Complete works of nevil.., p.571
Complete Works of Nevil Shute, page 571
She laid down her book. ‘Not a bit. I’ve been admiring your bathing shorts,’ she said.
I laughed. ‘They are a bit gaudy. I like them.’
She laughed with me. ‘I think they’re wonderful. Wherever did you get them?’
‘You can buy them at Honolulu,’ I said. ‘There’s a place in Kalakaua Avenue just by the Post Office. Ten dollars. You can get women’s costumes like them, too. I don’t know how much they are.’
‘I wouldn’t dare,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure that I know where Kalakaua Avenue is, anyway.’
‘The main street is Waikiki,’ I told her. ‘Half a mile or so from where we stay.’
‘I don’t know Honolulu yet,’ she said. ‘I must explore it.’
I offered her a cigarette, and lit it for her. ‘Is this your first time away from Australia?’
She shook her head. ‘I went to England once, just after I qualified.’
‘Like it?’
She nodded. ‘It was marvellous. I’d have liked to have stayed there and worked, but it wasn’t possible.’
‘Why not?’
‘My grandmother was getting very old,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair.’
‘Is she your only relation?’
‘She was,’ she replied. ‘She died about two years ago, soon after I got back from England.’ She paused. ‘She brought me up. My mother and father were killed in a car crash.’
‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘Did that mean a lot to you?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t remember them at all.’
‘You live in Melbourne, I think you said?’
She nodded. ‘In South Yarra. All my friends are there; it’s where I was brought up. Grandmother left me all her furniture, so I took a couple of rooms in a friend’s house as a sort of flat, and I’ve kept that on.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ I said slowly. ‘You’ve always got somewhere to go back to, with your own things and people who know you.’
She glanced at me curiously. ‘Where do you live?’
I laughed. ‘Where I work. Here.’
‘Haven’t you got a flat anywhere?’
I shook my head. ‘I seem to move around too much. I’ve got stuff stuck away in stores in London, and in Montreal, and in Vancouver.’
‘You just live in clubs and airport hostels?’
‘That’s right. I’ll be retiring in about a year, and then I’m going to have a house. A real house, for the first time in my life.’
She smiled. ‘Where’s that going to be?’
‘In Tasmania, I think. I haven’t quite decided.’
‘Are you a Tasmanian?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I was born a Canadian, in Hamilton, Ontario. I’ve still got some relations there, but I haven’t seen them for years.’
‘You wouldn’t want to go back there to live?’
I shook my head. ‘I haven’t lived there since I left home for the First World War. I wouldn’t want to go back there. It’s either going to be somewhere near Victoria, B.C., or else Tasmania. I rather like Tasmania. There’s a little place called Buxton that I’ve got my eye on.’
She wrinkled her brows in thought. ‘In the northwest, somewhere, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s a very little place, isn’t it?’
I laughed. ‘I like little places. I’ve had my fill of seeing the great world.’
There was a pause then, while we sat watching the people in the pool. I asked her if she would like a drink and she elected for a Coke, so I went and fetched a couple from the bar. When we were settled down again, she asked me, ‘Did you ever work in England?’
I nodded. ‘I was in England in the First War, and I stayed on for twelve years.’
‘Did you love it?’
‘It was all right,’ I said. ‘Better than India.’ She laughed. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve worked there longer than that. I was based in England all through the Second War, and after that.’ I thought for a moment. ‘I went to T.C.A. in 1947. But I wasn’t living much in England in the war. I was all over the shop.’
‘Airline flying?’
‘Transport Command, mostly. Ferrying Liberators over the Atlantic some of the time. Flying Yorks to Singapore after that. All sorts of things.’
‘You’ve been everywhere,’ she said.
I smiled. ‘I’ve never been to South America, or Russia.’
We sat in silence for a time. ‘I did love England,’ she said at last. ‘Of course, I’d always want to come back to Melbourne. But England in the spring is just like fairyland. The primroses, and the bluebells in the woods!’
