by Nevil Shute
“A very little one, Dwight,” she said. “If I’m going to watch this, I’ll watch it sober.”
The next two heats produced nine crashes, four ambulance cases, but only one death, the driver of the bottom Austin-Healy in a pile up of four cars at The Safety Pin. The rain had eased to a fine, misty drizzle that did nothing to damp the spirits of the competitors. John Osborne had left his friends before the last race, and he was now in the paddock sitting in the Ferrari and warming it up, his pit crew around him. Presently he was satisfied and got out of the car, and stood talking and smoking with some of the other drivers. Don Harrison, the driver of a Jaguar, had a glass of whisky in his hand and a couple of bottles with more glasses on an upturned box beside him; he offered John a drink, but he refused it.
“I’ve got nothing to give away on you muggers,” he said, grinning. Although he had what was probably the fastest car on the circuit, he had almost the least experience of any of the drivers. He still raced the Ferrari with the three broad bands of tape across the back that indicated a novice driver; he was still very conscious that he did not know by instinct when he was about to spin. A spin always caught him unawares and came as a surprise. If he had known it, all the drivers were alike on these wet roads; none of them had much experience of driving under such conditions and his consciousness of inexperience was perhaps a better protection than their confidence.
When his crew pushed the Ferrari out on to the grid, he found himself placed on the second line, in front of him the Maserati, the two Jaguars, and the Gipsy-Lotus, beside him the Thunderbird. He settled himself into his seat revving his engines to warm up, fastening his safety belt, making his crash helmet and his goggles comfortable upon his head. In his mind was the thought — This is where I get killed. Better than vomiting to death in a sick misery in less than a month’s time. Better to drive like hell and go out doing what he wanted to. The big steering wheel was a delight to handle, the crack of the Ferrari’s exhaust music to his ears. He turned and grinned at his pit crew in unalloyed pleasure, and then fixed his eyes upon the starter.
When the flag dropped he made a good start and got away well, weaving ahead of the Gipsy-Lotus as he changed up into third and outdistancing the Thunderbird. He went into Lake Bend hard on the heels of the two Jaguars, but driving cautiously on the wet road with seventeen laps to go. Time enough to take chances in the last five laps. He stayed with the Jaguars past Haystack Corner, past The Safety Pin and cautiously put his foot down on the sinuous back straight. Not hard enough, apparently, for with a roar and a crackle the Gipsy-Lotus passed him on the right, showering him with water, Sam Bailey driving like a madman.
He slowed a little, while he wiped his goggles, and followed on behind. The Gipsy-Lotus was wandering all over the road, harnessed only by the immensely quick reaction time of its young driver. John Osborne, watching, sensed disaster round it like an aura; better follow on at a safe distance for a while and see what happened. He shot a quick glance at the mirror; the Thunderbird was fifty yards behind, with the Maserati overtaking it. There was time to take it easy down The Slide, but after that he must step on it.
On entering the straight at the end of the first lap he saw that the Gipsy-Lotus had taken one of the Jaguars. He passed the pits at about a hundred and sixty miles an hour making up upon the second Jaguar; with a car between him and the Gipsy-Lotus he felt safer. A glance in the mirror as he braked before Lake Bend showed that he had drawn well away from the two cars behind; if he could do that, he could hold the fourth position for a lap or two and still go carefully upon the corners.
He did so till the sixth lap. By that time the Gipsy-Lotus was in the lead and the first four cars had lapped one of the Bentleys. As he accelerated away from The Slide he glanced in his mirror and in a momentary glimpse saw what appeared to be a most colossal mix-up at the corner. The Maserati and the Bentley seemed to be tangled broadside on across the road, and the Thunderbird was flying through the air. He could not look again. Ahead of him, in the lead, the Gipsy-Lotus was trying to lap one of the Bugattis by synchronizing its desperate swerves at a hundred and forty miles an hour to the manoeuvre necessary for passing, and failing to do so. The two Jaguars were holding back at a discreet distance.
