In the Wet (27 page)

The Consort asked, “Do you never drink these things, Commander?”

“No, sir.”

“How very wise.” The Consort sipped his sherry. “Is that policy or disinclination?”

“Disinclination,” said the pilot. He hesitated. “I’ve always been afraid of drink,” he said. “I think it might get
hold of one. I’ve never started. I think I’m different to other people in that way.”

“It’s quite true,” said Rosemary. “He doesn’t drink at all. I believe he’s the only man I know who doesn’t.”

“I’m very glad to hear it,” said the Queen. “I shall feel safer than ever when we’re flying, now.”

David smiled. “I think that must be the reason why they picked me for this job, madam. I can’t think of any other.”

“Nonsense,” said the Queen. “I know why they picked you.”

Macmahon joined them before dinner, and gave his agreement to Rosemary’s day off. They dined at a small table in the bow window of the big dining room and talked principally of Australian gardens and flowers, and of the Queensland drought. They had coffee in the Queen’s drawing room, and then David and Rosemary took their leave, and were driven back to the hotel at Canberra.

They took off from Fairbairn aerodrome next morning punctually at ten o’clock, and flew across the mountains at ten thousand feet with an escort of four fighters of the R.A.A.F. to Berwick, twenty miles to the south east of Melbourne; over the aerodrome the fighters peeled away up into the sky and David put the Ceres down and taxied in. There were few people on the aerodrome because this visit was incognito and no mention of it had appeared in the Press, and the aerodrome was one used only for charter work and private flying. Four cars were waiting on the tarmac; David parked the Ceres near these cars, stopped engines, handed over the machine to Ryder, and followed Frank Cox and Rosemary out down the steps. To his relief there were no pressmen there, and no photographers.

The Queen was talking to two very old men standing by one of the cars, one of them rather stout. David, standing with Frank Cox and Rosemary, could hear what she was
saying. “You shouldn’t have come out,” she said. “I was coming to you.”

He recognised the Menzies features in the stout one, who replied, “I hope I’ll never be so old as not to be able to drive out to meet you, madam.” The other said, “Too right.”

The Queen said, “Well, I’m not going to have you standing about in this wind, either of you. Do you want to see the aeroplane? It’s a lovely thing, the most comfortable aeroplane I’ve ever travelled in, and so fast, too. We came from Ottawa to Canberra in less than eighteen flying hours.”

“My word, that’s going,” said old Mr. Calwell.

The Queen turned, and saw David. “Come here, Wing Commander.” To the two old men she said, “This is one of your own countrymen, the captain of the aircraft. Wing Commander Anderson, Sir Robert Menzies and Mr. Calwell.”

David asked, “Would you like to see over the machine?”

The old men glanced at each other. “One aeroplane’s just like another to me,” said Mr. Calwell. “I’ve seen enough of them to last my lifetime.”

Sir Robert said, “I can imagine it.” He paused, and let his eye run over the great silvery thing. “Such a pity Dick Casey died,” he said quietly. “He would have been so interested to be here, and to have seen the Queen come to Australia in an Australian aeroplane of the Queen’s Flight, with an Australian crew …” He turned to the Queen. “This was his private aerodrome in the early days, you know, madam—he owned a lot of land round here. He had an aeroplane of his own, and he went on flying himself as a pilot till he was over seventy—his wife was a pilot, too. I often used to come here in the Forties, but I never went up with him. He had a wooden hangar just over there beside the show ground, where the Shell depot is.”

The Queen cut short this flow of reminiscence by shepherding the old man back into the shelter of his car. She got in after him herself, and the Consort and Mr. Calwell got into another car, and both drove off out on the Melbourne road.

There was a third car waiting on the tarmac. David said to Rosemary, “This one is ours.” The chauffeur opened the door for her, and David got in beside her, and they followed the other cars up to the Princess Highway and the road to Melbourne.

Rosemary said, “I feel an awful fraud. Do you think this car is ours for the whole day?”

“I should think so,” he replied. “It’s got to bring us back to Berwick by about five o’clock, or the Queen won’t be able to go home. What would you like to do?”

