The Stick

by David Beaty

  Down at the far end of the lane, Harker turned right again through open wrought iron gates and into a small drive.

  Elmtrees was a brick and tile eighteenth-century cottage which had been enlarged and renovated by speculative builders in 1953 just before the Harkers were married. The same firm of builders had renovated other cottages in that part of the Thames valley and a number had been bought by Atlanta people, so the Harkers had quite a circle of friends. But over the quarter-century, the friends had dispersed. Some had taken early retirement and gone to live in Greece or Spain. Their closest friend, Jim Davis, had died of a coronary and his widow had remarried a doctor in Yorkshire. So now only the Truscotts remained.

  In Harriet’s opinion, the renovators had been rather over-enthusiastic with the extra beams and the diamond-paned windows, but they had four comfortably sized bedrooms, two modern bathrooms – one pink, one avocado green – a large sitting room with French windows and, her pride and joy, the glass camellia house. The dining room was small, but with large windows giving a view of the lawn and the rose garden. There was a little study for Paul, very useful now that he was Flight Captain with so much paperwork, and a large country-style kitchen with an Aga – the heart, Harriet called it, of the house.

  As usual on his return, the whole place was immaculate. The woodblock floor in the hall shone. The furniture, the silver on the sideboard and the brasses had been polished. There were bowls of freshly-cut roses everywhere. The house smelled as it always did of Johnson’s lavender wax, a multitude of flower fragrances, old wood, Imperial Leather soap, and Harriet’s favourite perfume Alliage.

  In the old days, he used to stand in the oak doorway and draw the scent into his lungs like some life-giving breath, but now on his return he seemed to notice it only as a sad nostalgic waft of something vanished.

  ‘The late camellias are well,’ Harriet said brightly as if she too felt nostalgia rather than welcome, the past rather than the present. ‘Two pink and one white. Come and see them.’ She caught his hand. Her own seemed thin, the bones bird-like in his grasp. I put the sherry in the camellia house. I thought that would be nice.’

  But it wasn’t. It was stilted, the conversation hard and difficult to spit out, like pebbles in the mouth. In the bright light her face looked pale and strained. She worried too much, that was her trouble, he thought. He admired the camellias, remarked that perhaps this and that bud might be nipped off, and then asked if she’d done anything exciting while he’d been away.

  ‘I did three hours at the hospital. Just routine chest X-rays. Then I rode Fandango. Not for long though. Mr Jarvis said he’d get one of his boys to ride him round.’

  Mr Jarvis was the farmer from whom they rented Fandango’s field and the little wooden shack divided into three that served as a stable, feedshed and tack room. In the heyday of her passion for horses, Paul remembered, Jane had kept the shack swept and even creosoted, and decorated with the rosettes of her insignificant wins at gymkhanas. Nearly all the rosettes were pink, which meant Jane was an also-ran even at that. Though the same age as Belinda, they were as different as chalk and cheese.

  ‘Anyway,’ Harriet said, ‘Fandango’s out to grass now, so he doesn’t need so much looking after.’ She rubbed her wrists. ‘But he’s hell to hold.’

  ‘And a hell of an expense to keep. He’s Jane’s horse, damn it! Not ours.’

  He frowned and pressed his eyes with his fingertips to try to erase the vision of Belinda which seemed to come tripping in every time on the heels of Jane.

  ‘Madge said she’d always go up to the field and see he had water.’

  ‘Oh, she’s been over, has she?’

  ‘Yes, poor old Madge. She came for morning coffee.’

  ‘And stayed for lunch, I bet!’ he said indignantly.

  ‘Yes.’ Harriet laughed, but Paul did not join in. Making her face solemn again, she added, I shouldn’t laugh. Poor Madge. She really does have a hard time with Archie.’

  ‘Nonsense! Why does she?’

  ‘He gets so depressed.’

  ‘So would I if I were married to Madge.’ This time Paul laughed, but Harriet did not.

  ‘Seriously though—’ Harriet began.

  ‘I am serious. Deadly serious.’

