He was a big, heavy man about fifty years old, considerably older than Derek. He was very Yorkshire, with an air of solid, burly prosperity about him. I only had time for a few words with him of no importance before I had to go up with a pupil again. Brenda wanted to take him up in her Moth so I told the ground engineer to get it out and run it up for her, and then I had to go off to give my lesson.
She flew him round for half an hour or so, I think, and then they sat in deck chairs on the lawn of the clubhouse. I went and had a word with them once between lessons, but they were quite prepared to wait until the rush was over. I landed for the last time at about six o’clock, jotted a few times down upon a pad upon my desk in the hangar office, and then walked over to them at the clubhouse. The crowd was thinning now, and the cars were beginning to roll away. We walked a little way up the aerodrome hedge in the evening light.
‘Ye’ve got a champion little club, Mr Pascoe,’ he remarked. ‘D’ye get many accidents with all this flying that goes on?’
‘We haven’t had one since I’ve been here,’ I replied. ‘I don’t believe in them.’
‘It’s an active little business,’ he said. ‘Do ye make it pay?’
‘It makes a profit every year,’ I told him. ‘Not a very large one, because we keep the cost of flying as low as we can for the members. When we look like making money, the Committee drops the rates.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s one way of doing it.’ And then he said, ‘Ye’ll be wondering how I got on this morning. Well, I’ve no good news for you. Derek will have nowt to do with any divorce.’
I glanced at him. ‘You told him about Brenda?’
‘Aye, I told him about that. Couple of scallywags, the pair of you, that’s what I say. Still, what’s done can’t be undone, and the only thing is, make the best of it. That’s what I told Derek this morning. But he’d have nowt to do with it.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘I dunno. He can be obstinate, can Derek. I wouldn’t say that anything he said was very sensible. Said he’d be getting out of The Haven before long, and then he’d make his mind up what was best to do.’
‘Is he going to get out soon?’
‘If that Dr Somers has anything to do with it, he will. Proper ninny that one is, alongside Dr Baddeley. But there’s two needed to sign the certificate, and two needed to unsign it. It’s not unsigned yet.’
‘You think he should stay in?’
‘Aye,’ he said heavily, ‘I do. Always queer, was Derek, ever since he was a little lad. Always doing things he shouldn’t do, we had to cover up.’
‘How soon would he be likely to get out?’
‘Well now, it wouldn’t be very soon. There’s nothing started yet, and these things take a while. I wouldn’t think that it would be before October, at the earliest.’
Brenda was there, but this man talked good sense; he had influence in this affair, and I might not have another chance to talk to him. I said, ‘October’s a bad time for a miscarriage.’
Brenda flushed and looked annoyed, but George Marshall stopped and slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Eh! lad,’ he laughed, ‘I like a man that calls a spade a spade.’ He turned to Brenda. ‘Don’t look so put out, lass. He’s got the rights of it, and he said nowt but what has to be said some day, by somebody. It wouldn’t do for you to be in Duffington when Derek gets out of The Haven, not the way things are. Ye’ll have to go away for the sake of the baby, and live quiet until this is all over. When’s it to be?’
‘March,’ she said.
‘Well now, what about America? It’s a fine place, New York. I was there two years back. There’s fine hospitals there, and good doctors. I’ll see you right for brass, if Derek won’t. What do ye say?’
She was silent. This loud-spoken, positive man meant very well indeed, but he was driving her along more quickly than he should. He didn’t know her well enough. There wasn’t a chance that she would agree to go to America to live and have her baby; it was too far, too unknown, too different because she only knew it from the pictures. But she recognised the goodwill in George and struggled to keep up with him. ‘It’s all so new,’ she said. ‘I want a little time to think it over. A series of rows with Derek might not be a good thing, just at that time. If I’ve got to go anywhere, couldn’t I go to France?’
I might have known that that would be her choice. She had been to France: and loved it; she had discovered that she could speak the language a little. People had helped her and she had been happy there. It was there that we had made love.
