Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  This time he chose a run slightly more under the lee of the land where the waves were not so high. Again she ploughed a long way before getting up on to the step, but after that it went better. She left the water after a run of about a mile and a half, touched again lightly; then she was clear and climbing slowly from the firth, her floats dripping and drying quickly in the rush of air. The pilot let her climb straight ahead for a time; at three hundred feet he put her in a wide turn and relaxed.

  He flew back over Invergordon and crossed the neck of the land to Tain, running out his aerial as he did so. Scotland lay spread out before them, purple with heather, cut with deep blue lochs, and very beautiful. The pilot turned and flew northwest to Lairg; then he followed the length of Loch Shin to the west coast. As soon as the aerial was out he began transmitting on his wireless, and was soon in touch with the Fleet Air Arm station at Evanton. He reported his position, course, and speed; then he changed his wave and tried to get in touch with Reykjavik. To his surprise he got them straight away, and tapped out a message to them in Morse.

  It was about a quarter to seven when he left the water at Invergordon. They were over the west coast of Scotland at a quarter to eight, flying at three thousand feet. They headed straight out to sea from the coast, passing the Butt of Lewis on their port hand at a quarter past eight. That dropped astern. Then there was nothing to be seen except the wide disk of the sea, a grey and corrugated sea, blotched here and there with cloud shadows.

  Ross abandoned the English stations and concentrated upon Reykjavik, transmitting his estimated position each half hour. Between transmissions he peered through his drift sight at the slowly moving waves below, did little sums on the slide rule, plotted their position on the map. He was continuously busy. Lockwood sat beside him watching these activities, bored and a little uneasy. They were so far from land, so far from any possibility of help if they should need it. In the whole crossing they only saw one ship, a trawler, soon after they left Scotland.

  Alix sat behind the pilot, wondering from time to time what he was doing. The tapping of the little key, she knew, meant that he was sending out a message on the wireless; she did not know to whom he was sending, and he was too preoccupied to explain. She did not know what he was looking at when he stared downwards through a hole cut in the floor, fiddling with some instrument. She did not know the purpose of the little handle above his head that he adjusted delicately from time to time, or what calculations he was doing on the slide rule. Yet it was clear to her that he knew just what he was doing, and that everything was going well. There was no uncertainty about his movements, no fumbling or hesitation. They were in good hands. Presently she relaxed and dozed a little.

  They went on like that, hour after hour.

  The clouds came lower as they went on, forcing them down to fifteen hundred feet. The weather remained good, however, and the sky was never wholly overcast. At twelve o’clock Ross said to Lockwood:

  “We might see land ahead any time now, sir. By my reckoning we’re about sixty miles off.”

  The don peered forward, but the horizon was hazy; there was nothing to be seen. Presently the clouds came lower still; Ross took the machine down to about eight hundred feet. From that height they could see the waves; there was a long swell running, difficult to land in if they had to. The girl looked at the grey rollers pensively; she felt that she hated the sea. Any sort of land would be better than this grey stuff, with its little streaks of foam.

  Suddenly she leaned forward and said, “Mr. Ross!”

  He swung round in his seat. “Yes?”

  “What’s the matter with the sea? It’s gone a different colour.”

  He looked down quickly; the dark grey had changed to a dirty, milky hue. He said, “Good enough — that means we’re very near. Quick of you to spot that.”

  “Does the sea change colour near land?”

  “It does here according to the books. It’s the glaciers or something.”

  They peered into the haze ahead. In a minute or two the pilot said:

  “There it is. See? Over there.”

  They followed his direction. A dark lava rock was standing in the sea, ringed with white foam; then there was another, and a little island. Suddenly a rocky and forbidding coast was plain before them; the pilot pulled the seaplane up a little higher. Lockwood stared forward. “What a horrible-looking place!”

  The pilot smiled. “I’ve heard of people coming to Iceland for their summer holiday.”

