Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  “Say, Dr. Scott,” she asked, “is this a Reindeer, too?”

  I sat up. “I’m afraid it is,” I said. “But I don’t think you need be afraid of anything going wrong this time.”

  She smiled. “Will we be landing at Gander again?”

  “I imagine so,” I said.

  She laughed. “You’ll be interested to meet your Mr. Honey there,” she said. “Mind if I sit down a little while and visit with you?”

  “Do — please.” I picked my papers off the seat, and she sat down beside me. “I hope Honey will be on his way home by this time. The Lincoln that was to pick him up was due through Gander today.”

  “He won’t be at Gander when we land?”

  “I hope not. I hope he’ll be at home.”

  She was silent. I glanced at her after a moment, and was surprised to see the hard lines of age and suffering on her face as she stared up the cabin. People had told me that she was over fifty, but I had never really believed it till then.

  I said, “Are you going back to the west coast?”

  She nodded. “I’ll go from Montreal to Chicago, and pick up with the airline there. I kind of like this way of travelling, unless there’s business in New York.”

  “When will you be over here again?” I asked. “Do let us know, so that Honey can bring Elspeth up to see you.” It’s extraordinary how cruel one can be, quite unintentionally, when one is too tired to be careful any more.

  She turned to me, and she was every day of fifty. “I don’t just know when that will be,” she said. “Maybe not for some years. I guess a person ought to stay in her own place.”

  I was more awake now to the situation. “Don’t think like that,” I said. “We’ve loved having you, and it’s been terribly kind of you to spend so much time with Elspeth. It’s taken a lot off Shirley.”

  She said quietly, “It’s been real nice getting out of Wardour Street and Claridge’s a little while, and getting to know you folks in your homes. I never knew that British people lived so much like folks in the U.S. But I guess if you’ve been born American you’re better off in your own country. Maybe you British think the same way.”

  “I think that’s true, after a certain age,” I said. “If you’re going to make your life in a new country you should go before you’re twenty-five. After that you start to get associations, little grooves and anchors, that make it difficult to change.”

  She nodded. “I know it. Not only living places, either — that goes for what you do. Take pictures, now. You get set in pictures when you’re young and maybe you think you can give up and get right out of it any time you say, like marrying and bringing up a family like any other woman. But then when you come down to hard brass tacks, you find you can’t. So many little grooves and anchors, like you said.”

  I said thoughtfully, “You mean, you’ve got to make the pattern of your life before you’re twenty-five. I never thought of that, but I dare say it’s true.”

  “I’d say that’s true,” she replied. “By that age you either go for marrying and raising a family and making a home, or you go for a job and forget about the other. If it happens later, maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t. But if you want to be sure, then you’ve just got to drop the job and do the other by the time you’re twenty-five.” She was about to add something, but checked herself.

  I was fully awake by that time. I smiled; the woman wanted to talk. “Marjorie Corder,” I said.

  She turned to me. “You’re clever,” she said. “I guess that’s why they made you boss of your department, all about fatigue and things like that. Well, there’s a case for you. I’d say she’s around twenty-four or twenty-five. And now she’s switching over.”

  I glanced at her. “You think she wants to marry Mr. Honey?”

  “She’s moved into his house already,” she said bitterly.

  There was a long pause. “I don’t say that I blame her,” she went on at last. “He’s a grand little guy, and he deserves a young wife.” Her face was lined and old. “I guess she knows she wouldn’t find a man like that so easily again; she’s been around, that girl has, and she’s got to know about men. I guess she’s in love with him all right.”

  There was a long silence. My eyes drooped in fatigue; sleep was not far away. But presently the actress said, “It’s funny the way those little quiet men get you. I knew a man one time, oh, years and years ago, before ever I went into pictures. In the office, that was, back in Terre Haute. He was so kind, but he was lame and I was a young fool and thought I’d meet ones like him around every corner, and get married when I wanted to. Well, I did get married, but it wasn’t like it might have been if I had married Eddie Stillson. I’d have had about four kids then and no money, and a lot of work and worry and been old and tired and worn out by this time.”

