by Nevil Shute
The pilot came to life about an hour before sunset and got up, put on a clean tropical suit, and went into the tiny mess room. He found Flight Lieutenant Vary in consultation with the Filipino cook boy, trying to concoct a dinner worthy of the Royal entourage. It was a task that might have daunted a better caterer than Vary, but he was tackling it with enthusiasm. “I thought we’d start off with crayfish mayonnaise,” he said. “We’ve got some tins of crayfish, and some tinned tomatoes, and we’ve got some real lettuces. We’ve killed a couple of chickens and we’ll have those for the main course, with tinned peas and sweet potatoes. And after that, Aguinaldo knows a wizard sweet made of young coconut, ice cream, and crème de menthe.”
“Don’t bother to push out the boat for us,” the wing commander said. “We’ll eat what you eat normally.”
The boy looked disappointed. “It’s not much trouble,” he said. “I’d like to try and do things properly, for once. It isn’t often that one sees a girl like Gillian Foster in a mess like this. Do you know, she comes from Shepparton — her people have a station there, and I’m from Swan Hill, only a hundred and twenty miles from where she lives. Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?”
It was obviously such a pleasure to him to try and put on a good dinner that David said no more to damp the project, but praised his work. “They’ve got a lot of Chinese lanterns in the store that they bring out for Christmas Day,” Vary said. “I wasn’t here last Christmas, but I’ve seen them. Do you think that’s a good idea?”
Rosemary came into the mess with Gillian Foster and they discussed the Chinese lanterns and decided to have one to shroud the naked bulb that dangled above the table on its length of flex. The stewardess went off to the District Officer’s house to see about her duties over there, and as the sun sank to the horizon David and Rosemary walked along the shore at the head of the beach. They laughed a little together about Mr. Vary. “He’s taking this dinner very seriously,” the girl said. “We must show that we enjoy it. He’s going to such a lot of trouble.”
“He’s having a marvellous time,” the pilot said. “I know what it is. I spent six months once on Keeling Cocos Islands, but this one’s worse. I’d never want to have a job like that again.”
They strolled slowly through the grove of casuarina trees that fringed the sand of the lagoon. The lagoon was roughly square in shape. Two coral reefs ran out from the mainland to the north and to the south, covered in sand and coconut trees, and these formed the entrance to the lagoon facing to the west; in the entrance gap was a small coral island. “That’s Cook Island,” said the pilot. “Captain Cook discovered this place on Christmas Eve — that’s why it’s called Christmas Island.” He paused. “You see the two points of land on each side of the entrance? The north one — that one — that’s called London. The other one, the south one, that’s called Paris.”
“Who called them that, Nigger?”
“I don’t know. They’re always called London and Paris. Someone who was stationed here, I suppose.”
“He must have been very lonely,” she said.
“Yes. I dare say he was. It’s bad enough now there’s an airstrip here. It must have been lonely here before.”
They strolled on, and now they were in sight of the District Officer’s house. Strolling towards them were another couple, arm in arm, a tall, slight, grey-haired man and a short, plumpish woman in late middle age, both dressed in tropical white. The pilot said, “Look. Had we better go back?”
Rosemary said, “No. Just walk past naturally, Nigger.”
The Queen stopped as they came up and said, “Good evening, Captain. Good evening, Miss Long. Isn’t this a beautiful place?”
“I think it’s simply lovely,” said the girl. The pilot smiled. “I’ve been telling Rosemary about London and Paris, madam,” he said.
“London and Paris?”
He explained the names and the Queen laughed. “How absurd!” She asked about the accommodation. “I do hope everybody’s going to be comfortable,” she said. “I’ve been feeling rather bad about it — the accommodation. It’s all right for us, of course. We’ve got the dearest little house.”
Rosemary said, “I think everybody’s very happy, madam. Everyone I’ve spoken to seems to be enjoying it so far.”
David said, “The R.A.A.F. are perfectly delighted.”
“I am so glad. I wish we could see more of these small places. I don’t think any of my family have ever been here, even when it was British.”
Rosemary asked, “When did it become Australian? I’m afraid I thought up till yesterday that it was British.”
“1961,” the Queen said. “Nine years after I came to the throne. We transferred all the Line Islands to Australia in 1961. It makes a much more sensible arrangement.” She paused, and then she said, “Do either of you two play tennis?”
Rosemary hesitated, and then said, “I’m an awful rabbit.”
“I play a bit,” the pilot said. “For fun.”
“I expect you’re much better than we are,” the Queen replied. “We discovered four tennis racquets in the house. Two of them have got broken strings, and they’re all a bit soft; I suppose that’s the climate. Would you two like to come and try a set or two with us tomorrow evening?”
“We’d love to,” said Rosemary.
“Oh, that will be nice. Say about half past four. That will give us about an hour and a half before sunset. I always think that one should try and take some exercise each day when one is in the tropics. But it’s so seldom possible to do it.”
They parted, and strolled on in different directions. For a time David and Rosemary walked together in silence. “She’s such a human little woman,” the girl said at last. “It’s bad luck, having a job like hers.”
