Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

PRUDENCE woke at eight in the morning. She lay still for a few minutes, thinking of the tennis dance, and luxuriating in the memory of her partners, how some of them had been enthralled by her conversation, and how Peter, who was already up at Cambridge and very experienced, had asked her for a second dance. She remembered Neville, and his oafish looks of adoration, and began to giggle. Rosemary knew all about Neville; she must telephone Rosemary, or was it too early? She began to dress, but when she had washed and brushed her hair, life seemed too dreary to be endured. The truth was, she simply couldn’t tango properly: Marion had noticed, even if Neville hadn’t: Marion had looked at her in a very bitchy way, and said, “You are learning quickly, considering.” Marion was coming to the dance next week. If she couldn’t tango perfectly by next week she would die. She threw the brush on the floor, and looked in the mirror. Her frock was too short, good enough for the house, Hester would say, but it wasn’t good enough for anything. If she bought some material she could make herself a new frock over the week-end and the family could starve. She remembered that Jackie was there to do the cooking; she was suddenly very hungry. She ran downstairs.

Jackie wasn’t in the kitchen. There was no burnt toast, no strong tea. She went to the sitting-room, and looked in.

Jackie was standing in the middle of the room, holding a duster. His flowered shirt looked shockingly bright beneath his drawn, exhausted face. Two limp rosebuds sagged from his button-hole.

“Good morning, Jackie. Going gay – the roses, I mean.”

Jackie’s hand went up to the roses. “He – he put them there, last night.”

“He?”

“Harry,” Jackie muttered.

“You mean Mr Walters,” Prudence said severely.

“I’ve always been fond of flowers. I’ll get the breakfast, Miss.”

Prudence suddenly remembered. “Morgan’s flying to Ireland today. I’d better get him up.”

She went back upstairs and knocked on Morgan’s door.

“Are you going to have some breakfast before you go, Morgan?” she called.

She opened the door cautiously. The room was heavy with cigarette smoke. Morgan sat in the middle of it, dressed in his usual dark clothes, holding his briefcase.

She looked at his face, and was frightened by the despair she saw on it. She took refuge in a breezy refusal to see that anything was wrong.

“Is that all you’re taking?” she asked, indicating the briefcase.

He shook his head. “Nothing more. Everything’s gone. Two years and two months. The end’s worse than the beginning. The end’s the worst. Do you think I can go, Prudence? Will they stop me? Brickford’s a long way. Ten-forty-five the plane goes. It’s only half past eight. Prudence, when they say it, don’t believe them.” He jumped up, and stood staring into her face.

“Don’t believe them. I’m telling you.”

“Morgan, have some breakfast,” she said in a frightened voice.

“I’m going. The plane’s my only chance.”

He pushed past her. She heard him running down the stairs. She was so glad that he had gone that she forgot she couldn’t tango, although the memory soon returned, so that she was curt and abstracted all through breakfast, while she waited for an opportunity to ask Hester for a secret lesson. Hester seemed scarcely aware of her presence, and spoke only once throughout the meal.

“You’re still wearing the roses in your button-hole, Jackie. Didn’t you go to bed last night?”

“Slept better’n I’ve ever done on Brighton beach,” Jackie assured her.

When he had left the room Hester stood up.

“How do you feel about dancing?” Prudence asked quickly.

“Just what I feel about singing, laughter, and love,” Hester said.

“Are you quoting someone?” Prudence asked suspiciously. “I mean someone like Harry?”

Hester looked at her watch. “He may be in Brickford now. In just over an hour he’ll be in the plane for Ireland. I don’t suppose he’ll ever come back,” she said in a low voice that acknowledged the humiliation of being deserted. “Prudence, don’t worry me today. I must go to Father. He’s not well.”

Prudence was left alone to contemplate the endless horrors of a day in which no one would help her to tango.

AT eleven o’clock Prudence was kneeling on a green sward of cotton, looking hopelessly at the instructions which were supposed to map her course around the strange peninsulas of the human form.

“Bring Fold to meet perforations at F, gathering lower back to meet notches. Leave open at G,” she read in despair. “Who’s that? Oh, Jackie. There’s no G, and I’ve lost all the notches. Attach collar to waist? It can’t mean anything.”

“It’s eleven o’clock, Miss. The plane will have gone.”

“The plane? To Ireland, you mean. I wish I’d gone too. I’ve just had about enough of dress-making. But I don’t want to go to Ireland. I’d like to go to Italy, or Spain. Somewhere hot, some country where people had feelings, and did things, and weren’t so dull as they are here. I go back to school in ten days, Jackie. Oh, it’s going to be so boring. What would you really like to be, Jackie, if you had the chance? I’m just going to go ahead and cut this, even if it’s all wrong.”

“I always wanted to be in a dance band,” Jackie said dreamily.

Prudence slashed at the material. “Can you play anything, Jackie?”

“No, Miss, I never had the chance.”

Prudence stood up, looking in amazement at what she had cut out.

“They’re flying now. I wouldn’t care if they stayed in Ireland for ever. Except Harry. Who’s quite funny sometimes.”

Jackie pulled the roses out of his shirt and dropped them in the wastepaper basket.

“Salmon for lunch, Miss?” he said, beginning to back out of the room. “You could have it straight from the tin, and no cooking.”

“Can you tango, Jackie?” she called after him. He didn’t hear. “Well, it was only a policy of desperation,” she muttered, kneeling down again with the scissors.

Quarter of an hour later she looked out of the window. Jackie, wearing his yellow pullover, now, was hurrying through the garden. He was carrying a bulging brown paper shopping bag by its string handle. Prudence assumed he was going to the village to buy some food for lunch. She wondered where he had found the money.

When she went into the kitchen, the housekeeping money, a meagre enough remnant, was intact. Underneath the opened tin of salmon was a sheet of paper, stained with the dismal grey oil of the dark, repellent fish.

“Dear Miss,” it said.

“I have gone to see my Mother in Hospital. (Being visiting Day) Love Jackie.”

Jackie didn’t come back. Hester and Prudence ate the tinned salmon alone. Later, when they heard the news about the aeroplane, they had no thoughts to spare for Jackie, or to wonder why he had gone away.

“THAT’S all,” Hester said. “It’s the whole story. So you see…”

“What do I see?” Inspector Lewis demanded, not yet aware how much he ought to see.

“I don’t know what you see. But it’s the whole story,” Hester repeated. “Isn’t it, Father?”

He looked at her with a stricken smile, guilty as a man who has survived a disaster but has seen his friends drown. She crossed the room quickly and sat on the arm of his chair.

“Father, we’ve told all the truth. There’s nothing more we can do now.”

“You can answer a few questions, Miss Wade,” Inspector Lewis said. “There’s some information I’d like. About Maurice Reid, for instance. Now, Mr Wade. You gave him a cheque. Was it a sizeable cheque?”