In the Wet (9 page)

From the bed Stevie spoke suddenly. He said, “This place on Dorset Downs?”

“That’s right,” I told him. “We’re near the Dorset River, about fifteen miles from the homestead. Where you live with Liang Shih.”

He muttered inconsequently, “I was born near here. My Dad was a drover.”

It was queer how fact and hallucination were mixed up in his mind. It was entirely credible that his father had been a stockman or a drover, as it was incredible that he had married a girl from Oxford. I would remember the address
that he had given me at Canberra, but it was most unlikely that he had a wife and family living there. And then I thought, it really didn’t matter. I could find out about him from the Post Office, because he drew a pension once a month. Some Government office would have most of the particulars of his life; indeed, Sergeant Donovan probably knew a good deal about him. I should only have to ask the sergeant.

“I’m sick, aren’t I?” he asked. “On Dorset Downs, up in the Gulf Country?”

“That’s right,” I repeated. “We’ll get you into hospital tomorrow.”

“There’s one thing you can do, cobber,” he muttered. I bent to catch his words. He said, “Send a telegram to Rosemary at Letchworth. Air Vice-Marshall Watkins. Got that, cobber? Air Vice-Marshal Watkins. Say to see Air Vice-Marshal Watkins, ’n the R.A.A.F. ’ll fly her up to Group at Invergarry, ’n she can come on in one of them helicopters.”

It was all delusions, of course, a hotchpotch of war memories. Invergarry was real enough. It was a bomber station in the second war, from which the Liberators had flown against the Japanese in Timor and New Guinea. I knew it as two vast bitumen runways in the bush, that would endure for ever. No aeroplane had landed there since 1946, except perhaps the ambulance to take away some injured stockman. There were no buildings there, no installations, and no people; nothing but wild pigs and wallabies.

“I’ll see to that in the morning,” I said quietly. “Now try and get some sleep.”

It seemed to me that he stirred restlessly in the darkness. “I got to get in touch with Rosemary,” he muttered, and it seemed to me that he was sobbing. “I got to get to
her. This ain’t real. She’ll get me out o’ this.…”

There was nothing I could do for him. I sat holding his hand, and listening to him sobbing in the darkness. Death sometimes comes in very distressing forms. After a time I asked him, “If you can’t sleep, shall I ask Liang Shih to make you another pipe?” I knew that Sister Finlay would allow it, if it would give him rest.

“I don’t smoke a pipe,” he muttered. “Never did. I
got
to get to Rosemary.”

He lay twisting and turning on the bed in his delirium, so far as the paralysis would allow. I had a raging thirst; half in a dream I got up and went to the table—I think—and took a long drink of the muddy water. As I moved across the room I seemed to be gliding in mid air; I could not feel my feet upon the ground or hear my movements, and when I picked up the glass I could not feel it in my hands. I was intolerably hot and my body was streaming sweat; my clothes were drenched, and sticking to me with each movement, and I could not think very clearly. After I had had the drink I went fumbling around to try and find my torch, because I wanted to switch it on, to look at Stevie lying on the bed. In my feverish state I had a strange thought that it wasn’t Stevie who was talking, and though with my intellect I knew this to be nonsense I wanted to switch on the torch and look at the old man. But I couldn’t find the torch, and then it didn’t seem to be important any longer, and I went back to the chair and sat down again, holding his limp hand.

He was still restless, muttering something incoherent. I bent to hear what he was saying but I could make no sense of it, though I heard the name Rosemary again. I straightened up wearily and sat there in a daze. His insistence on the name worried me. It was just possible that some part of all this rigmarole was true, and that he really
had a wife called Rosemary who had been born in England. My lips were thick and dry again in spite of the drink that I had taken, too parched to speak, but I managed to ask him somehow, “How did you come to meet Rosemary?”

The drumming of the rain upon the tin roof was insistent, too loud for me to hear his weak voice, but he answered, “I got sent to Boscombe Down after the war. And then I got sent to White Waltham. I met her at the Palace.”

In my fever I asked him, “What Palace?”

“Buckingham Palace,” he said. “Where the Queen lives, cobber.”