  Freed from the strain of the last hours, Alix laughed, a little shrilly. The pilot turned in his seat. “Let’s have those sandwiches,” he said. “It’ll be an hour before we get to Reykjavik.”

  The little occupation of unwrapping the sandwiches steadied the girl; the food itself refreshed them and removed their fatigue. The presence of the land raised their spirits; they began to study the countryside with interest and to comment on it cheerfully as they had their lunch. It was a land of little barren farms along by the seashore, with hills rising sharply to the north, lined with white streaks of glaciers running down from the ice cap. Ross flew a little way inland from the coast, homing with his wireless on the broadcasting station. Presently they crossed a ridge of high land by a lake; in front of them lay Faxa Fjord, and Reykjavik.

  Ross circled over the town, studying the port. “I think I’ll land outside in the fjord and taxi into the harbour,” he said. “There ought to be a red buoy for us, straight opposite the jetty.” He turned to the girl, smiling. “Can you do your stuff again, Miss Lockwood?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good enough. Look, put on one of those lifebelts before you get out.”

  He made a wide circuit, throttled back, and brought the machine down to the surface by the harbour wall. She touched gently, sank down into the water, and came to rest. In the cabin the girl took off her stockings and put on her sand shoes and her life jacket; the pilot turned and taxied into the made harbour.

  This time the mooring went off without an incident. The pilot saw his buoy some distance off and taxied over to it; fifty yards away he slowed down to a walking pace and the girl got down on to the float, boathook in hand. He brought the buoy up to her feet; she caught it with the boathook, clipped the spring hook on to it, and threw it back at once.

  She stood on the float looking up at the pilot, leaning sideways out of his window. “How’s that, Mr. Ross?”

  The seaplane drifted back and lay quietly at the mooring. “Money for jam,” he said. “It’s too easy.”

  She laughed. “I didn’t even get my feet wet that time.”

  He stopped the engine and turned off the petrol. A motor boat came out to them from the shore and drew up near to them; the man in it hailed to them.

  “Hvor kommer De Fra? Fra Skotland?”

  Ross shook his head. He called out to the man, “Are you Mr. Sorensen?”

  The boatman smiled at them. “Not speak Engelsk,” he said. He added an incomprehensible sentence.

  Alix, still standing on the float, said, “Er De Herr Sorensen?”

  The man addressed himself to her. Presently she turned to Ross, a little doubtfully. “I think he’s saying that Mr. Sorensen has had to go away, and he’ll be back tonight. He’s Sorensen’s man all right.”

  The pilot stared at her. “Do you speak Danish?”

  “Not properly. I did a month at the Berlitz school before we started.”

  They beckoned to the boat to come alongside. The girl spoke to the boatman for a time, slowly and haltingly, fumbling for her words. Then she turned back to Ross. “He says Mr. Sorensen told him to look out for us. We can use the boat. He knows where the petrol is, if you want it.”

  The pilot nodded. “We’d better get our things up to the hotel, and then I’ll come back and fill her up. If this fine weather lasts I want to go to Angmagsalik tomorrow. Get along while the going’s good.”

  They collected their personal luggage from the machine and got into the boat. As they went t
owards the shore the boatman began explaining something to Alix. She listened with strained attention to his many repetitions. Then she turned to Ross.

  “He says he knows a good place where you can get the seaplane on shore, right out of the water, if you want to. It’s something to do with trawlers, I think. I couldn’t quite make out what it is.”

  “Probably a slipway.” The pilot looked around him at the sky. “It all seems pretty settled. Tell him I want to get a weather report. If it’s a good one, we’ll leave her where she is, I think, and go on in the morning.”

  He smiled at her. “Can you put that over?”

  “I’ll try.”

  She made arrangements for the man to meet him again in an hour’s time for the refuelling; then they landed at the jetty and walked up to the hotel through a small crowd of spectators. The girl felt conspicuous in her overalls and was glad to get into her room to change. From the hotel, the pilot went alone to the meteorological office in the broadcasting building.

