Round the Bend by Nevil Shute
We got up at four in the morning, and Mum got up and cooked us breakfast. Then the taxi was there, and it was time to go. I went and said good-bye to Dad in bed. “Look after yourself,” I said. “No more of that pneumonia,” and he said, “Get on with you,” and that was our parting.
I went down and kissed Mum. “Good-bye, Tom,” she said. “Don’t be so long away this time.” She was crying a little, a thing I never saw Mum do before, but she was getting old.
“I’ll try not to, Mum,” I said quietly. “Cheer up. I’ll be back before long.” And as I said that, I couldn’t help remembering Beryl, because that was what I’d said to her.
It’s bad when you’ve got to say good-bye.
Thirty-four hours later I put the Tramp down on the runway at Bahrein, a bit different to that first journey in the Fox-Moth. As I taxied in towards the hangar all the staff came crowding out to see the new machine.
Although I was still sick at leaving Mum and home, it was good to be back.
Connie was there to meet us, of course. I left the clearing up of the pilot’s duties to Gujar Singh, and walked down the length of the vast cabin and opened the rear door and got out on the hot tarmac. It was mid afternoon, late in May, and Bahrein was warming up; the heat hit me like a blow. “Afternoon, Connie,” I said. “Well, here’s your baby.”
He grinned. “Looks a nice job. Have any trouble on the way out?”
I shook my head. “Not a thing. Just kept going.” We moved away and looked up at the engine nacelles; there were no oil leaks and everything was factory clean. “I think she’s quite all right.”
I turned to him. “How have things been here?”
“Okay,” he said. “Mr. Johnson rang up yesterday to ask if we’d be able to do that flight to Australia. I told him I thought you were on the way, and that you’d give him a ring as soon as you got in.”
I nodded. “I’ll ring him this afternoon.”
“Which one will you take—this or the Carrier?”
“Carrier ready?”
He nodded. “She’s got about two hundred and eighty hours to go before the engine change, but that’s plenty.”
“I think I’ll take this one,” I said slowly. “I’d like to get to know her. I don’t think I’ll take the Carrier through the Dutch Indies till I’ve got to. You never know.”
I strolled into the hangar with him and had a look at the maintenance that had been going on in my absence. Everything was in apple pie order, as I had known it would be. I didn’t keep him very long because I knew he would be wanting to get on to the new machine, and I had a mass of stuff waiting for me in the office.
“Okay,” I said. “Better get that one inside and give her a check over. There’s a sort of family bible of maintenance schedules for her, with the log books. Gujar knows about it. If you get started on that, I’ll be out as soon as I’ve had a look in the office.”
He hesitated. “My sister arrived the day before yesterday,” he said. “Would you like to see her in the morning?”
I had forgotten about her. “Oh—yes. She’d like a job with us?”
“I think she would. There’s nothing for her to do here unless she works.”
“Where’s she staying?” I wasn’t quite sure how much of an Asiatic this girl was.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got her a room alongside mine, in the same house.”
I wasn’t quite sure how he lived, or where, except that it was somewhere in the souk near Gujar Singh. “That’s all right for her, is it?”
“Oh, yes. She won’t come to any harm.”
If he was satisfied, it was no concern of mine how the girl lived. “Shorthand typist?”
“Yes.”
“Fine,” I said. “Tell her to come up tomorrow morning, and I’ll give her a tryout. Two months I said, didn’t I?” He nodded. “Well, no hard words if I boot her out at the end of it.”
He grinned. “I’ve told her that.”
“All right. What’s her name?”
“Nadezna.”
I stared at him. “How much?”
“Nadezna.”
“How do you spell it?”
He spelt it out for me. “Nadezna,” I said. “That’s a new one on me.”
“It’s a Russian name,” he said. “It means Hope.”
“Does it! I never knew anyone with a Russian name before.”
He smiled. “Well, you know me. Constantine is Russian. Our mother was a Russian, so we both had Russian names. She met my father at a place called Barkul; he was a silk merchant from Canton. She’d done something in Russia and the Tsarist police were after her. She married my father in Barkul and they went down to Shanghai, and then they emigrated and got settled down in Penang. I was born in Penang. Old Mutluq bin Aamir here, the chap whose house I live in—he’s a silk merchant and he knew my father.”
“Where’s Barkul?” I asked.
He smiled. “Now you’re asking something. It’s right in the middle of Asia somewhere, but I don’t know where. In Sinkiang, I think. It’s somewhere about a thousand miles northwest of Shanghai.”
“I’ve never heard of it before,” I said.
“No. Nor has anybody else.”
I turned away. “Well, tell your sister to come up tomorrow morning. Nadezna. I’ll have to write that down.”
