by Nevil Shute
As is the case on Port Phillip Bay, the wind blew up very quickly. By the time they had been round once it was blowing quite hard and they were sailing gunwale under; Commander Towers was too busy with the sheet and tiller keeping the boat upright and on her course to have much attention for anything else. They started on the second round and beat up to the further turning point in brilliant sunshine and clouds of spray like diamonds; so occupied was he that he failed to notice the girl’s toe as she kicked a coil of mainsheet round the cleat and laid a tangle of jib sheet down on top of it. They came to the buoy and he bore away smartly, putting up the tiller and letting out the sheet, which ran two feet and fouled. A gust came down on them and laid the vessel over, the girl played dumb and pulled the jib sheet in, and the boat gave up and laid her sails down flat upon the water. In a moment they were swimming by her side.
She said accusingly. “You held on to the mainsheet!” And then she said, “Oh hell, my bra’s coming off!”
Indeed, she had contrived to give the knot between her shoulder blades a tweak as she went into the water, and it now floated by her side. She grabbed it with one hand and said, “Swim round to the other side and sit on the centreboard. She’ll come up all right.” She swam with him.
In the distance they saw the white motor boat on safety patrol turn and head towards them. She said to her companion, “Here’s the crash boat coming now. Just one thing after another. Help me get this on before they come, Dwight.” She could have done it perfectly well herself, lying face down in the water. “That’s right—a good hard knot. Not quite so tight as that; I’m not a Japanese. That’s right. Now let’s get this boat up and go on with the race.”
She climbed on to the centreboard that stuck out horizontally from the hull at water level and stood on it holding on to the gunwale while he swam below, marvelling at the slim lines of her figure and at her effrontery. He bore his weight down on the plate with her and the boat lifted sodden sails out of the water, hesitated, and then came upright with a rush. The girl tumbled over the topsides into the cockpit and fell in a heap as she cast off the mainsheet, and Dwight clambered in beside her. In a minute they were under way again, the vessel tender with the weight of water on her sails, before the crash boat reached them. “Don’t you do that again,” she said severely. “This is my sun-bathing suit. It’s not meant for swimming in.”
“I don’t know how I came to do it,” he apologised. “We were doing all right up till then.”
They completed the course without further incident, finishing last but one. They sailed in to the beach, and Peter met them waist deep in the water. He caught the boat and turned her into wind. “Have a good sail?” he asked. “I saw you bottle her.”
“It’s been a lovely sail,” the girl replied. “Dwight bottled her and then my bra came off, so one way and another we’ve had a thrilling time. Never a dull moment. She goes beautifully, Peter.”
They jumped over into the water and pulled the boat ashore, let down the sails, and put her on the trolley on the slipway to park her up on the beach. Then they bathed off the end of the jetty and sat smoking in the warm evening sun, sheltered from the offshore wind by the cliff behind them.
The American looked at the blue water, the red cliffs, the moored motor boats rocking on the water. “This is quite a place you’ve got here,” he said reflectively. “For its size it’s as nice a little club as any that I’ve seen.”
“They don’t take sailing too seriously,” Peter remarked. “That’s the secret.”
The girl said, “That’s the secret of everything. When do we start drinking again, Peter?”
“The crowd are coming in at about eight o’clock,” he told her. He turned to his guest. “We’ve got a few people coming in this evening,” he said. “I thought we’d go down and have dinner at the hotel first. Eases the strain on the domestic side.”
“Sure. That’ll be fine.”
The girl said, “You’re not taking Commander Towers to the Pier Hotel again?”
“That’s where we thought of going for dinner.”
She said darkly, “It seems to me to be very unwise.”
The American laughed. “You’re building up quite a reputation for me in these parts.”
“You’re doing that for yourself,” she retorted. “I’m doing all I can to whitewash you. I’m not going to say a word about you tearing off my bra.”
Dwight Towers glanced at her uncertainly, and then he laughed. He laughed as he had not laughed for a year, unrestrained by thoughts of what had gone before. “Okay,” he said at last. “We’ll keep that a secret, just between you and me.”
“It will be on my side,” she said primly. “You’ll probably be telling everyone about it later on this evening when you’re a bit full.”
Peter said, “Maybe we’d better think about changing. I told Mary we’d be back up at the house by six.”
They walked down the jetty towards the dressing-rooms, changed, and rode back on their bicycles. At the house they found Mary on the lawn watering the garden. They discussed ways and means of getting down to the hotel, and decided to harness up the grey and take the buggy down. “We’d better do that for Commander Towers,” the girl said. “He’d never make it back up the hill after another session in the Pier Hotel.”
She went off with Peter to the paddock to catch the grey and harness her. As she slipped the bit between the teeth and pulled the ears through the bridle she said, “How am I doing, Peter?”
He grinned. “You’re doing all right. Never a dull moment.”
“Well, that’s what Mary said she wanted. He’s not burst into tears yet, anyway.”
“More likely to burst a blood-vessel if you keep going on at him.”
“I don’t know that I’ll be able to. I’ve worked through most of my repertoire.” She laid the saddle over the mare’s back.
