The Atlantic Sky (16 page)

‘Why, I’d love to!’ said Patsy. ‘But I can’t. You see we’ve only got a three-day stand-off ... and anyway I can’t ski, and ev
e
n if I could I haven’t got
any skis or a ski-suit, only slacks...’

‘That’s all right,’ said Mrs. Hitchin. ‘No need to have a suit, and you can hire skis. It’s a deal, eh?’

Patsy smiled and nodded.

‘We’ll call for you tomorrow, then,’ Mr. Hitchin said. ‘A couple of days in the mountains is just what you need!’

‘Sure is,’ Mrs. Hitchin echoed.

They both regarded their first guest with considerable satisfaction. ‘We’re on the phone up there,’ Mr. Hitchin said. ‘So they can call you if they want you. In fact,’ the Canadian wound up, ‘there just isn’t any excuse we’ll take. Except that you don’t want to...’

‘I’d love to,’ Patsy said quickly. ‘And thank you very much.’ She stood up. ‘And now I’ll just go to the back and get an extra blanket. You might get an hour or so’s sleep.’

And then, as their reading lamp, too, went out, Patsy sat herself down in the rear seat and, leaning her chin on her hand and her elbow on the armrest, gazed out at the clear night sky.

She didn’t see the tall quiet figure moving down the blue
-
lit aisle among the sleeping passengers. But she did hear Captain Prentice’s voice, as he said, ‘Admiring the scenery again, Miss Aylmer?’

But this time his voice was gentle, and she wondered if she’d been mistaken before in thinking that unsmiling face sarcastic and unkind. Now he leaned a little forward and rested his hand on the back of her seat, so that he could look out at the same patch of star-filled sky. ‘That’s Altair,’ he said, and pointed at one small glittering point among a thousand. ‘Sometimes the navigator uses that for sextant shots ... remember?’ He smiled a gently teasing smile that carried her back to the classroom. Only with a difference.

Here was a hazard of the North Atlantic ... new and unforecasted ... the greatest hazard of all that they never taught you anything about.

‘And there’s Vega.’ His hand was so near her shoulder that if she’d leaned a little back, she would have touched it. And she couldn’t see Vega, or any other star for that matter. She could only see that profile, so close to her own. She didn’t want any lecture on stars or sextant shots or navigation. She just wanted to stay here, in the middle of the Atlantic, the only two people awake in this sleeping cabin, and see his face and hear his voice.

Just for a moment, it was exactly like that. His hand still rested on the back of her seat Their two profiles were etched against the starlit porthole. Except that there was silence. A curious companionable silence, that was neither embarrassing nor troubled nor watchful. The sort of silence when, if it hadn’t been on board an aircraft, if it hadn’t been between two people in uniform and on duty, and worst of all between a captain and his stewardess, one hand would have stolen over the other, and the companionship would have been complete.

Then he suddenly straightened. ‘Bring some sandwiches up with the tea, would you, Miss Aylmer?’ he said quite kindly, and the peace and the dream were shattered together. Stars and silences and quiet companionship and he was only thinking of sandwiches!

‘Ham or cheese, sir?’ she asked, but he was already walking away. At least, his feet were. As far as he himself was concerned, they were already millions of miles apart. Yes, she thought, pressing her nose against the porthole for one last look, further than Vega or Altair or whatever their names were. As far as the tiniest pin-head of light which her eyes could see.

She got up and stretched and walked rather wearily back to the galley, and, mechanically and half-heartedly, began to lay the flight deck tray.

But after they landed at Dorval airport in Montreal, and after she had caught up with her sleep, life began to look quite different. There was a wonderful sharp tang in the air, the streets were bathed in bright pale winter sunshine, and the sky above the clean-looking buildings was of an unbelievable blue. Looking out of the hotel bedroom window, Patsy began to look forward to the two days up in the Laurentians, and to hope that Mr. and Mrs. Hitchin were serious about the invitation and would, as they had promised, come round and pick her up.

And things could hardly have worked out better. For at just the right time of half-past ten, when Patsy had had her breakfast and put on her suit and her soft blue sweater and packed her slacks and done her hair, the telephone rang.

