No Highway (26 page)

She stared at him. “What’s that?”

He smiled. “Everything,” he said. “All matter is built up of the associations that result in crystals, like miniature universes. It’s an extraordinary thing that schools don’t teach more about it.” He turned to her. “Schools only teach results,” he said. “All the basic knowledge that Elspeth has, she seems to have got from me.”

“I’d believe that,” she replied. “Say, does she get around at all—parties with boy friends and that sort of thing?”

“Who—Elspeth? She’s only just a child.” He was amazed. “She’s only twelve years old.”

Miss Teasdale laughed. “From what you say about her crystal—crystall—what you said, she sounds to be about forty. Still, maybe English children don’t get around so early as they do at home. Has she got a flapjack?”

“What’s that?”

She stared at him. “For powder.” She rummaged in her bag. “Like this.”

He was at a loss. “No,” he said weakly. “Ought she to have one?”

She laughed. “It’s not obligatory. I guess she ought to have it when she wants it.”

“I really don’t think she’s old enough for that,” he said. “I don’t think any of the other children at her school have those.”

“Maybe not.” And then she said, “Tell me about this Dr. Scott that I’m to go and see. And how do I get to this place you work at, Farnborough?”

He told her, and wrote a short letter for her to give to me, and presently they dined together. Then her plane landed to refuel and the lounge was filled with passengers stretching their legs after the flight up from New York, In the bustle he said good-bye to her as her luggage was carried out. “I’ll tell him just the way you’re fixed,” she said. “Leave it to me. And I’ll say that you’d appreciate it if you could get back to your work in England.”

“Do please tell him that,” he said earnestly. “I really feel I’m much more use in the Establishment than on this sort of thing.”

The passengers departed and the plane taxied away for the take-off for England in the dusk. Mr. Honey was left reading the
Saturday Evening Post
in the deserted lounge. At ten o’clock the stewardess came up softly behind him. “I’ve got a bedroom ready for you, sir,” she said. “Would you like me to show you which it is? It’s just over the road.”

He said, “Oh, thank you,” and got up and went with her out into the night. It was cold and bright and brilliantly starry out on the road. To the north the sky was shot with spears of glimmering white light reaching up towards the zenith. They paused for a minute, looking at it. “That’s the aurora,” the girl said. “They call it Northern Lights here. We often see it.”

He said, “It’s associated with the cosmic rays, I believe. It would be interesting to find out more about it.” And then he said, unusually for him, “It’s very beautiful.”

“It’s wild,” the girl said, “and uncanny. I don’t like it much.” She took him into a two-storeyed wooden hutment, one of a row upon the other side of the road, and opened a door. He saw rather a bare bedroom, but his bag had been unpacked for him, and his hairbrush and shaving things laid out neatly on the dressing-table, and his pyjamas put to air upon the radiator so that they would be warm for him to get into, and the bed was turned down invitingly. “I put a hot-water bottle in the bed,” she said. “I hope you’ll find everything all right, sir.”

He had not been treated like that for years. “Oh, thank you,” he said. “It all looks most comfortable. Did you do all this for me?”

She smiled. “It’s what I’m here for, sir.” She hesitated. “I hope you don’t mind—I’ve taken two pairs of your socks to darn. They’ve both got holes in the toe. I’ll bring them with your tea in the morning.”

He said, “Oh please, you don’t have to bother. They won’t show.”

The girl said, “I’ve got nothing else to do, and you can’t go around like that.” She hesitated. “I did notice your pyjama coat has a great tear in the back,” she said. “If you let me have that tomorrow I’ll mend it for you. It must be terribly uncomfortable wearing it like that.”

He flushed. “It’s so old,” he said. “I ought to get another suit, but there never seem to be any coupons.”

She asked curiously, “Who mends your clothes when you’re at home?”

“Oh, I do that myself,” he said. “It’s really very little trouble, and Elspeth’s getting quite good at it, too. We get along splendidly, only the coupons are so short.”

Coupons, she knew, were always short for the bad managers. “I’ll take your jacket anyway tomorrow,” she said. “The material’s quite good—it’ll patch all right.”

