I got out of the machine and stood on the damp concrete floor, cold and unhappy. There was no car there, for Billy Monkhouse had taken his over to me with the petrol, and he was not back yet. I rang up the police station while I was waiting for him and spoke to the sergeant, and told him the position. He said that the Met report was discouraging. There was no break in sight. Dr Parkinson and his pilot had gone for dinner at the hotel, with the lady.
‘What lady?’ I asked.
‘A lady came just after you took off,’ he said. ‘A Mrs Forbes. Something to do with Captain Pascoe, I think. She flew across to Launceston from Melbourne first thing this morning, and got a taxi here. She’s going to stay at the hotel.’
‘Is she a relation?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know that,’ he said. ‘She might be. I didn’t give her much attention, what with other things.’
I rang off, and soon after that Billy Monkhouse drove up with the doctor. I told him what I had done, and that a woman had arrived. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘She come just as you were taking off.’
‘Do you know who she is?’
‘She didn’t say. A cousin, perhaps. I dunno.’
There was no point in bothering with her; she couldn’t help us. I said, ‘Show me which is Johnnie’s house. Can I get something to eat at the hotel?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘Not at this time, you can’t. Dinner’ll be off. Mrs Lawrence’ll fix you up something. She does for Captain Pascoe – lives next door. I’ll take you there.’
I got into his little car with the doctor He said that he would look in at the hotel and see Dr Parkinson, which would save my going into town. I think he saw that I was just about all in from the strain of flying in difficult conditions and the lack of sleep, and indeed I think I actually fell asleep in the three or four minutes that it took us to drive from the hangar to the first house on the edge of the little town, because I know I woke up with a start.
We went and spoke to Mrs Lawrence in the next house, a fat, comfortable woman washing up after their midday dinner. ‘I think he’s got some bacon and eggs in the house,’ she said when the position was explained to her. ‘I could come over in a minute and do that, if that would be enough.’ I said anything would do. ‘I’ll bring over some bread and some milk,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to be in tonight I could go in and get a bit of steak.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘We’re all so sorry about the captain.’
‘We’ll get a doctor in to him before long,’ I told her. ‘As soon as this weather lifts.’
She nodded. ‘I never knew it be so crook. It’s been like this for days. You go on over and make yourself at home, and I’ll be over in ten minutes. There’s a fire laid all ready in the lounge.’ She took a key down from a nail over the sink and gave it to me. ‘That’s the back door key.’
Monkhouse drove the car on to the town with the doctor, splashing on the dirt road through the sheets of rain, and I went over to the other house. The door opened into the kitchen and I shut the rain out. I was cold and wet, and the house seemed chilly and unlived in. I went through into the lounge and dropped down on my knees before the fire, and lit it. There was wood in the wood box and a good pile outside the back door. There was no need to stint myself of warmth; I stayed on my knees in my leather coat for some time piling on the twiggy bits and then the rather larger pieces and finally the logs. With the shelter from the weather and the increasing glow from the fire a little warmth began to creep back into me, and presently I noticed that my coat was dripping water on the fire-irons and the fender. I stood up stiffly, and took it off, and went and hung it on the back of the kitchen door. Then I came back to the fire and looked around.
The sitting room was a pilot’s room, the walls covered with photographs of a long flying life. On the wall above the mantelpiece was a wooden propeller with queer, curved blades, hung as a trophy like a pair of antlers. There were little bits of aeroplane all over the place, most of them old and quite unfamiliar to me. On another wall among the photographs there was a complete instrument panel hanging like a picture, but the only instruments on it were a clumsy airspeed indicator, an equally antique aneroid, an oil-pressure gauge, and spirit cross and fore-and-aft levels. I wondered idly what sort of an aircraft that had come out of, but I had no time for his mementoes at that moment. What I wanted was a bed, and I went out into the little corridor.
