by Nevil Shute
“We were good friends in the war,” she muttered, looking down at her plate. “She’s had a bad spin since, and I’d like her to be happy.”
Instinctively I sheered away from the difficult subject. “Do you think she’d be happy if she got back into the Wrens?”
She raised her head and stared across the room. “She might. It’s difficult to say. She only knew the Wrens in wartime, and it’s very different now.”
“What she wants is a third World War,” I said, half laughing.
“Of course.” She sat silent for a moment, and then she said, “Until we’re dead, we Service people, the world will always be in danger of another war. We had too good a time in the last one. We’ll none of us come out into the open and admit it. It might be better for us if we did. What we do is to put our votes in favour of re-armament and getting tough with Russia, and hope for the best.”
I stared at her. “Is that what you really think?”
She nodded. “You know it as well as I do, if you’re honest with yourself. For our generation, the war years were the best time of our lives, not because they were war years but because we were young. The best years of our lives happened to be war years. Everyone looks back at the time when they were in their early twenties with nostalgia, but when we look back we only see the war. We had a fine time then, and so we think that if a third war came we’d have those happy, carefree years all over again. I don’t suppose we would — some of us might.”
“We’re getting older every year,” I said. “Perhaps more sensible.”
She nodded. “That’s one good thing. Most of us are gradually accumulating other interests — homes, and children, and work that we wouldn’t want to leave. It’s only a few people now like — well, like Janet, who’ve had a bad spin since the war, who are so desperately anxious now to see another war come — for themselves.” She sat in thought for a moment. “But for our children — I don’t know. If I had kids, I’d want them to have all I had when I was young.”
“If you had daughters, you’d want them to be boat’s crew Wrens?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’d want them to have that. I’d want them to have all I had when I was young.” She turned to me. “Your father served in the first war, didn’t he?”
I nodded. “He was at Gallipoli, and afterwards in France. He served in the last war, too.”
“Was he shocked and horrified when you and Bill joined up?” she asked relentlessly. “Or was he glad you’d done it, for your own sakes?”
I sat in silence. “I see what you mean,” I said at last. “I never thought of it like that.”
“When you and I are dead, and all the rest of us who served in the last war, in all the countries,” she said, “there’ll be a chance of world peace. Not till then.”
“Get a nice hydrogen bomb dropping down upon Earl’s Court tonight,” I said. “That’ld get rid of a good many of us.”
She smiled. “Maybe that’s the answer. But honestly, war’s always been too pleasant for the people in it. For most young people it’s been more attractive as a job than civil life. The vast majority of us never got killed or wounded; we just had a very stimulating and interesting time. If atom bombs can make life thoroughly unpleasant for the people in the Services, in all the countries, then maybe we shall have a chance of peace. If not, we’ll have to wait till something else crops up that will.”
“Actually, in the last war, people in the Services in England had a better time than the ones who stayed at home, working in the factories,” I said.
“Of course they did,” she replied. “That’s the trouble. You’ll never get rid of wars while you go on like that.”
It was better for us to go on talking so rather than to get back to Janet Prentice, and we went on putting the world right throughout our dinner till the coffee came and I lit her cigarette. She drank her coffee quickly. “I must go back soon,” she said. “I’ve got some work to do upon a script before tomorrow morning.”
I knew that she was making an excuse to cut our meeting short. “This’ll have to be good-bye for the time being,” I said awkwardly. “I don’t know when I’ll be in England again.”
“Not for some years, I suppose,” she said.
I nodded. “I ought to have gone home a year ago. My father and mother are both getting pretty old, and there’s the property to be looked after.”
She said, “Maybe that’s as well, Alan, for both of us.” She ground her half-smoked cigarette out into the ash tray and said, without looking up at me, “Are you going to ask her if she’ll marry you?”
“I don’t know,” I protested. “I may be mad as a March hare, but I’m not as mad as all that. Nine years ago, and only for a few hours then. We’ll both have changed. You said that once yourself.”
