by Nevil Shute
T. A. Jenkinson
Messrs. Louden, Jenkinson, and Priestly,
Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
London.
Chapter 1
I THINK THAT as a man pursues his life he sometimes comes to a point, just once and again, when he must realise that for the last three weeks or six he has been living as a stranger to himself. That has happened to me on two or three occasions, generally in connection with some girl; I cherish these vignettes, only a few weeks each, in which I have been kind and true, thought clearly and acted generously. I cherish them as an old lady cherishes her love-letters — things unreal, almost unbelievable in their tenderness, and yet which actually happened. For this reason I want to write down something about the weeks I lived last summer, so that if I live to be old I may have this notebook with me to look over. It is the details, the silly little things that mean so much to me, that I want to remember; I should be very willing to forget the major incidents.
I crashed my car one night last spring, driving home along the shore road in the dark. That is what they told me in the nursing home, when I recovered consciousness on the evening of the following day. But I think I must begin my story before that, and try if I can put down all that I have ever been able to remember of the earlier portion of the night, before my accident.
What I have to write about that evening will appear confused. Bachelor evenings sometimes are like that, and I had much that day that I would willingly have drowned in gin. Looking back now upon that evening I think I must have had some measure of success, and that is what made the elucidation of my accident a little difficult when I came to my senses in the nursing home. But I had better start by putting down exactly what I can remember of that night.
I was in Plymouth. I don’t know exactly when it was that I left the club; it was after midnight. I must have been the last to leave, or one of the last. I remember we had dinner in the club and went on to the Empire; we had a box there. Then we went back to the club for a game of snooker. I won that, not because I can play snooker, but because I was practically stone sober. Nothing seemed to sink me that night, which was a pity.
I was the last to leave, or one of the last. Our three cars were drawn up together outside the club, and because I could see that the others might want help I waited till they got away. Kennet was the first to go; he got in to second all right, but third defeated him, and so he went home like that. It was Jim’s turn next, and I put him into his saloon and pressed the starter for him, and shut the door, and pushed him off back home. I was left by myself on the pavement, then, thirty miles from my own place. And I was alone, or I supposed I was. I don’t remember anyone else.
I stood there for a bit looking round, and the moon was very round and plain and the sky was deep blue, so that the moon hung in it like a great shilling. Behind me and to the left there were lights in the downstairs of the house; I stood there nursing my apples and wondering what they would do if they knew that I was there. By standing on my toes I could rest my arms on the top of the wall and see into the paddock. I had to rest my arm like that because the faggots hurt my bare feet, and the roughness of the bricks rasped my arms and chest through the woolly stuff of my pyjamas. And where I pressed my chest against the wall the apple crammed into the pocket of my jacket stuck into me and hurt, and I think perhaps I may have bruised it because there was a great scent of apples in the brilliant silence of the night.
I saw an owl fly out from somewhere into the trees on the other side of the paddock; I heard him hoot and I wondered if that meant that he had caught a mouse. I knew that was what he came out for, to catch mice. And I wondered, as I stood there shifting from foot to foot, how he could manage to see such a little thing as a mouse in the darkness or whether it was just a sort of story like they tell you when they think it’s something that you ought not to know.
I could hear the pony chumping away over on the other side of the field, but he was in the dark shadow of the trees and I couldn’t see where he was, but only hear him chumping. I wondered if I could catch him with an apple, because I could spare one of my apples to catch him and have a ride on his back. I could get another one as I went back through the garden to the house. I’d probably have to leave one apple behind anyway, because I didn’t see how I was going to climb up to my bedroom window carrying three of them, because you want two hands to carry three apples and I had to have one left to climb with.
I thought he might come for an apple, but it wasn’t so good as a bit of sugar, because I knew he’d come for that, because I’d tried it. And they said I must hold my hand quite flat, and not be afraid. And then I wondered if I caught him whether he would let me get on to his back, or whether I could, because he was much too high for me to get up on to unless he would let me lead him up to the gate and get on him from that. I wondered whether he would stand still and let me climb up his front leg. I thought that I could get on his back that way if he’d stand still and let me, and I wondered if people ever tried that way of getting on to a pony’s back. Because I’d never heard of it being done.
I stood there for a long time in the bright moonlight, shifting from one foot to the other on the crinkly woodpile, resting my folded arms on the wall and looking over. I had three apples in my hands and another in my pyjama jacket that was digging into me as it rubbed against the wall. And I stood there till I was sleepy for my bed, and cold in my pyjamas, and stiff with standing on my toes and with the pain in my feet.
And presently somebody touched “Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but was you . me on the shoulder. . anything?” wanting .
Very slowly I raised myself and turned my head; then I dropped my arms from the saloon top of my car and stood erect upon the kerb. The moon was very round and plain and the sky was deep blue, so that the moon hung in it like a great shilling. It was Nicholson, the grey-haired, infinitely discreet, head waiter at the club. He was in a soft hat and a raincoat; on his way home, I suppose. And I had something in my hand, and I said to him: “What’s this I’ve got, Nicholson?”
