Rat Race (19 page)

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘He had no axe to grind. That’s what convinced her.’

‘No axe… did he say that?’

‘I believe so. What does it matter?’

‘Was it a Polyplane pilot who told her? The one, for instance,
who is flying you today?’ Getting his own back, I thought, for :he way I’d threatened him at Redcar.

Colin’s mouth opened.

‘No axe to grind,’ I said bitterly. That’s a laugh. They’ve been trying to prise you loose from Derrydowns all summer and now it looks as if they’ve done it.’

I turned away from him, my throat physically closing. I didn’t think I could speak. I expected him to walk on, to walk away, to take himself to Polyplanes and my future to the trash can.

Instead of that he followed me and touched my arm.

‘Matt…’

I shook him off. ‘You tell your precious sister,’ I said thickly, that because of the rules I broke leading her back to Cambridge last Friday I am going to find myself in court again, and convicted and fined and in debt again… and this time I did it with my eyes open… not like that…’ I pointed to the newspaper clipping with a hand that trembled visibly, ‘when I had to take the rap for something that was mostly not my fault.’

‘Matt!’ He was himself appalled.

‘And as for the cowardice bit, she’s got her facts wrong… Oh, I’ve no doubt it sounded convincing and dreadful… Polyplanes had a lot to gain by upsetting her to the utmost… but I don’t see… I don’t see why she was more upset than just to persuade you not to fly with me…’

‘Why didn’t you tell her yourself?’

I shook my head. ‘I probably might have done, one day. I didn’t think it was important.’

‘Not important!’ He was fierce with irritation. ‘She seems to have been building up some some sort of hero image of you, and then she discovered you had clay feet in all directions… Of course you should have told her, as you were going to marry her. That was obviously what upset her most…’

I was speechless. My jaw literally dropped. Finally I said foolishly, ‘Did you say
marry
…’

‘Well, yes, of course,’ he said impatiently, and then seemed struck by my state of shock. ‘You were going to marry her, weren’t you?’

‘We’ve never… even talked about it.’

‘But you must have,’ he insisted. ‘I overheard her and Midge discussing it on Sunday evening, after I got back from Ostend. ‘When you are married to Matt,’ Midge said. I heard her distinctly. They were in the kitchen, washing up. They were deciding you would come and live with us in the bungalow… They were sharing out the bedrooms…’ His voice tailed off weakly. ‘It isn’t… it isn’t true?’

I silently shook my head.

He looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Girls,’ he said. ‘Girls.’

‘I can’t marry her,’ I said numbly. ‘I’ve hardly enough for a licence…”

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘It does to me.’

‘It wouldn’t to Nancy,’ he said. He did a sort of double take. ‘Do you mean… she wasn’t so far out… after all?’

‘I suppose… not so far.’

He looked down at the cutting in his hand, and suddenly screwed it up. ‘It looked so bad,’ he said with a tinge of apology.

‘It was bad,’ I said.

He looked at my face. ‘Yes. I see it was…’

A taxi drew up with a jerk and out piled my passengers, all gay and flushed with a winner and carrying a bottle of champagne.

‘I’ll explain to her,’ Colin said. ‘I’ll get her back…’ His expression was suddenly horrified. Shattered.

‘Where has she gone?’ I asked.

He screwed up his eyes as if in pain.

‘She said…’ He swallowed. ‘She went… to Chanter.’

I sat all evening in the caravan wanting to smash something. Smash the galley Smash the windows. Smash the walls.

Might have felt better if I had.

Chanter
…

Couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep.

Never had listened to my own advice: don’t get involved. Should have stuck to it, stayed frozen. Icy. Safe.

Tried to get back to the Arctic and not feel anything, but it was too late. Feeling had come back with a vengeance and of an intensity I could have done without. I hadn’t known I loved her. Knew I liked her, felt easy with her, wanted to be with her often and for a long time to come. I’d thought I could stop at friendship, and didn’t realise how far, how deep I had already gone.

Oh Nancy…

I went to sleep in the end by drinking half of the bottle of whisky Kenny Bayst had given me, but it didn’t do much good. I woke up at six in the morning to the same dreary torment and with a headache on top.

There were no flights that day to take my mind off it.

