by Nevil Shute
I had a cup of coffee and a plate of sandwiches with him in the pilots’ room, because I had missed my breakfast on the Viscount through sitting up front talking to him. As we sat together we glanced over the morning papers. There was a case going on in England against an unmarried girl and the newspapers were full of it in all its details. Essentially, it was quite a simple matter. The girl had borne an illegitimate baby. Wanting to get rid of it, she had left it on the steps of a Foundling Hospital in the traditional style; she had done that about midnight to escape attention. It was in a little basket with one thin cloth over it. It snowed in the early hours and then froze hard; when they found it in the morning it was dead from exposure. They were trying the girl for murder.
‘Looks like they’ll pin it on her,’ Ronnie said. ‘But she’ll get a reprieve.’
‘I hope she doesn’t,’ I said bitterly. ‘I hope she bloody well hangs.’ It ought to have been me, of course, and I should have hung, too, for I had gone to India.
‘That seems a bit severe,’ he said mildly.
I threw down the paper, for it had upset me. When you do a thing like that it’s done for ever, and you can’t undo it. You’ve got to live with your guilt for the rest of your life, even if no one ever knows. ‘People who do that sort of thing to their illegitimate kids ought to hang,’ I said vehemently. ‘The kids have a hard enough row to hoe anyway, without being neglected. Without being just chucked away in the gutter because their parents don’t want them. I hope they throw the whole book at that bloody girl.’ As, of course, they should have thrown the book at me.
He didn’t answer that outburst, but turned the page. I sat gradually collecting myself, recovering from my temper and my shame. I lit a cigarette and sat staring at the runways outside the window, at a Skymaster taking off and a Dakota coming in. If Ronnie Clarke knew about Brenda and myself I had probably told him a bit more, but I didn’t really care. He was a very old friend now, and there are some things that a friend ought to know.
I left him presently, and went back to the AusCan office over the road. We landed back at Nandi about ten o’clock that night, and I was very glad to be there, hot and humid though it was after the southern spring. I walked up from the terminal buildings to the hostel. There was a light on in her room and I thought perhaps she might come out and talk to me, and so I went and had a whisky at the bar and sat for half an hour looking at the ancient magazines that I had seen before. But she must have been too far towards her bed because she didn’t come, and presently I went to bed myself, thinking of the photographs that I would have to show her in three days’ time at Honolulu.
I showed them to her next week, sitting on the terrace of the Edgewater Hotel with our soft drinks. She was very interested, as I thought she would be, and examined each of them quite closely. I showed her the alterations I had made to the design of the house upon the enlargement of the photographed plan. ‘The kitchen’s quite a decent size,’ she remarked. ‘Twelve feet by fourteen feet – from here to that chair …’ She measured with her eye. ‘That ought to be big enough. The lounge doesn’t look to be much bigger than that, though.’
‘Fourteen feet square,’ I said. ‘It’s easy to keep a room that size warm.’
‘It’s not very big. And then you’ve got a great big bedroom.’
‘I like a big bedroom,’ I said. ‘And you haven’t got to keep that warm.’
‘I suppose not. And one tiny little spare room.’
‘I’m not expecting visitors,’ I said. ‘Something had to be cut down, so I cut that.’
She turned to the other photographs. ‘It’s a pretty little place, I should think. What do they do there?’
‘They farm,’ I told her. ‘Mostly sheep and beef cattle. It’s a bit far from a town for dairying. Some of them do that, but not very many. They used to have a market there at one time, but now everybody sells at Devonport.’
‘What happens if you get ill?’ she asked. ‘Is there a doctor there?’
‘There isn’t yet,’ I told her, ‘but they say that there’s one coming. A young chap just qualified. He’s going to put up his plate after the New Year. But anyway, I don’t intend to get ill.’
She laughed. ‘Nobody ever does.’
I offered her a cigarette and lit it for her. ‘You’ve got it all worked out,’ she said presently. ‘You’re going to get the sort of a retirement that will suit you best, I think. You’d never be really happy now away from flying, would you?’
