No Highway (13 page)

“Does anybody else know about this place in the Men’s Room?” she asked. “I mean, is there going to be a run on it? Because I’m kind of allergic to a crowd.”

He hesitated. “I told the stewardess, Miss Corder,” he said. “When—when I thought perhaps you didn’t want to hear about it. But it’s all right—the stove is quite wide enough. There’ll be room for two if you crush up close together.”

The actress said, “That’s the girl who waited on us with the coffee?”

He nodded. “She was so—so kind.”

There was a silence. Miss Teasdale sat staring up the cabin in front of her, thoughtful and silent. What she had heard bore the stamp of truth to her; in the quiet comfort of this aeroplane she realised that death might be very near. She could take that philosophically, so long as it was quick; with the Atlantic down beneath them it would be so. She would have liked to live, but she had no dependants; and as she sat there she knew that she had had the best of life. She had been born of middle-class parents in Terre Haute, Indiana; when she left school she had gone to work in an insurance office as a stenographer. Then, at the age of nineteen, she had won a beauty competition, becoming Miss Terre Haute; she had gained a screen test and her first job in Hollywood. She had been three times married, but never with success; twice she had created the divorce. The last time she had married Andy Summers, the band leader, and had divorced him after eighteen months; since then she had lived alone. She had
never had a child. Twice she had visited her own state in glorious pageantry to start the Indianapolis Motor Race; these visits were to her the climax of a long career. She treasured the memory of them more dearly than her Oscars. She had a brother who ran a flourishing automobile agency in Louisville and a sister who had married an attorney and lived in Norfolk, Va.; she had not seen either of them for many years. When her star waned she planned to rent an apartment in Indianapolis, in her own state where people were proud of her, but she would spend her winters in Miami. There were indications at the box office that that time was not very far off now.

So, if it had to end, she would be missing little but old age and she could do without that, anyway.

Presently, she turned to Mr. Honey. “Why did you pick on me to give me the best seat in the house for this show?”

He said awkwardly, “Well, you’re a very well-known person, Miss Teasdale. You’ve given so much pleasure to so many people.”

All her life she had received compliments; they had become commonplace to her, just things that people said. With death very near, this one struck rather a new note and arrested her attention with its sincerity. She said quietly, “You thought so much about my pictures? Do you go to the movies a great deal?” She had not taken him for an escapist.

He hesitated. “Well—not now,” he said. “I used to go a great deal when my wife was alive. But I’ve gone very little in the last five years. I’m afraid I haven’t seen any of your recent films.”

“You haven’t missed a lot,” she said. “There was more adventure in the picture business in the ’thirties. Every picture that I made had something new about it then. Now—well, I don’t know. Directors seem to have got cautious.”

“That’s what we always said,” said Mr. Honey eagerly. “There was always something new about your pictures. I think we saw everything that you were in from the first day we got engaged right up to the end.”

She asked, “When did your wife die, Mr. Honey? Was it in the war?”

He nodded. “It was at the time of the V
.2S
—the rockets, you remember. We had a flat in Surbiton.” He stared up the aisle. “It was rather a long way from the factory, but there’s a very good train service to Ash Vale. And there was always something going on in Surbiton: there was the Country
Dancing Club and the Art Club and the Camera Club. We
did
have such fun …” He was silent for a minute, and then he said, “I’d have been at home when it happened, only I was doing my turn firewatching at the factory. I didn’t even hear about it till the morning. Elspeth was quite all right when they got her out—just a bit shocked, you know. But Mary—well, she died …”

She said impulsively, “Oh, I’m sorry.” And then, to keep him talking and to ease the difficulty, she said, “What did you do, Mr. Honey? About Elspeth, I mean?”

“It was a terrible job,” he said simply. “You see, all our furniture was gone, everything we had. We’d only just got the clothes that we were in—Elspeth was in her pyjamas. Of course, everyone was frightfully kind and we got fitted out all right, and lots of people offered to give Elspeth a home in the country right away from the bombing—places in Wales and Cornwall—all that sort of thing. But—well, there were only the two of us, and I thought that sending her away to be with strangers would do more harm than good.” The actress nodded thoughtfully. “So I kept her with me and we managed to get digs in Farnham to start with; there wasn’t much bombing there. And then we got a house, and bit by bit we got some furniture together. I think it was the best thing to do.”