  “Sorry?” I inquired.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “I never did my stuff. Seems I’ve always been a kind of passenger.”

  There was another of those long, slow pauses. “It’s too late to do anything about it now,” she said. “That kind of man, he’s got a right to have a family when he marries. It wouldn’t be good for him to marry somebody like me, not now. That kind of man, he’s got a right to a young wife, who’ll have some children for him, and not mind living in a little house like that and working, with just two weeks in a summer camp some place each year. I couldn’t do that, now.

  “You can’t put back the clock,” she said. “You may want to, terribly badly. But some things you just can’t do, and that’s one of them.”

  I was desperately tired, and closed my eyes for a moment to think this over. When I opened them again the lights in the saloon were dimmed and Miss Teasdale, the World’s Pin-Up Girl, had gone back to her own seat three rows ahead of me. I turned on my pillow and slept again, and when next I woke the stewardess was standing over me, telling me to fasten my belt. We were going in to Gander.

  We came round in a great sweep, low over the forests in the moonlight. The approach lights came in view, the flaps came down and the runway appeared immediately beneath our wheels; then we were down and rolling towards the hangars and the office buildings. We drew up near the Reindeer lying on its belly on the tarmac.

  As soon as we were allowed to disembark I went to the reception hall and asked for Honey at the C.A.T.O. desk. But he had left about tea-time the day before in a Lincoln for Shawbury; he must have been already in the British Isles when I took off for Gander. Probably by that time he would already have arrived back in Farnborough. I went and had a wash and a shave and then crossed the road to the restaurant; as I went in I passed Miss Teasdale coming out, fresh and blooming like a rose.

  I stopped. “I was terribly rude last night,” I said. “I went clean off to sleep while we were talking.”

  She laughed, and passers-by stared at me with interest and with envy. She said, “You must have been tired after a day like that. I felt real sorry for you.”

  “I’ve just heard that Honey left for home yesterday,” I said. “He’ll be there by now.”

  “You see he stays there,” she said. “He’s a great little guy, but not the sort to go wandering around the world alone.”

  “Too true,” I said. The sight of the first Reindeer lying on its belly was still fresh in my mind. “What’s the breakfast like in here?”

  She laughed. “I had just a cup of coffee — I never take more in the morning. The people at the next table had buckwheat cakes and syrup, with a sausage on the side.”

  I asked anxiously, “Can I get porridge, do you think?”

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t know about that. You’re on our side of the Atlantic now.”

  I did not speak to her again. I breakfasted in a hurry on cornflakes and bacon and eggs, and then went out with one of the C.A.T.O. officials to the tarmac to inspect the first Reindeer. It was a sad sight, the propellers, flaps, and engine cowlings crushed and distorted, and the belly of the fuselage on which it rested badly crumpled. The air bags
to raise it had not yet arrived and were not expected for another week; when they came they would be placed under the delicate wing structure and inflated; by bearing on so large an area they would gently lift the great thing without further damage. The A.R.B. inspector, Symes, appeared while I was looking at it, and the official introduced me.

  He grunted. “We got rid of your Mr. Honey yesterday,” he said. Evidently he did not think much of Honey.

  I asked, “Have you made any examination of the tail?”

  “It’s perfect,” he replied. “There’s not a sign of trouble, of any sort. Of course, I know that this fatigue may not give very much warning, but I’d stake my reputation that that tail’s as perfect as when it left the factory. About the only thing that is,” he said gloomily, looking at the aircraft. “Just wanton destruction, I call it.”

  “There are two views on that,” I said. “It’s just possible that he might turn out to be right.”

  “I’ve been in this industry since 1917,” he said. “I don’t say that fatigue never does occur. What I say is, that you don’t very often meet it.”

