The Stick

by David Beaty

  Suddenly Madge let out one of her bellowing laughs.

  ‘Listen to this, you men!’

  The men eagerly looked in Belinda’s direction.

  ‘Listen!’ Madge clapped her hands. ‘This wonderful girl has just told me something. You’ve got to listen to this, Paul! Belinda here loves horses. Do you understand?’

  Griffiths patently didn’t. Archie perhaps vaguely understood. He nodded, more owlish than ever. Only Paul knew the enormity of what Madge was about to suggest.

  ‘Don’t you see, dear Paul? Think! She’s the one that can exercise Fandango. Don’t you see, Belinda will solve all your problems?’

  Chapter Six

  He made no immediate mention to Harriet of Madge’s ridiculous scheme. Madge had been at first indignant and then as time passed, in her heavy hippopotamus-like way, rather suspicious that he didn’t greet her suggestion with enthusiasm.

  ‘All I’m saying is … leave it for the moment, Madge dear. Harriet seems so much more sure these days that Jane will come home.’

  It had been a shot in the dark, an excuse snatched at desperately to avoid the possible meeting between Harriet and Belinda, but oddly enough it seemed that he had said no more than the truth.

  ‘Jane phoned just before you came in,’ Harriet told him on the following Tuesday as he hung his Burberry in the cloakroom at the end of a gruelling day at the office.

  He gave his usual noncommittal grunt. But when Harriet said no more, he found himself unable to resist adding, ‘ Don’t tell me she forked out for the expensive rate?’

  ‘Yes.’ Harriet preceded him into the sitting room. She was moving a little better, he thought. She smiled tentatively at him over her shoulder. ‘Would you like a drink?’ She waved towards the drinks tray.

  ‘Am I going to need one?’

  She shook her head. Her smile deepened with some secret pleasure. ‘No. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that you usually like a drink at this time.’

  ‘I’ll have one in a moment.’

  He flung himself into an armchair. Harriet perched herself opposite him. Clasping her hands round her knees, she looked pregnant with news. ‘Jane,’ she said quietly, ‘is probably coming home. Only for a visit. But coming home.’ She said those last words with such rounded pleasure that even had the information not been entirely to his liking, he would probably have reacted in the same way.

  ‘That is good news! Wonderful news!’

  Harriet looked tremulous. ‘You’re pleased?’

  ‘I’m delighted.’ He came over and kissed the top of her head. ‘Over the moon.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘Here, let me get us both a drink.’ He walked over to the tray and poured Harriet a sherry and himself a gin. He handed Harriet hers and then bent down to clink glasses. ‘To our errant daughter!’

  ‘To our dear daughter.’

  ‘To the prodigal!’

  ‘Please don’t call her that.’

  ‘I’m only joking.’

  ‘But she feels you think of her like that.’

  ‘I don’t really.’ To himself he thought, I hardly think of her at all. But that wasn’t quite true either. She was a void, an ache, a darkness.

  ‘You won’t be angry with her, will you? When she comes?’

  ‘If she comes. No. Why should I be?’

  ‘You’ve been very angry to me about her.’

  ‘That was because of all the worry she gave you.’

  ‘Children are always a worry.’

  He shrugged. ‘ Colin isn’t.’

  ‘I worry about him for different reasons.’

  ‘You worry too much,’ he said crossly, and saw her expression stiffen. He felt a sudden upsurge of unreasonable rage. Why did she make a virtue of loving and caring? Why couldn’t she be flippant and joyful and young? For a second, they teetered on the edge of a row. Then he turned his anger back to Jane.

  ‘I can never forgive Jane for that.’ He touched Harriet’s stick with the toe of his shoe. ‘Causing you to hurt yourself.’

  ‘She didn’t. Anyway, she feels very guilty.’

  ‘So she should.’ He frowned. ‘All that unnecessary worry.’

  Harriet drew a deep breath. ‘I think she feels there’s more you might be angry about than just the worry.’ She looked at him invitingly, but he deliberately didn’t pursue the subject. Instead he decided to get the Madge/Belinda bit of nonsense over and done with.

