The Rainbow and the Rose (34 page)

She nodded slowly. ‘Is that why Grannie took me back to Cannes?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘She left directly the funeral was over, before Derek Marshall came home. She was afraid that if he saw you he might do you an injury.’

‘That’s what she told me.’ We were getting on better now. ‘Why did she go back to Cannes?’

‘She’d just come from there,’ I said. ‘She knew the hotel, and they knew her. It was the easiest thing for her to do.’

‘Well, when did you go to India?’ she asked.

‘Almost at once,’ I said. ‘I had to get away from Duffington, and Imperial Airways wanted pilots for the East. I stopped in Cannes on the way out and spent a day with Mrs Duclos, and saw the baby.’

‘Me,’ she said.

‘I suppose so.’ I paused. ‘There wasn’t anything that I could do. Your grandmother had plenty of money and everything was under control. I couldn’t have interfered if I’d wanted to, legally. But everything was going on all right.’

She said slowly, ‘You mean, I wasn’t legally your child?’

I nodded. ‘Legally, you hadn’t got a father.’

She smiled gently. ‘And now I’ve found one, he doesn’t care about me much.’

‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘I always cared about you. You were Brenda’s child.’

We sat together in silence on the beach. A moon was coming up in the palm trees behind us, and the point of land a mile away was bathed in light. We sat in the half-light each busy with our own thoughts. It was quite true what I said; away in the heat and dust of Delhi Airport I had loved that child, because she was a part of Brenda.

Presently she asked, ‘How did you get on with Grannie?’

‘Not very well,’ I told her slowly. ‘We never quarrelled, but she never liked me much. You see, it was because of me that it all happened. It was really because of me that Brenda died.’

‘Oh, I see,’ she breathed. ‘That does explain a lot.’

‘What does it explain?’

She turned to me. ‘When she invented this story that I died. It seemed a bit hard on you, if you
had
minded. I asked her that once, and she said it would have been a relief to you. She said it was the best thing, if you married somebody – not to have an illegitimate child round your neck.’

‘I never wanted to marry anybody after Brenda,’ I remarked. ‘Anyway, not till now.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘All right,’ I laughed. ‘I’m a bit old for marrying, anyway.’

We laughed together about that, and eased the tension. ‘Why did she do it?’ I asked presently. ‘When did you first know that you’d got a father living?’

‘When I was twenty-one,’ she said. ‘She told me then. Before that, all I knew was that my father and mother were killed together in a car accident in England.’ She paused. ‘Of course, I knew that wasn’t right. I came to that conclusion when I was about fourteen. Whenever I asked her about my
father and mother she told me something a bit different – she was getting old, you see. I knew I must be illegitimate, and of course I thought it must be nastier than it was, because she wouldn’t tell me.’ She paused. ‘It wasn’t very happy, in my school days.’

‘There wasn’t anything nasty about it,’ I said. ‘You can forget about that.’ I thought about it for a minute, and then said, ‘I still don’t understand why she told me you were dead.’

‘It wasn’t only you,’ she replied. ‘She told everybody.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘It was all such a mess, you see. She was afraid of Derek Marshall, for one thing. She was afraid he’d come to Cannes and do me some harm. She was afraid he might claim me, and take me away from her to Duffington and try to bring me up there – when he was a mental case.’

‘That would have been a bad one,’ I said quietly.

She nodded. ‘She was afraid of all sorts of things. She thought that you’d marry somebody, and if you had to look after me I wouldn’t get a square deal. She was afraid of me knowing when I was too young that my mother committed suicide, and that I was illegitimate.’ She paused. ‘Tell me one thing, Johnnie. Did you ever know my mother’s maiden name was Dawson?’

I shook my head. ‘It never occurred to me to question that it was Duclos.’

‘That’s what Grannie said. She said you never knew my mother was her child by her first marriage. But you see, when my mother registered my birth at Cannes, she told the registrar that her husband was in a mental home and that he wasn’t the father. I was registered in her maiden name as illegitimate, and there was a note against the entry of her married name.’

I glanced at her. ‘I never saw the entry. You were registered as Brenda Margaret Dawson?’

She nodded. ‘That’s my name.’

‘Well, when did you go to Australia?’

