Air Bridge

CHAPTER THREE

Time stood still for me on Membury aerodrome in the weeks that followed. November slid into December and I scarcely noticed it. We rose at six and started work at seven. There was coffee around eleven and we had our lunch and our tea at the work bench. Breakfast and dinner were the only meals we had back at the quarters, dinner anywhere between seven-thirty and nine according to how the work ran. Tempers were short and the working hours long, and though Diana Carter talked about Prince Charles and the fighting in Palestine and the opening of Tegel airport, it meant nothing to me, for I didn’t read the papers. My life was the cold, grey cavern of the hangar; I lived and dreamed engineering and the world outside Membury ceased to exist.

And yet through it all ran a thread of pure excitement. Saeton never gave me a briefing on the engines. He left me to find out for myself and as the Satan Mark II, which was what he called it, took shape under our hands, my sense of excitement mounted.

The difference lay mainly in the system of ignition and the method of fuel injection. High-pressure injectors delivered filtered fuel to the combustion chambers. Injector timing replaced ignition timing and there was a complicated system for metering the fuel, the flow having to be adjusted constantly in relation to altitude. It was essentially a compression ignition motor and though it was a long way removed from the diesel design, it was soon clear to me that the man who had made the original design must have been a diesel expert.

It took us just over five weeks to build that second engine and all the time it was a race — our skill against my bank balance, with the airlift date looming ever nearer.

It was a queer life, the four of us alone up on that derelict airfield, held there by Saeton’s tenacity and the gradual emergence of that second engine. I got to know Tubby Carter and his wife well, and they were as different as two people could be. Maybe that was why they had got married. I don’t know. They were an oddly assorted pair.

Tubby was a stolid, unimaginative man, round of face and round of figure with rolls of fat across his stomach and sides that gave him the appearance of a man-sized cupid when stripped. His nature was happy and friendly. He was one of the nicest men I have ever met, and one of the most uninteresting. Outside of flying and engineering, he knew nothing of the world, accepting it and ignoring it so long as it let him get on with his job. What had caused this unenterprising son of a Lancashire poultry farmer to take to flying I never discovered. He had started in a blacksmith’s shop and when that closed down he had got a job in a foundry producing farm equipment. He was one of those men who shift along on the tide of life and the tide had drifted him into a motor factory and so into the engineering side of the aircraft industry. That he had started to fly because he wanted to would have been quite out of character. I imagine it just happened that way and his stolidity would have made him an ideal flight engineer in any bomber crew.

When I think of Tubby, it is of a happy child, whistling gently between his teeth. He was like a fat, cheerful mongrel, something of a cross between airedale and pug. His eyes were brown and affectionate and if he’d had a tail it would have wagged every time anybody spoke to him. But when I think of him as a man, then it is only his hands I remember. His hands were long and slender, and quite hairless like the rest of him — very different from Saeton’s hands. Give those hands a piece of metal and ask them to produce something out of it and he grew to man’s stature in an instant, all his being concentrated in his fingers, his face wreathed in a smile that crinkled his eyes, and his short, fat lips pursed as he whistled endlessly at the work. He was a born engineer, and though he was a child in other respects, he had a streak of obstinacy that took the place of initiative. Once he had been persuaded on a course of action, nothing would deflect him. It was this tenacity that made one respect as well as like him.

His wife was so different it was almost unbelievable. Her father had been a railroad construction engineer. He had been killed when she was seventeen, crushed by a breakdown crane toppling on its side. In those seventeen years she had travelled most of America and had acquired a restless taste for movement and the atmosphere of the construction camps. Her mother, who had been half-Italian, had died in childbirth and Diana had been brought up in a masculine world. She had many of a man’s qualities — a decisiveness, the need of a goal to aim for and a desire for strong leadership. She was also a woman, with a good deal of the hot passion of the Italian.

After her father’s death she became a nurse. And when Pearl Harbor came she was one of the first to volunteer for overseas service. She had come to England as a W.A.A.C. in 1943 and had been stationed at a B17 station near Exeter. That was where she had met Tubby. They had met again in France and had been married at Rouen in 1945. Later she had worked for a short time in the Malcolm Club Organisation, whilst Tubby was flying with Transport Command.

I have said that she was a hard, experienced-looking woman. Certainly that was my first impression, But then I had expected somebody altogether younger and softer. She was several years older than Tubby and her life had not been an easy one. Her brother had been working for the Opel people in Germany, and with no family and no friends, she had been very much on her own in the big hospital in New York. She would never talk about this period. She had endless stories to tell of the railroad camps and of her service life in Britain, France and Germany. But I never heard her talk of her life in that New York hospital.

Tubby she treated rather as a child. I learned later that she had had an operation that had made it impossible for her to have any children of her own. Whether this had anything to do with it, I don’t know. But I do know this, that right from the start she was fascinated by Saeton. She breathed in the atmosphere of drive and urgency that he created as though it were life itself. I had a feeling that in him she found all the excitement and her girlhood again, as though he recreated for her the life she had led with her father on the railroads of America.

But though I got to know these two well, Saeton himself remained a mystery. What his background was I never discovered., It was as though he had sprung like a phoenix from the flames of war complete with his looted engine and the burning dream of a freighter fleet tramping the airways of the world. He’d talk and he’d conjure visions, but he never talked about himself. He had been a test pilot before the war. He knew South America, particularly Brazil, and he’d flown for an oil company in Venezuela. He’d done some gold prospecting in South Africa. But as to who his family were, what they did and where he’d been born and brought up, I still have no idea. Nor have I any knowledge of how he came to be a pilot.

He was the sort of person that you accept as a finished article. His personality was sufficient in itself. I felt no urge to rummage around the backstairs of his life. He seemed to have no existence outside of the engines. He even slept with them after that scene with Randall as though he were afraid an attempt might be made to steal them. When he had warned me that his temper would be short until we were in the air, it was no understatement. His moods were violent and when nervous or excited he used his tongue like a battering ram. I remember the day after I had promised to finance the company he came up to me as I was working at the lathe. ‘I think you agreed to cover us over the building period.’ His voice was angry, almost belligerent. ‘I want some money.’

I began to apologise for not having settled the financial details with him before, but he cut me short: ‘I don’t want your apologies. I want a cheque.’ The rudeness of his tone jolted me. But it was typical of the man, and if I expected deference on account of my financial standing in the company he made it clear I wasn’t going to get it.

He wanted the money right away to meet some bills and I had to go back to the quarters for my cheque book. That was how I first came into real contact with Else, the fifth character in this extraordinary story. She was standing at the entrance to the quarters, calling for Diana.

‘She’s just taken coffee up to the hangar,’ I said.

The girl turned at the sound of my voice. She wore the same brown overall that she’d worn the previous day when Diana had brought her to the hangar and in her hands she held four very still but sharp-eyed fowls. ‘I have bring these,’ she said, making a slight movement of her hands that caused the one cockerel to beat his wings angrily.

‘I didn’t know we were having a feast tonight,’ I said.

‘No, no. Mrs Carter starts to keep chicken for you, I think.’ The girl’s voice, with its marked foreign accent, was like a breath of the old life, a reminder of brief meetings in bars and hotel bedrooms that is all in the way of memories that most pilots take out of the cities where they touch down.

