The Breaking Wave

by Nevil Shute

  Where had I seen a ladder? I had seen one somewhere, very recently, a ladder of light alloy, painted red. It was a fire ladder. I remembered it. It hung on hooks along the wall of the servants’ corridor above three fire extinguishers. It was to put out of the window of the corridor to reach down to the flat roof of the scullery in case fire isolated people on the top floor of the building.

  It was worth having a look up in the roof, and I could probably manage to get up and down the ladder if I was careful and took my time. I opened the swing door wide and went into the servants’ quarters, hoping that Annie wouldn’t come out again, and took the ladder down from the wall, and carried it into the main house, shutting the swing door behind me. I set it up in the corridor and poked the trapdoor upwards with the top end of it; it stood at a convenient angle, firm and adequate.

  It would be very dirty in the roof and I was in my evening clothes. Moreover, for a man with my disability to get up into a roof would be something of a gymnastic feat entailing much use of the arms; I had developed a good deal of muscular strength in my arms and chest in compensation over the years. I went back into my room and put on an old pair of trousers and a pullover, and then, with the torch in my pocket, I went up into the roof.

  Getting up into the roof wasn’t too difficult, but when I was up there there were only a few planks laid loosely on the rafters above the plaster ceiling, with nothing to hold on to if I stood up. I looked around and there was nothing unusual to be seen: various tanks and water pipes, and brick chimneys, and electrical conduits. I hesitated to stand up and walk upon the planks, and crawled on hands and knees away from the trapdoor and the ladder, till in the end I found what I was looking for.

  It stood upon the rafters behind one of the tanks and in an angle formed by the brickwork of a chimney, a little shadowed place where it might have rested for fifty years and never come to light. It was a small suitcase, fairly new and free from dust or dirt. It had the initials J.P. embossed on the lid, and it was locked.

  There was a bit of rope up there lying on the rafters, perhaps some relic of our possum hunts, and with this I lowered the case down through the trapdoor into the corridor. I replaced the trap and eased myself carefully down the ladder to the floor, and took the case into my room. I was very dirty, and I washed my hands before doing anything else. Then I replaced the ladder on the wall of the servants’ corridor, and went back to my room and put the suitcase on a table by the fire.

  I knew where the key was, of course. There had been three keys on a ring in her bag, but I was reluctant to go back into her room to take them from her. I had a bunch of keys of my own for my own suitcases and for the trunks that were on their way to me by sea, and I tried these all in turn to see if I had one which would unlock her suitcase.

  I failed; none of them would fit. There was nothing for it; with a heavy heart I went back through the swing door, and opened the door into her room. It seemed a despicable thing that I was doing. The girl had been in trouble and she was dead, lying there beneath the sheet in the room with me. She had gone to great pains to maintain some privacy in her affairs. Now she was dead and could no longer defend herself; I had all but breached her privacy and now I was robbing her bag, to find out things about her that she wanted to keep from us.

  Standing by the chest of drawers opening her bag I imagined I could feel the horror and the protest from the girl beneath the sheet upon the bed behind me. I whispered, “My dear, I’m sorry to be doing this to you,” and took the keys, and thrust the bag back into the drawer, and got out of her room and through the swing door and back to my own place as quickly as I could.

  I was in no hurry to open her case, now that I could do so. I was a little shaken and upset, and not at all sure that I was doing the right thing. I left the keys lying on the suitcase and went slowly downstairs to the drawing-room. There were still red embers in the grate and warmth in the room, and I poured myself another whisky and soda to steady my nerves. The clock struck eleven while I was doing so.

  I stood in front of the fire, glass in hand, recovering my self-possession. I was intensely reluctant to open that case. To do so would clearly be an act in opposition to the dead girl’s earnest wish, and one should respect the wishes of the dead. The Law might require me to do so, but I had the power to tell the Law to go jump in the lake, for nobody but I knew that the case existed. There was no evidence that the slightest harm would come to anybody if I took that suitcase now and thrust it deep into the central heating furnace, and if I did that I should certainly be carrying out the dead girl’s wish.

  On the other hand, I was responsible for the happiness and wellbeing of everybody in our little community so far as lay within my power. Amongst our little party there had been enormous catastrophic grief that had made this girl take her life. Unless I knew what it was, that grief might come again. It might be something that did not affect Jessie Proctor alone. It might be something to be rooted out of Coombargana, some evil that had grown up with the ageing of my father and relaxation of the firmness of control. We might have got a sadist or a pervert of some kind on the property. If I left this uninvestigated the grief might come again, upon some other person. Some other person might now be suffering as this girl perhaps had suffered.

  It was my job to open up that case and see if I could find out what the trouble had been. A brief inspection by the coroner might have to follow, but after that it could all go into the fire and the sooner the better. But opened it would have to be.

  I went up to my room again presently, with a quiet mind. There was nothing now to wait for; I shut the door carefully behind me and turned the key in the lock. Then I went over to the fireside and opened the case upon the table with one of her keys.

