The Rainbow and the Rose (26 page)

‘We oughtn’t to be doing this,’ she murmured. ‘Not in the hangar. You’ll lose your job.’

‘Wives’ Trades Union,’ I laughed. She laughed with me. ‘We won’t do it again. But this is a special occasion.’

I had had her Alvis checked over at the garage and made clean for her, and I had brought it to the hangar the day before when she was to have come home. She got into it, and it was just like the old days as I stood chatting with her at the window. ‘I’ll be out tomorrow morning,’ she said, ‘or I’ll give you a ring. I’ll have to see what’s happening in the domestic situation, but if it’s all under control will you come up for dinner tomorrow night?’

‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to fix up something now about the christening.’

She nodded. ‘I’ll see the vicar about that. I think he’ll do it privately for us, up at the Manor.’ I nodded. ‘I registered the birth, of course. In Cannes.’

‘What name did you give her?’

She smiled. ‘Brenda. Brenda Margaret. I thought she ought to have two.’

I went up to the Manor for dinner next evening. Already the spontaneous gaiety of her arrival had been dissipated by the constraints of Duffington. The vicar had proved difficult over the christening; apparently he disapproved of the whole thing. He said that her baby should have been christened in Cannes by the resident Church of England clergyman, and he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t been. He could not refuse baptism to a child presented to him, but he would do it in the village church and nowhere else. Brenda had had to explain to him the general position of affairs and the necessity to avoid a public scandal if she were to go on living there. He had said that in the circumstances he would require the permission of the bishop before baptising the child privately, and he would let her know. It had all been rather unpleasant.

She had rung up Dr Somers and had asked if her husband would like her to visit him. He had been reasonably cordial, but had warned her that the subject was a delicate one and he would have to approach it tactfully. He would ring her as soon as he had done so, probably before the end of the week.

I went back to the Seven Swans that night deeply troubled in my mind. It seemed to me that we had made a vast mistake in bringing her back to Duffington with her baby and that nothing but trouble lay ahead of us. It seemed to me that I should have insisted on a little house at Oxford or some place like that where no one knew her, even if it meant that I could
only see her once a week for a time. If we had done that, this christening trouble would not have arisen, for one thing. In Duffington Manor she was now living with my child in an entirely false position from a twisted sense of loyalty to her husband, and the worst of it was that I could see no way to put things right.

I had adjusted the rigging of her Moth and had test-flown it for her, and she came out and flew it for a time next day. It seemed to put her mind at rest, and she came down far more composed and cheerful than she had been when she had taken off. On the following day she came out and flew it again, but she had heard nothing from the vicar and nothing from Dr Somers. And that evening she rang me up just as I was leaving the aerodrome.

She said, ‘Johnnie, can you come up here at once? I’ve got to talk to you.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

She said dully, ‘Derek’s escaped. He got out of The Haven.’

‘My God!’ I said. ‘Where is he now?’

‘They don’t know. They’re out looking for him.’

‘All right, darling. I’ll be with you straight away.’

When I got to the Manor I heard the whole story, so far as she knew it. It seemed that there was a gate to the high-walled grounds of The Haven, an iron grille affair which was kept locked. That afternoon the gardener had unlocked it to push a barrow through; at the same time one of the nursing sisters of the women’s side of the place was fiddling unskilfully with the motor of her car in the garage about fifty yards from the grille. She moved a chafed lead, and the horn began to sound and went on sounding – loud, raucous, and continuous. The staff of The Haven knew from past experience that sudden noises such as that can excite a proportion of mental patients and make them almost unmanageable, and the gardener dropped everything,
left the grille open, and went to help the sister stop it. It was over an hour before they discovered that Derek Marshall was no longer there.

Later that evening they discovered that he had pawned his silver cigarette-case in the city for twenty-five shillings, and had vanished in the rush-hour crowds.

It was bad, any way you looked at it. My first concern, of course, was for the safety of Brenda and her baby, not to mention her mother and the nurse and cook. ‘I’ll sleep here tonight,’ I said. ‘You’d better have somebody around.’

