The Rainbow and the Rose (25 page)

‘That’s as may be,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ve changed my mind since Mrs Duclos went to France. I’m laying off
the housemaid. The cook will be staying on as housekeeper through the winter, to keep the house right for them when they come back here in April.’

I glanced at him. ‘What about Derek? Isn’t he coming out?’

‘The Commissioners are coming down here on the sixteenth of October,’ he said. That was a fortnight hence. ‘We shan’t know till they’ve examined him and made their report. But – no, I’d be surprised if they should let him out.’

‘I thought it was a certainty,’ I said.

‘It never was that …’ He stood and thought for a minute, and then he said, ‘Ye’ve a right to know how things are, Mr Pascoe. When Derek was in trouble and was certified three years ago, the court and the Commissioners didn’t know the half of it. We didn’t see the sense in making a bad matter worse by raking up old troubles when he was a boy, things we’d been able to cover up and no scandal, and all forgotten about. But now, it’s different. He’s happy in The Haven and well looked after. We wouldn’t want to see him given the responsibility of living his own life again.’

He paused, and then said heavily, ‘I went and saw Mr Justin Forbes, in his chambers, and told him everything that had happened, ever since Derek was a little lad. He’s one of the Commissioners, the barrister. We don’t want any more trouble, and he’s happy where he is.’

‘He took it seriously?’

‘Aye, he did that. Got his clerk in for a shorthand note, and had it typed out as a formal statement. I went back and swore to it that afternoon.’

We stood in silence for a time. I was sorry for this man, sorry for all of them. It was obvious to me that George Marshall was afraid of another crime if Derek was released. If that should happen, he might go to prison for it. They were paying very high fees for him in The Haven, and it was better that he should stay there.

‘You spoke pretty frankly to him?’ I asked.

‘I did that. Want to leave well alone, that’s what I said.’

I thought about it for a moment. ‘If the Commissioners decide to keep him in, then, Brenda and Mrs Duclos could come back here if they want to?’

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘they could do that. But she’ll be four months gone by then, and better she should stay quiet where they are, and save the scandal. I was thinking, when all this has blown over, say around Christmas time, I’d come down and see Derek again and see if he’d go on with the divorce. Maybe Mr Forbes would help in that. But all that’s in the future.’

‘Does Brenda know you’ve seen the Commissioner?’

He shook his head. ‘I’d as soon you didn’t tell her, either. Just leave it be, and tell her what the Commissioners decide. You can tell her after, if ye think it necessary. But least said, soonest mended.’

Things seemed to be improving again so far as Brenda was concerned, and I went back and wrote to her cheerfully. Thereafter life went in a normal, routine sort of way. I wrote to her every other day and she wrote to me; I know that I lived for her letters, and I think she did for mine. Presently the Commissioners arrived, examined Derek, deliberated, and decided that he had better stay where he was. My solicitor heard about it first, and rang me with the news, saying that Dr Somers was rather upset. I telegraphed it to Brenda.

The Leacaster Flying Club were fairly generous with leave; they gave their pilot-instructor three weeks every year provided that he took it in the winter months. I had taken no leave at all the previous year, my first year with the club, and I had little difficulty in getting the Committee to agree that I should take two spells of a fortnight each, one in January and one in March. We had several members with over five hundred hours of war-time flying in the distant
past, and two with current B licences for commercial flying, who could act as assistant instructor while I was away. I spent all the early months of winter arranging that the work should go on steadily while I was on leave, and early in January I left for France.

That fortnight was a delightful time. Brenda was very well, and more composed than I had expected to find her. She had had no contact with her husband in The Haven since she had left Duffington, and though she was growing tired of the hotel life with her mother she was well adjusted to it. She could not have a piano but she went to every concert that took place in Cannes, and on the second day she showed me, rather shyly, two or three water colour paintings, landscapes. Encouraged, she produced another water colour that she was attempting of her Moth in flight. This was in an early stage; she had traced the drawing from an air photograph of a Moth similar to hers but had got it a bit wrong in spite of that assistance. She knew that it was wrong but she didn’t know where the error had crept in. I was able to help her there; I could not draw but I did know very certainly what her Moth looked like when it was in flight. We worked at this together for a couple of mornings, and it was tremendous fun.