  It was full of papers of all sorts, neatly arranged. There were letters and bank books, and about a dozen quarto manuscript books at the bottom. I shuffled through the things on top, and her passport caught my eye. I pulled it out, and stood dumbfounded by the name upon the cover. I opened it and had a little difficulty in turning the pages, for my fingers were all thumbs. I stared at the photograph that stared back from the page at me, the broad, square, kindly face that I remembered so well, the bushy dark eyebrows.

  This wasn’t Jessie Proctor. It was Janet Prentice.

  Leading Wren Janet Prentice, that I had met with Bill in April 1944, at Lymington in Hampshire, before the invasion of Normandy.

  THREE

  THERE were little, practical jobs to be done mechanically, that saved me the necessity of thinking for a minute or two, I started to unpack her papers on to the table and arrange them into little heaps in order that I might examine them methodically, and very soon I came upon the photograph frame. It was a little leather thing that opened like a wallet to stand upon a table, that held two photographs beneath a cellophane glaze. I stood for a long time with it open in my hand. I knew one of them; it was the one that Bill had had taken by an indifferent professional photographer in Portsmouth, when he had been in training with the Royal Marines at Eastney. It showed him in the uniform of a private before he had attained a rank, rather a stiff, hack portrait. My mother has a print of it that stands upon the table in her room, with one of Helen and one of me. I wondered what she would have thought if she had known that her house parlourmaid had a copy of it, too.

  Opposite this one, in the other glazed frame, was a more living picture. It was a snapshot of Bill taken shortly before his death, in the battledress uniform of a sergeant in the Marines, taken in the open air upon the roadway of some camp. Janet Prentice was beside him in the uniform of a Leading Wren; he had his arm around her shoulders and they were laughing together.

  I knew that one existed, though I had never seen it; my mother did not know of it at all. Bill had told me about it when I met him in the spring of 1944. I was at Fighter Command in those days after two tours of operations, first on Hurricanes and then on Spitfires. It was so long since we had met that when a job cropped up that was to take me to a c
onference at Beaulieu aerodrome I had shamelessly extended it and snatched an extra twenty-four hours from my office on Sunday in order that I might see Bill before “Overlord,” before the balloon went up. I flew down in a Spit from Northolt late one Saturday evening and landed in the dusk. Tony Patterson was there and he had laid a car on for me to take me in to Lymington, where I had booked a room at the Roebuck Hotel, and Bill had met me there for dinner.

  In the first exchanges over a couple of drinks before we ate, Bill told me that he knew Beaulieu aerodrome. It was nearly two years since we had met; I had been in Egypt and the Western Desert before my office job, and when I was drafted back to England he had been up at some Commando training place on the west coast of Scotland. So much had happened to us both, so differently had we developed, that it took us a few minutes to establish contact again and to reach the point when we could talk about the matters we both wanted to discuss. The gin helped, of course.

  “What were you doing at the aerodrome?” I asked. “You don’t go arsing about up in the air?”

  He shook his head. “There’s a flight sergeant there in charge of the P.R. unit,” he said. I nodded; Beaulieu aerodrome was now a mass of fighters, Thunderbolts and Typhoons in readiness for close support of the invasion landings on the other side, but previously there had been a photographic reconnaissance flight of Lightnings there and the photographers with their equipment for developing and printing were still in one of the buildings. “He’s a good type,” said Bill. “Nobody’s allowed to have a camera down here, of course.” I did not know that, but with the intense security precautions necessary before the invasion it was obviously so. “He’ll take anybody’s picture for a dollar and let you have the prints. Good pictures, too. I went up there with Janet this afternoon and he took one of us. I’m going to pick them up on Wednesday.”

  This was getting near the subject we both wanted to discuss. “Where’s Janet now?” I asked. “Is she here?” I had never met her then, of course.

  He shook his head. “She only got a three hour pass. She caught the ferry back to Mastodon from just outside the aerodrome.” He meant the naval truck that plied between Exbury Hall upon the Beaulieu River that was now H.M.S. Mastodon, and Lymington. “She’s got a full day off tomorrow.”

  “Got anything laid on?”

  “She’s got a boat,” he said. “When have you got to go back?”

  “Be all right if I get off at dawn on Monday,” I replied. “I’ve got a natter on with the Americans tomorrow evening—I’ve got to be up at the aerodrome at six o’clock. And I’ll have to slip out to the aerodrome in the morning to ring up the office. That won’t take more than half an hour. After that I’ve got all day, till six o’clock.”

  “You could make the call from here.”

  I shook my head. “It’s got to be a scrambled line. It won’t take long. I’ve got transport laid on to collect me here at half past eight.”

  He looked me up and down, and grinned. “All these bloody rings and gongs,” he said. “I suppose they give you transport any time you want it.”

  I ordered two more gins. “Mum was asking in the last letter if you were ever going to get a commission.”

  “Not much,” he said. “I get more fun this way. If I’d been an officer I wouldn’t have met Janet.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” I replied. “Most of the officers’ popsies that you see are in the ranks. They don’t give commissions to the best popsies. Reserve them for a higher destiny than being a wing officer.”

  “Reserve some of them for a job of work,” he observed.

  I glanced at him. “What does she do?”