For only the space of two seconds did she hope that the voice would be deep and firm and English. And then it was the next best thing. ‘Hi,’ said Mrs. Hitchin. ‘We’ve parked right outside. Come along down! Or aren’t you ready yet?’

Patsy said she was absolutely ready and wasn’t it a wonderful morning, and certainly she’d be right down.

Then better still, as she stepped into the elevator with her small suitcase in her hand and her big off-white chunky-looking coat tossed elegantly around her shoulders, she was aware of a dark head and a massive pair of shoulders towering above the seven or eight tightly-packed occupants of the lift. The alert eyes took in every detail of her, she was sure, before she had time to say, for some reason a little breathlessly, ‘Good morning, Captain Prentice, isn’t it a ...’

‘All face front,’ the lift-boy said crossly, and Patsy obediently turned, so that her shoulder was wedged somewhere in the region of the Captain’s very English tweed jacket, and the top of her head was just level with his shoulder.

‘Going somewhere?’ Captain Prentice asked very distinctly in her ear, ignoring what had been the beginnings of a remark about the beauty of the morning.

Patsy nodded her head vigorously.

‘Where to?’ He asked it so sharply that their immediate neighbours slid their eyes sideways in their direction.

‘To the Laurentians ...’ Patsy murmured, wishing that she could see his face.

‘Mezzanine,’ said the lift-boy, but nobody moved.

There was a long pause.

‘Street level,’ said the lift-boy, and clanged open the gates.

‘In that case—’ Captain Prentice began, as they moved forward on to the foyer floor. He glanced with only passing interest as Mr. and Mrs. Hitchin and nodded at their smiles—‘don’t forget to leave your address with Operations.’

He began to move away.

‘Isn’t that the Captain?’ Mrs. Hitchin asked, coming up and taking Patsy’s hand and saying it was just grand that she was coming.

Patsy nodded.

‘Then maybe he’d like to come along as well. There’s plenty of room, and we like lots of young people around.’

But Patsy shook her head. ‘No,’ she said decisively. ‘He wouldn’t come if you asked him.’ They both watched the large figure making its way across the crowded foyer. ‘There’s a girl in England ...’ Patsy murmured. ‘He doesn’t go out with the crew at all.’

Mrs. Hitchin slowly transferred her bright eyes to Patsy ‘Oh, I get you,’ she said. But got it all quite wrong. Instead of saying nice for her, or nice for him, or some such remark that showed it didn’t really concern either of them, she took Patsy’s hands in her own gloved ones and squeezed them hard, and with typical Canadian warm-heartedness said confidently, ‘Oh, never mind! We’ll just have lots of fun, and forget all about that, eh?’

And certainly it wasn’t the Hitchins’ fault that it didn’t work out that way. For everything was laid on, from snowcapped mountains and quaint ski lodges with brightly painted pine walls to luxury bathrooms with scalding water and unobtrusive but welcome oil-fired central heating.

And the ski instructor with his enormous black sweater covered with the heads of elks, and shoulders that were only a size smaller than Captain Prentice’s—he made the first steps look like child’s play. But next day, on her hired skis, and with the Hitchins and their friends already swooping away and out of sight, Patsy discovered what a child must really feel like.

Then after a whole morning of feeling as though she’d got a couple of five-bar gates on her feet, Patsy slowly began to get the hang of it. The slope looked even easier, and it wasn’t difficult if you kept going the same way.

And then suddenly, coming down almost parallel to her, but far faster than she was going and rapidly converging on her path, was a flying swift-moving figure. It waved her to move to one side, to turn, to stop. There was one moment when she could feel the particles of snow flying against her face. She felt herself knocked sideways with a great rushing flying gust. Something that felt like the tip of a ski seemed to crack down hard on the back of her head, then she was falling ... falling ... falling into layer after' layer of black cotton-wool.

When she opened her eyes, the sun was shining. But it was shining in horizontal stripes that lay tigerwise across a neat white bed. Patsy blinked her eyes. The polished pine walls of the ski lodge seemed suddenly to have been painted white. The Hitchin’s guest-room bed had turned from a quilted luxury divan to a neat white box with a white-painted iron frame, and a wooden board at the bottom. The window, too, was no longer a large picture one that framed the snowy side of a mountain, but prim and rectangular and equipped with Venetian blinds.

