by Nevil Shute
‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. ‘Are there any other guests in the house?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was the only one.’
‘I’ll just go in, then, and make sure the windows on the ground floor are all fastened, and the doors,’ he remarked. ‘We don’t want any trouble in the night.’
‘Are you expecting him?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Not unless he’s a lot crazier than what they say he is,’ he replied. ‘He’d be too cunning to come here. But there’s no harm in making sure.’
That was the twenty-eighth of April, and the fortnight would be up on May 12th. On May 13th Derek might be expected to show up if they hadn’t caught him before, an appropriately unlucky date, it seemed to me. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it, though. I tried once more to make Brenda go away with her mother and the baby, but I only succeeded in annoying her. The nurse, not liking the atmosphere, gave in her notice and left.
She came out to the aerodrome every morning to fly her Moth, and that was good for her, and seemed to ease her mind. She chose the mornings rather than the afternoons because there were seldom any people at the aerodrome on week-day mornings, and there had been a story in the newspapers about Derek’s escape from The Haven, with a photograph of him. Apart from these visits to the aerodrome I don’t think she left the grounds of the Manor at all. She didn’t come on Saturday or Sunday because of the people, but I got her Moth out for her on Monday morning when the club was normally closed. There was so little I could do for her.
Throughout that fortnight the tension grew, till it became nearly unbearable. I know that she was taking sleeping tablets of some sort. I didn’t do that myself because drugs and flying don’t mix very well, and I used to lie awake most nights till two or three in the morning. On top of the anxiety and the suspense over Derek, I had a terrible feeling that Brenda was growing away from me. Our aims were different. I wanted her to leave her husband and become my wife in fact, if not in law. She wanted to stay with him, not because she loved him but because she had an ethereal sense of duty, almost like a nun. I knew that she was terrified of his return, but she was moving away from me to face it upon planes that I could not reach.
She came out to the aerodrome on the morning of the 11th. She seemed completely normal, went to the club house to change into her boiler suit, and came back to the machine. I had it out upon the tarmac and I was in the cockpit running up the engine for her; I was doing everything I possibly could for her at that time, myself. She went into the office for a moment and came out again to the machine. I throttled back and got out, and she got into it without speaking. She fastened her belt, smiled at me, and taxied out to take off.
I watched till she was in the air, and then went back into the office. There was a note there on my desk. It read:
Dear Johnnie –
Thank you for everything.
Brenda.
I dashed out on to the tarmac, with a ghastly feeling of disaster in my throat. She was coming over the aerodrome now at seven or eight hundred feet, flying straight and level. Then, as I watched, she throttled back the engine, pulled the nose of the machine right up, and kicked on full rudder. The Moth hesitated for a moment, and then fell over in a spin.
I breathed, ‘Oh God … please … no!’
I stood watching her in horror. At three hundred feet she was still spinning, and I shouted to the men to get the crash wagon. The elevators were still hard up, the rudder hard over. Then she centred the controls and the machine stopped spinning and went into a straight dive, gathering speed quickly. She never made the slightest effort to pull out. She hit the ground near the far hedge with a dull thud and a splintering noise of wood, and as I ran I heard the crash wagon start up behind me.
For the second time that night I woke from a bad dream. I was sweating and trembling, and for a time I didn’t know where I was. I thought that I was in the small hotel that I had lived in in New Delhi, where I had woken up in that way practically every night. Brenda was dead, and now the baby was dead, the only part of Brenda that was left to me. I had killed her baby by neglect for I had gone away to India and left her, left Brenda’s baby and mine. Mine was the guilt, and my punishment was to go on living in loneliness and shame.