  He was welcomed warmly by the meteorologist, who had been responsible for the Reykjavik end of their wireless messages in the morning as they crossed from Scotland. He told Ross at once that the weather between Reykjavik and Angmagsalik was fine that day, but liable to sudden changes. However, they expected it to last for the next day or two.

  Ross talked his programme over with the meteorologist and made arrangements with him for a forecast at six o’clock next morning. A true isobaric forecast would not be available; the best that they could do would be to get a message from Angmagsalik to say what it was like there. If it was good at both ends, he decided, he would start.

  He asked, “Is there much ice in the fjord at Angmagsalik?”

  He was told, “It has been a good season. The pack broke early, and the ice has been not much at Angmagsalik. There has been fog this year — plenty, plenty.”

  Of the two, he would rather have had ice. Both were bad enough.

  He, went back to the hotel, and told Lockwood what he had decided. “If you’re game for it, sir, I’d like to get along tomorrow — the weather seems as good as it ever is in these parts. If we did that I wouldn’t mind how long we take to do the rest of it.”

  The don nodded. “You’re quite happy about the machine? You wouldn’t like to have a day here to look her over?”

  The pilot shook his head. “She’s all right. I’m just going down to fill her up, with the boatman; then she’ll be all ready for us in the morning.”

  He went out through the hall of the hotel. Alix was there, dressed in her blue jersey with rather a sad-looking grey skirt. She said, “Are you going to fill up, Mr. Ross?”

  He nodded. “I’m just going down now. I want to get that done right away.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  He smiled. “Don’t bother about that, Miss Lockwood. I can manage all right with the boatman.”

  “I’d like to come, if I won’t be in the way.”

  He shook his head. “You won’t be in the way. As a matter of fact, you’ll be able to talk to him for me.”

  They found the man down at the jetty. The petrol was in cans in the fuel store three hundred yards from the boat; Ross and the boatman set to work to carry it down, helped by a little boy. The girl stood and watched their work, can after can, journey after journey, from the store to the boat. At the end of three-quarters of an hour of heavy work they were ready to go out to the seaplane.

  The refuelling commenced. The girl squatted in the rear part of the cabin, translating now and again for Ross. Apart from that, there was little she could do to help him. Sitting there and watching, she was amazed and a little shocked at the hard physical work the pilot had to do. First, the contents of the big tank had to be pumped into the service tanks in the wings. The pump was a small double-acting cylinder beside the pilot’s seat, worked by an oscillating handle that could be operated only with one hand. About a hundred and ten gallons had to be pumped from the big tank to the service tanks, five feet higher in the wing. For half an hour the pilot worked the handle; then the boatman took a turn and Ross came aft to Alix, streaming with sweat, mopping his face with a handkerchief.

  She said, “That’s a terrible job, Mr. Ross. Isn’t there any better way of doing it?”

  He said, “It’s not so bad, really. In the air that amount of fuel would last about six hours. You’d have that time to get it up. It’s no work then; the pumping gives you something to do. It’s only when you’re filling up that it’s a bit of trouble.”

  He sat down by her on the sleeping bags, dazed and fatigued. The strain of the morning’s flight was coming out; he felt sleepy, sick, and muddled in the head. It was impossible to smoke a cigarette because of the petrol fumes. He yawned. “Get to bed early tonight,” he said. “I want to go on early tomorrow morning, if we can.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather wait a day, Mr. Ross? We’ve got plenty of time in hand.”

  “I don’t think we’d better, unless you’re anxious to, Miss Lockwood. We’ve got good weather now. Once it breaks, up in these latitudes, it may be bad for a long time. We might get stuck here for a fortnight.”

  “I suppose so,” Alix said. “Shall we be starting very early?”

  He smiled slowly. “I won’t make you get up at half past four again. We’ll have an easy day. Breakfast at half past five.”

  She laughed. “I don’t mind getting up at half past four, if you want to start then.”

  He shook his head. “There’s no point in it. I must have the weather report before we go, and I can’t get that till six.” He considered for a moment. “Besides, we aren’t going so far. It’s only four hundred and eighty miles to Angmagsalik.”