When he came round again to The Slide he saw that the shambles at the corner had involved two cars only; the Thunderbird lay inverted fifty yards from the track and the Bentley stood with its rear end crushed and a great pool of petrol on the road. The Maserati was apparently still racing. He passed on, and as he entered his eighth lap it began to rain quite heavily. It was time to step on it.
So thought the leaders, for on that lap the Gipsy-Lotus was passed by one of the Jaguars taking advantage of Sam Bailey’s evident nervousness of his unstable car upon a corner. Both leaders now lapped a Bugatti, and a Bentley immediately after. The second Jaguar went to pass them on Haystack Corner with John Osborne close behind. What happened then was very, very swift. The Bugatti spun upon the corner and was hit by the Bentley, which was deflected into the path of the oncoming Jaguar, which rolled over twice and finished right side up by the roadside without a driver. John Osborne had no time to stop and little to avoid; the Ferrari hit the Bugatti a glancing blow at about seventy miles an hour and came to a standstill by the roadside with a buckled near side front wheel.
John Osborne was shaken, but unhurt. Don Harrison, the driver of the Jaguar who had offered him a drink before the race, was dying of multiple injuries in the scrub; he had been thrown from his car as it rolled and had then been run over by the Bentley. The scientist hesitated for a moment but there were people about; he tried the Ferrari. The engine started and the car moved forward, but the buckled wheel scrooped against the frame. He was out of the race, and out of the Grand Prix, and with a sick heart he waited till the Gipsy-Lotus weaved by and then crossed the track to see if he could help the dying driver.
While he was standing there, helpless, the Gipsy-Lotus passed again.
He stood there in the steady rain for several seconds before it struck him that there had been no other cars between the two transits of the Gipsy-Lotus. When it did so, he made a dash for the Ferrari. If in fact there was only one car left in the race he still had a chance for the Grand Prix; if he could struggle round the track to the pits he might yet change the wheel and get the second place. He toured on slowly, wrestling with the steering, while the rain ran down his neck and the Gipsy-Lotus passed a third time. The tire burst at The Slide, where about six cars seemed to be tangled in a heap, and he went on on the rim, and reached the pits as the Lotus passed again.
The wheel change took his pit crew about thirty seconds, and a quick inspection showed little damage apart from panelling. He was off again several laps behind, and now one of the Bugattis detached itself from the chaos around The Slide and joined in. It was never a threat, however, and John Osborne toured around the course discreetly to win second place in the heat and a start in the Grand Prix. Of the eleven starters in the heat eight had failed to complete the course and three drivers had been killed.
He swung his Ferrari into the paddock and stopped the engine, while his pit crew and his friends crowded round to congratulate him. He hardly heard them; his fingers were trembling with shock and the release of strain. He had only one thought in his mind, to get the Ferrari back to Melbourne and take down the front end; all was not well with the steering though he had managed to complete the course. Something was strained or broken; she had pulled heavily towards the left in the concluding stages of the race.
Between the friends crowding round he saw the upturned box where Don Harrison had parked his Jaguar, the glasses, the two whisky bottles. “God,” he said to no one in particular, “I’ll have that drink with Don now.” He got out of the car and walked unsteadily to the box; one of the bottles was still nearly full. He poured a generous measure with a very little water, and then he saw Sam Bailey standing by the Gipsy-Lotus. He poured another drink and took it over to the winner, pushing
through the crowd. “I’m having this on Don,” he said. “You’d better have one, too.”
The young man took it, nodded, and drank. “How did you come off?” he asked. “I saw you’d tangled.”
“Got round for a wheel change,” said the scientist thickly. “She’s steering like a drunken pig. Like a bloody Gipsy-Lotus.”
“My car steers all right,” the other said nonchalantly. “Trouble is, she won’t stay steered. You driving back to town?”
“If she’ll make it.”
“I’d pinch Don’s transporter. He’s not going to need it.”
