Trustee From the Toolroom (40 page)

The solicitor got up with him. 'You're looking very well,' he remarked. ' Much better than when I saw you last. You must have been out in the sun.'

' I had a bit of a holiday,' said Keith defensively.

'A very good thing to do,' said Mr Carpenter. They moved towards the door. 'Tell me,' he said, 'did you ever do anything about the engine that was salvaged from your brother-in-law's yacht?'

'I had it shipped home,' said Keith. 'I've got it in the garden. But it's not much good, not really.'

The shadow of a smile appeared on Mr Carpenter's face. ' I don't suppose it is, not now,' he said. He moved to the door with Keith.' I wish some of my other clients took their trusts as seriously as you have done,' he said. 'I think Commander Dermott made a very wise choice of a trustee.'

Janice still goes to Miss Pearson's school in West Baling, but she is entered for the Royal Naval School for Officers' Daughters at Haslemere and she will go there next year. After that, Katie would like her to go to Oxford or to Cambridge if she can get in, and Miss Pearson thinks she probably will. Katie says that that's what Jo would have wanted for her, and she may be right.

Jack and Dawn Donelly are married in a kind of way, though there is still a little doubt about Jack's marital status. They live on Raiatea Island in the
ties sous le Vent,
at the south-east corner, on Baie Hotopuu. They lived first on the
Mary Belle
at anchor in the bay, mostly on fish and cornmeal fritters, but presently Chuck Ferris sent the
Flying Cloud
to Raiatea with a prefabricated house for them broken down into small sections for deck cargo, and Captain
Petersen helped them to put up the main structure before sailing for home. The completion of this house has kept Jack busy woodworking, which he does very well, and he in turn has kept Dawn busy for she had three children in one calendar year, twin girls in January and a boy in December; I believe there is another one on the way. Of course, she lives some distance from a pharmacy. Chuck Ferris is sending out another house to them, to make a bit more room.

Sol Hirzhorn has just finished the Congreve clock and is thinking about starting off on the hydraulic models in Keith's serial. Julie still works for him and looks after him in the winters when Mrs Hirzhorn is in Florida. He would like Keith to come out to the West again and bring Katie and Janice with him for a few weeks' holiday. Keith has deferred this until Janice is a little older, but Julie writes privately that Sol really means it and that Joe says that in view of Keith's professional services the lares would certainly be chargeable to Hirzhorn Enterprises Inc, so Keith will probably accept the invitation in a year or two.

Keith finally sold the engine salvaged from
Shearwater
for sixty pounds, but it took him six months to do so. It cost him fifty-nine pounds eight shillings and tenpence in shipping charges from Seattle, so that he made a profit on the transr action.

Katie no longer works in Buckley's drapery shop in Baling Broadway. They discovered that the interest on the sterling equivalent of seventeen thousand dollars just about equalled her wages at the shop, and that all Janice's expenses were amply covered by the interest on her own money, relieving them of the burden they had willingly assumed. At the same
_:
time Keith's correspondence throughout the world was growing to such an extent that some days he did nothing but write letters. So Katie gave up her job and bought a typewriter and a tape dictating machine and took charge of the letters. She is not a Julie Perlberg and she never will be, but Keith by sitting in his chair and talking into the microphone can clear the heaviest mail in an hour or so, and the letters get done somehow.

If you happen to be in the trolley bus from Southall or from Hanwell at about nine o'clock on a Friday morning, you may see a little man get in at West Baling, dressed in a shabby raincoat over a blue suit. He is one of hundreds of thousands like him in industrial England, pale-faced, running to fat a little, rather hard up. His hands show evidence of manual work, his eyes and forehead evidence of intellect. A fitter or a machinist, you think, perhaps out of the toolroom. If you follow him, you will find that he gets out at Ealing Broadway and takes the Underground to Victoria Station. He comes up to the surface and walks along Victoria Street a little way to an office block, where he climbs four flights of stone stairs to the dingy, old-fashioned office of the
Miniature Mechanic
to deliver his 'copy'.

He will come out presently and take a bus to Chancery Lane, to spend the remainder of the day in the Library of the Patent Office. He will be home at Somerset Road, Ealing, in time for tea. He will spend the evening in the workshop, working on the current model.

He has achieved the type of life that he desires: he wants no other. He is perfectly, supremely happy.