Shute, Nevil (11 page)

Then he said: ‘You want to hurry up and get away, Mr. Corbett.’

The solicitor nodded. ‘I’m going this morning.’ He paused, and then asked gently: ‘What will you do?’

‘I got to . . , make arrangements for her.’ There was a short pause. ‘And after that I’m going back into the Army. I’m not that old, and I was a company sergeant-major in the Machine-Gun Corps last time. They got new guns now, I hear, but I could soon learn them.’ He paused. ‘I figured it out when I was sitting up there with her last night, and the bombs going and all. And I thought she’d want me to go back into the Army, like I was before we met.’ He was silent for a moment.

‘So I’ll be all fixed up, Mr. Corbett. But you want to think of your family, and get them away out of this.’

Joan appeared then, with the children. Littlejohn went away and Corbett, cooking a second breakfast for his family, discussed the position with Joan. ‘I’ll take the silver and your jewel-box down to the bank first of all,’ he said, ‘and get them to store that for us. Then I’ll come back with the car, and we’ll get off to Hamble as soon as we can. You’d better get your packing done while I’m away.’

She nodded. ‘But we must have some more milk to take with us, I’ve only got two tins left. See if you can get any in the town. And we’ll want some meat.’

He laughed. ‘What about a bottle of fizzy lemonade?

She laid the dish down, and laughed with him. ‘I can’t believe it. Like a sort of picnic!’ She went on laughing, and he laid his hand upon her arm.

‘Stop that,’ he said.

She pulled herself together. ‘I’m sorry, Peter.’

He smiled. ‘Would you like to see what Littlejohn gave me this morning?’

‘What was that?’

He pulled the automatic from his pocket and showed it to her; the light shone on the blued steel. She turned it over curiously. ‘Is it loaded?’

‘No. I do know that much about it.’

She glanced at him, smiling. ‘Peter, do you know how it works?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve seen Humphrey Bogart with one often enough–—’ They examined

it together. ‘I believe the empty cartridges come popping out of here.’

He paused. ‘He was so-so genuine. I couldn’t possibly refuse to have it. What shall we do with it?’

‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘I like to know it’s there.’

He washed and shaved, packed the silver and Joan’s jewellery in a wooden box, locked it, carried it out to the car, and drove down to the bank. In the city he noticed listlessness for the first time. The new damage was extensive, but the repair squads were few in number, and weakly manned. They were mostly soldiers of the Royal Engineers; civilian labourers were in the minority. He saw a good many shops damaged and open to the street, with nobody to guard the goods.

He found the bank manager exactly in his normal guise, spotlessly dressed, pink-cheeked, and with a flower in his button-hole; ‘Just room for one more in the strong-room,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Of course, you understand that we take no responsibility for risks directly or indirectly attributable to the war. You see, that is quite clear on this form of receipt. Would you mind signing here?’

Corbett signed. ‘What’s my balance to-day?’ he asked.

A clerk looked up the figure. ‘A hundred and nine pounds, fifteen shillings and fourpence, Mr. Corbett.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll take the hundred and nine pounds in notes. As many ones as you can give me.’

He pocketed the money, and then turned to consider his stocks. He had a few small English securities, and about fifteen hundred pounds in the Canadian Pacific Railway. He sorted out the share certificates of that, put them in a separate envelope, and took them away with him.

In the street near the bank there was a lorry selling milk, without bottles or cartons. He went into a ironmonger’s shop and bought an enamel hot-water jug holding about a gallon, had it filled, and took it to the car. His search for food was not very productive, but he got a piece of bacon about seven pounds in weight, a few more tins, some baking-powder, and some more flour. Bread seemed to be unobtainable.

‘The men won’t work,’ they told him at one baker’s shop, a little ruefully. ‘All they think about is getting out into the country with their families.’ Corbett laughed. ‘You surprise me.’ The girl was nettled. ‘Well, I mean to say, somebody’s got to make the bread, haven’t they?’ He did not attempt to answer that. He went to his office, and let himself in with his key. The building was still intact, though every window had been smashed; papers and carpets in the rooms were wet and sodden. A few, a very few, letters had been thrust in at the letter-box; he could not wait to attend to them, and laid them unopened on a table. There was no sign that anybody else had been there since he had left. He tried the telephone; it was dead. He locked the office door and went away.