The scientist stared at him. “That’s an idea. . . .” The dead driver had brought his Jaguar to the race on an old truck to avoid destroying tune by running on the road. The truck was standing not far from them in the paddock, unattended.
“I should nip in quick, before someone else gets it.”
John Osborne downed his whisky, shot back to his car, and galvanized his pit crew of enthusiasts with the new idea. Together they mustered willing hands to help and pushed the Ferrari up the steel ramps on to the tray body, lashing her down with ropes. Then he looked round uncertainly. A marshal passed and he stopped him. “Are there any of Don Harrison’s crew about?”
“I think they’re all over with the crash. I know his wife’s down there.”
He had been minded to drive off in the transporter with the Ferrari because Don would never need it again, nor would his Jaguar. To leave his pit crew and his wife without transport back to town, however, was another thing.
He left the paddock and started to walk down the track towards the Haystack, with Eddie Brooks, one of his pit crew, beside him. He saw a little group standing by the wreckage of the cars in the rain, one of them a woman. He had intended to talk to Don’s pit crew, but when he saw the wife was dry-eyed he changed his mind, and went to speak to her.
“I was the driver of the Ferrari,” he said. “I’m very sorry that this happened, Mrs. Harrison.”
She inclined her head. “You come up and bumped into them right at the end,” she said. “It wasn’t anything to do with you.”
“I know. But I’m very sorry.”
“Nothing for you to be sorry about,” she said heavily. “He got it the way he wanted it to be. None of this being sick and all the rest of it. Maybe if he hadn’t had that whisky . . . I dunno. He got it the way he wanted it to be. You one of his cobbers?”
“Not really. He offered me a drink before the race, but I didn’t take it. I’ve just had it now.”
“You have? Well, good on you. That’s the way Don would have wanted it. Is there any left?”
He hesitated. “There was when I left the paddock. Sam Bailey had a go at it, and I did. Maybe the boys have finished up the bottles.”
She looked up at him. “Say, what do you want? His car? They say it isn’t any good.”
He glanced at the wrecked Jaguar. “I shouldn’t think it is. No, what I wanted to do was to put my car on his transporter and get it back to town. The steering’s had it, but I’ll get her right for the Grand Prix.”
“You got a place, didn’t you? Well, it’s Don’s transporter but he’d rather have it work with cars that go than work with wrecks. All right, chum, you take it.”
He was a little taken aback. “Where shall I return it to?”
“I won’t be using it. You take it.”
He thought of offering money but rejected the idea; the time was past for that. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “It’s going to make a big difference to me, having the use of that transporter.”
“Fine,” she said. “You go right ahead and win that Grand Prix. Any parts you need from that—” she indicated the wrecked Jaguar— “you take them, too.”
“How are you getting back to town?” he asked.
“Me? I’ll wait and go with Don in the ambulance. But they say there’s another load of hospital cases for each car to go first, so it’ll probably be around midnight before we get away.”
There seemed to be nothing more that he could do for her. “Can I take some of the pit crew back?”
She nodded, and spoke to a fat, balding man of fifty. He detached two youngsters to go back with John. “Alfie here, he’ll stay with me and see this all squared up,” she said dully. “You go right ahead, mister, and win that Grand Prix.”
He went a little way aside and talked to Eddie Brooks, standing in the rain. “Tires are the same size as ours. Wheels are different, but if we took the hubs as well . . . That Maserati’s crashed up by The Slide. We might have a look at that one, too. I believe that’s got a lot of the same front-end parts as we have. . . .”
They walked back to their newly acquired transporter and drove it back in the half light to Haystack Corner, and commenced the somewhat ghoulish task of stripping the dead bodies of the wrecked cars of anything that might be serviceable to the Ferrari. It was dark before they finished and they drove back to Melbourne in the rain.
