The Rainbow and the Rose (15 page)

‘There
is
a bed,’ I said, ‘and it’s got a mattress on it, but no bedclothes and no pillows, and it’s all a bit dirty. She’s welcome to that, but you’ll have to rustle up some bedclothes for her.’

He thought for a moment. ‘I’ve got a sleeping bag,’ he said. ‘I think she’d better use that. You don’t mind if she sleeps in the house with you?’

‘Not if she doesn’t.’

‘It’ll make it a bit more convenient for getting out early in the morning if she’s there with you,’ he said. ‘She’s just
going to have supper. Be all right if I bring her down in about an hour?’

I hesitated. ‘That’ll be all right,’ I said at last. ‘I’m sleeping in Johnnie Pascoe’s room, and I’m going back to bed now. That’s the room on the left as you go into the passage from the living room. She’ll be sleeping in the room on the right – I’ll leave the door open. The thing is – it’s rather important that I should be on the top line tomorrow morning and I want to get a really good night’s sleep. I’m going to take a Nembutal. When you come in, try not to make a noise.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a Nembutal, have you? I can let you have one if you haven’t.’

‘No, I’ve got all I want,’ I said. ‘Just try not to wake me up when you come in. I’m setting an alarm clock for five o’clock, and I’d like to sleep through till then.’

I rang off, and stood for a moment looking round the room. I was wakeful and thirsty, and the thought of another whisky crossed my mind. Alcohol, however, is a stimulant and might not be a very good thing to take if one wanted the hypnotic drug to work. A glass of milk would be better, and I went through to the kitchen and found milk in the refrigerator, and came back to the living room with a glass of ice-cold milk and a couple of biscuits.

Cold milk. Cold milk at a party. Ice-cold milk with Crème de Menthe. What bell did that ring in the distant past? Something to do with flying, certainly – but what? Ice-cold milk and Crème de Menthe? What pilot had that been?

And then it all came flooding back into my memory, the inquest that the Coroner, my father, had held on Brenda Marshall after she died in the hangar of the club. Me sitting in the body of the court and Johnnie Pascoe on the witness stand, and Dad asking him questions about the accident, and writing down his answers all in longhand so that the enquiry stretched out, painful and apparently interminable. ‘Have you any reason to suppose that the
deceased had taken any alcoholic liquor before she went up on this flight?’ And Johnnie Pascoe answering, ‘No, sir. As a general rule, she never drank anything but cold milk in the clubhouse. Sometimes in the evening at a party she would drink a Crème de Menthe, but I never saw her do that before flying. I shouldn’t think that alcohol had anything to do with it.’ Johnnie Pascoe on the witness stand, the pilot instructor, bronzed and athletic, very grave and serious.

Brenda Marshall.

I crossed the room and stood looking at the photograph again, immersed in memories. It must have been taken in 1930 or 1931, about the time I learned to fly. I remembered the Moth behind her in the photograph so well. She had it painted white, and because the registration letters were G-EMLF she called it Morgan le Fay. Over her shoulder in the photograph I could see the beginning of the word Morgan, painted below the engine.

Johnnie Pascoe had taught her to fly in 1930, the year before he taught me. Brenda Marshall, with her short, curly hair, her shy and friendly smile, her white flying suit, her Moth. Brenda Marshall, who was kind to everyone, who made a home for her sister’s baby when her sister had to go to India with her husband. Brenda Marshall, at Duffington aerodrome in 1930. Brenda Marshall, of Duffington Manor, the big house in the village. Brenda Marshall, who had had bad luck with her husband, who lived alone in the big house with her mother till her sister wished the baby and nurse on her. Brenda Marshall, the first woman I was ever in love with, though I was eighteen and she nearly thirty. Brenda, that everybody in the Duffington club had been in love with including Johnnie Pascoe, pilot instructor. But nobody knew that but me, I think, and I never told a soul. Brenda Marshall, who had taken me up in the front seat of her new Moth one day and let me fly it, long before I learned to fly officially.