“You’ll marry her,” she said, “and you’ll be very happy together. And I’ll send you a wedding present, and stand godmother to one of your kids.” She raised her eyes to mine, and they were full of tears. “And now if you don’t mind, Alan, I think I’m going home.”
She got up from the table and went quickly to the door of the little restaurant, and I went with her. In the doorway she turned to me. “Go back and pay the bill,” she said. She put out her hand. “This really is good-bye this time, Alan.”
I took her hand. “I’ve done you nothing but harm, Viola,” I said, “and you’ve done me nothing but good. I’m sorry for everything.”
She held my hand for an instant. “It wouldn’t ever have worked,” she said. “I see that now. You’re what you are and she would always be between us, even if you never see her again. We’re grown-up people; we can part as friends.” She let my hand go. “Good luck in Seattle.”
“Good-bye, Viola,” I said.
She turned away, and I stood in the doorway watching her as she went down the street, irresolute, half minded to go after her and call her back. But presently she turned the corner and was lost to sight, and I went back to pay the bill, sick at heart. Whatever I did with my life seemed to be wrong and make unhappiness for everyone concerned. I tried to kid myself it was because I was a cripple, but I knew that wasn’t true. You can’t evade the consequences of your own actions quite so easily as that.
I went back to my flat in Half Moon Street and sat down to write a letter to Janet Prentice. I slept on it, tore it up, wrote it again, slept on it next night, and wrote it a third time. When I was satisfied and posted it by air mail I had cut it to about one half of the original length. I just reminded her of our meeting in the war and said that while I was in England I had met Viola Dawson, who happened to have her address. As I was flying back to Australia in a week or so it would hardly be out of my way to come to Seattle to see her, and I would give her a ring as soon as I got in.
It took me a fortnight to re-arrange my passage to Australia by air through the United States and to comply with all the formalities, maintaining the old adage— “If you’ve time to spare, go by air.” It was not until October the 14th that I finally took off from London airport for New York. I was leaving behind me in England a great deal that I admired and valued, but as I settled down into the Stratocruiser’s seat I was absurdly and unreasonably happy. Of course I was going home after an absence of five years, and that probably accounted for a little part of my elation.
I had one or two friends in New York and I had never been in the United States before, so I went to a hotel and spent three days there, seeing my friends and being entertained and seeing the sights. I couldn’t spare more time than that for the greatest city in the world because I had a date to keep in a smaller one. On the night of the nineteenth I was sitting in a Constellation on my way across the continent to Seattle; we got there in the morning and I checked in at a big hotel on 4th Avenue.
I didn’t want to rush at this, so I had a bath and went down to a light lunch in the coffee shop. Then I went back up to my room and looked for Prentice in the telephone directory. It was there, all right, with the same add
ress, though the name was Mrs. C. W. Prentice. I stared at it in thought for a minute. There had been mention of an aunt that she was going to live with. This would be the widow of her uncle, the one who had been on the faculty of Stanford University. Widow, because if the husband had been alive the telephone would have been in his name.
I put the book down presently and sat down on the edge of the bed, and called the number.
A woman’s voice answered, with a marked American accent. I said, “Can I speak to Miss Prentice?”
“Say, you’ve got the wrong number,” she replied. “Miss Prentice doesn’t live here now.”
A sick disappointment came upon me; I had been counting on success this time. “Can you tell me her number?” I asked. And then, feeling that a little explanation was required I said, “She’s expecting me. I’m on my way from England to Australia, and I stopped here in Seattle to see her.”
I don’t think my explanation impressed the woman very much, because she said, “She left here more than a year back, brother, after the old lady died. We bought the house off her. Did she give you this number?”
“No,” I said. “I looked it up in the book.”
“I’d say you’d got hold of an old book. Did you say she was expecting you?”
“I wrote to her from England a few days ago to say that I’d be passing through Seattle, and I’d ring her up,” I explained.