“Who lives with you to keep house?” she asked.

“Nobody,” he said. “We get along all right, Elspeth and I. Of course, now that she’s growing up and can do things for herself it’s getting a great deal easier.”

“How old was she when that happened?” Miss Teasdale asked.

“Eight,” he replied. “It’s bad luck to have a thing like that happen when you’re only eight.”

She breathed, “I’ll say it is.”

They sat in thoughtful silence for a time. At last the actress asked, “Was your wife a great movie fan, Mr. Honey?”

He said, “We both were, for good pictures like yours. We used to pick and choose. But Mary was terribly fond of your films.” He turned to her. “That’s really why I want you to do what I say and go and sit down in the Men’s Toilet if anything happens. You will, won’t you?”

There was a sudden watering behind her eyes. He certainly was the oddest little man. “Surely,” she said gently. “Of course I’ll go.”

He stared past her through his thick glasses. “I don’t know if there’s any truth in what they say in church about meeting people again,” he said. “When the end of the world comes or when you die. Or if it all just finishes. It’s an idea that kind of—helps, to think you’ll meet people again. If it’s true, I wouldn’t want to go to Mary and tell her I hadn’t done everything that could be done to help you. You see, you gave her so much pleasure.”

“I’ll do just what you say,” the actress said humbly.

They sat in silence while the Reindeer moved across the night sky above the overcast, beneath the stars, in steady, effortless flight. From time to time this thing had happened to her before, that she had suddenly been brought face to face with the incredible power of the honky-tonk, of the synthetic, phoney film business. Storey-teller, script writer, producer, director, cameraman, musician, cutter, actors and actresses, all came together for the purely commercial business of creating something that would sell; if they succeeded they created something that would sway the lives of men and women by the million, in all the countries of the world. That happened on the side. It was purely accidental to the business what they came together for, which was to make money.

She had few illusions about her profession; few film actresses have. In the endless, monotonous sequence of takes and retakes on the set she had a faculty for carrying through the emotion of a scene from one shot to another taken ten days later, so that given the proper opportunities by her director she could turn quite an ordinary script into a masterpiece. That, with her beauty, had made star material of her, fit for publicity. She had few other talents; but for that knack she might still have been Miss Myra Tuppen, stenographer in the Century Insurance Office in Terre Haute. At first she had attributed her screen success to her young beauty, but soon she had discovered that in Hollywood beauties were two a penny, and it was years before she got an inkling what it was that differentiated her from all the stand-ins and the walkers-on. When she discovered what it was, that she had a knack that other women had not, a tenuous knack not clearly understood even by herself, she had been terrified for years that she would lose it. That fear had left her now; she had put away a fortune in safe stocks and real estate, and now she did not greatly care if she stayed on in the commercialised entertainment business that had been her life, or not.
Sometimes she felt that her life might even have been more fun if she had remained Miss Tuppen of Terre Haute instead of becoming Miss Teasdale of Beverley Hills.

When such thoughts came to her she put them away; they were the discontents of middle age, and she must not be middle-aged while she remained in business. They were nonsense anyway; life had given her everything, everything but children. That was one thing that she had had to miss; her income had been much associated with her beauty, so that she could not afford to run risks with her figure. But treasonable thoughts returned from time to time, and recently she had wondered now and then what would have happened to her if she had not gone into the movies, if she had stayed on in the office. She would have married and settled down and raised a family, no doubt. Whom would she have married? One of her brother’s friends in the automobile business? She hardly thought so. One of the boys she had met in High School—Dwight Henderson? Dwight had been a nice boy; she had heard of him during the war. He was Vice-President of a corporation that made women’s shoes, in New York City. Her mind turned to the Century Insurance Office, well remembered after all these years, all these experiences. It would have been funny if she had married little Eddie Stillson the lame ledger clerk.…