  ‘Let’s face it,’ he said in a judicious and weighty tone, ‘Jane pushing off like that caused your injury. Fandango was too much for you. But oddly enough, dear old Madge had just lured some poor girl into saying she’d exercise him for us. Now of course that Jane is coming back, we can tell her to forget all about it.’

  Harriet nodded absently, barely listening. Her eyes looked sad. ‘Mind, I don’t know how long Jane will stay, Paul.’

  He nodded, relieved to have got the bit about Belinda out, if only obliquely. ‘ She’ll stay long enough to decide what we’re going to do with Fandango.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘I insist so.’

  Harriet said nothing. Suddenly she seemed rather flat about the subject of Jane’s return, and though she hobbled round the house getting everything ready for the prodigal’s return, she rarely spoke of it. Only the to-ing and fro-ing of her Mini to the local shops and the accelerated tapping of her stick gave indications of Harriet’s excitement at her daughter’s return.

  The stick stood in an alcove next to the telephone. Easy to reach, Harriet said, and the telephone ringing was always the signal for having to walk somewhere and do something. Every time he came into the hall, he saw it there, the rich golden colour of clear honey. The shepherd’s crook handle, Harriet said, fitted warmly over her fingers and held as strongly as a good handshake. He began rather to dislike it. He had expected it to be discarded within a few days, and its continued presence irritated him. As though it were an unwelcome guest, he wondered whether it would ever go.

  The moment she came out of the sitting room, immediately she reached for it. Simply going down to the bottom of the garden, the stick accompanied her. A shadow, an everlasting companion, there was about it a reminder to him of weakness, both a prop and a warning against not falling.

  ‘Do you really have to take it everywhere?’ he asked her. ‘Can’t you manage without it?’ She gave him a slight smile. ‘Oh yes, I often go round the house without it. It’s just that somehow it’s companionable. Something to hold onto.’

  ‘Mightn’t it simply turn into a habit?’

  ‘Don’t you like to be seen with a wife using a stick?’

  ‘It’s not that at all,’ he said hotly. ‘It doesn’t seem to be getting better. I’m worried.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Dr Forbes said it’s getting on as well as can be expected.’

  ‘I’d be happier if you saw a consultant.’

  ‘Oh, I am,’ she said. ‘ I’m getting all the best treatment.’

  He nodded. ‘One advantage anyway of working with the medical profession. They do look after their own. More than can be said for airlines.’

  That thought and her own cheerful non-complaining reassured him. She took her stick with her – ‘my talisman’ she called it – in her Mini when she drove to the hospital on her duty days, but she didn’t like driving further. ‘A couple of miles down a quiet country lane I can cope with,’ she said. ‘Anything further and a lot of traffic, I want to avoid just in case I can’t put enough pressure if I have to stamp on the brake.’

  He gave the horse feed and water before he left at eight in the morning for the airport and again when he returned at night. Every time he came back into the house, first he saw the stick and second he was apprehensive whether Belinda had phoned.

  On the first Friday in October, he actually enquired. Harriet shook her head. ‘Not a peep out of her.’ He was both glad and disappointed.

  ‘Probably too busy on the route.’

  ‘Too busy with her boyfriend mo
re like,’ Harriet said. ‘After all, that’s the next step for girls after horses.’

  ‘After horses … exactly.’ He became disproportionately irritable. ‘Certainly was for Jane.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I do! If she’s not going to come home, that horse goes! I’m fed up, Harriet!’

  ‘He’s out to grass most of the time.’

  ‘Even so, he’s a nuisance. He gets no exercise. No grooming. No proper care. We’ve got to sell him.’

  ‘That would be cruel to Jane.’

  ‘It’s cruel to the horse, keeping him like this!’

  That Saturday, they gave the Wheatsheaf lunchtime session a miss. Harriet didn’t feel like it, and he didn’t want to risk bumping into Belinda. Madge rang up reproachfully during the afternoon when Harriet had gone upstairs for a rest.

  ‘We missed you, Paul.’

  ‘Harriet didn’t feel like it.’

