The Rainbow and the Rose (32 page)

‘That’s right. It’s better to leave it be when it’s like that.’

It was many, many years since I had talked to anyone about my marriage. In fact, I can only remember telling two people about it in my life before this girl, Arthur Stuart and Brenda Marshall. Arthur was killed a year later in Ferry Command taking off a Liberator from Prestwick. He had been easy to talk to, so had Brenda Marshall, and now this girl was another. There are some people that you don’t mind telling about painful things, but they don’t come very often.

That lunch set a pattern of many others. We fell into a habit of strolling out together on our morning in Honolulu after a late, lazy breakfast, to look at the yachts in the
yacht harbour, or the sampan fishing boats, or the shops of down-town Honolulu or Waikiki. She had a friend who was at the Queen’s Hospital, an ex-hostess of Pan American, and we lunched there once, and once or twice we went together to a concert in the Civic Auditorium. Several times I got a drive-yourself car, and we explored the nearer parts of the main island, lunching at Fisherman’s Wharf, Hanauma, or Waimanalo. It became an established habit that we would do something together once a week upon our day in Honolulu, a habit that was only to be interrupted when one or other of us was on leave. At Nandi in Fiji it was different and we didn’t go about together; at the airport we seemed more or less on duty all the time; I was the captain and they treated me as one. But in Honolulu we could get lost in the crowd, away from our responsibilities.

I came to look forward to these weekly outings very much indeed; I think she did, too. I never made love to her; perhaps I was too old. Perhaps I told myself that, like the water polo, I just didn’t want to do it. Instead of that, a very close companionship grew up between us. I never told her anything about Brenda Marshall; that lay too deep to talk about, but within a couple of months she must have learned practically everything else about me; she was easy to talk to. In return, I learned a good deal about her. Her life had been a simple melody of Melbourne and her grandmother, a melody of school, of visits to the seaside at Portsea and Barwon Heads, of cheerful comradeship within the hospital, of the great adventure of her trip to England. She never told me anything about her love affairs, however; like me, she had her reticences.

Although we didn’t see much of each other at Nandi apart from the work and the tennis court, which after all was just another sort of work, she was never much out of my mind. As soon as we had landed and rested on the Friday morning, I usually found myself planning things that we could do
together the following week in Honolulu. Very soon, of course, I got wise to myself. I was a silly old fool, for I was coming very close to falling in love with a girl less than half my age, at a time of life when I should certainly have known better. No future in that, I told myself. In all the years that had elapsed since Brenda Marshall nothing like this had happened in my life; that it was happening now was a sure sign of senile decay.

I tried to take a grip upon myself but it wasn’t very easy. One morning at Honolulu I told her at breakfast that I had to go down to the maintenance base at the airport, and I didn’t know how long I’d be; she’d better not wait in for me. She was surprised and obviously disappointed, which didn’t make it any easier, and I drove down to the base sick and angry with myself for hurting her. They were a bit surprised to see me at the base; I milled around there for an hour and asked a lot of damfool questions till I thought she would have gone out, and then went back to the hotel. I found her sitting disconsolately in the lounge reading a copy of
Time
, terribly pleased to see me, as I was to see her. I backslid then, of course. I had the car outside and we drove out to Kualoa on the east coast for lunch, and had a grand time together.

October came, and towards the end of the month I went on a week’s leave again. I went to Buxton and put up at the hotel. Nothing had changed since I was there before, either at the aerodrome or in my own affairs; my deadline for getting out of AusCan was now January the 31st. It was time that I made up my mind, with only three months left to go. I made it up. It was spring in northern Tasmania and the country was very lovely, fresh and cool and sunny after the hot humidity of Fiji, with wattles in bloom everywhere and everybody going trout fishing. I got myself one of the two solicitors in the town and the Shire Clerk got the other and we set them to draw up a lease of the hangar and the
flying rights upon the aerodrome, the latter based upon a very small percentage of my turnover. When that was all in train, I set myself to organise a house.