He drove back to the house. Joan had packed two suitcases and put them in the hall; Corbett went up to his room and packed a few clothes for himself. Then they took the luggage out to the car with all the food that they had in the house, and a large quantity of blankets and pillows.

Mr. Littlejohn arrived in his car and drew Corbett on one side. ‘I got seven cans of petrol,’ he said quietly. ‘Fourteen gallons. You want to take them with you-I got them for you. But put them somewhere where they won’t be seen. Petrol’s not to be had for love or money in the town to-day, and if some of the rough chaps saw you with all that … well, they might make trouble, and you don’t want that. But you’ll need petrol.’

‘That’s terribly good of you. How did you get hold of them?’

‘Never you mind where they come from, Mr. Corbett. Same place as the pistol. You got that all right?’ Corbett nodded.

‘Better keep that with you, Mr. Corbett. Not that you’ll ever need it, or anything of that. But there’s a lot of the rough lads out and about what don’t care nothing for nobody, if you take my meaning. But they’d keep right away from anyone they knew carried a gun. See?’

Corbett said: ‘What about you, Littlejohn? Can we help at all?’ He glanced towards the house

The builder shook his head. ‘I got the undertaker coming this morning,’ he said. ‘Don’t seem like it was her at all, somehow… . And her sister Aggie, from Millbrook, she said she’d look round.’ He shook his head. ‘You can’t do nothing, Mr. Corbett, thanking you all the same. You want to get away. Soon as I’ve seen her put away I’ll be going down to join up.’

Corbett went back into the house. Joan had packed the children’s clothes; he carried them out to the car, now stuffed as full as a removal van. Then he went back into the house.

‘How much can the children take in the way of toys, Peter?’ she asked.

He hesitated. ‘Nothing very big.’

They went up with the children to the nursery. He asked Phyllis: ‘Which of the dollies are you taking on the boat with you?’

‘Mary and Teddy. And we’ll take the dolls’ house, Daddy?’

‘Not the dolls’ house. Big girls don’t take dolls’ houses on boats with them. Take Mary and Teddy.’

‘May I take my engine, Daddy?’

‘Yes, you can take that.’

‘And my tricycle?’

Joan said: ‘We’ll come back and get the tricycle another day. That’s enough toys for you. Now for a few books.’

They took Peter Rabbit, and Jemima Puddle-Duck, and When Jesus Was a Little Boy, and Nicodemus and his Gran’-pappy’, and, by special request, Ameliaranne at the Circus. And they took a disreputable wooden horse for John, and the wooden bricks with letters on them, and a vehicle consisting of a pair of wheels and a bell that tinkled when you pulled it along. They took a couple of woolly animals for the baby. And they took the hot-water bottles, the one that looked like a rabbit for Phyllis and the one that looked like Donald Duck for John. Then they went downstairs.

They took the children and the baby out to the car, left them there, and went back into the house for a last look round. ‘It’s hateful to be leaving it,’ said Joan, a little sadly. ‘We’ve had a good time here.’

She went into the drawing-room, cavernous and dark behind the boarded windows, and picked up a little ebony elephant from the dusty, littered mantelpiece.

‘I want to take this with me, for remembering,’ she said.

Corbett laid his hand upon her arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said gently. ‘It’s rotten having to leave home like this. But we’ll be back before long.’

She gazed around the room and shook her head. ‘I’m not sure of that,’ she said quietly. ‘I think we’re going for good. I don’t think we shall ever come back here again.’

The village of Hamble lies upon the Hamble River, a tidal tributary of Southampton Water, about six miles as the crow flies from Southampton. In the last century Hamble was a fishing village; by 1914 it had become a prosperous centre for the building, fitting out, and laying up of yachts. In later years an aerodrome, a seaplane station, and three small aircraft factories came into being near the village, while the yachting industry increased enormously. In consequence the village spread out in a rash of villas, clubs, and week-end cottages.

Peter Corbett kept his yacht, the Sonia, at Hamble. She was not the sort of yacht worn with white duck trousers. She was nearly forty years old, a gaff-rigged cutter with a straight stern and a long old-fashioned-bowsprit, based upon the style of the fishing-smacks belonging to the east coast village where she had been built. Her hull was low in the water and painted a dull black, her sails were tanned, her decks painted with buff paint which made them tolerably water-tight when the paint was new and unbroken in the spring.