‘She’ll be back in a minute,’ I said. ‘If you and the chickens can wait.’ I started to move through the door and then stopped and we stood there for a moment smiling at each other, not saying anything.

‘You are partners with Mr Saeton now?’ she said at last.

‘Yes.’

She nodded and her gaze strayed to the trees that screened us from the hangar. Her face was rather square, the cheekbones high, the skin pale and dappled with freckles. Her nose tipped up slightly at the end as though she’d pressed it too often against windows as a kid. She wore no make-up and her eyebrows were thick and fair, like the untidy mop of her hair that blew in the wind. She turned to me slowly and her lips parted as though she were about to say something, but she just stood there looking up at me with a frown as though by staring at me she could resolve some riddle that puzzled her. Her eyebrows were dragged down at the corners and her eyes shifted from the adhesive tape on my forehead to meet mine with a direct, level gaze. They were the colour of mist in a mountain valley — a soft grey.

‘What were you doing up at the hangar the other night?’ I had asked the question without thinking.

Her lips moved slightly at the corners. She had a very mobile mouth. ‘Perhaps I ask you why you run away, eh?!

For an instant I thought she had connected me with the police inquiries in the neighbourhood. But then she asked, ‘Are you an engineer?’ and I knew it was all right.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And you work on the engines with Mr Saeton?’

I nodded.

‘Then perhaps we meet again, yes?’ She smiled and thrust the birds into my hands. ‘Will you please give these to Mrs Carter.’ She half-turned to go and then hesitated. ‘When you do not know what to do with yourself, perhaps you come and talk with me. It is very lonely up here sometimes.’ She turned then and walked across the clearing and as I watched her disappear amongst the trees I felt excitement singing through my blood.

The story of Else Langen was a jig-saw puzzle that I had to piece together, bit by bit. I asked Saeton about her that night, but all he’d say was that she was a German D.P. ‘Yes, but what’s her story?’ I persisted. ‘Tubby says her father died in a concentration camp.’

He nodded.

‘Well?’ I asked.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Why are you so interested in her?’ he demanded. ‘Have you been talking to the girl?’

‘I had a few words with her this morning,’ I admitted.

‘Well, keep clear of her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I tell you to,’ he growled. ‘I don’t trust her.’

‘But you had her cooking here for you.’

‘That was-’ He stopped and his jaw stiffened. ‘Have some sense,’ he added. ‘The girl’s German and this engine we’re working on was first designed in Germany.’

‘Is that why you’re sleeping up at the hangar now?’ I asked. ‘Are you suggesting that the girl-’

‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ he snapped. ‘I’m just telling you to keep clear of her. Or is it too much to expect you to keep your hands off a woman for five weeks?’

The sneer in his voice brought me to my feet. ‘If you think-’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Neil. Sit down. All I’m asking you to do is not to get talking to anyone outside of the four of us here. For your sake as well as mine,’ he added pointedly.

I might have taken his advice if the monotony of our life hadn’t got on my nerves. Perhaps monotony is the wrong word. It was tension really. The work itself was exciting enough. But we never relaxed. The four of us were cooped up together, never leaving the aerodrome, always in the same atmosphere of pressure, always in each other’s company. Within a fortnight the strain was beginning to tell. Tubby ceased to whistle at the bench and his round, cheerful face became morose, almost sulky. Diana did her best, but her chatter was hard and brittle against the solid background of long hours in the hangar. Saeton became impossible — tense and moody, flying into a rage at the slightest provocation or at nothing at all.

The atmosphere got on my nerves. I had to find some relaxation, and automatically it seemed I began thinking of Else more and more often. It is very lonely up here sometimes. I could see the lift of her eyebrows, the smile in her eyes and the slight spread of the corners of her mouth. When you do not know what to do with yourself… The invitation couldn’t have been plainer. I brooded over it at my work, and particularly I brooded over Diana’s suggestion that the girl had been a camp-follower. Saeton hadn’t denied it. In the end I asked Tubby about it. ‘I wasn’t interested in her, if that’s what you mean,’ he answered ‘I don’t go for foreign women.’

‘What about Saeton?’ I asked.

Bill?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t know.’ And then he added almost viciously. ‘They all fall for him. He’s got something that appeals to women.’

‘And she fell for him?’

‘She was always around before Diana came.’ He glanced up at me from the fuel pump he was assembling and his eyes crinkled. The monastic life getting you down? Well, you shouldn’t have much trouble with Else. Randall used to take her out in his car when he visited us up here.’

It was a warm, soft night despite a clear sky and after dinner I said I’d take a stroll. Saeton looked across at me quickly, but he said nothing and a moment later I was striding through the still dampness of the woods, my heart suddenly light with the sense of relief at escaping at last from the atmosphere of the aerodrome. A track ran from the quarters down to the road and a little farther on I found the gates of the Manor. A light shone through the trees and the gentle putter of an electric light plant sounded across the silence of the lawns. An owl flapped like a giant moth to the shelter of the trees.

I went round to the side of the house, and through an uncurtained window saw Else standing over a table rubbing salt into a large ham. Her sleeves were rolled up and her face was flushed. She was a big, well-built girl with a full bosom and wide shoulders. She looked soft and pleasant, working there in that big kitchen and I found myself tingling with the desire to touch her, to feel the warm roundness of her body under my hands. I stood there for quite a while, watching her, liking the capable movements of her hands and the glowing concentration of her features. At length I moved to the door and knocked.

She smiled when she saw who it was. ‘So! You have become bored, eh?’

‘I thought you might like to come for a walk,’ I said. ‘It’s a warm night.’

‘A walk?’ She looked up at me quickly. ‘Yes. Why not? Come into the kitchen whilst I go and dress myself in some clothes.’

It was a big kitchen, warm and friendly, with bacon hanging from hooks in the ceiling and bunches of dried herbs and a smell of chicken. ‘You like cream?’ She produced a bowl full of thick cream, a loaf of bread and some home-made jam. ‘Help yourself please. I will be one minute, that is all.’

I hadn’t tasted cream in years and I was still eating when she returned. ‘You like to take some back with you? Mrs Ellwood will not mind. She is a very ‘ospitable woman.’

‘No. No thanks.’ I should have to explain to Saeton where it had come from.

She looked at me with a slight frown, but she made no comment. ‘Come. I take you to the pond. It is very funny there at night. The frogs croak and there are many wild things.’

We went round behind the outbuildings, through the farmyard and out into a grass field. ‘There are mushrooms here in the autumn. What is your name?’

‘Neil Fraser.’

‘Do you like working at the airfield?’

‘Yes.’ I spoke without thinking, conscious only of her nearness and of the fact that she hadn’t hesitated to come out with me.

‘It is going well, I hope?’

‘Yes. Very well.’

‘When will you have finished the engines?’

I took her hand. Her fingers were warm and soft in mine. She raised no objection.

‘Well?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘What was it you asked?’

‘When will you finish? When do you fly?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘In about a month.’

‘So soon?’ She fell silent. We were in the woods again now on a path that ran downhill. The night air rustled gently among the tall, spear-like shafts of the osiers. I tightened my grip on her hand, but she didn’t seem to notice, for she asked if I were a flier and then began to talk about her brother who had been in the Luftwaffe. ‘Where is he now?’ I asked.

