Unusual headwinds delayed the eastbound. Belinda brought his dinner on the flight deck with a very proper, ‘Fresh salmon, Captain Harker’, and a shielded sensuous little smile. He pretended to be busy and waved it away. He didn’t feel like eating anyway.
They were an hour late arriving over Heathrow Airport. Then they were held in the stack, gradually being brought down by thousand-foot levels to land on instruments in visibility just above limits.
The Citroën was drawn up in its usual place by the kerb outside Operations. Harriet was waiting patiently in the front passenger seat. As he came out, he caught a glimpse of her in profile, shoulders sagging, paler than he remembered, older by far, it seemed, than when he’d left her. Then he saw her give a quick uncertain glance at herself in the mirror as she spotted him, a glance which somehow pierced him more sharply than his guilt.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ he said as he climbed behind the wheel and leaned across to kiss her.
‘I didn’t mind, so long as you came … eventually.’ She said it quite nicely but with a certain soberness as if he might not have come. He felt guilty. The old uncertainties began to stir, and with them an anger against Harriet that was unwarrantable.
She sensed it immediately. Damn it, she always did. She looked sideways at him as he shoved the key in the ignition with irritated force.
‘You’re not angry, are you?’ She touched his left hand as it rested on the wheel.
‘No. Of course I’m not angry. Why should I be?’
Harriet shrugged. ‘My phone call perhaps,’ she suggested as he started up and pulled away from the kerb.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Nice to hear your voice.’
‘You didn’t sound as though it was.’
‘Phones are deceptive.’
‘You sounded quite put out.’
‘I was surprised.’
‘More than surprised.’
‘Anxious perhaps. I tell you, I thought the house had burned down.’ He gave a hollow laugh that deceived neither of them. ‘Or Colin had got his promotion. Or Jane had done something . . something Jane-like.’
‘Jane’s fine.’ Harriet relaxed into a smile. ‘She said she’d come home for her birthday.’
‘Bloody decent of her,’ he said bitterly. ‘Well, I’m not rolling out the red carpet.’ His lips tightened into a thin straight line as he threaded his way through the airport traffic and into the neon-lit tunnel. ‘She’ll get sweet FA from me.’
‘You are angry.’
‘With Jane, yes! Bloody angry! Bloody, bloody angry!’
‘No. With me, too.’
He could feel her studying his profile in the unkind tunnel lights.
‘Not with you, damn it, Harriet! With her!’ He felt himself sweating with anger and discomfort. ‘ That daughter of ours doesn’t know she’s born.’
With a certain relief, he drove out of the tunnel, round the roundabout and headed into the westbound stream. He felt as if he was simultaneously escaping and entering a prison.
‘Here she is,’ he exclaimed, ‘brought up in a loving family. No money problems. No problems, period. And what does she do? She throws it all away!’
‘She feels she has problems.’
‘Well, she hasn’t. Take it from me, Harriet …’ He put his foot down hard on the accelerator, and cut across into the fast lane. I wonder if she ever thinks there are hundreds of girls who would give their eye teeth for loving parents and a stable home like hers.’ His voice for some reason shook slightly. An alien wistfulness had crept into it.
Harriet, ever-perceptive, shot him a searching glance. But she looked away again almost as quickly, and said nothing for a moment. Then with deliberate lightness, ‘ Oh, I don’t know about that!’
About to open his mouth and say ‘Well, I do!’ he stopped himself. He frowned at the road ahead and then said, all heavy-father, ‘ Well, let’s not talk about Jane. Any news of the better half of the family?’
‘Colin?’
‘Yes, Colin.’
‘One letter while you were away. Usual scrappy scrawl.’
‘But he’s all right?’
‘Fine. Doing splendidly. The ship’s in Hong Kong.’
‘Lucky him!’
‘He says he spent most of his time ashore, shopping.’
‘I went shopping,’ Paul began, then stopped. A vision of Belinda and himself, hand in hand, had come into his mind with devastating clarity. It was followed by a vision of Belinda in the blue-bedecked white peignoir. He frowned, leaned forward and fiddled with the air-conditioning until the vision cleared.
‘I bought you a present, darling,’ he said and smiled falsely at the tail-board of a lorry ahead.
‘Oh, Paul! That was sweet of you.’ Harriet was genuinely touched. ‘Especially as you must have been tired and New York hot.’ Even at fifty, Harriet still occasionally blushed. Now a dark rosy colour stole over her cheeks.
‘Bloody hot! Stifling. And wet. But I wasn’t so far from the shops. And I didn’t feel so tired. I do now.’
‘Poor you!’ She smiled at him gently. ‘But you won’t have to go out again for some time.’
Being the Flight Captain, and in his office dealing with the paperwork on the crew and the route, he did less than half the trips of a Line pilot. Of this Harriet approved, because he was at home, even if it was on a nine-to-five office basis.
‘Don’t know about that,’ he warned her, ‘summer schedule.’
‘But you’ve also got a Check in three weeks’ time.’
Harker squinted at the curve coming up on the road ahead. Like all pilots, he hated these regular checks of his flying ability – like having your licence under perpetual potential suspension by the Inquisition. But all he said was, ‘Well, I’ll have to do a trip before then.’
