The Atlantic Sky (22 page)

She hardly heard him say, ‘And talking of
them,
Patsy, they did ask me to come back some time...’

She continued to stare out into the grey sky beyond.

‘... and as you’ve a few days off, and so have I, I thought we might go.’

She suddenly looked up at him. ‘Home, d’you mean?
Our
home.’

‘Yes.’ He gave her an oddly shy smile. ‘There would just be time,’ he drew a deep breath, ‘to ask if I may marry their daughter ... and,’ he grinned ruefully and nervously, ‘to let them look me over.’

Patsy laughed and picked up her bag and her gloves.

‘I think,’ she said happily, ‘that they’ve done that already.’

Then, as they walked out to the car, she added, ‘Now I come to think of it Dad always had a soft spot for you. Even before he met you.’

‘And now I come to think of it,’ Robert Prentice smiled as he fitted the key in the ignition and started the car, ‘he always did look to me like a remarkably perceptive man.’

They drove along in a companionable silence. Neither of them noticed that it had stopped raining. The tyres hissed on the damp road. The bare hedges and the brown grass dripped mournfully. And the houses with their neat blue-grey heads stared at them like rows of still wet seals. But ahead of them, the clouds had stopped their long march in from the Atlantic. As the car turned into the westbound stream, Patsy could see, at the farthest end of the Great West Road, that the tarmac was glistening with the first feeble rays of the emerging sun. Then they were running smoothly along the same road that ran parallel to the main runway at London Airport. The selfsame road along which she had watched, on the day of her interview, the bus and the rest of the earth-borne traffic disappear into a factory
-
lined, house-enclosed horizon.

But the factories and the houses and suffocation of that horizon didn’t seem to be there any more. Only the safe sure feeling of being on the ground, added to all the wonder and the beauty of the limitless air above her. For after all its suffocating snow and fog, its rain-drenched cloud, and its angry gales, the Atlantic sky had suddenly handed her a clear horizon, had shown her a safe harbour—a quiet landfall after the storm.