The Last Houseparty by Peter Dickinson Page A

produced an oily job sheet, and told the inquiring officer that he had serviced both engine and air-frame, the latter being necessary because of the illness of A/c Strong. The Lysander had been fully airworthy, though a week before the loss he had discussed with Flight Lieutenant Allison the possibility of cannibalising one machine to ensure the safety of the other, and they had agreed that there might be a need for that if spares did not arrive, but not for a couple of months or more. Meanwhile having two aircraft available when only one was needed for regular use allowed proper maintenance to be carried out on the other one, with the additional safety that that implied.
    There was one brief diversion from matters mechanical.
    â€œI understand that on the morning after the loss the mess waiter returned to you a note you had left for Major Quintain,” said the enquiring officer. “Perhaps we had better hear whether that had my hearing on the state of the Lysander.”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œNevertheless would you mind telling us what was in the note.”
    â€œWell, sir, it was like this. I’d run across Major Quintain before the war. He had a little Jowett what he used to have a lot of trouble with the carburettor of—he’d get it into his head it was running too thin and he’d try and adjust it himself and make a balls of it, mid then he’d think it was the timing and foul that up too, messing round, and only when the Jowett was hardly going he’d bring it along to me to put right. Happened time and again, almost like it was it game between us. Well, you see, bumping into each other there, he thought he’d like a chat about old times. There wasn’t time before the flight if I was going to get the plane set up, so he said what about after. He told me he’d a bottle of Scotch in his baggage and he left it to me to fix some place we could meet and have a nip or two. That’s what the note was about.”
    The social difficulty, even under desert conditions, involved in an officer from another unit sharing so rare a commodity with an Other Rank while failing to do so with his hosts in the mess—though it was for that that he had originally brought the bottle, no doubt—was clear to the inquiry. Some kind of semi-secret rendezvous among the dunes would certainly have been necessary. So the inquiry moved on, reaching the obvious verdict that no blame attached to anyone for the failure of the Lysander to return, but that the actual cause of that failure—enemy action, breakdown, pilot error—could not be known until the wreckage, now several hundred miles away after the abrupt retreat, was found.
    It never was.

IV
    1
    W aiting for the train on Saturday morning, Sir Charles Archer leaned both hands on his black cane and stared along the railway line. Though still as an image, his pose expressed inward restlessness, or hunger; he might have been waiting for the train to bring him his bride. That mysterious smoky and oily breeze, which even on still days railway stations seem to conjure up, more like an outdoor draught than any natural wind, breathed gently past him; but he leaned into it as if it had been a gale and he on some cliff-top look-out, peering seaward. In front of him, but invisible from the platform, the long and dreary township of High Wycombe wound through its valley to the west.
    â€œHow’s the army treating you, my boy?” he said suddenly.
    â€œVery decently, sir,” said Vincent. “I’m enjoying it.”
    â€œThey teaching you to kill effectively?”
    â€œI’m teaching other chaps now. I’ve been posted to our new TA battalion in Hackney.”
    â€œSo you will march to battle at the head of costermongers and clerks. Charming. Who are they planning to let you slaughter first?”
    â€œThe c-current assumption is that it’ll be the Germans.”
    â€œYou’ll enjoy that