  ‘No, you’re not. You’re teasing. Madge is a good sort. You like her really. You’ve often said so. And Archie gets quite pathologically depressed. He’s on all sorts of different pills.’

  ‘Oh, we all know what it is,’ Paul said with finality. ‘And pills won’t cure it.’

  ‘His crash?’

  ‘If you must say it, yes.’ Paul gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to talk about Archie. Dress as Archie might in his fine clothes, and laugh his hollow laugh, he was like the dead crows gamekeepers hang up as warnings.

  ‘I’m ravenous.’ Paul rubbed his hands in eager anticipation. ‘Let’s eat. Something nice as usual?’ He put his hand on her shoulder as he followed her into the dining room.

  ‘Fresh salmon,’ she said, cheering at his apparent change of mood.

  A vision of Belinda carrying away her unwanted tray of salmon, blinking her eyes in disappointment and rejection, superimposed itself on his vision of Harriet. It reminded him of his childhood in the thirties, and his harassed mother’s dictum: ‘What you won’t eat for supper, you’ll eat up tomorrow!’

  He tried to eat the meal with an appreciative appetite. Harriet, an accomplished cook, watched him anxiously.

  ‘D’you know I’d never tasted fresh salmon until I went into the Air Force?’ he said for something to say.

  He’d enjoyed his Short Service Commission which he’d taken after leaving Peterborough Grammar School. He’d met Harriet shortly after he was demobbed, in the romantic circumstances of rescuing her from the river.

  She patted his hand. ‘Good old RAF!’

  He could think of nothing else to talk about. Then he remembered the diversion of the present. ‘Before I demolish the rest of the salmon,’ he said jovially, ‘let me show you what I bought you.’

  He rushed to his bag in the hall, unzipped it, and hauled out the giftwrapped parcel. Harriet did not possess Belinda’s flair for receiving presents. Harriet’s role in life was that of giver, not receiver. She was touched to be bought a present, to be remembered, to be loved. But the present itself was less important.

  However, she unfastened the giftwrapping with smiles of enthusiasm, murmuring how well the Americans did everything. She drew out the white froth of the peignoir with genuine admiration, holding it up and letting its soft folds dribble through her fingers.

  ‘It’s lovely, Paul! Absolutely beautiful!’ She looked anxious. ‘ It must have cost you an awful lot!’

  ‘The company’s just upped our overseas allowance.’

  ‘Oh,’ she held the peignoir against herself, looking at it doubtfully. ‘You don’t think it’s too young for me?’

  ‘I think it’s perfect for you. That’s why I bought it.’

  She smiled gently. ‘ I’m very touched you actually went into a shop to get it. The nightwear department!’ She laughed. ‘I know what you’re like!’

  Her words were genuinely felt. Her expression totally innocent. But her own remark seemed to generate a sudden sharp suspicion. He knew her well enough to recognise it, and to recognise her stifling of that suspicion as unworthy and ungrateful. She put her thin birdy arms round his neck.

  ‘Thank you, Paul. It was sweet of you. I love it. I shall wear it tonight.’

  But the suspicion had not been stifled, only lulled. Over an early dinner, Harriet said, ‘I’m tired now too. And I know you are. Shall we have an early night?’

  When he climbed up to their bedroom, she had already bathed and brushed her hair and was standing by the bed, dressed in a blue nightgown and the new peignoir. Just for a moment in the dimmed lights and to his tired eyes, she looked the image of Belinda, modelling that peignoir over her blue cotton dress, shimmering into a vision of Belinda naked in his bed
room.

  Belinda. He was sure he didn’t say her name aloud, but it hammered in his head. He knew, though, that he let out a choking cry, and grabbed her in his arms, kissing her mouth, her neck, her ears.

  Until like someone waking out of a dream to icy reality, he felt Harriet’s outraged angry body, cold as stone, stiff and hostile in his arms.

  Chapter Three

  ‘So now it’s your turn for the torture chamber, dear boy?’

  The first person Paul Harker met when he pushed open the glass swing doors of the training complex three weeks later had a fruity voice and walked with a slight swagger. His right hand was in the pocket of his double-breasted grey suit which matched his grey face, his grey hair and his grey eyes.