“You’ll get a bit more inspiration as the night goes on,” he remarked. “Maybe.”
The night went on. They dined at the hotel and drove back up the hill more moderately than before, unharnessed the horse and put her in the paddock for the night, and were ready to meet the guests at eight o’clock. Four couples came to the modest little party; a young doctor and his wife, another naval officer, a cheerful young man described as a chook farmer whose way of life was a mystery to the American, and the young owner of a tiny engineering works. For three hours they danced and drank together, sedulously avoiding any serious topic of conversation. In the warm night the room grew hotter and hotter, coats and ties were jettisoned at an early stage, and the gramophone went on working through an enormous pile of records, half of which Peter had borrowed for the evening. In spite of the wide open windows behind the fly wire the room grew full of cigarette smoke. From time to time Peter would throw the contents of the ash trays into the waste paper bin; from time to time Mary would collect the empty glasses, take them out to the kitchen to wash them, and bring them back again. Finally at about half past eleven she brought in a tray of tea and buttered scones and cakes, the universal signal in Australia that the party was coming to an end. Presently the guests began to take their leave, wobbling away on their bicycles.
Moira and Dwight walked down the little drive to see the doctor and his wife safely off the premises. They turned back towards the house. “Nice party,” said the submarine commander. “Really nice people, all of them.”
It was cool and pleasant in the garden after the hot stuffiness of the house. The night was very still. Between the trees they could see the shore line of Port Phillip running up from Falmouth towards Nelson in the bright light of the stars. “It was awfully hot in there,” the girl remarked. “I’m going to stay out here a bit before going to bed, and cool off.”
“I’d better get you a wrap.”
“You’d better get me a drink, Dwight.”
“A soft one?” he suggested.
She shook her head. “About an inch and a half of brandy and a lot of ice, if there’s any lef
t.”
He left her and went in to get her drink. When he came out again, a glass in each hand, he found her sitting on the edge of the verandah in the darkness. She took the glass from him with a word of thanks and he sat down beside her. After the noise and turmoil of the evening the peace of the garden in the night was a relief to him. “It certainly is nice to sit quiet for a little while,” he said.
“Till the mosquitoes start biting,” she said. A little warm breeze blew around them. “They may not, with this wind. I shouldn’t sleep now if I went to bed, full as I am. I’d just lie and toss about all night.”
“You were up late last night?” he asked.
She nodded. “And the night before.”
“I’d say you might try going to bed early, once in a while.”
“What’s the use?” she demanded. “What’s the use of anything now?” He did not try to answer that, and presently she asked, “Why is Peter joining you in Scorpion, Dwight?”
“He’s our new liaison officer,” he told her.
“Did you have one before him?”
He shook his head. “We never had one before.”
“Why have they given you one now?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he replied. “Maybe we’ll be going for a cruise in Australian waters. I’ve had no orders, but that’s what people tell me. The captain seems to be about the last person they tell in this navy.”
“Where do they say you’re going to, Dwight?”
He hesitated for a moment. Security was now a thing of the past though it took a conscious effort to remember it; with no enemy in all the world there was little but the force of habit in it. “People are saying we’re to make a little cruise up to Port Moresby,” he told her. “It may be just a rumour, but that’s all I know.”
“But Port Moresby’s out, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is. They haven’t had any radio from there for quite a while.”
“But you can’t go on shore there if it’s out, can you?”
“Somebody has to go and see, some time,” he said. “We wouldn’t go outside the hull unless the radiation level’s near to normal. If it’s high I wouldn’t even surface. But someone has to go and see, some time.” He paused and there was silence in the starlight, in the garden. “There’s a lot of places someone ought to go and see,” he said at last. “There’s radio transmission still coming through from some place near Seattle. It doesn’t make any sense, just now and then, a kind of jumble of dots and dashes. Sometimes a fortnight goes by, and then it comes again. It could be somebody’s alive up there, doesn’t know how to handle the set. There’s a lot of funny things up in the northern hemisphere that someone ought to go and see.”
“Could anybody be alive up there?”
“I wouldn’t think so. It’s not quite impossible. He’d have to be living in a hermetically sealed room with all air filtered as it comes in and all food and water stored in with him some way. I wouldn’t think it’s practical.” She nodded. “Is it true that Cairns is out, Dwight?”
“I think it is—Cairns and Darwin. Maybe we’ll have to go and see those, too. Maybe that’s why Peter has been drafted in to Scorpion. He knows those waters.”
“Somebody was telling Daddy that they’ve got radiation sickness in Townsville now. Do you think that’s right?”
“I don’t really know—I hadn’t heard it. But I’d say it might be right. It’s south of Cairns.”
“It’s going to go on spreading down here, southwards, till it gets to us?”
“That’s what they say.”
“There never was a bomb dropped in the southern hemisphere,” she said angrily. “Why must it come to us? Can’t anything be done to stop it?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing. It’s the winds. It’s mighty difficult to dodge what’s carried on the wind. You just can’t do it. You’ve got to take what’s coming to you, and make the best of it.”
