The Atlantic Sky (21 page)

Patsy looked at the message before it—Weather Ship J was steaming towards their track, and so was an oil tanker. While in the air above these ships, a Belgian aircraft had altered course to keep their crippled aircraft company to the coast.

When the first, light came from the eastern horizon the two engines were still running sweetly, and a little way away just above them, they could see the navigation lights of the Belgian aircraft.

And somehow, its presence made it easier for Patsy to tell the passengers. She had tea and orange juice and coffee and slices of ham all ready. Then as soon as they began to stir, as the first dawn light penetrated the cabin, she went quietly forward.

‘May I have your attention, please?’ She was taking a few seats at a time to make her words heard above the engines’ roar. Quite cheerfully, she told them, ‘For some hours now, we have been flying on two engines. We can,’ she added, and mentally crossed her fingers, ‘if necessary keep airborne on one.’ There was a murmur, half disbelief, half admiration. ‘In any case,’ she added, almost off-handedly, ‘we are only just over an hour away from land. After breakfast,’ and she willed them to eat it slowly, ‘we’ll see the coast of Ireland.’

Because it was said in a matter-of-fact way, they accepted it so. Then Patsy clasped her hands. ‘Before that, though, I would like to go over again the emergency exits she pointed them out, ‘—the dinghy.’ She paused. ‘I have here a life-jacket.’ She slipped it over her head. ‘There is one under every seat. Just feel again, and make sure you know exactly where it is. All right, now. The inflation release is on the right ...
there.
But only inflate
outside
the aircraft.’ She stopped and smiled at them. ‘Not that you’ll need it ... and I can assure you there’s no cause to be afraid. You weren’t afraid when you were asleep, and now things are much better. We’re nearer land. We’ve got two very good engines, and if we
are
a bit slower, it’ll mean you’ll have lots to tell your friends when you
do
land. And talking of friends...’ she went on, ‘look out there! That’s a Belgian aircraft. It’s coming with us to the coast, just to keep us company. And there are ships, too, though you can’t see them, down there in the Atlantic, which have altered course to come near us in case we need their help.’ Patsy’s voice shook a little—not with fear, but with the emotion that the discovery of this fellowship of the air gave her. ‘But we won’t,’ she smiled confidentially. ‘And now,’ she straightened her white monkey jacket, ‘breakfast!’

For the next half-hour, the. passenger cabin was filled with the reassuring sights and sounds and smells of breakfast. Captain Maynard spoke over the loudspeaker to them. The crew ate their meal, and Patsy started to clear away. Then just as she filled up her sink, there was a rustle of excitement in the passenger cabin. Far down below them was the rocky tip of Ireland, sticking out of a muzzy bank of fog.

‘Half an hour more to London,’ Patsy said, and smiled. ‘Maybe less ... because I believe now there’s a tail wind.’ And out beyond their starboard wing, the Belgian aircraft, its job done, dipped one wing and then another in goodbye and started to climb up and away from them, into the cloud.

But it was this same cloud that grew thicker and denser. Gradually the gap in which they were flying, between the fog on the ground and the grey stratus above, closed relentlessly in on them, until finally it closed completely, and the Astroliner pushed its way forward to London through a clammy mass of mist.

When Patsy went up to the front to clear away the crew’s breakfast things, there was not the relieved air of homecoming that there was in the passenger cabin. The Radio Officer made a wry face at-her, and said, ‘Vile weather at London.’

‘Will we be going to an alternative airport?’ Patsy asked.

The R.O. shrugged his shoulders. ‘Everywhere’s just about as bad.’ Then he jerked his thumb in the direction of the two dead jets on the port wing. ‘Not going to be so good.’

She felt the nose dip. They would be descending now, flying towards the unseen ground. But the cloud did not lessen. Rain suddenly slammed in a noisy torrent all over the metal fuselage. The tail gently rocked from side to side. Then the left wing dropped slowly. They would be turning towards the runway.

The engine noise died down. They were going lower and lower. The Seat Belt sign snapped on, and Patsy saw that its order was carried out. Locked at the back like this, with nothing to do but watch the endless waves of rain and cloud lap at the porthole—imagining things, not knowing exactly what was going on at the front—was always the worst.

And yet, oddly enough, though Patsy knew the difficulties and the dangers of descending to an almost invisible runway in a heavy, crippled aircraft, she did not worry. Superimposed, it seemed, on the grey porthole beside her was the quiet, calm face of Robert Prentice—on top of the swirling mist and the torrential rain, and the wrath of the sky outside. She remembered Bill Maynard’s bitter words about the Training Captain insisting on practising two-engined flying—practice, practice, practice, for something that would never happen.