There were two bedrooms in the house, one on each side. I opened the door on the left, and found myself in Johnnie Pascoe’s bedroom. It was a very large room, much larger than I should have expected to find in a house of that nature. I glanced around and saw that it was quite well furnished, and then backed out and tried the other door. It would be better to use his spare room.
It was his spare room all right, but it wasn’t up to much. There was a bed there with a mattress on it, but there were no bedclothes and no pillows. There was a dressing table but the dust lay thick upon it. There was no chair. There was a short strip of worn carpet on the bare, unstained boards beside the bed and thin, faded curtains joined by a few cobwebs shrouded the closed window.
I was tired, too tired to set about cleaning up his spare room and getting it in order. I went back to his own bedroom. It was spacious, well furnished, and comfortable; the bed made up neatly and covered with a bedspread with an eiderdown on top of that. His razor, his hair brushes were all there on the dressing table, his washing things were on the basin by the gleaming taps. His dressing gown hung behind the door, his slippers were under the bedside table with the reading lamp; I opened the door of the built-in wardrobe idly, and it was full of his clothes. Like the sitting room, the walls of this room were covered with photographs and souvenirs, but what riveted my attention was the bed. It looked just marvellous, exactly what I needed. Johnnie Pascoe wouldn’t mind my sleeping there, I knew. It would be some time before he would use it, anyway, for when we got him out from the Lewis River he would certainly go into hospital.
I put my haversack of warm clothes on the bed and then Mrs Lawrence came in at the back door and began to organise a meal for me in the kitchen. I had a word or two with her, and went back to the sitting room and put more wood upon the fire. My flying was over for the day; I was still cold, and started to look around for a drink. I hadn’t far to look; there was a corner cupboard in the sitting room with three unopened bottles of Scotch in it, and one half empty. I went and got a glass and some water from the kitchen and gave myself a drink of his whisky. Glass in hand, standing by the fire, warm and comfortable for the first time that day, I had leisure to examine the room.
On the wall over the cupboard that housed the whisky there was a studio portrait photograph of a very pretty blonde girl. It was inscribed across the corner in a round, flowing hand, ‘For Johnnie with oceans of love, from Judy,’ but the ink had faded and some of the words were hardly legible. The photograph had gone a bit yellow, too, but there was nothing on it to indicate the date.
I looked around the corner, and there were other photographs of the same girl upon the walls, and of aeroplanes, all biplanes except one, which was a triplane. This was a corner of the room that was devoted to Judy, it seemed, and I studied the photographs curiously as I stood there, drink in hand, before the fire. They all seemed to have been taken at the time of the first war. There was a very young man in the double-breasted ‘maternity’ jacket of the Royal Flying Corps standing in front of the triplane – could that be Johnnie? I moved over for a closer look, thinking of the pilot instructor who had taught me to fly nearly thirty years ago. It was Johnnie all right – a much younger man than I had known, but the same. In the photograph he was very young indeed, no more than eighteen or nineteen. The drooping wings upon his chest had no ribbons beneath them. The triplane was a single-seater with a rotary engine and an open cockpit; it had R.F.C. roundels on the fuselage. I searched my memory for pictures I had seen – could that have been a Sopwith?
There was one of Judy driving a golf ball off the tee. The
re was something wrong about that one, but at first I couldn’t place it. It looked faked in some way, too good to be true. Then I got it. It was like a photograph of an actress or a model playing golf in one of the glossy magazines, perhaps in an advertisement, posed carefully by the golf pro in exactly the right position at the end of the swing, and holding the pose while the photographer did his stuff. The clothes were very old-fashioned.
There was a very pleasant photograph of Johnnie and Judy in front of the rotary engine of some fighter. It was a biplane, a very small machine. The portion of the undercarriage that was visible looked terribly flimsy, the tyre on the one wheel that was showing unbelievably small. He had his arm around her shoulders and they were laughing together at the camera, both very young. The drooping wings had two medal ribbons underneath them now, and the arm around her shoulder had a thin bit of gold braid vertical above the cuff. One of the ribbons seemed to be the Military Cross, but I could not make out the other, nor could I identify the aeroplane. The wooden propeller behind them had the same curved leading edge, and I turned and looked at the one over the mantelpiece. The boss, I saw, was stamped with a lot of letters and numbers and the one word ‘CLERGET’. I wondered if that propeller was the same as featured in that merry photograph, if Johnnie and Judy had once leaned against it, forty years ago.