‘Don’t be too eager,’ Harriet pleaded. ‘They won’t pay you any more.’
‘Counting overseas allowances, they do.’
‘And you look as though you could do with a rest.’
He almost said and so do you – something he had learned from past experience never to say to Harriet. Instead he substituted, ‘ It’s the double trip that gets you. Hungry too.’ Suddenly he remembered the shapely, white little hand holding the tray of salmon. ‘Cabin staff were too busy to feed us properly.’
‘Well, lunch is all ready. Then maybe you’d like a nap.’
‘Naps are for old ladies.’ He smiled, but her suggestion irritated him.
‘You’ve often had one after a morning arrival.’
‘But I don’t want one now.’
She shot him another glance. ‘Would you like me to drive?’
‘Of course not! Driving doesn’t tire me. I could drive in my sleep.’
He gave a huge yawn, knowing she would now leave him in peace to digest his uneasy fragmented visions of Belinda – and his uneasier visions of his ageing self – until they reached Maybury and home.
They drove westwards in silence, skirting the Chilterns, then moving closer to the Thames. The red gash of Reading showed up on the left, but beyond were the green fields and gentle slopes of Pangbourne and then the village of Maybury.
The church showed up first, the spire coming up like a sword from the trees. Then they came up to the Wheatsheaf, a red brick Georgian ex-coaching inn where they used to come for a Saturday lunch-time session. Not that there were many Atlanta characters round here. Only the Truscotts, who lived in Thatched Cottage – a typical picturesque survival of olde worlde England that they were passing now.
Like Archie Truscott himself, Paul thought, turning sharp right. Nine years ago, Captain Truscott had tried to become airborne from Tecuma without his take off flap down and, not having the necessary lift, had failed. The aircraft had caught fire and burned out. Twenty-seven crew and passengers had been killed. Archie had been the sole survivor. There had been some matter of an unexpected change of runway that had contributed a disorganising factor to the cause, but the Inquiry verdict was Pilot Error. Paul didn’t know all the details – he doubted if anybody could know them – but Archie would never forget. Suddenly into a quite ordinary conversation he would introduce his ‘twenty-seven ghosts who follow me around everywhere’, to everybody’s embarrassment.
Harker had seen some of the abusive letters Archie had received from complete strangers. He felt terribly sorry for him, terribly sorry for Madge. Even so, he would have preferred it if Atlanta had got him a ground job elsewhere instead of establishing him as a simulator instructor at the training complex the company used. It was bad enough having Madge popping in and out of Elmtrees to chat up Harriet without running the risk of having Archie also materialising for a simulator Check.
Down at the far end of the lane, Harker turned right again through open wrought iron gates and into a small drive.
Elmtrees was a brick and tile eighteenth-century cottage which had been enlarged and renovated by speculative builders in 1953 just before the Harkers were married. The same firm of builders had renovated other cottages in that part of the Thames valley and a number had been bought by Atlanta people, so the Harkers had quite a circle of friends. But over the quarter-century, the friends had dispersed. Some had taken early retirement and gone to live in Greece or Spain. Their closest friend, Jim Davis, had died of a coronary and his widow had remarried a doctor in Yorkshire. So now only the Truscotts remained.
In Harriet’s opinion, the renovators had been rather over-enthusiastic with the extra beams and the diamond-paned windows, but they had four comfortably sized bedrooms, two modern bathrooms – one pink, one avocado green – a large sitting room with French windows and, her pride and joy, the glass camellia house. The dining room was small, but with large windows giving a view of the lawn and the rose garden. There was a little study for Paul, very useful now that he was Flight Captain with so much paperwork, and a large country-style kitchen with an Aga – the heart, Harriet called it, of the house.
As usual on his return, the whole place was immaculate. The woodblock floor in the hall shone. The furniture, the silver on the sideboard and the brasses had been polished. There were bowls of freshly-cut roses everywhere. The house smelled as it always did of Johnson’s lavender wax, a multitude of flower fragrances, old wood, Imperial Leather soap, and Harriet’s favourite perfume Alliage.
In the old days, he used to stand in the oak doorway and draw the scent into his lungs like some life-giving breath, but now on his return he seemed to notice it only as a sad nostalgic waft of something vanished.
‘The late camellias are well,’ Harriet said brightly as if she too felt nostalgia rather than welcome, the past rather than the present. ‘Two pink and one white. Come and see them.’ She caught his hand. Her own seemed thin, the bones bird-like in his grasp. I put the sherry in the camellia house. I thought that would be nice.’
But it wasn’t. It was stilted, the conversation hard and difficult to spit out, like pebbles in the mouth. In the bright light her face looked pale and strained. She worried too much, that was her trouble, he thought. He admired the camellias, remarked that perhaps this and that bud might be nipped off, and then asked if she’d done anything exciting while he’d been away.
‘I did three hours at the hospital. Just routine chest X-rays. Then I rode Fandango. Not for long though. Mr Jarvis said he’d get one of his boys to ride him round.’