I knew with my intellect, of course, that this was nonsense. He was delirious, and I was not much better. I knew it was all rubbish, but I was too dazed and fuddled to be able to think clearly why it should be so. I sat there holding his hand, thinking that presently Sister Finlay would wake up and hear what I could not, that he was talking, and she would do something to relieve me. In the meantime, I could sink into the daze, and we could go on talking without speaking; it was easier that way.

“Where’s Boscombe Down?” I asked.

“In England,” he said. “West o’ London.” He said that it was where new aeroplanes for the R.A.F. were tested in flight. In a dazed stupor I remembered that this man had been a pilot in France in the first war, so it was possible that he had been to such a place. He said it was a very big place on an aerodrome, staffed by many engineers and scientists, all testing these aeroplanes. The pilots were a mixture of every nationality in the British Commonwealth because each country used to send its best pilots to Boscombe Down, so that there were British and Canadian and Australian and Rhodesian and Indian pilots, and many others, all working together test flying these aeroplanes and living in the same mess.

I sat there, feverish and confused, listening to his fantasy while the rain drummed down upon the roof, drowning all sound. He said that he had been there for about six weeks, flying on some experimental test flight every day, when he first met Group Captain Cox. He had done a job early in the morning which had involved a climb to eighty thousand feet in an experimental fighter followed by a long dive down to a lower altitude, but the refrigeration had been unsatisfactory and he had had to pull out and reduce speed at forty thousand feet as the temperature in the cockpit became unbearable. He went up and tried it again, and managed to hold the dive down to thirty-two thousand feet; he landed after an hour and ten minutes in the air, very exhausted. He wrote some notes for his report while the details were still fresh in his mind, and went back to his quarters for a shower and a change. Then he went over to the mess for lunch.

There were three Australian pilots on the course at that time, one from the Navy and one other with himself from the Air Force. In the ante-room he saw the other two standing with the C.O. and this strange Group Captain. The C.O. called him over, and introduced him to Cox. “This is Squadron Leader Anderson.”

The Group Captain was evidently English, and an officer of the old type, lean and soldierly and handsome, with perfect manners. “Morning,” he said. “I’m in the book. What are you drinking?”

He said, “Tomato juice, sir.”

“Flying this afternoon?”

He shook his head. “I grounded my thing for a refrigeration check. It’s got to go into the hot hangar; it won’t be ready till tomorrow.”

“Have a sherry, then.”

“No, thanks. I never do.”

He found that the Group Captain was interested in the work that he had been doing on the fighter, and wanted to know a good deal about it. Quite early in the conversation David Anderson became mindful of security and parried one particularly direct question skilfully by turning it into a joke, which made the C.O. and the Group Captain laugh, not altogether at the joke. “
It’s
all right, Anderson,” the C.O. said. “You can talk to him.”

“Everything?”

“Oh yes, everything. We’re not afraid of him.”

They lunched together, and in conversation it became evident to David that the Group Captain’s main interest lay in the flight trials of the new de Havilland 316, later to be known as the de Havilland
Ceres
. This was of interest to the Australian, too. Before he had left Laverton to come to England for this course, David had had an interview at Canberra with the Australian Minister for Air. The Minister had told him about this new mail carrier which was then beginning its flight trials in England, and he had told him that the Australian air line, Qantas, had placed an initial order for six of the new machines to expedite the air mail service from England. Because of this order, and because the aircraft might be interesting to the Royal Australian Air Force for other purposes, the Minister had written to the Air Ministry in London to request that Squadron Leader Anderson should participate so far as possible in the flight trials of the aircraft while it was at Boscombe Down. So far, David had had nothing to do with it.

He spent that afternoon, however, with Group Captain Cox and with the firm’s test pilot examining the new machine in the hangar. The mail carrier was designed to fly from England to Australia with one stop at Colombo, which is almost exactly halfway between London and Canberra. The cruising speed of the machine was about five hundred
knots at fifty thousand feet, so that the journey from England to Australia would be completed in about twenty hours, carrying three tons of mail. The manufacturers, with an eye to other markets for this fast, long range aeroplane, had designed the fuselage to be sufficiently large to carry twenty passengers in lieu of freight, so that the 316 was quite an interesting aircraft capable of a variety of uses.