“I don’t like putting you to so much trouble,” he said.

“I’d like to do it,” the girl said. “I like mending things.”

She went away, and Mr. Honey went to bed in greater comfort than he had experienced for many years. He stood for a few moments in his torn pyjamas before opening the window, looking at the Northern Lights, noting the form of the radiation. Then he got into bed; with his feet resting snugly on the hot-water bottle he was able to relax and think about the geographical distribution of the cosmic rays, a subject that was beginning to intrigue him. He lay in warm comfort doing mental calculations of the strength of the earth’s magnetic field in various latitudes and computing its effect upon the distribution of the protons and the positrons as they approach the planet, till sleep came to him.

He was roused at eight o’clock in the morning by the stewardess, who brought him a cup of tea and a few slices of bread and butter on a tray. She pulled his curtains and let in the sunlight. “It’s going to be a lovely day, sir,” she said. “What would you like for breakfast?”

He smiled at her. “What can I have?”

“Orange or pineapple juice,” she said. “Porridge or cereals. Eggs anyway you like. Bacon, cold ham, sausages. Buckwheat cakes and syrup with a sausage on the side—that’s very good. Toast, hot rolls …”

He considered this. “Could I have porridge and bacon and eggs?”

“Two eggs?”

“Well—yes, if I can.”

“Coffee or tea?”

“Er—coffee, I think.”

She nodded. “What time would you like it? It’s eight o’clock now.”

“Oh, I don’t take long. Half-past eight?”

“Very good, sir.” She paused, and then she said, “I want to go out for a walk this morning—it’s such a lovely day. Would you like to do that?”

He considered this. “Well—yes, I would. It seems rather stupid to be in Newfoundland and see nothing of the country, doesn’t it? May I come with you?”

“Of course,” she said. “The Gander River’s only about two miles away and there’s a road down to that, but there’s nothing much to do there except bathe, and it’s frightfully cold still. But going the other way, out past the restaurant, there’s a path that takes you to a lake; it’s awfully pretty there. That’s where people go to fish. Do you do any fishing, sir?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The staff, the people stationed here, go fishing there on their days off,” she said. “They catch salmon and trout and all sorts of things. But apart from that, it’s terribly pretty. We could go there, if you like.”

He said eagerly, leaning up upon one elbow in his bed, “Do let’s. I haven’t done that sort of thing for years.”

She hesitated. “Would you like to take out lunch? I could cut some sandwiches.”

He said doubtfully, “It’d be fun.… But do you think I ought to be away all day? I mean, there might be a cable for me from the office.”

She smiled. “It could wait. We’d be back anyway by four, and if you’re ordered to go on or to go back, you won’t miss a plane because they all come through at night. I think a day out in the country would do you good.”

He said, “I think it would.”

She nodded. “I’ll see about the sandwiches. Oh, and here are your socks—I did them last night.”

He took them gratefully. “It’s terribly kind of you to do all this for me.”

“Not a bit,” she said. “Let me have your pyjama jacket when we get back and I’ll do that for you.” She glanced at the tear. “You can’t go on wearing it like that.”

“I know,” he said ruefully. “It got bigger in the night.”

When she was gone he sat in bed sipping his tea and fingering his socks, full of pleasure. He had not been looked after like that since Mary died; since then he had battled on alone, doing everything for himself and most things for his little girl. When Mary had been killed he had resigned himself to a life of celibacy; it had never entered his head, as practical politics, that he should go looking for another girl. He would not have known how to set about it. He had not married Mary; she had married him, to the surprise and consternation of her
friends in the office, who thought she might have done a great deal better for herself than that. Mary had just happened in his life, a rare, sweet interlude that he had done very little to provoke; when she had gone he had slipped back quietly into his bachelor ways, more complicated now that there was Elspeth to look after.

He got up presently, and as he dressed looked ruefully at his pyjama jacket; not only was it very badly torn but it was indisputably dirty. He could not hand it over to her to be mended in that state; he washed it ineffectively in the basin in his room and hung it over the radiator to dry. As a consequence he was late for breakfast and it was nearly ten o’clock before he was ready to start off.