She thought for a minute. “I’d like to drive through Melbourne and see what kind of a place it is.” She turned to him. “I’m so very ignorant,” she said. “It’s on the sea, isn’t it?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Not the open sea. It’s on a great big circular bay, Port Phillip Bay, at the north end. It’s about forty miles from the sea proper.”

“Do people sail there, like we do at home?”

“My word,” he said. “We’ve got all the small racing classes that you’ve got at home. I’ve got a Dragon laid up here, in the Brighton Club.”

She looked up at him in wonder. “You told me once you used to sail a Dragon. Is she here?”

He nodded. “This is my home town. I mean, I’m a Queenslander by birth, but most of my Service life has been in and around Melbourne. I was stationed at Laverton before I came to England.”

She said, “Could we go and see your Dragon, David? I’d love to see an Australian sailing club.”

“Of course,” he said. “I’d like to go and have a look at her myself. It’s a year since I saw her. We’ll drive through the city and have lunch somewhere, and then go down to Brighton.”

“Is that far?”

He shook his head. “It’s only a few miles out of town. It’s a suburb—quite a good one.”

She looked about her with interest as they drove in through the outer suburbs. “Such a lot of new houses,” she said. She turned to him. “David, could we stop and look at one?”

He said, “Of course.” He leaned forward and spoke to the driver. “That’s one that’s practically finished—there. Stop at that one.”

They got out of the car, and she looked around at the littered garden plot. “I suppose all this builder’s mess is inevitable,” she said. “It must take an awfully long time to get the garden right, though.”

She stood looking around. “And anybody who has the money can just buy a bit of land, like this, and build a house on it, like this?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“And then it’s your own property, and you can do what you like with it—sell it, or alter it, or live in it, or let it for as much as you can get? Without asking the Ministry?”

“I think that’s right. I’ve never heard that you have to ask anybody.”

“It would be fun,” she said, “to have a house that was really your own, like you own a boat.”

The door was open, and the painters and the electricians were in putting the finishing touches. The girl said, “Can you spend as much as you like on it? I mean, if you wanted one really lovely room, with a stainless steel floor and mirrors all round and a sunk alabaster fishpond in the floor
with a glow of light shining up through it—could you have it?”

He laughed. “I don’t think there’s anything to stop you, if you’d got enough money and you wanted to spend it that way.”

“I just wanted to know,” she replied thoughtfully. “I don’t want a stainless steel floor with a fishpond in it, or mirrors all round. But it’s nice to know that you could have it if it was what you really wanted more than anything.”

They wandered from room to room. The detail fittings intrigued her, the design of the taps and the latches and the kitchen sink. “Of course,” she said, “we just don’t get new things like this in England, because there aren’t any new houses. The taps and the sink in our house must be sixty or seventy years old. Things like that never wear out.”

She turned to him. “David, how much would a house like this cost? I mean, a brand new house, like this one.”

“Three bedrooms,” he said. “There’s nothing particular about it. I should think it’ld cost about four or five thousand pounds.”

She looked up at him, smiling. “If you ever married anyone, could you afford a house like this?”

He grinned down at her. “Yes,” he said. “We could afford a house like this.”

She turned away. “I didn’t say that,” she remarked. “I said, you.”

They got back into the car and drove on into Melbourne. “There’s nothing much about this city,” he said. “It’s not particularly big, only about two million people. But to my mind it’s got everything you want, clubs and theatres and picture galleries and concerts. And—I don’t know, but it’s a gracious place, with plenty of parks and wide streets. I’ve seen a good bit of the world, but I think I like Melbourne just about as well as any place I know.”

By the end of the day she was inclined to agree with him. They lunched at a small Greek restaurant where he was known to the proprietor, who made a fuss of them because his name had been much in the papers in connection with the Queen’s unexpected visit to Australia. From there they drove to the Treasury Gardens, where he showed her Captain Cook’s cottage, saved by a generous benefactor from demolition in Whitby and reverently transported stone by stone twelve thousand miles to be re-erected in the Antipodes that he explored. They drove then to the Royal Brighton Yacht Club, and here the smell of salt water and seaweed, and varnish, and clean timber brought nostalgic memories of Itchenor to Rosemary. “Oh David—there’s an International fourteen footer—and there’s another!”