‘I don’t think I should,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been at it so long.’
‘I know. I wish you weren’t starting in quite such a new place. It’s going to be lonely for you, just at first.’
It was the second time that she had said that. ‘I make friends fairly easily,’ I said. ‘As a matter of fact, I know some people in Melbourne, and I shall be going over there fairly often, I expect.’
She glanced at me, surprised. ‘Who do you know in Melbourne – besides me?’
‘A chap called Ronnie Clarke,’ I said. I went on to tell her about Ronnie, how I had taught him to fly back in England in the dark ages, how I had bumped up against him in the small world of aviation throughout my life, how I had travelled in the cockpit of his Viscount with him from Essendon to Sydney. ‘It was good meeting Ronnie again,’ I said. ‘I always liked him. He’s a trout fisherman, too.’
She smiled. ‘It must be funny, flying with somebody you taught to fly yourself.’
‘He was born to be a pilot,’ I told her. ‘Never wanted to be anything else, right from the start.’
She went on leave soon after I got back, and when she was away I had time to think things over. She was right in saying that I should be lonely when I went to Buxton, but not the way she meant. I wasn’t a bit afraid of being lonely for the company of men. I had lived for so long with men alone that making friends came naturally to me. In the saloon bar or the golf club I got on all right with people; I suppose I was good company, for I was never without friends. I should be lonely all right, because when I left AusCan a close friendship that I had grown to depend on would be interrupted, probably for good. I should be lonely, very lonely indeed, but my loneliness would be for her.
In that week I faced up to what would happen if I asked her to marry me, with all its implications. I knew it was a silly thing to do at my age, and I knew that she would probably laugh it off, and there would be an end of the companionship that meant so much to me. For that reason I must put it off till I was nearly out of AusCan, in fairness to both of us. Yet if I didn’t do it, this companionship must come to an end anyway when I retired, and I should be left kicking myself for a fool that I hadn’t reached out to take the love she might have offered me.
It would have been an easy decision to make for I didn’t stand to lose much either way, but for one thing. I didn’t particularly want her as a woman, and I had never made love to her. That was very serious indeed. It was my age, I thought; I was still fit and virile but I was just on sixty years old and my interests were probably beginning to wane. Yet if I married her, a woman in her middle twenties, she had a right to have a family, and I must marry her with that intention or else leave her alone. The thought of bringing up an adolescent family when I was nearing the age of eighty and probably hard-up rocked me a bit, but that was what I had to face if I went on with this. On the other hand, I was one of the fittest men of sixty in the world; they could not fault me at the medical examination I took every three months. At sixty I still had the physique of an average man of forty. If I went on like this, at eighty I might still have the physique of a man of sixty, able to enjoy the vagaries of adolescent children. It would be a new experience for me and one that I looked forward to in a way; new experiences keep one young.
By the end of the week I had come to the conclusion that I must try my luck. If she accepted me, it would be an unusual marriage, but there was no earthly reason why it shouldn’t turn out very happily for both of us. If she didn’t, well that would b
e too bad, but not so bad as failing without ever trying. I would do it about Christmas time, I thought. That would leave a month before I retired from AusCan and left Nandi for good, and my crew broke up. She might well want time to think about so unusual a proposal, and that month would give her all the time she needed to make up her mind before we had to separate. If she refused me, as she probably would, a month of awkwardness would lie before us, but only a month; there was an end to it.
She came back from her leave and we went on doing things together in Honolulu every week. It wasn’t quite the same, because now there were fresh circumstances of my retirement in my mind that I couldn’t possibly discuss with her till this got straightened out; I was very conscious of evasions and constraints that had not been there before. We enjoyed our days together, perhaps more than ever, but there was no doubt that our relationship was changing. Once or twice I caught her looking at me with a sort of wonder, and in turn I wondered how much she knew.