He met her in the lounge. “I say,” he said diffidently, “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

“Not long,” she said. She had a small blue stewardess’s bag in her hand. “I’ve got the sandwiches, and I brought a thermos of coffee too.” She hesitated. “I didn’t ask you what sort of sandwiches you like,” she said. “I made some chicken ones and some sardine and some cheese. Is that all right?”

“Oh—of course,” he said. “That’s fine.” Food did not mean a great deal in his life; his meals were either canteen meals at the factory or scrappy messes that he cooked himself at home; moreover, his mind was usually too full of other matters for him to pay much attention to what he was eating. “I like all those,” he said.

She was relieved. “I had an awful feeling that perhaps you wouldn’t like sardine …”

They set out walking down the path away from the hangars; as they went he asked her how she knew the way so well. He learned a little of her life. She made three Atlantic crossings, on the average, each week; most times she came to Gander for a short stop to refuel. Sometimes, on the rare occasions of easterly gales in the Atlantic, the flight had been delayed there for a day or longer; once before she had been stranded there for several days due to defective motors in the aircraft. “But we shan’t have to stop here for weather in the future, I don’t think,” she said. “The Reindeer carries so much petrol we can make the crossing even against the worst gales in the winter. That’s what Captain Samuelson was saying.”

Mr. Honey said, “Well, that will save a lot of trouble. But we’ve got to get its tailplane right first of all.”

She nodded. “How long do you think that will take, sir?”

He smiled up at her. “Please—don’t you think you might stop calling me sir? I mean, you’re doing so much for me that you don’t have to.”

She laughed. “All right. But how long do you think the Reindeers will be grounded for?”

“I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “These things usually seem to take three or four months to put right. But that’s supposing that what I think is correct.” His face clouded, and he was in distress again. “It’s just an estimate,” he said. “I didn’t want people to take me up on it like this. I should have had more time, and now there’s all this row …”

She said sympathetically, “I know. But it had to be done this way, didn’t it?”

He shook his head. “We should have gone on working in the department in the proper way until we had some positive results to show.”

She smiled. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Why?”

She said gently, “I should have been killed.”

He blinked up at her, taller than he was, slim and lovely against a background of Newfoundland fir trees and blue sky. It was Mary all over again, incredible that girls like that should come to death. He stared at her, confused by the clash of the theoretical and the practical in his work. “Jean Davenport and Betty Sherwood were the stewardesses in Captain Ward’s Reindeer,” she said. “That one that fell in Labrador. If you’d gone on working in the proper way, I should have been killed too.”

He said a little timidly, “Did you know them?”

“Of course I did. I knew them very well.”

“Oh. Were they people like you?”

She glanced at him curiously. “They were both fair. Betty was smaller than me. I suppose Jean was much the same.”

“But were they young, like you?”

“I suppose they were about twenty-five,” she said. “It’s not a job for people much older than that. Most of us are round about that age.”

They walked on for a time in silence through the woods. “I suppose Dr. Scott was right,” he said at last. “But there ought to be more time for scientific work. One can’t produce results all in a hurry, out of the hat, like this.”

She said, “It must be terribly difficult.”

He glanced up at her, distressed. “I don’t know what to do. There must be a tremendous row going on in England because I damaged this Reindeer. You see, there isn’t any proof yet, Sir Phillip Dolbear didn’t believe a word I said.”

She was sorry for him; if it would help him to tell her al about it she wanted him to do so. “Who is Sir Phillip Dolbear?” she asked.

She listened while he told her the whole story. “You see,” he said at last, “there isn’t any proof at all—it just rests on my estimate. I was on my way to Labrador to find out if the fracture at the tailplane of the crashed one is crystalline—if it supports the theory of failure in fatigue. They never meant me to do anything like this. They’ll all be very angry about it, I know. But it seemed the only thing to do.”

“It
was
the only thing to do,” she said gently. “It was playing safe. Captain Samuelson isn’t angry about it. And after all, he’s been flying nearly thirty years and he does know about things.”

He shook his head. “I told them they’d do better to send someone else. I always do this sort of thing all wrong.”