Nancy and Chanter
…

At some point in the morning I telephoned from the coinbox in the customers’ lounge to the Art School in Liverpool, to ask for Chanter’s home address. A crisp secretarial female voice answered: very sorry, absolutely not their policy to divulge the private addresses of their staff. If I could write, they would forward the letter.

‘Could I speak to him, then, do you think?’ I asked: though what good that would do, Heaven alone knew.

‘I’m afraid not, because he isn’t here. The school is temporarily closed, and we are not sure when it will reopen.’

‘The students,’ I remembered. ‘Are on strike?’

‘That… er… is so,’ she agreed.

‘Can’t you possibly tell me how I could get in touch with Chanter?’

‘Oh dear . . You are the second person pressing me to help… but honestly, to tell you the truth we don’t know
where he lives… he moves frequently and seldom bothers to keep us up to date.’ Secretarial disapproval and despair in the tidy voice. ‘As I told Mr Ross, with all the best will in the world, I simply have no idea where you could find him.’

I sat in the crew room while the afternoon dragged by. Finished writing up all records by two thirty, read through some newly arrived information circulars, calculated I had only three weeks and four days to run before my next medical, worked out that if I bought four cups of coffee every day from Honey’s machine, I was drinking away one fifteenth of my total week’s spending money, decided to make it water more often, looked up when Harley came stalking in, received a lecture on loyalty (mine to him), heard that I was on the next day to take a Wiltshire trainer to Newmarket races, and that if I gave Polyplanes any more grounds for reporting me or the firm to the Board of Trade, I could collect my cards.

‘Do my best not to,’ I murmured. Didn’t please him.

Looked at the door swinging shut behind his back.

Looked at the clock. Three twenty two.

Chanter and Nancy.

Back in the caravan, the same as the evening before. Tried turning on the television. Some comedy about American suburban life punctuated by canned laughter. Stood five minutes of it, and found the silence afterwards almost as bad.

Walked half way round the airfield, cut down to the village, drank half a pint in the pub, walked back. Total, four miles. When I stepped into the caravan it was still only nine o’clock.

Honey Harley was waiting for me, draped over the sofa with maximum exposure of leg. Pink checked cotton sun-dress, very low cut.

‘Hi,’ she said with self possession. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘For a walk.’

She looked at me quizzically. ‘Got the Board of Trade on your mind?’

I nodded. That, and other things.

‘I shouldn’t worry too much. Whatever the law says or does, you couldn’t have just left the Rosses to flounder.’

‘Your uncle doesn’t agree.’

‘Uncle,’ she said dispassionately, ‘is a nit. And anyway, play your cards right, and even if you do get a fine, Colin Ross will pay it. All you’d have to do would be to ask.’

I shook my head.

‘You’re daft,’ she said. ‘Plain daft.’

‘You may be right.’

She sighed, stirred, stood up. The curvy body rippled in all the right places. I thought of Nancy: much flatter, much thinner, less obviously sexed and infinitely more desirable. I turned abruptly away from Honey. Like hitting a raw nerve, the thought of Chanter, with his hair and his fringes . . and his hands.

‘O.K., iceberg,’ she said, mistakenly, ‘Relax. Your virtue is quite safe. I only came down, to start with, to tell you there was a phone call for you, and would you please ring back.’

‘Who…?’ I tried hard to keep it casual.

‘Colin Ross,’ Honey said matter-of-factly. ‘He wants you to call some time this evening, if you can. I said if it was about a flight I could deal with it, but apparently it’s something personal.’ She finished the sentence half way between an accusation and a question and left me ample time to explain.

I didn’t. I said, ‘I’ll go up now, then, and use the telephone in the lounge.’

She shrugged. ‘All right.’

She walked up with me, but didn’t quite have the nerve to hover close enough to listen. I shut the lounge door in front of her resigned and humorously rueful face.

Got the number.

‘Colin? Matt.’

‘Oh good, he said. ‘Look. Nancy rang up today while Midge and I were along at the races… I took Midge along on the Heath because she was so miserable at home, and now of
course she’s even more miserable that she missed Nancy… anyway, our cleaning woman answered the telephone, and Nancy left a message.’

‘Is she… I mean, is she all right?’