I stirred, and reached out for the letter from Mrs Duclos to read it for the hundredth time, though I knew every word by heart. It wasn’t there, and my torch wasn’t there, either. There was something vertical and unfamiliar. As consciousness came back to me I realised my hand was on the standard of a table lamp. In my misery I fumbled about with a trembling hand until I found the switch and got it lit. I lay blinking in the flood of light. I was in Johnnie Pascoe’s room, and everything was quite all right. I hadn’t just seen the girl I loved dive in. I wasn’t in New Delhi. I hadn’t killed her baby by neglect. It was a bad dream, a nightmare. I was Ronnie Clarke, and it was quite all right.
I lay there with the light on, gradually calming down. I was Ronnie Clarke, and Sheila was waiting for me back at Essendon, and Peter, and Diana. It was all right. Presently I stirred and looked at the wrist-watch on the table by my side. It was only half past twelve, and I had set the alarm clock for five. I had had a few hours of sleep, though whether it had done me much good was another matter. I had a job of hard and difficult flying to do at dawn when I should need to have all my wits about me. There was still time for another spell of sleep, but I knew I shouldn’t get it till I had composed my mind. The one thing that I wasn’t going to do was to take another Nembutal.
Presently I got out of bed, put on Johnnie Pascoe’s dressing gown and bedroom slippers, and pulled the bedclothes up to the pillow to keep the bed warm. I felt in the pockets of the dressing gown and found his packet of cigarettes and his box of matches. I put a cigarette into my mouth and took the matchbox from the other pocket. There was only one match left in it. I struck that with fingers that were still clumsy and trembling, and the head broke off short.
There was another box on the mantelpiece in the sitting room, that I had used to light the fire. I went through, and stood rooted in the doorway, sick with horror. The fire had been made up and was glowing red, but all the lights were out. And there, in the firelight, in the white boiler suit that she had worn the day she died, curled up in the armchair and asleep, was Brenda Marshall.
6
I SUPPOSE I made some exclamation, made some noise, because the girl in the armchair stirred and sat up. The white boiler suit melted away and resolved itself into a white starched dress, a sister’s dress. The short, curly, reddish brown hair that I had expected wasn’t there when she sat up into the firelight; this girl had darkish, wavy hair, shingled at the back. The face was different, too; vaguely familiar, but quite different. It wasn’t Brenda Marshall at all, and I had been a fool.
She brushed the hair back from her face, and stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I must have dropped asleep. Are you Captain Clarke?’
I nodded. And then I hesitated while I gathered my wits together and composed myself. ‘You must be the nurse.’
‘I’m Sister Dawson,’ she replied. ‘Dr Turnbull brought me down here and said it would be all right if I slept here. I hope we didn’t wake you when we came in?’
I shook my head. ‘I never heard you. I thought you were going to sleep in the other room.’
She nodded. ‘We brought down his sleeping bag.’ She indicated it, draped over a chair. ‘It’s a bit messy in there, though, and very cold. I thought I’d get a better night if I slept in the chair here, by the fire. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’m only sorry if I woke you up. I didn’t know you were here. I just came in for a match.’ I reached out and took the box from the mantelpiece and lit my cigarette. It helped to calm my nerves. And then I recalled my manners and offered her the packet from the pocket of the dressing gown. ‘I’m so sorry. Will you have a cigarette?’
‘Thanks.’ She took one, and I lit it for he
r. She glanced at her wrist-watch. ‘Half past twelve,’ she said. ‘I thought you were sleeping through.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I woke up.’
She frowned, evidently puzzled. ‘What time are we taking off?’
‘If the weather’s at all possible I’d like to get into the air soon after six, and be down at the Lewis River at dawn,’ I said. ‘I set the alarm for five.’ I crossed to the window, and pulled the curtain aside. The wind was very strong, but the rain had stopped. There was an overcast at about two thousand feet, eight-tenths, but behind it there was a moon, and there were flying, fitful gleams of moonlight on the countryside. I stood looking out for a few moments, and then let the curtain fall and turned back into the room. I went and tapped the barometer; it had risen in the night, and was still rising. ‘It’s looking better,’ I said. ‘Was it raining when you came in?’
She thought for a moment. ‘No – it wasn’t raining then. It had been raining very hard before.’