  We climbed up into the fuselage and went aft through the luggage bay. They had taken out a panel from the pressure bulkhead and I was able to crawl in and get all round the spars with an electric torch. What the inspector had said was quite true; the structure seemed in perfect condition. I knew that that meant nothing in the case of fatigue trouble, but it was depressing all the same. The evidence was running all in favour of the diehards.

  Mr. Symes clearly did not believe in the least that there was anything the matter with the machine at all, apart from what Honey had done to it. I had to leave them, because the passengers were being marshalled out to the other Reindeer, the one that I had come from England in. I followed them and we took off for Montreal.

  We landed there at about ten o’clock in the morning, local time. Miss Teasdale was surrounded in the reception hall by a little crowd of friends and fans; I was met by a flight-lieutenant of the R.C.A.F. who had a four-seat Beaver waiting to fly me down to Ottawa. The actress was busily engaged and I was reluctant to keep my officer waiting, moreover, I had nothing more to say to her. I left her to her other life, and went with him to the Beaver and took off for Ottawa.

  We got there in about an hour and there was a car to meet me. We drove straight to the Bureau of Civil Aviation, and in half an hour I was sitting in conference with the Director, a Group-Captain Porter, and the Inspector of Accidents, Squadron-Leader Russell.

  A small population in a big country seems to breed a clearer-headed sort of man than we get in England, although they may be less well informed. These men knew all about my business, and they were very ready to accept the possibility of fatigue in the Reindeer tail. Indeed, they were very interesting in their opinions of the onset of fatigue at sub-zero temperatures. When operating a certain high-speed jet-propelled medium bomber at temperatures exceeding thirty degrees below zero they had had two cases of structural failure by fatigue, one of a vertical fin and one of an elevator. They were convinced that temperature came into it, a new idea to me. They suggested that the life of Mr. Honey’s Reindeer had been prolonged by the fact that it had operated mostly in the tropics.

  All this was very stimulating, and they were not less helpful in the practical investigation of the crash in Labrador. They had a Norseman seaplane all laid on for the journey, and all the equipment and provisions for a week or ten days in the woods already loaded into it. The pilot was to be a civilian bush-pilot called Hennessey, a thick-set tough who knew that country intimately; Russell and an assistant of his called Stubbs were coming with us, making a party of four. The programme was that we should fly up and land on Small Pine Water, about eleven miles from the wreck; from there a trail made by previous visitors to the scene led over the hills and through the forests. It was, of course, quite impossible to put a landplane down in such country.

  “They say the trail’s pretty well defined,” Russell said. “There was our party first of all, and then there was a funeral party went up there, and then the Russians sent a third party to bring away the body of their Ambassador for burial in Russia. They had the hell of a job carrying a coffin down that trail.”

  “Our people were all buried up there, were they?” I inquired.

  “Oh yes. It wasn’t practical to bring the rest of them away. There were over thirty, and all would have had to be carried eleven miles. No, we buried them all up there; a padre went up for the funeral service.”

  They were all ready to start, and were only waiting for me. We lunched and then they took me to a sort of store and fitted me out with a bush shirt, breeches, and high laced boots that buckled close below the knee. “The mosquitoes are liable to be mighty bad this time of year,” Hennessey said. They had hammocks for sleeping in, provided with a sort of roof of waterproof fabric with a mosquito net attached.

  I transferred some small personal kit from my suitcase into a small kitbag; then I was ready and we drove down to the dock, where the Norseman was moored. It was only about three o’clock in the afternoon, and we were all ready to start. “I guess we’ll make Ivanhoe by sundown,” Hennessey said. “Tank up there, ‘n have plenty up at the lake.”

  The others agreed with this programme. “How far is this place Ivanhoe?” I inquired.

  Russell said, “About five hundred and fifty miles. It’s on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, about a hundred miles from the crash.”

  I said good-bye to the Director and thanked him for all his help; then we got into the machine. Hennessey started the engine and someone on the pontoon swung the wing tip round; we taxied out into the lake, running up the engine in short bursts as we went. Then we headed into wind and took off after a long run, about fifty seconds. The machine was very heavily loaded for its power.