  ‘You’re looking after her?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’ He paused. ‘Oh, the ankle. Well, it’s slow, you know. These things always are.’

  ‘She had a nosebleed the other day when we went out to coffee.’

  He said indignantly, ‘ She didn’t say anything about that!’

  ‘She never does, Paul, you know she never complains.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Paul, she is all right, isn’t she?’

  ‘Madge, of course she is!’

  ‘I sometimes think she gets tired easily.’

  ‘She’s been working too hard at the hospital. I’ll see she cuts it down.’

  ‘That would be a good idea, Paul.’

  ‘And then you must come over for a meal. Our turn.’

  ‘We’d love to.’ He heard an insistent intrusive note in her voice, and he wanted to stop his ears. He added hastily, ‘When the ankle’s better.’

  When the ankle’s better … why did that sound so like the phrase he’d picked up when he was flying to the Sudan, tomorrow with the apricots, the equivalent of the Spanish mañana?

  ‘We’ll give you a ring, Madge.’

  ‘And you’ll bring Harriet to the lunchtime session next Saturday?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  But next Saturday, he was in Seattle. Atlanta Airways’ old Astrojet, X-Ray November, had had an extensive overhaul and a crew had to fly over to collect it. As Flight Captain, he could have got someone else to do it – a nice trip, flying over as a passenger on a New York Service, then onto Seattle on American Airlines, to be given the customer treatment at the best hotel, complete with the usual lavish hospitality.

  It had been a good trip over. Behind him in the first class section were a First Officer and an Engineer Officer he knew slightly, friends apparently for they talked to each other, never to him. The Captain was Tilsley, Adams’favourite skipper, the flying was smooth and nobody bothered him.

  He was even more anonymous on the American 737, westbound from Kennedy. He sat at the back, savouring his own isolation. Nobody knew of him or his problems, nor wanted to know. From his porthole, he watched the vast continent unroll like a spool of film.

  Lake Michigan gleamed battleship grey in the half-light of evening. Then came the thousands of yellow pin-pricks on Detroit’s skyscrapers.

  One thing at least Harriet loved about flying – the view from the windows at thirty-five thousand feet. That huge cumulus build-up, round which little fireflies of aeroplanes busily darted. There was something mystical, she had always said, about being suspended like this in time and space, looking down at the world as at another planet and another existence.

  They refuelled at Minneapolis. It was bright moonlight when they flew over Yellowstone Park. Finally Seattle, catching sight of the huge hangars of the Berkeley Aircraft Corporation just before letting down to the city airport.

  The anticipated luxury hotel, the drinks, the warm hospitality all turned up, but what he hadn’t expected was a delay. They were supposed to be flying X-Ray November back two days after they arrived, but this stretched to a week, and still they weren’t away. Some trouble, they told him, with the pressurisation.

  He went round the factory, through the vast echoing cathedrals of workshops and hangars, seeing himself part of it, a vital piece in a huge design. He looked up in the sky and saw a new 747 on test flight, glittering silver in the sun, seeing it as a schoolboy might, imagining himself in it, flying it, directing it, being in total control.

  The week stretched to two, and he was still enjoying himself. This was a holiday, away from home and the office with their various problems. There was only one little episode that marred an otherwise perfect time. He was having a drink with his Engineer and First Officer in the bar before going to dinner with some Berkeley executives, when the Engineer, a keen photographer, probably because the conversation was pretty sticky, produced from his pocket some photographs of a recent trip to Bermuda that he’d just had processed.

  Other people’s photographs Harker abominated above all else, but he had no option but to make the usual appreciative remarks as one by one they were passed to him.

  ‘And this one’s at the hotel pool. That’s me, just diving in. There’s Geordie Griffiths, sitting at the table. That girl beside him—’

  Harker had no need to be told her name.

  ‘—is one of our stewardesses. Don’t know if you know her, sir. Not been with Atlanta long. Belinda something or other. Geordie’s very keen—’ he laughed and pointed to the encircling arm, ‘—as you can see.’