‘Too many people,’ I remarked.
‘I know. But it’s – England.’
She was very Australian in her outlook; at any moment I expected to hear her speak of going Home to the Old Country. ‘There’s a good bit of England here, of course,’ I said. ‘Down in Suva everybody seems to be English.’
‘I want to go to Suva,’ she remarked.
‘There’s not much to see there,’ I observed. ‘It’s not a very big place. It’s worth seeing, though.’
‘You go there in the little aeroplanes, don’t you? Fiji Airways?’
I nodded. ‘You can drive along the coast, if you like. It takes all day. Some of the buses are quite good. But Fiji Airways might give you a free pass if they’ve not got a full load. They gave me one, once.’
She smiled. ‘You’re a captain.’
I laughed. ‘All the same, they made me pay coming back.’
Presently she said, ‘I’m very ignorant. Is Fiji a mandate or something?’
I glanced at her. ‘It’s a British colony. Most of the Government officials here are English. A few New Zealanders, but mostly English. It’s a very English place.’
‘I’d like to see more of it,’ she said. ‘It’s silly to be in a country and see nothing but the aerodrome.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve got plenty of time.’
‘I haven’t,’ she retorted. ‘You make us play tennis all the time.’
I laughed. ‘I’ll accept a certificate from the Governor that you played four sets a day in Suva.’
A few days later Charlie Lemaitre was a passenger with us from Honolulu southwards. Mr Lemaitre had been Minister of Transport in Canada off and on for fifteen years, and I had known him off and on as long as that. He was on his way to Sydney for a conference, but he had brought his wife along with him and he intended to stay three or four days in Fiji on the way for a holiday. Normally, I never invite a passenger to the flight deck; AusCan forbid it and I think it’s bad practice. It makes young captains and first officers swollen-headed if they are allowed to bask in the admiration of really important people, and swollen heads bring accidents in their train. Mr Lemaitre was different because he had a pass from the Head Office and I had him on the flight deck with me for over an hour after we took off, sitting in the second pilot’s seat and chatting. He had been a pilot in the First World War, as I had myself, though I never met him then.
When we got to Nandi I took time off to attend to Mr and Mrs Lemaitre myself for a few minutes; they were going on to Suva by Fiji Airways. Mrs Lemaitre apparently didn’t very often travel with her husband, and she was absurdly grateful for the little things that I did for the Minister as a matter of course. ‘So very kind of you, Captain Pascoe,’ she said. ‘Charlie will be giving a little dinner for some of the Government people in the hotel on Monday night. Could you come down to Suva for that, and bring Miss Dawson with you?’
I thought quickly. This was in the nature of a Royal Command, and AusCan would probably want me to be there to show the flag. I could charge up the expenses. I didn’t know how Bill Myers would feel about expenses for the hostess, but it was not an unreasonable invitation from the Minister’s wife, and one which it would be awkward to refuse. The hostess wasn’t present so I couldn’t bring her into it; I would have to decide this for her, and she would do what she was told. ‘That’s really very kind of you,’ I said. ‘I should like to be there very much. You’d like me to bring Miss Dawson?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘She told me that she’d never been to Suva, and nor have I.’
I hoped that Bill Myers would consider this an adequate reason for charging up her expenses. ‘I’m sure she’d like to come,’ I said. ‘It’s very kind of you to think of her.’
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It will be so nice to have you there, all among these stuffy English people. Charlie had to give a party at Bermuda once, and it was dreadful!’
This was another reason that I could put up to Bill Myers, but it didn’t seem much better than the first. I thanked them both and saw them off upon the little aeroplane for Suva, and then walked up to my room in the hostel and lay down and slept till lunch, as I usually did on Friday morning after the night flight.
After lunch I went down to our office in the airport buildings and rang up our manager, Stanley McEwen, who was in our office at Suva that day, and told him all about it. He said I’d better come, and then I told him about the hostess. ‘She asked her, too,’ I said. ‘How do you react to that one?’