“I don’t understand it,” she said stubbornly. “People were saying once that no wind blows across the equator, so we’d be all right. And now it seems we aren’t all right at all …”
“We’d never have been all right,” he said quietly. “Even if they’d been correct about the heavy particles—the radioactive dust—which they weren’t, we’d still have got the lightest particles carried by diffusion. We’ve got them now. The background level of the radiation here, today, is eight or nine times what it was before the war.”
“That doesn’t seem to hurt us,” she retorted. “But this dust they talk about. That’s blown about on the wind, isn’t it?”
“That’s so,” he replied. “But no wind does blow right into the southern hemisphere from the northern hemisphere. If it did we’d all be dead right now.”
“I wish we were,” she said bitterly. “It’s like waiting to be hung.”
“Maybe it is. Or maybe it’s a period of grace.”
There was a little silence after he said that. “Why is it taking so long, Dwight?” she asked at last. “Why can’t the wind blow straight and get it over?”
“It’s not so difficult to understand, really,” he said. “In each hemisphere the winds go around in great whorls, thousands of miles across, between the pole and the equator. There’s a circulatory system of winds in the northern hemisphere and another in the southern hemisphere. But what divides them isn’t the equator that you see on a globe. It’s a thing called the Pressure Equator, and that shifts north and south with the season. In January the whole of Borneo and Indonesia is in the northern system, but in July the division has shifted away up north, so that all of India and Siam, and everything that’s to the south of that, is in the southern system. So in January the northern winds carry the radioactive dust from the fall-out down into Malaya, say. Then in July that’s in the southern system, and our own winds pick it up and carry it down here. That’s the reason why it’s coming to us slowly.”
“And they can’t do anything about it?”
“Not a thing. It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle. We’ve just got to take it.”
“I won’t take it,” she said vehemently. “It’s not fair. No one in the southern hemisphere ever dropped a bomb, a hydrogen bomb or a cobalt bomb or any other sort of bomb. We had nothing to do with it. Why should we have to die because other countries nine or ten thousand miles away from us wanted to have a war? It’s so bloody unfair.”
“It’s that all right,” he said. “But that’s the way it is.”
There was a pause, and then she said angrily, “It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, Dwight. We’ve all got to do that some time. It’s all the things I’m going to have to miss …” She turned to him in the starlight. “I’m never going to get outside Australia. All my life I’ve wanted to see the Rue de Rivoli. I suppose it’s the romantic name. It’s silly, because I suppose it’s just a street like any other street. But that’s what I’ve wanted, and I’m never going to see it. Because there isn’t any Paris now, or London, or New York.”
He smiled at her gently. “The Rue de Rivoli may still be there, with things in the shop windows and everything. I wouldn’t know if Paris got a bomb or not. Maybe it’s all there still just as it was, with the sun shining down the street the way you’d want to see it. That’s the way I like to think about that sort of place. It’s just that folks don’t live there any more.”
She got restlessly to her feet. “That’s not the way I wanted to see it. A city of dead people … Get me another drink, Dwight.”
Still seated, he smiled up at her. “Not on your life. It’s time you went to bed.”
“Then I’ll get it for myself.” She marched angrily into the house. He heard the tinkle of glass and she came out almost immediately, a tumbler more than half full in hand with a lump of ice floating in it. “I was going home in March,” she exclaimed. “To London. It’s been arranged for years. I was to have six months in England and on the Continent, and then I was coming back through America. I’d have seen Madison Ave
nue. It’s so bloody unfair.”
She took a long gulp at her glass, and held it away from her in disgust. “Christ, what’s this muck I’m drinking?”
He got up and took the glass from her and smelt it. “That’s whisky,” he told her.
She took it back from him and smelt it herself. “So it is,” she said vaguely. “It’ll probably kill me, on top of brandy.” She lifted the glass of neat liquor and tossed it down, and threw the ice cube out upon the grass.
She faced him, unsteady in the starlight. “I’ll never have a family like Mary,” she muttered. “It’s so unfair. Even if you took me to bed tonight I’d never have a family, because there wouldn’t be time.” She laughed hysterically. “It’s really damn funny. Mary was afraid that you’d start bursting into tears when you saw the baby and the nappies hanging on the line. Like the squadron leader in the R.A.F. they had before.” Her words began to slur. “Keep him occ … occupied.” She swayed, and caught a post of the verandah. “That’s what she said. Never a dull moment. Don’t let him see the baby or perhaps … perhaps he’ll start crying.” The tears began to trickle down her cheeks. “She never thought it might be me who’d do the crying, and not you.”
She collapsed by the verandah, head down in a torrent of tears. The submarine commander hesitated for a moment, went to touch her on the shoulder and then drew back, uncertain what to do. Finally he turned away and went into the house. He found Mary in the kitchen tidying up the mess left by the party.
“Mrs. Holmes,” he said a little diffidently. “Maybe you could step outside and take a look at Miss Davidson. She just drank a full glass of neat whisky on top of brandy. I think she might want somebody to put her to bed.”