The Atlantic Sky

by Betty Beaty

  He smiled. ‘Partly,’ he said. ‘We hadn’t exactly got on very well before. Remember?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And after this morning, the most important thing seemed to be ... to tell you,’ his voice was very low. ‘To hold you in my arms.’ He looked down at her. ‘But I didn’t need this morning to tell me that I loved you. I’ve always known that. I can’t remember a time since I knew you that I didn’t love you.’

  ‘Then you took a long time to tell me.’

  ‘You were very young,’ he said. ‘And very new. And I didn’t know how you felt. Up till a little while ago, you seemed to regard me as a cross between a slave-driver and a Captain Bligh!’

  She laughed delightedly. ‘Which is just what I did! You see, I didn’t know at the beginning why you had to .. she hesitated for the right word, ‘be tough with us.’

  He smiled rather wryly.

  ‘And then it seemed that you disliked me especially ... were extra tough with me. And I did feel angry lots of times.’

  ‘And then at Heron Field,’ he went on quietly, almost as though she hadn’t spoken, ‘you looked at me ... almost lovingly ... so that if it had been anywhere else or at any other time, I might have tried to tell you.’

  ‘Then you thought of Geoff Pollard!’ Patsy said quickly, and Robert Prentice’s brows flew up.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t know. Not then, I mean. I just know now. Things look awfully different when seen from the ... well, loved and loving side, if you know what I mean. For instance, I even don’t believe now that you were interested in Monica Fairways, after all.’ But she looked at him eagerly all the same.

  ‘And I should hope not, too!’ he said firmly.

  ‘You weren’t?’

  ‘Never.’ He gave her shoulders a little shake. ‘Nor you in Bill Maynard?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She smiled. ‘As Geoff used to say, the grapevine gets it a bit right and a lot wrong. All the same,’ she went on happily, ‘you put your foot down rather firmly about him seeing me in hospital.’

  ‘And a good thing, too!’

  ‘But it was nice of you to go and see my parents.’ Her voice trailed away, as her thoughts returned to her home and her family and to how it all began. ‘It seems a long time since I came here,’ she said softly. ‘A lot seems to have happened ... and I’ve learned a little...’ but she wasn’t thinking about Mr. Crosbie’s excellent lectures or Mr. McWhirter’s engineering skill, or even about Robert Prentice’s lucid explanations on meteorology and the route. She was thinking of men and their curious make-up, and love-affairs and their tortured ramifications, and herself and all the unknown mixture of liking and disliking, of love and fear and hope and joy that seemed to be her.

  She hardly heard him say, ‘And talking of them, Patsy, they did ask me to come back some time...’

  She continued to stare out into the grey sky beyond.

  ‘... and as you’ve a few days off, and so have I, I thought we might go.’

  She suddenly looked up at him. ‘Home, d’you mean? Our home.’

  ‘Yes.’ He gave her an oddly shy smile. ‘There would just be time,’ he drew a deep breath, ‘to ask if I may marry their daughter ... and,’ he grinned ruefully and nervously, ‘to let them look me over.’

  Patsy laughed and picked up her bag and her gloves.

  ‘I think,’ she said happily, ‘that they’ve done that already.’

  Then, as they walked out to the car, she added, ‘Now I come to think of it Dad always had a soft spot for you. Even before he met you.’

  ‘And now I come to think of it,’ Robert Prentice smiled as he fitted the key in the ignition and started the car, ‘he always did look to me like a remarkably perceptive man.’

  They drove along in a companionable silence. Neither of them noticed that it had stopped raining. The tyres hissed on the damp road. The bare hedges and the brown grass dripped mournfully. And the houses with their neat blue-grey heads stared at them like rows of still wet seals. But ahead of them, the clouds had stopped their long march in from the Atlantic. As the car turned into the westbound stream, Patsy could see, at the farthest end of the Great West Road, that the tarmac was glistening with the first feeble rays of the emerging sun. Then they were running smoothly along the same road that ran parallel to the main runway at London Airport. The selfsame road along which she had watched, on the day of her interview, the bus and the rest of the earth-borne traffic disappear into a factory-lined, house-enclosed horizon.

  But the factories and the houses and suffocation of that horizon didn’t seem to be there any more. Only the safe sure feeling of being on the ground, added to all the wonder and the beauty of the limitless air above her. For after all its suffocating snow and fog, its rain-drenched cloud, and its angry gales, the Atlantic sky had suddenly handed her a clear horizon, had shown her a safe harbour—a quiet landfall after the storm.