She had acquired a little car, a Renault, through the generosity of George Marshall and we made two or three long drives in this, to Grasse and up into the Esterelles. She was becoming very interested now in her coming baby, who she had quite decided was to be a boy, and she had two or three books on infant welfare in her room. She was very optimistic about a divorce; perhaps in Cannes it was easier to be optimistic than it was in the grey Midlands of England. She thought that Derek must agree to a divorce before very long, since it must now be clear to him that their marriage could not go on. She thought it would be better, when that happened, if I could get a job abroad as a commercial pilot so that when we married we could start off fresh in a new
place, away from England. She realised that that meant the tropics in all probability and she welcomed that for herself, though she was puzzled about the baby. What were the special problems of a baby in a hot country? Did I know of any book about it? She spent every evening after dinner sewing little clothes.

She was going to call him Johnnie.

Once she said, ‘I suppose we’ll have to go back to Duffington, shan’t we? After the baby’s born?’

‘Nobody has to do anything,’ I told her. ‘I could give up my job there. But if I was going to do that, I ought to tell them now, so that they could get another pilot in the saddle before the summer rush comes on.’

She asked, ‘Could you get another job with some other club, in some other part of England?’

‘I don’t think I could,’ I said slowly, ‘It would get around why I had left Duffington. The wives of members aren’t so keen on a pilot who’s a co-respondent.’

She bent her head over her sewing. ‘The Wives’ Trades Union,’ she murmured. ‘I see that.’

‘The only thing that I could do would be to get into air transport,’ I told her. ‘I’ll have to do that one day, anyway. But that means India or somewhere.’

‘We’d never see each other then,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could face this all alone.’

I took her hand. ‘I know. I think I ought to go on at Duffington for the time being, anyway. But that doesn’t mean you’d have to come back there.’

She sat motionless for a few moments, her sewing on her lap. ‘It hasn’t been a very happy place,’ she said quietly. ‘The club, and flying, and you, and everything we’ve done together – that’s been just a dream. But not the rest of it.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Would you like a little house somewhere not too far away, but not in Duffington? In Oxford, say?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘If I didn’t go back to
Duffington it would be like running away because I was afraid.’ I was silent. ‘Let me think about it, Johnnie,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to decide anything for the next couple of months.’

‘It might look a bit odd if you went back there with a baby,’ I remarked. I was very disinclined for her to go back there, even then.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ she replied. ‘People gave up calling, after Derek’s case. Nobody ever comes to the house anyway. A baby more or less won’t matter.’ She paused. ‘I thought perhaps that I might say he was my sister’s baby.’

‘Have you got a sister?’ I asked.

She smiled. ‘No. But one has to say something, even though you know that people won’t believe it.’

She had her own way of looking at things, and her reputation didn’t seem to worry her a bit. I left her at the end of the fortnight reasonably happy in my mind about her. In this very difficult time she was quiet and composed, enjoying her little life of waiting, with her concerts and her painting and her country drives. I went back to Duffington refreshed with the short holiday, and there I found a letter waiting for me from George Marshall.

He told me, very briefly, that he had failed again to make Derek consider a divorce. Derek seemed to consider that George was responsible for his failure to get out of The Haven, which indeed was true, and he was actively hostile to any proposal that his brother put up. It seemed very probable to me that Dr Somers had been talking.

I was barely two months back at Duffington, and then I was off again to Cannes. Brenda had picked a pleasant little hospital on one of the hills behind the town, and two days after I arrived she went into this place to have her baby. A couple of days later, it was born, and it was a girl.

I saw her for a few minutes that evening, weak and exhausted. She was terribly disappointed. She had convinced
herself that it was going to be a boy and that he would be a pilot, like his father. I tried to cheer her up. ‘Girls are fun,’ I said. ‘I’d rather have a girl.’

