In the Wet (33 page)

“Good night, Nigger darling.”

“Good night, Rosemary. Sleep tight.”

The uneasy days went by, and at ten minutes to seven on Friday night David stood in the cold, windy darkness upon the platform of Maidenhead station, waiting for the electric train from Paddington. It came in with a glow of lights and a sighing of pneumatic brakes, and he stood by the ticket collector watching for Rosemary with her father. She was not there, but an elderly man in an old raincoat and a battered felt hat stopped by him. “It’s Wing Commander Anderson?”

He glanced sharply at the man, and saw her features in his face. “That’s right,” he said. “Are you Professor Long?”

“That’s right. Rosemary said I was to tell you that she’s got to go back to the Palace tonight. So I thought I’d better come and meet you, anyway. We may not have another chance for some time. I knew you by the colour of the uniform, of course.”

David said something or other in reply, and guided Rosemary’s father to the car. As they drove the short distance to his flat he said, “I’m sorry she’s got to work tonight. She’s working much too hard.”

“Ah well,” her father said, “it’s not much longer now.” The pilot did not answer that.

In the flat he gave Professor Long a glass of sherry, and with his own tomato cocktail in his hand he turned to face him. “In a way, I’m glad you’ve come alone this evening,” he said. “We’ll probably be able to talk more
freely. Did Rosemary tell you that we want to get married?”

The older man smiled. “She did say something about it.”

The pilot said directly, “Did she tell you that I’m not pure white? That I’m a quadroon?”

“She did.”

“What do you think about that, sir?”

The professor shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve got a lot of more important things to think about than that. To start with, have you ever been married before?”

“No. I never came within a mile of it. It’s not so easy when you’ve got a touch of colour.”

The other smiled. “You’ve started on the awkward subjects, so we may as well clear the decks of all of them.” He asked two further questions, and the pilot grinned, and answered them. “Well, that just leaves the colour. I think that’s Rosemary’s affair and nobody else’s.”

“You wouldn’t mind about it very much, yourself? I’d rather know now if you take a strong view about boongs.”

“Boongs?”

“Coloured people. It’s a word we use up in North Queensland, where I come from.”

“I see. I think the view I take is this: that if you’re regarded as suitable to serve the Queen as intimately as you do, you’re suitable to be my son-in-law, if Rosemary wants to marry you. That covers it, so far as I’m concerned.”

David had got Jim Hansen, the Australian steward from Tare, to come in and serve the dinner; he sat down with Rosemary’s father to a dinner of clear soup, English chicken, Australian ham, and a fruit salad of mangoes and pawpaw and fresh apricots from Kenya served with Australian cream and sugar. Sitting over coffee at the conclusion of the meal, when the steward had left the room, the older man said, “You’ve had no orders yet?”

The pilot shook his head.

“I think I’d better tell you what I told Rosemary this afternoon,” her father said. “These are difficult times, and she’s mixed up in great affairs. I told her that if she finds herself in some far country where she feels she has to stay for months, or even for years, and if she wants to marry while she’s out there, she mustn’t let thoughts of her mother and myself stand in her way. Naturally, we should like to see her married. But if that’s not possible, she mustn’t hold up anything on our account. Rosemary’s got her own life to lead, and if she wants to marry while she’s out there, she’ll have our blessing.”

David said, “It’s very good of you to take that line about it, sir.”

He asked David one or two questions about his education and his early life and they talked about North Queensland. “Rosemary told us most of this,” the older man said once. “I shall be sorry for our own sakes if she makes her life in Australia, because my wife and I are English. We shall never leave Oxford. But in another way, I think she may be doing the right thing. She’s had a hand in great affairs as a young woman. If she goes to Australia with you, she’s going to the coming centre of the Commonwealth, where all the great affairs will happen in the future, and before she’s old.”

David glanced at him curiously. “You think that, do you, sir? You think Australia will be the centre of the Commonwealth in years to come?”