In the dusk they turned and walked back to the mess. Dinner was arranged for seven o’clock in order that Gillian Foster could get over to the District Officer’s house to help to serve the meal there at eight o’clock. It was a very merry dinner in the mess, with Australian sherry, Australian claret, and Australian port. Under the Chinese lantern the thick plates and the service cutlery looked almost delicate, and the crayfish mayonnaise made by the Filipino boy was delicious, if rather heavily spiced to hide the slight metallic taste. Rosemary said crayfish disagreed with her, and didn’t have any. They drank the health of the Queen with more sincerity, perhaps, than usual in a mess, and then Frank Cox proposed the health of the Mess President for the good dinner. There was nothing much to do after they had finished eating except to sit out on the verandah and talk, looking out over the lagoon in the bright moonlight. Everyone was tired with the long day and the flight from Ottawa; one by one they made excuses and slipped away. By half past nine David was in bed.
In the middle of the night the pilot had a horrible dream.
He dreamed that he was dying. It seemed to him that he was lying on a bed in a dark room, and he was very cold and sweating at the same time. He had an appalling, tearing pain in his abdomen and his legs seemed to be paralyzed, and everything about him stank. His body stank of stale sweat, the bed stank of dirty linen, and there was a vile, unnatural flavour in his mouth and nose. He knew in some way that this disgusting fragrance could relieve his pain and he struggled feebly to move his hands to renew it, but no motion came to his muscles. He knew that whiskey hot and burning in his throat would ease the pain and quench the filthy stink that he was lying in, and he struggled to ask for whiskey but no sound would come, for he was practically dead.
There was a man sitting by the bedside and holding his hand, and this man was out of his mind. His hand was as hot as David’s was cold, and both were sweating freely so that it was as if they were holding hands beneath the water. This man was ill and wandering in his mind; he was a priest, too, and a good cobber who got beds for fellows with bad ears, but he was away out of his mind now and wandering in a crazy world of harps and angel’s wings.
There was a woman there, a sister from a hospital who could do n
othing to relieve his pain because a crocodile had eaten her medicine case, and so she had gone to sleep; she sat there at the table with her head upon her arms, and he was left alone with the mad priest in the darkness. The place that he was in was a tumbledown house or shack upon an island in the middle of great floods and all the animals in the world had come through the darkness and the floods, running and creeping and hopping and crawling to this small place in the wilderness. They had come because death is a great mystery and animals are curious about the mystery as well as men, so they had come to see him die. There they were, grouped in a circle round the house in the intermittent moonlight, and they were getting closer every minute because there was nobody but a mad priest awake in the house, and they were not afraid of him. Presently, when he died, they would come into the room to watch him die; he would know the moment when they came into the room, and they were getting closer every minute. The tearing, tearing pain.
Animals were right. Cobbers they could be sometimes; they never did you any harm unless you went for them. Two hundred and thirty horses at Wonamboola station he had had; dumb brutes but they never called you Pisspot, only if they got frightened they might go wild on you and hurt you without meaning. He wasn’t afraid of animals; let them come into the room and watch him die if they wanted. Sooner the better. His body was contorted once again with the intolerable pain.
In the darkness there was a glow of light, like a bloke that might be holding half an inch of candle in a saucer, where the edge of the saucer hid the candle and the flame and you could only see the glow. And in this glow there was a face, yellow and wrinkled, the face of an old Chinaman floating in the air before his eyes. The face floated before his eyes in the darkness, and the lips moved, and they said, “You want a pipe, Stevie?”
The words somehow meant relief. He tried to speak but no sound came; he looked imploringly into the eyes, and the face said, “Or-right, I get you pipe.” There was a period then, while some familiar movements were going on quite close to him that promised a relief from pain, and then the vile fragrance that he welcomed was upon him once again, and in his mouth, and in the back of his nose. Now he could relax, free from the pain. Now he could turn to the dream, England, and Ratmalana, and Fairbairn aerodrome at Canberra, all across the world, backwards and forwards, all across the world and carrying the Queen. Christmas Island in the middle of the Pacific, and being in love.
Christmas Island. The pain hit him like a blow, and he opened his eyes, groaning and muttering with the pain. He was in a strange room that he did not recognize, but it was different to the hut in the middle of the floods, and there was moonlight in the room, and a glow of electric light under the door. Through the thin partition he heard a voice say, “Somebody else is having trouble in here. Who’s sleeping in this one?”
He heard Rosemary say, “That’s Wing Commander Anderson.”
The door opened and the light was switched on, and he sat up in bed, his stomach cramped and tense with pain. Dr. Mitchison in his pyjamas stood in the door, with Rosemary in her dressing gown behind him. The doctor said, “Are you feeling all right?”
“By God I’m not,” the pilot said. “I’m feeling awful.”
“Stay there a minute, and I’ll get you something.” The doctor vanished up the corridor, and Rosemary stood in the doorway looking at him, and she was laughing; even in his pain he thought how charming in her dressing gown she looked. “What’s happening?” he asked.
She said, “It’s the crayfish, I think, Nigger. Everybody’s been in trouble except me — I didn’t have any. It must have been a bad tin.”