‘Hell,’ he said. ‘She can’t ask everybody.’
‘We can get out of it,’ I told him. ‘Say she’s sick, or something. She didn’t ask her personally. She just told me to bring her along.’
‘I see …’ There was a pause. ‘Did she ask for her by name?’
‘That’s right. Miss Dawson. She asked the two of us.’
There was another pause. ‘Was Charlie Lemaitre in on this?’ he asked.
‘Yes. He was with her at the time.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’d better bring her down.’
‘Be all right to charge up her expenses?’
‘I suppose so,’ he said reluctantly. ‘Keep them down as much as possible, or I’ll have Billy Myers in a screaming fit. You’d better both come and spend the night with me.’
‘Two nights,’ I suggested. ‘Give us time to do some shopping.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll expect you both on Sunday.’
I had laid on tennis that afternoon at four o’clock; our crew of eight was just right for two courts, so that it was difficult for anyone to make an excuse. I played in the mixed doubles that afternoon with Mollie Hamilton against Peggy Dawson and Wolfe; my partner was good and we beat them 6 – 4, 5 – 7, 8 – 6. When we were walking off the court towards our showers, dripping with sweat, I called Peggy Dawson over. ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ I said. ‘Mrs Lemaitre wants us both to go down to a dinner party that she’s giving in Suva on Monday.’
She stared at me. ‘Wants me to go?’
‘That’s right. She asked me to go down and bring you, too. I rang Mr McEwen and we’ll be staying in his house. We’ll be going down on Sunday.’
She asked, ‘What sort of a party is it? It wouldn’t be long dress?’
I hadn’t really thought about it. ‘I suppose it will,’ I said. ‘The Governor will probably be there.’
‘But I’ve got nothing to wear!’
I smiled. ‘That’s your problem,’ I said equably. ‘All I’ve contracted to do is to deliver you to the party. The company are paying your expenses.’
‘Are the company paying for a dress for me?’
‘I don’t suppose so for a moment,’ I replied. ‘You’d better try that one on Stanley, though.’
That was on Friday night, and she went into an earnest huddle with the other hostesses that night. Lautoka, the second city of Fiji, is fifteen miles from the airport and the Indian tailors and dressmakers there work very quickly. She went in with another girl on the seven o’clock bus on Saturday and was away all day; they came back in a taxi in the evening and I saw her showing them a pastel green gown with a bolero which was apparently the right thing for her to wear. I had found a Suva taxi at the airport with an Indian driver and had kept him overnight to drive us down, and we started off on Sunday morning on the daylong drive through the fields of sugar cane to Singatoka and down the coast and through the groves of coconut palms to Suva.
It was April, and most of the hot humidity of the monsoon season was behind us. When the sun shone it was really hot, of course, but there was much cloud to keep it cool, and an occasional brief shower of rain. I had been in Fiji before and knew it fairly well, but everything was new to her. The Indian driver spoke good English and could answer her questions. He stopped once, laughing, and got her a foot of sugar cane so that she could see what the children were all chewing, and she nibbled it experimentally before we drove on.
It was many years since I had been anywhere with a girl, and I was awkward and constrained. I had put away all thoughts of marriage when I went to India in the early thirties. Hostesses on international routes are hand-picked for their courtesy and competence, and in the last twenty years I had been closely associated in my work with many charming and delightful women. I had never taken one of them out. All my interests had been purely masculine, and now at the age of fifty-nine I found that I had wholly lost the knack of entertaining a young woman. I didn’t know what would appeal to her, or what would interest her. The brown, dark-eyed children waving to us by the roadside as we drove past did not excite me particularly, but they were fascinating to her. ‘Just look at that little boy with the big tummy!’ she exclaimed once. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’
‘Looks to me as if he’s got something,’ I remarked, and felt an awful stiff. I should have been able to enter into her mood.
