The Rainbow and the Rose (31 page)

That was all right, but now that the resemblance was in my mind it would not be put aside. Tenuous and unsubstantial, there was a definite resemblance to Brenda Marshall. It was nothing physical, nothing to be photographed and set down as a specimen and studied. Since my marriage in the First
World War I had led rather a solitary life till Brenda had burst on me for a brief year of glory. In that year for the first time I had known what it was to have somebody really care about me, really care whether I lived or died. After it was over I had lived a very withdrawn life, avoiding contact with women so far as is possible for a man in my position, something of a recluse. Now, the resemblance that had arisen was a resemblance of caring for my welfare, a resemblance of caring whether I lived or died. It was nothing really that I could put my finger on, but after twenty-seven years it came as a bit of a shock. Quite unsought, without any conscious effort on my part, it looked as though that fortune was being given to me again.

I stood looking out over Suva Bay in the moonlight. A Sunderland flying boat on night landing practice flew across almost at eye-level, and I hardly noticed it. It had begun on that first evening when she had put the clean pillow for me in the crew’s berth on the D.C.6b; it had gone on unobtrusively like that all the time. Someone must have influenced the cooks in the AusCan hostel to bring my breakfast egg and bacon to the table as I like it, fried on both sides. I had not told them; it could only have been one of the two hostesses. In the first week half my laundry was lost or went astray. I had given up the struggle to find the damn stuff and had bought more in Honolulu, but since then it had returned punctually the next day with nothing ever missing. Was that one of the hostesses? It’s not the sort of thing that happens on its own at Nandi Airport. For the first few days I had had one of the dumbest girls in Fiji to do my room, a very jungly type. The Head Girl had succeeded her, a very quick and intelligent part-European, and I had done nothing to arrange the switch. Who had done that for me? And then, on top of everything, had been that very penetrating remark about me being lonely when I went to Buxton. So penetrating, and so true.

The odd thing about it all was that I couldn’t feel that this girl, Peggy Dawson, was ‘setting her cap at me’, as my grandmother used to say. It didn’t seem to be like that, somehow. I have had that one before, of course, in twenty-seven years of airline flying, and I have seen it happen many, many times with other officers. They spend time on their hair and face and eyelashes before coming to the flight deck, and then they come with bright and tinkling vivacity until I slam them down. They dress, off duty, rather better than their pay would normally permit; frequently they start to use scent, and to drink a little more, and to stimulate gay parties. One cannot blame them if they do what every human being does at one time or another; one has to grin and bear it and see that their work is done correctly. I couldn’t feel, however, that this was one of those. There were none of the usual symptoms, and it didn’t feel like that.

The truth of it was that she was just a very decent girl and a good senior hostess, who took it to be one of her duties to see that her captain was made comfortable as well as her passengers. I turned from the window, smiling a little; by God, I thought, she’d make a wife for somebody, some day! I hoped that didn’t happen before my time was up with AusCan. I didn’t want the jungly girl doing my room again, putting the wet soap in my handkerchief drawer and my clean shoes on the floor of the shower to get filled with water.

We went back to Nandi next morning, played a little tennis, and took the machine on to Honolulu that evening. Our lives slipped back into the normal groove for several weeks. I took my leave and went to Buxton to have a look round, and stayed at the hotel. That was the worst part of the set-up, because the hotel was horrible, dirty and uncouth. It wasn’t a bad little town, however, with good trout streams not much fished within thirty miles or so. I didn’t want to stay in the hotel, anyway, and there were several new houses going up, half built. The aerodrome was a grass field of about
five hundred acres that had been laid out for training in the last war and not much used since; it was grazed by sheep and the farmer had the one small hangar full of haymaking machinery and stuff of that sort. A bit of money wanted spending on the roof before it could be used for aeroplanes, but the Shire Clerk told me they would do that if I took it on a five years’ lease. There seemed to be some charter and instruction work offering and several of the mountain graziers wanted superphosphate spread from the air because they couldn’t get it on their rough back country any other way. If I went there I should never make much more than a bare living but on the other hand I shouldn’t have to work very hard. I met most of the locals in the four days I was there and thought them a decent sort of a crowd. I told them who I was and just how I was fixed, and that I’d make my mind up within the next: three or four months whether I wanted to lease the hangar and come there. But when I left to fly to Melbourne I had practically made up my mind, and I spent a morning at Moorabbin airport before flying on to Sydney and Fiji talking to Arthur Schutt to find out how the prices and availability of little aeroplanes were running.