  Harker’s spirits sank. He didn’t feel like Archie Truscott and his twenty-seven ghosts. Not today. He didn’t really want Archie to be in that glass-sided cabin at all, watching the red snail’s track across the glass-covered map marking the ‘progress’ of the flight, while inside the Duty Training Captain would be giving him ‘emergencies’ and watching his reactions and his movements on the controls.

  He tried to pump as much enthusiasm as he could into his voice. ‘Hello, Archie. How’s business?’

  ‘If you mean how many heads have been chopped off today, the answer is nil, old chap. The bloody simulator’s on the blink.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Harker turned to go back out again, feeling relieved. ‘I’ll come back another day.’

  Anyway, he didn’t feel too good. That heavy sort of tiredness was still hanging over him. Probably the weather of course – terribly high humidity – plus jet lag. When you were shuttling to and fro between two countries with a five-hour time difference, your body never really had a chance to settle down. Crew fatigue wasn’t something you shrugged off with two days stand-off. It mounted up like an overdraft. Cumulative fatigue, some joker had called it. He’d done another double crossing last week. Belinda Chafford wasn’t on the crew and the trip had gone smoothly. And they had landed back three days ago.

  A plump grey hand was laid on the lapel of his jacket. ‘ Not so fast, dear boy. The technicians have promised it serviceable in ten minutes. And you are to be Number One.’

  They walked side by side down the elephant-grey rubber-floored corridor to the simulator section. Archie went on gesticulating. Few would guess that he had been a pilot. Indeed few would guess the occupation of most pilots, Harker thought – they can’t be classified. It rarely showed, like it did with lawyers and civil servants and the clergy and armed services officers. All sorts of unexpected people for some reason or other wound up as pilots.

  During a lull in Archie’s monologue, Harker asked, ‘ Who’s the Duty Training Captain?’

  ‘George Osborne.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  An ambitious man nine years younger than he was whom he cordially hated. Harriet had a theory that all feelings were mutual, so probably Osborne hated him too. Quite why he had no idea – but then you never did.

  ‘I understand how you feel, old chum. You know, I never realised how my life was ruled by medicals and Checks, until I didn’t have to have them.’ Archie paused. ‘And now I’m a free man, I can live at last!’

  The words rang out so much like a hollow bell that all Harker could think of to say was, ‘Things have changed a bit.’

  By which he meant that at first Training Captains went drunk on all the unpleasant things they could do to pilots they were testing in a simulator. Runaway stabilisers, instrument failures, tyre bursts, explosive decompressions, engine failures, fuselage fires, total electrical failures – you name it, they gave it, one after the other or even together in a cornucopia of failures until the poor pilot was reduced to a sweating rag. Now sense had prevailed, and you got a couple of failures at the most. But they could be anything, that was the trouble, and you had to be alert for the lot. And Clever Dicks like Osborne had a habit of sending a failure in with a twist.

  ‘Since my accident?’ That hollow bell again. ‘Yes, of course, and so have I. But I still would not relish being cooped up for four hours with chum Osborne in that phosphorescent tomb. And what do they clean the things with? I’ve never been able to discover. Formaldehyde? Pure alcohol? Whatever it is, it smells like a hospital. You have my sympathies, dear boy.’

  As they went into the high-ceilinged room and the simulator reared up its truncated body and little fins of wings like a beached white whale, Harker saw who his First Officer was and swore under his breath.

  ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

  ‘Afternoon, Mr Adams.’

  Terry Adams had once been a boyfriend of Jane’s. Several times he’d been over to Elmtrees. He’d been a nuisance. There was a row. Harker had more or less thrown him out of the house. Jane was upset, which hadn’t exactly helped the family situation.

  Behind Adams stood his Engineer Officer.

  ‘Hello, Mr Griffiths, haven’t seen you around lately.’

  ‘Been on the double Bermuda shuttle, Captain Harker.’

  ‘Lucky boy.’

  As he took off his coat, Harker heard the sound of the door swinging open and the rubber-soled footsteps creeping closer. He turned his head round.