She shook her head. ‘There’s no need to do that. He won’t come home.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s the first place they’d look for him. I saw a policeman in the garden just before you came in, down by the summer-house. Didn’t you see him?’

I shook my head.

‘He’ll keep right away from us,’ she said. ‘He’s only got to stay free for a fortnight.’

‘I’ve heard something about that,’ I replied. ‘After a fortnight he’s regarded as sane, isn’t he?’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘If he stays free for a fortnight, then he’s got to be re-certified.’ She paused, and then she added, ‘I don’t think Dr Somers would certify him – not unless he does something bad.’

‘Do you think he will?’

She sighed wearily. ‘I don’t know, Johnnie. Not in the next fortnight, anyway.’

I asked, ‘Have you got any idea where he’d be?’

She shook her head. ‘Anywhere. He may have some old army friend who’d hide him for a fortnight. Even a relation. I don’t know.’

I took her hand. ‘Look, dear,’ I said, ‘this puts the lid on it. You can’t stay here. This is his house, after all, and he’ll come back here in a fortnight when he’s free to do so. I’ll
slip down to Oxford tomorrow and find somewhere for you to go – a furnished house, if possible, or else a flat. You’d like Oxford, wouldn’t you?’

‘It won’t do, Johnnie,’ she said sadly. ‘It just won’t do.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘It’s the only thing we can do.’

‘I’m his wife,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

‘He agreed to divorce you. You wouldn’t have been his wife by this time; you’d have been married to me. But he’s not right in the head, and he went back on it. We can’t go along on those lines, dear. They’re crazy lines.’

‘I know they are,’ she said. ‘Some day perhaps we’ll get them straightened out. But in the meantime, I’m his wife, and this is where I’ll have to stay till he comes home.’ I was silent, and presently she said, ‘Perhaps when I see him I’ll be able to talk him round.’

I could not move her from that, however hard I tried, and presently I left her and went back to the village. As I drove down the drive of the Manor a dark figure came forward out of the bushes to stop the car, and I pulled up. It was Sergeant Entwhistle, of the police.

‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. ‘Are there any other guests in the house?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was the only one.’

‘I’ll just go in, then, and make sure the windows on the ground floor are all fastened, and the doors,’ he remarked. ‘We don’t want any trouble in the night.’

‘Are you expecting him?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘Not unless he’s a lot crazier than what they say he is,’ he replied. ‘He’d be too cunning to come here. But there’s no harm in making sure.’

That was the twenty-eighth of April, and the fortnight would be up on May 12th. On May 13th Derek might be expected to show up if they hadn’t caught him before, an appropriately unlucky date, it seemed to me. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it, though. I tried once
more to make Brenda go away with her mother and the baby, but I only succeeded in annoying her. The nurse, not liking the atmosphere, gave in her notice and left.

She came out to the aerodrome every morning to fly her Moth, and that was good for her, and seemed to ease her mind. She chose the mornings rather than the afternoons because there were seldom any people at the aerodrome on week-day mornings, and there had been a story in the newspapers about Derek’s escape from The Haven, with a photograph of him. Apart from these visits to the aerodrome I don’t think she left the grounds of the Manor at all. She didn’t come on Saturday or Sunday because of the people, but I got her Moth out for her on Monday morning when the club was normally closed. There was so little I could do for her.

Throughout that fortnight the tension grew, till it became nearly unbearable. I know that she was taking sleeping tablets of some sort. I didn’t do that myself because drugs and flying don’t mix very well, and I used to lie awake most nights till two or three in the morning. On top of the anxiety and the suspense over Derek, I had a terrible feeling that Brenda was growing away from me. Our aims were different. I wanted her to leave her husband and become my wife in fact, if not in law. She wanted to stay with him, not because she loved him but because she had an ethereal sense of duty, almost like a nun. I knew that she was terrified of his return, but she was moving away from me to face it upon planes that I could not reach.

