“Quite all right, sir.”
“Getting all the stores and material you want?”
“Yes, sir. There were a few minor difficulties just at first, but Major Macmahon got those ironed out for us. Everything seems to be going very smoothly now.”
The Prince said, “When the Queen goes to Canada next month with my father, Group Captain Cox is going too. You’ll be left in charge here, I suppose.”
David said, “Yes, sir.”
“If anything should crop up that you don’t feel you can handle, while the Group Captain is away,” the Prince said, “you’d better give me a ring, or come and see me.”
The pilot blinked a little in surprise. “Very good, sir,” he said. “Thank you.”
The Royal party went to the Canadian machine, and David got his own crew into Tare in their places. He stood by the fuselage door himself waiting; it was over half an hour before the Queen emerged from Sugar. He came to attention and saluted as she crossed to the Australian machine. “I’m afraid this one is exactly the same as the other, Your Majesty,” he said.
She smiled. “Never mind. I want to meet your crew. It will make it so much easier to get to Tharwa, now that we have this beautiful aeroplane to go in. How long will it take us, Wing Commander?”
“About nineteen hours flying time, madam,” he said. “Colombo is almost exactly half-way, and we should have to put down there to refuel. That would take about an hour.”
She asked, “Could we go by night?”
“Going Eastwards the time difference makes the night short,” he said. “If your time is at your own choice, it would be best to start after dinner, say at about nine o’clock at night. You could go to bed then, and have eight hours sleep before we reach Colombo at about noon, local time. You could lunch upon the ground then if you want to, and going on we should reach Canberra nine hours later, but that would be before dawn of the next day.”
She said, “It sounds as if I shall be spending most of the journey in bed in my cabin.”
“I should say that that’s the best way to take it,” he said. “The cabin is very quiet in this aircraft, and I think you would be comfortable.”
“I’m sure of it,” she said. She turned to the Consort. “Twenty four hours in bed with no possibility of a box reaching you, and Tharwa at the end of it. It sounds too good to be true!”
They passed into the machine laughing together, and David followed with Prince Charles. The aircraft was, in fact, a replica of the one that they had seen before, but they spent twenty minutes in it, talking to the crew. The Queen spent several minutes in her cabin talking to the stewardess, a girl called Gillian Foster from Shepparton; coming out, David heard her say to the girl, “I can hardly wait to spend a night in here.”
“We’ll do our very best to make you comfortable, madam,” the stewardess said.
The inspection over, the party left the machine, but they seemed to be in no hurry to get back to Windsor. The Queen stood with the Consort for a time upon the tarmac, chatting to the officers. To David she said once, “It makes our lovely home at Tharwa seem so close, to get into this magnificent thing and to be there in about twenty hours.”
He asked her curiously, “You like Tharwa so much as that, madam? We have no autumn colours like Canada, and no high mountains.”
“I know,” she said. “That corner of Australia is beautiful in its own way. I am always sorry when it’s time to come away from Tharwa.”
At last they got into the Daimler and drove off, and even then it seemed to the officers that they were reluctant to go. Dewar turned to Cox, “Well, that went off all right,” he said. “They seemed to like these aircraft.”
The Group Captain nodded. “I thought at one time they were going to ask if they could have a ride in one of them. I thought they’d only be here for about ten minutes.”
“They could have gone up if they’d wanted to,” said David. “Tare’s had her daily. We could have flown Tare.” He paused. “I didn’t expect them to be so enthusiastic,” he said. “It must be just another aeroplane to them.”
“They’re only human,” said Frank Cox. “Things aren’t so complicated for them in Australia and Canada. Now they can get there just whenever they want to, without bothering Lord Coles of Northfield.”
David drove back to his flat that evening happier in his job than he had been since he started. It had made a difference to him that the Queen had said that she liked Tharwa. He knew the Royal residence in the Federal Territory by motoring past it and looking at it from the hills upon the west side of the Murrumbidgee, two miles away. He had even studied it with field glasses, for curiosity. It was a long, white house in pastoral surroundings, set in a bowl of wooded hills and with lawns running to the Murrumbidgee river from the house. With the inferiority complex of an Australian he could see no reason why anyone should want to come to Tharwa. He had been quite deeply moved by the Queen’s statement that she found it beautiful in its own way, because it was his country, and he himself would rather have lived there than anywhere else though he could not have said why.
That evening he rang up Rosemary in her flat. She said, “Hullo, Wing Commander. How did your party go off today?”
“It went off very well,” he said. “I think they were pleased with everything.”
“I thought they would be.”
“They’re bonza people,” he said. “I was really impressed.”
“Had you never met them before?”
“No,” he said. “I’d read about them in the papers, of course. But you can’t believe all that stuff.”
“You can now,” she said.
“That’s right. Are you going down to Itchenor this week end?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m going down on Friday night and staying at the club. Will you be coming over?”
“I thought I would,” he said. “I’ll probably get into Wootton and lie there for Friday night, and come on to Chichester Harbour on Saturday morning early. It’s high water about midday, isn’t it?”
“I think so. I’m racing in the afternoon,” she said. “Would you like to crew for me?”