I think I remember that the old man chuckled, and he said: “Why, sir, that’s the apple what you took away with you from the dinner table, and you’ve been carrying about with you all evening.”
And I stared at him, and I said: “Is it an eating apple?”
And he said: “Yes, sir, they’re very good apples, those.”
“Then I’ll eat it,” I said, conscious of having reached a true decision after wading through a tangled mass of evidence. “I’ll eat it, Nicholson. And I’m bloody sorry to have kept you up so late.”
“Oh, that’s all right, sir,” he said. I think I must have got away then, because the next thing that I remember is that I was sliding through the outskirts of the town at fifty or sixty, raucous on the horn at every corner that I passed.
Some time that night I passed through a village, the street brilliant in the yellow light of the acetylenes. I remember that very clearly. I swung her round by the school and opened her out as we dropped down the hill into the country, and as we went I looked at my watch and calculated that we had averaged twenty-eight miles an hour for the run. With open country and clear roads ahead it ought to be possible to do better; with luck I might push that up to an average thirty for the journey. I thought that there were very few cars in England that could do that speed at night. And full of this I leaned over to Jardine beside me in the bucket seat and shouted against the roaring of the engine that I would bet him a sovereign that we should be in Oxford by eleven.
He pulled out his watch, snapped it open, leaned forward to study it in the dim light reflected from the road, and shook his head. “You can’t do seventeen miles in thirty-one minutes,” he shouted.
I laughed. “I can. She’ll go up to fifty if I let her out.”
He went fumbling round the back of his seat as the great car pitched and dithered. “Have an apple,” he said, and held one out to me. “What’s she doing now?”
I peered at the squ
are box of the speedometer, but it was too dark to see the flickering needle. “I bet we were doing forty-five along that straight,” I said, crunched my teeth into the apple, and dropped it on my lap to clutch the jerking wheel before we left the road. And as I drove I can remember that the scent of apples rose all around me in the draughty stuffiness beneath the hood.
I don’t know what time it was when we drew up before the new motor garage in Longwall Street, but I remember chucking the sovereign to Jardine for him to catch as we stood upon the pavement waiting for the young manager to come and open up. In that place there was a light in the offices upstairs to all hours of the night. I think he used to design cars up there by night after the work of the garage was over for the day; I remember going up there one night when I was late and drinking coffee with him and listening as he told me of the cars he had in mind to build. Cars for everybody; the cars of a dream. He was very lean and restless; he brushed his hair straight back from his forehead and he worked all night.
We walked on down Holywell to the digs; the moon was round and bright and the sky deep blue, and it was very still. There was whisky and a siphon left out for us on the table in the digs. I had driven the car too hard upon the run from London; that and perhaps the whisky filled my night with dreams, the nightmares of the road. Once a white donkey walked out of a gate into the road in the brilliance of my headlights not thirty yards ahead of me. I must have been doing sixty and I flung the car sideways beneath its nose, and missed it, and took the grass by the roadside with a lurch and a tremendous skid, and I awoke clutching the blankets in a sweat of terror. And once, sitting quiet in the saloon, driving with one hand and with the other fingering the apple in my pocket because it seemed to be that that was the only thing worth having that remained, I came round a bend in the road at a great speed to find myself faced by a plain brick wall and a shop front, where the road made a T-turn in a little town. In such a case the movements are entirely automatic. I remember the ringing grind of the brakes, the scream of the tyres, and a series of swift accelerations and rotations, and the Bentley came to a standstill ten yards up the top right-hand arm of the T, broadside across the road with the front and rear wheels in the gutter on each side.
And there was a man standing by the corner of the pavement. It was very quiet in the little street, and I said to him: “I didn’t drop my apple.” Because when we had broadsided to a standstill I found I had it undamaged in my hand, and it was fragrant in the stuffiness of the saloon.
He said: “What’s that?”
And I said: “I didn’t drop my apple.”
In the dim light he walked slowly towards the window at my elbow. “You didn’t ought to drive like that,” he said heavily. “Where d’you want to go to?”
I sat there staring at him for a minute. I could go anywhere I liked, because I had had the car filled up in Plymouth. Three hundred miles. I could go on the run and get right away, if that was any good.
“London,” I said at last. “I should be there by dawn.”
He said: “You want to go through Totnes for that. That way.” And he pointed to the other road.
I jerked my head towards the road that I was on. “Where does this go?” But I knew. It went home. And I knew that if I went the other way that night it would only be because I was afraid to go back and be alone.
“Slapton,” he said.
I nodded. “That’s right,” I said. “That’s where I want to go.” I backed the car a little and then swung her forward over the pavement of that narrow street and went gently up between the houses for fear that I should wake the sleeping people of the town, and over a bridge across a river and so out into the moonlit country where I was alone again.
I shall always be alone. It seemed to me then that I was back in the little town that I had left that afternoon, and although I suppose that these things must have happened earlier in the day I cannot expunge them from the sequence of my memories of the night. I think they may have happened to me that afternoon. I only know they happened to me that night.