Well, it had happened now. And all that practice, practice, practice would be crystallized into the real thing.

Down and down they went, but there was no break in the wet curtain of cloud. The left wing dropped. The hydraulic pump whined out, and she saw the flaps emerge from their home under the wing. Craning sideways, to look ahead, she could still see nothing but the rain and the mist.

The tail gave a little tremor. The cloud below opened a wispy, indefinite mouth to disclose a small pink misty light—then another one: a chimney with a long scarf of fog flapping around it: a piece of glistening road: a hedge: and then grass.

The extended main wheels, which had been lazily turning in the unresisting air, suddenly began rotating ten times as fast against the hard surface of the runway. Lights flashed by one by one. Gradually the wheels slowed down to a stop. For a moment, the Astroliner stood quite still on the runway, before turning off to begin its cautious, lop-sided nosing through the mist between the blue taxi-track lights towards the Overseas Arrivals Ramp.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was just about the time of the mid-morning break. From the hangars, a steady stream of overalled men hurried towards the canteen. People sipping coffee in the passenger restaurant stared out unconcernedly through the huge glass windows at yet another arrival at London Airport. Everything was so familiar, so just as it should be, that if you didn’t think about it, the night before might never have happened. Only the group of maintenance engineers staring up into the two port nacelles, the extra-excited chatter of the passengers as they came down the steps, gave any indication that this was rather a different arrival from the others.

One other thing. Captain Prentice had been waiting beside their station on the ramp. As the aircraft swung into its position, Patsy had caught sight of his face, no longer just superimposed by her mind on the glass of the porthole, but there in reality—worried and anxious-eyed.

And after the cabin was empty, when she had left the aircraft, from the foot of the steps she saw him standing under the port wing, talking to Captain Maynard. As she walked over to the crew bus, she heard him say, ‘Good show, Bill!’

‘All I did was to do exactly what you drilled into me.’

‘And you found it worked?’

‘Are you asking for a reference?’ Out of the corner of her eye, she saw them both laugh. Pleasantly—with relief and humour and a new-found understanding, born of strain and danger.

She got into the car, and waited for the rest of the crew. Everyone was talking now, so her own silence went unnoticed.

It was warm and bright inside the Customs Hall and as usual the Customs Officer, so unlike his American counterpart, was pleasant, said
Good, morning, what a day,
and chalked her bag without opening it. Mechanically she got back into the car, and handed over her bar and stores and equipment to the Catering Section.

And then, off duty now and supposedly as free as the air around and about her, she still didn’t quite know which way she was going. The roadway was wet and full of black, oily puddles, but she didn’t notice them. She felt as though she were walking in a dream. Her head felt as though it were made of cotton-wool, and her feet didn’t belong to her ... so that she was only half aware of them as they walked and splashed once more through the puddles. Only her bag seemed to be real and that bumped against her legs and it weighed a ton.

Her bag, and something else. Inside herself, nothing to do with the bag or any other part of her, was a deep and miserable weight. It felt as though it would stay there and get bigger and bigger for the rest of her life. A weight of missed opportunity, of misunderstanding, of romance gone wrong that never was a romance to begin with. And if, as so often it did, this airline business rewarded you with moments of startling clarity, as it had done on this trip, they usually came too late.

For it wasn’t Robert Prentice who had discovered any new feelings about
her,
in what must have been (however little he cared for her personally) some hours of anxious waiting. But she who had discovered for perhaps the last time that the man she’d disliked and misjudged and misunderstood was the only person who had been consistently right.

And just to prove how right he was, all the passengers and Captain Maynard (who had misjudged him as well) and she herself were safe and sound at London Airport. Just because Captain Prentice had insisted that every captain and every crew member should be a hundred per cent efficient.

She remembered, as she stood at the kerbside and waited for a petrol bowser to go by, how he’d made Bill Maynard do that asymmetrical instrument approach over and over again. How she’d spilled the lunch as a result of it. How he’d gone on making him practise it on the under-supervision trip.

And now all her other grievances against him dissolved in the clear light of her sudden understanding. His brusqueness, his severity, his impatience with anything short of perfection.

Patsy wiped her hand across her face that was wet with the rain. The hand that held her bag was cramped and stiff, but she was only vaguely aware of it, because she was trying to put into words just what she’d say to him, if ever she was privileged to have a moment alone with him again.