‘Grannie took me straight there from Cannes,’ she said. ‘You see, she had relations there.’

‘Had she?’

She nodded. ‘My grandfather’s brother Ernest – Grannie’s brother-in-law, – he married a girl at Colac with five thousand acres. The family’s there still, Coniston Station.’ She paused. ‘I’m pretty sure we went there right away, because I can remember living there when I was little. Then when I was five or six and had to go to school, Grannie took a house in South Yarra, and we lived there all the time.’

‘I see,’ I said slowly. ‘She made a clean break, and started you off somewhere fresh.’

‘She thought it was the best thing to do,’ she said.

I sat looking out over the moonlit sea. ‘Probably it was.’ I turned to her. ‘How did you come to be here?’

‘I was curious,’ she said simply.

‘About me?’

She nodded. ‘You see, Grannie told me everything she knew when I was twenty-one. I was training at the Alexandra then, so it wasn’t quite the shock it might have been. And anyway, I’d guessed that it was something like that. She hadn’t kept in touch with you, but she thought you might be still alive somewhere.’

‘She vanished into the blue,’ I remarked. ‘I tried to find her when I was on leave, but I never got a line on her at all. She never even kept in touch with old George Marshall up at Halifax. She just vanished.’

‘I know. She thought it was the best thing to do. She was afraid of Derek Marshall.’

‘Well, what happened then?’

She said, ‘As soon as I was qualified, I went to England.’

‘To look for me?’

‘Partly,’ she said. ‘Only partly.’ She turned to me. ‘Try
and understand, Johnnie. I wanted to know how I’d been born, what really happened.’ She stared out over the sea. ‘What Grannie told me was such a confused sort of a story, so unlikely in some ways. It could have been wonderfully good, or it could have been – just smutty. I didn’t mind much about being illegitimate, but I wanted to know how it all happened.’

‘It was wonderfully good,’ I said. ‘Good enough to keep me single all these years, anyway. Do you want me to tell you about it?’

‘If you will.’

‘Finish your story first. What did you find out in England?’

‘Very little,’ she said. ‘I went to see the Marshalls up at Halifax. George Marshall – the one you knew – he died about ten years ago. I saw his son, John Marshall, and told him who I was. He knew hardly anything. His uncle, Derek Marshall, blew his brains out with a shot gun soon after we got to Australia. That must have been while you were still in India.’

‘I heard that,’ I said.

‘I was just one of a whole lot of unsavoury scandals that the Marshalls wanted to forget,’ she remarked. ‘John Marshall didn’t introduce me to his family.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ I said, and I was.

She smiled quietly. ‘I hadn’t expected much else. So then I went to Duffington.’

‘You went there?’

She nodded. ‘That was no good either. There’s no flying club there now.’

‘The aerodrome’s a big place, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s got runways about two miles long, and the American Air Force are there. And Duffington Manor’s been turned into a girls’ school.’

I sat thinking back about those distant days upon the far side of the world. ‘Peter Woodhouse could have told you
something,’ I remarked. ‘He should be in the district still. You didn’t talk to him?’

She shook her head.

‘Well, what did you do then?’

‘I went back to London and went to the Royal Aero Club. The secretary there was awfully nice and I think he knew you, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me where you were. He told me to go to a public library and look you up in
Who’s Who in Aviation
. So I did that, and found that you were with AusCan.’

Up the beach at the old Catalina slipway three Fijians had launched a boat. They came paddling slowly down the shore in the darkness with a brilliant acetylene lamp hanging on a pole over the bows, spearing fish as they came to the light. We watched them in silence as they crept along. London seemed very far away.

‘That’s how you came to know I was in AusCan,’ I said thoughtfully.

She nodded, watching the boat. ‘I went to the AusCan office in Piccadilly and got a time-table,’ she said. ‘I asked the girl who gave it me if Captain Pascoe was still flying for them, and she knew all about you. She said you were in London every week, because you brought in the machine from Vancouver over the North Pole and took it back again. It was quite a new service then – just one machine a week. She said you were training younger captains on the route.’

I grinned. ‘She told you a damn sight too much. Bloody gossip.’