I went into the office to the babu clerk. He had done his best while I was away, but there was a great pile of invoices and statements and A.R.B. notices and Notams and applications for jobs and correspondence about spares and payments, over a foot high. I shuffled through this mass of stuff hoping to God this girl was going to be some good, and then I rang up Johnson of the Arabia-Sumatran.
He said, “Glad to hear you, Cutter. Gujar Singh told you about this flight we want on the 6th?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “We’ve got all that laid on. I’ll go with him myself, in the new aircraft. When are you coming down to see it, sir?”
“I want to meet you,” he said. “There have been some developments; if this first trip to the East Alligator goes all right, we may want more. We might even have to have something like a regular service.”
“I’d better come and see you,” I said. “When shall I come?”
He thought a minute. “I’d like to see your new machine,” he said. “I’ll come over late tomorrow afternoon.”
I settled down to plough through the pile of papers that had accumulated for me. When you run a show like mine that’s what you have to do; you fly all day and come into the office tired with the strain, and start off on the real work. I’d been at it for about half an hour when a car drove up and parked outside. It was the Liaison Officer, Major Hereward. He hadn’t wasted much time in coming up to see me; I suppose they’d seen the Tramp flying over on the circuit as I came in to land.
Hereward was an Indian Army officer, or had been at one time. He wasn’t a bad sort, but I’d had very little to do with him. I never got invited to any of the Residency parties, of course, because only officers go to those and I lived with the radio operators and in the sergeants’ mess. I’d spoken to him once or twice upon the tarmac and he’d always been quite friendly. I got up as he came in and gave him a chair and a cigarette.
“What I’ve come about,” he said, “is this loan. I understand that you’ve been borrowing money, Cutter, from the Sheikh of Khulal.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You may know the amount.”
“Sixty thousand pounds?”
I nodded. “That’s right.” It struck me that he didn’t care about the job he had to do.
“Well, that’s a very large sum of money,” he observed.
“It would be to you or me,” I said. “It’s a very small amount in the aircraft business. It’s the cost of one aeroplane.”
“That may be,” he replied. “Quite frankly, Mr. Cutter, we don’t much care to see the sheikhs lending their money to buy aeroplanes. We should very much prefer to see them spending it upon their peo
He had a point there, of course, but I didn’t see what I could do about it. “I see what you mean,” I said. “This is a local enterprise and we employ a good many local people. I should have thought local capital was rather a good thing.”
“I’m afraid we don’t take that view of it at all up at the Residency,” he said. “In fact, you employ hardly any truly local people. Half a dozen labourers at the most. All your skilled employees come here to work for you from other parts of the East. If you were employing two or three hundred Arab labourers recruited in the district upon work that they can do, digging ditches for example, we might take a different view of this large loan. As it is, I’m afraid we consider it very undesirable, and in more ways than one.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said. I sat in thought for a minute, wondering how much trouble they intended to make. “This loan wasn’t my doing,” I said at last. “I didn’t go round asking for it. I had to get in some more money to do what the oil companies want me to do—I had to get another large aircraft. The Sheikh of Khulal heard that I was in that position and sent his Wazir to offer me this money as a loan. That’s what happened.”
“Where is the money now?” he asked.
I didn’t like that one. “Just outside the hangar,” I said evenly. “That is, unless my chaps have pushed it in.”
“You mean, it’s been spent upon the aeroplane that you’ve brought back from England?”
“That’s what it was lent me for,” I replied. “Fifty-five thousand pounds was the cost of that aircraft. I’ve got about eight thousand pounds’ worth of spares on order for it.”
“I see,” he said. “How did the Sheikh of Khulal get to hear you needed money?”
It was no good trying to conceal anything from these people. They probably knew anyway. “My chief engineer goes over to Khulal sometimes,” I said. “I think he told them I was having to expand.”
“That’s Shak Lin?”
For some reason his use of the Chinese version of the name annoyed me, though I did it often myself. But this was a pretty formal matter, and Connie was a British subject. “Mr. Shaklin is my chief engineer,” I said.
“Yes. And he goes and talks some bastard form of religion to the old man.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “Whatever he does over there he does in his spare time, on his day off. I know, of course, that Mr. Shaklin is a religious man. But I’ve never discussed the Sheikh of Khulal with him, or him with the Sheikh. You’re not suggesting, are you, that he should have had a permit of some kind before going to see the Sheikh?”
“No …” he said thoughtfully. “You’d better know the suggestions that have been made, though, Mr. Cutter. It has been suggested that your man Shak Lin used his religious influence with the Sheikh of Khulal to get you a very large loan which would be free of interest under the Islamic law, whereas for a speculative business such as yours you would have had to pay large interest charges on a loan obtained from any other source.”
I got up and crossed over to the window and stood looking out. I wasn’t going to answer that one in a hurry; I was too angry.
“That’s a nice suggestion,” I said at last. “Who thought that one up?”