He used her in the summer for week-ends in the Solent, and for an annual short summer cruise westwards down the coast. Joan and Peter sailed her normally alone, sometimes with a friend or two. On very fine, hot, calm week-ends they would take the children on board and drive her to Seaview for a bathe, under the power of her ancient engine, noisy and difficult to start, converted from a Model T Ford of a bygone age. She was an aged dirty little boat, not very sound, but Joan and Peter thought the world of her. She was their hobby and their holiday, deep-laden with sweet memories of escape from their routine.

As a permanent residence for two adults, two children, and an infant, her accommodation was not impressive. From the bows, she had a forecastle where a water-closet stood starkly between the chain locker and the cooking galley. The galley was served by two Primus stoves, one of which carried a rusty tin cooking oven. A water-tank of about fifteen gallons’ capacity was clamped to a bulkhead; a little crockery was stored with the frying-pans and saucepans in a cupboard. Aft of the forecastle the saloon was furnished with a settee berth on either side and a swinging table in the middle, with one or two small lockers beside the settees. A paraffin lamp in gimbals swung from the bulkhead. Aft again, one passed up on deck into the cockpit by means of a couple of steps forming the fore end of the engine-cover, removable to permit the flywheel to be cranked, knuckles to be damaged, or, occasionally, arms to be broken. On either side of this contraption were the head ends of two very narrow berths, the feet of which extended aft under the cockpit seats. In summer-time these berths were filled with odd lengths of old rope, sails, damp towels and bathing-dresses, solitary canvas shoes bereft of their laces, mildewing straw sun-hats.

Corbett had paid two hundred pounds for her six years before. It was a lasting wonder to him that two hundred pounds could have bought so much happiness.

For the winter he laid her up in a mud berth in the salt marshes of the estuary, where he could come and potter about on her in the short daylight hours of Sunday afternoon, and where an aged fisherman kept an eye on her in stormy weather. He had stored her sails and gear with a local yard; her mast and standing rigging he had left in place. Her dinghy was stored in the yard. At high tide he could get at her with a boat, but at low water the depth of mud made access to her difficult, if not impossible.

As he drove his overloaded car through the streets of the malodorous, stricken city that morning in March, Corbett was not depressed. It takes a very little thing to lift the spirits of a man. He was leaving his home for an indefinite time, leaving his house, his business and his office ruined and abandoned, flying with his family from death by high explosive or disease, journeying towards a future all unknown. And yet, his heart was light. Routine was broken; there would be no more drafting of conveyances for a time, anyway. The sun was shining after the rain of the night. He had a hundred pounds in his pocket. And, above all, he was going to his boat.

He began to hum a little tune as he drove the heavy car. Joan looked up at him in surprise, troubled and still clinging to her elephant. Then she smiled a little, and relaxed. If he was happy, things would be all right.

She touched him on the arm. ‘We’d better have some sweets for the children. If you see a shop open, let’s stop and get something.’

He nodded, shifting in his seat; the automatic in his coat pocket was hard to sit upon. ‘All right. We’ll make a picnic of it.’

She laughed. ‘I must say, it’s a relief to get away. I was getting to hate it-and that awful trench, every night. It’ll be fun, being on the boat.’

He nodded. ‘We ought to have come before.’

He turned off the main road down a lane towards Hamble village. The lane was choked with Royal Air Force lorries; driving behind one and meeting many others they made slow progress. As they approached the aerodrome they saw that there was much activity. The road ran along one boundary for a short distance; Corbett ran the car off the road on to the grass verge and stopped to watch.

He knew that the aerodrome was the home of a training school of some sort. He did not take much interest in aeroplanes, but the scores of small machines with yellow wings which infested the air round Hamble made the function of this place unmistakable. But now the aerodrome seemed to have been turned into a base for a fighter squadron, or several squadrons. Near-by a breach had been made in the hedge that separated the aerodrome from the road, and through this breach the lorries ground and swung, to lurch across the grass to where a city of tents was growing up in an adjacent field. Along the hedge the low-wing monoplanes were parked, grey-green in colour, single-seaters with retractable undercarriages and cellon hoods over the cockpits. There were a great many of them. From where he sat Corbett counted over fifty picketed down along the edges of the aerodrome; there were several in the air. In the adjacent field, and round the aeroplanes, men were swarming in an orderly bustle of improvisation. Engines were running up; a singing grind came from a workshop lorry. An empty petrol-tank lorry came lurching out of the aerodrome and joined the traffic of the lane.