Of all the people in the office, she remembered Eddie Stillson best. His desk was next to hers; because he was a low-grade clerk the noise of her machine was supposed not to disturb his work. She had been seventeen when she went to the Century office from her school of commercial typing; she supposed now that Eddie must have been twenty-one or twenty-two, but at that time she had thought him older. He had a pasty face and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles; one leg was shorter than the other, so that he could not take much exercise, or dance. He wore a sort of iron extension fitted to his right boot. Thinking back now more than thirty years in time, she remembered Eddie Stillson as one of the kindest men that she had ever known.

It had begun on the first morning, her first morning in her first job. At the school the machines had all been modern Remingtons. In the office she had been given a worn-out Underwood. It was just different enough to spoil her work; each time she forgot and worked up speed her flying fingers would depress two keys together or print ½ instead of a stop, so that each letter that she typed was spoiled and messy with
erasions. By the middle of the morning she was near to tears of apprehension and frustration, when the office boy put down upon the table by her side a glass of milk and a stick of chocolate.

“I always stop ’n take a lil’ drink of something, middle of the morning,” Eddie had said, drinking his milk. “I see they’ve given you the lousiest old machine in the office. Nobody else wouldn’t have it.” After that, things had gone better.

She had worked in that office for two and a half years. Her evenings gradually became a whirl of dances, movies, and walks with various young men, though she found it better to cut out the walks as time went on. In all that time she never went out with Eddie Stillson. He never asked her to the movies; if he had done so she would have regarded it as a disaster, and would have told her friends about it, laughing. All she ever talked to him about was carbon papers, and the weather, and how many bits they owed the office boy for milk. Yet when opportunity came to her with a minor contract in Hollywood and she went round the office saying good-bye in a whirl of excitement and congratulations, the only leave-taking that left the smallest pang was that with Eddie Stillson, though it only took two minutes. In later years she knew he would have married her if she had so much as lifted her finger. She had sometimes thought that she would have had a very happy life if he had.

This man Honey was just such another one as Eddie Stillson, shy, insignificant, brave and kind. With her experience of married life behind her, she now knew that such men made good husbands, though girls seldom realised it. There was security in them. She wondered what kind of girl his wife had been.

In the rear of the cabin Marjorie Corder sat with the other stewardess, Miss Peggy Ryan, by the galley. She had told Peggy all about Mr. Honey’s apprehensions, and they had agreed facilely that they were bunk. Now she sat silent, recalling her crash drill. Although in conversation she was prepared to write off Mr. Honey as a nervous crank, she was not in the least prepared to do so deep in her own mind. If things started to go wrong with the aircraft she had certain duties to perform; she sat quietly, conning her drill over. Safety belts had to be fastened; she must go up and down her end of the cabin, not hurrying, smiling reassuringly, but seeing that the passengers did fasten them, helping those who were
agitated. The upholstery rip cords must be pulled, disclosing the escape hatches, but on no account must the hatches be opened till the differential pressure indicator showed zero. She must be ready to jettison the cabin doors by pulling the hinge-pins. She must be ready with her first-aid box. She must be ready at the telephone to the flight deck for taking any orders that might come by it, and all the time she must be cheerful and composed and charming. Only by the sheerest chance would she be free to fling herself down on the deck in the Men’s Toilet when the crash was imminent; in any case it would be wrong for her, the stewardess, to take the only place of safety in the aircraft. She could hardly do that.

Her home was in Ealing, a suburb to the west of London; her father was a vegetable merchant in Covent Garden. She had gone to the London Hospital as a probationer early in the war, and then she had exchanged into the R.A.F. Nursing Service; she had given up nursing eighteen months before for the more varied life of an airline stewardess. She had been engaged during the war to an Ealing boy who had died in a Lancaster over Dortmund a month before her marriage; that had happened five years before, but she had not ventured into love again. She was rather older than the general run of stewardesses and had already exceeded the average length of service.