She was silent for a moment, and then she said, ‘He is dead. He was shot down over England.’ She glanced up at me, her face serious. ‘Do you think we shall ever be at peace — Germany and England?’

‘We’re at peace now,’ I answered.

‘Oh, now! Now you are the victors. You occupy us with your troops. But it is not peace. There is no treaty. Germany is not permitted to join any international organisation. We cannot trade. Everything is taken from us.’

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t interested in a political argument. I didn’t want to be reminded that she was German. I just wanted her companionship, her warmth, the feel of her close to me. The screen of osiers parted and we were looking down a steep bank to a dew pond. It was fringed with reeds and the still surface in the centre was like a plate of burnished pewter reflecting the stars. ‘It is beautiful here, yes?’ The cry of a night bird jarred the stillness and a frog croaked. The stillness and the wintry beauty of it brought the blood hammering to my throat. I reached out and caught her by the shoulder twisting her round so that her neck lay in the curve of my arm. Then I bent and kissed her.

For a moment she was limp in my arms, her lips soft and open against mine. Then her body became rigid and her mouth tightened. She fought me off with a sudden and intense fury. For a moment we struggled, but she was strong and my passion subsided with the obstinacy of her resistance and I let her go. ‘You — you-’ She stood there speechless, panting with the effort she had made. ‘Because I am German and you are English you think I should lie on my back for you? Verfluchter Kerl! Ich hasse Sie!’ She turned, tears of anger on her face, and fled up the path. In an instant the screen of osiers had swallowed her and I was alone by the pond with the protesting croak of the frogs.

Saeton was just leaving when I got back to the quarters. ‘What have you been up to?’ he said, looking up at me from under his shaggy eyebrows. ‘That cut of yours has opened up again.’

I put my hand to my forehead and my fingers came away sticky with blood. Else must have scratched the scab as she fought me off. ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘A branch of a tree caught me, that’s all.’

He grunted and went out into the night towards the hangar. As I passed the door of the Carters’ home I heard Diana say, ‘All right. But any time I like the

Malcolm Club will…” I was back in the tense atmosphere of our own little world and I’d destroyed my one chance of escape. I went to bed feeling depressed and angry with myself, for Else had been right — I had treated her as though she were a piece of occupied territory to be bought for a bar of chocolate.

The next day we had visitors. Diana rang through on the field telephone. ‘There’s an R.A.F. officer here and a Mr Garside of the Ministry of Civil Aviation. They want to speak to Bill.’ I had answered the phone and I passed on the message to Saeton. He jumped to his feet as though I’d cracked a stock whip. ‘Tell her they’re not to come up here. I’ll see them over at the quarters.’ He searched quickly along the bench, picking up odd parts that lay amongst the junk at the back. Tubby. Take these out the back somewhere and hide them. Go over the whole bench and see that there’s nothing left of the old engine here. I’ll hold them at the quarters for five or ten minutes.’

‘They may only have come to check over the plane prior to airworthiness tests,’ Tubby said.

‘Maybe. But I’m taking no chances. You’d better keep in the background, Neil.’

He hurried out of the hangar and Tubby searched frantically along the bench, picking up parts and stuffing them into a canvas tool bag. I stood watching him, wondering whether my identity had been discovered.

Tubby had barely returned from hiding the bag when Saeton brought the two men into the hangar. ‘These are my two engineers,’ he said. ‘Carter and

Fraser. Tubby, this is Wing-Commander Felton, R.A.F. Intelligence, and Garside, Civil Aviation. Well, now, what exactly do you want to look at?’ Saeton was forcing himself to be genial, but I could see by the way his head was hunched into his shoulders that he was angry.

‘Well, if you did take it, I don’t imagine you’d be fool enough to leave the prototype lying about,’ the R.A.F. officer said. ‘We’d like to have a look at the design you’re working on.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Saeton said. ‘That’s the one thing I can’t allow you to do. You can have a look at the finished engine, but the design remains secret until we’re in the air.’

‘You’re not being very helpful,’ the Intelligence Officer said.

‘Why should I be?’ Saeton demanded angrily. ‘. German company complains that an English concern is working on a pet project of their own and immediately they have the support of our own people and you come rushing up here to investigate.’

‘As far as I’m concerned the Germans can stew in their own juice,’ Felton replied. ‘But they’ve persuaded Control Commission the matter needs investigating. My instructions come from B.A.F.O. H.Q. Garside here is1 acting at the direct request of Control Commission.’

‘Have the Rauch Motoren sent over the plans of their prototype?’ Saeton asked.

‘No.’

‘Then how can you check from my plans whether I’ve lifted their design?’

The Intelligence Officer glanced at his companion. ‘According to my information,’ Garside said, ‘they claim that the plans were looted with the prototype.’

‘The plans can be withdrawn.’

‘The designer is dead. The fools arrested him in the middle of his work for alleged complicity in the July 20 bomb plot.’

‘Then they’ve only themselves to blame,’ Saeton said.

‘How did you know that it was the Rauch Motoren who had lodged the complaint?’ the R.A.F. officer asked.

‘I’ve admitted already that it was seeing their prototype that gave me the idea,’ Saeton answered. His voice was quiet. He was keeping a tight hold of himself. ‘The same company has already made an effort to get control of my outfit through a gentleman called Reinbaum who now holds the mortgages on the plane and equipment here.’ He turned and faced the two of them. ‘What exactly are the authorities trying to do? Do they want a German company to produce a new type of aero engine in preference to a British concern? Carter and I have worked for nearly three years on this. If we’d pinched their prototype and it was so far advanced that they were ready to go into production with it, surely we’d have been in the air now, instead of mortgaged to the hilt and still working to produce a second engine?’

The two men glanced at each other. ‘So long as it can’t be proved that you looted the thing…’ The R.A.F. officer shrugged his shoulders. ‘The trouble with Control Commission is that they think in terms of supporting the Jerries. You don’t have to worry as far as I’m concerned, Saeton. Three years ago I was bombing the beggars and if you’d looted the complete article …’ He turned to his companion. ‘What’s your view, Garside?’

The other looked helplessly round the hangar. ‘Even if it was looted,’ he said slowly, ‘it would be very difficult to prove it now.’ He turned to Saeton. ‘In any case, you’ve done three years’ work on your engines. My advice is, get it patented as soon as possible. Doubtless the Patents Office will compare your design with the German company’s, if they can produce one and if they put in a claim.’

‘I notified Headquarters at the time I saw the Rauch Motoren prototype,’ Saeton said.

The R.A.F. officer nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve looked over your report. Had the devil’s own job digging it out of its pigeon hole in the Air Ministry. You acted perfectly correctly as far as the authorities were concerned. You don’t have to worry about that. But as Garside says — get your patents. Every day you delay, German pressure is becoming more effective.’ He held out his hand to Saeton. ‘Well, good luck!’

‘You’d better come and have some coffee before you drive back,’ Saeton suggested and he shepherded them out of the hangar.

‘Well, what’s all that about, Tubby?’ I asked as the door of the hangar closed behind them.

‘Just that our problems won’t be over even when we get into the air,’ he answered and went back to the bench.

