Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  The Leacaster Flying Club were fairly generous with leave; they gave their pilot-instructor three weeks every year provided that he took it in the winter months. I had taken no leave at all the previous year, my first year with the club, and I had little difficulty in getting the Committee to agree that I should take two spells of a fortnight each, one in January and one in March. We had several members with over five hundred hours of war-time flying in the distant past, and two with current B licences for commercial flying, who could act as assistant instructor while I was away. I spent all the early months of winter arranging that the work should go on steadily while I was on leave, and early in January I left for France.

  That fortnight was a delightful time. Brenda was very well, and more composed than I had expected to find her. She had had no contact with her husband in The Haven since she had left Duffington, and though she was growing tired of the hotel life with her mother she was well adjusted to it. She could not have a piano but she went to every concert that took place in Cannes, and on the second day she showed me, rather shyly, two or three water colour paintings, landscapes. Encouraged, she produced another water colour that she was attempting of her Moth in flight. This was in an early stage; she had traced the drawing from an air photograph of a Moth similar to hers but had got it a bit wrong in spite of that assistance. She knew that it was wrong but she didn’t know where the error had crept in. I was able to help her there; I could not draw but I did know very certainly what her Moth looked like when it was in flight. We worked at this together for a couple of mornings, and it was tremendous fun.

  She had acquired a little car, a Renault, through the generosity of George Marshall and we made two or three long drives in this, to Grasse and up into the Esterelles. She was becoming very interested now in her coming baby, who she had quite decided was to be a boy, and she had two or three books on infant welfare in her room. She was very optimistic about a divorce; perhaps in Cannes it was easier to be optimistic than it was in the grey Midlands of England. She thought that Derek must agree to a divorce before very long, since it must now be clear to him that their marriage could not go on. She thought it would be better, when that happened, if I could get a job abroad as a commercial pilot so that when we married we could start off fresh in a new place, away from England. She realised that that meant the tropics in all probability and she welcomed that for herself, though she was puzzled about the baby. What were the special problems of a baby in a hot country? Did I know of any book about it? She spent every evening after dinner sewing little clothes.

  She was going to call him Johnnie.

  Once she said, ‘I suppose we’ll have to go back to Duffington, shan’t we? After the baby’s born?’

  ‘Nobody has to do anything,’ I told her. ‘I could give up my job there. But if I was going to do that, I ought to tell them now, so that they could get another pilot in the saddle before the summer rush comes on.’

  She asked, ‘Could you get another job with some other club, in some other part of England?’

  ‘I don’t think I could,’ I said slowly. ‘It would get around why I had left Duffington. The wives of members aren’t so keen on a pilot who’s a co-respondent.’

  She bent her head over her sewing. ‘The Wives’ Trades Union,’ she murmured. ‘I see that.’

  ‘The only thing that I could do would be to get into air transport,’ I told her. ‘I’ll have to do that one day, anyway. But that means India or somewhere.’

  ‘We’d never see each other then,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could face this all alone.’

  I took her hand. ‘I know. I think I ought to go on at Duffington for the time being, anyway. But that doesn’t mean you’d have to come back there.’

  She sat motionless for a few moments, her sewing on her lap. ‘It hasn’t been a very happy place,’ she said quietly. ‘The club, and flying, and you, and everything we’ve done together – that’s been just a dream. But not the rest of it.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Would you like a little house somewhere not too far away, but not in Duffington? In Oxford, say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘If I didn’t go back to Duffington it would be like running away because I was afraid.’ I was silent. ‘Let me think about it, Johnnie,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to decide anything for the next couple of months.’

  ‘It might look a bit odd if you went back there with a baby,’ I remarked. I was very disinclined for her to go back there, even then.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she replied. ‘People gave up calling, after Derek’s case. Nobody ever comes to the house anyway. A baby more or less won’t matter.’ She paused. ‘I thought perhaps that I might say he was my sister’s baby.’

  ‘Have you got a sister?’ I asked.

  She smiled. ‘No. But one has to say something, even though you know that people won’t believe it.’

  She had her own way of looking at things, and her reputation didn’t seem to worry her a bit. I left her at the end of the fortnight reasonably happy in my mind about her. In this very difficult time she was quiet and composed, enjoying her little life of waiting, with her concerts and her painting and her country drives. I went back to Duffington refreshed with the short holiday, and there I found a letter waiting for me from George Marshall.

  He told me, very briefly, that he had failed again to make Derek consider a divorce. Derek seemed to consider that George was responsible for his failure to get out of The Haven, which indeed was true, and he was actively hostile to any proposal that his brother put up. It seemed very probable to me that Dr Somers had been talking.

  I was barely two months back at Duffington, and then I was off again to Cannes. Brenda had picked a pleasant little hospital on one of the hills behind the town, and two days after I arrived she went into this place to have her baby. A couple of days later, it was born, and it was a girl.

  I saw her for a few minutes that evening, weak and exhausted. She was terribly disappointed. She had convinced herself that it was going to be a boy and that he would be a pilot, like his father. I tried to cheer her up. ‘Girls are fun,’ I said. ‘I’d rather have a girl.’