So preoccupied was she that she hardly noticed when a hand took her bag away from her, a voice said, ‘In here. Mind your head, that car door’s a bit low...
’
And then she was suddenly wide awake, and sitting beside Robert Prentice in his rather out-of-date car.

Suddenly, she wasn’t tired any more. She felt as though she’d had a week’s holiday, a morning dip, or a walk in the hills. When she looked through the windscreen, the cloud curtain seemed to be parting, and, though perhaps no one else could see it, the sun was trying to break through. Even the pools and puddles along the roadway were glistening and colourful.

She tried to remember all the things she had been going to say and she couldn’t remember one of them. So she just smiled. And as though that was an infinitely satisfactory arrangement, Robert Prentice just smiled too. Neither of them said anything about the trip, the hours of waiting, or the anxiety. Instead, he said, ‘I know of a place a mile or so away where they serve late breakfast. I don’t suppose you’ve had any.’ And yet even in those mundane words, it was all there.

‘I’d like that,’ Patsy said, conscious as she did that if he had said he knew of a place where they could get octopus in ink or frogs’ legs in snail sauce or any of her pet aversions, she’d have liked that too.

They drove a little way in silence. Patsy clasped her hands on her knee. She didn’t need to talk. Just here in this car, with the rain now falling continuously and the tyres swishing on the road, and the wet, sodden, half
-
excavated landscape around London Airport marching slowly past them, was as near to heaven as anything she could think of.

Eventually they stopped at a small whitewashed house, which had been allowed to keep a small garden despite the building going on all around it, and which had a tired, now dusty creeper round its front windows. It had a sign
Teas
,
morning coffee. Grills.

‘Not very grand,’ said Captain Prentice, leaning across her and opening the car door. ‘But you’ll get good hot coffee
and some bacon and eggs.’ He looked at her in a curiously parental manner as though he’d like to feed her three square meals a day, and see she went to bed early and kept her feet dry.

‘It looks just what I like,’ Patsy said, because to her, anyway, and at this moment, it had indeed the look of a place where momentous words might well be said.

‘I often come here’ Robert Prentice told her, ducking his head to go inside the doorway, pulling off his cap and grinning at the old man who came forward and asked
‘Same as usual, sir?,
‘when I come off service.’

Patsy sat down at a table in the window. It gave a view of a neat little patch of grass and a border and a low stone wall. She frowned slightly as she pulled off her gloves and laid them with her shoulder bag on the window-sill.

‘Don’t you go home?’ she said gently.

He shook his head.

It seemed all wrong somehow that Robert Prentice should have no one looking out of the window for his return, no one to see that the bath-water was hot because he’d be tired after flying all night, or that his slippers were there, or his meal piping hot and just as he liked it. And as she thought that, he seemed so much less remote than the efficient, the ruthless, the authoritative Captain Prentice. The silence between them took on a newer, deeper companionship.

Then too, sitting with a pot of hot coffee and bacon and eggs between them, it would have been impossible for anyone to be remote. There was a curious homeliness about this place, with its three white-clothed tables, its papered walls and its chintzy curtains.

‘Feel better now?’ A small gratified smile played around his lips as he saw her well-cleaned plate.

Patsy nodded. ‘I’d no idea I was so hungry.’

‘Nor I.’

There didn’t seem anything else to say. She refilled his coffee cup, and then her own. She turned and glanced out of the window.

‘Patsy...?’ he said at last.

‘Yes?’

The old remote look was back again. A slight frown drew together his dark brows. With his table knife, he was drawing patterns on the white cloth. All the same, his voice was absolutely steady. Only a slight deepening of its tone, an added incisiveness of the words, showed any form of emotion. ‘Last night I made up my mind to say something to you.’ He looked up suddenly and his hazel eyes searched her face keenly. ‘Or rather’—he half smiled, a little ruefully, and seeing his mouth close like this, Patsy wondered that she could have ever thought it sarcastic or unkind—‘to try again to say ... something I nearly said before.’

With deep concentration, he completed the pattern on the cloth, Patsy could say nothing, because she was too much afraid. Afraid even to clear her throat (and it was desperately dry and choky) in case a noise or a word or anything would break the fragile bubble of this moment. When she still sat there, quite silent and quite still, he said, ‘Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes.’ It was a cracked and a husky little syllable that barely reached across the table between them. He looked up again. His eyes now were curiously protective.