He licked his lips to try to clear the foul taste from his mouth. “I had an awful dream,” he muttered.
“What about?”
“I don’t know. I was dying in a hut with a mad priest, and a crocodile had eaten all the medicines.” The doctor came back carrying a tumbler half full of water with a white powder in it, that he was stirring with the handle of a toothbrush. “Drink this,” he said. “If it makes you sick, come along at once and I’ll give you some more.”
The pilot took it from him. “What is it?”
“Diazentothene. It’ll put you right if you can keep it down.”
He drank, and handed the glass back to the doctor, who went out quickly to another patient. David said to Rosemary, “Do you say everyone’s like this?”
“Everyone who ate the crayfish. It’s ptomaine poisoning or something. Mr. Vary and Miss Turnbull are the worst, Nigger. They’re really bad.”
Nausea seized him, and he got quickly out of bed. “I’m another one,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to run.”
Nobody in the officers’ quarters got much more sleep that night, except Rosemary who went back to bed after an hour or two when everything was under control. It was a white and shaken party that crept out on to the verandah one by one next morning as the bedrooms grew too hot to occupy with comfort; they sat in deck chairs in the shade in the breeze in the lightest of clothing, gradually recovering. Rosemary went up and reported their troubles to Major Macmahon at the District Officer’s house, who came down to see them. There was nothing to be done except to let nature and modern drugs take their course. Most of the party lunched on diazentothene and brandy, though the stronger ones pecked at a milk pudding. Rosemary finished up the cold chicken.
David felt better after lunch. He dressed in a clean tropical uniform and went out in the utility to the airstrip to inspect the aeroplane and see that everything was in order there. He came back to the mess at about four o’clock and found Rosemary sitting on the verandah alone. “I went up to the District Officer’s house and saw Philip,” she said. “I asked if we could be excused from tennis, and he said we’d have the mixed doubles tomorrow. I was wondering how you’d feel about a bathe.”
“I’m feeling all right now,” he said. “I’d like a bathe.” So they changed in their rooms and walked down to the beach, and lay together in the lukewarm water on the silvery white sand. There were reported to be sharks in the lagoon from time to time, and so they did not venture far from the shore.
A quarter of a mile up the beach to the north of them were three or four men of the R.A.A.F. detachment bathing in the shallows. A quarter of a mile to the south of them in front of the District Officer’s house a small shade had been created at the head of the beach by slinging a tent fly between the casuarina trees, and in this patch of shade a middle-aged woman and her husband were sitting in bathing dresses in deck chairs. They had evidently been bathing, because their towels hung draped upon the ropes supporting the tent fly, but now they were just sitting together, looking out over the lagoon.
David rolled over in the water, and looked at them, and said, “I wonder what they’re talking about.”
“England,” said Rosemary. “I wonder if this is a good place to make decisions about England?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
She turned to him in the water. “It’s too lovely, I mean, just look at it.” She glanced around at the blue, sparkling sea, the white beaches, the olive green groves of the coconut palms. “It’s like something out of a theatrical set. England is grey industrial cities — Leeds and Bradford, Newcastle and Birmingham. That’s the England that really counts, and it’s got nothing in common whatsoever with a place like this. Do you think that one could make a sound decision on what’s best for Manchester, on Christmas Island?”
He glanced at her, and his glance strayed for a moment to her white skin, and the soft curves of her figure. He recalled himself to the subject under discussion. “She hasn’t got to decide what’s best for Manchester,” he said. “She’s got to decide what’s best for the Commonwealth. Quite a lot of the Commonwealth consists of places like this — England’s only just a little bit of it.” He paused. “And anyway, she can’t sit and think quietly anywhere else, without being badgered all day.”
“I know,” she said. She turned to him. “I went up there this morning to see Major Macm
ahon, and I asked if there was anything that I could do — washing or ironing her clothes or anything like that while Gillian Foster and the maid are ill. He said he didn’t think she wanted anything, or to be bothered at all. She was sitting out there on the beach with Philip all this morning, and she’s been there all this afternoon.”
“We’ll know someday what it’s all about,” he said. “Forget about it now.” He glanced again at her fair skin, now flushed a little. “You’re burning,” he said. “You’ll be badly burned if we stay out in this sun. Let’s get into the shade.”
She looked down at her arms and legs. “I suppose I ought to. I’m not used to this.” And then she looked at him. “You’re much browner.”
“Too right,” he said equably.
“I didn’t mean that, David,” she said. “You’re sunburnt too, aren’t you?”
He glanced down at his body. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think this is about as pale as I ever get. It’s nearly a year since I left Australia. I go a lot darker than this in the summer, if I do a lot of bathing or sunbathing.”
“You’re looking disgustingly well now, anyway,” she laughed. “You’re looking just like an Englishman who’s come back from a summer holiday in the south of France.”
“Permanent sunburn,” he replied. “I can recommend it. Won’t come off.” He glanced at her. “You’re like something off the lid of a chocolate box.”
She laughed. “Anyway, nobody would think to look at you that you’d been writhing in agony twelve hours ago.”
“My word,” he said. “I was crook. The things I dreamed about!”