  We circled the city and steadied on our course back over the route I had flown that morning. The machine was equipped for hard commercial work in the Canadian north, mostly for carrying freight. The passenger seats were small and rather hard, designed to be quickly removable; they wasted no weight upon blinds, and the cabin on that sunny afternoon became very hot. I sat drowsing and sweating and tired, but unable to sleep as we droned back past Montreal towards Quebec, a slow, interminable journey. Finally as the sun was getting down to the horizon we came to Ivanhoe, a little town of white wooden houses on the shore of an inlet of the sea. Behind it stretched the fir woods, apparently pathless, impenetrable. Such roads as there were came to an end immediately outside the town. There were three churches, with white wooden steeples, a little dock with a few fishing vessels and another seaplane moored to it, a small air-strip suitable for very little aeroplanes. That was all there was of Ivanhoe.

  We saw all this as we circled round for the landing; then Hennessey put her down on the water gently; he was a very good pilot, on that aircraft anyway. She touched with a quick slapping of the small waves on the bottoms of the floats; the floats bit down into the water and she leaned forward and decelerated, and slowed, and floated on the water off the town, pitching a little. Hennessey turned her, and we taxied into the pontoon.

  A sergeant in the gay red tunic of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was there to meet us; he knew Hennessey, and said, “Guess you folks’ll have to sleep in the store tonight. Hotel’s full of summer visitors.”

  In the fading light he took us to a sort of marine store, a wooden shed full of old ships’ ropes and other gear. There were big hooks down each wall especially put there, it seemed, for slinging hammocks; it was frequently used as a dormitory. We slung ours, Stubbs assisting me and showing me how to do it, and made the seaplane fast at the pontoon; then we walked into the little town and sat down at the counter of the only café, and ordered dinners of steak and onions and fried potatoes, from a girl who spoke nothing but French. Over the ice-cream and coffee we talked a little.

  The crash was about four months’ old, but Hennessey had been up there within the last month as a guide to th
e party of Russians who had come from the Embassy to disinter the body of their Ambassador and carry him away. “Great big jars of stuff they had with them,” he said, “and a kind of zinc tank with a lid you could screw down on a rubber gasket. He didn’t smell so bad when they got him all sealed down. Eight handles it had, for carrying, but gee, that was a mean load. I never want another one like that again. Eleven miles, and a rough trail at that.”

  He stared at his cup. “I’m not sure even now they got the right one. It was the right grave, but when we buried them they weren’t too easy to identify, and it didn’t seem to matter which got which cross; they were all there together. We tossed a dime for which cross to put on some of them. Still, it wouldn’t make a row of beans, anyway.”

  We went back to the store in the soft darkness; at the pontoon near-by the Norseman loomed with a great shadowy wing over the water. We undressed partially and got into our hammocks, but for a long while I could not sleep. I was overtired, and lay restless, wondering what the Director was saying to Honey in my absence, wondering what the next day would bring for me, wondering if corrosion would have destroyed the evidence for which I sought. Then, unhappily, I wondered if temperature did enter into this fatigue problem. If so, it might well mean a year’s investigation before we could say definitely if the Reindeer was, in fact, unsafe. In that case it would be quicker to take the aircraft out of service and modify them whether they were dangerous or not, but what a stinking row there would be about that!

  I rolled insecure, sleepless, overtired, and unhappy for most of the night. The store was full of rats, who scurried all around incessantly.

  Early in the morning we were up and breakfasting in the same café, served by the same French-speaking girl. Then we began the weary task of filling six forty-gallon drums of petrol into the tanks of the Norseman through a semi-rotary pump. Each barrel had to be rolled from the petrol store a hundred yards away down to the pontoon, and the empties rolled back again. It took us about two hours, and by that time the sun was high and hot, and we were tired and sweating. At last it was finished, and we got into the machine and started up the engine, and took off.