Mr Jarvis was the farmer from whom they rented Fandango’s field and the little wooden shack divided into three that served as a stable, feedshed and tack room. In the heyday of her passion for horses, Paul remembered, Jane had kept the shack swept and even creosoted, and decorated with the rosettes of her insignificant wins at gymkhanas. Nearly all the rosettes were pink, which meant Jane was an also-ran even at that. Though the same age as Belinda, they were as different as chalk and cheese.
‘Anyway,’ Harriet said, ‘Fandango’s out to grass now, so he doesn’t need so much looking after.’ She rubbed her wrists. ‘But he’s hell to hold.’
‘And a hell of an expense to keep. He’s Jane’s horse, damn it! Not ours.’
He frowned and pressed his eyes with his fingertips to try to erase the vision of Belinda which seemed to come tripping in every time on the heels of Jane.
‘Madge said she’d always go up to the field and see he had water.’
‘Oh, she’s been over, has she?’
‘Yes, poor old Madge. She came for morning coffee.’
‘And stayed for lunch, I bet!’ he said indignantly.
‘Yes.’ Harriet laughed, but Paul did not join in. Making her face solemn again, she added, I shouldn’t laugh. Poor Madge. She really does have a hard time with Archie.’
‘Nonsense! Why does she?’
‘He gets so depressed.’
‘So would I if I were married to Madge.’ This time Paul laughed, but Harriet did not.
‘Seriously though—’ Harriet began.
‘I am serious. Deadly serious.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re teasing. Madge is a good sort. You like her really. You’ve often said so. And Archie gets quite pathologically depressed. He’s on all sorts of different pills.’
‘Oh, we all know what it is,’ Paul said with finality. ‘And pills won’t cure it.’
‘His crash?’
‘If you must say it, yes.’ Paul gritted his teeth. He didn’t want to talk about Archie. Dress as Archie might in his fine clothes, and laugh his hollow laugh, he was like the dead crows gamekeepers hang up as warnings.
‘I’m ravenous.’ Paul rubbed his hands in eager anticipation. ‘Let’s eat. Something nice as usual?’ He put his hand on her shoulder as he followed her into the dining room.
‘Fresh salmon,’ she said, cheering at his apparent change of mood.
A vision of Belinda carrying away her unwanted tray of salmon, blinking her eyes in disappointment and rejection, superimposed itself on his vision of Harriet. It reminded him of his childhood in the thirties, and his harassed mother’s dictum: ‘What you won’t eat for supper, you’ll eat up tomorrow!’
He tried to eat the meal with an appreciative appetite. Harriet, an accomplished cook, watched him anxiously.
‘D’you know I’d never tasted fresh salmon until I went into the Air Force?’ he said for something to say.
He’d enjoyed his Short Service Commission which he’d taken after leaving Peterborough Grammar School. He’d met Harriet shortly after he was demobbed, in the romantic circumstances of rescuing her from the river.
She patted his hand. ‘Good old RAF!’
He could think of nothing else to talk about. Then he remembered the diversion of the present. ‘Before I demolish the rest of the salmon,’ he said jovially, ‘let me show you what I bought you.’
He rushed to his bag in the hall, unzipped it, and hauled out the giftwrapped parcel. Harriet did not possess Belinda’s flair for receiving presents. Harriet’s role in life was that of giver, not receiver. She was touched to be bought a present, to be remembered, to be loved. But the present itself was less important.
However, she unfastened the giftwrapping with smiles of enthusiasm, murmuring how well the Americans did everything. She drew out the white froth of the peignoir with genuine admiration, holding it up and letting its soft folds dribble through her fingers.
‘It’s lovely, Paul! Absolutely beautiful!’ She looked anxious. ‘ It must have cost you an awful lot!’
‘The company’s just upped our overseas allowance.’
‘Oh,’ she held the peignoir against herself, looking at it doubtfully. ‘You don’t think it’s too young for me?’
‘I think it’s perfect for you. That’s why I bought it.’
She smiled gently. ‘ I’m very touched you actually went into a shop to get it. The nightwear department!’ She laughed. ‘I know what you’re like!’
Her words were genuinely felt. Her expression totally innocent. But her own remark seemed to generate a sudden sharp suspicion. He knew her well enough to recognise it, and to recognise her stifling of that suspicion as unworthy and ungrateful. She put her thin birdy arms round his neck.
‘Thank you, Paul. It was sweet of you. I love it. I shall wear it tonight.’
But the suspicion had not been stifled, only lulled. Over an early dinner, Harriet said, ‘I’m tired now too. And I know you are. Shall we have an early night?’
When he climbed up to their bedroom, she had already bathed and brushed her hair and was standing by the bed, dressed in a blue nightgown and the new peignoir. Just for a moment in the dimmed lights and to his tired eyes, she looked the image of Belinda, modelling that peignoir over her blue cotton dress, shimmering into a vision of Belinda naked in his bedroom.
Belinda. He was sure he didn’t say her name aloud, but it hammered in his head. He knew, though, that he let out a choking cry, and grabbed her in his arms, kissing her mouth, her neck, her ears.
Until like someone waking out of a dream to icy reality, he felt Harriet’s outraged angry body, cold as stone, stiff and hostile in his arms.