The system of land tenure in Fiji is quite interesting, because the Indian cane farmers can’t buy their land but have to rent it from the Fijians, so that the Fijian has little to do but sit in the sun and scratch. I tried to explain this to her as we drove along but couldn’t raise her interest, but a Fijian schoolmistress teaching the children to play net-ball was absorbing to her, and we had to stop the car to look at that. She listened absently while I talked about the village and its part in the feudal system of Fijian government, but when we passed the village where a British film had been made she really got excited. I hadn’t seen the picture, so I fell down on that one, too.
I was getting an old man, of course, and she was young. I don’t think I had ever realised till then just how old I was. It never intruded itself into my normal life, for I could still do practically all the things that most young men can do, and do some of them a good deal better. I had never thought of myself as an old man when I was dealing with young men; I was just more experienced than they were, less likely to get into a flap in an emergency. My reaction times were still practically as good as theirs. Water polo was the only thing that I had given up, and I glossed that over in my mind, pretending I had never been much interested in it. It needed a day out with a young woman to drive home the inescapable fact that I was getting an old man.
I said something of the sort to her when we stopped for lunch at the small hotel in the little town of Singatoka, feeling that some apology was necessary. We were sitting over short drinks in the lounge that overlooks the river. ‘I suppose as you get older your interests change,’ I said. ‘I’m much more interested now in finding out what makes this country tick than in the physical side of it. This country, or any other country.’
She smiled. ‘Much more interested in that than in little boys with a grin on their faces and hook-worms in their tummies.’
I nodded. ‘Getting an old man.’
She shook her head. ‘I won’t have that.’
‘I’m fifty-nine,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to come off airline work next year.’
‘Fifty-nine isn’t old,’ she said. ‘Not in these days, for a man like you. I’ve never met anyone who played a harder game of tennis. You wear us all out.’
‘You can keep the physical side in order if you’re careful,’ I remarked. ‘I’m not so sure about the mental side. One gets to think like an old man, and there doesn’t seem to be a great deal you can do about it. One’s interests change.’ I glanced at her, smiling. ‘You should have made this trip with someone like Sam Wolfe.’
She laughed. ‘When I want a bit of slap and tickle I’ll arrange it for myself, thank you. I’m having a marvellous time just like we are.’
‘Well, have another drink. The mind of an old man moves on a higher plane. An alcoholic one.’
‘If I have another I’ll probably go to sleep this afternoon.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘You won’t see me.’
We lunched and drove on in the hot afternoon, and I think I may perhaps have dozed in the car as perhaps she did, because we passed the big beach hotel at Korolevu without seeing it. When I came back to earth we had passed from the sugar cane country into the coconut country where the higher rainfall brings the lusher type of tropical scene. We passed by coral beaches white on the border of a brilliantly blue sea where the surf thunders on the reef some way out. There were dazzling little bays between the promontories where the coconut trees hang slanting forward over the water so that the nuts drop into the sea. She said once, ‘It’s simply marvellous!’
I nodded. ‘Real South Sea stuff.’
‘Fancy having a beach party at a place like that, and swimming in the lagoon!’
‘Sharks,’ I said.
‘Pat Petersen says the sharks don’t come inside the reef.’
I laughed. ‘Famous last words.’ As a matter of fact, I had good reason to say that, because I had met one a few days previously when I had been spear-fishing with Jim Hanson. I had been fifteen or twenty feet down beside the coral gardens of the reef, and it had come at me from curiosity, I think; a great shadowy thing seven or eight feet long in the pale green water. I poked it on the nose with the spear gun and it went away, and I got out on to the reef damn quick. Jim Hanson was still down and I was terrified for him, not knowing what to do, and I didn’t recover until we were in the boat. Jim never saw it at all.
I told her about this incident as we drove on down the coast, and she was very much concerned. ‘You oughtn’t to go taking risks like that,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth it.’