Saeton was looking pleased with himself when he came back. ‘What I didn’t tell them,’ he said with a grin, ‘is that the designs are already with the Patents Office. If the German company want to put in a claim they’ll have to get busy.’

‘Do you think Randall had anything to do with that visit?’ Tubby asked.

‘Randall? Of course not. If they got hold of Randall, then there would be trouble.’

At dinner that night he announced that he was going to London. ‘I want to have a word with Dick,’ he said. ‘Also it’s time I saw the patents people.’

Diana paused, with her fork half-way to her mouth. ‘How long will you be gone, Bill?’ Her voice was tense.

‘A couple of days.’

‘Two days!’

It’s strange how you can live with people and not notice what’s happening right under your nose because it happens so gradually. Tubby glanced at his wife, his face pale, his body very still. The atmosphere had suddenly become electric. In the way she had spoken she had betrayed herself. She was in love with Saeton. And Tubby knew it. Saeton knew it, too, for he didn’t look at her and answered too casually: ‘I shall be away one night. That’s all.’

It was queer. Nothing of any importance had been said, and yet it was as though Diana had shouted her infatuation from the middle of the runway. She had stripped herself naked with that too interested, too tense query and her repetition of the time as though it were eternity. Silence hung over the table like a storm that has revealed itself in one lightning stab but has still to break.

Tubby’s hand had clenched into a fist and I waited for the moment when he’d fling the trestle table over and round on Saeton. I’d seen men break like that during the war, sane, solid men pushed over the edge by nerves strung too taut through danger, monotony and the confined space of a small mess.

But he had that essential stolidity, that Saxon aversion for the theatrical. The scrape of his chair as he thrust it back shattered the silence. ‘I’m going out for a breath of air.’ His voice trembled slightly. That was the only indication of the angry turmoil inside him — that and his eyes, which showed bright and angry in the creases of fat. His cheeks quivered slightly as he turned from the table. He shut the door quite softly behind him and his footsteps rang on the frozen earth outside and then died away into the woods.

The three of us sat there for a moment in a stunned silence. Then Saeton said, ‘You’d better go and talk to him, Diana. I don’t want him walking out on me. Without him, we’d be lost.’

‘Can’t you think of anything but your engines?’ The violence of her emotion showed in her voice and in her eyes.

He looked at her then. There was something in his face I couldn’t fathom — a sort of bitterness, a mixture of desire and frustration. ‘No,’ he said. The one word seemed drawn out of the depths of his being.

Diana leaned quickly forward. Her face was white, her eyes very wide and she was breathing as though she were making a last desperate effort in a race. ‘Bill. I can’t go on like this. Don’t you understand-’

‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ his voice rasped. ‘I didn’t want you here.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ She seemed to have forgotten my presence entirely. Both of them had. Their eyes were at grips with each other, face to face with something inside them that had to come out. ‘But I’m here. And I can’t go on like this. You dominate everything. You’ve dominated me. I don’t care how long you’re away. But I can’t-’ She stopped then and looked at me as though aware of my presence for the first time.

I started to get to my feet, but Saeton leaned quickly forward and gripped my arm. ‘You stay here, Neil,’ he said. I think he was scared to be left alone with her. Still gripping my arm as though clutching hold of something solid and reasonable, he turned and looked at her. ‘Go and find Tubby,’ he said. His voice was suddenly cold and unemotional. ‘He needs you. I don’t.’

She stared at him, her lips trembling. She wanted to fight him, to beat at his resistance till it was down. But I think the essential truth of his words struck home, for suddenly there were tears in her eyes, tears of anger, and she turned and fled from the room. We heard the door of her room slam and it muffled the sound of her sobs.

Saeton’s fingers slowly released their grip of my wrist. ‘Damn all women to hell!’ he muttered savagely.

‘Do you want her?’ I had put the question without thinking.

‘Of course I do,’ he answered, his voice tight as a violin string and trembling with his passion. ‘And she knows it.’ He gave a growl of anger and got to his feet. ‘But it isn’t her I want. Any woman would do. She knows that, too — now.’ He was pacing up and down and I saw him feel automatically in his pocket for a cigarette. ‘I’ve been lost to the world up here too long. God! Here I am with the future almost within my grasp, with everything I’ve dreamed of coming to the verge of reality, and it can all be thrown in jeopardy because a woman senses my primitive need.’

‘You could send her away?’ I suggested.

‘If she goes, Tubby goes, too. Tubby loves her more than he loves himself or his future.’ He turned and looked at me. ‘And Diana loves him, too. This is merely-’ He hesitated. And then almost bitterly, ‘You know, Neil, I don’t think I’m capable of love. It isn’t a word I understand. Else knew that. I thought she’d see me through this period of monasticism. But when it came to the point, she wanted something I wasn’t prepared to give her.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Diana is different. But she’s got Tubby. She’s driven by nothing more than an urge for excitement. There’s that in women, too. The constant craving for novelty, conquest. Why the hell can’t she be satisfied with what she’s got already?’ His hand gripped my shoulder. ‘Go and find Tubby, will you, Neil. Tell him… Oh, tell him what you like. But for Christ’s sake smooth him down. I can’t get this engine to the flying stage. Nor can you. He’s been in it from the beginning. The prototype didn’t work, you know. For months I studied engineering, made inquiries, picked other people’s brains. I produced a modified version, flew it in an old Hurricane and crashed it. Then I found Tubby and with his genius for improvisation we built one that worked. Go and talk to him. He’s got to stay here, for another month at any rate. If he doesn’t, you’ve lost your money.’

I found Tubby in the hangar and I think it was then that I first really admired him. He was quietly working away, truing up a bearing assembly that had been giving trouble. He stopped me before I could say anything. ‘Bill sent you to talk to me, didn’t he?’

I nodded.,

He put the bearing down. ‘Tell him that I understand.’ And then, more to himself than to me: ‘It’s not his fault. It’s something Diana wants that he’s got. It was there inside her before she ever came here — a restlessness, an urge for a change. I thought by bringing her up here-’ He moved his hand in a helpless gesture. ‘It’ll work itself out. She ought to have had a child, but-’ He sighed. ‘Tell Bill it’s all right. I won’t blame him so long as he gives me no cause. It’ll work itself out,’ he repeated. And then added quietly: ‘In time.’

Saeton left next morning on the old motor bike which was their sole form of transport. And it was only after he’d gone that I realised how much the whole tempo of the place depended on him. Without the driving enthusiasm of his personality it all seemed flat. Tubby worked with the concentration of a man trying hard to lose himself in what he was making. But it was a negative drive. For myself I found the rime hang slowly on the hands of my watch and I determined to go down to the farm that evening and make it up with Else. Somehow I hadn’t been able to get her out of my mind. I think it was her presence in the hangar with Saeton that first night that I’d arrived at Membury that intrigued me. The obvious explanation I had proved to be wrong. Now, suddenly, I was filled with an urgent desire to get at the truth. Also I was lonely. I suppose any girl would have done — then. But she was the only one available and as soon as Tubby and I knocked off I went down to the Manor.