George Marshall frowned. ‘Dunno about the French doctors, lass. Scruffy lot, from what I hear.’
She smiled. ‘Don’t be absurd. Babies get born in France just as well as they do anywhere else.’
‘Aye,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I’d sooner ye were having it in Leeds Infirmary. But that’s not to be.’
We talked about France for a little while. In the months immediately before her confinement Normandy would be cold and bleak; if she had to go away she might as well go where it was warm and sunny, to Cannes, perhaps, or Nice. For her reputation in the district, too, it would be better for her to go before her condition became apparent. She could give out that she was going to spend the winter in the south of France, with her mother. If she then came back to Duffington in the spring with a baby – well, that was a bridge that we could cross when the time came. Everything might have changed by then.
George Marshall repeated his offer to finance her if Derek cut off her allowance. She was grateful, but I walked in silence while this was going on, not too well pleased. When they were leaving, I got him on one side to talk to him alone. ‘It’s very good of you to offer to find the money she’ll need, Mr Marshall,’ I said. ‘But I can look after that. I’ve got a bit saved up.’
‘How much have ye got?’ he asked directly.
‘Nearly five hundred pounds.’ I was including the value of my car.
‘And ye’ll need every penny of it if you’re going to set up as a married man,’ he said. ‘I tell ye straight, Mr Pascoe, I’m right sorry for the lass, and so is my wife. She’s had a rough spin from the Marshall family and that’s a fact, for all that Derek’s my brother. If now she’s got herself in trouble with the right kind of a man, well, human nature’s what it is, and it’s not for the Marshall family to turn their back on her. No, leave the brass for this to me, and save your money till you’re setting up a household. Ye’ll need it then.’
I could only thank him.
He went away with Brenda in the Alvis, and we went on much as we had before. The first time Brenda went to visit Derek in The Haven there was a violent scene, so that she had to leave after ten minutes. She went once more, and there was another one. After that Dr Somers asked her to suspend her visits for a time till Derek had got used to the present state of affairs, till he expressed a wish to see her. After that she didn’t go to the hospital again, and the lack of occupation was a distress to her. She said once that she felt that she was living in the Manor under false pretences.
In the weeks that followed I dined with her at the Manor many times. We were still careful about being seen about together, but on Mondays when the aerodrome was closed we used to go off separately in our cars, park one of them in some village ten miles away, and go on in the other up on to the heather-covered moors, happy to be together, walking or sitting talking in the sunshine, forgetting our troubles for a few hours.
Towards the end of August one Monday, up on the backbone of England on the purple hills, she asked me, ‘Do you think I could fly to Cannes?’
‘When?’
‘Now, in Morgan le Fay.’ She turned to me. ‘I’d like to go there and spy out the land, find a nice quiet hotel where we could stay all winter, and find out about nursing homes and doctors. I thought perhaps I could fly down to Cannes in easy stages, stay a week, and fly back again.’
‘You’d go solo?’
‘You couldn’t come, could you?’
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p; I shook my head. ‘Not at this time of year.’ There was really no reason why she shouldn’t go, because she was getting quite good at cross-country. ‘You wouldn’t take anyone with you?’
She shook her head. ‘I’d rather go alone, and do it all by myself.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘I’ve been thinking, this may be the last chance I’ll have to do a proper long flight, on my own. Later on, the weather will get bad, and anyway I wouldn’t want to fly much when the baby gets well on the way. And after he’s born – well, everything may be different. I might be anywhere. Perhaps I won’t be able to fly at all then. I would like to have one really good, long flight behind me to look back upon and think about.’