“That’s right,” he said. “They’ve got a class of them here.”

“I never knew that,” she said in wonder. “I mean, I always thought of them as English boats.”

He laughed at her. “That’s why they’re called International.”

They ducked under the bows of vessels laid up in the boat shed and came to his Dragon standing on shores at the back, covered in dust. “This is
Ariadne,
” he said. “That’s her mast and boom.” He pointed to the spars on racks beside the vessel on the wall.

“She’s just like an English Dragon,” said the girl. She stepped back and looked critically at the hull. “They
have
got beautiful lines.”

“She’s a bonza thing to sail,” the pilot said. “She must be forty years old, I think, but she’s perfectly sound still.” He caressed the topsides with his hand, and smiled at the girl. “It’s nice to see her again, and know she’s waiting for me when I get back to Australia.”

She stood studying the boat for a moment. Then she
said, “You’re longing to get back here, aren’t you?”

“It’s my own country,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have missed this job in the Queen’s Flight for the world. I’m glad I didn’t turn it down when it was offered to me—I very nearly did. I think I’m beginning to understand a bit more about England, too. But I’ll be glad to get back here again one day, and get this thing out, and sail her.” He patted the boat. “Would you like to get up into the cockpit? It may be a bit dirty.”

“I’d like to see what she’s like on deck, David.” So he got a ladder and they climbed up into the cockpit, and she brushed the dust off the varnished coaming and sat looking up and down the deck. “She must be very fast,” she said. “I’d love to have a sail in her one day.”

“I hope you will,” he replied.

She disregarded that. “What did you mean just now by saying that you were beginning to understand about England?” she enquired. “Are you getting to like it a bit better?”

He thought for a moment. “I’d never want to live there,” he replied. “I think there are better places to live, and this is one of them. No—what I mean is this. There’s so much in England to admire and like. Their technical achievements, their courage in the bad conditions they’ve had forced on them, the Queen herself. There’s a good deal to dislike, their political system, their subservience to civil servants. I’m not sure that we’ve got the right to pat ourselves on the back, here in Australia, because we’ve not got those bad things. Maybe it’s just the luck of the game, and if we couldn’t feed our people out of what we grow ourselves we’d get to be the same as England.”

She smiled reflectively. “There, but for the Grace of God, goes Australia,” she said.

“What? Well—yes. I feel that if we’d had as bad a spin
as England we might: be in the same boat. We’re basically the same people, and we’d probably react in the same way.”

She smiled. “You don’t think that Australians are a superior race of people?”

“I used to think that,” he said candidly. “I used to think we’d got a know-how of government that England had lost, and that’s what made this country happier and more prosperous. But now I’m not so sure. Compared with England, we’re still backward in the sciences and the techniques. I’m not sure that things aren’t just easier here because it’s still an empty country, because it’s still expanding, because almost anyone with any guts can start up a new business and see it prosper. More saucepans wanted every year, more food, more power, because more people. I’m not sure that it’s really any virtue in ourselves, although we like to kid ourselves it is.”

She repeated his words. “Just the luck of the game.”

“That’s right. How do you like it here?”

“I’ve only seen the very top layer of it, David,” she protested. “I’ve been here for about four days, and all I’ve seen is the Canberra Hotel, and the Royal Residence, and the restaurant we lunched in, and this boat shed.” She laughed. “I’m not going to even think if I like it or not. I’ll say this—that I never knew it was so lovely, or that so many flowers grow here, or so many flowering trees. But it would be silly if I said I liked Australia when I’ve only seen the bits of it I’ve seen.”

“That’s true,” he admitted. “You want to live on a station for a year with nobody to talk to but the cattle and the sheep, and have a drought and a couple of bush fires.”

She laughed. “If I did that I’d probably be glad to get back to my flat in Dover Street.”

She got up, and he held the ladder for her while she went down. They walked around and found the foreman and
talked a little about
Ariadne
, and then they went into the club house and had tea in a window looking out over the bay. Then it was time to get into the car for the drive back to Berwick.