The kitchen curtains were drawn and when I knocked at the door it wasn’t Else who opened it. A small, grey-haired woman stood framed against the light, a swish of silk at her feet and the scent of jasmine clinging on the air. ‘I was looking for Else Langen,’ I explained awkwardly.

She smiled. ‘Else is upstairs dressing. Are you from the aerodrome? Then you must be Mr Eraser. Won’t you come in? I am Mrs Ellwood.’ She closed the door behind me. ‘You must find it very cold up at the airfield now. I really think Mr Saeton should get some proper heating put in. I’ve told him, any time he or his friends want a little home comfort to come over and see us.

But he’s always so busy.’ We were in the kitchen now and she went over to the Aga cooker and stirred vigorously at the contents of a saucepan, holding her dressing-gown close around the silk of her dress. ‘Have you had dinner, Mr Fraser?’

‘No. We have it later-’

‘Then why not stay and have some food with us? It’s only stew, but-’ She hesitated. ‘I’m cook tonight. You see, we’re going to the Red Cross dance at Marlborough. It’s for Else, really. Poor child, she’s hardly been anywhere since she came to us. Of course, she’s what they call a D.P. and she’s here as a domestic servant — why do they call them D.P.s? — it’s so depressing. But whether she’s a servant or not, I don’t think it right to keep a young thing shut away here without any life. You people at the aerodrome are no help. We never see anything of you. And it is lonely up here. What do you think of Else? Don’t you think she’s pretty, Mr Fraser?’

‘I think she’s very pretty,’ I murmured.

She cocked an eye at me. She was like a little grey-haired sparrow and I had a feeling that she missed nothing. ‘Are you doing anything tonight, Mr Fraser?’

‘No, I was just going to-’

‘Then will you do something for me? Will you come to this dance with us? It would be a great kindness. You see, I had arranged for my son, who works with the railways at Swindon, to come over, but this afternoon he rang up to say he had to go to London. I wouldn’t mind if it were an English girl. But you know what country places are. And after all’ — she lowered her voice — ‘she is German. It would be a kindness.’

‘But I’ve no clothes,’ I murmured.

‘Oh!’ She waved the spoon at me like a little fairy godmother changing me into evening clothes on the spot. ‘That’s all right, I’m certain. You’re just about my son’s size. Come along and we’ll see.’

And of course the clothes fitted. It was that sort of a night. By the time I had changed the three of them were assembled in the big lounge hall. Colonel Ellwood was pouring drinks from a decanter that sparkled in the firelight. He was a tall, very erect man with grey hair and a long, serious face. His wife fluttered about with a rustle of silk. And Else sat in a big winged chair staring into the fire. She was dressed in very deep blue and her face and shoulders were like marble. She looked lonely and a little frightened. She didn’t look up as I came in. She seemed remote, shut away in a world of her own. Only when Mrs Ellwood called to her did she turn her head. ‘I think you know Mr Eraser.’ She saw me then and her eyes widened. For an awful moment I thought she was going to run from the room, but then she said, ‘Good evening,’ in a cold, distant voice and turned back to the fire.

She hardly said a word all through dinner and when we were together in the back of the car she drew away from me and sat huddled in her corner, her face a white blur in the reflected light of the headlights. Not until we were dancing together in the warmth of the ballroom did she break that frigid silence and then I think it was only her sense of loneliness in that alien gathering that made her say, ‘Why did you come?’

‘I was lonely,’ I said.

‘Lonely?’ She looked up at me then. ‘You have your — friends.’

‘I happen to work there — that’s all,’ I said.

‘But they are your friends.’

‘Three weeks ago I had never met any of them.’

She stared at me. ‘But you are a partner. You put up money.’ She hesitated. ‘Why do you come here if you do not know them?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I answered and holding her close in the swing of the music I suddenly found myself wanting to tell her. But instead I said, ‘Else. 1 want to apologise for the other night. I thought-’ I didn’t know how to put it, so I said, That first night I came to Membury — why were you in the hangar with Saeton?’

Her grey eyes lifted to my face and then to the cut on my forehead. ‘That also is a long story,’ she said slowly. And then in a more friendly tone: ‘You are a strange person.’

“Why did Saeton think I was a friend of yours that night?’ I asked. ‘Why did he call to me in German?’

She didn’t answer for a moment and I thought she was going to ignore the question. But at length she said, ‘Perhaps I tell you some day.’ We danced in silence for a time. I have said that she was a big girl, but she was incredibly light on her feet. She was like thistledown in my arms and yet I could feel the warm strength of her under my hand. The warmth and the music were going to my head, banishing loneliness and the tension of the past weeks. ‘Why did you come to the farm tonight?’ she asked suddenly.

‘To see you,’ I answered.

‘To apologise?’ She was smiling for the first time., ‘You did not have to.’

‘I told you — I was lonely.’

‘Lonely!’ Her face seemed to harden. ‘You do not know what that word means. Please, I would like a drink.’ The music had stopped and I took her over to the bar. ‘Well, here is to the success of those engines!’ Her tone was light, but as she drank her eyes were watching me and they did not smile. ‘Why do you not drink? You are not so crazy about those engines as Mr Saeton, eh?’ She used the word crazy in its real sense.

‘No,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Of course not. For him they are a part of his nature now — a great millstone round his neck.’ She hesitated and then said, ‘Everyone makes for himself on this earth some particular hell of his own. With Saeton it is these engines, ja?’ She looked up into my face again. ‘When are they finished — when do you fly them?’

I hesitated, but there was no reason why she shouldn’t know. Living so close at the Manor she would see us in the air. ‘With luck we’ll be in the air by Christmas. Airworthiness tests are fixed for the first week in January.’

‘So!’ A sudden mood of excitement showed in her eyes. ‘Then you go on to the. I hope your friend Saeton is happy then.’ Her voice trembled slightly. She was suddenly tense and the excitement in her eyes had changed to bitterness.

‘Why are you so interested in Saeton?’ I asked her.

‘Interested — in Saeton?’ She seemed surprised, almost shocked.

‘Are you in love with him?’ I asked.

Her face hardened and she bit at her lower lip. ‘What has he been saying?’

‘Nothing,’ I answered.

‘Then why do you ask me if I am in love with him? How can I be in love with a man I hate, a man who has-’ She stopped short, staring at me angrily. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘You are so stupid. You do not understand nothing — nothing.’ Her fingers were white against the stem of the glass as she sought for words.

‘Why do you say you hate him?’ I asked.

‘Why? Because I offer him the only thing I have left to offer — because I crawl to him like a dog-’ Her face was suddenly white with anger. ‘He only laugh. He laugh in my face, I tell you, as though I am a common — Nutte.’ She spat the word out as though she were hating herself as well as Saeton. ‘And then that Carter woman comes. He is a devil,’ she whispered and then turned quickly away from me and stared miserably at the crowded bar. ‘You talk of loneliness! That is what it is to be lonely. Here, with all these people. To be away from one’s own people, a stranger in a-’

‘You think I don’t understand,’ I said gently. ‘I was eighteen months in a prison camp in Germany.’

‘That is not the same thing. There you are still with your own peoples.’

‘Not after I escaped. For three weeks I was alone in Germany, on the run.’

She stared up at me and gave a little sigh. ‘Then perhaps you do understand. But you are not alone here.’

