parked outside the entrance to her flat; for a time they sat talking in the car, reluctant to break it up. “I have enjoyed this evening, David,” she said. “It’s been fun, every minute of it. It was sweet of you to take me.”
“Pity it’s going to be some time before we can do another,” he said. “How long is she staying over in Canada?”
“About a month,” she said. “I don’t know the exact date when we come back, but it’s before December the twentieth anyway, because her appointments start again here then. It’s not so long.”
“I’ll probably be in Singapore or in Nairobi,” he said gloomily. “Charles will want to go and shoot an elephant or something.”
She laughed. “He’s got to stay at home and hold the fort,” she said. “He’s not allowed to go away.”
“Will you have dinner with me when you get back?” he asked. “Th
e first free night, and tell me all about it?”
“I’ll have dinner with you, Nigger,” she said, “but I don’t suppose I’ll tell you all about it. I never met such a nosey man as you are.”
“I don’t mean what the Queen did,” he said. “I’m not interested in that. I mean, what you did.”
“I can tell you that now,” she said. “I sat in an office and took letters down for Major Macmahon, and typed them out, and put them on his desk for him to sign. Eight hours a day, when it wasn’t ten.”
“Doesn’t he ever give you a holiday?”
“I get three weeks’ holiday a year,” she said. “Sometimes Major Macmahon gets a bilious attack and then there usually isn’t any work to do. That’s an extra. They don’t make me count it as a day of my three weeks.”
“Perhaps he’ll get a bilious attack over in Canada. Canadian food is full of grease and calories.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
He was very conscious of her close beside him in the little car. “What sort of scent is that you’re using?”
“Bonne Nuit,” she said. “It’s French. It means Good Night.”
“Fancy!” he said.
She stirred a little and reached for the door. “I’m not going to sit here talking about my scent at three in the morning when I’m going away tomorrow,” she said. “You can raise the matter again when I get back if you’re still interested.”
He got out and walked round the car, and helped her out on to the pavement. They stood together in deserted Dover Street in the pale moonlight. “I’ll remember that,” he said. “I’ll write it down in my little book.”
She said, “I expect you’ll have more to tell me when I get back than I have to tell you.”
“And how,” he said. “More than you bargain for.”
She laughed a little self-consciously, and moved towards her door, fumbling in her bag for the key. She found it and unlocked the door, and stood for a moment in the doorway.
“Look after yourself, Nigger,” she said. “And thanks again for such a lovely evening.”
“Thank you for everything,” he said quietly. She paused, uncertain, on the threshold for a moment; then she went inside and the door closed behind her.
On the Wednesday the Queen left for Canada. The Press and the newsreel cameras were at White Waltham very early, photographing the machine and the Canadian crew. The minor members of the entourage arrived in several cars, amongst them Rosemary who waved to David as she passed into the aircraft. Finally at ten o’clock the Royal car arrived carrying the Queen and the Consort, and followed by two other cars, one bringing the Prince and Princess of Wales and their two boys, the other bringing the Princess Royal with her husband, the Duke of Havant, and little Alexandra. There were a few minutes of Royal leavetaking and then the Queen went up the three steps into the fuselage, followed by the Consort and escorted by Frank Cox.
Dewar was waiting at the door to welcome them; in the cockpit Johnnie Clare, the second pilot, broke out the Royal Standard at the mast at the exact moment that the Queen entered the machine, while cameras whirred and clicked outside. The door closed, and presently the machine moved forward on the taxi track towards the runway’s end. The Ceres lined up on the runway, the mast and standard sank down into the fuselage, the outboard engines started, and then it was accelerating smoothly with the white plumes from the rockets leaving a long trail behind. It was airborne very quickly and the undercarriage disappeared into the wing; it put its nose up in a great climbing turn and vanished into the clouds towards the north.
David was left in charge upon the aerodrome. He escorted the Prince and the Princess back to their cars and answered a few questions from their children. Then they drove off, and he was left to cope with the reporters, some of whom had been perplexed by the direction the machine had taken. He got rid of them after an hour or so, and settled down into the uneventful routine of the Queen’s Flight, waiting for a job to do.
The Trades Union Congress met at Blackpool for their annual conference next week end, and gave him something to think about. For some years past it had been usual for the more violent elements of the T.U.C. to rail against the size of the Civil List and the general expense of the Royal Family to the country, a method of blowing off steam which wounded nobody’s feelings except those of the Family, who had no votes to be endangered and so didn’t matter. It was undoubtedly the case that in the past the accumulation of Royal Palaces in England had represented a very minor extravagance for an impoverished country, but one by one the less essential ones had been eliminated from the List by making them self-supporting in a fitting and a gracious manner as in the case of Sandringham, the permanent headquarters of the Commonwealth Co-ordination Council. Those which remained were fully used by various offices connected with diplomacy, which could not be reduced, or with the Royal Family, and the fact that they were paid for out of the Civil List was a matter of historical interest rather than evidence of Royal extravagance.