There were other photographs of ancient aeroplanes, one of them an enormous biplane pusher that I thought might be a Farman, but no more of them featured the girl Judy. I poured myself another whisky and studied the portrait, wondering if that had been the marriage that went wrong. It could quite well have been; the date was about right. It was a very pretty face but rather a hard one, perhaps; the face of somebody who knew exactly where she was going. The lines of the chin and jaw were very firm, in spite of the softness of youth. She was very young in the portrait, but it was quite possible, I thought, that by the age of thirty she might have developed into a real hard piece. Perhaps she had, and that had been the trouble. Or again, it might have been his fault. You just can’t say.
Mrs Lawrence called me to the kitchen for my meal, which Johnnie Pascoe evidently had normally upon the kitchen table. She had done bacon and eggs and fried potatoes; there was bread and cheese and a pot of jam, and a big pot of hot coffee. I thanked her, and she said, ‘That’s nothing. Just leave everything upon the table when you’ve done. I’ll come in again later.’
‘I can wash these few things up,’ I said.
‘Captain Pascoe leaves them and I come in,’ she replied. ‘You’d better do the same.’ She looked out of the window. ‘I never saw such rain,’ she said. ‘I do hope you can get a doctor to him soon.’
‘One or other of us will be flying down to him the minute the weather clears,’ I told her.
She went away, and I sat down to my meal. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, and already the light was beginning to fade; I got up half way through and put on the kitchen light over the table. I ate heartily and drank several cups of coffee with a lot of milk. Then, taking Mrs Lawrence at her word, I got up from the table and went back to the sitting room. The fire was burning well. I switched on the light and stood in the warm glow, thinking now of bed. Better give the meal time to settle, however, and I lit a cigarette. I wondered if there would be time to put a call through to Sheila before I slept, and decided that I ought to. I crossed to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and put in the call. I asked what the delay would be, and told them to ring me back if it was going to be long.
I put the instrument down, and raised my eyes to the wall above it. There was a photograph there, and after nearly thirty years my heart turned over because it was a photograph of Brenda Marshall. It was Brenda Marshall as I had known and loved her from a distance when I was a boy, when I was eighteen and she was nearly thirty. It was taken outside the hangar at Duffington aerodrome, where I learned to fly in the same year that that photograph must have been taken. She was standing beside her Moth in the white boiler suit she always flew in, smiling a little shyly at the camera. She had her white flying helmet in her hand, showing her short, curly hair. It was Brenda Marshall as I had known her in my youth.
It brought me up short, and I stood staring at it, full of sad memories. The corner of the hangar that showed just behind the Moth was the corner she had died in, on the stretcher, as I well knew. I was only eighteen at the time, and hers was the first fatal crash that I had had to do with. I stood staring at the photograph, remembering her vivacity. Brenda Marshall … Johnnie Pascoe must have got hold of that photograph, and he had kept it all these years. He had taught her to fly, too.
A car splashed to a standstill in the rain outside the house. I looked out of the window in the semi-darkness, and it was the taxi. A woman got out of it and spoke to the driver, who indicated my house. She pushed the gate open and came up through the neglected front garden to the door. I cursed her inwardly because I wanted to go to bed, but she knocked and rang the bell. There was nothing for it, and I went to the front door and opened it for her.
‘Captain Clarke?’ she asked.
I said, ‘Yes.’ I did not invite her in, though she was standing in the rain.
‘I just came down to talk things over with you,’ she said. ‘I’m Marian Forbes.’