I hesitated, and then I said, ‘More alone than I have ever been.’

‘More alone than-’ She stopped and gazed at me unbelievingly. ‘But why is that?’

I took her arm and guided her to a seat. I had to tell her now. I had to tell someone and she was a German, alone in England — my story was safe with her. I told her the whole thing, sitting there in an alcove near a roaring fire with the sound of dance music in my ears. When I had finished she put her hand on mine. “Why did you tell me?’

I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know myself. ‘Let’s dance,’ I said.

We didn’t talk much after that. We just seemed to lose ourselves in the music. And then Mrs Ellwood came and said we must go as her husband had to start work early the next morning. In the car going back Else didn’t talk, but she no longer shrank into her corner of the seat. Her shoulder leant against mine and when I closed my hand over hers she didn’t withdraw. ‘Why are you so silent?’ I asked.

‘I am thinking of Germany and what fun we could have had there — in the old days. Do you know Wiesbaden?’

‘Only from the air,’ I answered and then wished I had not said that as I saw her lips tighten.

‘Yes, of course — from the air.’ She took her hand away and seemed to withdraw into herself. She didn’t speak again until the car was climbing the hill to Membury, and then she said very quietly, ‘Do not come to see me again, Neil.’

‘Of course I shall,’ I said.

‘No.’ She said it almost violently, her eyes staring at me out of the darkness. Her hand gripped mine. ‘Please try to understand. We are like two people who have caught sight of each other for a moment through a crack in the wall that separates us. Whatever the S.S. do to my father, I am still a German. I must hold fast to that, because it is all I have left now. I am German, you are English, and also you are working-’ She stopped and her grip on my hand tightened. ‘I like you too much. Do not to come again, please. It is better so.’

I didn’t know what to say. And then the car stopped. We were at the track leading up to the quarters. ‘You can return the clothes in the morning,’ Mrs Ellwood said. I got out and thanked them for the evening. As 1 was about to shut the car door, Else leaned forward. ‘In England do you not kiss your partners goodnight?’ Her face was a pale circle in the darkness, her eyes wide. I bent to kiss her cheek, but found her lips instead. ‘Goodbye,’ she whispered.

The Ellwoods were chuckling happily as they drove off. I stood watching until the red tail-light had turned into the Manor drive and then I went up the track to the quarters, wondering about Else.

It was to be nearly three weeks before I saw Else again, for Saeton returned the following evening with the news that the Air Ministry now wanted the plane on the airlift by 10th January, and airworthiness tests had been fixed for 1st January.

In the days that followed I plumbed the depths of physical exhaustion. I had neither the time nor the energy for anything else. And it went on, day after day, one week dragging into the next with no let-up, no pause. Saeton didn’t drive. He led. He did as long as we did at the bench, then he went back to the hangar, typing letters far into the night, ordering things, staving off creditors, running the whole of the business side of the company. My admiration for the man was boundless, but somehow I had no sympathy for him. I could admire him, but I couldn’t like him. He was inhuman, as impersonal as the mechanism we pieced together. He drove us with the sure touch of a coachman who knew just how to get the last ounce out of his horses, but didn’t care a damn what happened to them in the end so long as he made the next stage on time.

But it was exciting. And it was that sense of excitement that carried me through to Christmas. The airfield hardened to iron as the cold gripped it. The runways gleamed white with frost in the sunshine on fine days. But mostly it was grey and cold with the ploughed-up earth black and ringing hard and metallic like solidified lava. There was no heating in the hangar. It had the chill dank smell of a tomb. Only the work kept us warm as we lathered ourselves daily into a sweat of exhaustion.

Saeton was working for engine completion on 20th

December, installation by 23rd December and first test on Christmas Day. It was a tight schedule, but he wanted a clear week for tests. But though we worked far on into the night, we were behind schedule all the time and it was not until Christmas Eve that we completed that second engine.

The final adjustments were made at eight-thirty in the evening. We were dead beat and we stood in front of the gleaming mass of metal in a sort of daze. None of us said a word. We just stood back and looked at it. I produced a packet of cigarettes and tossed one to Saeton. He lit it and drew the smoke into his lungs as though smoke alone could ease the tension of his nerves. ‘All right, fill her up with oil, Tubby, and switch on the juice. I’ll get Diana. She’d like to be in on this.’ He went over to the phone and rang the quarters. I helped fill up with oil. We checked that there was petrol in the wall tank, tightened the unit of the petrol feed and switched on.

There was a tense silence as we waited for Diana. Five weeks’ work stood before us and a touch of the starter button would tell us whether we’d made a job of it. It wasn’t like an engine coming out of a works. There everything moves with an inevitable progression from the foundry and the lathes and the electrical shop to the assembly and the final running in. This was different. Everything had been made by hand. One tiny slip in any of the precision work … I thought of how tired we were. It seemed incredible that everything would work smoothly.

A knock on the door of the hangar sounded incredibly loud in the silence. Tubby went to the door and let his wife in. ‘Well, there it is, Diana,’ Saeton said, pointing to the thing. His voice trembled slightly. ‘Thought you’d like to see what your cooking has given birth to.’ Our laughter was uneasy, forced. ‘Okay, Tubby. Let her go.’ He turned away with a quick nervous twist of his shoulders and walked down to the far end of the bench. He wasn’t going to touch that starter switch himself. He wasn’t even going to watch. He stood with his back towards us, puffing at his cigarette, his hands playing aimlessly with the pieces of metal lying on the bench.

Tubby watched him, hesitating.

‘Go on — start it.’ Saeton’s voice was a rasp.

Tubby glanced at me, swallowed nervously and crossed to the starter motor which was already connected up. He pressed the switch. It groaned, overloaded with the stiffness of the metal. The groaning sound went on and on. He switched off and went over to the engine, his practised eye running over it, checking. Then he went back to the starter motor. The groaning sound was faster now, moving to a hum. There was a sharp explosion. The engine rocked. The hum of the starter took over again and then suddenly the stillness of the hangar was shattered by a roar as the motor picked up. The whole building seemed to shake. Tubby switched off, hurried to the engine and adjusted the controls. When he started it again, the roar settled to a steady, glorious hum of power, smooth and even like the dynamos of a power station.

Saeton ground out his cigarette and came back along the bench. His face was shining with sweat. ‘She’s okay,’ he shouted above the din. It was part statement, part question. Tubby looked up from the controls and his fat, friendly face was creased in a happy grin and he nodded. ‘Carburation wants a bit of adjustment and the timing on that-’

‘To hell with the adjustments,’ Saeton shouted. ‘We’ll do those tomorrow. All I care about at the moment is that she goes. Now switch the damned thing off and let’s go and have a drink. My God, we’ve earned it.’

The roar died away as Tubby cut off the juice. The hangar was suddenly still again. But there was no tension in the stillness now. We were all grinning and slapping each other on the back. Tubby caught hold of his wife and hugged her. She had caught our mood of relief. Her eyes were shining and she just didn’t seem able to contain her excitement. ‘Anybody else like a kiss?’ I was nearest to her and she reached up and touched her lips to mine. Then she turned and caught hold of Saeton. She pressed her lips to his, her hands tightening on his overalls. He caught hold of her shoulders and pushed her away almost roughly. ‘Come on. Let’s get a drink.’ His voice was hoarse.