  ‘Hello, George.’

  ‘Hello, Paul.’ George Osborne nodded his egg-shaped head towards the others, ‘… gentlemen. Well, simulator’s serviceable. So shall we get started while we have some of the afternoon left?’

  Archie Truscott disappeared into his glass shell from where he would take on the role of Air Traffic Controller, giving instructions and at the same time watching the red ink line of the ‘ aircraft’ track on the map of the particular exercise being carried out – which way the Captain turned, how long he stayed on course, his descent, his blind landing, his height and speed jotted in crayon – what he’d been doing was all here on the glass for him to see when he emerged, always in his shirtsleeves, often red-faced and sweating from his four-hour ordeal. Checks used to be done in the old days in the aeroplane. But now with the cost of an airborne Astrojet running at three thousand pounds an hour, all of them were done on the far cheaper simulator.

  The session started all right. Harker let off the parking brakes. Outside, the simulated lights of the simulated airport pricked out the darkness as they ‘ moved’ down the blue taxi lights.

  They got to the end of the runway. Terry Adams read out the Before Take Off Check List. Harker and Engineer Officer Griffiths called each item back when it was done and checked.

  ‘Keep the Engine Failure and the Engine Fire Check Lists ready on the throttle box, Mr Adams.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Harker could hear Archie, in a very Heathrow-Air-Traffic- Controller voice, giving them take off clearance. It was one of Archie’s specialities that he simulated the personalities and accents of traffic controllers all over the world – American, Greek, Arab, Indian, Japanese, Australian depending on which part of the world the simulator was supposed to be at the time.

  Adams repeated the clearance back. Harker opened the throttles. The engine roared. Sluggishly at first, then faster, the needle on the airspeed indicator began to creep round the dial.

  Seconds later, all hell broke loose – red flashing lights, bells clanging, Griffiths’ voice shouting, ‘ Fire in Number One!’

  ‘Engine Fire Check List!’ Harker roared to Adams as he slammed all throttles closed.

  ‘Warning light?’

  ‘Cancelled.’

  ‘Thrust lever?’

  ‘Closed.’

  ‘Start lever?’

  ‘Cut off.’

  ‘Essential power?’

  ‘Reselected.’

  ‘Fire shut off?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Fire shut off!’ Harker yelled. ‘Fuel’s still on! Griffiths, you’re feeding the fire!’

  ‘Fire shut off?’

  ‘Lever down.’

  The Check List continued till the first extinguisher bottle was pulled and the b
ell stopped.

  ‘Reverse thrust!’

  There was another, deeper-throated roar. The ‘aircraft’ slowed and came to a stop.

  ‘Bit slow on the fire shut off,’ Osborne said. ‘Otherwise no complaints. Shall we go back to the ramp and start again?’

  It was on this second sortie that the trouble started. Harker taxied out all right, and got to the end of the runway. The Before Take Off Check was completed with the selection of twenty per cent take off flap. Adams had begun to ask for take off clearance when – presumably on previous instructions from Osborne – up on the R/ T came Archie’s voice, this time suitably altered to a different accent for ground control, telling them that the starboard trailing edge flaps appeared to be damaged, probably from a stone thrown up from the taxiway, and they were to return to the ramp for inspection.

  ‘Flaps up!’

  Adams moved the lever. ‘Flaps in, sir!’

  Harker continued to taxi back. Seconds later, when they were in the process of turning off the runway, no doubt again on Osborne’s instructions, up came Archie’s voice, back in its Heathrow-Air-Traffic-Control accent to assure them everything was all right now and could they take off immediately as there was a 747 on final.

  Harker turned back onto the runway and pushed the thrust levers hard against the stops. Of course he should have been aware, Harker realised afterwards. Knowing Osborne, knowing him for the shyster he was, he should have been prepared. But he was wanting to get the Check over with. He’d started off well. He wanted to continue well.

  Down the ‘runway’ they pounded – on and on and on. They were three-quarters of the way down now, nosewheel off the ground, past VI and V2. Harker pulled back on the stick.