  There was a snap the size of a playing card. Blonde hair, blue eyes and red bikini, surrounded by four young men just off Service, very correct in the company uniform. ‘You’ll know everyone here, of course …’

  Next day the aircraft was ready, and the three of them flew it empty to New York, then after a day’s rest set out empty over the Atlantic.

  The reconditioned aircraft was a delight to fly. There was a lovely clean scent about the passenger cabin, a sheer symmetrical beauty in those rows of immaculate vacant seats. There’s an exhilaration, he thought, about driving something mechanical in which everything works perfectly. To move the throttles forward with the tips of your fingers and to hear the enormous burst of power and a thunderous echo was the most reassuring thing in the world.

  He said as much to the First Officer as together they set about checking each of the three separate installations of the automatic landing system.

  ‘Trouble is, sir—’ the young man indicated the controls and knobs and dials that they had just fixed into position to fly the aeroplane ‘—soon robots will be taking over from men.’

  ‘Never!’ He felt quite put out at being classified second fiddle to a robot. ‘What if there was a fire in one of the engines? What would a robot do then?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll think of something.’

  ‘Robots aren’t a hundred per cent reliable, you know.’

  ‘Nor are men.’

  Harker wondered whether this was an oblique Adams-like reference to himself. Hardly, considering the way he’d been flying. Two excellent take offs and a greased-on landing at New York.

  ‘When robots make a mistake, they can’t surmount it like men can.’

  The First Officer gave him an old-fashioned look, but didn’t argue. It was perfect weather when they arrived at Heathrow Airport, but the automatic landing system needed a full check, so Harker gave it the landing, while he and the First Officer sat with their arms folded, watching.

  The aircraft came in high. A gust caught it and no correction was made. Down came the right wheels onto the runway with an almighty thump.

  Nothing really wrong. Nothing dangerous. But not what could remotely be called a good landing. And certainly nothing like the last three of his own.

  ‘See what I mean?’ he said triumphantly, as he taxied to the ramp. Then they checked in at Operations, said goodbye to each other and set off with their bags and briefcases on their separate ways.

  H
arker saw the Citroën in the car park and began walking towards it. Harriet was sitting in the passenger seat. The window was wound down. She put her head through and waved. Jane was behind the wheel watching his approach, her peaky face smiling.

  Reaching the car, he bent forward and gave Harriet a quick peck through the open window.

  ‘Lovely to see you, darling. Thanks for coming. Sorry it was such an age.’ As he leaned forward, he saw the stick beside her. Christ, he thought, surely she should have got rid of that by now! Then he was aware that his daughter was watching him.

  ‘Well, well …’ he said, ‘The prodigal daughter! Long time no see.’

  Jane overreacted. Her head went back as if he’d hit her. She thrust out her jaw, her eyes glittered. She wrenched open the driver’s door, and with a lot of childish door-slamming got herself into the back.

  He wanted to tell her that her tantrums did nothing to improve her appearance but he forbore. She was looking most unattractive to begin with. Dark hair all over the place. No make-up. Jeans and a T-shirt with a CND badge on it. No wonder only Adams had shown himself interested.

  He supposed he ought to have kissed her, but he didn’t feel like it. As he turned on the ignition and rested his left hand on the wheel, Harriet squeezed it imploringly.

  He began to talk in a jolly voice to the car in general about the trip to Seattle. Only Harriet answered him. When he ran out of descriptions and boring anecdotes – odd how they all dissolved when you felt yourself pressurised – Harriet took over.

  They’d seen quite a bit of Madge and Archie. They’d all been to the races at Windsor. Madge had won on the tote but Archie had been out of luck. A pity, because Archie was in one of his depressions again.

  ‘He should pull himself together,’ Paul said, not thinking of Archie but staring at the stick. ‘He leans too much.’

  He heard a derisive little laugh from the back. It was an uncomfortable ride. He wished he’d had the forethought to buy Harriet a present. He could at least have filled the silence by telling her about it. When finally they arrived at Elmtrees, Jane got quickly out of the back and opened the front passenger door. Harriet took a long time leaving her seat.