by Nevil Shute
Coupons, she knew, were always short for the bad managers. “I’ll take your jacket anyway tomorrow,” she said. “The material’s quite good—it’ll patch all right.”
“I don’t like putting you to so much trouble,” he said.
“I’d like to do it,” the girl said. “I like mending things.”
She went away, and Mr. Honey went to bed in greater comfort than he had experienced for many years. He stood for a few moments in his torn pyjamas before opening the window, looking at the Northern Lights, noting the form of the radiation. Then he got into bed; with his feet resting snugly on the hot-water bottle he was able to relax and think about the geographical distribution of the cosmic rays, a subject that was beginning to intrigue him. He lay in warm comfort doing mental calculations of the strength of the earth’s magnetic field in various latitudes and computing its effect upon the distribution of the protons and the positrons as they approach the planet, till sleep came to him.
He was roused at eight o’clock in the morning by the stewardess, who brought him a cup of tea and a few slices of bread and butter on a tray. She pulled his curtains and let in the sunlight. “It’s going to be a lovely day, sir,” she said. “What would you like for breakfast?”
He smiled at her. “What can I have?”
“Orange or pineapple juice,” she said. “Porridge or cereals. Eggs anyway you like. Bacon, cold ham, sausages. Buckwheat cakes and syrup with a sausage on the side—that’s very good. Toast, hot rolls …”
He considered this. “Could I have porridge and bacon and eggs?”
“Two eggs?”
“Well—yes, if I can.”
“Coffee or tea?”
“Er—coffee, I think.”
She nodded. “What time would you like it? It’s eight o’clock now.”
“Oh, I don’t take long. Half-past eight?”
“Very good, sir.” She paused, and then she said, “I want to go out for a walk this morning—it’s such a lovely day. Would you like to do that?”
He considered this. “Well—yes, I would. It seems rather stupid to be in Newfoundland and see nothing of the country, doesn’t it? May I come with you?”
“Of course,” she said. “The Gander River’s only about two miles away and there’s a road down to that, but there’s nothing much to do there except bathe, and it’s frightfully cold still. But going the other way, out past the restaurant, there’s a path that takes you to a lake; it’s awfully pretty there. That’s where people go to fish. Do you do any fishing, sir?”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“The staff, the people stationed here, go fishing there on their days off,” she said. “They catch salmon and trout and all sorts of things. But apart from that, it’s terribly pretty. We could go there, if you like.”
He said eagerly, leaning up upon one elbow in his bed, “Do let’s. I haven’t done that sort of thing for years.”
She hesitated. “Would you like to take out lunch? I could cut some sandwiches.”
He said doubtfully, “It’d be fun.… But do you think I ought to be away all day? I mean, there might be a cable for me from the office.”
She smiled. “It could wait. We’d be back anyway by four, and if you’re ordered to go on or to go back, you won’t miss a plane because they all come through at night. I think a day out in the country would do you good.”
He said, “I think it would.”
She nodded. “I’ll see about the sandwiches. Oh, and here are your socks—I did them last night.”
He took them gratefully. “It’s terribly kind of you to do all this for me.”
“Not a bit,” she said. “Let me have your pyjama jacket when we get back and I’ll do that for you.” She glanced at the tear. “You can’t go on wearing it like that.”
“I know,” he said ruefully. “It got bigger in the night.”
When she was gone he sat in bed sipping his tea and fingering his socks, full of pleasure. He had not been looked after like that since Mary died; since then he had battled on alone, doing everything for himself and most things for his little girl. When Mary had been killed he had resigned himself to a life of celibacy; it had never entered his head, as practical politics, that he should go looking for another girl. He would not have known how to set about it. He had not married Mary; she had married him, to the surprise and consternation of her friends in the office, who thought she might have done a great deal better for herself than that. Mary had just happened in his life, a rare, sweet interlude that he had done very little to provoke; when she had gone he had slipped back quietly into his bachelor ways, more complicated now that there was Elspeth to look after.
He got up presently, and as he dressed looked ruefully at his pyjama jacket; not only was it very badly torn but it was indisputably dirty. He could not hand it over to her to be mended in that state; he washed it ineffectively in the basin in his room and hung it over the radiator to dry. As a consequence he was late for breakfast and it was nearly ten o’clock before he was ready to start off.
He met her in the lounge. “I say,” he said diffidently, “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”
“Not long,” she said. She had a small blue stewardess’s bag in her hand. “I’ve got the sandwiches, and I brought a thermos of coffee too.” She hesitated. “I didn’t ask you what sort of sandwiches you like,” she said. “I made some chicken ones and some sardine and some cheese. Is that all right?”
“Oh—of course,” he said. “That’s fine.” Food did not mean a great deal in his life; his meals were either canteen meals at the factory or scrappy messes that he cooked himself at home; moreover, his mind was usually too full of other matters for him to pay much attention to what he was eating. “I like all those,” he said.