A fortnight later I was standing on the corner of Beach Walk and Kalakaua in Waikiki one morning waiting to cross the road upon the lights to get a few cigars at the drug store, when Peggy Dawson came along, walking quickly. She stopped, and I greeted her. ‘Too hot to walk like that,’ I said. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I was going back to the hotel,’ she said. ‘But now –’ She paused. ‘Could you let me have some dollars?’

‘Why, certainly,’ I said. ‘How many do you want?’ In AusCan on the Pacific route everyone was paid on the same scale, but the Canadians were paid in dollars and the Australians were paid in pounds, and so had difficulty in buying anything in Honolulu under their own steam. In the aircrew this never made any trouble because there
were always Canadians who wanted to take holidays in Australia, and anyway at Nandi Airport all currencies got a bit mixed up.

‘Could you let me have thirty?’ she asked. ‘I’ll give you the pounds back at the hotel. I want to get a dress.’

I pulled out my wallet and gave her the money. ‘Nice dress?’

She took it, smiling. ‘It’s a beaut. Would you like to see it before I buy it?’

I smiled with her. ‘I was only just going across to the drug store.’ So we turned and walked along the sidewalk together in the warm sun, till we got to the shop and saw her dress upon the dummy in the window. She showed it to me. ‘That’s the one. It’s only twenty-two fifty.’

It was a sort of mottled pastel blue colour, with trimmings of a rather darker blue. It was too old for her, I thought; it seemed to me to be a dress for a woman of fifty. She was so pleased with it that I didn’t say so. ‘It’s very quiet and restrained,’ I remarked. ‘I think you’d look very nice in it.’

She nodded. ‘I think it’s lovely. I don’t like things too bright.’ We went together into the shop and she set about buying it. It would need small alterations which could be done in the back room by the Japanese girls in a couple of hours, but first a fitting would be necessary. ‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and get my cigars while you try it on. Then we’ll go and have lunch somewhere and you can pick it up.’

She smiled. ‘I’d like that. But I pay for my own lunch.’

‘Toss you for that one,’ I said, and went off for my White Owls. When I came back from the drug store she was waiting for me. ‘Where are we going to lunch?’ she asked.

‘The Edgewater’s as good as anywhere,’ I said. It was in our price bracket, too; we were well paid by any standard except that of the largest Waikiki hotels. We went to the
terrace of the hotel overlooking the blue swimming pool, and had soft squashes full of fruit and ice before lunch. We had to fly that night, and in AusCan we don’t drink the day we fly.

As we sat there smoking she asked me, ‘How did you get on at Buxton?’

‘All right,’ I told her. ‘I think I shall go there.’

‘Will there be enough for you to do there, though?’

‘I think so,’ I said slowly. ‘I shan’t get fat on it, but there’ll be something to do every day even from the start. And these things snowball, you know. Once you start up in a place like that, business that you never thought of comes along.’

I started in to tell her all about it, and she listened attentively. ‘Anyway,’ she said once, ‘it’s not as if you had to work at all, is it? I mean, you’ll have your pension.’

I nodded. ‘I could get by on that. But I’ve got something saved up, of course. Enough for two or three small aircraft. Enough for a house too, I think. I don’t want anything big.’

‘What about furniture?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have to get that. But I shan’t need much.’

‘Who’s going to do for you? Cook your meals, and all that sort of thing?’

I laughed. ‘I haven’t got as far as that yet. I haven’t even made up my mind if I’m going there at all. I’m not afraid of that one, though. I’ve managed on my own before now, sometimes for months on end.’

She nodded. ‘You’ll have to have somebody. I should think you’d find somebody to come in daily.’

‘I should think so.’

We moved to a table on the dining portion of the terrace and ordered lunch. ‘When have you got to make your mind up about Buxton?’ she asked.