It was not until the evening that David Anderson discovered the identity of the officer with whom he had spent the afternoon. At dinner in the mess he asked the C.O. what appointment this Group Captain held; he was still slightly troubled about security, because he had been talking to him very freely.

The C.O. said, “He’s the Captain of the Queen’s Flight. Didn’t you know?”

David shook his head. He knew vaguely that the post existed and that it had to do with the air travel of the Royal Family, but he knew little of the organisation. “What is that, sir?” he asked. “Do they have their own aeroplanes?”

The C.O. shook his head. “Not now,” he said. “They used to in the very early days, but now they charter machines for their journeys from one of the Corporations, or borrow them from the Royal Air Force. It’s nominally an independent organisation paid for out of the Privy Purse, but nowadays there’s not much more than a typist charged up to the Royal Family. Cox is an R.A.F. officer, of course.” He paused. “They’ve got a hangar at White Waltham aerodrome still, and a little ground equipment. The Prince of Wales had an Auster there at one time, but I think he’s sold it now.”

David had not been in England long enough to know all the aerodromes, and he had never been to White Waltham. “That’s a civil aerodrome, isn’t it?” he asked.

The other nodded. “Near Maidenhead. It’s quiet for them there, and close to Windsor.”

In the fortnight that followed, David saw a good deal of Group Captain Cox. He found himself allocated to the flight trials of the mail carrier next day, and Cox was evidently deeply interested in the machine. When David began to fly in it on trials as second pilot he found that Cox was frequently a passenger in the bare fuselage behind him with the scientific test observers and their gear. Several times when the test work was over and before landing, at the instigation of the Chief Pilot, David slid out of his seat and the Group Captain took his place to fly the 316 for a time. He was a very good pilot still, though he had grey hair and he was well over fifty years of age.

When this had been going on for about a month, David was mildly surprised to receive an invitation from the Group Captain to dine with him at his home. He lived in a small Georgian house in Windsor, standing in about an acre of ground that adjoined Windsor Great Park, so that the house looked out over a wide expanse of park land, and a herd of deer grazed up to the garden fence. It was a very stately little house, beautifully kept and very well furnished; it was a Grace and Favour house. Here Frank Cox lived with his wife and family of three young children, in a dignified and gracious way of life that David had never seen before.

It was a somewhat formal dinner party, conducted with such ease that it did not seem formal to the Australian. The other guests were a Major and Mrs. Macmahon, and a sister of Mrs. Cox. Macmahon was a man of forty-five or fifty, cast in the same mould as the Group Captain, a pleasant man with easy manners but with quite a keen business sense, and widely travelled. He had evidently spent some time in Australia and could talk about it with some
inner knowledge; David did not learn who he was or what he did, and wondered about it a little.

Like many test pilots, David was a keen sailing man. Since he was likely to remain in England for a year, he was planning to buy a small five ton yacht and to keep her in the Hamble River, and he was about to clinch this deal. He found that both Macmahon and Cox were yachtsmen, and this made a bond and enabled him to keep his end up in the conversation on that topic. They talked a good deal about flying, too, and about the recent war when he had been an acting Wing Commander in charge of an Australian bomber squadron operating from Luzon. Altogether, the evening passed very pleasantly and quickly for David Anderson; it was a surprise to him to find at the end of his cigar that it was eleven o’clock, and time for him to take his leave and drive back to Boscombe Down in his small sports car.

A week or ten days later he got a letter from the High Commissioner for Australia instructing him to call on the Commissioner at Australia House, and giving him an appointment in the afternoon. Somewhat surprised, and wondering what this was all about, he took the day off and went up to London, and was shown into the office of the High Commissioner, a Mr. Harry Ferguson. He had met Mr. Ferguson for a few minutes formally when he had arrived in England, but he had not seen him since.

Mr. Ferguson got up from his desk to greet him. Like all Australians, he believed in using Christian names. “Come on in, David,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to see you.” He made him sit down in a comfortable chair by the desk, and sat down again himself, a heavy, genial man in a grey business suit.