  The pump sucked. The boatman got down into the motor boat and began passing up petrol cans to Ross. The petrol was in two gallon cans. The pilot stood in the cabin emptying these cans into a very large duralumin funnel lined with chamois leather; from long experience of the North he was insistent on straining every drop of petrol that went into the machine.

  In all, they put in about a hundred and forty-five gallons, seventy-three cans. Very soon they found the routine. The boatman handed up a can to Alix at the cabin door, who passed it up to Ross at the petrol tank, receiving from him an empty one in exchange. She passed that down to the boatman and took another full one; it went on interminably. The cockpit windows and the cabin door were open, but the cabin was filled with petrol fumes. Before long the girl was faint and dizzy; she had to force herself to go on with the work. The pilot, stooping above the petrol funnel in the close, hot little cabin, worked on doggedly. It took them rather over two hours to put in the petrol.

  After that there was the oil tank to be filled, the filters to be cleaned, and the sumps to be checked.

  The girl sat in the boat while this was going on, recovering herself in the clean air, watching the pilot as he stood upon the floats at his work. It was nearly seven o’clock; they had been working for three and a half hours, and she was very tired. The sun was getting towards the horizon; the mountains and the little town were bathed in the warm glow of evening. The seaplane and the motor boat rocked quietly together on the calm, dappled water of the harbour. The pilot worked on steadily, methodically. For the first time Alix began to understand long-distance flying. It was not courage, or resourcefulness, or ability that counted in this game, though they were necessary subsidiary qualities. It was the capacity to work efficiently at tiring, menial tasks upon the ground that made great flights a success.

  At last Ross was finished. He locked the cabin door and got down into the boat, hot and dirty. As they were carried to the shore she made arrangements with the boatman for Ross to be able to get at the boat if wind should get up in the night, and for the boat to meet them at the jetty at a quarter past six in the morning. Then they landed, and walked slowly up to the hotel.

  “It’s been very good of you to come and help, Miss Lockwood,” said the pilot wearily. “It’s got us through much quicker.”
r />   “I never knew that there was so much work in it.”

  “It’s not so bad really. Takes a bit of time. Your Danish came in very handy.” He glanced at her curiously. “Did you go and learn it specially for this trip?”

  She nodded. “Uncle David said it would be useful.”

  “Uncle David knows his stuff.” They reached the hotel. “Would you like a drink when we’ve had a wash, Miss Lockwood?”

  “I should think we’ve earned it.”

  He nodded. “Sherry? I’ll order it when I get down.”

  He met Lockwood in the lounge as he came down from his room; the don ordered the drinks. “Sherry for Miss Lockwood,” said the pilot. “I’ll have a tomato cocktail.”

  Alix came in as he spoke. “Break your rule and have a whiskey and soda,” she said. “It’ll give you an appetite.”

  He shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said, smiling. “I’d rather stick to something soft, if you don’t mind.”

  Lockwood said, “Do you make a point of that?”

  The pilot looked uncomfortable. “Well — in a way. I’ll drink a bucket with you when we get down to New York.”

  Presently they went in to dinner. The Lockwoods made a good meal; the pilot was too tired and too sick from the petrol fumes to eat very much. At the end they got up and went to take their coffee in the lounge. Ross stretched himself in his armchair, and relaxed. “I’d like to take a little walk along by the harbour presently,” he said. “Not very far. And then a spot of bed.”

  Lockwood said, “That’s a good idea; I’ll come out with you. You’ve had a heavy day, Mr. Ross.”

  “Oh, not so bad. But I’ll be glad to get to bed.”

  A stout Icelandic gentleman came bustling into the lounge and asked a question at the desk. Then he crossed the room to them, radiating bonhommie, and bowed to them stiffly from the waist.

  “Sorensen,” he said. “I am very sorry that I was not here to meet you when you arrived. Just now I have come back from Thorlakshavn,” he explained. “Just now. Directly.”