“Wait now,” she said. “There’s a letter came the other day for her from England. I meant to give it to the mailman, and I clean forgot. Just stay there while I go get it.” I waited till she came back to the phone. “What did you say your name was?”
“Alan Duncan.”
“That’s correct,” she said. “That’s the name written on the back. Your letter’s right here, Mr. Duncan.”
I asked, “Didn’t she leave a forwarding address with you?”
“A forwarding what?”
I repeated the word.
“Oh, address,” she said. “You certainly are English, Mr. Duncan. No, she didn’t leave that with us. A few things came in after she had gone, and we gave them to the mailman.”
I thought quickly. There was just a possibility that the woman might know more than I could easily get out of her upon the telephone, or possibly the next door neighbour might know something that would help me. “It looks as if I’ve missed her,” I said. “I think the best thing I can do is to come out and collect that letter.”
“Sure,” she said affably. “I’ll be glad to meet you, Mr. Duncan. I never met an Englishman from England.”
I laughed. “You’ve not met one now. I’m Australian. Would it be all right if I come out this afternoon?”
“Surely,” she said. “Come right out. The name’s Pasmanik — Mrs. Molly Pasmanik.”
I drove out in a taxi half an hour later. It was quite a long way out of town, in a district known as North Beach; the house was a street or two inland from the sea at Shilshole Bay, a decent suburban neighbourhood. The taxi driver didn’t want to wait, so I paid him off and went into the open garden to ring the bell of the small, single-storey house.
I spent an hour with Mrs. Pasmanik, who produced a cup of coffee and some little sweet cakes for me, but I learned very little about Janet Prentice. She had lived there with her aunt until the aunt had died, but Mrs. Pasmanik could not tell me how long she had lived there; they had themselves come to Seattle very recently from New Jersey. She really knew very little that was of any use to me.
I could not find out from Mrs. Pasmanik that Janet had made friends in the neighbourhood, and in that district houses seemed to change hands fairly frequently. The neighbours on the one side had left two months before my visit, and on the other side had come shortly before Janet had sold the house, and they knew nothing of her. The aunt had died in May 1952 and the Pasmaniks had bought the house from Janet in June. They had not seen much of her as the business had been handled by an agent; they had an idea, however, that she was going down to San Francisco to live there. There had been one or two legal complexities about the sale of the house because she was an alien in the United States, inheriting the estate of the aunt who was a U.S. citizen. They had never had any address for the forwarding of letters, but had given everything back to the mailman. She thought the post office would have a forwarding address. The aunt had been cremated and the urn had been deposited in a cemetery at Acacia Park.
There was nothing more to be done there. Janet Prentice had been here, had lived here for some years, but she had gone on. I said good-bye to Mrs. Pasmanik and walked slowly three or four blocks up the street to the Sunset Hill bus that would take me back to town. These were the streets she must know very well, the surroundings that had formed her in the years that she had spent in this district while I searched for her in England. Here were the stores where she had done the daily shopping for her aunt, the A. & P. and the Safeway, far from her home in Oxford, far from the Beaulieu River and from Oerlikon guns. As I drove in to town in the bus we crossed a great bridge and I saw masses of fine yachts and sturdy, workmanlike fishing vessels ranged along the quays and floats, and I wondered if the ex-Wren had found solace there, some anodyne related to her former life. Somewhere along that waterfront there might be somebody who knew her, some fisherman or yachtsman, but how to set about such an enquiry in a foreign country was an enigma.
I sat in my hotel bedroom that evening brooding over my problem, which seemed now to be as far from a solution as it had ever been. True, I had caught up with her in time and I was now no more than fifteen months or so behind her so that the memories of those who might have known her would be fresher, but to balance that she had disappeared into a foreign country, if a friendly one, of a hundred and fifty million people. I had dinner in the dining room of the hotel, and then I couldn’t stand inaction any longer and went out and walked the streets painfully until I found the inland water I was looking for, with infinite quays and wharves packed with small craft. I must have walked for miles that night beside Lake Union. I walked till the straps chafed raw places on my legs and hardly felt them, but it was like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay, of course. Once, crazily, I stopped an old man coming off a little run-down fishing boat and asked him if he had ever heard of an English girl who worked on boats, called Janet Prentice.