The weather in Fiji got very hot and sticky in December; it rained almost every day and on some days even walking from the hostel to the terminal brought us out in a sweat, fit though we were. Our day in Honolulu then was a real relief; it was much cooler there. At Nandi I cut down the tennis; three sets was trying for us men on some days and altogether too much for the girls. The object was to keep us on the top line for flying all night through, and that wasn’t achieved by sheer exhaustion in the afternoon. Instead of tennis on the worst days, I made them all go swimming at Saweni beach, and when they got there I made sure that they did swim and swim reasonably long distances. I wasn’t going to have them all getting potbellied just because it was the monsoon season.
Saweni is a very lovely little land-locked bay half way between the airport and Lautoka. It used to be a seaplane station in the Second War but it has been out of use since then; only a concrete slipway shows now where the Catalinas were pulled up. It has a long, gently shelving coral beach that runs down into clear, calm water; coconut trees shade the shore and grow right down on to the beach, so that they lean out over the sea. There are shelters for men and for women to change in; at the weekend it tends to be crowded, but on week-days there is seldom anybody there except the aircrews like ourselves.
I used to take them down there in one of the AusCan station waggons for their disciplinary swim, or else Pat Petersen would drive them. I had a half share in a little Austin car myself at that time. Jim Hanson and I owned it together, and as we were only at Nandi together for two days in each week the joint ownership worked very well. Sometimes I used to go down in that and so be independent of the crew.
We landed in from Honolulu on Friday morning just before Christmas. It had been a tiring and a troublesome flight through monsoon weather all the way from Canton. The thunderheads were up to forty thousand feet so we had to go through the stuff and there were quite a lot of electrical discharges at times all around us. I had to reduce speed to under two hundred knots in the turbulence and once I went down as low as three thousand feet in an attempt to get through underneath it. There was never any danger, of course, because the aircraft was all right and Canton was in the clear behind us, but a lot of the passengers were sick and the hostesses had quite a busy time. Nobody got any sleep that night, of course, and when we came to Nandi it was in a cloudburst. The Control kept us in the holding position for a quarter of an hour before they brought us in, and when we finally put down we had been in the air for nearly fifteen hours.
It was like a Turkish bath out on the tarmac. We were all tired but not unreasonably so, because that’s what the tennis is for. The girls had had the worst of it, and they were looking white and strained. When we had cleared and handed over to the fresh crew in the office I told them we’d all go down to the beach at three o’clock if it was reasonably fine, and fixed up for the station waggon to be at the hostel for us then.
I walked up to the hostel with my senior hostess. It was hot and steamy, but the frangipani was fragrant in the rain. ‘Nice to be out in the fresh air, anyway,’ she said once. ‘I’m tired of vomit.’
‘Get a bit of sleep and then a swim,’ I replied. And then I said, ‘I tell you what. Would you like to stay down on the beach this evening if it’s fine, and have a supper picnic?’
‘Not everyone? Just us?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the cook to make us up a supper. Something cold and light. Crayfish salad and ice cream, and a bottle of hock.’
She smiled. ‘That’d be marvellous. But it’ll probably rain.’
‘I don’t think it will,’ I told her. ‘The Met say this one’s passing, and we’re going to get a spell.’
It was very lovely on the beach that evening. The clouds had cleared away but for a storm down on the horizon, and the sun set in a clear sky. The crew went back to Nandi in the station waggon and we stayed on upon the beach, alone but for another party of four about a couple of hundred yards away. We sat on the white, coarse sand in our bathing things luxuriating in the coolness and the beauty of it all, enjoying the little whispers of warm wind about our bodies after the strain and effort of the night. I undid our supper and the bottle of chilled hock wrapped in a wet cloth, and we ate together in the fading light. A coconut fell once with a plump on to the sand only a few yards away from us, and a little Fijian girl appeared out of the shadows of the bush, and smiled at us, and carried it away.
