Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  He smiled, puzzled by the contrast between the new house and the old. “Sort of rough living here,” he said warily.

  Morgan said: “It was rough all right.”

  Nay Htohn said: “It was as we wanted it to be. My father when we married wanted to build us a good house. But Mandinaung itself was so much ruined that we did not want to live like that. It would not have been right.”

  Comprehension was beginning to dawn on Mr Turner. “What ruined it?” he asked.

  Morgan said: “We did it a bit of no good one day with the Thunderbolts and Hurribombers, early in 1945, when we were coming down this way. It was a Jap headquarters. These places burn like fun, you know — there wasn’t much left of the town when we’d done with it.”

  “I suppose they do burn pretty easy.”

  “They do that. When I got back here afterwards and we got married, all building materials were in short supply. Well, you see how it was. We didn’t kind of fancy building a brand new slap-up house with all modern conveniences while the rest of the bloody place was flat — especially with my RAF record. So we made do with a bashah for the time.” He glanced around. “They’re really quite comfortable, these places, but they get old pretty soon. This one’s just about had it.”

  The girl said: “These are very good houses while you can live simply, with just the two of you. Later on, when the babies come, it is more difficult. I was glad when we could build the new house last year, with a bathroom. But I do not regret the years we spent in this small place, and the people liked it too, when they came to understand the reason why we lived here.”

  They turned, and walked up to the house. They passed through the garden, a few beds full of flowering azaleas, and strange flowers that Mr Turner did not recognize that he learned later were orchids. He was diffident about asking questions. They moved in a scent of flowers brought out by the rain; beside them the azaleas and the orchids, beyond those the mimosa and the great orange and red glory of a flame tree. Mr Turner walked through these wonders in a daze.

  “When did you leave England?” Morgan asked.

  “Only last week — I come out by air.”

  The girl walking between them said: “Has Rita Hayworth made a new film, after Gilda?” She laughed. “I am a terrible fan.”

  Mr Turner scratched his head. “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t go much, myself. You want to ask my wife; she’s always going to the pictures.” He glanced at the pale brown girl beside him curiously. “Where do you go to see a film, out here?”

  “Sometimes they are shown in Danubyu,” she said. “But every two or three months we go down to Rangoon for a few days, while Phillip does business.” She laughed. “Then I am in the picture house all the time.”

  Mr Turner said: “Cary Grant made a good one that I saw just before I come out,” and he told her all about it.

  They went up the steps on to the wide, shady veranda and into the house. There was a hall with rooms that opened out of it; the hall itself seemed to be the living-room and there was a table laid with afternoon tea, and long cane chairs with leg extensions.

  Presently they were sitting down to tea. A large white cat walked slowly into the room from the veranda, and walked straight to Mr Turner as he lay in the cane chair, and jumped up on to his lap.

  Mr Turner said: “Hullo, puss,” and stroked its ear. Then he noticed Morgan and Nay Htohn staring at it.

  “Well I’m damned,” said Morgan. “Never seen it do that before. You’re honoured, old boy.”

  The cat stood kneading on his stomach for a moment, then settled down and began to purr. In that tropic heat its presence was uncomfortable, but Mr Turner liked a cat and was prepared to put up with it for a time. “Took a fancy to me,” he said.

  The girl said something softly to Morgan in Burmese. He smiled at her gently, and said a word or two in the same language.

  “What’s his name?” asked Turner.

  Morgan glanced at the girl; she nodded slightly. “I don’t call him anything,” he said. “Nay Htohn calls him Moung Payah.” He hesitated for a moment. “That means, Your Reverence.”

  “Strewth,” said Turner comfortably, “what a name to call him.”

  “As a matter of fact, you’re very much honoured,” said Morgan. “He’s a most unfriendly cat in the normal way. Won’t have anything to do with me or Nay Htohn. Catches a lot of rats, though.”

  He turned the subject. “How did you get to know I was out here?” he asked.