Saeton had kept a bottle of whisky for this moment. ‘Here’s to the airlift!’ he said.

‘To the airlift!’ we echoed.

We drank it neat, talking excitedly of how we’d manage the installation, what the first test flight would show, how the plane would behave on two engines. Saeton planned to use the outboard engines for take-off only. With the extra power developed by the Satan Mark II all flying would be done on the two engines. We bridged in our excitement all the immediate problems and talked instead of how we should develop the company, what planes we should buy, what routes we should operate, whose works we should take over for mass production. In a flash the bottle was empty. Saeton wrung the last drop out of it and smashed it on the concrete floor. ‘That’s the best bottle of Scotch I’ve ever had and I won’t have it lying on any damned rubbish heap,’ he shouted. His eyes were dilated with the drink and his own excitement.

Our glasses suddenly empty, we stood around looking at them in silence. It seemed a pity to end the evening like this. Saeton apparently felt the same. ‘Look, Tubby,’ he said. ‘Suppose you nip on the old bike and run down into Ramsbury. Bring back a couple of bottles. Doesn’t matter what it costs.’ He glanced at me. ‘Okay, Neil? It’s your money.’ And as I nodded, he clapped my arm. ‘You won’t regret having backed us. If you live to be as old as Methuselah you’ll never make a better investment than this. More Scotch, Tubby!’ He waved his arm expansively. ‘Get on your charger, boy, and ride like hell. This bloody dump is out of Scotch. Come on. We’ll hold your stirrups for you and we’ll be out to cheer you as you ride back, bottles clanking in your saddle-bags.’

We were all laughing and shouting as we trooped out to the store-room where the bike was housed. Tubby roared off, his face beaming, his hand whacking at the rear of the bike as he flogged through the gears.

His tail-light disappeared through the trees and we fell suddenly silent. Saeton passed his hand across his eyes. ‘Let’s go in,’ he said moodily and I saw that the nerves at the corners of his eyes were twitching. He was near to breaking point. We all were. A good drink would do us good and I suddenly thought of Else. ‘What about making it a party?’ I said. ‘I’ll go down and see the Ellwoods.’ I knew they wouldn’t come, but I thought Else might. Saeton tried to stop me, but I was already hurrying down the track and I ignored him.

A light was on over the front door of the farm. It looked friendly and welcoming.

Mrs Ellwood answered my ring. ‘It’s you, Mr Fraser.’ She sounded surprised. ‘We thought you must have left.’

‘We’ve been very busy,’ I murmured.

‘Come in, won’t you?’

‘No, thank you. I just came down to say we’re having a party. I wondered if you and Colonel Ellwood could come up for a drink. And Else,’ I added.

Her eyes twinkled. ‘It’s Else you’re wanting, isn’t it? What a pity! We’ve been expecting you all this time and now you come tonight. Else has had to go to London. Something about her passage. She’s going back to Germany, you know.’

‘To Germany?’

‘Yes. Oh, dear, it’s all very sudden. And what we shall do without her I don’t know. She’s been such a help.’

‘When is she going?’ I asked.

‘In a few days’ time, I imagine. It was all very unexpected. Just after that dance. She got a letter to say her brother was very ill. And now there is some trouble about her papers. Do come and see her before she goes.’

‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘Yes, I’ll come down one evening.’ I backed away trying to remember if Else had said she had a second brother. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Ellwood. Sorry you won’t join us.’ I heard the door close as I started back down the drive. Hell! The evening suddenly seemed flat. A feeling of violent anger swept through me. Damn the girl. Why for God’s sake, couldn’t she be home this evening of all evenings?

I took a short cut through the woods. I was just in sight of the quarters when I heard the snap of a twig behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the figure of a man emerging out of the darkness. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. The voice was Tubby’s.

‘Neil,’ I said. ‘Did you get the Scotch?’

For an answer I heard the clank of bottle against bottle. ‘Bloody bike ran out of petrol just up the road.’ His voice was thick. He’d either had several at the pub or he’d opened one of the bottles. ‘What are you doing, looking for fairies?’

‘I’ve just been down to the farm,’ I said.

‘Else, eh?’ He laughed and slipped his arm through mine.

We went on in silence. A lighted widow showed through the trees like a homing beacon. We came out of the woods and there was the interior of the dining-room. Saeton and Diana were there, standing very close together, a bottle on the table and drinks in their hands. ‘I wonder where they got that?’ Tubby murmured. ‘Come on. We’ll give them a surprise.’

We had almost reached the window when Diana moved. She put down her drink and moved closer to Saeton. Her hand touched his. She was talking. I could hear the murmur of her voice through the glass of the window. Tubby had stopped. Saeton took his hand away and turned towards the door. She caught hold of him, swinging him round, her head thrown back, laughing at him. The tinkle of her laughter came out to us in the cold of the night air.

Tubby moved forward. He was like a man in a dream, compelled to go to the window as though drawn there by some magnetic influence. Saeton was standing quite still, looking down at Diana, his hard, leathery face unsoftened, a muscle twitching at the corner of his mouth. Standing there in the darkness facing that lighted window it was like watching a puppet show. ‘All right. If you want it that way.’ Saeton’s voice was harsh. It came to us muffled, but clear. He knocked back his drink, set down the glass and seized hold of her by the arms. She lay back in his grip, her hair hanging loose, her face turned up to him in complete abandon.

Saeton hesitated. There was a bitter set about his mouth. Then he drew her to him. Her arms closed around his neck. Her passion was to me something frightening. I was so conscious all the time of Tubby standing there beside me. It was like watching a scene from a play, feeling it through the senses of a character who had yet to come on. Saeton was fumbling at her dress, his face flushed with drink and quite violent. Then suddenly he stiffened. His hands came away from her. ‘That’s enough, Diana,’ he said. ‘Get me another drink.’

‘No, Bill. It’s me you want, not drink. You know you do. Why don’t you-’

But he took hold of her hands and tore them from his neck. ‘I said get me another drink.’

‘Oh God! Don’t you understand, darling?’ Her hand touched his face, stroking it, smoothing out the deep-etched lines on either side of the mouth. ‘You want me. You know you do.’

Tubby didn’t move. And I stood there, transfixed by his immobility.

Saeton’s hands slowly reached out for Diana, closed on her and then gripped hold of her and hurled her from him. She hit the edge of the table and clutched at it. He took two steps forward, standing over her, his head thrust slightly forward. ‘You little fool!’ he said. ‘Can’t you understand you mean nothing to me. Nothing, do you hear? You’re trying to come between me and something that is bigger than both of us. Well, I’m not going to have everything wrecked.’

‘Go on,’ she cried. ‘I know I don’t rate as high as that bloody engine of yours. But you can’t go to bed with an engine. And you can with me. Why don’t you forget it for the moment? You know you want me. You know your whole body’s crying out for-’

‘Shut up!’

But she couldn’t shut up. She was laughing at him, goading him. ‘You never were cut out for a monk. You lie awake at nights thinking about me. Don’t you? And I lie awake thinking about you. Oh, Bill, why don’t you-’

‘Shut up!’ His voice shook with violence and the veins were standing out on his forehead, hard and knotted.