“Never heard the name,” he said. “There’s a lot of boats in these parts, mister, and a lot of girls.”
Finally I came out to a busy street and hailed a taxi and went back to the hotel. I didn’t sleep much that night.
There were still a few faint threads to be followed up that might possibly lead to her. I went and saw the British vice-consul in the morning; he knew of her existence but thought she had returned to England. I went to the head post office and saw a young man in the postmaster’s department, who told me that it was against the rules to give out forwarding addresses and suggested that I should write a letter to the last known address, whence it would be forwarded if any forwarding address existed. I hired a car after lunch and went out to the cemetery and talked to the janitor, who showed me the urn containing the ashes of the late Mrs. Prentice and told me that the urn had been endowed in perpetuity at the time of the funeral. I had hoped that annual charges of some sort would be payable which might lead to an address, but there was nothing of that sort.
With that I had shot my bolt in Seattle, but there remained one faint hope of contact in America. I flew down to San Francisco next morning and got a room in the St. Francis Hotel. That afternoon I got a car and drove out to the beautiful Leland Stanford University, and called on the Registrar as a start, who passed me on to the Dean. He remembered Dr. Robert Prentice, an Englishman who had joined the faculty about the year 1925 and had worked with the Food Research Institute; he had left Stanford about seven years later to take up an appointment with the University of Washington at Seattle, where he had died about the year 1940. They had no records that would help to trace his niece. I thanked them, and went back to the hote
l.
That evening I booked a reservation for the flight across the Pacific to Sydney. I had followed a dream for five years and it had got me nowhere. Now I must put away the fancies that I had been following and, as Viola had once remarked, stop behaving like a teen-ager. I was a grown man, nearly forty, and there was work for me to do at Coombargana, my own place. I dined that night in a restaurant at Fisherman’s Wharf looking out upon the boats as they rocked on the calm water of the harbour. I must put away childish things and get down to a real job of work. I was content to do so, now that it was all over. I knew that I should never quite forget Janet Prentice, but that evening I felt as though a load had slipped down to the ground from off my shoulders.
8
IT WAS NEARLY two o’clock in the morning in my bedroom at Coombargana in the Western District before I could bring myself to begin upon a detailed examination of the contents of her attaché case. I had been reluctant to violate her privacy when she was impersonal to me, a housemaid that had been engaged while I had been away. Now she was very personal, for she had been Bill’s girl. She had come here for some reason that I did not understand after the death of her mother and her aunt, and she had looked after my mother and father in my absence more in the manner of a daughter than a paid servant, all unknown to them, till finally she had died by her own hand. Why had she done that?
If I had been reluctant to violate her privacy when she was a stranger I was doubly reluctant now. I laid the contents of her case out on the table, putting the letters in one pile, the photographs in another, and the bank books and the cheque book in a third. There remained the diaries, eleven quarto books of varying design. I had opened one and shut it again quickly; her writing was small and neat and closely spaced. Those books, I had no doubt, would tell me all I had to know, and I didn’t want to know it.
There was no need to hurry over this, I told myself. I made the fire up, took off my dirty trousers and pullover and changed back into my dinner jacket, sat staring at the fire for a time, wandered about the room. Twice I roused myself and drew a chair up to the table to begin upon the job and each time my mind made excuse, and little trivial things distracted me from the job I hated to begin. I remember that I stood for a long time at the window looking out over our calm, moonlit paddocks stretching out beyond the river to the foothills. Already one hard, painful fact protruded, the first of many that her diaries must contain. She had made an end to her life on the eve of my return home, presumably because I was the only person who could recognize her and disclose her as Bill’s girl. I had arrived earlier than I had been expected; if I had come by sea as they all thought, she would have been buried by the time that I arrived and her secret would have been safe.