He said, “It seems rather an obvious deduction from the facts.”
“Maybe.” The trouble was, that it was so very nearly true. It was the truth told with a twist. “The facts are what you say, of course. I have saved interest charges. The motive was completely different—the motive for taking this loan. You can believe that or not, just as you like.”
“It’s all very unfortunate,” he said. “It lends itself to misinterpretation.”
I swung round from the window; I’d had just about enough of this. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Give back the money?”
He smiled. “I don’t suppose you can do that.” I could have wiped that grin off his face with the greatest pleasure, but I didn’t do it.
I crossed to the table where my brief case was, full of the papers I had brought from England. “I could,” I said. “I don’t know that I’m going to. However, I’ll show you something.” I pulled out the letter from Mr. Norman Evans and chucked it across the table to him. “That’s a cash offer for this business,” I said. “I’ve just refused it, but I could get it back again. I could pay back that sixty thousand in a month from now if I decided to. But I shan’t do that just because you and the Resident have come to the conclusion that I’m a bloody crook.”
He took up the letter and began reading it. “That’s rather extreme language,” he said mildly.
I didn’t answer that, but I stood in silence staring out of the window as he read the letter. One works and struggles to build something up over the years, and then an ignorant and suspicious official, full of his own importance, comes along and tries to knock it down.
He came to the end of the letter and laid it down. “I see,” he said. “You say that you have refused this offer?”
“That’s right.”
“Why? It seems a very good offer to me.”
I crossed to the desk and sat down in my chair, and lit a cigarette. “I’ll tell you why I refused it,” I said slowly. “I was going to accept it first of all, and retire from the Gulf, and take my money and go back and live in England. Then I heard from my chief pilot that you people had been raising a packet of trouble out here, over this loan and over Mr. Shaklin’s religious doings. In England, it looked as if you’d stirred up a hornet’s nest here for no reason at all. Well, when I sell a business, I sell it clean—not with a packet of unknown trouble hanging round its neck. I called the deal off and I came back here.”
“Why do you think that we raised any trouble?”
“I know damn well you did. Everything was quite all right here when I went away. Then you found out about this loan, and your boys at the Residency heard you talking and spread it all over the souk. My people live down there—they know what happened. If the Imam hadn’t been such a good chap you’d have had a holy war or something on your hands.”
He coloured a little. “That’s a considerable exaggeration,” he said stiffly.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s leave that. Where do we go from here?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “I’m quite willing to co-operate with you, provided what you want is reasonable.”
“Well, Mr. Cutter,” he said, “I shall have to go and talk it over with the Resident. Some rather large issues may arise out of this matter, concerning the whole future of commercial development in the district. If anything has to be done, I’ll get in touch with you again.” He paused. “In the meantime, may I take it that there will be no more borrowing money from the sheikhs?”
“You may for the next month,” I said. “I’ve got no further expansion in mind at the moment.”
“Only for a month?”
“I should have thought that was time enough for you to make your mind up what you want to do,” I said. “I’m not going to accept a permanent restriction of that sort just from you, this afternoon.”
That was the end of it, and I went out with him to his car. It was a bit unfortunate that sunset prayers outside the hangar were just starting up. I hadn’t seen that for a month or so, and it had grown a great deal in my absence. The waste ground by the hangar had been levelled off over an area of about a hundred yards by fifty, and marked out with white stones with a semicircle in the side towards Mecca. That had been done since I went away. There were only about twenty of our people from the hangar, but there were three motor bus loads from the town, and a large number of miscellaneous Arab bodies f
Major Hereward stood looking at this going on in silence for a minute. His disapproval was evident, but there didn’t seem to be much that I could do about it. Finally he snorted, got into his car, and drove away without a word.
It didn’t look so good.
When I got to the office at half past seven next morning, our normal time for starting work in that hot place, the girl was there waiting for me. She was in European clothes, a light cotton frock, bare legs, and white shoes. She had long black hair done up in European style upon her head, but you could see the Chinese in her as, indeed, you could with Connie. I think her Russian mother must have been a pretty woman because Nadezna had good features, and she had a sort of impish cheerfulness that may have come from the Chinese father.
“Morning,” I said. “It’s Miss Shaklin?”
“That’s right,” she said. “My brother told me to stick around here.” She spoke with a slight American intonation.
“Come on in,” I said. I led the way into the office and gave her a chair. “Your brother told me that you’d like a job with us.”
She nodded. “That was the general idea.”
“Can you take dictation at the rate I’m speaking now?”
“Why, surely, Mr. Cutter. I can take quicker than that.”
“I told your brother that I’d give you a tryout for a couple of months if you came here,” I said. “After that, no hard feelings if we part.” She nodded. “What we didn’t discuss was what the wage would be. Got any ideas on that?”