‘You could do that,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t have any difficulty, provided that you aren’t in a hurry. I wouldn’t fly in bad weather, if I were you. If it’s raining, or if the Met say that it’s going to, wait till next day and have a look at the town.’ I got down to it with the maps with her that evening, planning her flight to Cannes in easy stages of not much more than a hundred miles each that she could take as she wished. From Duffington to Heston, from Heston to Lympne, to Le Touquet for Customs, to Le Bourget for Paris, to Auxerre, to Dijon, to Lyons, to Avignon, and so to Cannes. She pored over the maps with me, entranced. ‘I’ll never get to Cannes,’ she said. ‘I’ll want to stop so long at all these places – Paris, Dijon. Avignon … Johnnie, if I want to have the plug checked, what do I say?’
‘I’ll get a couple of sets of new ones for you to take, and some other things,’ I said. ‘Then all you’ve got to do is, ask them to changer les bougies.’
‘Changer les bougies,’ she repeated. ‘I must get a little book and start writing all these things down.’
The excitement of this journey was very good for her; she was brighter and more cheerful than she had been for weeks. In the next few days I marked all her maps with a thick blue line from place to place, with the distance against it in red pencil, with the magnetic course to steer going out in blue and the magnetic course to steer coming back in green. I got her a course-and-distance calculator and showed her how to use it to check drift, and got her a fuel carnet and an aircraft carnet. Then, with her passport, she was ready to go. I put her bag of spares and tools in the front cockpit with her suitcase and strapped them down, her log books and clean overalls in the rear locker. She got in and I swung the prop for her; she ran it up, waved the chocks away, and taxied out, as pretty and excited as she had been on her first solo. I stood watching as she took off, got on course, and vanished to the south.
It was lonely at Duffington without her, and I knew that it was going to be lonely all the winter. She sent me telegrams from every place where she night-stopped, and a letter every couple of days. I wrote to her every day, and because it took her eight days to get to Cannes there must have been quite a packet of them waiting for her there. She flew home more quickly, in three days, and one afternoon towards the end of September she flew in and taxied to the hangar.
She unfastened her helmet and got out of the machine, her overall smeared a little with dirt and oil. ‘It was simply glorious,’ she said. ‘Like something out of this world. Nothing went wrong, I never got lost – I never touched the spares. And I could make them understand me, Johnnie!’
She was very happy, and looking very well. She had taken a cheap little folding Kodak with her and had taken a lot of photographs, and had had them developed and printed in Cannes. She wanted me to go up to the Manor for dinner that night so that she could show me them. I drove her home and then went off to wash and change before going up to the big house.
When I got there she was waiting for me in the drawing room with her mother. The radiant happiness had all disappeared, and she was looking white and drawn. ‘Things have been happening in the last few days, Johnnie,’ she said. ‘Derek.’
‘Important things?’ I asked.
Mrs Duclos said, ‘He’s applied for his certificate to be annulled. Dr Somers rang me up about it on Monday. As Brenda was coming home so soon I thought I wouldn’t spoil her holiday.’
‘How soon shall we know?’ I asked.
‘The Commissioners in Lunacy are coming down to examine him,’ she told me. ‘Dr Somers didn’t know when, but he said he’d let me know.’
It seemed that Derek had made a formal application to the visiting committee for a review of his case. He had put it to them personally on one of their periodic visits, acting in a very restrained and sensible manner. Dr Somers, apparently, had backed the application, which had gone to the Commissioners in Lunacy. The procedure now was that two of the Commissioners, one of whom had to be a doctor and one a barrister, were to come down and examine him. If their report was favourable, the certificate would be annulled and Derek would be free.
Brenda said listlessly, ‘Dr Ford-Johnson will probably be one of them. He’s a specialist, in Harley Street, and he’s one of the Commissioners. It was he who certified Derek, with someone else – some barrister, I think.’
The photographs, the flight, her happiness, were all forgotten, and we were back in the same dreary mess. We talked about it all evening. Mrs Duclos had rung George Marshall and had told him the news, and she thought that he was doing something in London. She didn’t think that the Commissioners were coming for a week or two, but she didn’t really know.
When we had been over and over the miserable business, I said, ‘I think you both ought to go to Cannes.’ Brenda had found a pleasant and inexpensive hotel just off the promenade at the east end.