  It was a question that Mr Turner had some difficulty in answering; the lie, when it came, was not very convincing. “I kind of wondered what had happened to you,” he said. “Then one day I met a chap in the Air Ministry who said he could find out, easy — put his girl on to look up in the records. Well, he did that, ‘n wrote and told me you were out in Burma, ‘n give me your last address, Ladbroke Square. Well, I didn’t think no more about it — stuck the letter in the file and forgot about it, till the question of this trip come up, at the office. Then I got to thinking if there was anybody that I knew out here, and looked out the letter. And I went ‘n had a talk with your mother and sister. Week before last, that was.”

  The meal was over, and they were smoking. Nay Htohn got up and went into an inner room, to the sound of children. Morgan said: “Let’s go and sit out on the veranda. It’s cooler there.”

  They went out, and pulled other long cane chairs together, and reclined, smoking and looking out over the wide river. There was still sunshine, and it was very hot; on the far side of the river over in the direction of the Pegu Yoma the thunderheads were massing for another storm.

  Morgan said: “How was my mother?”

  “She didn’t seem very well to me,” said Mr Turner. “ ’Course, I don’t know her. Sort of invalid, is she?”

  “Yes.” The pilot hesitated, and then said: “I suppose she didn’t give you a very good account of me.”

  Mr Turner was silent for a moment. “Seems kind of different out here to what it did in Ladbroke Square,” he said at last. “What she said was right enough, but it had got a twist, if you get me. Not like things really are.”

  The other said quietly: “I know. I’ve tried to make her see it, but it’s no damn good. We don’t write much now. I had to make a choice between England and Burma and — well, I chose Burma.” He paused, and then he said: “England wasn’t very kind to me, you know.”

  “How did you come to get out here?” asked Mr Turner. “I mean, settled in like this, and knowing everyone, and that?”

  Morgan said: “I’ll tell you.”

  * * *

  He said that when he left the hospital at Penzance he went up to London to that lovely girl, his wife. She flew into his arms directly he opened the door of the little flat in Pont Street, and in her close embrace all doubts slipped away from him. Then they broke away, and she said: “Did you bring my parcel?”

  He said: “I’m terribly sorry — I’m afraid it’s gone. They’ve cleared away the wreck and everything.”

  She said sharply: “But it can’t be gone! I mean, it’s part of your luggage. It must be somewhere, if you look for it.”

  “I don’t know what to do about it now,” he said. “I think it’s a write-off.”

  She said petulantly: “Oh, it can’t be. I mean, it had perfume in it, and silk stockings. I need stockings. I haven’t got a thing to wear.”

  Thinking to please her, he said: “Those are lovely ones you’ve got on now. Your legs look wizard in them.”

  She said: “Oh, those are a pair Bill gave me, but they’re literally the only ones I’ve got. You must be able to find that parcel. Can’t you write to somebody about it?”

  He shifted uneasily. “You aren’t allowed to bring that sort of stuff into the country, you know. Makes it a bit difficult.”

  She said: “Oh, nobody pays any attention to that.”

  She did not think to ask him how he was, or to explain why she had not been able to get down to Penzance to see him,
or to answer his letters. She was nice to him in a distracted sort of way, but her mind was utterly engrossed with her theatrical job, and with her clothes, and with the cabarets and night clubs that she went to, usually with Bristow. Flight-Lieutenant Bristow had a job at the Air Ministry which kept him in London; Morgan found himself an intruder into a pleasant little friendship. Whenever he went out with Joyce, Bristow was likely to go with them, and they seldom sat at home.

  * * *

  “It’s difficult,” said Morgan, staring out over the wide river to the dim hills beyond. “You don’t know what to do when things get like that. I didn’t make a song and dance about it, because I wanted to go on ops and, well, there’s always the risk, you know.” He paused. “Anyway, Bristow usually paid the bill. I hadn’t got nearly enough money for all the things Joyce wanted to do.”

  He sat silent for a moment. “I suppose I was a bit of a coward,” he said. “I was afraid to start a row.”