‘Was there a moon?’
She shook her head. ‘It was quite dark.’
‘Well, it’s definitely better now. It’s nothing like the forecast, of course, but they don’t get any actuals down here from the south-west.’ This woman had been an air hostess, so I hadn’t got to explain things to her. ‘If it stays like this we shall be taking off soon after six. Did Dr Turnbull explain about the trip to you?’
‘Yes, sir. He told me that there’d be no cabin door, and we’d have to try and jump out on the strip while you held her against the wind.’
‘Is that all right with you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
I glanced at her. ‘You can’t wear those clothes.’
‘He gave me a ski suit and ski boots.’ She indicated them in a corner. ‘I’ll change into those for the flight. But I can’t help him at an operation in those. I’ll take this dress with me in a bundle. I’ve got a theatre gown with me.’
They seemed to have got their side of it all buttoned up. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You’d better try and get a bit more sleep. I’m sorry I woke you up.’
She hesitated, and then said, ‘I thought you were sleeping through, sir, and I’d have to wake you.’
‘I thought I would,’ I said. ‘But I woke up.’
She frowned, evidently puzzled. ‘Dr Turnbull told me that you were very tired, and you’d taken a Nembutal.’
‘I did,’ I told her. ‘But it didn’t work.’
‘How much did you take?’ she asked.
‘Just one,’ I said.
‘A grain and a half, or three-quarters?’
‘A grain and a half.’
She frowned again. ‘Do you take it very often?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t suppose I take more than three or four a year. But they’re useful to have with you at a time like this.’
‘I can’t understand it,’ she said. ‘With a grain and a half of Nembutal you should be sleeping like a log.’
‘I had a bad dream,’ I told her.
She nodded. ‘Would you go to sleep if you went back to bed again?’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.
She stood in thought. ‘I’d better get you something. I saw some milk in the kitchen. Would you take a cup of hot cocoa if I can find anything like that?’
‘Don’t bother.’ She disregarded that, and went down the short corridor into the kitchen, very much the nurse. I heard cupboard doors opening and shutting. ‘There’s Ovaltine here,’ she said. ‘You’d better have a cup of that. I’ll warm up some of this milk.’
It seemed that I was to have little say in the matter. A hot drink might not be a bad thing, anyway, if it brought me a few hours’ more sleep, for I was still all on edge and the coming flight would be a difficult one. The Auster was a very little aeroplane to fly at night with a full load in bad weather, especially when practically all one side of the cabin was removed. I would have to fly it manually on instruments, of course, over bad country with no lights or navigation aids. I didn’t want to start off all tensed up as I was then. Her cup of hot Ovaltine might quite well be the shot.
I threw some more wood on the fire and sat down before it. Presently she came back with a tray of two cups of the hot drink and a few biscuits on a plate. I took one cup and she took the other, and we sat together before the fire waiting for the drink to cool a bit.
‘Dr Turnbull said that you’d been a hostess,’ I remarked. ‘With Captain Pascoe.’
She nodded. ‘I was in his crew for about ten months, in AusCan. You know him too, don’t you?’
‘He taught me to fly,’ I told her, ‘back in the dark ages, in England. I’ve known him off and on since then.’
‘Is that why you came over here?’
I nodded. ‘How did you come to be in AusCan?’
‘I was trained at the Queen Alexandra Hospital, in Melbourne,’ she said. ‘Then I was on Surgical. Then about three years ago I got an itch to get out and go places – you know.’ I nodded. ‘AusCan like their senior hostesses to have hospital training,’ she said. ‘I put in for it and got it. I was with them for a little over a year.’
I smiled. ‘Get fed up with it?’
‘Well – yes. You get it out of your system after a time – just serving meals and drinks. I’m back at the Queen Alexandra now.’
‘You heard about this, and came over?’
‘It was on the wireless,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d come over to see him in hospital. I never dreamed there’d be this difficulty in getting him out. I only heard about it when I got to Launceston.’