“I’d like to,” he replied.
“I’ll be looking for you in the morning, then,” she said. “You should be able to pick up a mooring at this time of year.”
“I’ll get in somewhere.” He paused. “I brought some steaks back from Ottawa, and some red wine. Will you have dinner with me on Saturday?”
“I might have known you’d do something like that if you went off to Canada. Of course, I’d love to dine with you. How did the flight go?”
“All right,” he said. “We got back in one piece. I’ve got a lot I want to talk to you about.”
“We’ll talk on Saturday,” she said.
He arrived in Chichester Harbour at about ten o’clock that Saturday morning, having sailed from the Isle of Wight at dawn. He dropped sailed just inside the entrance to the wide stretch of inland water and motored up the long channel to Itchenor, three miles from the entrance. He saw Rosemary put off in a dinghy from the shore as he drew near the village and scull out into the middle of the stream; he put the clutch out and she came on board and streamed her dinghy astern. “There’s a yellow mooring a few hundred yards upstream,” she said. “You can take that one.”
She was wearing her yachting clothes, thin shirt, shorts, and blue sandshoes; she brushed his arm as they were pulling in the mooring chain together, and he found her proximity disturbing. She helped him to make up the mainsail on the boom and get the vessel into harbour trim. Then she rowed him ashore in her dinghy, and so began a very happy day.
She took him to the beach and showed him her boat; they rigged it together and waded out with it, scrambled aboard, and sailed for an hour in the Itchenor and Bosham channels while he got the hang of the boat. She let him sail it, and offered to let him sail it in the race that afternoon, but he refused, saying that he did not know it well enough and that they would do best if she h
ad the tiller and he crewed for her. So they landed before the club, and went up to the bar for a sandwich lunch. She introduced him to a number of her friends. They raced that afternoon with eleven or twelve other boats of the same class, twice round a long course that took them practically down to the harbour entrance. They came in fourth, and went ashore for tea and gossip; then they took the sails off the boat and put them away, and rowed out to his little yacht for supper.
Again she exclaimed at the amount of meat he had aboard. “We can’t possibly eat a quarter of this, Nigger,” she said. “You’re a floating butcher’s shop.”
“There’s tomorrow,” he replied. “You wouldn’t have me starve on the way back to Hamble?”
“You won’t starve,” she said. “What time have you got to go?”
“I’ll have to get away after breakfast,” he replied. “The tide will be making eastwards by eleven o’clock.” He hesitated, and then he said, “You wouldn’t like to come with me?”
“I’ve got to be back in Dover Street without fail tomorrow night,” she said. “I go to work in the morning.”
“We should be ashore at Hamble by six,” he said. “I’ve got the car there. I can run you home. I’ve got to be on the job on Monday morning bright and early, too.”
“It would be an awfully long way out of your way to take me up to Dover Street,” she said. “You could put me on the train at Guildford.”
He grinned. “We’ll argue about that. But would you like to come?”
“I’d love to, David,” she said. “I’d love a day out in the Solent in this boat.” She paused. “I’ll have to put my fourteen footer in the shed and hose her down before I go,” she said. “I shan’t be sailing her again this season, because of Canada.”
He nodded. “I’ll come on shore and give you a hand in the morning. About half past eight?”
“Come and have breakfast at the club.”
“All right. When is the Canada trip starting?”
“Wednesday morning of next week—in ten days’ time,” she said. “She’s opening the hydro-electric thing on Thursday.” The girl paused. “What’s Edmonton like?”
“We didn’t go in from the aerodrome,” he replied. “I only saw it from the air. It looked just like any other town.”
“I’m longing to see it,” she said. “I’ve never been to America at all before. What’s the Ceres like to travel in?”
“She’s very comfortable,” he told her. “No noise to speak of, and no vibration. The party seemed to like her all right.” He poured her out a glass from the bottle of sherry he had bought for her, and a tomato cocktail for himself.
She nodded. “They liked what they saw,” she said. “The Queen’s been talking about nothing else.”
“What did she say?”
The girl laughed. “I wasn’t there, of course. I only hear that sort of thing third or fourth hand. Gossip of the servants’ hall, David.” She raised her glass. “Here’s luck to Tare.”
“I’d rather not trust to luck.” He drank with her. “I’m taking Tare off on a trial next Wednesday. We’ve never flown her longer than an hour and a half, and we’ve never flown either of them in tropical conditions. The manufacturers did tropical trials on the prototype, of course. But I think we ought to see one of them function in the tropics before taking our sort of passengers about the world.”
“Are you going far?” she asked.
“We shall only be away one night,” he said. “I’m going down to Gambia, to Bathurst on the west coast of Africa, and spending the night there. Then next day we’ll go north eastwards across Africa to Cyprus, turn there without landing, and back to White Waltham. That makes about a nine hours’ flight, getting on for the maximum safe operating range.”
She said curiously, “Do you feel that you’re really travelling, on an enormous flight like that?”
He shook his head. “You’re just flying. Usually you can’t see the ground because of the cloud layer, and if you can you’re ten miles up, so you don’t see any detail. The sky is almost black, and the sun’s much brighter. You can’t see much.”