‘And d’you still want me to go on?’ His voice was very deep, very measured, and yet infinitely gentle.

‘Yes.’ This time it was much louder.

Robert Prentice half smiled.
‘Quite
sure?’

‘Quite sure,’ Patsy said steadily. She held her hands tightly under the table.

‘I’m in love with you, Patsy.’ He said it quite steadily, quite calmly, and yet terribly humbly.

Patsy’s hands slowly unclasped themselves. ‘And I,’ she said, ‘... and I ...’

But she hadn’t got his wonderful control. The words clamoured and jostled in her throat, while tears and smiles and sobs and laughs mingled with them. Then she saw his face close to hers. She saw love in it. And she felt the comfort of it.

‘And I love you,’ she murmured. ‘I’m in love with you, too.’

Then she couldn’t stop saying it. However many times she repeated it, it would never tell him just how much. Until he walked round the table and drew her to her feet, and put his arms around her. Then, with his lips firm and warm and hard on hers, she knew that she didn’t have to say it any more. Nor he to her. It was part of him and part of her. And in that, they were no longer him and her, but one person together.

They stood quite still for a moment. There was no sound except the waterfall splash and splatter of the rain from the gutterings, the distant noise of an aircraft four or five miles away. From the safe harbour of his arms, she looked out at the low cloud and the grey rain, the earth-borne end of this morning’s blanketed air, and suddenly it seemed benign and friendly. She saw the two of them in different places and at different times staring out into the dark curtain of the cloud for each other—and in that searching, they had understood themselves and in that understanding, found each other.

For as surely as she loved him, she knew that the very qualities in him that she had set out to dislike ... the efficiency that at first had found her very much wanting, the discipline she’d longed to flout, the determination which had seemed too harsh ... had been the life-lines for her safe landing this morning, and for his at Heron Field.

Very gently, she pulled herself a little away from him and asked, ‘Was it this morning ... that made you tell me ... again?’

He smiled. ‘Partly,’ he said. ‘We hadn’t exactly got on very well before. Remember?’

She nodded.

‘And after this morning, the most important thing seemed to be ... to tell you,’ his voice was very low. ‘To hold you in my arms.’ He looked down at her. ‘But I didn’t need this morning to tell me that I loved you. I’ve always known that. I can’t remember a time since I knew you that I didn’t love you.’

‘Then you took a long time to tell me.’

‘You were very young,’ he said. ‘And very new. And I didn’t know how
you
felt. Up till a little while ago, you seemed to regard me as a cross between a slave-driver and a Captain Bligh!’

She laughed delightedly. ‘Which is just what I did! You see, I didn’t know at the beginning why you had to .. she hesitated for the right word, ‘be tough with us.’

He smiled rather wryly.

‘And then it seemed that you disliked me especially ... were
extra
tough with me. And I did feel angry
lots
of times.’

‘And then at Heron Field,’ he went on quietly, almost as though she hadn’t spoken, ‘you looked at me ... almost lovingly ... so that if it had been anywhere else or at any other time, I might have tried to tell you.’

‘Then you thought of Geoff Pollard!’ Patsy said quickly, and Robert Prentice’s brows flew up.

‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t know. Not then, I mean. I just know now. Things look awfully different when seen from the ... well,
loved
and
loving
side, if you know what I mean. For instance, I even don’t believe now that you were interested in Monica Fairways, after all.’ But she looked at him eagerly all the same.

‘And I should hope not, too!’ he said firmly.

‘You weren’t?’

‘Never.’ He gave her shoulders a little shake. ‘Nor you in Bill Maynard?’

‘Of course not.’ She smiled. ‘As Geoff used to say, the grapevine gets it a bit right and a lot wrong. All the same,’ she went on happily, ‘you put your foot down rather firmly about him seeing me in hospital.’

‘And a good thing, too!’

‘But it was nice of you to go and see my parents.’ Her voice trailed away, as her thoughts returned to her home and her family and to how it all began. ‘It seems a long time since I came here,’ she said softly. ‘A lot seems to have happened ... and I’ve learned a little...’ but she wasn’t thinking about Mr. Crosbie’s excellent lectures or Mr. McWhirter’s engineering skill, or even about Robert Prentice’s lucid explanations on meteorology and the route. She was thinking of men and their curious make-up, and love-affairs and their tortured ramifications, and herself and all the unknown mixture of liking and disliking, of love and fear and hope and joy that seemed to be her.