She was relieved. “I had an awful feeling that perhaps you wouldn’t like sardine …”
They set out walking down the path away from the hangars; as they went he asked her how she knew the way so well. He learned a little of her life. She made three Atlantic crossings, on the average, each week; most times she came to Gander for a short stop to refuel. Sometimes, on the rare occasions of easterly gales in the Atlantic, the flight had been delayed there for a day or longer; once before she had been stranded there for several days due to defective motors in the aircraft. “But we shan’t have to stop here for weather in the future, I don’t think,” she said. “The Reindeer carries so much petrol we can make the crossing even against the worst gales in the winter. That’s what Captain Samuelson was saying.”
Mr. Honey said, “Well, that will save a lot of trouble. But we’ve got to get its tailplane right first of all.”
She nodded. “How long do you think that will take, sir?”
He smiled up at her. “Please—don’t you think you might stop calling me sir? I mean, you’re doing so much for me that you don’t have to.”
She laughed. “All right. But how long do you think the Reindeers will be grounded for?”
“I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “These things usually seem to take three or four months to put right. But that’s supposing that what I think is correct.” His face clouded, and he was in distress again. “It’s just an estimate,” he said. “I didn’t want people to take me up on it like this. I should have had more time, and now there’s all this row …”
She said sympathetically, “I know. But it had to be done this way, didn’t it?”
He shook his head. “We should have gone on working in the department in the proper way until we had some positive results to show.”
She smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Why?”
She said gently, “I should have been killed.”
He blinked up at her, taller than he was, slim and lovely against a background of Newfoundland fir trees and blue sky. It was Mary all over again, incredible that girls like that should come to death. He stared at her, confused by the clash of the theoretical and the practic
al in his work. “Jean Davenport and Betty Sherwood were the stewardesses in Captain Ward’s Reindeer,” she said. “That one that fell in Labrador. If you’d gone on working in the proper way, I should have been killed too.”
He said a little timidly, “Did you know them?”
“Of course I did. I knew them very well.”
“Oh. Were they people like you?”
She glanced at him curiously. “They were both fair. Betty was smaller than me. I suppose Jean was much the same.”
“But were they young, like you?”
“I suppose they were about twenty-five,” she said. “It’s not a job for people much older than that. Most of us are round about that age.”
They walked on for a time in silence through the woods. “I suppose Dr. Scott was right,” he said at last. “But there ought to be more time for scientific work. One can’t produce results all in a hurry, out of the hat, like this.”
She said, “It must be terribly difficult.”
He glanced up at her, distressed. “I don’t know what to do. There must be a tremendous row going on in England because I damaged this Reindeer. You see, there isn’t any proof yet, Sir Phillip Dolbear didn’t believe a word I said.”
She was sorry for him; if it would help him to tell her al about it she wanted him to do so. “Who is Sir Phillip Dolbear?” she asked.
She listened while he told her the whole story. “You see,” he said at last, “there isn’t any proof at all—it just rests on my estimate. I was on my way to Labrador to find out if the fracture at the tailplane of the crashed one is crystalline—if it supports the theory of failure in fatigue. They never meant me to do anything like this. They’ll all be very angry about it, I know. But it seemed the only thing to do.”
“It was the only thing to do,” she said gently. “It was playing safe. Captain Samuelson isn’t angry about it. And after all, he’s been flying nearly thirty years and he does know about things.”
He shook his head. “I told them they’d do better to send someone else. I always do this sort of thing all wrong.”
To distract his mind she said, “Look, there’s the lake. It’s lovely, isn’t it?”
It lay blue and shimmering before them under the summer sky, fringed with tall fir trees, its shores broken up into little rocky bays. Waterfowl were dotted about upon its surface; three or four deer, grazing on a rocky sward beside the water half a mile away, looked up as they stopped and vanished into the woods. “There are all sorts of wild things here,” she said. “There’s a stream running out at the far end where there were beavers last year. And there are bears here, too.”
He stared at her. “Are they dangerous?”
She laughed. “The only time I saw one he ran like a rabbit. They say they’re all right unless you feed them; then they come after more and you get clawed. But if you let them alone they’re quite harmless.”
The path ran alongside the lake, made by the fishermen from the airfield; they passed a couple of rough dorys moored to the bank. They went on and came to the place where the deer had been and studied their tracks, and on until they came to the beaver stream. But the beavers were gone and only fragments of their dam remained.
They laid out their lunch by the stream, on a bare rock. “It’s so quiet here,” she said. “You might be a thousand miles from anywhere.”
“Apart from the airport,” Mr. Honey said, “we probably are.”
She nodded. “It’s a mistake to leave the path, they say,” she remarked. “You can quite easily get lost in these woods, and that’s not so funny. All this country looks the same.”
“Do people ever get lost?” he asked in wonder.
“Oh yes. Two of the boys from the airport got lost last year. One of them died; it was eight days before they were found.”
He thought this over for a minute. “You have a very adventurous life,” he said at last. “What will you do? Can you go on as a stewardess indefinitely?”
She smiled. “I suppose you could if you wanted to,” she said. “I don’t know that I should want to, though.”
“Don’t you like it?”