Her voice dropped to a low murmur of invitation. I could no longer hear the words. But the sense was there in her face, in the way she looked at him. His hands came slowly out, searching for her. Then suddenly he straightened up. His hand opened out and he slapped her across the face — twice, once on each cheek. ‘I said — shut up! Now get out of here.’

She had staggered back, her hand to her mouth, her face white. She looked as though she were going to cry. Saeton reached out for the bottle. ‘If you’d had any sense you’d have given me that drink.’ His voice was no longer hard. ‘Next time, pick somebody your own size.’ He tucked the bottle under his arm and turned to go. But he hesitated at the door, looking back at her. I think he was going to say something conciliatory. But when he saw the blazing fury in her eyes, his face suddenly hardened again. ‘If you start any trouble between me and Tubby,’ he said slowly, ‘I’ll break your neck. Do you understand?’ He wrenched open the door and disappeared.

A moment later the outer door of the quarters opened and we were spotlighted in the sudden shaft of light. Saeton stopped. ‘How long have you two been-’ He slammed the door. ‘I hope you enjoyed your rubbernecking. I’m going over to the hangar.’ His footsteps rang on the iron-hard earth as his figure merged into the darkness of the woods.

Neither of us moved for a moment. Utter stillness surrounded us, broken only by the muffled sound of Diana’s sobs where she lay across the table, her head buried in her hands amongst the litter of glasses. I felt the chill glass of the bottles as Tubby thrust them into my hands. ‘Take these over to the hangar,’ he said in a strangled voice.

I watched him as he opened the door of the quarters and went inside, walking slowly, almost unwillingly. I didn’t move for a moment. I seemed rooted to the spot. Then the door of the dining-room opened and I saw him enter. I’d no desire to stand in as audience on another painful scene. I turned quickly and hurried through the woods after Saeton.

When I entered the hangar, Saeton was sitting on the work bench staring at the new engine and drinking out of the bottle. ‘Come in, Neil.’ He waved the bottle at me. ‘Have a drink.’ His voice was slurred, almost unrecognisable. God knows how much he’d drunk in the short time it had taken me to get to the hangar.

I took the bottle from him. It was brandy and more than.-half-empty. The liquid ran like fire down my throat and I gasped.

‘You saw the whole thing, I suppose?’ he asked.

I nodded.

He laughed, a wild, unnatural sound. “What will Tubby do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

He got off the bench and began pacing up and down. ‘Why did he ever let her come here? It was no place for her. She likes plenty going on — lots of people, excitement, plenty of noise and movement. Why don’t men learn to understand their wives? Let’s forget about it.’ He waved his arm angrily. ‘What have you got there — Scotch?’ He came over and picked up one of the bottles from the bench where I’d placed it. ‘Thank God we’ve got some liquor, anyway.’ He glanced at the bottle of brandy which I still held. ‘Queer, a woman hiding away a bottle like that.’ He unscrewed the top of a whisky bottle.

‘Haven’t you had enough?’ I suggested.

He gave me a glassy stare. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it? And the engine is finished. I could drink a bloody vat.’ He raised the bottle to his lips and drank, rocking slightly back on to his heels and then forward on to his toes. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ he muttered hoarsely, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. ‘You start out with the idea of celebrating and before you know where you are you’re trying to drown your sorrows. Neil, old man.’ His free hand reached out and fastened around my shoulders. Tell me something. Be honest with me now. I want an honest reply. Do you like me?’

I hesitated. If I’d been as drunk as he was it wouldn’t have mattered. But I was comparatively sober and he knew it.

His arm slipped away from my shoulders and he staggered away from me towards the engine. He stood in front of it and addressed it. ‘You bastard!’ he said. Then he lurched round towards me. ‘I haven’t a friend in the world,’ he said and there was a frightful bitterness in his voice which caught on a sob of self-pity. ‘Not a friend in the whole wide world,’ he repeated. ‘Diana was right. An engine is something you create, not a living being. God damn it! I don’t care. Do you hear me? — I don’t care. I don’t give a damn for the whole human race. If they don’t like me, why should I care? I don’t need anything from them. I’m building something of my own. And that’s all I care about, do you hear? I don’t give a damn-’ He turned suddenly at the sound of the hangar door opening.

It was Tubby. He came slowly down the hangar. ‘Give me a drink,’ he said.

Saeton handed him the bottle. Tubby raised it to his lips and gulped, Saeton watching him, his body tense. ‘Well?’ he asked. And then as Tubby didn’t answer he added, ‘For God’s sake say something, can’t you? What happened?’

Tubby raised his eyes and looked at Saeton. But I don’t think he saw him. His hand strayed to the leather belt that supported his trousers. ‘I thrashed her,’ he said in the same flat tone. ‘She’s packing now.’

‘Packing?’ Saeton’s voice was suddenly hard and crisp. In that moment he seemed to shake off all the effects pi the drink.

‘I’ve telephoned for a taxi.’

Saeton strode over to him and caught hold of him by his jacket. ‘You can’t walk out on me now, Tubby. In a few days we’ll be making our first test flight. After all this time.’

‘Can’t you forget about your engine for just one night?’ Tubby’s voice was tired. There was a sort of hopelessness about it. ‘I want some money, Saeton. That’s what I came up to see you about.’

Saeton laughed suddenly. ‘There isn’t any money. You know that. Not until we’re on the airlift.’ The sudden sense of domination was back in his voice and I knew that he had seen how he could keep Carter with us.

‘How much do you want, Tubby?’ I asked, feeling for my wallet.

Saeton rounded on me, his face heavy with anger. ‘If you think the two of us can get the plane into the air, you’re crazy,’ he said. ‘For one thing the margin of time is too small. For another there may be alterations to make. Neither you nor I-’ He turned away with a quick, angry shrug.

‘How much do you want?’ I asked again.

‘A fiver.’ He came across to me and I gave him the notes. ‘I hate to do this, Neil, but…’ His voice tailed away.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Are you sure that will be enough?’

He nodded. ‘It’s only to get Diana to London. She’ll stay with her friends. She’s got a job waiting for her. It’s just to see her through for a few days. She’s going back to the Malcolm Club. She worked for them during the war and they’ve been wanting her back ever since the airlift got under way.’ He stuffed the money into his pocket. ‘She’ll pay you back.’

He turned to leave the hangar, but Saeton stopped him. ‘They employ girls at the Malcolm Club, not engineers. What are you going to do?’

Tubby looked at him. ‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘I promised I’d see you into the air and I’ll keep my promise. After that-’

But Saeton wasn’t listening. He came across the hangar like a man who had been reprieved. His eyes were alight with excitement, his whole face transfigured. ‘Then it’s okay. You’re not walking out on me.’ He caught hold of Tubby’s hand and wrung it. ‘Then everything’s all right.’

‘Yes,’ Tubby answered, withdrawing his hand. ‘Everything’s all right, Bill.’ But as he turned away I saw there were tears in his eyes.

Saeton stood for a moment, watching him go. Then he turned to me. ‘Come on, Neil. Let’s have a drink.’ He seized hold of the opened bottle of Scotch. ‘Here’s to the test flight!’

There was only room for one thing in the man’s mind. With a sick feeling I turned away. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I said.