  * * *

  He was posted to an aerodrome near Exeter for ground duties after his leave, still in Transport Command. From there he could get up to London pretty frequently upon a weekend pass, and each time he returned from leave distressed and worried. Bristow was very much in evidence, and it was clear to Morgan that his wife went out with Bristow almost every night. They had little secret jokes from which he was excluded, and though the girl was still kind to him it gradually became clear that she was bored by his visits. Morgan became morose and unhappy, too inexperienced to knew what to do about such things, too much tied by the RAF to do very much about it anyway.

  In the spring of 1944 he was put back on flying duties and sent for a short conversion course to fly Dakotas. From there he was sent to a Dakota squadron forming up in Yorkshire for supply dropping duties; while he was there he saw very little of Joyce, who now called herself Bobby Charmaine. In July 1944 the squadron were ordered out to India, and Morgan saw his wife for the last time upon his final leave.

  It was not very different from his other leaves. He was going out to the war in the Far East; he would be away for three years or so, if he came back at all. His last leave left little impression on his mind but a series of wild parties after the theatre with his wife, and Bristow, and various officers of the US Air Force — and a series of hangovers next day that lasted till the evening party started up again. During that fortnight he thought he was having a marvellous time and that everything would be all right, and that Joyce would write to him every week while he was away; he had bought her a very expensive fountain-pen, and she had promised to use it. Sometimes he wondered if they couldn’t do something in the country like sailing a boat or riding a horse, which might be rather fun, but the theatre intervened, or the hangover. Then the evening party would start up, and he would have a marvellous time all over again.

  The squadron left England in August 1944, and flew by night over the French battles to land at Malta in the dawn. From Malta they flew on to Cairo West, from Cairo West to Shaibah in Iraq, from Shaibah to Karachi, from Karachi to Barrackpore in Bengal. They rested at Barrackpore for a fortnight after the flight out while defects in the aircraft were made good and the crews became acclimatised. Then, as a fully operational unit, they flew down to the dirt airstrip of Cox’s Bazaar, a little place on the Bay of Bengal, on the edge of Burma.

  From there, they began to operate down the coast of Arakan to support the Army battling in the vicinity of Buthidaung. Each Dakota carried a load of four tons for relatively short hauls such as that; they flew in everything the Army needed from field gun ammunition and petrol to sausages and hair oil, dropping the loads by parachute from three hundred feet on ground marked out with white cloth strips by the Army, and returning immediately to Cox’s for another load. They had more crews than aircraft, and the machines were worked very intensively. It was usual for the same crew to do two or even three trips in one day, flying for as much as twelve hours; then they would have two days of complete rest.

  Morgan lived with the rest of his squadron in tents immediately beside the airstrip and the aircraft. There was no shade, of course; the fierce September sun beat down upon the tents and on the blazing sand that made the strip. There is surely no place hotter in the tropics than an unpaved airstrip, except perhaps a paved one. At times it was so hot that it was possible to fry an egg upon the metal tail plane of the Dakota, and this was about the only recreation that the strip provided. From time to time they would take one of the squadron jeeps and drive down to the beach, and bathe in the lukewarm Bay of Bengal from the grey, dirty sand. The water was too warm and sticky to refresh.

  He lived in a continual grit of dust blown up from the surface of the strip as the aircraft took off or ran up engines on test. It got into his food, into his cigarettes and his drink, into his blankets; it formed a gritty mud upon his body with the sweat that poured off him all day. He lived dressed in a bush hat and a dirty jungle suit, which is like a battledress made of thin green material. Usually he wore the trousers only, and the top half of his body became tanned deep brown. In three months of this strange life of supply dropping he matured considerably; he grew more self-reliant in this mode of living stripped down to the elementals of the job.

  At the beginning of November Phillip Morgan got a letter from his wife, the first to reach him since he had left England. Thrilled and excited, he carried it off to his tent, and sitting on the charpoy in the sweltering shade, he opened it. It read:

  Phillip Darling,

  This is going to be a dreadful letter to write and I really don’t know how to begin but it’s not as if we ever had been married really is it I mean had a home and all that. I know when Jack was killed you were too sweet in looking after me and of course he wanted it and so we simply had to and it’s been marvellous and I’ll never regret one minute of it will you?