‘Oh, no!’ she gasped, putting up her hand to her head and feeling a bandage.
‘No
!’

But as if in that clinical stillness her horrified whisper had been a shout of defiance, the door opened. A smiling nurse popped her head round the door, and before Patsy had time to ask anything, said in her friendly Canadian voice, ‘I’m Benson. What price the bronze medal?’

Patsy had just had time to pick up enough skiing jargon to know she meant the beginners’ speed-trials prize.

‘Am I—?’

‘In hospital?’ the nurse said briskly. ‘Sure.’ She picked up the chart at the bottom of the bed, and said, ‘What d’you think I am ... a nightmare?’

Patsy grinned rather feebly.

‘And in case you don’t know how long you’ve been asleep,’ the nurse went on, ‘it’s still Tuesday. Afternoon, not morning. And how are you feeling?’

Patsy said she was fine. She lay back in the pillows and gazed up at the ceiling while the nurse took her pulse and her temperature. Rather muzzily, she was trying to make lightning calculations.

‘Before you ask,’ the nurse said, blinking her shrewd brown eyes, and taking advantage of the thermometer in Patsy’s mouth, ‘a Mrs. Hitchin said she’d telephoned Dorval and that you’re not to worry. She sent in a bunch of flowers and a box of candy’—the nurse broke off to whip the thermometer out of Patsy’s mouth—‘and if you’re good, you can have a visitor tomorrow.’

‘No other message?’

The nurse shook her head. ‘Sorry.’

‘They ... er ... didn’t phone from the airport?’

‘I guess your friends took care of that. They said they phoned Dorval and everything was fine at that end.’ She smiled very firmly and very reassuringly.

And I can guess just how fine, Patsy thought, leaning back restlessly on her pillows. The stand-by stewardess called out. The roster moved up one ... and Christmas coming on.

Christmas! She’d forgotten. She sat up in bed. ‘How long will I be here?’

‘Four or five days. Maybe longer, I guess.’

‘Four or five days! Then I’ll be here over Christmas?’ She put her hand to her mouth. Now the whole situation became terribly and hopeless confused. Not only the roster, but the whole complicated financial situation began to worry her. ‘What have I got?’ she asked, feeling her head again, and then trying to move the different parts of her body. Hands, arms, neck, ribs all right. But how about further down?

‘You’ll live,’ the nurse said with professional vagueness, and then Patsy felt her ankle. A bang on the head and what felt like a badly sprained ankle. She lay back and sighed.

There was Christmas at home gone and her parents’ disappointment, to say nothing of all the fuss and bother she’d have caused.

What wouldn’t she give, she thought, to have someone come in and say
now you
’
re not to worry:
the roster’s all right: the stand-by is fixed up: with luck you’ll be home in a few days: accidents happen to anyone, and it was jolly plucky of you to try anyway: now forget everything: you’re sure you’re not in pain? Your room is quite comfortable? Someone with a strong, firm jaw she had in mind. Someone by the name of Robert Prentice.

And then, next day, when she’d just had a delicious lunch and her face was made up and her hair brushed, and she was feeling small and feminine and helpless in her austere little bed, the nurse was popping her head round the door and saying, ‘There’s a Captain Prentice to see you,’ exactly as if her thoughts had conjured him up.

He was in uniform, and he came into the sunlit room very slowly. With a pang, Patsy realised that in a few hours’ time he’d be taking off to England, and she felt a twinge of loneliness at being left behind. But at the moment, it was nice to lie there, and to look at him, and to feel touched and happy and reassured that he’d come to see her.

The nurse wheeled a little tubby armchair close by the bed, and giving them both a dazzling smile hurried out. Captain Prentice smiled and said thank you to the nurse, pulled the chair to a more comfortable distance from the bed, laid his cap and his gloves down on to the table and in a quiet, unhurried (almost uncaring) voice said, ‘How are you feeling?’