She picked up a twig of fir, and absently scratched a little furrow in the earth. “It’s been quite fun,” she said. “It’s been fun meeting people and going to new places. I went into it after the war when I was restless, with Donald being killed, and everything. But now—well, I don’t know. I sometimes feel I’d like to give it up.”
“You’d find it rather difficult to settle down,” he said. “After this.”
She said, “When you’ve seen all the new places you’ve got no more new places to see. And anyway, one new place is just like another new place.… I used to like meeting new people every trip—and I still do. But those things, meeting new people, seeing new places, they aren’t everything. And while you go on in that sort of life you can’t have any real friends or any real home. Because you’re never there …”
“You don’t get worried about the risks?” he asked.
She shook her head. “There’s so little danger in flying now. I know Jean and Betty bought it in the first Reindeer, but that sort of thing happens so seldom.” She flashed a smile at him. “Thanks to people like you.” He was confused, and she went on, “No—it’s fun living this sort of life, but there’s nothing permanent about it, if you understand. Sometime I’d like to be a bit more permanent.…”
“You’ll be looking for another job?” he asked.
“I suppose so.”
He said, “So shall I.”
She glanced at him. “Are you going to leave Farnborough?”
He nodded. “I’ve decided to resign.”
“Oh …” There was a pause, and then she said “Do you think that’s necessary? Surely they’ll understand?”
He shook his head. “They’ve got nothing tangible on this fatigue at all—just my own hypotheses, which nobody really believes in but myself. And there’s certain to be a row about this Reindeer, because I’m a Government servant and so the Government will have to pay for its repair. And that means the Treasury and—oh, all sorts of things. I thought it all out last night. I want to write a letter to Dr. Scott putting in my resignation, and get it to him as soon as I can.”
She was convinced in her own mind that he was doing the wrong thing, but she knew too little of the problems that confronted him to argue. She said, “But what will you do? What sort of a job would you look for, Mr. Honey?”
He said, “I think they might take me on at the National Physical Laboratory—I know a lot of people there. And the work might be quite similar.… I should try that first of all. Or else I might try teaching.”
She was distressed for him. With her wider knowledge of the world she knew one thing very certainly; that Mr. Honey would not be much good at keeping order in a class of boys. He would be ragged unmercifully, grow bitter and morose. She said, “I should think the other one would be better.”
“I think it might be more interesting,” he said thoughtfully. “There’s such a lot of new stuff coming up about the earth’s magnetic field and its relation to cosmography. It’s all getting rather exciting.”
“I’m sure it must be,” she said. “Look, try one of these chicken ones—they’re rather nice.”
He brought his mind back to the matter in hand. “They’re very nice,” he said. “Things you make yourself always taste better than what you get in a canteen, don’t they?”
She said, “You take a lot of your meals in the canteen, do you?”
He said, “Well, yes, we do. We get our own breakfast, but then I always have lunch at the factory, and Elspeth has her’s at school. There’s a very good British Restaurant in Farnham and we go there sometimes in the evening, but it shuts at six and that sometimes isn’t very convenient. It’s such a lot of work getting meals at home, you know, when you’re both working all day.”
She nodded slowly. “It isn’t very good, having so many meals out, is it?”
He s
aid, “It makes it rather expensive. I think you’re right in a way—I get a lot of indigestion that I didn’t seem to get before. But one can always take magnesia for that.”
She laughed. “That’s expensive, too.”
They sat by the lake for a couple of hours, talking, finding out about each other. In the middle of the afternoon they recalled the cables and the signals that might be waiting for them in the airport office from the outside world, and got up reluctantly and walked slowly back up the path.
At the edge of the airport clearances they stopped for a moment. “It was terribly kind of you to suggest coming out like this,” Mr. Honey said. “I haven’t had a day like this for years.”
“Nor I,” she said. “I’m getting rather tired of aeroplanes, I think, and racketing around the world. A quiet day like this is rather a relief.”
Mr. Honey hesitated, uncertain how to put in words what he wanted very badly to say. “Do you think we might do it again some time in England,” he asked timidly, “one Sunday? There are some lovely walks along the Hog’s Back …”
She smiled down at him, “I’d love to do that, Mr. Honey,” she said. “I’ll give you my address.”
They went back together to the airport, rather quiet. In the C.A.T.O. office there was a signal ordering her to take passage on the night aircraft for London; there was a cable for Honey telling him to stay at Gander till an R.A.F. aircraft arrived later in the week to bring him back to England.
He wrote a short letter to me giving in his resignation, and gave it to Marjorie Corder to deliver; at dusk he walked with her to the plane.
“It’s been terribly kind of you to do all that you have for me,” he said. And then he added wistfully, “We’ll meet again in England, won’t we?”
For some odd reason, tears welled up behind her eyes. “Of course, Mr. Honey,” she said quietly. “Of course we will.”
8
I SAT FINGERING Mr. Honey’s letter of resignation while Miss Corder was telling me what had been going on at Gander; I was only listening to her with half my mind. With the other half I was wondering if I dared put his letter in the wastepaper basket and tell him not to be a bloody fool when I saw him, or whether I ought to show it to the Director. I sat fingering it uncertainly as she talked.