‘Do you mean, is she with Chanter?’ His voice was strained. ‘She told our cleaner she had met an old art school friend in Liverpool and was spending a few days camping with her near Warwick.’

‘
Her
?’ I exclaimed.

‘Well, I don’t know. I asked our Mrs Williams, and she then said she
thought
Nancy said “her”, but of course she would think that, wouldn’t she?’

‘I’m afraid she would.’

‘But anyway, Nancy had been much more insistent that Mrs Williams tell me something else… it seems she has seen Major Tyderman.’

‘She didn’t!’

‘Yeah… She said she saw Major Tyderman in the passenger seat of a car on the Stratford road out of Warwick. Apparently there were some roadworks, and the car stopped for a moment just near her.’

‘He could have been going anywhere… from anywhere…’

‘Yes,’ he agreed in depression. ‘I rang the police in Cambridge to tell them, but Nancy had already been through to them, when she called home. All she could remember about the driver was that he wore glasses. She thought he might have had dark hair and perhaps a moustache. She only glanced at him for a second because she was concentrating on Tyderman. Also she hadn’t taken the number, and she’s hopeless on the make of cars, so altogether it wasn’t a great deal of help.’

‘No…

‘Anyway, she told Mrs Williams she would be coming home on Saturday. She said if I would drive to Warwick races instead of flying, she would come home with me in the car.’

‘Well… thank God for that.’

‘If for nothing else,’ he said aridly.

I flew the customers from Wiltshire to Newmarket and parked the Six as far as possible from the Polyplane. When the passengers had departed standwards, I got out of the fuggy cabin and into the free air, lay propped on one elbow on the grass, loosened my tie, opened the neck of my shirt. Scorching hot day, a sigh of wind over the Heath, a couple of small cumulus clouds defying evaporation, blue sky over the blue planet.

A suitable day for camping.

Wrenched my thoughts away from the profitless grind: Nancy despised me, despised herself, had chosen Chanter as a refuge, as a steadfast known quantity, had run away from the near-stranger who had not seemed what he seemed, and gone to where she knew she was wanted. Blind, instinctive, impulsive flight. Reckless, understandable, forgivable flight…

I could take Chanter, I thought mordantly. I could probably take the thought and memory of Chanter, if only she would settle for me in the end.

It was odd that you had to lose something you didn’t even know you had, before you began to want it more than anything on earth.

Down at the other end of the row of aircraft the Polyplane pilot was strolling about, smoking again. One of these fine days he would blow himself up. There was no smile in place that afternoon: even from a hundred yards one could detect the gloom in the heavy frowns he occasionally got rid of in my direction.

Colin had booked with Harley for the week ahead. Poly-planes must have been wondering what else they would have to do to get him back.

They played rough, no doubt of that. Informing on Derry-downs to the Board of Trade, discrediting their pilot, spreading smears that they weren’t safe. But would they blow up a Derry-down aircraft? Would they go as far as that?

They would surely have had to be certain they would gain from it, before they risked it. But in fact they hadn’t gained. No one had demonstrably been frightened away from using Derrydowns, particularly not Colin Ross. If the bomb had been meant to look like an attack on Colin’s life, why should Colin think he would be any safer in a Polyplane?

If they had blown up the aircraft with passengers aboard, that would have ruined Derrydowns. But even if they had been prepared to go that far, they wouldn’t have chosen a flight with Colin Ross on it.

And why Major Tyderman, when their own pilots could get near the Derrydown’s aircraft without much comment? That was easier… they needed a bomb expert. Someone completely unsuspectable. Someone even their pilots didn’t know. Because if the boss of Polyplanes had taken the dark step into crime, he wouldn’t want chatty employees like pilots spilling it into every aviation bar from Prestwick to Lydd.

The second aeroplane, though, that Tyderman had sabotaged, hadn’t been one of the Derrydowns at all. On the other hand, he had thought it was. I stood up, stretched, watched the straining horses scud through the first race, saw in the distance a girl with dark hair and a blue dress and thought for one surging moment it was Nancy. It wasn’t Nancy. It wasn’t even Midge. Nancy was in Warwickshire, living in a tent.

I thrust my balled fists into my pockets. Not the slightest use thinking about it. Concentrate on something else. Start from the bottom again, as before. Look at everything the wrong way up.