“Do you get bored sometimes?”
He shook his head. “It’s what I like doing. I never get bored.”
Presently they went down into the little cabin and began to fry the steaks over the oil stove, with a few potatoes sliced. “One day if you get to Australia, I’ll show you how a steak ought to be cooked,” he said.
She smiled. “How’s that?”
“Grilled, over a fire of gum tree twigs. It’s very quick.” He paused. “It’s the best way in the world to cook a steak, and so far as I know you can only do it in Australia.” He turned to her. “It’s like sugaring in Canada.”
“What’s that?”
“You go up through the snow on skis to a little hut in the woods, and there you find an old man boiling down the sap out of the maple tree to make maple syrup.” He told her all about it as they cooked their dinner: the bright snow, the bright sun, the wood fire under the evaporating pan, and the heavenly smell. “All countries have one taste or smell that others can’t equal,” he told her. “Grilled steaks are Australia to me. Sugaring is Canada.”
Presently they took their plates and sat down at the little table to eat their meal, one on each side of the cabin. They topped up with bread and honey, and with a mug of coffee made out of a tin; then in the warmth and intimacy of the little lamplit room they sat smoking together.
“The Prince said one thing that I didn’t understand,” he told her presently. “When they came to see the aeroplanes. He said, if Frank Cox was away and something happened at White Waltham that I couldn’t handle, I was to get in touch with him at once.” He paused. “What do you think he meant?”
She smiled at him. “Just what he said, Nigger.”
“What sort of thing?”
She opened her eyes wide. “He didn’t tell me.”
He laughed. “All right, you win. I suppose I can put two and two together for myself.”
“I expect you can,” she said. “You won’t get far upon that flight from Gambia to Cyprus and White Waltham unless you can do that.”
She stayed till about half past nine, and then made off for the shore in her dinghy. David watched her rowing off in the bright moonlight, thinking how well she managed her boat, how well her job.
He went ashore for breakfast with her and helped her with the business of putting her dinghy away for the winter. Then they sailed in Nicolette for Hamble, passing down the long channels of the harbour under sail this time with Rosemary on board as pilot, out through the entrance and straight out to sea over the bar, finally bearing away towards the forts at Spithead at the entrance to the Solent, with a light southerly breeze. All day they sailed together in close contact of a little yacht, doing the thing that they both loved to do, happy together.
They passed into the Hamble River at about five o’clock, and took down sail and put the sail covers on as they motored up the river to the mooring. By quarter to six they were on shore packing their luggage into the little car. They had a snack meal at: the Bugle Inn upon the foreshore. While they were eating, David said, “We never saw Judy Marsh in Red Coral. What about going to see that before you go to Canada?”
She hesitated. “When could we go? I can’t tomorrow night, or Friday. I’m going home this week end.”
“I’ve got this trial—the Gambia affair.” He thought for a moment. “I’d better get to bed early on Tuesday. Wednesday, Bathurst, and I’ll probably be a bit tired on Thursday night.”
“I should think you might be,” she said drily. “It would have to be next week, we go off on Wednesday.”
“What about Monday?”
“I should think Monday would be all right,” she said thoughtfully. “Will you ring me at the Palace about lunch time? If there’s an awful lot of work before we go, I might have to wash it out, David. You’d understand that, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course,” he said. “I??
?ll get seats anway, and ring you lunch time on Monday.”
He drove her up to London and deposited her outside her flat in Dover Street, still in her salt spotted blue jeans and rough blue jersey. She asked him in, but he refused that, thinking that she had to work next day and ought to get to bed. He drove back to Maidenhead in a dream, and thought of nothing else but Rosemary all night.
That week, with Frank Cox in command and carrying the Canadian crew as passengers, David flew Tare from London to Bathurst in five hours. They stayed, as usual, in the R.A.F. station for the night having refuelled the machine and loaded up with pineapples for private use. They took off at dawn next day and flew to Cyprus in about five and a half hours, turned over Nicosia, and landed back at their home aerodrome in England at tea time, with nothing particular the matter with the aeroplane.
He cruised alone in the Solent that week-end and found it cold and lonely.
He picked up Rosemary on Monday evening and gave her a couple of pineapples in spite of her protests that she wouldn’t have time to eat them before leaving for Canada. “You can try,” he said firmly. “I brought them from Bathurst specially for you, and I’m not going to have them thrown back in my face.” They went and dined at the R.A.C., and this time, having no confidential business to discuss the dinner was a success. They went on to the movies to see Judy Marsh in Red Coral and sat very close together for two hours.
Coming out, he said, “You don’t have to go home yet, do you? Let’s go to the Dorchester and dance.” So they went up to the Dorchester and danced together for the first time, and enjoyed it, and laughed a great deal, till the orchestra played God Save the Queen and woke them to the realisation that it was two in the morning.
He drove her back to Dover Street in his small car and parked outside the entrance to her flat; for a time they sat talking in the car, reluctant to break it up. “I have enjoyed this evening, David,” she said. “It’s been fun, every minute of it. It was sweet of you to take me.”
“Pity it’s going to be some time before we can do another,” he said. “How long is she staying over in Canada?”