The boat before us paused, and there was a lot of excited chatter from it, because one of the men had speared a fish. It was quite a big one, but I couldn’t tell her what sort of fish it was. We sat looking at the spectacle, talking about it; then as the boat moved on we came back to our conversation.

‘Is that when you decided to become a hostess?’ I asked.

‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘I went down to London Airport
a couple of days later and stood in the public enclosure to see the AusCan machine come in from Vancouver. Before it landed, I asked at the AusCan office who the captain was, and they told me it was you. When the machine came in and all the passengers got off, you came off with the other officers – an awful lot of them. There must have been eight or nine. You passed quite close to me.’

I sat there in my bathing trunks in the warm night, trying to put myself in this girl’s place when first she saw her father. ‘What did you think?’ I asked.

She said seriously, ‘I thought you looked rather nice. Very strict, but rather nice.’

I didn’t like the very strict part much, but it was probably justified. ‘I may have been tired,’ I said. ‘It’s a long flight from Vancouver, and we didn’t know the route well, just at first.’

She nodded. ‘I went to bed much happier that night.’

I was glad of that, but I didn’t know how to say it. ‘Then did you go back to Australia?’

She smiled. ‘I flew back with you.’

‘Flew back with
me
?’ I was dumbfounded. ‘As a passenger?’

‘I was so terribly curious,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t at all sure if I wanted to know you, or to let you know who I was. There wasn’t any reason why I should, after all. I wanted to know all about you first – what sort of a person you were.’ She paused. ‘What sort of a person I am,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘I understand that,’ I replied.

She stared after the boat, now moving away from us and coming out of the shadow of the palm trees into the moonlight. ‘I couldn’t really afford to fly back to Australia, but I had to,’ she said. ‘I went tourist, of course, and I made quite sure that you’d be the captain before I confirmed the booking.’ I smiled, and she smiled with me. ‘You came down
the cabin once and asked me if I was comfortable, and told me when we’d be landing at Frobisher. That was the first time I ever spoke to you.’

I sat trying to recollect that evening, one of so many similar flights. I couldn’t place it. ‘When I took you on in Billy Myers’ office in Vancouver,’ I said slowly, ‘I thought I’d seen you before. I wonder if that was it.’

‘I saw you several times at Vancouver when I was in Captain Forrest’s crew,’ she remarked. ‘I don’t know if you saw me. We never spoke.’

‘That might have been it. How did you come to be in AusCan, then?’

‘I flew on back to Sydney down this route,’ she said. ‘You handed over at Vancouver, of course. It was after that that the idea came to me. I talked to the senior hostess, Mary Barrett, about hostess work.’

‘I remember Mary Barrett,’ I said. ‘She got married.’

She nodded. ‘When I told her about my nursing experience, she said that I could get to be a hostess on this line quite easily. She told me what to do, and all about it. By the time I got to Sydney I wanted to do that more than anything. I thought if I could get to be in your aircrew I could really get to know about you. I wanted to find out everything I could about you, and then make up my mind whether I’d tell you who I was, or not.’ She paused. ‘I couldn’t do it while Grannie was alive. It wouldn’t have been fair to leave her. I had to put it out of my mind. But then she died. After that I couldn’t do it at once, till the estate was settled up. But then I was quite free to do whatever I wanted to.’ She stared after the boat. ‘And what I wanted to do was – this.’

We sat together in silence on the beach in the warm night. I was thinking how much I had missed, in all these years. And yet, I couldn’t have done much more for her if I had been around during her adolescence. Mrs Duclos had done a good job of bringing her up, and though I never got on
well with the old lady, I was grateful to her. For better or worse, I had an adult daughter ready-made. I should never, perhaps, be very close to her for I had seen nothing of her childhood. Perhaps I should never really understand her, as perhaps I had never really understood her mother.

I sat for a long time thinking of these things. Presently she said gently, ‘Will you tell me about my mother?’

‘I’ll do what I can to tell you,’ I said heavily. ‘I only know it from my side, of course. She came to learn to fly at Duffington, and we fell in love. But there was more to it than that on her side, much, much more. I never got to understand her side of it, not properly.’ I turned to her. ‘We wanted to get married. But we never had more than a day or so together. She did things that I never really understood, because I never had the chance to get to understand
her.
’ I paused. ‘We were just in love.’