There was a sunset in the room. There must have been, because there is no other light that could have given to her face and throat the warm glow, translucent, that was spreading slowly downwards as she leaned forward to scrape the ashes from the grate. It was early in April, and it was a Wednesday, because that was her free day. It was just after tea. I remember that because she had given me tea in her little room; the teapot and the large, blue-rimmed cups with oranges on them were still upon the table. I don’t know why there was a fire, or how there could have been a sunset at tea-time on that day. But there was. No other light could have given to her the warm colours that I remember, and I remember them so well.
We stayed there like that for a long time in silence. I had said all that I had to say; I leaned back in my chair and watched her playing with the poker till the fire glowed in the bars with a fierce, destructive efficiency that was foreign to that room. I knew what was coming to me, and as I sat there I can remember thinking that one should just take what little pleasures one can get and let the big ones go, the policy of small profits. And so I sat quiet in her room while she would let me, watching the play of the light upon the soft, straight hair that ended at her neck, and the grace of her movements. I have these things still, so that I saved something after all from the disaster of that afternoon.
And presently she looked up at me. “I’m so frightfully sorry,” she said quietly. “You do know that, don’t you? I never knew you cared for me like that a bit. Or not so much. I thought we were — just friends.”
My time was getting short, and at the thought I stirred a little in my chair. “Well, we weren’t,” I said. “That was just my cunning. You ought to have seen through that.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t. You’ve been so quiet about it. Honestly, I never knew that you were thinking about me in that way. Or I’d have let you know before — that it wasn’t any good.”
I nodded. “I know you would.”
She laid the poker down and turned to me. “It’s been a wonderful thing to hear you say this,” she said simply. “For me. It means a lot to a girl to hear what you’ve said to me. I’m only so frightfully sorry that I can’t play up.” She paused, and turned again towards the fire so that she gave me back her profile. “Of course, I know that you could make things different for me — with all your money. I suppose you’d be able to give me all the little bits of things I’ve wanted all my life” — her voice dropped a little— “things that I’ll never be able to afford. But that’s not everything — is it? You wouldn’t want me to marry you for that?”
I roused myself. “No,” I said quietly. “I wouldn’t want you to marry me for that.” It wasn’t true, but it sounded as if it was the right thing to say.
“And there’s nothing more to it than that,” she said.
I winced a bit at that one. I suppose everyone likes to picture himself as a Lancelot, though God knows I ought to have outgrown that by now. And while I was recovering I said:
“You’re quite sure about it? You know you can have as long as you like, to think it over.”
She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be any good. I’m most frightfully sorry — for myself as well as you. But if it was ever going to be different, I think one’d know.”
“I suppose you would,” I said.
I would willingly have spun out the Indian summer that remained to us. I would have liked to have sat on for a little longer in the room with her, but there was nothing left to stay for. And so:
“I expect it’s time I went away,” I said.
She came with me to the door. “There’s such lots of other girls,” she said quietly. “Malcolm, you won’t go worrying about this? It’s not worth it. You’ll find somebody else” — she did not say ‘with all your money’— ‘and then you’ll probably be glad it wasn’t me.’
I turned to her and laughed. “You don’t want to worry about that,” I said. “This happens to me every
eighteen months. There’s only another seven or eight months to go before I start again. I run pretty regularly to schedule.”
She eyed me a little wistfully. “I wish you didn’t live alone.”
I laughed. “I’m not going to — not next winter, anyway. I’ll pay some sweet young thing a salary to come and live with me.” I think that reassured her a little, because she was smiling when I went away. We succeeded in making a joke out of what might have been a most embarrassing affair, and so it is that my last memory of her is of her laughter.
All that night her laughter followed me along the winding roads that stretched brilliantly in front of me and eddied into dust behind. I remember that there was a bridge. I stood there for a moment staring down the stream, and as I stood there listening to the rippling of the water it seemed to me that here was a pause in my journey, a little time when I might be alone. I had left my hat somewhere, and a wind came down the river lifting the hair upon my forehead and blowing coolly in my face. My mouth was dry and parched. And so I went down the bank a little way until I reached the gravel spit where the cattle went down to drink. I had an apple with me in my hand, and as I stooped to drink I thrust it deep into the pocket of my ulster to be safe. I can remember that the water was very cool and sweet upon my face, dipping it up and drinking from my hands, and the moon most infinitely clear. Beyond the bridge the Bentley loomed silent by the roadside, a dark mass pierced by the brilliance of the red tail light. It was very quiet by the stream.
I left the water and went and sat down upon a hummock of grass on the bank, and as I went I shivered. And I remember that I was concerned about myself because I was feeling cold; I wrapped my coat more closely round me and thought I must get back to the car. I thought that I must be very careful now and look after myself very well, or I should be ill again. That, I suppose, is one of the last tenets of the bachelor, but for three months I had forgotten it. But now, from now onwards, I said that I must be very careful and look after myself, because there’d be nobody to do it for me. And that amused me a little, and I remembered being amused by it before.