Fuel cocks were checked and fuel contents gauges registered as full. The priming pumps were in working order, and the oil system was OK’d by Nash and Bennett. The galley was sufficiently aired to light a stove for supper, and Appleyard used the last eggs to make omelettes. We sat at table, hatches battened against the cold. Whisky was poured into steaming tea, so we drank to our take-off in the morning. I couldn’t envisage the event but neither, if turned out, could anyone else, and we finished our meal in silence.
Nash and Appleyard were rewarded with four hours’ sleep for their labour of refuelling, so the nightwatch was split between Rose doing the first stint and me the second. During my two hours free I envied those who weren’t kept awake by the nagging of anxiety. Nash, our mainstay, lay at peace, hands clasped behind his head, his pruning-saw snore forming a duet with Bennett’s tread around his small room. Appleyard kipped by the stove, under a blanket which he’d acquired during his recruit training and had never been without.
I could cut off from the sounds of people by turning on my radio, an extension of the senses which connected me to the spheres. I wanted to be in both worlds at once: one with ordinary life, and also float through the atmospherics of the heavens. But the two would not exist together, and I could only blunder from one to the other until such time as I found a way of combining the attractions of both.
As in everything, one had to make a choice. But those I had so far made had taken refuge behind the phrase ‘I couldn’t care less’, because to care would demand too much energy, too much thought, too much consideration for others, too much anxiety about our fate, thus creating unnecessary (and unwanted) disturbance. To gather wisdom from those experiences in which I had been forced by fate to take part, and to combine that wisdom with speculation and intelligence gathered from the ether, were two areas of the same necessity. Craving both, I could deny neither one nor the other, though for the moment I couldn’t put up with Bennett’s obsessive footfall or Nash’s grinding snores.
I trod soundlessly to the flight deck, passing boxes covered in tarpaulin and well lashed down so that none would move when airborne. Rose at the controls was so still that I thought he too was asleep, until a finger by the throttle-levers twitched. I sat on the arm of the other seat. ‘What were you thinking about, before I came up?’
Such a question couldn’t bring a serious reply, but he answered with a weariness that lack of sleep alone hadn’t given. ‘I was meditating on the benefits of a new face.’
The unexpected response had nothing to do with our plight. ‘What the hell for?’
‘I’d like to get rid of the personality that gave it to me.’
Anger was pushed out by curiosity. ‘We’d all like to do that.’
‘You’ll be telling me I have to live with it next.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But I’m not sure I want to.’
‘You don’t have much choice.’
‘I think you’re wrong. Can man make something as perfect and beautiful as a flying boat, and not have choice?’ His emotion surprised me. He pushed the throttle lever of the port inner slightly forward, then drew it back again. ‘I’ve known since I was born that I could end it whenever I liked. But there’s nothing more calculated to make one live forever! I suppose it helped me to survive all those ops over Germany.’
‘What about the rest of the crew?’
‘They were lucky, perhaps. Skilful, to a certain extent. That we were brave goes without saying. So were those who didn’t come back.’
It was hard to talk sense in the gloom. ‘Fate decides everything, I suppose.’
‘If you let it.’
‘There’s no option.’
After a silence he said: ‘Oh yes, there is.’
It was useless to deny it. ‘You’ll feel different once we’re airborne.’
He shifted in his seat. ‘When I’m in England, wherever I am, I feel that if I stretch my arms I’ll touch walls. It’s comforting. But here, even inside the flying boat, there are neither walls nor limits. I don’t like it.’
‘That’s just what makes me glad to be here.’
He wasn’t interested. ‘It’s a long night. Low cloud, not much visibility, no stars to guide us. Like life itself.’
‘You’ll see plenty of stars on the way to Colombo. Good fixes all the way.’
Was it a mistake? It depends on what you believe. Fate may be cruel, but he who blames it must be guilty of something, a thought which justified what I had said. In the dim light I watched his various grimaces registering the fact that I had blurted out the truth when I mentioned Colombo.
Or some such place, I was about to add. But I had too much respect. To make good with false words was unworthy, by which I meant to imply that it would have been less worthy of myself. That second more distant pucker of his face wanted me to admit that I had made a mistake, but any half-hearted statement would not be acceptable. My paralysis lasted until speaking would do no good, and it was too late in any case. When he had waited too long to feel any benefit, and his features had settled into the permanent expression of a disappointed child, I said: ‘At least it looked like Colombo.’
His flicker of gratitude was broken by a bitter smile, which seemed unconnected to my error of saying we were going to Colombo when he had assumed that we would set course for Perth. I should have kept my mouth shut, but it wasn’t me who had spoken – or so I could not but assume. There was something pathetic in his anguish. Nothing could justify it, and anger with myself turned to annoyance at Rose being upset because he thought that such common knowledge among the lesser grades of the crew had not been passed to him first. I could not say that my information was only a faint line seen before Bennett had time to get the chart out of my sight. The glimpse was enough to show, however, that between Kerguelen and Perth no track was drawn at all.
‘How do you know it’s Colombo?’ The fight to ask this took time, and by not volunteering the gen, and forcing the effort out of him, I had at last done what was right.
‘No one knows except you and me.’
He leaned over the chart table, as if to read a description of how his life had been wasted. ‘Nash must.’
‘I don’t see why. But does it matter?’
He didn’t answer. I was to wish he had. In the gap before responding lay the waste of his life – and its loss. The two hour watch was up. ‘I’m going to find a place to sleep,’ he said. ‘We’re a pretty clapped-out lot, aren’t we?’
‘Depends which way you look at it.’
‘The last of the many, if you ask me.’ He scribbled calculations, erased them, wrote a couple of lines, then threw the pencil down. I thought he was making too much fuss and was glad when my turn for watch came because, though tired, and not knowing when I would sleep again, the radio waves would keep me alert.
15
Every few minutes I detached myself from the ambrosia of static and walked to the flight deck, hardly able to imagine the cold flying boat coming to life and getting us beyond the surrounding wall of night and rock. I was cheered by the magic eye of the Marconi, and knew that inevitably the darkness would lift and my watch reach its end. I felt some trepidation, for when it did, with a ton of gold and such a quantity of fuel, we would need limitless visibility and the longest run for take-off that a flying boat ever had. At supper we agreed that only Bennett could get the Aldebaran airborne. ‘A good captain never reflects on danger until he is right near it,’ said Nash. We needed luck, however, and who in the history of the world had as much as they needed? The bold prospered, the just progressed, the skilful succeeded, but now and again someone fell from on high because his luck ran out, no matter what qualities he had.