Jeffrey Archer - As the Crow Flies

As with everything on which Daniel embarked, he spent hours of research and preparation long before he even set off for Southampton. He allocated three days to the Australian High Commission Information Department in the Strand, and made sure he regularly sat next to a certain Dr. Marcus Winters, a visiting professor from Adelaide, whenever he came to dine at Trinity High Table. Although the first secretary and deputy librarian at Australia House remained puzzled by some of Daniel's questions and Dr. Winters curious as to the motives of the young mathematician, by the end of the Trinity term Daniel felt confident that he had learned enough to ensure that his time wouldn't be wasted once he had set foot on the subcontinent. However, he realized the whole enterprise was still a huge gamble: if the first question he needed to be answered yielded the reply, "There's no way of finding that out."

Four days after the students had gone down and he had completed his supervision reports, Daniel was packed and ready. The following morning his mother arrived at the college to drive him to Southampton. On the journey down to the south coast he learned that Charlie had recently applied to the London County Council for outline planning permission to develop Chelsea Terrace as one gigantic department store.

"But what about those bombed-out flats?"

"The council has given the owners three months to proceed with an application to rebuild or they have threatened to issue a compulsory purchase order and put the site up for sale."

"Pity we just can't buy the flats ourselves," said Daniel, trying out one of his non-questions in the hope that it might elicit some response from his mother, but she just continued to drive on down the A30 without offering an opinion.

It was ironic, Daniel reflected, that if only his mother had felt able to confide in him the reason Mrs. Trentham wouldn't cooperate with his father she could have turned the car around and taken him back to Cambridge.

He resumed to safer territory. "So how's Dad hoping to raise the cash for such a massive enterprise?"

"He can't make up his mind between a bank loan and going public."

"What sort of sum are you talking about?"

"Mr. Merrick estimates around a hundred and fifty thousand pounds."

Daniel gave a low whistle.

"The bank is happy enough to loan us the full amount now that property prices have shot up," Becky continued, "but they're demanding everything we own as collateral including the property in Chelsea Terrace, the house, our art collection, and on top of that they want us to sign a personal guarantee and charge the company four percent on the overdraft."

"Then perhaps the answer is to go public."

"It's not quite that easy. If we were to take that route the family might end up with only fifty-one percent of the shares."

"Fifty-one percent means you still control the company. "

"Agreed," said Becky, "but should we ever need to raise some more capital at a future date, then further dilution would only mean we could well lose our majority shareholding. In any case, you know only too well how your father feels about outsiders being given too much of a say, let alone too large a stake. And his having to report regularly to even more non-executive directors, not to mention shareholders, could be a recipe for disaster. He's always run the business on instinct, while the Bank of England may well prefer a more orthodox approach."

"How quickly does the decision have to be made?"

"It should have been settled one way or the other by the time you get back from America."

"What about the future of Number 1?"

"There's a good chance I can knock it into shape. I've the right staff and enough contacts, so if we're granted the full planning permission we have applied for I believe we could, in time, give Sotheby's and Christie's a run for their money."

"Not if Dad keeps on stealing the best pictures—"

"True." Becky smiled. "But if he goes on the way he is now, our private collection will be worth more than the business—as selling my van Gogh back to the Lefevre Gallery proved only too cruelly. He has the best amateur's eye I've ever come across—but don't ever tell him I said so."

Becky began to concentrate on the signs directing her to the docks and finally brought the car to a halt alongside the liner, but not quite so close as Daphne had once managed, if she remembered correctly.

Daniel sailed out of Southampton on the Queen Mary that evening, with his mother waving from the dockside.

While on board the great liner he wrote a long letter to his parents, which he posted five days later from Fifth Avenue. He then purchased a ticket on the Twentieth Century Limited for a Pullman to Chicago. The train pulled out of Penn Station at eight the same night, Daniel having spent a total of six hours in Manhattan, where his only other purchase was a guidebook of America.

Once they had reached Chicago, the Pullman carriage was attached to the Super Chief which took him all the way to San Francisco.

During the four-day journey across America he began to regret he was going to Australia at all. As he passed through Kansas City, Newton City, La Junta, Albuquerque and Barstow, each city appeared more interesting than the last. Whenever the train pulled into a new station Daniel would leap off, buy a colorful postcard that indicated exactly where he was, fill in the white space with yet more information gained from the guidebook before the train reached the next station. He would then post the filled-in card at the following stop and repeat the process. By the time the express had arrived at Oakland Station, San Francisco, he had posted twenty-seven different cards back to his parents in the Little Boltons.

Once the bus had dropped him off in St. Francis Square, Daniel booked himself into a small hotel near the harbor after checking the tariff was well within his budget. As he still had a thirty-six-hour wait before the SS Aorangi was due to depart, he traveled out to Berkeley and spent the whole of the second day with Professor Stinstead. Daniel became so engrossed with Stinstead's research on tertiary calculus that he began to regret once again that he would not be staying longer, as he suspected he might learn far more by remaining at Berkeley than he would ever discover in Australia.

On the evening before he was due to sail, Daniel bought twenty more postcards and sat up until one in the morning filling them in. By the twentieth his imagination had been stretched to its limit. The following morning, after he had settled his bill, he asked the head porter to mail one of the postcards every three days until he returned. He handed over ten dollars and promised the porter that there would be a further ten when he came back to San Francisco, but only if the correct number of cards remained, as precisely when he would be back remained uncertain.

The senior porter was puzzled but pocketed the ten dollars, commenting in an aside to his young colleague on the desk that he had been asked to do far stranger things in the past, for far less.

By the time Daniel boarded the SS Aorangi his beard was no longer a rough stubble and his plan was as well prepared as it could be, given that his information had been gathered from the wrong side of the globe. During the voyage Daniel found himself seated at a large circular table with an Australian family who were on their way home from a holiday in the States. Over the next three weeks they added greatly to his store of knowledge, unaware that he was listening to every word they had to say with uncommon interest.

Daniel sailed into Sydney on the first Monday of August 1947. He stood out on the deck and watched the sun set behind Sydney Harbour Bridge as a pilot boat guided the liner slowly into the harbor. He suddenly felt very homesick and, not for the first time, wished he had never embarked on the trip. An hour later he had left the ship and booked himself into a guest house which had been recommended to him by his traveling companions.