Presently I started in to say my piece. It would have been easier if I had ever held her in my arms, ever kissed her, but I had never done that. ‘I’ll be retiring in about a month from now,’ I said. ‘There’s something that I wanted to say to you before then, but I don’t know if you’ll want to hear it.’
‘What’s that, Johnnie?’ she asked quietly.
‘It was just a crazy idea I had,’ I told her. ‘We get on so well together that I’m going to miss you terribly when we have to break it up. I was wondering if you could ever bring yourself to think of marrying me.’
She was silent.
I reached out and took her hand. ‘It’s a May and December sort of a proposal, this,’ I said. ‘People will laugh at you if you accept it, because I’m an old man. But I do love you very truly, Peggy, and I think I could give you a very happy life.’ I paused. ‘I suppose I’m doing this very badly. I don’t do it every tick of the clock. But I would like you to think it over, if you would.’
She sat silent, motionless. At last she said, ‘How often do you do this, Johnnie? How often have you done it?’
‘You mean, in my whole life?’
She nodded.
‘Twice,’ I said. ‘Only twice.’
She turned to me. ‘Was one of them Brenda Marshall?’
I stared at her, amazed. ‘Who told you about her?’
‘Was it?’ she asked gently.
Somebody must have told her, but I couldn’t think who it could be. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Brenda was the last one. But that was a long time ago.’
‘I know,’ she said. We sat silent together on the warm sand in the fading light. At last she said, ‘I’ve been playing a trick on you, Johnnie, and I’m feeling very badly about it. I want you to try and forgive me.’ She hesitated, and then said, ‘It’s been wonderful to hear you say this. How wonderful, you just don’t know. But I couldn’t marry you.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said a little thickly. ‘It was just a silly idea I had.’
She turned to me. ‘It’s not that, Johnnie. It’s not that at all.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘You see, if everybody had their rights, I should be Brenda Pascoe.’
7
I STARED AT her. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t get that,’ I said. ‘Is your name Brenda?’
‘My names are Brenda Margaret,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s how my birth was registered, at Cannes, in France.’ I sat speechless. ‘Grannie always called me Peggy,’ she remarked. ‘I don’t think I ever did get christened properly. There was some trouble about it.’
I turned to her. ‘L
et me get this straight. Are you trying to tell me that you’re Brenda Marshall’s daughter?’
She faced me. ‘That’s right, Johnnie. I’m Brenda Marshall’s daughter, and yours.’
‘What was your grandmother’s name?’
‘Duclos,’ she said. ‘She was married twice. Her first husband was my grandfather, Henry Dawson.’
‘But Brenda’s baby died!’
She smiled gently. ‘She didn’t, Johnnie. She grew up a very ordinary child, and finished up as an air hostess in her father’s crew.’
I sat back and stared out over the dark sea. I had made the most colossal fool of myself, and I needed a little time to recover from what this girl had done to me before I spoke again.
Presently she said in a low tone, ‘Don’t be angry.’
‘I’m not angry,’ I replied. ‘But Mrs Duclos wrote to me from Cannes. She said the baby died there.’
She nodded. ‘I know. She did what she thought was the right thing.’
‘Why did she tell me that?’ I asked resentfully.
‘I’m not sure that I know the whole story,’ she said. ‘Probably you know the bits I don’t. My mother committed suicide, didn’t she?’
‘I think she did,’ I said painfully. ‘She spun her Moth into the deck at Duffington.’
‘Why did she do that, Johnnie?’
I was silent. Even with this girl it was difficult to talk of that bad time. ‘Her husband got out of The Haven,’ I said at last. ‘He’d have been coming home to live with her in a few days. He was a mental case, you know. And she was in love with me.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Is that why Grannie took me back to Cannes?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘She left directly the funeral was over, before Derek Marshall came home. She was afraid that if he saw you he might do you an injury.’
‘That’s what she told me.’ We were getting on better now. ‘Why did she go back to Cannes?’
‘She’d just come from there,’ I said. ‘She knew the hotel, and they knew her. It was the easiest thing for her to do.’