‘You’re Australian, I suppose?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘I was brought up in South Yarra.’ She glanced at me. ‘You’re English, aren’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘I emigrated out here when I got married, in 1946. I don’t suppose I’ll ever live anywhere else, now. One gets dug in.’
We sat sipping our hot drinks. Presently she said, ‘There was a woman in the hotel called Mrs Forbes. Did you meet her?’
‘She came here for a few minutes just before I went to bed,’ I replied. ‘She seemed rather a queer type.’
‘I think she’s mental,’ the nurse remarked.
I laughed. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘She was telling everybody that she was his daughter,’ she said, a little hotly. ‘Well, that’s just not true. On top of that she was telling everybody not to risk their lives by flying in to help Captain Pascoe.’
‘She came to tell me that,’ I said. ‘But she’s his daughter all right. At least, I think she is.’
She stared at me. ‘How can that be?’ And then she said, ‘At least …’ She stopped.
‘He was married a long time ago,’ I said. ‘In the last year of the First War. His wife was an actress and she left him and went over to America. She divorced him there, at Reno. But I think there was a daughter.’
‘That’s right,’ she said slowly. ‘There was.’
‘There’s a photograph here,’ I remarked. I put my cup down and got up, and showed her the photograph of Johnnie and Judy in front of the rotary-engined fighter. ‘I think that was his wife.’
She glanced over her shoulder at it, but she did not get up; she had evidently seen it before. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It didn’t last for long.’ There was a pause, and then she said, ‘He was so terribly young.’
I went back to my chair. ‘I don’t suppose he was much more than twenty-one.’
She nodded. ‘Anyway,’ she remarked with some satisfaction, ‘Dr Turnbull tore her off a strip all right, in front of everyone.’
I glanced at her. ‘The police sergeant told me something about that, over the telephone. Were you there?’
She nodded, smiling. ‘I’d only just arrived; I landed straight into it. I couldn’t quite make out what it was all about, at first. Dr Turnbull seemed to be in the minority, so I went in with him.’
‘The others were all saying that it was too dangerous?’
&nb
sp; ‘That’s right. The woman didn’t know what she was talking about. She seemed to be just spiteful.’
I took a drink from my cup. ‘I’m changing my opinion of Dr Turnbull,’ I said presently. ‘I didn’t think a lot of him at first. But I’ll say this for him. He’s got any amount of guts.’
‘I think he’s very good,’ she said slowly. ‘We were talking about the operation, what he’s got to do. I’ve never seen him operate, of course, but I think he’d be very steady …’ She glanced up at me. ‘I’ve seen so many young house surgeons,’ she said. ‘And of course, we talk about them in the sisters’ home. They seem to get into their stride after they’ve done a few major operations successfully – if they’re the right sort.’
‘Is he the right sort?’ I asked.
‘I should think he is. I’d rather see him operate on Captain Pascoe than that Dr Parkinson.’
I finished my drink, and put the cup down. ‘Well, I’m glad to hear you say that,’ I said. ‘All we’ve got to do now is to keep our fingers crossed and hope that I can put you out upon the airstrip.’ I crossed to the window and looked at the weather again. ‘It’s getting finer all the time. Thank God for that.’ I turned back from the window. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed now, and see if I can get a bit more sleep.’
‘Sit down there for a minute while I make your bed,’ she said.
‘Oh – that’ll be all right,’ I objected.
She went to the door. ‘Sit down there. You’ll sleep better if I make it.’ She was very much the nurse, and I had no option but to obey her. I sat down again in the warm glow of the fire; in the next room I heard her slamming the pillows about, and the rustle of sheets and bedclothes. Once she appeared in the doorway with a rubber hot water bag in her hand. ‘This was hanging behind the door,’ she said. ‘Shall I fill it for you?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I never use one.’
‘Are your feet warm?’
I smiled. ‘Quite.’