  “O.A.,” he told me. “Ordnance Artificer at Mastodon. Leading Wren. She looks after the guns on the L.C.T.s and the L.C.I.s. Force J mostly, in the Beaulieu River.”

  I glanced around, for this was careless talk and there might be some security snooper listening to us. But there was no one within hearing. “Services the guns?”

  He nodded. “If a ship reports defects in its Oerlikon or twin Lewis she goes on board and checks it over, and if it’s crook she takes it on shore to the armoury and swaps it for another.”

  I raised my eyebrows a little. Most of the popsies that had come my way were ornamental young women from the ops room, or in radar.

  Bill grinned. “She knows her stuff.”

  “Are you engaged to her?”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “Nothing like that.” He stood fingering his glass upon the bar. “Not till after the balloon’s gone up. Time enough to think about that then.”

  I said, “You’d like to be?”

  He nodded. “She’s a beaut girl.”

  “How would she go down with Dad and Mum?” At Lymington in Hampshire, in the British forces, we were a long way both in distance and in thought from Coombargana in the Western District.

  “She’d be all right.”

  “Does she know anything about Australia?”

  He grinned. “Not a thing. They none of them do. It’s no good trying to explain, either. I told her we were farmers. They understand that.”

  I nodded. I had had some of this myself. When I was new to England I tried once or twice to explain to people how we lived, and found that they thought I was shooting a line. I had soon learned to shut up and to identify myself as a farmer’s son—which, of course, was true.

  “Got any idea what you’re going to do when this is over?” I asked him.

  “When what’s over? ‘Overlord’?” He dropped his voice for the last word, as one which ordinary people did not speak aloud.

  “No. The war.”

  “When’s that going to be?”

  “May be this autumn. It probably won’t go another year.”

  “Is that what they are saying at your place?”

  I nodded. It was difficult for either of us to credit such a thing, after five years. “Think you’ll go back to Cirencester?” Bill had come to England in July 1939, when he was nineteen years old, to go to an agricultural college. He had stayed there, unwilling, for a few months in the period of the phoney war before enlisting in the Marines.

  He shook his head. “I’d never go back to school now. What about you?”

  I had done two years of Law at Oxford, at the House, on my Rhodes scholarship. “I wouldn’t mind going back for a bit, finish off what I started.”

  “Go home and see the parents first of all?”

  “Oh, I think so. Go home for a month or two, and then come back to finish off at Oxford.”

  Bill put his glass down thoughtfully upon the bar. “I don’t want to do that,” he said. “I’d like to marry Janet and go back to Coombargana, and stay there looking at the sheep for a long, long time.”

  I glanced at him quickly. “Like that, is it?”

  “A bit.” He was a frogman at that time, of course. I did not know the full scope of his work then, though I knew that he went repeatedly to the beaches of northern France in the dark night, to go ashore and to survey the tetrahedrons and the Elements C with land mines tied to them with which the Germans were fortifying the landing beaches. I had seen the air photographs that the Lightning pilots had returned with, taken as they flew along through flak at fifty feet, and I knew that one of Bill’s jobs was to go by night in M.T.B. or submarine, to swim ashore or paddle in a folboat in the darkness under the noses of the Germans at the head of the beach, to examine these things and report on them. It seemed to me that he was starting to feel the strain, but there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I had been through periods of strain myself.

  I said, “One of us ought to get back there as soon as possible. Helen says the rabbits are just terrible.” With my father on service in the Northern Territory. Mother was running the station, with Helen nominally helping her but spending most of her time in Melbourne doing something with the Red Cross. Mother was putting up a marvellous show, but with half the men away at the war the property was obviously going downhill.

 
He glanced at me. “You won’t be going back yourself?”

  I shook my head. “You go. Marry the girl and make an honest woman of her”—he grinned—“and go back and help Dad work it up again. If I go back to live at all, it won’t be for years.” I knew what he was thinking: that I was the elder son. “If ever I come back, it’s big enough to split up into two.”

  He nodded. “If we don’t do that, somebody ’ll do it for us. It’s too much land to hold as one property in these days.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Anyway, you go back and run it, soon as you like. Take Janet with you, and give her a shock.”

  He laughed. “She’ll get that all right. A farm here means about a hundred acres.”

  “Who is she, Bill?” I asked him curiously. “What’s her background?”

  “Good middle class,” he said. “Nothing social, or upstage. You may know her father. He’s a professor or a don or something, at Oxford.”

  “Professor Prentice?” Or was it Dr. Prentice? The name was somehow familiar.

  “I suppose so. Do you know him?”

  I shook my head. “There’s such a lot of them. Do you know what college he’s in?”

  “Is there one called Wyckham, or some name like that?”

  I nodded. “He’s at Wyckham?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you know what he teaches?”

  Bill grinned. “Semantics,” he said. “I learned that word.”

  “Christ. Do you know what it means?”

  “Well, it’s not Jews,” said Bill. “Janet won’t have that. It’s words or something.”

  I nodded. I didn’t think there was a chair of Semantics in the university; it was probably a research subject. He might be a professor of modern languages or English literature if, indeed, he was a professor of anything. In any case, it was a decent background for the girl to have; she would be able to hold her own in feminine society in the Western District.