I blew a long cloud of smoke as I stood looking at the photograph twenty-eight years later. At that time and for some years afterwards it seemed to me that Dad had never been so stupid. He could be very dense sometimes. Before the inquest I had tried to make him understand something about aeroplanes, with the superior knowledge of about five hours’ solo to my credit. I had said to him that the accident needed a good deal of sifting and investigation; she had got into a spin at six or seven hundred feet right over the middle of the aerodrome, and that sort of thing just didn’t happen to an experienced pilot like Brenda Marshall. But Dad had been pig-headed and legal that day, and had refused to listen to me. He just said that aeroplanes were very dangerous things for women pilots, that she must have fainted, and that anyway I couldn’t possibly know what had happened in the machine. He had taken that line at the inquest, too. He had asked the standard, rather stupid, questions about the airworthiness certificate of her Moth and about the validity of Brenda’s licence and about her general state of health, and he had written all that down in longhand. He had examined Dr Haughton who had given him an account of her multiple injuries, two broken legs, fractured pelvis, three fractured ribs, fractured right forearm, fractured jaw, and fractured left clavicle, and had told us that the cause of death was shock, and Dad had written all that down. He had examined the police sergeant who turned up on a bicycle just before she died and had a long account to give that told us nothing, and he had written all that down in longhand, too.

By that time the inquest had lasted for an hour and a half, and I suppose Dad felt that he had done his stuff. He shuffled his papers together and announced that after a full investigation of this very sad affair he found that the deceased had met her death by accidental causes in a flying accident. He expressed the sympathy of the court with the dead woman’s mother and with her husband who was shortly
to come out of hospital. With that he closed the court, and at home he refused to discuss the case with me at all. As he had been so stupid about it all, I didn’t pursue the matter. Soon after that Johnnie Pascoe left Duffington to take a job with Imperial Airways in India and the club got another pilot instructor. Her mother went away and took the baby with her but it died a short time later, someone told me. Within six months there was another tragedy at Duffington when Derek Marshall who had had shell-shock in the war and had been in and out of hospital ever since, got himself involved in a particularly unpleasant case of rape and blew his head off with a shotgun. After that the house was sold and some people called Forsyth came to live there, who bred goats.

It was years before it gradually occurred to me that possibly Dad hadn’t been so stupid after all. But he was dead by that time, and I never had a chance to verify my hunch.

The cold milk was beginning to work, and I was feeling more relaxed. I stubbed out my cigarette and went into the bedroom, glass in hand, and found the little bottle of hypnotic pills in my haversack, and swallowed one down with a mouthful of milk. The unmade bed was beginning to look inviting, but I went back to the sitting room for a few minutes to stand by the fire and finish my glass of milk. The time was half past nine.

Johnnie Pascoe, I thought, must know much more about Brenda Marshall than I did, because I had seen him kissing her in the half-light late one evening in the hangar, behind the Blackburn Bluebird. I remember that evening particularly because it was the evening she came back to Duffington from France. She had been away in France for the whole of the winter, and in those months her Moth had been down at Heston for a C. of A. She had stayed in London for a few days on her way home, and had picked up her Moth after its overhaul and flown it home. When she came back
to Duffington that April afternoon we had none of us seen her since the previous September, and it was grand to have her back. I was in the air with Johnnie Pascoe doing dual when she came in. He saw her first, a little speck in the south-east just above the horizon, coming towards us, and we flew to meet her, and turned and flew alongside her Moth in formation, waving at her as she waved back to us. From the air we watched her landing and landed ourselves immediately, cutting short my lesson, and taxied in behind her. I hung around till dusk examining her Moth after we had pushed it into the hangar, because it had had Sperrys put in it at the overhaul and I wanted to ask one or other of them how you used them. But they were both too busy to have time for me. It hurt a bit to see him kissing her although I was able to laugh at myself, for she was nearly thirty and a married woman and I was only just eighteen. But they both looked so happy I was glad for them, and after all her husband had been in the loony-bin for years.

I stood there wondering, as I had wondered for the last two years since chatting with him in the pilots’ room at Sydney airport, whether the baby had been his, the one that died. When I was eighteen it never entered my head and if it had it would have been incredible. But now, with greater knowledge of the world, I wondered …

Presently I finished my glass of his milk, went back sleepily into his bedroom, threw off his dressing gown, and got back into his bed. The Nembutal was beginning to work, and I was drowsy now. The time was about twenty minutes to ten. His travelling alarm clock was on his bedside table by my side; I reached out for it and set it for five o’clock. With any luck now I could get to sleep before the doctor brought the nurse into the house, and I settled down upon his pillows with his bedclothes round my shoulders.