  A tear trickled down her cheek. ‘I did so want a boy.’

  I wiped it away gently. ‘Girls can be pilots, too,’ I said. She smiled faintly, and squeezed my hand. Then the French sister came and made me go away.

  She recovered her strength quickly, but the sense of disappointment persisted. During the last week of my leave I raised the question of the baby’s name once or twice; she had decided to wait to have her baptised till they returned to England. I wanted to call her Brenda, and she agreed to that without much interest. She was fond of the child, but decided to wean her at an early stage, before they came back to England. Her mind was set more on flying her Moth that summer than it was on nursing her child. If it had been a boy, I think things might have been different.

  My leave was up, and I had to go back to Duffington before she left the hospital. At that time English nursemaids were not uncommon in Cannes, and Mrs Duclos had already been in touch with one and was to interview another. They planned that when Brenda came out of the hospital they would go back to the quiet hotel where they had lived for six months and stay there for another month, getting the baby weaned and accustomed to a good English nurse. Then they would all come back to Duffington, arriving at the Manor about the end of April.

  I went back to my job, and on my first Monday I flew her Moth down to Heston for the renewal of the certificate of airworthiness. In the year that she had owned it it had only flown about a hundred hours, but under the regulations of those days it had to be pretty well pulled to pieces for inspection every year, and that meant quite a lot of work. I left it there for this work to be done, and wrote to her in Cannes about it. In her reply she said that she would fly it back herself from London on her way home, which would save me another journey.

  She flew in one afternoon at about tea time. I knew that she
was coming, for her mother and the baby and the nurse had arrived by train the day before; she should have come on the same day but something had happened at Heston to delay the delivery of her Moth. I got a telephone call from Heston in the middle of the afternoon to say that she had taken off for Duffington; it was a fine, sunny afternoon with all the promise of spring, so I knew that she would be all right. Young Ronnie Clarke was learning to fly at that time, having taken his matriculation with an effort, and he was coming out for a lesson at four o’clock. He was a very quick pupil as such boys usually are; he had soaked himself in theoretical knowledge for years before he actually commenced instruction, and he had flown so many hours as a passenger in club machines that I could have sent him off solo quite safely after about three hours’ dual. The insurance regulations demanded that he have eight hours, so rather than keep him at the dreary round of circuits and bumps I had been teaching him aerobatics. We were up at about three thousand feet that afternoon in a clear sky and I was showing him how to roll off the top of a loop; each time we came upright and climbed for another one I scanned the horizon to the south, looking for Morgan le Fay. I saw her as a faint speck in the distance about half way through the lesson and pointed her out to Ronnie; we broke off the lesson and he flew towards her and came round into loose formation with her while I told him what to do, and so we flew together the last five miles towards the aerodrome waving at each other. I held Ronnie off and made him do a circuit while she went in to land; I watched her till she was down and taxi-ing towards the hangar, and then let Ronnie land behind her.

  She met us, radiant, upon the tarmac, and it was just like the old days of the previous summer. Ronnie switched off the engine and we sat unbuckling our helmets, and she came up to the machine beside us. ‘Johnnie, it’s simply glorious to be back,’ she said. ‘How’s Ronnie getting on?’

  ‘Getting on all right,’ I said. ‘He could make anybody sick now. He’d have made me sick if you hadn’t come along. Have a good flight up?’

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Morgan’s flying a bit left wing low, I think.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll take her up and check her over for you. She may want a bit of fine adjustment on the rigging. Landing all right?’

  She nodded. ‘Not too bad. I did two or three at Heston before leaving. It’s so lovely to be back …’

  ‘Lovely for us,’ I said quietly. Ronnie was there, of course, and the young don’t miss much. We got out on the tarmac and pushed the machines into the hangar, and we all went into the office for a cup of tea. Brenda was radiantly happy, with colour in her cheeks and brightness in her eyes, looking younger than ever. I had a look at her aircraft log book for the rigging check, and then I took her out to look at the machine, leaving Ronnie in the office. Behind the Bluebird we were out of sight, and I took her in my arms and kissed her.

  ‘We oughtn’t to be doing this,’ she murmured. ‘Not in the hangar. You’ll lose your job.’

  ‘Wives’ Trades Union,’ I laughed. She laughed with me. ‘We won’t do it again. But this is a special occasion.’

  I had had her Alvis checked over at the garage and made clean for her, and I had brought it to the hangar the day before when she was to have come home. She got into it, and it was just like the old days as I stood chatting with her at the window. ‘I’ll be out tomorrow morning,’ she said, ‘or I’ll give you a ring. I’ll have to see what’s happening in the domestic situation, but if it’s all under control will you come up for dinner tomorrow night?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to fix up something now about the christening.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll see the vicar about that. I think he’ll do it privately for us, up at the Manor.’ I nodded. ‘I registered the birth, of course. In Cannes.’

  ‘What name did you give her?’

  She smiled. ‘Brenda. Brenda Margaret. I thought she ought to have two.’