‘When?’ she asked thoughtfully.
‘Now. Before the Commissioners arrive.’
‘You mean, in the next week?’
I nodded. ‘As soon as you can.’ I paused. ‘You won’t be able to go so well when Derek is just due to come home. Better go now, at once.’
Brenda sat in thought, her chin cupped in her hand. ‘Of course, for myself I’d love to go. It’s such a lovely place. But what would Derek have here to come home to? I mean, there’d just be the servants.’
Mrs Duclos said, ‘I think that’s a matter for the Marshalls, dear. One of them would have to come and live here and keep house for him. After all, there are plenty of them. Myra could come down, or Janet.’
Brenda said, ‘Not Myra – she’s got the old lady to look after. Janet might come.’
Her mother said, ‘He’s right, dear. I think you ought to get away from here.’
Brenda said, ‘It’s like running away.’
She knew that she would have to go, but she fought for a long time against a decision. In the end, at about eleven o’clock, she finally agreed. Her mother was for it; she had travelled widely in her youth and knew Cannes quite well. There seemed no point in making any delay. We arranged that they should go to London in about three days’ time, stay there a little while to make what purchases they needed, and then go on across France with sleepers on the train.
Brenda said, ‘It’s going to be a miserable way of travelling, after Morgan le Fay.’
I smiled. ‘It’s going to be quicker.’
‘I know. But the other was such fun.’ She turned to me. ‘You’ll look after Morgan for me, Johnnie?’
‘I’ll look after her,’ I said. ‘If you stay away all winter she’ll have to have her certificate of airworthiness renewed. I’ll be in touch with you about that. We’d better get that done while you’re away, and then she’ll be all ready for you to fly next summer.’
She said wistfully, ‘I’d like to fly to Spain. Could we do that together some day?’
‘Next summer,’ I promised her. ‘I’ll get leave, and we’ll go together.’
She came out to the aerodrome and flew her Moth once more. Then we put it at the back of the hangar and folded the wings. She brought down a lot of dust sheets and we spent an afternoon covering most of it up with these. ‘You’ll be sure they turn the engine every week?’ she asked me anxiously. ‘It says you have to do that, in the book.’
I pressed
her arm. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll look after her myself.’
A couple of days later I saw them off at the station. It was terribly, terribly lonely when they’d gone.
Some time after that George Marshall rang me up from the Manor, and asked if I would run up there to see him. I had no idea that he was in the district. I went up there at once, and had a talk with him. It seemed that Mrs Duclos had been in touch with him in London, and that he had undertaken to see that the house was ready for Derek when he came out of The Haven, with some member of the family living there to run it for him. I said something about his kindness.
‘That’s as may be,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ve changed my mind since Mrs Duclos went to France. I’m laying off the housemaid. The cook will be staying on as housekeeper through the winter, to keep the house right for them when they come back here in April.’
I glanced at him. ‘What about Derek? Isn’t he coming out?’
‘The Commissioners are coming down here on the sixteenth of October,’ he said. That was a fortnight hence. ‘We shan’t know till they’ve examined him and made their report. But – no, I’d be surprised if they should let him out.’
‘I thought it was a certainty,’ I said.
‘It never was that …’ He stood and thought for a minute, and then he said, ‘Ye’ve a right to know how things are, Mr Pascoe. When Derek was in trouble and was certified three years ago, the court and the Commissioners didn’t know the half of it. We didn’t see the sense in making a bad matter worse by raking up old troubles when he was a boy, things we’d been able to cover up and no scandal, and all forgotten about. But now, it’s different. He’s happy in The Haven and well looked after. We wouldn’t want to see him given the responsibility of living his own life again.’
He paused, and then said heavily, ‘I went and saw Mr Justin Forbes, in his chambers, and told him everything that had happened, ever since Derek was a little lad. He’s one of the Commissioners, the barrister. We don’t want any more trouble, and he’s happy where he is.’