Twenty-eight years later, for Johnnie Pascoe the wheel had come round the full circle, for he was now a pilot instructor
at a little flying club again teaching young men and women how to fly an Auster or a Tiger Moth. Successive waves of sleep were passing over me and sinking me down into forgetfulness of present things, and as I went I wondered if he had ever had another pupil such as Brenda Marshall. I knew how it had happened; it was all as clear as if it had been yesterday. She lived with her mother in the big house at the entrance to the village, and she drove an Alvis sports saloon. In a way she owned the aerodrome because it had been requisitioned in the war from one of her husband’s farms, and the Air Ministry were still leasing it. For a year after I arrived in Duffington I saw nothing of her. I lived at the hotel, the Seven Swans, and I was busy working up the club, and I was getting most of the enterprising young men and women of Leacaster as members. I knew the Marshalls’ car and I knew who she was by sight, and I had heard that her husband was in some hospital. It was a surprise to me when the Alvis drew up outside the hangar one bleak morning in January and she got out. I had never spoken to her but I knew that in a way she was our landlord, and I went out of the office to meet her.

She came towards me. ‘It’s Captain Pascoe, isn’t it?’ she asked.

I smiled. ‘That’s right.’

She said, ‘I’m Mrs Marshall.’

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I’m very glad to meet you.’

She said, ‘I ought to have met you a long time ago, but we don’t go out a great deal.’ She hesitated, and then said, ‘I felt I must come down here and see what’s going on. After all, we’re such near neighbours.’

‘I’d like to show you everything there is to see,’ I said. The January wind whistled around us from the north. ‘Would you like to come into the office? There’s a coke stove in there. We’ve got a fireplace in the club room, but we don’t light the fire unless we know that there are people coming out. Only
the week-ends. Things go a bit flat in the winter in a flying club, you know – although the hours are keeping up quite well. We did a hundred and five hours in December.’

‘That’s splendid,’ she said vaguely. I showed her to the office, and the hot air and the stink from the coke stove hit us like a blast, She threw back her fur coat. She was bare-headed, and the short reddish-brown curls were massed all over her head, boyish. She was rather pale, and I thought she did not look well.

‘Have you got a lot of members here?’ she asked.

‘Two hundred and ten flying members,’ I told her, ‘and about three hundred associate members. Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Oh, please don’t bother.’

‘We usually have one about this time.’ I went out and spoke to the ground engineer, and asked him to slip over to the clubhouse for another cup, with a saucer, unusual in the hangar. Then I went back to my visitor and found her standing in the office door looking at the aircraft. ‘They’re so much bigger when you see them close up,’ she observed.

‘These two are Moths,’ I told her. ‘That’s a Bluebird.’

She walked over and looked into the cockpit of the nearest Moth. ‘All these clocks mean something, I suppose …’

‘That’s the most important one,’ I said. ‘Tells you how fast you’re going. Have you ever flown?’

‘Just for ten minutes, about two years ago,’ she said. ‘A man was here giving joyrides.’

‘Would you like to go up again?’ I asked. ‘I can take you up any time. We charge two pounds ten an hour.’

She brightened. ‘Could you do that?’

‘That’s what we’re here for. We could go up this morning, if you like, but you might enjoy it more when it’s sunny. I’d like to take you, any time you say.’

She looked out of the hangar door; it had begun to rain
a little. ‘I’d love to go up again, but it’s a bit piggy now. I’d like to go when you can see something.’

I laughed. ‘Quite frankly, Mrs Marshall, so would I. Creeping along in the rain just above the tree tops, trying to find one’s way back here by recognising the cows, isn’t really my idea of fun. There’s a change forecast for this evening, though. We might get a fine day tomorrow.’

We went back into the office for our tea. ‘Esmé Haughton’s a member of this club, isn’t she?’ she asked.

‘The doctor’s daughter? She’s been doing quite a bit of dual. She’ll be going solo in a week or two.’