  Well now I’ve found somebody at last who can provide for me properly just what Jack would always have wanted for me it seems too terrible that he couldn’t have been there first of all but that’s the way things happen isn’t it?

  I wonder if you can guess who it is? Jack Bristow isn’t it funny that his name should be Jack too it came to me like a thunderclap the other morning that this was what my first Jack would have wanted for me and of course I thought of you at once and my dear I was miserable and Jack and I talked it over last night when he came round after the show and he said I must write and tell you my dear I felt terrible I couldn’t sleep. I asked him again this morning and he said I must and if I didn’t he’d never see me again so I said I would and he said I ought to ask you to give me evidence a hotel bill or something so that I can divorce you and get the whole thing straight and then we can be married.

  I feel this is a stinking mess but it’s the only way I expect you can fix up something in Calcutta or something much better get it all settled up before you come home only please be quick because Jack only has another two months at the Air Ministry and it’s horrible being sort of neither one thing nor the other in spite of it having been all a mistake to start with hasn’t it? I do hope we’ll be frightfully good friends for dear old Jack’s sake.

  Ever your loving,

  Bobby

  Phillip Morgan sat for an hour in the sweltering tent turning this cri du coeur over and over in his hands. He sat upon the charpoy naked to the waist; the tears made little streaks in the damp mud of dust upon his cheeks and mingled with the stream of sweat from his temples, and ran down his neck and into the sweat beads upon his chest, and were lost in the steady stream that ran down his body. At the end of the hour he lit a cigarette with hands that trembled a little; then Flying-Officer Scott who shared his tent came in from a trip over the mountains into northern Burma, and Morgan showed him the letter dumbly. Scott had the best part of a bottle of Indian gin, and sympathy, and he gave both to Morgan, and a bottle of the Wing-Commander’s beer ration. Presently the sharp pain eased to a dull ache, another ache among the many aches and pains and itches that made up life upon the airstrip of Co
x’s Bazaar.

  There was, of course, nothing that he could do about the question of divorce. There were only five European women, nurses, in the district at that time, and about seventy thousand men, and there were no hotels to provide him with a bill even if there had been any women. He was too far from England, and too much strained and occupied with war to do anything about it; he stopped writing home, and did not answer the letter. He sank into an apathy of heat and dust and sweat, and joined the morose ten per cent of men in South-East Asia Command whose wives had let them down.

  He had one relaxation for his long hours of leisure that was denied to the other pilots of his squadron. Along the strip there was a squadron of Spitfires commanded by a squadron-leader who had served with Morgan in Africa; these Spitfires operated upon long-range tanks right down into the south of Burma, bombing a little, dropping parachute supplies a little, shooting up a lot. Morgan had done two tours in Spitfires, and in times of little pressure he could borrow a machine, and get up into the clean, cool air at ten or fifteen thousand feet in something that would really fly. Once or twice, when one of the Spitfire pilots was sick, he substituted for him and flew with them upon an operational sortie; he did that for the last time on November 25th, about a fortnight after he had received the letter from his wife.

  The job was at extreme range for the Spitfires, to strafe Japanese river boats and shipping on the Irrawaddy river between Prome and Yandoon.

  The accident, when it came, was almost unbelievably stupid. The Spitfire that he flew was old and battered, maintained for six months in the open air in the pouring rain and blazing sun of the airstrip, with only improvised appliances. Everything on it worked after a fashion; nothing worked with the mechanical reliability that Morgan was accustomed to in Spitfires. Still, he was glad of the chance to fly it, and took off with the squadron and flew into Burma. He flew on the belly tank until, not far from Zalun as he was flying down the Irrawaddy with the squadron at two hundred feet, his engine coughed and spluttered. He zoomed up and turned on the wing tanks, but the engine did not play. Instead, it went on coughing for a little, and then stopped for good.