She was a woman about forty years of age. I did not move from the door. ‘Is this anything urgent?’ I enquired. ‘I got no sleep last night, and I’m just going to bed.’
‘You poor thing!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know. I shan’t keep you more than two minutes.’
Very reluctantly I let her in out of the rain, and she pushed forward past me into the sitting room. ‘What a lovely fire you’ve got!’ she said. ‘And what a cosy room!’ She turned to me with a winsome air that might have been attractive twenty years ago. ‘You know, there isn’t anywhere at all to sit in that hotel, except the bedroom! Don’t you think that’s dreadful?’
‘What can I do for you?’ I asked. ‘I’m just going to bed.’
‘I know – I know,’ she said. ‘I shan’t keep you more than two minutes.’ She took off her raincoat and laid it on a chair at the back of the room, and moved over to the fire. ‘I just wanted to have a little talk.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘You are in a hurry to get rid of me, aren’t you? And I’ve been waiting such a long time to see you. I got here just before you started off on the last flight but I was too late to talk to you then.’
The telephone rang, and I picked up the receiver. It was the exchange to say that there was a two hours’ delay to Melbourne. I told them to cancel the call. There was now nothing but this woman to keep me from my bed, and I turned back to her. ‘Let’s cut this short,’ I said rudely. ‘I’m going to bed in about thirty seconds. Who are you, anyway?’
She said, ‘Well, I’m John Pascoe’s daughter.’
3
I stood silent for a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I never knew he had a daughter.’
‘I don’t suppose you did,’ she said. ‘He’s probably forgotten it himself.’
It didn’t seem to be any concern of mine, anyway. ‘We’re doing everything we can to get a doctor down to him,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to do now but to wait until the weather clears.’
‘That’s what they told me,’ she replied. ‘I suppose you’ve known him a long time?’
‘He taught me to fly, back in England in 1931,’ I said. ‘I can’t say that I know him very well, but I’ve certainly known him a long time.’
‘That’s what they told me in the hotel.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘I live in Adelaide.’ Later on, I learned that her husband was one of the leading surgeons of the city. ‘I told Dennis when we heard it on the news last night, I told him that I’d have to come over and see that everything possible was being done. After all, he is my father.’
I wrinkled my brows. ‘You weren’t very closely in touch with him?’
She laughed shortly. ‘Good Lord, no! I don??
?t suppose he knows I’m in Australia. I don’t suppose he cares where I live. He left my mother when I was two years old and after that we never heard a word from him. I knew that he was here because I saw it in the paper.’
It seemed a funny sort of relationship, but it was nothing to do with me. ‘Well, everything that’s possible is being done, Mrs Forbes,’ I said. ‘While this weather lasts we can’t do much by landing at the Lewis River, but there’s a Lincoln of the R.A.A.F. on its way with a parachute doctor and a parachute nurse. It ought to be at Hobart by this time. Apart from that, a ground party started off about midday today, but it’s going to take them three days to get there over the mountains. The doctor’s been talking to the woman, Mrs Hoskins, over the radio every two or three hours and telling her what to do. Everything possible is being done.’
A gust of wind whistled around the house and beat upon the window.
‘They tell me you’re a married man,’ she said.
I was surprised. ‘That’s right.’
‘Any children?’
‘Two.’ I wondered what on earth she was getting at.
‘I wouldn’t want to see anything happen to a man like you,’ she said flatly. ‘Not for the sake of a man like Pascoe.’
There was a hostility in that remark, of course, hostility to her father, and I didn’t quite know what to say in reply. I was evidently dealing with a spiteful woman, and I wanted to go to bed. She had, however, settled down in front of my fire. I wasn’t inclined to let her stay there after that. She would have to go back to the hotel, uncomfortable as it was.
‘Johnnie Pascoe’s all right,’ I said. ‘In any case, I can look after myself.’
‘Are you a friend of his?’ she asked.
‘Not a close one,’ I said. ‘He taught me to fly, and I’ve known him off and on since then.’