“I do. What’s the population of Australia now?”

“About twenty-seven million, I think. It’s changing pretty rapidly. It was twenty-three million at the last census, but that’s some time ago.”

The don nodded. “That’s about right. And what do you think it will be, ultimately?”

“It’s hard to say,” David replied. “It’s all a matter of the water, I think. When I was a boy people were still saying that twenty-five million was the limit. But in my lifetime the Snowy irrigation scheme has been completed, and the Burdekin, and half a dozen others, and now they’ve got this nuclear distillation of sea water in the North, around Rum Jungle, and that’s getting cheaper and cheaper. People are saying now that the limit may be fifty millions, but others say a hundred and fifty millions.”

The professor said, “Whether it’s fifty millions or a hundred and fifty doesn’t matter much. England can feed thirty millions, and when the population of this country gets down to that figure things will suddenly improve, and England will be a happy and prosperous country again. But your country will always have the advantage of population, and the great advantage of strategic safety. And on top of that, you’ve got a system of democracy that works.”

“You mean, the multiple vote?”

The older man nodded. “How many votes have you got?”

“Me?” asked the pilot. “I’m a three vote man.”

“Basic and education?” David nodded. “What’s the third?”

“Living abroad,” the pilot said. “I got that for the war.”

There was a short pause. “If everybody of your type in England had three votes instead of one,” the don said heavily, “there’d be no question of a Governor-General.”

David sat silent. So that was what was in the wind. There was to be a Governor-General in England as in all the other Dominions, a buffer between the elected politicians and the Queen, selected by the Queen for his ability to get on with the politicians of the day while serving her. Somebody
who could take the day to day hack work of Royalty off her, who could open the Town Halls and lay the foundation stones and hold the Levees and the Courts and the Garden Parties, and leave the Monarch free for the real work of governing the Commonwealth. And as he sat there pondering this information, the pieces of the puzzle fell together in his mind. Tom Forrest was the man chosen to be the first Governor-General of England, Tom Forrest who had worked his way up from the bottom, Tom Forrest who was honoured and respected as the soldier who had led the British people to victory in the last war, who had been Governor-General in Canada for the last two years, who was a friend of the Prince of Wales. And at that thought, another piece of the puzzle fell into its place; with Tom Forrest or somebody like him between the Monarch and Iorwerth Jones, perhaps the succession would be less distasteful to Prince Charles. Perhaps that was what Rosemary’s father meant. Perhaps a Governor-General in England was a condition that the heirs to the Throne had made, as an alternative to abdication. Perhaps the row over White Waltham aerodrome had been the last straw laid upon Prince Charles by the Prime Minister; perhaps it had even been intended to be so. Perhaps David had flown Prince Charles to Canada to speak both for his sister and himself, to tell their mother that they would not have the job.

All this passed through his mind in a few seconds while Rosemary’s father sat in thought before the fire, heedless of his indiscretion, or perhaps thinking that the pilot must already have heard about the changes that were to be made. “One man one vote has never really worked,” he said quietly. “It came in at a time of liberal social awakening in the middle of the nineteenth century. The governing elements in this country leaned over backwards to redress
the wrongs that previous generations of their class had wrought upon the common man, and they made all men equal in deciding the affairs of the country, relying on the veto power of the House of Lords to put a curb on irresponsible elected politicians. The thing looked promising for a time, while the educated and travelled members of the House of Lords still held the veto. But they never reformed the House of Lords, so in the end that restraint had to go, and then the system ceased to work at all.”