8
IN MARY HOLMES’ garden the first narcissus bloomed on the first day of August, the day the radio announced, with studied objectivity, cases of radiation sickness in Adelaide and Sydney. The news did not trouble her particularly; all news was bad, like wage demands, strikes, or war, and the wise person paid no attention to it. What was important was that it was a bright, sunny day; her first narcissus were in bloom, and the daffodils behind them were already showing flower buds. “They’re going to be a picture,” she said happily to Peter. “There are so many of them. Do you think some of the bulbs can have sent up two shoots?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” he replied. “I don’t think they do that. They split in two and make another bulb or something.”
She nodded. “We’ll have to dig them up in the autumn, after they die down, and separate them. Then we’ll get a lot more and put them along here. They’re going to look marvellous in a year or two.” She paused in thought. “We’ll be able to pick some then, and have them in the house.”
One thing troubled her upon that perfect day, that Jennifer was cutting her first tooth, and was hot and fractious. Mary had a book called Baby’s First Year which told her that this was normal, and nothing to worry about, but she was troubled all the same. “I mean,” she said, “they don’t know everything, the people who write these books. And all babies aren’t the same, anyway. She oughtn’t to keep crying like this, ought she? Do you think we ought to get in Dr. Halloran?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” Peter said. “She’s chewing her rusk all right.”
“She’s so hot, the poor little lamb.” She picked up the baby from her cot and started patting it on the back across her shoulder; the baby had intended that, and stopped yelling. Peter felt that he could almost hear the silence. “I think she’s probably all right,” he said. “Just wants a bit of company.” He felt he couldn’t stand much more of it, after a restless night with the child crying all the time and Mary getting in and out of bed to soothe it. “Look, dear,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got to go up to the Navy Department. I’ve got a date in the Third Naval Member’s office at eleven forty-five.”
“What about the doctor, though? Don’t you think he ought to see her?”
“I wouldn’t worry him. The book says she may be upset for a couple of days. Well, she’s been going on for thirty-six hours now.” By God, she has, he thought.
“It might be something different — not teeth at all. Cancer, or something. After all, she can’t tell us where the pain is. . . .”
“Leave it till I get back,” he said. “I should be back here around four o’clock, or five at the latest. Let’s see how she is then.”
“All right,” she said reluctantly.
He took the petrol cans and put them in the car, and drove out on the road, glad to be out of it. He had no appointment in the Navy Department that morning but there would be no harm in looking in on them if, indeed, there was anybody in the office. Scorpion was out of dry dock and back alon
gside the aircraft carrier waiting for orders that might never come; he could go and have a look at her and, as a minor side issue, fill up his petrol tank and cans.
On that fine morning there was no one in the Third Naval Member’s office save for one Wran writer, prim, and spectacled and conscientious. She said that she was expecting Commander Mason on board any minute now. Peter said he might look in again, and went down to his car, and drove to Williamstown. He parked beside the aircraft carrier and walked up the gangway with his cans in hand, accepting the salute of the officer of the day. “Morning,” he said. “Is Commander Towers about?”
“I think he’s down in Scorpion, sir.”
“And I want some juice.”
“Very good, sir. If you leave the cans here . . . Fill the tank as well?”
“If you would.” He went on through the cold, echoing, empty ship and down the gangplank to the submarine. Dwight Towers came up to the bridge deck as he stepped on board. Peter saluted him formally. “Morning, sir,” he said. “I came over to see what’s doing, and to get some juice.”
“Plenty of juice,” said the American. “Not much doing. I wouldn’t say there would be now, not ever again. You haven’t any news for me?”
Peter shook his head. “I looked in at the Navy Department just now. There didn’t seem to be anyone there, except one Wran.”
“I had better luck than you. I found a lieutenant there yesterday. . . . Kind of running down.”
“There’s not so long to run now, anyway.” They leaned on the bridge rail; he glanced at the captain. “You heard about Adelaide and Sydney?”
Dwight nodded. “Sure. First it was months, and then it got to be weeks, and now I’d say it’s getting down to days. How long are they figuring on now?”
“I haven’t heard. I wanted to get into touch with John Osborne today and get the latest gen.”
“You won’t find him in the office. He’ll be working on that car. Say, that was quite a race.”