  I went up to the Manor for dinner next evening. Already the spontaneous gaiety of her arrival had been dissipated by the constraints of Duffington. The vicar had proved difficult over the christening; apparently he disapproved of the whole thing. He said that her baby should have been christened in Cannes by the resident Church of England clergyman, and he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been. He could not refuse baptism to a child presented to him, but he would do it in the village church and nowhere else. Brenda had had to explain to him the general position of affairs and the necessity to avoid a public scandal if she were to go on living there. He had said that in the circumstances he would require the permission of the bishop before baptising the child privately, and he would let her know. It had all been rather unpleasant.

  She had rung up Dr Somers and had asked if her husband would like her to visit him. He had been reasonably cordial, but had warned her that the subject was a delicate one and he would have to approach it tactfully. He would ring her as soon as he had done so, probably before the end of the week.

  I went back to the Seven Swans that night deeply troubled in my mind. It seemed to me that we had made a vast mistake in bringing her back to Duffington with her baby and that nothing but trouble lay ahead of us. It seemed to me that I should have insisted on a little house at Oxford or some place like that where no one knew her, even if it meant that I could only see her once a week for a time. If we had done that, this christening trouble would not have arisen, for one thing. In Duffington Manor she was now living with my child in an entirely false position from a twisted sense of loyalty to her husband, and the worst of it was that I could see no way to put things right.

  I had adjusted the rigging of her Moth and had test-flown it for her, and she came out and flew it for a time next day. It seemed to put her mind at rest, and she came down far more composed and cheerful than she had been when she had taken off. On the following day she came out and flew it again, but she had heard nothing from the vicar and nothing from Dr Somers. And that evening she rang me up just as I was leaving the aerodrome.

  She said, ‘Johnnie, can you come up here at once? I’ve got to talk to you.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  She said dully, ‘Derek’s escaped. He got out of The Haven.’

  ‘My God!’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘They don’t know. They’re out looking for him.’

  ‘All right, darling. I’ll be with you straight away.’

  When I got to the Manor I heard the whole story, so far as she knew it. It seemed that there was a gate to the high-walled grounds of The Haven, an iron grille affair which was kept locked. That afternoon the gardener had unlocked it to push a barrow through; at the same time one of the nursing sisters of the women’s side of the place was fiddling unskilfully with the motor of her car in the garage about fifty yards from the grille. She moved a chafed lead, and the horn began to sound and went on sounding – loud, raucous, and continuous. The staff of The Haven knew from past experience that sudden noises such as that can excite a proportion of mental patients and make them almost unmanageable, and the gardener dropped everything, left the grille open, and went to help the sister stop it. It was over an hour before they discovered that Derek Marshall was no longer there.

  Later that evening they discovered that he had pawned his silver cigarette-case in the city for twenty-five shillings, and had vanished in the rush-hour crowds.

  It was bad, any way you looked at it. My first concern, of course, was for the safety of Brenda and her baby, not to mention her mother and the nurse and cook. ‘I’ll sleep here tonight,’ I said. ‘You’d better have somebody around.’

  She shook her head. ‘There’s no need to do that. He won’t come home.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s the first place they’d look for him. I saw a policeman in the garden just before you came in, down by the summer-house. Didn’t you see him?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He’ll keep right away from us,’ she said. ‘He’s only got to
stay free for a fortnight.’

  ‘I’ve heard something about that,’ I replied. ‘After a fortnight he’s regarded as sane, isn’t he?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘If he stays free for a fortnight, then he’s got to be re-certified.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘I don’t think Dr Somers would certify him – not unless he does something bad.’

  ‘Do you think he will?’

  She sighed wearily. ‘I don’t know, Johnnie. Not in the next fortnight, anyway.’

  I asked, ‘Have you got any idea where he’d be?’

  She shook her head. ‘Anywhere. He may have some old army friend who’d hide him for a fortnight. Even a relation. I don’t know.’

  I took her hand. ‘Look, dear,’ I said, ‘this puts the lid on it. You can’t stay here. This is his house, after all, and he’ll come back here in a fortnight when he’s free to do so. I’ll slip down to Oxford tomorrow and find somewhere for you to go – a furnished house, if possible, or else a flat. You’d like Oxford, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘It won’t do, Johnnie,’ she said sadly. ‘It just won’t do.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘It’s the only thing we can do.’

  ‘I’m his wife,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

  ‘He agreed to divorce you. You wouldn’t have been his wife by this time; you’d have been married to me. But he’s not right in the head, and he went back on it. We can’t go along on those lines, dear. They’re crazy lines.’

  ‘I know they are,’ she said. ‘Some day perhaps we’ll get them straightened out. But in the meantime, I’m his wife, and this is where I’ll have to stay till he comes home.’ I was silent, and presently she said, ‘Perhaps when I see him I’ll be able to talk him round.’

  I could not move her from that, however hard I tried, and presently I left her and went back to the village. As I drove down the drive of the Manor a dark figure came forward out of the bushes to stop the car, and I pulled up. It was Sergeant Entwhistle, of the police.