He turned to David. “I doubt if history can show, in any country, at any time, a more greedy form of government than democracy as practised in Great Britain in the last fifty years,” he said. “The common man has held the voting power, and the common man has voted consistently to increase his own standard of living, regardless of the long term interests of his children, regardless of the wider interests of his country.” He paused. “When I was a young man we lost the Persian oilfields and the Abadan refinery,” he said. “In the last year of operation of that company the shareholders took four million pounds out of the profits, the Persian Government were given sixteen millions, and the British Government took fifty-four millions in taxation. The Persian Government revolted, and we lost the entire industry, refinery, oil rights, and all, because we were too greedy. Since then it has been the same melancholy story, over and over again. No despot, no autocratic monarch in his pride and greed has injured England so much as the common man. Every penny that could be wrung out of the nation has been devoted to raising the standard of living of the least competent elements in the country, who have held the voting power. No money has been left for generous actions by Great Britain, or for overseas investment, or for the re-equipment of our industry at home, and the politicians who have come to power through this system of voting
have been irresponsible and ill-informed, on both sides of the House.”

He paused. “You people in the Antipodes have been wiser. Perhaps it was easier for you, by reason of your economic situation. But until this country follows your example once again, as they followed it in instituting the secret ballot and in giving votes to women, I cannot see a very satisfactory future here.”

He knocked his pipe out. “I should be getting back to Oxford,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you about these things a little, because it is because of them that I am reconciled to Rosemary going to Australia, and marrying there if she should decide she wants to do so. I think your country it on the right road to greatness. I don’t think this one is.”

He got to his feet, and David got up with him. “Is this what you’ve been telling Tom Forrest, sir?” the pilot asked.

The don smiled. “More or less,” he said. “More or less. When one holds certain prejudices very strongly one is apt to shoot them off at everyone one meets. Especially as one gets older.”

David lifted the telephone and rang Flight Sergeant Syme, who was to drive the professor back to Oxford in David’s car. And while they were waiting for the car they talked of minor matters. “I should have got in touch with you earlier,” the pilot said. “I should have met Rosemary’s mother. But things have been a little difficult in the last week or two, and now it looks as if I shall be off again quite soon.”

The older man said, “Never mind. In your appointment you will probably be back in England in a month or so, before Rosemary, and you can come and see us then.”

The car came, and David went down to the street and saw the professor off to Oxford. He went back to his empty
flat and stood before the dying fire for a long time, conning over what he had learned and speculating upon what it meant to him. If the Queen were to announce the appointment of Tom Forrest as Governor-General in England, it meant that she would leave England herself almost immediately; she would hardly remain in the country after the appointment. In the year that he had been in England he had learned sufficient of the temper of the country to realise that the shock would be immense. That, then, was why Rosemary had told him to be very, very careful—and another piece of the puzzle fell into its place. Rosemary, of course, knew everything that was going on. She must have known of this for weeks and weeks, perhaps even when they were in Ottawa. No wonder she was looking white and strained.

The shock to the British people would be immense. Under that shock, a few small sections of the people might well lose their heads, behave wildly and do foolish things. There would be sections of the British people who would turn against the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth that had seduced their Queen away. Strong hatreds would arise, and ugly things might happen. The distinctive Australian Air Force uniform might prove a liability; an Australian aeroplane might be exposed to sabotage. He knew that in a week or so England would settle down and would regain her traditional balance, but anything might happen in the first few days. These overworked and undernourished people were in no condition to think clearly and objectively under a great shock.

He thanked God for the warning Rosemary had given him, for the wisdom of the Australian naval officer that had given him the sailors as a guard for the machine against a danger that he had not understood himself and that he could not have explained. His duty was to keep the aircraft safe
and efficient, with its crew, ready to take the Queen wherever she wished to go. But as he stood there by the dying fire, his sympathies were with the British; did ever a people have the wind so strongly in their face? For forty years they had battled for existence in a world adverse to the economy by which their nation had been built up. They had battled on tenaciously, closing their ranks and pulling together in the Socialism suited to their hard and bitter struggle. They had made mistakes—what nation does not?—but they had performed prodigies of skill and production which had served only to reduce the pace of their decline and make it manageable. Now as a reward, their Queen was withdrawing from them a little, that the dynasty might continue and the Commonwealth be held together. Poor, badly used British people! Poor, harassed, anxious Queen!