There were houses on the other side of the town available, but I wanted one upon the road that led to the aerodrome. I bought the last lot of a row of building sites, the one nearest to the hangar, and started my negotiations with the local builder. I wanted to buy three aeroplanes, and tools, and spares, and a reasonable second-hand car; that meant that there wouldn’t be a great deal of money left for a house. It would have to be a fairly small house of nine or ten squares, but I didn’t want a big one anyway. He had a book of designs of small weatherboard houses, and we went into a huddle together over that. I picked a house that was within my price bracket, and started to consider it in detail.

It had a large lounge, a kitchen, and two bedrooms, one very small and the other not a great deal bigger. Without admitting to myself why I was making the alterations I decided on meals in the kitchen as a regular thing, cut the lounge down till it was quite a small room, and doubled the size of the main bedroom. That made a reasonable house for an elderly bachelor, I thought, and the builder agreed with me. A weatherboard house goes up very quickly, and he was confident that he could get it finished in the time. I had a small camera with me and took a photograph of the amended plan so that I could think it over back at Nandi, and fixed with him that I would come on leave again about the end of December, by which time the house would be nearing completion and we could settle details of the fixtures and the decoration. Then we got on to the money side, and he told me who to see about a loan at the State Savings Bank in Hobart. I got an estimate in writing from him and signed a contract in the solicitor’s office, and paid him five hundred pounds deposit. I signed the lease for the hangar and the aerodrome, and then my business in Buxton was over for the time being.

I had the afternoon to spare before the bus left for Hobart at four o’clock. I wandered round upon the aerodrome with my camera, snapping everything I could think of, the hangar, the site of my house, the view from where the house would be, the shopping street of the small town – everything. I knew that next week when I was in Honolulu I should want to tell Peggy Dawson all about it, and that she would want to know; the Indian photographer in Lautoka would get this film developed and printed for me before Tuesday so that I could take the photographs to Honolulu with me to show her. With the views that I had taken and with the photographed plan of the house she should be able to get a very good idea how I was going to live, I thought.

I got to Hobart at eleven o’clock that night after seven hours of sitting in various buses or waiting at bus stops, changing at Devonport and Launceston. I got into a hotel and went to the State Savings Bank next morning, and put in my application for a loan. Then I went round Hobart looking at furniture, new and second-hand, and getting estimates. The bedroom furniture bothered me a bit because I was a silly old fool and nothing could ever come of it, but there was no harm in looking and finding out what the stuff cost.

I flew to Melbourne on an afternoon plane and saw Arthur Schutt again that night, and told him that I’d write to him with definite orders about Christmas time. After I had done with him I took a tram out to South Yarra, and walked around in the warm night, trying to visualise what her life had been among these quiet streets and houses. I found the house in which she had her flat, her
pied-à-terre
, and stood in the lamplit road looking at it from the outside for ten minutes. I was a silly old fool, of course, but I asked my way to the Queen Alexandra Hospital and went and had a look at the outside of that, too.

Next morning I flew to Sydney on the eight o’clock service of Australian Continental Airways. When I was in my seat
I saw a list of the aircrew posted on the door into the flight deck, and the captain was R. Clarke, Ronnie Clarke, that I had taught to fly at Leacaster so many years ago, in that wonderful year. I had been very happy then, and I was happy now, and here was Ronnie Clarke again. When we were airborne and the notice about seat belts had gone out and we were climbing upon course, I asked one of the hostesses to tell the captain that Johnnie Pascoe was on board and she went forward to the flight deck.

She came back at once with an invitation to me to go up forward. Ronnie made his second pilot get out of his seat, and I settled down by my old pupil, and the hostess brought me a cup of coffee. I was glad to see Ronnie again. He had been a commercial pilot practically all the time since I taught him to fly, first with John Sword and then with British Airways. In the war he had been in the R.A.F. for a time, anyway, because I remember flying him home from Burma in 1944 or 45. He joined Australian Continental soon after the war; he was married with two children. It was some years since I had seen him to talk to, and I enjoyed it. Sitting there together at the controls of the Viscount we exchanged news as we slid along past Eildon and Canberra towards Kingsford Smith. He was well dug in with Continental now, unlikely to make any change. I told him about my coming retirement and about Buxton, and what I hoped to do there. ‘Like going back to Duffington again,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ I replied shortly. I hoped it wasn’t going to be like going back to Duffington again.