However, any stick does to beat a dog, and for years a section of the T.U.C. had harped upon this theme. This year a fresh note was added to the melody. David Anderson, opening his newspaper one morning to read the comic strip, found that a Mr. Andrew Duncan of the National Union of Blastfurnacemen had made a stinging speech about White Waltham aerodrome. This aerodrome, declared Mr. Duncan, comprised about twelve hundred acres of the soil of England, the property of the British people. At present it was reserved for the use of the Royal Family, who did not use it more than once or twice a year, and whose huge aeroplanes were wastefully maintained there at a vast expense; he did not say at whose expense that was. The Royal Family were keeping this land for their selfish pleasures, but if the land were freed from their tyrannical grasp and handed back to the People, it could be farmed and made to produce food to support four hundred working families. Four hundred families, said Mr. Duncan, were going hungry, eight hundred undernourished, pale-faced children were pitifully crying for the crust of bread that was not there, in order that these pampered aristocrats, these relics of an effete, outdated feudalism, might stamp upon their faces. It made his blood boil, said Mr. Duncan.
It made David’s blood boil, too, when he thought of the two thousand sheep that fouled the runways and the tarmac and had to be laboriously herded to one side before the Royal aircraft could take off or land. White Waltham in the second war had been a training aerodrome; in the third war it had been expanded for operational use and it was held by the Air Ministry as a reserve field for Bomber Command. He knew that Frank Cox had had particular instructions from the Consort about the grazing; the sheep had first rights on that aerodrome, and the aeroplanes came a long way behind.
Blood, in fact, boiled freely over White Waltham, and before the day was out the aerodrome had become a serious political issue. No less than four speakers took the matter up, some vehement and some, the more effective, grieved that the Monarchy should have sunk so low. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Air were both present but said nothing to reveal the true position of the airfield to the Congress; perhaps they did not know it. Finally Lord Coles got up and assured the Congress that the matter would be looked into, and that suitable action would be taken. Mr. Iorwerth Jones said nothing.
David went out to go to White Waltham, and on the way bought all the other newspapers that he could find. The Daily Telegraph in a first editorial said roundly that the whole thing was a Socialist plot to discredit the Royal Family, and disclosed the fact that 744 fat lambs had been sold off White Waltham aerodrome in the last calendar year, one for each of Mr. Duncan’s starving children. The Times deplored the use of the Royal Family for political purposes, and did little else. The Daily Herald said that whatever the merits or demerits of White Waltham aerodrome, it was beyond all question that the working man could no longer afford the annual expenses of Buckingham Palace or Windsor. St. James’s Palace, said the leader writer, was the historic one and was quite sufficient for the Royal Resid
ence. All other Royal palaces, castles, or houses in the country should be put to some remunerative use, or be turned over to the Ministry of Works to house some overcrowded Government department.
In the office David pored over these leading articles, with Dick Ryder, his second pilot, looking over his shoulder. “They don’t like us much,” he said at last.
The younger man shook his head. “Looks like they’re going to winkle us out of here,” he said. “Where do you think we’ll go?”
“God knows. One of the R.A.F. aerodromes, probably.”
“We’d have to get permission from the R.A.F. for every flight then, wouldn’t we?”
David stared at him. “Theoretically, I suppose we should. They couldn’t interfere with us, though.”
“They hate us like hell,” said Ryder. “I believe they could.”
“The R.A.F. don’t hate us.”
“Lord Coles and the Prime Minister do. The R.A.F. would have to do as they were told, if we were on their aerodrome.”
David sat in silence for a minute. “I hadn’t thought about that one,” he said. “Do you think that’s behind it?”
“Could be. Whatever is behind it, anyway, it’s not because they like having us here, or want to make our job any the easier.”
David turned to the papers again. “My God,” he said, “there’ll be a stink at home if they touch Buckingham Palace or Windsor.”
“Of course there will,” the second pilot said. “But they don’t think of that. They see it as an English problem, that’s no business of Australia. I don’t believe they think of us at all when they decide these things.”
David nodded. “No reason why they should. Half of them don’t know where Australia is.”
He spent the morning upon nominal duties, and left for London at about noon, having Frank Cox’s office in St. James’s Palace to look after as well as his own. He lunched at the R.A.C. and walked down Pall Mall after lunch to the Palace, and in the two small rooms that opened on to Engine Court he set to work with the girl secretary to deal with the correspondence. At about half past three the telephone rang; the girl answered it and handed it to him. It was Miss Porson, speaking from the Palace.