‘I told them I’d make up my mind about leasing the hangar by October,’ I said. ‘They’ve got to get the farmer out before
I can go into it, and he’s got it on a monthly tenancy. And then there’s quite a bit of work to be done before I could put aeroplanes in it. The roof leaks pretty badly, but they’d do that for me. And then, I suppose I’d have to do something about a house. The hotel’s simply terrible.’

She laughed. ‘They usually are. When would you think of going there?’

‘I’ll be sixty in February,’ I told her. ‘I’ve got to be out of this by then.’

The waitress brought our lunch. When she had gone, the hostess remarked, ‘I suppose that means there’ll be a switch around of aircrew when you leave us.’

I hadn’t thought about it before, immersed in my own affairs. ‘I suppose there will,’ I said. ‘I know Pat Petersen would rather be upon the northern route.’

‘It’s his wife,’ she said. ‘She gets prickly heat.’

‘I know. When’s Mollie Hamilton getting married?’ She had got herself engaged on her last leave to a chap who worked for Mobilgas at Kingsford Smith.

‘They haven’t got a date. She’ll stay the year out.’

‘Wolfe’s got a girl in San Francisco,’ I remarked. ‘Looks like a General Post after Christmas.’

She nodded. ‘I don’t believe I’ll stay on when that happens.’

I glanced at her. ‘Getting tired of it?’

‘Not exactly,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘It’s a lovely life in many ways. I’ll never be sorry to have seen all this, and worked for AusCan. But one sometimes feels it isn’t really important – not like nursing.’

‘Would you go back to the hospital?’

She nodded. ‘I think so. Either the Alexandra or some other hospital.’ There was a pause while we ate. ‘I think I’d like to try it in an orthopaedic hospital,’ she said. ‘Polio children.’

The blue, brilliant swimming pool lay before us, with the
superbly healthy young Americans in and out of it in the bright sunshine. ‘Kind of an antidote to this,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Well – yes. I wouldn’t want this to be any other way. But after all, it’s work like that that makes this possible – getting crooked kids straight.’

‘I know what you mean,’ I said. I had never felt it personally, of course, because of the responsibilities. Every hour that I spent in the air was spent with the emergency routines upon the threshold of my consciousness. Every change in engine note was a minor shock that jerked me into maximum alertness to check with instruments and cathode ray plug indicator exactly what was happening. So many things can happen to a big four-engined aeroplane, most of which could end up fatally if I fell down upon the job, that I had never felt the need to shoulder any more responsibilities. With the hostesses who came to us from hospital work the case was very different. None of them stayed longer than a year or two; because they were hand-picked for their qualities of character the hospitals drew them back.

I glanced at her, smiling. ‘Marriage doesn’t come into your programme?’

She laughed. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

‘You don’t want to leave it too long,’ I remarked. ‘Everybody ought to be married.’

‘You’re a fine one to be talking like that,’ she retorted.

I glanced at her. ‘I was married once.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Nothing for you to be sorry about,’ I replied. ‘I was married in the First World War, very nearly forty years ago.’

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘She divorced me,’ I told her. ‘In Reno. She was an actress – Judy Lester. Ever hear of her?’

She shook her head.

‘Oh well, she was a bit before your time. But she was quite well known. I had rather a dud job in England after the war
and she got a film contract in Hollywood. She divorced me from there.’

‘Why did she do that? Or is it a rude question?’

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘She wanted to marry a band leader in Hollywood. She got it for desertion.’

She wrinkled her brows. ‘I don’t understand. Who deserted who?’

I smiled. ‘I deserted her, because I wouldn’t go to Hollywood.’

‘But could she get a divorce for that?’

‘She could then, in Nevada. I believe they’ve tightened things up a bit since those days.’

‘Did you have any children?’

I nodded. ‘There was a daughter, but I never had any thing to do with her. We never lived together after she was born. Her mother took her with her to America.’

‘You didn’t keep in touch?’

I shook my head. ‘I was a bit sore about the whole thing, and anyway I hadn’t any money to go to America. It was nearly twenty years before I got there, in the Second War, and then I didn’t feel like digging it all up again.’

She nodded, slowly. ‘The girl must have been grown-up.’