We both had about three hours to kill at Sydney before he left to take the lunch-time flight back to Melbourne, before I got on to the AusCan flight to Nandi. He asked me to come up to the pilots’ room at Kingsford Smith and I said I would, and went back to my seat in the cabin as he started to lose height.

When we landed I went and made my number with AusCan on the overseas side, and then went back to have
another chat with Ronnie Clarke. I always liked Ronnie, and now he was one of the oldest friends I had; moreover he lived in a Melbourne suburb and I could see him from time to time when I went over to the mainland from Buxton. I wondered, as I walked back to the domestic side, how much he ever knew about my love for Brenda Marshall. I had a vague idea that he probably knew quite a lot, because he was always at Duffington in those months and he went to the inquest with his father. Another thing was that in all the years that I had known him, off and on, he had never spoken of her.

I had a cup of coffee and a plate of sandwiches with him in the pilots’ room, because I had missed my breakfast on the Viscount through sitting up front talking to him. As we sat together we glanced over the morning papers. There was a case going on in England against an unmarried girl and the newspapers were full of it in all its details. Essentially, it was quite a simple matter. The girl had borne an illegitimate baby. Wanting to get rid of it, she had left it on the steps of a Foundling Hospital in the traditional style; she had done that about midnight to escape attention. It was in a little basket with one thin cloth over it. It snowed in the early hours and then froze hard; when they found it in the morning it was dead from exposure. They were trying the girl for murder.

‘Looks like they’ll pin it on her,’ Ronnie said. ‘But she’ll get a reprieve.’

‘I hope she doesn’t,’ I said bitterly. ‘I hope she bloody well hangs.’ It ought to have been me, of course, and I should have hung, too, for I had gone to India.

‘That seems a bit severe,’ he said mildly.

I threw down the paper, for it had upset me. When you do a thing like that it’s done for ever, and you can’t undo it. You’ve got to live with your guilt for the rest of your life, even if no one ever knows. ‘People who do that sort of thing to their illegitimate kids ought to hang,’ I said vehemently. ‘The kids have a hard enough row to hoe anyway, without
being neglected. Without being just chucked away in the gutter because their parents don’t want them. I hope they throw the whole book at that bloody girl.’ As, of course, they should have thrown the book at me.

He didn’t answer that outburst, but turned the page. I sat gradually collecting myself, recovering from my temper and my shame. I lit a cigarette and sat staring at the runways outside the window, at a Skymaster taking off and a Dakota coming in. If Ronnie Clarke knew about Brenda and myself I had probably told him a bit more, but I didn’t really care. He was a very old friend now, and there are some things that a friend ought to know.

I left him presently, and went back to the AusCan office over the road. We landed back at Nandi about ten o’clock that night, and I was very glad to be there, hot and humid though it was after the southern spring. I walked up from the terminal buildings to the hostel. There was a light on in her room and I thought perhaps she might come out and talk to me, and so I went and had a whisky at the bar and sat for half an hour looking at the ancient magazines that I had seen before. But she must have been too far towards her bed because she didn’t come, and presently I went to bed myself, thinking of the photographs that I would have to show her in three days’ time at Honolulu.

I showed them to her next week, sitting on the terrace of the Edgewater Hotel with our soft drinks. She was very interested, as I thought she would be, and examined each of them quite closely. I showed her the alterations I had made to the design of the house upon the enlargement of the photographed plan. ‘The kitchen’s quite a decent size,’ she remarked. ‘Twelve feet by fourteen feet – from here to that chair …’ She measured with her eye. ‘That ought to be big enough. The lounge doesn’t look to be much bigger than that, though.’

‘Fourteen feet square,’ I said. ‘It’s easy to keep a room that size warm.’