She came out to the aerodrome on the morning of the 11th. She seemed completely normal, went to the club house to change into her boiler suit, and came back to the machine. I had it out upon the tarmac and I was in the cockpit running up the engine for her; I was doing everything I possibly could for her at that time, myself. She went into the office for a moment and came out again to the machine. I throttled back and got out, and she got into it
without speaking. She fastened her belt, smiled at me, and taxied out to take off.

I watched till she was in the air, and then went back into the office. There was a note there on my desk. It read:

I dashed out on to the tarmac, with a ghastly feeling of disaster in my throat. She was coming over the aerodrome now at seven or eight hundred feet, flying straight and level. Then, as I watched, she throttled back the engine, pulled the nose of the machine right up, and kicked on full rudder. The Moth hesitated for a moment, and then fell over in a spin.

I breathed, ‘Oh God … please … no!’

I stood watching her in horror. At three hundred feet she was still spinning, and I shouted to the men to get the crash wagon. The elevators were still hard up, the rudder hard over. Then she centred the controls and the machine stopped spinning and went into a straight dive, gathering speed quickly. She never made the slightest effort to pull out. She hit the ground near the far hedge with a dull thud and a splintering noise of wood, and as I ran I heard the crash wagon start up behind me.

For the second time that night I woke from a bad dream. I was sweating and trembling, and for a time I didn’t know where I was. I thought that I was in the small hotel that I had lived in in New Delhi, where I had woken up in that way practically every night. Brenda was dead, and now the baby was dead, the only part of Brenda that was left to me. I had killed her baby by neglect for I had gone away to India and left her, left Brenda’s baby and mine. Mine
was the guilt, and my punishment was to go on living in loneliness and shame.

I stirred, and reached out for the letter from Mrs Duclos to read it for the hundredth time, though I knew every word by heart. It wasn’t there, and my torch wasn’t there, either. There was something vertical and unfamiliar. As consciousness came back to me I realised my hand was on the standard of a table lamp. In my misery I fumbled about with a trembling hand until I found the switch and got it lit. I lay blinking in the flood of light. I was in Johnnie Pascoe’s room, and everything was quite all right. I hadn’t just seen the girl I loved dive in. I wasn’t in New Delhi. I hadn’t killed her baby by neglect. It was a bad dream, a nightmare. I was Ronnie Clarke, and it was quite all right.

I lay there with the light on, gradually calming down. I was Ronnie Clarke, and Sheila was waiting for me back at Essendon, and Peter, and Diana. It was all right. Presently I stirred and looked at the wrist-watch on the table by my side. It was only half past twelve, and I had set the alarm clock for five. I had had a few hours of sleep, though whether it had done me much good was another matter. I had a job of hard and difficult flying to do at dawn when I should need to have all my wits about me. There was still time for another spell of sleep, but I knew I shouldn’t get it till I had composed my mind. The one thing that I wasn’t going to do was to take another Nembutal.

Presently I got out of bed, put on Johnnie Pascoe’s dressing gown and bedroom slippers, and pulled the bedclothes up to the pillow to keep the bed warm. I felt in the pockets of the dressing gown and found his packet of cigarettes and his box of matches. I put a cigarette into my mouth and took the matchbox from the other pocket. There was only one match left in it. I struck that with fingers that were still clumsy and trembling, and the head broke off short.

There was another box on the mantelpiece in the sitting
room, that I had used to light the fire. I went through, and stood rooted in the doorway, sick with horror. The fire had been made up and was glowing red, but all the lights were out. And there, in the firelight, in the white boiler suit that she had worn the day she died, curled up in the armchair and asleep, was Brenda Marshall.

I suppose I made some exclamation, made some noise, because the girl in the armchair stirred and sat up. The white boiler suit melted away and resolved itself into a white starched dress, a sister’s dress. The short, curly, reddish brown hair that I had expected wasn’t there when she sat up into the firelight; this girl had darkish, wavy hair, shingled at the back. The face was different, too; vaguely familiar, but quite different. It wasn’t Brenda Marshall at all, and I had been a fool.

She brushed the hair back from her face, and stood up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I must have dropped asleep. Are you Captain Clarke?’