On the Beach by Nevil Shute Page A

to sea this week. There’s probably a flock of messages on my desk.”
    “I suppose you’re the sort of person who works very hard, all the time, whether you’ve got to or not.”
    He laughed. “I suppose I must be.” He glanced at her. “Do you do any work?”
    “Of course. I’m a very busy woman.”
    “What do you work at?”
    She lifted her glass. “This. What I’ve been doing ever since I met you yesterday.”
    He grinned. “You find that the routine gets tedious, sometimes?”
    “Life gets tedious,” she quoted. “Not sometimes. All the time.”
    He nodded. “I’m lucky, having plenty to do.”
    She glanced at him. “Can I come and see your submarine next week?”
    He laughed, thinking of the mass of work there was to do on board. “No, you can’t. We go to sea next week.” And then, because that seemed ungracious, he said, “You interested in submarines?”
    “Not really,” she said a little listlessly. “I kind of thought I’d like to see it, but not if it’s a bother.”
    “I’d be glad to show it to you,” he told her. “But not next week. I’d like it if you’d come down and have lunch with me one day when things are quiet and we’re not clashing round like scalded cats. A quiet day, when I could show you everything. And then maybe we could go up to the city and have dinner some place.”
    “That sounds good,” she said. “When will that be, so that I can look forward to it?”
    He thought for a moment. “I couldn’t say right now. I’ll be reporting a state of operational readiness around the end of this coming week, and I’d think they’d send us off on the first cruise within a day or so. After that we ought to have a spell in the dockyard before going off again.”
    “This first cruise—that’s the one up to Port Moresby?”
    “That’s right. I’ll try to fit it in before we go away on that, but I couldn’t guarantee it. If you’ll give me your telephone I’ll call you around Friday and let you know.”
    “Berwick 8641,” she said. He wrote it down. “Before ten o’clock is the best time to ring. I’m almost always out in the evening.”
    He nodded. “That’ll be fine. It’s possible we’ll still be at sea on Friday. It might be Saturday before I call. But I
will
call, Miss Davidson.”
    She smiled. “Moira’s the name, Dwight.”
    He laughed. “Okay.”
    She drove him to the station in the buggy after lunch, being herself on her way home to Berwick. As he got down in the station yard she said, “Good-bye, Dwight. Don’t work too hard.” And then she said, “Sorry I made such a fool of myself last night.”
    He grinned. “Mixing drinks, that’s what does it. Let that be a lesson to you.”
    She laughed harshly. “Nothing’s a lesson to me, ever. I’ll probably do that again tomorrow night, and the night after.”
    “It’s your body,” he said equably.
    “That’s the trouble,” she replied. “Mine, and nobody else’s. If anybody else became involved it might be different, but there’s no time for that. Too bad.”
    He nodded. “I’ll be seeing you.”
    “You really will?”
    “Why, sure,” he said. “I’ll call you like I said.”
    He travelled back to Williamstown in the electric train, while she drove twenty miles to her country home. She got there at about six o’clock, unharnessed the mare and put her in the stable. Her father came to help her, and together they pushed the buggy into the garage shed beside the unused Customline, gave the mare a bucket of water and a feed of oats, and went into the house. Her mother was sitting in the screened verandah, sewing.
    “Hullo, dear,” she said. “Did you have a nice time?”
    “All right,” the girl replied. “Peter and Mary threw a party last night. Quite good fun. Knocked me back a bit, though.”
    Her mother sighed a little, but she had learned that it was no use to protest. “You must go to bed early tonight,” she said. “You’ve had so many late nights