A tear trickled down her cheek. ‘I did so want a boy.’

I wiped it away gently. ‘Girls can be pilots, too,’ I said. She smiled faintly, and squeezed my hand. Then the French sister came and made me go away.

She recovered her strength quickly, but the sense of disappointment persisted. During the last week of my leave I raised the question of the baby’s name once or twice; she had decided to wait to have her baptised till they returned to England. I wanted to call her Brenda, and she agreed to that without much interest. She was fond of the child, but decided to wean her at an early stage, before they came back to England. Her mind was set more on flying her Moth that summer than it was on nursing her child. If it had been a boy, I think things might have been different.

My leave was up, and I had to go back to Duffington before she left the hospital. At that time English nursemaids were not uncommon in Cannes, and Mrs Duclos had already been in touch with one and was to interview another. They planned that when Brenda came out of the hospital they would go back to the quiet hotel where they had lived for six months and stay there for another month, getting the baby weaned and accustomed to a good English nurse. Then they would all come back to Duffington, arriving at the Manor about the end of April.

I went back to my job, and on my first Monday I flew her Moth down to Heston for the renewal of the certificate of airworthiness. In the year that she had owned it it had only flown about a hundred hours, but under the regulations of those days it had to be pretty well pulled to pieces for inspection every year, and that meant quite a lot of work. I left it there for this work to be done, and wrote to her in Cannes about it. In her reply she said that she would fly it
back herself from London on her way home, which would save me another journey.

She flew in one afternoon at about tea time. I knew that she was coming, for her mother and the baby and the nurse had arrived by train the day before; she should have come on the same day but something had happened at Heston to delay the delivery of her Moth. I got a telephone call from Heston in the middle of the afternoon to say that she had taken off for Duffington; it was a fine, sunny afternoon with all the promise of spring, so I knew that she would be all right. Young Ronnie Clarke was learning to fly at that time, having taken his matriculation with an effort, and he was coming out for a lesson at four o’clock. He was a very quick pupil as such boys usually are; he had soaked himself in theoretical knowledge for years before he actually commenced instruction, and he had flown so many hours as a passenger in club machines that I could have sent him off solo quite safely after about three hours’ dual. The insurance regulations demanded that he have eight hours, so rather than keep him at the dreary round of circuits and bumps I had been teaching him aerobatics. We were up at about three thousand feet that afternoon in a clear sky and I was showing him how to roll off the top of a loop; each time we came upright and climbed for another one I scanned the horizon to the south, looking for Morgan le Fay. I saw her as a faint speck in the distance about half way through the lesson and pointed her out to Ronnie; we broke off the lesson and he flew towards her and came round into loose formation with her while I told him what to do, and so we flew together the last five miles towards the aerodrome waving at each other. I held Ronnie off and made him do a circuit while she went in to land; I watched her till she was down and taxi-ing towards the hangar, and then let Ronnie land behind her.

She met us, radiant, upon the tarmac, and it was just like
the old days of the previous summer. Ronnie switched off the engine and we sat unbuckling our helmets, and she came up to the machine beside us. ‘Johnnie, it’s simply glorious to be back,’ she said. ‘How’s Ronnie getting on?’

‘Getting on all right,’ I said. ‘He could make anybody sick now. He’d have made me sick if you hadn’t come along. Have a good flight up?’

‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘Morgan’s flying a bit left wing low, I think.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll take her up and check her over for you. She may want a bit of fine adjustment on the rigging. Landing all right?’

She nodded. ‘Not too bad. I did two or three at Heston before leaving. It’s so lovely to be back …’

‘Lovely for us,’ I said quietly. Ronnie was there, of course, and the young don’t miss much. We got out on the tarmac and pushed the machines into the hangar, and we all went into the office for a cup of tea. Brenda was radiantly happy, with colour in her cheeks and brightness in her eyes, looking younger than ever. I had a look at her aircraft log book for the rigging check, and then I took her out to look at the machine, leaving Ronnie in the office. Behind the Bluebird we were out of sight, and I took her in my arms and kissed her.